Dogged Blog

Michael Vick to be released to house arrest

From ESPN, news that convicted dog killer Michael Vick will be finishing out his sentence in the comfort of his own home:

Vick is serving a 23-month sentence at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan., after pleading guilty to bankrolling a dogfighting operation at a home he owned in eastern Virginia's Surry County. He also admitted to participating in the killing of several underperforming dogs.



Vick's lawyers have said they expected him to be moved any day into a halfway house in Newport News. But because of a lack of space, Vick will be released instead to his home in nearby Hampton at some point on or after May 21, said the official, who has knowledge of the case but requested anonymity because the individual was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

He's also declaring bankruptcy... or at least, he's been trying to. And of course, his team, the Atlanta Falcons, has been trying to trade him for a couple of weeks.



The sports world is dividing into opposing camps on what his future should be. Some, like this guy, figure nothing you do to a dog really matters, and he needs a second chance:

Crime is crime and I’m definitely not absolving crime, but isn’t one human life more important than every single animal on the planet? This might be an unpopular belief to be critical in this instance (like I care), but there are some folk out there who don’t think so. What’s that about? Kinda crazy right? Let me put it this way, if I had a family dog in my household for years and I had to make a decision whether to save it or a total stranger, I guess I’ll be making a trip to the pet store. Of course I would be sad, but isn’t there a difference? Is this illogical?



I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say that while some cats like Bernie Maddoff chill in Manhattan condos, Mike was serving time. He was contrite during that very humbling press conference, so it’s time to ease back and let the man live. He killed no one but you would think he ran through Virginia like Nat and slashed folks on outta here. The press coverage was absolutely sickening. Some view dog fighting as a horrible crime, but it never warranted the coverage it received no matter what some of you say.

Others, like Sports Illustrated editor Jim Gorant, see it differently; those people see it from the point of view of what Vick did to his dogs:

(It) began in 2001, about the same time Vick started cashing NFL paychecks and bought a 15-acre plot of land at 1915 Moonlight Road in Smithville, Va. The property sits across from a Baptist church. A bright green lawn surrounds a white brick house that has a pool and a basketball court in the backyard and is bordered by a white picket fence. When Vick bought the land, the house didn't exist and wouldn't be built for a few years. It wasn't a priority. The Atlanta Falcons' new quarterback never intended to live there.



Beyond the house, shrouded by trees, were five sheds painted black from top to bottom, including the windows and doors. Past them were scattered wire cages and wood doghouses. Farther still, where the trees got thicker, two partly buried car axles protruded from the ground. This was the home of Bad Newz Kennels, the dogfighting operation that Vick and three of his buddies started a year after Vick became the first pick of the 2001 NFL draft. When local and state authorities busted the operation in April 2007, 51 pit bulls were seized, Jasmine among them.



By most estimates Jasmine is around four years old, which means she was most likely born into Bad Newz, and her life there fit the kennel's name. A few of the dogs, probably pets, were kept in one of the sheds. The fighters and a handful of dogs that Bad Newz housed for other people lived in the outdoor kennels. The rest -- dogs that were too young to fight, were used for breeding or were kept as bait dogs for the fighters to practice on -- were chained to the car axles in the woods.



The water in the bowls was speckled with algae. Females were strapped into a "rape stand" so the dogs could breed without injuring each other. Some of the sheds held syringes and other medical supplies, and training equipment such as treadmills and spring bars (from which dogs hung, teeth clamped on rubber rings, to strengthen their jaws). The biggest shed had a fighting pit, once covered by a bloodstained carpet that was found in the woods.



According to court documents, from time to time Vick and his cohorts "rolled" the dogs: put them in the pit for short battles to see which ones had the right stuff. Those that fought got affection, food, vitamins and training sessions. The ones that showed no taste for blood were killed -- by gunshot, electrocution, drowning, hanging or, in at least one case, being repeatedly slammed against the ground.



It's impossible to say what Jasmine saw while circling the axles deep in the woods, but dogs can hear a tick yawn at 50 yards. The sounds of the fights and the executions undoubtedly filtered through the trees.

Me, I'm no sports fan, but the side I'm on in is pretty clear: I don't give a damn about Vick's second chance. How about you?



Photo of rescued Vick dog Jonny Justice, courtesy of BAD RAP.

" A " for effort... but otherwise, a housebreaking fail

A friend who recently lost her beloved dog called me today, and we moved, as often happens, from sad stories of long-gone dogs to laughing at the things those same animals did while they were alive.



We started out discussing whether or not we let our other dogs see and sniff the body of a dog who has died, which might sound a bit macabre to some but has actually led to some heartwarming moments and, we both think, better grief processing on the part of the surviving dogs.



That reminded me of one of my favorite stories about such a moment, when my hyper little cattle dog/Chessie mix, Scarlett, first sniffed and then walked on the body of my mom's dog Doughal.



"That has to be the most perfect Scarlett thing to do, ever," my friend said, laughing.



I agreed, as anyone who knew Scarlett would have to. But it reminded me of a very different kind of moment during the life of my deerhound Bran.



Like nearly every deerhound I've ever owned, Bran hated going out in the rain. (And yes, I have explained to them that it rains around 300 days a year in Scotland. They usually reply with something about castles and serfs and royal dog of Scotland, and continue to hold me personally responsible for all things meteorological.)



When we lived in the country I had a dog door to a safely fenced area, and my dogs had access to it through a dog door in my living room wall. I lived in the area with the second highest rainfall of any place in California, and one day, during a particularly bad storm, the wind was blowing, the rain was coming down in sheets, and my dogs (except, actually, Scarlett) were lying around letting their bladders stretch and swell and refusing to go outside.



Finally, Bran had enough. He stood up and marched bravely to the dog door, stuck his head outside, walked a foot or so into the deluge, and stopped.



His head and shoulders were in the storm. His back was covered by the flap of the dog door. His hindquarters were still inside my living room. In his mind, however, he was outside, and so he peed.



Not a minor pee, either; this had been building since the night before.



And what did I do while my hardwood floors were being soaked with dog urine? Did I shove my dog out into the rain and minimize the damage?



I might have, if I hadn't been first stunned and then laughing so hard I almost peed myself.



Remind me to tell you about the time I had to carry an umbrella out into the yard and hold it over my deerhound Lillie before she'd potty for the first time in two days.

Gina's dad is gone

I just heard from Gina that her father passed away just now:

Anthony J. "Nino" Spatafore, May 6, 1933 -- Feb. 25, 2009

I know how much the concern so many of you have expressed as she and her family have gone through this time has meant to her. She says she won't be around much for the next few days, but don't think for a minute that means she isn't feeling your thoughts and kindness -- she is.

And to Gina from all of us here at Pet Connection, you're in our thoughts and hearts. I know you hate the mushy stuff so I'll just stop there.

Photo: Anthony J. "Nino" Spatafore. Publicity still, San Jose Red Sox, 1954 (Minor league team for Boston).

Best Friends reports: HSUS willing to reconsider on pit bull issue

H/T to EmilyS in the comments for news from Best Friends Animal Society that HSUS wants to talk about its pit bull policy:

The Humane Society of the United States on February 23 issued an interim policy recommending all dogs be evaluated as individuals, and is calling a meeting of leading animal welfare organizations concerning dogs victimized by dog fighting.



Wayne Pacelle, chief executive officer and president of the Humane Society of the United States, suggested the meeting of major stakeholders in Las Vegas to work through the associated issues. This meeting is in response to concerns expressed by Best Friends Animal Society in December 2008 regarding HSUS policies related to animals confiscated in dog-fighting busts.



Pacelle said the meeting, scheduled for April, will include the participation of national stakeholder organizations that deal with pit bulls. The meeting was in the planning stages before Superior Court Judge Ed Wilson Jr. ruled that 145 pit bulls, including approximately 70 puppies, confiscated from Wildside Kennels in Wilkes County, North Carolina, would be euthanized without evaluation to determine suitability for placement.



The new interim policy announced by the HSUS, pending the outcome of the meeting, recommends that local law enforcement and animal control evaluate such dogs as individuals rather than as a category before any decision is made regarding their future.



“We expect government, corporations, and individuals to constantly re-evaluate how they deal with animal issues,” Pacelle said. “Likewise, we regularly review our own policies and procedures here at HSUS, and we think it is important to talk with professional colleagues in the movement to examine issues related to the disposition of fighting dogs.



“I am pleased to discuss these issues with personnel from Best Friends and other organizations interested in the welfare of pit bulls.”

Although this sounds good, it's a little misleading. This isn't a summit called in response to the killing of 145 pit bulls in Wilkes County, North Carolina, but a meeting proposed to be held during an event that happens every year, the HSUS Animal Care Expo, which this year takes place April 6-9 in Las Vegas. Still, a "new interim policy... (that) recommends that local law enforcement and animal control evaluate such dogs as individuals rather than as a category" before deciding their fate is a definite step in the right direction.



Many of the commenters at Best Friends' website are less than impressed, however. Nicole, on the second page of the comments, wrote:

Sadly, one cannot trust statements from the HSUS. They change their story all the time.



John Goodwin of HSUS said the following in a recent e-mail message: “Those particular fighting dogs in Wilkes County, NC were very, very different than the Vick dogs. Whereas Michael Vick was a pro football player that fought dogs as a hobby, the breeder of these dogs was a globally recognized professional dogfighter. Vick was not a good breeder, and he lost most of his fights. His dogs were a poor representation of true fighting dogs.” However Wayne Pacelle of HSUS said exactly the opposite to The New York Times about the Michael Vick dogs at the time they were seized: “Officials from our organization have examined some of these dogs and, generally speaking, they are some of the most aggressively trained pit bulls in the country,” Wayne Pacelle, the president and chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States, said in a telephone interview Tuesday.”



If HSUS is allowed to assess a dog, they will say it is not possible to rehabilitate it, and send it to its death.



HSUS has NO experience, NONE, in rescuing fighting pit bulls, or any dogs for that matter. They must no be allowed to assess any dog. Only outside organizations with experience in this area must assess the dogs. The pressure needs to be kept on HSUS.

Best Friends sees it in a much more positive light:

Julie Castle, director of Community Programs and Services for Best Friends said, “There had been more than enough airing of feelings and outrage that the dogs were not evaluated prior to being summarily euthanized. It was time to hit the reset button on this in order to move things forward in a constructive way. Mr. Pacelle was open and receptive to what we had to say and we are looking forward to our meetings in April.”

Even if Nicole is right, if what HSUS needs is pressure from their donor base, the general public, pit bull advocates, bloggers, animal lovers or other animal welfare organizations to start doing the right thing for these much-maligned dogs, well, I wouldn't worry too much about the future. There seems to be an awful lot of it out there.



Read the whole story here.



Photo of Meryl, one of the Vick dogs rescued and given sanctuary by Best Friends Animal Society.

Me and the markets

I own no stocks or bonds, and have no retirement account. I live in a house that one might say I "own," if one were to overlook the fact that I currently have zero equity in said house, and am paying somewhere around half my monthly income to be allowed to live in it.

A year and a half ago, I had substantial equity in this home, not the result of appreciation but reflecting the 20 percent down payment I made when I bought it a little more than two years ago. Sadly, that all vanished in the economic collapse of recent months, and at the moment, I'm underwater on my mortgage for the first time in my life.

I'm 49 years old, and have been in the San Francisco Bay Area real estate market since I was 21 years old, before real estate prices went insane here. Every home I've purchased has gone up in value during the years I lived in it, sometimes as much as 100 percent. I've bought up, down, and horizontally at different times, but have never bought a house the payment on which I couldn't afford, never financed at more than 80 percent of the value of my home and often much less, and never did any of the "irresponsible" things a hundred mortgage brokers tried to convince me to do.

And yet right now, today, if I lost my income, I'd lose everything I have in the world. I can't sell my house to get out of this dangerous position, because I owe more on it than it's worth.

I can't re-finance into a better interest rate (I'm paying 6.75 percent, but rates right now are more like 5.25 percent for a fixed), even though it would reduce my monthly payment by several hundred dollars to do so, because I no longer have any equity.

And I probably won't be able to qualify for the new mortgage assistance program even though it lets you re-fi to 105 percent of your home's current value, because it also restricts you to 31-38 percent of your income in mortgage payments, and in San Francisco, that's simply unrealistic. Nearly everyone here pays more like half their income in housing costs, because this is one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country.

It's also my hometown. I was born here and this is where my family is. And while two years ago I could honestly say none of my income was tied to my location, now quite a bit of it is.

So, what can I do? If I sell this house and move somewhere less expensive, I'll be left with nothing, and I'll never get back into the real estate market here, nor will I have anything on which to retire.

I will leave my mother, who is elderly and has cancer. I'll no longer live near my brothers and their families, which means I won't see my nephews grow up. They won't know me, and I won't know them.

And I'll lose income, although not all of it.

To make all this worse, quite a bit of my income is coming from the newspaper business, which is not what I'd call in a growth phase right now.

/sarcastic understatement

There's nothing profound about this post. In some ways, these are the breaks, and I guess if I can just hold on to this house for the next 5 or 10 years, I'll be more or less okay after that.

But there's no way out of this place I'm in. In the short term, I can't win, I can't break even, and I can't quit the game.

And you know what's left.

Old dogs and business trips: Out of sight, but never out of mind

My dogs are old, and so is my mom. And those two facts have made my life very complicated lately.



I only have two dogs, the fewest I've had in more than two decades. At one time, my mom, pictured at right in 1991, and I had 11 dogs between us -- dogs we walked, and fed a homemade diet, and took damn good care of, for years. But that was a long time ago, when my mother had a lot more energy and strength than she has today.



Today, she's survived two bouts with cancer in the last year, and doesn't even have the strength anymore to walk the dogs across the street to the park. Of course, they're my dogs, so that doesn't matter; I walk them myself. But it does mean that going out of town for even a single night is a huge undertaking now.



I have to make all the dogs' meals, and leave them in covered bowls in the refrigerator, or freezer if I'm going for more than a few nights. I have to hire a dog walker, and given Kyrie's fearful reaction to other dogs when she's on a leash, I'm pretty picky about who I'll let walk her. When I can't get either of the two people I trust, I have to ask my younger brother -- who used to have a deerhound of his own -- to walk them on his way to work and his way home every day I'm gone.



If I'm going for a lengthy trip, I've resorted to begging friends to come stay at the house, so my mom doesn't have to disrupt her life too much.



If my dogs were young themselves, it wouldn't be such a problem. But my back stairs are too steep now for Rebel; he can't get down to my yard anymore, and he can't just trot down them to bark at my mom's apartment door and visit grandma for a little while.



Kyrie's still agile, even though she's the same age as Rebel; Borzois are "younger" at the same age than deerhounds. But she's had several bouts of MRSI now, as everyone who reads this blog knows, and whoever I leave her with has to be able to recognize a flare-up, or any other health problem, and get her to the vet. The last time I went away for a few days, the daughter and son-in-law of a friend came and stayed. They're dog people, which is a good thing, as Kyrie had a reaction to the antibiotic she was on and flooded all over the bed. They cheerfully washed all the bedding and soaked the mattress in Nature's Miracle. I bought them dinner at a fancy restaurant; I figured it was the least I could do.



I told Gina that I was going to blog something "light" about my trip to Las Vegas and how hard it was to leave the dogs, but in re-reading this, of course I see it's far from light.



It's the bittersweet downside of the hill, and I don't really want to be away from Rebel and Kyrie, or my mother, these days. If there's one tiny sliver of silver lining on the economic collapse for me, it's that nearly all my business travel for the next few months has been canceled, and I don't have to worry about finding pet sitters and bagging up their meals, or worrying one of them will need to go to the vet or have diarrhea in the middle of the night, and my mom not be able to deal with it.



Someone wrote me for advice about her dog's MRSI the other day, and after I told her how I was dealing with it, she said, "What do you do if you go away?"



The answer is just this: I worry. I spent the entire 26 hours I was on my way to, or in, Las Vegas worrying. Now, I hate Las Vegas with the burning fire of a thousand suns, so that was part of it. And I was staying -- sadly -- at Harrah's, which was hellishly noisy, and that probably explained more than anything else why I got exactly three hours of sleep. But I lay awake worrying a good part of the night, too.



What do you do when you have old pets, or pets with health problems? Who do you trust to care for them? Do you board them, or have someone stay at the house, or just have someone come in a couple of times a day?



And one more question: how do you turn back the clock, for old moms and old dogs alike?

Late night gratuitous pibble blogging

Because everyone knows that pit bulls are vicious and can never be trusted with other pets.

Saturday night chat with avian vet Dr. Brian Speer and Gina Spadafori!

Gina's having a reunion with her "Birds for Dummies" co-author Brian Speer, DVM, ABVP(av), ECAMS, and it's on PetHobbyist.com as part of its 11th Annual Chat Month!



Dr. Speer is one of the country's few board-certified avian specialists, and has been a guest on PetHobbyist.com three times before -- he's one of our most-requested repeat guests.



So if you have birds or questions about their health, including nutrition, husbandry, and veterinary care, please come join Gina and Dr. Speer at 9 PM Eastern/6 PM Pacific Time in the Aviary chat room on PetHobbyist.com.



The complete schedule for the rest of the month, plus links to transcripts as they're available, is here.

HSUS: We must kill this pit bull to save it

I want to propose a new law: No pit bull or other dog bred or conditioned for dog fighting can be killed without a behavioral and medical evaluation by a qualified person or organization experienced with the rehabilitation of these kinds of dogs. If such qualified person or organization deems the dog to be treatable, he or she must be made available to a qualified rehabilitation or sanctuary organization for care, treatment, rehoming/sanctuary. Only if the dog is deemed to be untreatable, or no such group can/will take the dog, can he or she be killed.

I'm normally against legislative "fixes," but I'm beyond done with the outdated, inhumane, and wrong-headed policy of slaughtering all dogs "saved" from dog fighting situations -- down to puppies born after the bust, puppies taken away from their foster homes to be killed, as was just done in Wilkes County, North Carolina to 145 dogs "saved" from a fighting ring.

And our friends at the Humane Society of the United States? I'm done with you, too, until you rescind your stated support for the slaughter of these dogs. It's been proven with thousands of dogs already, most famously with Michael Vick's rehabbed fighters, that these dogs can and must be evaluated individually, and you will have no credibility with me or anyone else with two functioning brain cells and a drop of compassion until you say: We thought we were right, but we were wrong. Pit bulls deserve a chance, like any other dog.

Either that, or "humane" clearly does not mean what I always thought it did.

More here, from Gina Spadafori at Pet Connection, who also links to some prime rantage on the subject from Nathan Winograd, as well as from Best Friends Animal Society (who have given lifetime sanctuary to some of the Vick pit bulls),  and the brave, good folks at BAD RAP -- from whom I snagged that photo of one of the vicious irredeemable fighting dogs slaughtered in Wilkes County.

Bizarre dreams: I haz them!

I had the strangest dream last night. In it, I was supposed to meet Renee O'Connor to do an interview with her. She asked me to meet her at a salon/day spa, so I did. She was having her hair colored, and the hairdresser didn't know how to touch up the roots and hairline properly, and was leaving big patches of untinted hair all over the place.

Then my mother came in to get a facial, and a lady was there who had been waiting two hours already and was wondering how much longer it would be.

I ended up doing Renee's hair color myself, and I'm not sure what happened to my mom. The dream morphed into some strange thing about an opposum with some kind of horrible skin disease living in my garage.

I have serious doubts about my sanity, not so much because of that dream, but because I just told everyone about it.