Dogged Blog

Thirty percent of the top ten stories shared on Facebook were about animals

From Schools.com as reported by PRDaily, an infographic showing that of the top ten stories shared on Facebook in 2011, three were about animals:

Still think animal journalism is just fluff and filler? I'd argue it's at the heart of how a very large chunk of the population relates to news, politics, social change, current events, and their personal lives.

Maybe this will mean PR people are going to stop sending me so many releases about new puppy purses and focus on the authentic role animals play in our lives. Hey, I can dream, right?

Failing shelters dodge blame. News at 11.

Take a look at these two photos of puppies in an animal shelter. Which photo would you think would be more effective in getting homes for those pups?

I was giving some assistance to a rescue group in another state that was dealing with a particularly difficult rescue situation. After looking over their proposed adoption listings, complete with all the details of their tragic story and gory photographs of the hellish animal control facility they'd been rescued from, I told them their approach, and in particular those photos, were not going to be effective in marketing those pets for adoption.

I got back a blistering tirade over how I shouldn't "accuse" or "blame" the shelter (words I never used, by the way), but rather blame the people who "forced" the shelter to treat animals this way because they wouldn't spay and neuter or be responsible.

Now, my point was about marketing, not shelter reform, but it was clear I hit a nerve. And guess what, rescue person? You hit one right back -- the one where I'm so sick and tired of this blame-shifting that I'm ready to scream.

No one is forcing anyone to kill or mistreat animals, not in your state nor any other. (In fact, I'm not sure you understand the meaning of the word "force." The people who work in the shelter in question do not have a gun held to their heads.) They may be killing these animals, and caring for them so badly, because they believe they have no choice, but they're wrong. And in this day and age, with progressive and proven sheltering practices spreading across the continent and even beyond, to hide behind that tired old whine is even less believable than it ever was.

If people mired in this old-school, ineffective, failed paradigm would step out of it for a few minutes, they'd realize how bad they're making themselves look every time they, always predictably, trot it out. "It's not our fault we do what we do," they say. "It's all the bad people! Blame them! We're just helpless victims!"

You people really need some new material.

My suggestion that you get new photos will help get those pets into homes. Think about that while you continue to enable your community's filthy high-kill shelter to fail the animals inside its walls.

Then go get a freaking camera. Because after all, everyone wants to adopt puppies who are smeared with feces and looking out through rusty cage bars, right?

Photo on left from Nevada  Humane Society presentation on increasing pet adoptions. Photo on right courtesy of Nathan Winograd.

Why Greyhounds wear pajamas

For those who think I make up the stories about how my Greyhounds shiver if they sleep without their pajamas... even WITH her jammies, Stella is still mostly buried in blankets and pillows. And no, I didn't do this. She did it all on her own.

Speak up before the Internet dies

Not blogging today. This is why.

Could Scruffy's Law have saved Lucy the Lab?

The Kansas Humane Society took about ten minutes to kill a young, healthy Lab named Lucy after her owner surrendered her -- just enough time for the owner to break down in the parking lot, change her mind, and come back in to get her back. From Yes Biscuit:

Ms. Nott went to her car in the pound’s parking lot and called her sister, sobbing.  Together, they decided that Ms. Nott should go back and get Lucy and they would “figure something out”.  But when she returned to the pound’s lobby, she learned the Kansas Humane Society had already deemed Lucy unadoptable – due to the description of the inappropriate chewing behaviors – and had killed her.

Their defense of this turbo-charged timeline is that her behavior problem -- excessive chewing and destructive behavior when alone -- would have precluded her from being adopted, and they wanted to spare her the stress of being in the shelter by killing her.

The ASPCA, a national organization that runs a shelter in New York City, weighed in, saying that the onus of Lucy's death is really on her owner, who should have known better than to have brought her to an "open-admission" shelter -- by which they mean "kill shelter," since there are plenty of open-admission shelters that would not have killed Lucy or a dog like her.

Now, maybe Lucy's owner really sucked. I don't know. Mostly I find that people who sob in the parking lot after surrendering their dog, and who surrender her with her toys, treats, brush and special food, as Lucy's owner did, don't actually suck. They're just at the end of their personal resources.

But let's say she sucks. Let me tell you why this is still the fault of the Kansas Humane Society and its defender, the ASPCA.

Lucy the Lab was not owned by someone who raised money by saying they were there to help animals. She did not  have the word "Humane" in her name, nor the phrase "Prevention of Cruelty to Animals." She was not a non-profit charitable organization. She did not have as her stated mission the protection of pets.

Lucy's owner told the Wichita Eagle:

I think the public needs to know what really goes on out there.... It is the Humane Society, after all. Whatever happened yesterday was not humane.

Animal shelters exist because some pet owners suck, and because even those who don't suck get into situations where they can't keep their pets. Blaming that predictable, eternal reality (being "overburdened," in the ASPCA's words) for an organization killing healthy young animals because they don't know what else to do with them is not just a failure of compassion and morality, it is a form of deceit being perpetrated on every person who donates a dollar to those organizations.

The Kansas Humane Society should not have accepted Lucy if they were going to kill her.

The ASPCA should not have defended them for doing so.

Perhaps Lucy's owner should have had her change of heart ten minutes earlier. Since she's not out there running ads on late night TV asking me to send her money to take care of "dogs like Lucy," that's between her and her conscience.

Scruffy's Law wouldn't necessarily have saved Lucy's life. But it would probably have turned down the flow of revenue to the Kansas "shelter" by forcing them to remove the word "humane" from their name as long as they were killing young healthy dogs like Lucy. Perhaps that threat would have been enough to push them to comply with the requirement that they have to earn that designation by saving at least 90 percent of the pets who come in their doors.

Read more about Scruffy and Scruffy's law here. And don't donate to organizations that use the words "humane," "shelter," or "prevention of cruelty to animals" unless they've earned them.