If This Dog Bit Someone…

Press reports would be filled with diatriabe about another ”pitbull’ attack.

But – because he’s a hero who took three bullets to save his owner… he’s just a dog.

The linked story is the only one I found that mentioned the dog’s breed (boxer mix).  I’m sure that if this dog had been injured attacking the maid instead of valiantly protecting his owner from her criminal cohorts – news outlets would have taken one look at this photo and featured headlines screaming about another “pitbull attack”.

Best wishes to hero dog Aslin for a speedy and full recovery.

Tricky

Hat tip to Southern Rockies Nature Blog for a link to the story of a very lucky unlucky gawd, I don’t know what to call it coyote who rode across California in the grill of a car.  According to KRCA:

Daniel East and his sister, Tevyn, were travelling at about 75 mph along Interstate 80 when they saw some coyotes running nearby. One of the coyotes ran in front of the car.

 ”Right off the bat, we knew it was bad,” Daniel East said.

 They said they kept driving because they thought they had killed the animal, so there was no point in stopping.

Well yeah, ’cause of course the best thing to do after you hit a defenseless animal on the road is just keep on truckin’.  After all, who’d want to stop and have to deal with all that suffering and blood and stuff.

And of course it makes perfect sense to wait eight or ten hours until you reach your destination to even check for damage to your car.  I wonder, did they have a full tank when they hit the coyote or did they just studiously avoid looking at the grill of their car on pit stops?

Imagine the surprise chagrin clueless confusion when they arrived at the art colony they were headed for and found a live coyote trapped in the engine compartment of the car.  To their credit, East and his sister called Wildlife Rehabilitation and Release after they found the coyote. 

The coyote was taken to the rehabilitation facility. It remained there until Thursday, when it managed to push up the steel at the bottom of a kennel to free itself, Crowell said.

 It hasn’t been seen since.

 ”We named it Tricky for a reason,” Daniel East said.

Somebody’s tricky here, I’m just not convinced it’s the coyote.  I’ll bet he was convinced that those tricky humans had just wedged him into a slightly larger trap

East told reporters that the coyote only had a few scrapes on its paws.  I hope that information came to him from the folks at the wildlife center because SRSLY -  How can a man who can’t tell there’s a live coyote wedged in the engine compartment of his Honda possibly diagnose a lack of broken bones and internal injuries in a panicked wild animal just by looking at it?

Check out the slide show at this link

Time to Eat the Dog

New Zealand’s Dominion Post published an ‘interesting’ opinion piece today on the supposedly dire environmental impacts posed by pet keeping.

Victoria University professors Brenda and Robert Vale, architects who specialise in sustainable living, say pet owners should swap cats and dogs for creatures they can eat, such as chickens or rabbits, in their provocative new book Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living.

The couple have assessed the carbon emissions created by popular pets, taking into account the ingredients of pet food and the land needed to create them.

“If you have a German shepherd or similar-sized dog, for example, its impact every year is exactly the same as driving a large car around,” Brenda Vale said.

“A lot of people worry about having SUVs but they don’t worry about having Alsatians and what we are saying is, well, maybe you should be because the environmental impact … is comparable.”

Do you suppose that the Vales took into account the fact that most of the “meat” that goes into commercial dog food is byproducts that might otherwise go to waste?  Did they also take into account the fact that most pet owners (present company included) don’t buy a new set of dog beds, crates, bowls, leashes and kennels every time they get a new dog.

What next, a book on the merits of cannibalizing children?

It looks to me like these folks took a page from PeTA’s playbook, using shock tactics to promote themselves.  This is one dog-related book I won’t be buying.  In fact, I’m not even going to post a link to it.

Not Good Enough

We sent our wonderful Aussie girl, Roo across the bridge almost seven years ago.  A bright, athletic and somewhat pugnacious soul, she was the perfect counterpoint to our Leonbergers.  Not long after we lost her my husband was transferred to the Twin Cities area so, while we were eager to add a new dog to our pack, we decided it would be prudent to wait until we’d settled into a new home before we started our search.

A year and a half later we moved into our home in Red Wing.  After taking a couple of months to settle in, I started surfing the websites of local rescue groups and PetFinder ads to find a suitable dog.  Since I’m an experienced professional dog trainer, I work from home and have been known to spend what some might find to be ridiculous sums of money on pet care I foolishly assumed that getting approved to adopt a dog – any dog - would be a slam dunk.

Silly me.

Here’s the score:

Two groups turned me down because my yard was not yet fenced. The fact that it was February in Minnesota and the ground was frozen to a depth of at least three feet, making fence building impossible did not sway them. Neither did the fact that I had a 50×50 foot, heated indoor area to exercise a dog in. Or receipts showing that I had already made a down payment on having not one - but two – fenced yards installed in the spring.

One group turned me down because I had lived in my current home for less than a year. They didn’t care that I’d lived in the previous one for a decade, that my husband had worked for the same company for fifteen years or that we had more than enough assets to pay off our currant mortgage if we chose to.

One group turned me down because I would not sign an agreement that specified exactly how I would feed, house and train a dog I rented ’adopted’ from them. An agreement that gave them the right to take the dog back at any time without notice if they felt that I in any way failed to follow these explicit (and IME ridiculous) instructions.

After strike four, I decided that I was apparently not worthy to adopt a dog.  So I gave up, found a breeder and bought an adorably cute Australian Kelpie puppy.  Poor Zip. Because I failed as an adoptive home she’s forced to live in this hell hole.  Look how sad the poor girl is [hangs head in shame]:

It seems I’m in good company. Earlier this week Nathan Winograd blogged about problems he recently faced when trying to adopt a dog.  In the post he nails the all-too-common rescue elitest philosophy:

Unfortunately, too many shelters go too far with fixed, arbitrary rules—dictated by national organizations—that turn away good homes under the theory that people aren’t trustworthy, that few people are good enough, and that animals are better off dead. Since leaving the Tompkins County SPCA, I’ve seen the same attitude within rescue groups. But the motivations of rescue groups differ from those of the bureaucrat I ended up firing in Tompkins County. Rescue groups love animals, but they have been schooled by HSUS to be unreasonably—indeed, absurdly—suspicious of the public. Consequently, they make it difficult, if not downright impossible, to adopt their rescued animals.

The qualities that make a person (not a house or a fence or a dog door) a good home for a dog can’t be measured in a rigidly quantifiable way.  I’ve met wonderful pet owners who lived in urban apartments and RVs.  And I’ve met people I wouldn’t trust to properly care for a tapeworm who lived on farms or in spacious suburban estates complete with immaculate indoor/outdoor kennels and dog doors.  Being a good pet owner, like being a good parent, is a skill.  A skill developed from practice that sometimes - inevitably – includes mistakes.  The goal of shelters and rescue groups should be to make a mindful individual evaluations of each pet and each potential adopter when making these important decisions. While this takes more time than reviewing a checklist, it could allow these groups to get more pets into good homes — and isn’t that the goal? 

Open-minded, individual evaluations could also provide opportunities for shelter and rescue staff to educate pet owners on husbandry skills – and to be educated on them as well (hey, contrary to what some people might want you to believe - nobody knows everything).  We need more of the kind of open-minded discussion that helps us allto  be better pet owners and less of the arrogant, closed-minded, “we know better than you” posturing that drives adopters away.

I am a rescue / foster volunteer.  And as a dog trainer I also get a lot of calls from people who want to get rid of inconvenient dogs.  I understand the frustration, the anger, and the burnout a person can feel when they’re bombarded with regular doses of weapons-grade stupidity – but the fact that some people are clueless or heartless doesn’t justify treating every pet owner and potential adopter as an animal abuser in training.

Read Nathan Winograd’s post over at the No Kill Blog  (just added to our blogroll) for some fascinating and disturbing background information on the history of the “not good enough” philosophy of pet adoption.

Animal “Husbandry”

Hat tip to BluntObject who pointed me to a atort in today’s Miami Herald.    Apparently Florida is one of the few states where bestiality is not yet illegal.  In a laudable effort to change this and make it a third-degree felony to engage in sex with animals the state senate has drafted a new piece of legislation.  The authors of the legislation felt they needed to specify that conventional dog-judging contests and animal-husbandry practices are still permissible and the Herald reports:

That last provision tripped up Miami Democratic Sen. Larcenia Bullard.

”People are taking these animals as their husbands? What’s husbandry?” she asked. Some senators stifled their laughter as Sen. Charlie Dean, an Inverness Republican, explained that husbandry is raising and caring for animals. Bullard didn’t get it.

”So that maybe was the reason the lady was so upset about that monkey?” Bullard asked, referring to a Connecticut case where a woman’s suburban chimpanzee went mad and was shot.

While I’m certainly not above a bit of snickering at Sen. Bullard’s expense, I have to say that I find this little anecdote far more disturbing than amusing.  At first glance I thought that the FL senate was engaging in pointless nit-picking when they granted exceptions for conformation and husbandry practices.  But viewed in the dim light of a state senator’s staggering ignorance of very basic animal welfare issues, their disambiguation makes perfect sense.  In fact, now I’m left wondering if they went far enough.

Has modern urban society become so disconnected with the realities of the natural world that we need to worry that conformation judges will be arrested for checking testicles on long-coated dogs or that collecting semen for artificial insemination could lead to years in prison?  Inconceivable!

The Threat is Real

 

And it isn’t from vicious, baby-killing pibbles….. 

Today Steve Salerno from www.skeptic.com published a wonderfully entertaining and insightful article about how our deeply flawed system of broadcast journalism habitually takes odd, random occurrences and uses them to manufacture epidemics designed to terrify the mindless hordes who still take what they see and read in the news at face value. 

In Mr. Salerno’s words, “by definition, journalism in its most basic form deals with what life is not.  By painting life in terms of its oddities, journalism yields not a snapshot of your world, but something closer to a photographic negative.” 

Instead of actually taking the time and effort to <gawd forbid> research a story, media pundits bent on achieving celebrity status at any cost manufacture stories using sound-bites, anecdotes, pointless opinion polls, twisted statistics and information culled from “experts” who are focused more on advancing personal agendas than in presenting accurate data. 

According to Salerno, “Nowhere are these foibles more noticeable — or more of a threat to journalistic integrity — than when they coalesce into a cause: so-called “advocacy” or “social” journalism. To begin with, there are legitimate questions about whether journalism should even have causes.  Worse, for our purposes, the data on which journalists premise their crusades are drawn from the same marginalia discussed above.  Just as journalists who run out of news may create it, journalists who run out of real causes may invent them. It’s not hard to do. All you need is a fact or two, which you then “contextualize” with more so-called expert opinion.” 

So what’s the panic du jour?  

Well, according to Jim Crosby at canineaggression.blogspot.com  a new record was set when 33 people were killed by dogs in 2007.  Most of the fatal attacks were made by unsupervised sexually intact dogs.  A record I’m sure some twit in the media will spin into “an epidemic” that animal rights advocates will use to try to put yet more limits on pet ownership. 

I think that Mr. Crosby is spot on when he says, “What I see these numbers indicating, based on my on-scene investigations, is that irresponsible owners tend not to spay and neuter, tend to chain their animals out for extended times with little or no socialization, and that Pits are currently popular with owners who maintain their animals with less wisdom and care than most of us. Once again, it’s the two-legged problem behind the four-legger that precipitates the problems.” 

Amen brother.   

And sad to say, instead of listening to voices of reason (how pointlessly boring would THAT be), the folks we’ve elected to serve us in cities, counties and states across the country are swallowing the twisted, self-serving media hype hook, line and stinker. 

According to my friend at caveat.blogware.com, Aurora, Colorado enacted a breed ban in 2005 largely as a knee-jerk response to the reinstatement of the adjacent City of Denver’s breed ban. She goes on to say, ‘City Councilmember Bob Fitzgerald explained the need for a citywide pit bull ban thus: “We don’t want ‘those people’ here.” ‘ 

O-kay… Just who are ‘those people’ Bob Fitzgerald wants to keep out?  If he wants to limit the kinds of people who can live in Aurora, why can’t he leave innocent dogs out of the equation and pass a law limiting residency in the city to law-abiding heterosexual white people with above-average incomes who drive hybrid cars and drink merlot? 

Watch out for the coming storm.  The media will be digging their ugly little claws into these statistics soon, and dog owners across the country had better be ready to get mauled.

Politics – “It’s the revulsion, stupid”

Thanks to Kristi Jo who sent me this link to today’s post on Daily Kos:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/2/5/20282/33584

This quote from his blog pretty much sums up my feelings on the matter too:

“I would vote for an honest, non-Republican illegal immigrant atheist gay transvestite who was a bigamist involved in both a gay AND heterosexual marriage if I thought it might help get my country back on track “

Check out his funny and insightful blog entry – and be sure to participate in his poll.

(in the spirit of journalistic disclosure I feel that I must add that: I am an agnostic, I am not a republican, two of my best friends are lesbians, my brother was a drug addicted transvestite {and my best friend} and my first love was the son of an illegal immigrant….)