Dogged Blog

Honest Dog: What do ‘greedy vet’ reviews on Yelp tell you?

Decision made: I'm going to keep this as my main blog, add a category specficially for writing about social media and communications for shelters, rescue groups, and animal welfare organizations, and blog about pet issues on HonestDog while still blogging here about my own experiences with dogs, and linking to stuff I write elsewhere like I used to do before life distracted me.

And with that, my most recent post on Honest Dog:

‘Greedy vet’ reviews on Yelp: What do they mean?

Thanks to everyone for your input!

Why can't we bring dogs into cafes like they do in other countries?

A dog with her people at a British pub, re-pinned from Dr. Marty Becker's Pinterest. I so much want to live in a place where you can just hang out in a cafe with your nice dog. So civilized!

Occupy Animal Control: It’s time for civil disobedience in the No-Kill Movement

Shelter reform advocates need to take a lesson from one of the most successful protest movements in the last two decades, and occupy animal control.

All over the country, bad shelters and animal control facilities are killing most or nearly all homeless pets that come in their doors. A shocking number are failing to provide even basic health care or, in many cases, food and water, to those pets.

What if those of us in those communities — Detroit, New York, Fresno, Memphis, and all the rest — stopped arguing on blogs and holding poster board picket signs and forming Facebook groups and writing ten-page impassioned pleas to reporters, and instead started occupying and mic-checking animal control board meetings, press conferences, and government agency offices, and performing civil disobedience at animal control facilities and high-kill “shelters”?

Read more...

How PETA is betraying vegans and the animal rights movement

The annual PETA "shelter" death report is out again. Thanks to the Commonwealth of Virginia for requiring this transparency, and making the world aware that PETA has no commitment to animal life, just publicity and donations. Why is anyone still listening to PETA?

I blogged about it over on Honest Dog. Check it out.

Why all your special modern pet-hair targeting vacuum cleaners suck

Look, a vacuum cleaner just shouldn't be this complicated.

A few months ago, I purchased a Panasonic JetSpin Cyclone based on a review I read on the old Pet Connection. I knew the Dyson Animal was supposed to be the pinnacle machine for pet owners, but $500 for a vacuum cleaner? Just no. But the Cyclone had good reviews on Amazon as well as the one on Pet Connection and was a fraction of the price, so I bought it.

The reviews may be accurate, but I have to assume the people who wrote them grew up in a different era than I did. Every vacuum I've ever used has worked just fine in picking up dog hair, cat hair, and whatever else was on my rugs. I haven't experienced all these clogs and suction-failures the TV ads wax dire over, and all I ever had to do was change the bag every few uses and, once or twice in the lifetime of the vacuum (which would run into decades) change a belt.

My new vacuum was so freaking complicated that I had to get out the instruction manual just to emtpy it. It has multiple filters and I can't even figure out how to get half the attachments off the machine or onto the wand. Hell, I don't even understand how the wand works at all. I hate it so much I'm giving it away, and I went to Amazon and ordered an old-fashioned bagged upright Hoover with hundreds of rave reviews that cost even less than the Cyclone (around $125).

Keep your stupid high tech vacuums and their bagless, filtered, super-magical special pet hair sucking technology. I'm going back to the kind of vacuums that had a one-page instruction manual. And if you want the Cyclone, it's yours.

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.

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.

 

Scruffy's Law: Making animal organizations tell the truth

Here's a law I can get behind.

That's because it's not an unfunded mandate, and it's not micro-management. It's just truth in advertising.

We need to pass a law that animal organizations that kill more than 10 percent of the animals that come in their doors may not use the words "humane," "shelter," or "prevention of cruelty" in their names.

I suggest we call it "Scruffy's Law," after the bottle-fed kitten killed by the Arizona "Humane" Society the other day, after they refused to provide emergency medical care for a cut that needed stitches unless her owner signed her over to them -- even though his mother was ready and able to pay for the care immediately with a credit card over the phone. From Yes Biscuit:

A 49 year old Phoenix man named Daniel Dockery bottle fed a kitten from birth whom he named Scruffy.  He raised enough money to get her spayed when she was old enough, fed her tuna, and slept next to her on the pillow at night.  Mr. Dockery credits Scruffy with helping him to remain sober for one year after battling a lifelong addiction illness.

Earlier this month, 9 month old Scruffy apparently cut herself on fencing and Mr. Dockery took her to the Arizona Humane Society for treatment.  Unable to come up with $400 on the spot, Mr. Dockery asked if the facility would accept his mother’s credit card by phone (she lives in MI) or be willing to accept payment the next day after his mother wired him the cash.  The Arizona Humane Society would do neither.  In fact, they reportedly advised Mr. Dockery that the only way for Scruffy to receive treatment was for him to sign over ownership.  He reluctantly complied.

For the next 3 weeks, Mr. Dockery searched area shelters and repeatedly asked staff about Scruffy.  He kept getting the runaround.  Finally this week, Mr. Dockery learned that Scruffy had been killed shortly after he signed ownership over to the Arizona Humane Society...

Their explanation? They lacked the resources to treat Scruffy, because they took in too many animals that day.

Why did they take her, then? Beats the hell out of me, and anyone else with a lick of sense or ounce of compassion. Scruffy had an owner -- an owner apparently quite willing to suffer for the sake of his pet, and a family member willing to pay for her care. 

In what universe did this make sense?

Only in a universe where an organization like this gets to market itself with the word "humane" in its name.

It's a simple fix, folks. A consumer protection law that will cost almost nothing, just some signs and new business cards. Heck, it will create jobs! Talk about a win-win!

And if they don't want to change their name, that's a simple fix, too. It's called the No Kill Equation. All the cool kids are doing it!

What do you say: Are you on board with Scruffy's Law?

A Greyhound Christmas

Stella on Christmas night, saying, "What do you mean, Santa's not coming again tomorrow?"

Rawley, the little varmint, hid not just his new toy in the woods, but hers, too. I can't find either of them. He didn't have enough time to bury them... they've got to be out there somewhere...

The No-Kill Movement: We are the 71 percent

We can argue all we want about what "no-kill" really means, whether it's about shelters or communities. Whether it's impossible or provably possible. About whether it's saving 90 percent or 98 percent or some strange and complicated definition involving highly subjective concepts like "adoptable."

What we can't argue about is this: The overwhelming majority of Americans -- 71 percent -- believe that shelters should not be allowed to kill any homeless pets unless they are too sick to be saved or too aggressive to be kept as pets.

That's what an Associated Press-Petside poll conducted by GfK Roper found in October when it asked 1,118 people in 50 states to identify which of two statements matched their own view.

Seventy-one percent said they believed  "Animal shelters should only be allowed to euthanize animals when they are too sick to be treated or too aggressive to be adopted."

Only 25 percent believed "Sometimes animal shelters should be allowed to euthanize animals as a necessary way of controlling the population of animals."

I know the history of animal sheltering in this country. I know how it came about that those who should have been tasked with sheltering, caring for, and showing compassion to homeless pets became their biggest killers.

But I also know the day when society found that acceptable is over. Completely and utterly over. Outdated, unwanted, increasingly unthinkable. Seventy-one percent of Americans know it, too. And those who insist it's impossible have now officially joined the ranks of those who never thought we'd have openly gay soliders or a black president.

In the battle for hearts and minds of nearly three-quarters of the people who live in this nation, no-kill won.