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So, I heard from the fine folks at Mammoth Dog Beds this morning, a mere 8 days after I first tried to contact them about the massive shrinkage of the cover on one of the beds I bought from them at the end of September.
Although my email went into detail on the problem and included a copy of my order and my order number, the reply said only that the covers were all pre-shrunk and asking "which item" I was having the problem with.
I wrote them back. They didn't seem to know that I'd challenged the credit card charge yesterday (although perhaps they did and just didn't mention it), nor that I wrote about this here. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that neither of those things got them to contact me, but that it just takes them more than a week to respond to customer communications.
Now, let's contrast that with a different company, Orvis.
When I was in Washington, I saw a wonderful sofa cover at my friend Terri's house.
I ordered it, and went yesterday to track it, only to find that it was shipping today, Nov. 14, a week after I ordered it. I sent a polite email saying that while I still wanted the item, I'd have liked to have been informed of the extended shipping time when I placed my order.
Within five minutes, even though it was well past business hours, I got a nice note back from Brian at Orvis Customer Service, apologizing that the information wasn't included on the website and refunding my entire shipping charge.
Now, THAT is customer service.
Any company can make a mistake. Any product can have a defect. I would never be upset because of that. But when you make it all but impossible for your customers to contact you other than to buy something from you, don't respond to customer inquiries for more than a week, don't answer your phones, and the contact systems on your website don't work -- you have a problem far beyond a little dog bed cover shrinkage.
Or you can be Orvis.
From UC Davis, released today, a report confirming what most of us thought would turn out to be the case:
Two chemicals found in recalled pet food during spring 2007 are relatively harmless alone but, if combined, create a deadly mix when consumed by cats, report researchers at the University of California, Davis.
A pilot study, led by veterinary toxicologist Birgit Puschner and colleagues at the California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory in the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, found that cats that were fed pet food spiked with both melamine and cyanuric acid quickly experienced acute kidney failure. Cats that received food containing only one or the other of those two chemicals experienced no ill effects.
Results of the study, believed to be the first report on the combined effects of melamine and cyanuric acid in any animal species, are published in the November issue of the Journal of Veterinary Diagnostic Investigation.
"The results of this study demonstrate that a single oral exposure of cats to melamine and cyanuric acid can result in acute kidney failure," said Puschner. "The study also provides information that will help veterinarians better diagnose the causes of kidney failure in cats."
During the pilot study, Puschner and colleagues found that the cats that received both melamine and cyanuric acid developed fan-shaped crystals in their urinary tracts. Such crystals were not normally observed in healthy cats. Those cats also experienced extensive damage to their kidneys within 12 hours after eating the spiked food.
Further clarifying the role that a pair of chemicals played in the deaths that prompted massive pet food recalls earlier this year, UC Davis researchers have shown that cats died only when fed two chemicals in combination.
To test what was suspected but not yet confirmed last spring, UC Davis veterinary toxicologists purchased four cats from a research facility and fed them different combinations of chemicals.
All four cats survived various doses of either melamine or cyanuric acid, two chemicals that regulators suspect may have been slipped into pet food to help a cheaper ingredient masquerade as a costlier one.
Yet the three cats that were fed pet food laced with both chemicals at once sickened within 12 hours, vomiting, losing their appetites and showing signs of kidney failure.
They were killed after 48 hours, and their tissues had the same kind of kidney damage detected in animal necropsies during the pet food recall.
The remaining cat – which had gotten melamine at one point and cyanuric acid later, but never the two together – appeared healthy and its necropsy showed undamaged kidneys.
"The data will make pet food ultimately safer because now we know what to look for," said Birgit Puschner, lead author of the study and a UC Davis professor of clinical veterinary toxicology.
On Thursday night, I braved some of the worst parking in San Francisco to hear Nathan Winograd speak to a packed house.
It was the latest stop on his nationwide book tour for “Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America.” He only has two dates left, and you’d think that by now he’d be running out of steam. You’d be wrong.
I wasn't able to actually liveblog the appearance as there was no wireless at the venue, but I did the next best thing and wrote it up (hey! no typos!) at Pet Connection:
In 1974, animal welfare groups including HSUS, the American Humane Association (AHA), the ASPCA, and the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) met in Chicago to investigate the cause of surplus cats and dogs in American shelters. Who, they asked, is to blame?
First, Winograd said, were the animals themselves. They were “to blame” for not being adoptable enough, with shelters estimating that only around 40 percent of the animals entering their doors were adoptable. They had a moral obligation to kill the other 60 percent.
The next group to get blamed were, of course, pet owners, and the answer to pet owner irresponsibility was more laws. Leash laws, limit laws, mandatory spay/neuter proposals, prohibitions against feeding strays, animal seizures allowed by animal control officers, and increased licensing fees exploded across the country after 7000 copies of the conference proceedings were distributed to shelters nationwide. “Shelters became adversaries of the public, often the most compassionate members of the public.”
As a consequence, shelters that were complaining they didn’t have the money to implement lifesaving programs like low-cost spay/neuter clinics or care for the animals inside their walls were diverting more resources to bringing in more animals, thus driving their kill rates even higher.
Read the whole very long thing here... and then, if you haven't already, READ THE BOOK!
On Thursday night, I braved some of the worst parking in San Francisco to hear Nathan Winograd speak to a packed house.
It was the latest stop on his nationwide book tour for "Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America." He only has two dates left, and you'd think that by now he'd be running out of steam. You'd be wrong.
This is what would have been a liveblog of the event if I'd had internet access during the presentation. Since I had time to polish it up, you'll get to skip all the usual typos, but I still hope those who aren't able to see him will get a feeling of what it was like to be there. I'm covering the material that was in "Redemption" more lightly than the material that was new to me, so as always, I strongly encourage anyone interested in these issues to read the book.
Standing in front of a screen that read "Reclaiming Our Movement," Nathan Winograd told an enthusiastic audience how he became involved in caring for the feral cats on the Stanford University campus when he was a law student. When the university announced it was hiring a professional exterminator service to have the cats trapped and killed, Winograd and other students, staff, and faculty banded together to find a different solution. They turned first to the local humane society, which handled animal control for the area. Their solution? Trap the cats, bring them to us, and we'll kill them for you.
The cat advocates had expected something more from a group with the word "humane" in the title, but they perservered. They turned to the nation's largest and wealthiest humane organization, the Humane Society of the United States. Their solution?
Amazingly, exactly the same as the first two: Trap 'em and kill 'em.
That little group of Stanford cat lovers found another way, and today the Stanford Cat Network is a model for responsible management of feral cat populations. But why, asked Winograd of his rapt audience, didn't any of those "humane" groups think saving the lives of those animals was the right thing to do -- or even any kind of option at all? What went wrong with the modern humane movement? How did this happen?
To answer the question, he took the audience back 150 years to the founding of the country's first animal protection organization, the American Society for the Prevention to Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). Its founder, Henry Bergh, is Winograd's hero; when I interviewed him, he told me that one of the goals of his book was to "to resurrect Henry Bergh from obscurity."
After outlining the early years of the humane movement, he recapped another story familiar from "Redemption": the evolution of most humane societies into animal control agencies, a function that Bergh believed would mean the destruction of the movement, a view Winograd obviously agrees with.
The animal welfare mission, he said, is to protect animals, while the animal control mission is to protect people. For animal welfare groups to take on the task of animal control is a hopeless conflict of interest, creating an inescapably adversarial relationship between animal shelters and the animals for whom they are supposed to be a safety net, and their owners. "In the 21st century, we're living with a 19th century sheltering model," he said sadly.
It's a model that hurts animals, communities, and shelter workers. Shelter directors were asking how to make killing more efficient, more humane, and less stressful for shelter workers, but never how to stop the killing.
In 1974, animal welfare groups including HSUS, the American Humane Association (AHA), the ASPCA, and the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) met in Chicago to investigate the cause of surplus cats and dogs in American shelters. Who, they asked, is to blame?
First, Winograd said, were the animals themselves. They were "to blame" for not being adoptable enough, with shelters estimating that only around 40 percent of the animals entering their doors were adoptable. They had a moral obligation to kill the other 60 percent.
The next group to get blamed were, of course, pet owners, and the answer to pet owner irresponsibility was more laws. Leash laws, limit laws, mandatory spay/neuter proposals, prohibitions against feeding strays, animal seizures allowed by animal control officers, and increased licensing fees exploded across the country after 7000 copies of the conference proceedings were distributed to shelters nationwide. "Shelters became adversaries of the public, often the most compassionate members of the public."
As a consequence, shelters that were complaining they didn't have the money to implement lifesaving programs like low-cost spay/neuter clinics or care for the animals inside their walls were diverting more resources to bringing in more animals, thus driving their kill rates even higher.
Why this focus on legislation, he asked, when all the most successful communities in the country did it without laws? "When was the last time a mandatory spay/neuter law led to a 50 or 75 percent decline in kill rates? Never."
Legislation was just the first part of the three-part program for dealing with the animal problem. The second was humane education, which Winograd described as diverting yet more resources by sending staff into classrooms in the hopes that the next generation would be more responsible than this one. "Does it work? Do the kids grow up and spay/neuter at greater rates? Do they keep their pets longer? No study shows that they do," he said.
The third part of the plan is sterilization, which is something, he said, everyone can agree on. The problem is, low-cost sterilization was opposed by most groups in the humane movement, because the AVMA perceived it as a threat to veterinarians. But is it?
In 1971, Los Angeles started Mercy Crusade, the first municipally-funded spay/neuter clinic. In its first decade of operation, LA shelters took in 50 percent fewer animals, and found that every dollar spent on spay/neuter saved $10. Their kill rate was in the lowest third in the country, with no loss of business to local veterinarians, because only the poorest people, who wouldn't have gone to the vet anyway, were using the clinic. Eighty-seven percent of all surgeries were still being done by private vets.
But then LA closed the clinics (by that time, there were three), and replaced them with some of the country's most draconian animal control laws. "To this day, tens of thousands of dogs and cats are needlessly losing their lives," Winograd concluded.
He then moved his story north, to San Francisco, where in the 1980s began what he called the "Experiment in Compassion." This story, too, will be familiar to readers of "Redemption," and it's familiar to me because I lived through it. It's the story of how Richard Avanzino and the San Francisco SPCA decided to give back their animal control contract and instead build a system of safety nets and programs designed to turn the city -- not that one shelter, but the entire city -- into a No-Kill area for dogs and cats. All dogs and cats, not just the healthy, cute, and cuddly.
The SF SPCA was the innovator of many programs that are in wide use today. They included:
Last night, I was at the talk "Redemption" author Nathan Winograd gave in San Francisco. I'll be blogging about it later over at Pet Connection. But while I was there, Gina Spadafori was doing some thinking about yesterday's post on No Kill from the Humane Society of the United States' Wayne Pacelle, and her commentary is brilliant:
Now, now, Mr. Pacelle, let’s give credit where credit is due. You wouldn’t even be posting this were it not for “Redemption.” And the no-kill movement — this semantic distinction of yours is more face-saving BS — hasn’t “divided our strengths” but rather energized and focused a new army of animal-lovers who are tired, tired, tired of the intitutional status quo of shelters run by people who cannot see any way out except to empty the cages by killing, fill them again and blame “bad people” for the problem. I’m really sorry if your feelings are hurt by the charges in “Redemption,” but it was apparently the only way to get your attention.
However, I’m absolutely delighted that you’re on the target and on the team now. I’m sure you’ll now be wanting to change your zeal for misguided mandatory spay-neuter legislation like California’s AB 1634 that targets reputable breeders and gives puppy-mills a free pass. I’m also sure you’ll be wanting to look more at the Maddie’s Fund model, of community engagement towards no-kill goals.
And I’m sure, more than anything else, you’ll be wanting to put your money where your mouth is, and loosen the HSUS purse strings for a massive program supporting the building of no-kill regional efforts and promoting cooperative strategies that bring all animal-lovers into the fight.
Am I right? Words are cheap, Mr. Pacelle. Let’s see some action.
Read more here.
When news broke that Ellen Degeneres and Portia De Rossi had found a new home for a dog they had adopted from a Southern California rescue group, the spotlight was turned on the many requirements and contract provisions of organizations that find homes for pets in need.
Some pet owners wondered at what point they really owned the pets they had adopted. Some became mistrustful of pet adoption. Others told stories of being disqualified by what they saw as too-stringent adoption screening procedures.
Why do rescue groups, shelters, and other groups have contracts and screening processes? Do such requirements result in more and better homes for pets? Do some groups go too far? Did this incident give rescue an unfair bad rap, or point out a possible weakness in the rescue system?
The PetHobbyist.com family of websites, including RescueNetwork.org, is sponsoring an online panel discussion on Friday, November 9, at 9:00 pm ET with several rescue representatives and find out what kind of requirements and contracts they have, how they came to have them, what it means to adopt a pet from a rescue group, and get your questions about adoption answered by the people in the front lines.
This will be a moderated discussion chat, all are welcome to attend. You can sign up to get a free email reminder, get more information, and find a link to the chat room, here.
Since apparently even top government officials have to eat and to feed their pets, the administration is proposing a few changes to how we regulate food safety in the United States. While the suggested changes, reported in Forbes, fall short of proposals to streamline and centralize food regulation, they are nonetheless pretty significant, and include something many people were shocked to find out wasn't already in place:
Acting on recommendations from an advisory panel, Bush proposed that the FDA be empowered to order mandatory recalls of unsafe food products. Currently, the FDA lacks such authority, even when the public health is at risk.
"Specifically, the FDA would be empowered to order a recall when a company refuses to recall their product voluntarily, or moves too slowly in removing the unsafe product from the market," Bush said.
The problems of the past year, like pet food ingredients spiked with the chemical melamine, won't necessarily go away once the plans are put in place, FDA commissioner Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach said. But the government should be able to better respond to eliminate or mitigate any threat when it does crop up, he said.
"Will there still be potential problems, where people who intend to do harm or by other circumstances something slips slip through? Yes, that's still going to be a possibility. That's why we're stressing response," von Eschenbach said of the FDA's food protection plan, which in large part revives a 2003 agency plan that has languished in draft form.
Government seals of safety could soon become regular fixtures on imported foods at risk for contamination, such as farmed fish, and on toys and other consumer products.
Under separate safety plans detailed by the Bush administration Tuesday, safety certification would be required for imported foods at risk. Foreign makers of toys and other common consumer products, too, could seek voluntary certification that they meet U.S. product safety standards in exchange for expedited entry into this country.
[....]
The administration sees the proposed certification program - likened to a seal of approval - for companies with a proven track record for meeting safety standards as a powerful tool, since it could make certified suppliers more attractive to big retailers.
"Blandly calling for 'enhanced cooperation' between FDA, USDA and other agencies is unlikely to bring about the same kind of efficiency that a single strong food safety agency would," said Sarah Klein, a food safety attorney at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
[....]
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said the president's package "leaves consumers in the dark and continues the hodgepodge of federal oversight."
Schumer said the FDA and CPSC need more money to carry out their jobs, consumers need quick and accessible food and product safety information and better oversight is needed.
Indeed, it remains to be seen how much the plans will cost, Leavitt and other administration officials said.
More money for the FDA will be "critical" if the food protection plan is to work, said Cal Dooley, president and chief executive officer of the Grocery Manufacturers Association/Food Products Association.
"We will have very limited success in changing the level of safety of our food supply if we do not see additional resources provided to FDA," Dooley said.
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