Dogged Blog

Sunday in the Park with the Religious Right

So last night I was watching Jon Stewart (what, you thought just because I tell other people to get lives, I'm going to go out and get one myself?), and busted a gut at his review of Sunday in the Park with the Religious Right, or whatever they called their little "We Shall Overcome" gathering.

According to Phyllis Schlafly, the biggest threat to America is "out of control judges." Stewart concurred, saying:

The biggest threat to America is our out of control judges.  Specifically 4th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Osama Bin Laden.

The theme of this little gripe-fest was , Stewart tells us, "Persecution." Of THEM, rather amazingly. As demonstrated by a  clip of Family Research Council president Tony Perkins saying:

We do not claim the right to speak for every American, but we do claim the right to speak.

Responded Stewart:

Yeah! Take THAT, non-existent entity denying him that right! Bet you'd feel pretty stupid ... if you existed ... which you don't.

Then he had Dem-in-name-only Senator Zell Miller "bring us home":

Isn't it strange that a government requires a no smoking sign around gas pumps, to remind us of that danger, but then thinks we don't need to be reminded of the danger of living a sinful life?

Not so much, in Stewart's view:

You know, I gotta say I think that's the way it should be. No smoking signs by gas stations, no religion in the public square. The government should keep us from being engulfed in f lames ON EARTH. And that's pretty much it.

But today it doesn't seem quite so funny. Via Ol' Cranky:

Last May, Indiana dad & practicing Wiccan Thomas Jones, Jr. filed an appeal to be allowed to expose his son to his own religion. Jones had preciously been ordered not to expose his child to "non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals" by the Marion County Indiana judge who granted Jones a divorce from the child's mother, Tammy Bristol. Jones and Bristol, also a practicing Wiccan, had been barred from exposing their 9-year old son to their mutual religion by Marion Superior Court Chief Justice Cale J. Bradford who made the ruling because the boy was enrolled in a local Catholic school and Bradford felt the best way to deal with the inconsistency between the two religions was for the child to continue his Christian education without the pesky interference of his Pagan parents.

Fortunately, the ruling was overturned. I say fortunately both because as a non-Christian, the whole thing makes my frigging skin crawl, and also because this IS America, right? I mean... right?

The Thing I Hate About Reviewing Books

First off, I want to mention that those of you who have been nagging me about how long it's been since I blogged need to get lives. You know who you are.

On the other hand, I was seriously annoyed when Kathy Flake went to Ireland and didn't blog the whole time she was gone, and have been tapping my foot in irritation at Planet Raw Milk's lack of entries since late July, and really had very dark thoughts about the week that passed without anything new over on Dogma, so I'm as bad as anyone else, I guess. I just didn't actually SCOLD them about it. Well, until  now.

Back when I first started writing for magazines and newspapers, I was really excited at the trickle of review copies of books I would get. When I was running the pet care area for AOL, that trickle became a river... but I still liked it. I would doggedly plow through pretty much every book I was sent, and always managed to find a nice word to say about everything.

What the heck is the point of a book review if the person writing it isn't honest?

So I changed my policy and started only reviewing books I liked. (Which is a shame, because I have a gift for ripping things to shreds.)

And that leads me to the current state of affairs as regards reviewing books.

I get so many books now that I couldn't possibly read them all. I ship a fair amount of them out to my staff over at PetHobbyist.com, because we recently started a pet book newsletter and have a section in our bookstore for reviews. It eases my guilt a bit.

But the worst, the absolute WORST, is when friends or acquaintances send me copies of their books to review. As long as I have nothing bad to say about the book at all, everything is fine. But let's face it, there aren't that many books that I have NOTHING bad to say about. One book I got from an acquaintance not too long ago was pretty good, but it had a sub-theme in it that made me want to tear my hair out and go beat the author up. The sub-theme had nothing to do with the main point of the book (in fact, IMO it was a total distraction and should have been left out, and not just because it annoyed the hell out of me), and I could easily have dismissed it with a single sentence and reviewed the book pretty favorably.

So, what's hanging me up? I can't review the book without expressing my view on the sub-theme, but I also can't bring myself to hurt the author's feelings. So the book sits there, read but unreviewed, while no doubt the author is wondering... is she going to review it? Did she get it? Did she hate it? Should I ask her?

And I sit here hoping against hope that he never, ever does.

Dogs Are Better Than Politics, 2

I honestly wanted to write something about the Cindy Sheehan story today, because the right wing smear campaign against her made my mother cry and I don't forgive people who do that.

But even going out and reading the political blogs, a dog story drew me in and won't let me go.

Chris Clarke's blog is called Creek Running North and is the site of some truly incandescent writing. But I somehow missed that he has a dog, named Zeke, and that Zeke hasn't been doing too well lately. I am not, it seems, the only one to ever love a dog and look over my shoulder to see if death is catching up.

As Chris tells it in an earlier post about Zeke:

The problem with dogs is that they live just long enough that one day you can no longer remember your life without them.

Or imagine it.

IDiots

Always nice to start the day with a smile. Via Pharyngula, the theory of "Intelligent Design" explained, from the funny folks at the Neon Bubble:

In a nutshell (one designed exclusively for the Earth Range by Almighty God and not some cheap, evolved knock-off) I.D. proponents argue that sure there's a lot of evidence to support evolution and yes scientific models of the universe's creation do seem to bear out pretty well in experiments and okay natural selection does appear to explain the many varied and wondrous shapes that nature has produced over the countless millions and billions of years but maybe that's what we're supposed to think, huh, huh? I.D. supporters point out that life is really, really complex and can cause headaches if thought about too hard so doesn't Occam's Razor indicate that it's much more likely that an omnipotent and omniscient divinity thought "Wait! What about a little horse that swims underwater?"

What, you ask, is Intelligent Design and why don't I like it? You can find out what it is by clicking that link (and I have a reason for asking you to do that, too!), and why I don't like it is pretty simple: It offends my sense of rational thought.

How Stupid is That?

The recent cloning of an Afghan hound in Korea has set off a media feeding frenzy not on the scientific impact of cloning a dog, but on the choice of breed. The Afghan hound, you see, was rated by author Stanley Coren as the least intelligent of all dogs.

Via Gina Spadafori blogging at The Bark, Nature Blog talks about the relative intelligence of the sighthound breeds, and what canine intelligence really is, and how it might correctly be measured:

One of our sighthound group describes a cartoon in which a bespectacled scientist stands at the top of a cliff demanding that a recalcitrant Afghan "Jump!". Below the ground is littered with the corpses of Labs, collies, shepherds.

Given that I share my life and home with a whole pack of sighthounds, I can't help but be glad someone is talking about this. Sighthounds  aren't intelligent in the same  way my cattle dog mix Scarlett is, no. They aren't trainable the way my chow mix Colleen was trainable, either. But to dismiss sighthounds as unintelligent is absurd. They are clever, a little lazy, somewhat feline, not inclined to cooperate. But they, like the cats they can resemble, have figured out quite well how to have their cake and eat it too, how to live in the house, sleep on the couch, eat their owners out of house and home, and, unlike their cousins the herding, working, and sporting dogs,  not have to do a speck of work for it in their lives - and you have to ask, well... how stupid is THAT?

And Then They Die

Comcast decided I didn't need my internet service  for 24 hours, and neglected to tell their support staff there was an outage in this area. So when I called to find out what the problem was, I wasted an hour on the phone with a tech, trying to troubleshoot my connection. In a burst of frustration pulling my computer out to bypass my router in yet another  futile attempt to figure out the problem, I managed to dislodge my keyboard and mouse connectors, so was offline nearly all day yesterday.

Anyone who reads this blog will know I've been slammed onto my ass lately by the loss of both my cats and the osteosarcoma diagnosis of my dog Raven. And for the first time since Daphne and Samson died, suddenly I was alone with all the stuff inside my brain.

I first distracted myself with housework. Then I sorted out the recycling. Then I washed all the dog bed covers, cleaned the refrigerator, and rearranged the furniture in the living room. By then the stuff in my brain was screaming. It had taken me only about nine hours to notice that I was in agony and that maybe I needed to pay attention to that as it didn't appear it was going to go away if I ignored it. (There was a time it would have taken me the better part of two years.) So I went and sat.

I sat out on the deck and looked at the creek and listened to the birds. Raven and my cattle dog mix, Scarlett, came out and sat with me. And I looked down at Raven and thought... I want to grow old with this dog. And I started to cry, which I'm guessing was what my brain had been screaming at me to do.

And then I thought... what the HELL? Dogs don't live long enough to grow old with us. That has nothing to do with Raven having cancer. It's just reality. What was  I thinking, that a dog is going to "grow old" with me? And suddenly I figured it out.

A little more than 20 years ago, I started losing  friends to AIDS. I helped care for some of them, stayed to the bitter end with one, and repeatedly found myself in situations I had absolutely no idea how to cope with and was not prepared for at all. I would be alone with a friend who had gone blind and had AIDS dementia, while his lover and primary caregiver took a night off. A friend who couldn't even go to the bathroom by himself, or remember from one minute to the next why I was there. One night I was sitting with another friend watching TV when he began to have massive seizures caused by cytomegologvirus. I had to call an ambulance, but the seizures stopped and his lover came home before it arrived, and everyone made me feel like I'd over-reacted somehow. I was ... overwhelmed. Lost. I was only 23.

Back then, there were no support groups for AIDS caregivers. Most of us were consumed with guilt that we were feeling sorry for ourselves when other people were, you know, DYING. So we shoved it down, medicated with our substance of choice, and pretty much white-knuckled our way through as much as we could stand and then went screaming into the night when we couldn't take anymore.

Sure, I felt guilty as hell that I could walk away. Truth is, I still do sometimes. But in 1991, I ran away. I  moved out of San Francisco. I lost touch with nearly all my friends and withdrew from everyone and everything outside myself. I was traumatized and couldn't stand to be around people anymore.

And that's when my dog Colleen stuck her little red paw into the rapidly closing door of my heart. And I think that's when I decided that dogs were a lot safer than people.

But you see, I was wrong. Because just like my friends with AIDS, dogs die too soon. So do cats. Humans are programmed to have the people they love around for all or most of their lives. Sure, we lose our grandparents, and later our parents, but our wiring tells us that our partners and children and siblings will be around a human lifetime. And somehow I got that little bit of mental code all wrong. For me, "normal" was all my animals being around.

Just as one day I realized I had an unconscious assumption that when AIDS was finally beaten all my dead friends would come back, I have been unconsciously waiting for my life to be "normal" again, which I defined as having all my animals with me still... not just Colleen, but all the dogs and cats I've ever had, plus all the ones I have now. For as long as I live.

So forgive me for once more turning into one of the journal people. But I have to get my brain reprogrammed, and understand that dogs do not live forever, and I won't be growing old with any of them.  And none of my friends is ever coming back.

"Teach the Controversy" Bites Back

Mike the Mad Biologist may be willing to accept the teaching of "Intelligent Design" alongside the "theory" of evolution after all. If, that is, they actually DO "teach the controversy." And he has a few suggested questions for the school board. Here is number two, my personal fave:

(H)ow will the authorship of the Bible be treated?  Much religious scholarship has presented convincing arguments that the Bible is a composite, and have been redacted multiple times.  Will this view, backed by religious scholars, be presented?

And then there's number three, another winner:

I've been referring to "the Bible." However, different groups have different versions of the Bible. The most obvious difference occurs in the Old Testament, with one version based on the Hebrew version, and another based on the Septaguint, based on a Greek translation of the Hebrew version. This isn't a trivial distinction. For example, different religions have very different views on abortion, for example, based on differences in translation. Also, different groups have different versions of the Ten Commandments. Which version will we try to install in every public institution? Which version of the Bible will we use?

It's really nice to see a biologist being so reasonable over this difference of scientific opinion and offering so nobly to help. And his motivation is completely pure. After all, he concludes, "The religious right thinks 'liberals' are intolerable when we live in far away places.  Wait until we get inside the wire..."

Read the whole curriculum here.

What Missing Leg?

When oncologist Greg Ogilvie DVM talked to me about Raven's osteosarcoma, he told me there are only three things that matter when talking about cancer treatment of animals: Quality of life, quality of life, and quality of life.

I had Raven's left rear leg amputated for one reason only: To control her pain. It's worked brilliantly, and she has needed no further pain medication of any kind. And I was fully prepared to have to limit her activities, protect her from the other young dogs, make allowances for her. My mom and I had talked about different carts we might get to help her get up and down to the creek. HAH!

After about 7 weeks, Raven is trucking around this place like she was born with three legs. She can go up and down to the creek, runs and plays with the other young dogs, goes on the whole "young dog" walk with us twice a day (and still has the energy to chase Kyrie in the dog door at the end).

The other day she came to me while I was working here on my computer (actual work, the kind that pays her obscene vet bills, not this frivolous blogging) and whimpered, a signal we've worked out that shows she needs something. I of course leapt up and went with her, assuming she wanted to be let outside as our laundry room dog door is temporarily closed while we do some work there.

She marched over to the sofa where her brother Rebel was sleeping and looked from me to him and back again, obviously expecting me to cater to her every whim as I'd been doing since she was stricken with cancer in May, and boot him off her chosen nap spot.

I burst out laughing and told her to think again. She was definitely surprised but sheepishly got on the office sofa and made do with that.  Oh, the horror.

I'm becoming very annoying on the various email lists and forums I'm on begging people not to decide against amputation for their dogs. I've read about dogs with hip dysplasia doing well after amputations, about dogs who weigh over 200 pounds doing well, of dogs whose owners and vets swore they couldn't function on three legs who are out in the yard running and playing as their owners report the miracle to the other listmembers. Having seen what I've seen, I can't help being a little pushy about this.  However long it lasts, if what you want is quality of life, this is it.

Do you know the number one way that osteosarcoma kills dogs? It's not the tumor itself. It's not metastases to the lungs. It's not the spread of the cancer to other bones.

It's because their owners put them to sleep because they can't control the pain of the slowly-exploding bone.

Unless your dog already only HAS three legs (and I've heard of a border collie who gets by on two, but even I would draw the line there for a deerhound), odds are that they really will be fine after the amputation. Dr. Ogilvie told me that over 95 percent of his clients who opt for amputation would do it again. How many decisions do we make in our lives with those kind of odds?