pet connection

(Revised from original to add a letter to PETA from the Commonwealth of Virginia regarding the adoptability of animals taken in by the group, plus context of that letter with regards to the legal definition in that state of a “shelter.”)

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I’ve been a journalist almost 30 years, and yesterday’s letter from PETA wasn’t the first such and I’m sure it won’t be the last. When you’re an ethical, responsible journalist, the first thing you do when you get something like that is to ask yourself:

Was I wrong?

Was I fair?

If you can’t say “no” to the first and “yes” to the second, you need to fix things. Not because of the possibility of a lawsuit, but because it’s the right thing to do.

Let’s start with what I am absolutely not wrong about, which is something most people do not seem to know about PETA: That the animal-rights group kills almost all the pets surrendered to it, almost 3,000 killed in 2006 alone. This information comes from PETA itself, as reported to the Commonwealth of Virginia in a report required of all the state’s shelters. More than nine of 10 pets who end up at PETA are killed there.

PETA does not dispute this.

The letter from the PETA Foundation attorney says I was wrong in assuming that an animal-rights group such as PETA would be trying to find new homes for the animals who were killed at PETA. The phrase he takes issue with is that the animals were there “in search of new homes.” Putting aside the matter of how, exactly, PETA’s attorney is able to divine what these animals truly were in search of, then I’d like to know how, exactly, were the determinations made, that, as he put it:

These animals were brought to, or picked up by, PETA because they were unadoptable for a variety of reasons, and had been surrendered precisely because they were not adoptable. Many of these animals were sick, and euthanasia brought them a peaceful release from the suffering that they endured.

So, were there medical examinations by a veterinarian, and written records of the same for each animal killed? A behavioral analysis by a qualified behaviorist, and written records of the same for each animal killed? May we see them? Or were these determinations made by the animal’s previous owners, and if so are there the signed forms standard at every veterinary office and shelter making sure the previous owner understands that they are turning the animal over to be killed? May we see those forms? Alternately, may we get the names of all the previous owners so we can ask each and every one of them if it was their understanding that they animal was unadoptable and would be killed when they surrendered the animal? So we can ask, exactly, what they were told by PETA?

If PETA staff made these determinations that the animals were unadoptable, may we have the names of these people and see their qualification to perform such tasks? Are they veterinarians or certified behaviorists? May we see the records of their medical and behavioral determinations that these animals were not adoptable? May we see PETA’s guidelines for determining adoptability?

Honestly, it’s impossible for me to determine if I was wrong without such documentation. PETA’s kill rate seems awfully high, so it’s natural we animal-lovers should wonder how it got that way. So show us those records, so we can understand. We want to understand.

I realize there must be a lot of records involved in the killing of 2,981 animals in 2006 as you reported to the Commonwealth of Virginia, so we’ll wait while they are compiled. Just give us a time frame, so we can prepare for the work of making all these documents public on our Web site here.

So, that’s the “was I wrong?” part. I have to admit the jury’s still out. But of course until we see these documents, we have no way of knowing if the animals PETA reported that they had killed — animals “brought to, or picked up by” them, in the words of the attorney — at rates far, far in excess of a normal shelter, were killed because nearly all of these animals were unadoptable for reasons PETA has not volunteered, not because they were “in search of new homes.”

Now, was I fair?

I’m simply not going to know that until we all see the documents related to the “was I wrong?” part. Of course, I immediately tried to be as fair as I could be by putting the PETA attorney’s claim both on the top of the blog and in the middle of the post he objected to.

How much more fair I can be will have to wait until PETA reveals how it was determined that the animals surrendered to them were not “in search of new homes” — the phrase their attorney says is wrong — and how that determination of “unadoptability” was made. How fair PETA was in killing these animals, and how unadoptable they truly were, we cannot determine, although it’s interesting to know that the Commonwealth of Virginia:

[R]equires the recordkeeping and reporting of only those animals that are taken into custody by releasing agencies for the purpose of adoption.

Emphasis mine. That, by the way, is from a letter sent to PETA from the Commonwealth of Virginia, with a copy to the same attorney who sent a letter to me. You can read that letter from the Commonwealth of Virginia to PETA here. (And here’s an expansion -- thanks, Patrick — of what that letter means, with regard to the animals surrendered to PETA.)

I’m going to put all these requests in a letter and send it to Mr. Kerr — to be fair, of course. I’ll post that letter, and any response.

Update from Christie: Apparently Mr. Kerr’s been busy telling bloggers to stop picking on PETA. Nathan Winograd got a letter, too (PDF) . And the Center For Consumer Freedom seems to have got wind of this: It’s all over their sites. Here’s the link to their article.

Update from Gina: More food for thought (thanks, Nancy). Why is anyone still listening to PETA?

We work very hard to be fair here at the PetConnection. We have our opinions — and are entitled to them, by the First Amendment — but we’re also about the facts and about our readers’ opinions, too. That’s why we not only allow but also encourage comments.

I guess PETA isn’t aware of that, since instead of commenting on my recent post that mentions them, they decided to e-mail, fax and certified mail me a letter. In the interest of fairness, I want to make sure that letter gets read.

In it, Jeffrey S. Kerr, the PETA Foundation’s General Counsel and Vice President of Corporate Affairs, takes issue with my wording indicating that the pets who end up at PETA are looking for new homes. He says the animals who end up at PETA are not adoptable, and that PETA’s 97 percent kill rate in 2006 — as reported to the Commonwealth of Virginia, click here to see — is because PETA is giving these animals a kind way out of this world.

Since the animals in question are no longer alive to be evaluated by independent veterinarians and behaviorists, we’ll have to take Mr. Kerr’’s word that:

The animals that you are referencing were not brought to PETA to find new homes. These animals were brought to, or picked up by, PETA because they were unadoptable for a variety of reasons, and had been surrendered precisely because they were not adoptable. Many of these animals were sick, and euthanasia brought them a peaceful release from the suffering that they endured.

Thank you for that clarification, Mr. Kerr.

Here’s the entire letter.

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Meanwhile, up in the Seattle area, the fight over the King County Animal Control shelter is getting louder and nastier. Don’t miss the comments on Christie’s post yesterday.

For more than a quarter-century, pet owners have turned to the “Home Veterinary Handbook” series when faced with questions about pet illnesses and injuries.

While the questions are mostly the same today as when the series debuted, the world of veterinary medicine has changed dramatically. New technologies, advanced diagnostic techniques, newly emerging diseases, and recent research on drugs, vaccines and surgeries have made having current information a necessity.

Fortunately, newly updated and revised editions of both of these classic reference books were released in the last few months, authored by a team of four veterinarians led by Dr. Debra Eldredge.

“The goal was to update the books with the wealth of new veterinary information we have had in recent years,” she said. And the authors succeeded: From cutting-edge diagnostics to alternative therapies, the handbooks cover it all.

The “Dog Owner’s Home Veterinary Handbook” and “Cat Owner’s Home Veterinary Handbook” (Howell Book House, $35 each) are organized by body system, with a comprehensive index in the back and a handy mini-index inside the front covers. Pet owners can read about the causes, symptoms, prevention and treatment of common as well as unusual animal health problems, from allergies to cancer. Sections are also included on first aid and medication, as well as instructions on how to monitor a pet’s vital signs.

There’s more than just practical advice on how to cope with health problems, too.

“The books are meant to make pet owners better health advocates for their pets, more informed and better able to communicate with their veterinarians,” said Dr. Eldredge.

That’s because the authors managed the tricky task of offering pet health information that’s genuinely useful but doesn’t confuse pet owners into skipping veterinary care when it’s needed. Easily followed guidelines tell owners when it’s appropriate or even necessary to give immediate aid to a dog or cat, when symptoms require an immediate trip to the emergency clinic, and when the pet can wait until regular office hours to be seen.

Also on the cutting edge are two new books on pet first aid from the American Red Cross. While there’s nothing new about pet health emergencies, some recent hurricanes, floods and fires have underscored the need for resources to cope with them. And these two spiral-bound books — one for dogs and one for cats — are great resources. Each book comes with a companion DVD that gives step-by-step instructions on how to give first aid to pets. The sections on animal poisoning are particularly impressive, as is the information on what to do in an emergency until veterinary care can be obtained. They cost $17 each and are available online at RedCross.org (click on “Store” and then “Reference Guides”), or by calling 1-866-782-3347.

One more book to round out the pet owner’s health library is Eldredge’s “Pills For Pets: The A to Z Guide to Drugs and Medications for Your Animal Companion” (Citadel, $15). It lists drugs by brand and generic names, covers issues including online pharmacies and compounded medications, and gives tips on how to get medicine into the pets — yes, even those uncooperative cats.

And don’t forget the Merck/Merial manual!

Most pet health books are lucky to have one veterinarian listed as an author. “The Merck/Merial Manual for Pet Health: The complete pet health resource for your dog, cat, horse or other pets - in everyday language” (Merck, $23) offers more than 100 veterinarians, most with advanced degrees and certification, as contributors.

Within each section of this hefty paperback is an encyclopedic listing of disorders and body systems, as well as an overview on routine care and preventive medicine. If it’s about animal health, it’s almost certainly in this book, often in surprising detail.

Your turn: In this Internet age, what pet-care books do you still value enough to keep on the shelf?

If you ever wondered if the federal “regulators” are working for us or the industries they regulated, well, wonder no more. From the AP (thanks, Marcy):

Under pressure from the food industry, the Agriculture Department is considering a proposal not to identify retailers where tainted meat went for sale except in cases of serious health risk, The Associated Press has learned.

Had that been the rule in place last month, consumers would not have been told if their supermarkets sold meat from a Southern California slaughterhouse that triggered the biggest beef recall in U.S. history.

In other words, you have no right to know where a recalled product might have gone. Just like you have no right to know where a product has been imported from.

So much for being able to make an educated decision when it comes to your food — or your pet’s.

For the three months, we’ve quietly been working behind the scenes on a pretty big Web project: Developing a complete and completely searchable archive of years of pet-care articles. This has been a dream of mine for a long time, but I didn’t have the technical skills and time to develop a searchable database myself, or the money to have someone else do it.

When Dr. Marty Becker and I wrote our first two books together (”Why Do Cats …?/”Why Do Dogs ..?”), we knew we had something good going. We loved working together and we never fought about anything. So we joined forces officially, with him dropping his Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) newspaper column to join me at the world’s biggest and best provider of syndicated content, the Universal Press Syndicate. (Not to mention the nicest: I love the folks there, especially my gifted, long-time editor, Greg Melvin.) Dr. Becker brought with him behaviorists Susan and Dr. Rolan Tripp, and I dragged the incomparable Christie Keith along with me — a kind of pet-care Brady Bunch, if you will. (We’ll have more top pet-care experts joining us soon, too!)

Dr. Becker and I merged forces on Jan. 1, 2007, and we’ve never looked back.

But what about those articles? I still dreamed of making them available to people who needed help — and not just the advice, but also things like Christie’s transcripts of interviews with important people in the animal world. A few months ago, Dr. Becker was kidding me about what I wanted for my 50th birthday, and I told him: A searchable database! He thought I was kidding, but … it’s really what I wanted most.

So now we have one.

We have a lot of companies asking to buy sponsorship banners on PetConnection.com and DogCars.com, but we turn most of them down. For one thing, we don’t want to clutter up our site with a ton of little junky ads. And for another, we’re not about to be giving space to puppy-mill retail sites or outfits pitching snake oil to desperate pet-lovers. So we’ve entered into sponsorship agreements with a handful of companies we respect, and made sure those companies understand that they are not buying us or our content — they get a banner to reach our readers.

One of those companies we decided to work with was Pfizer, and when we asked them to underwrite the development of the searchable archives, they eagerly agreed. Our Black Dog Web team drew up the prototypes and the behind the scenes interface, and we hired top pet-care editor Phyllis DeGioia to handle the difficult task of editing and inputting thousands of articles.

She’s about halfway through that job, with more than 2,000 articles in the database, so we’ve launched it to see how it works as she continues to add another couple thousand more.

Check it out and let us know what you think. You can get to the article search from the Pet Connection home page or from any Pet Connection page by clicking on “Article Search” in the top navigation.

We’re considering this a “soft-roll” beta version and will continue to tweak it until it’s exactly best for helping the most people and pets. And if you don’t find something you need an answer to, let us know. That probably means we need to do an article on it for our newspaper feature. Or maybe it means Phyllis hasn’t gotten to it yet!

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Did you miss Dr. Becker?

Last week he was all over the media. We now have all the links so you can watch online

ABC News Now:

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4517525
Pudgy Pooch? Best Doggie Diets!
Learn how to alter your dog’s diet to get your overweight pet back in shape.

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4517547
Fido Fitness Unleashed!
Help your dog put their best paw forward with the latest walking accessories.

XM radio 155:

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4480429

Good Morning America video:

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4480189

Good Morning America article:

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/AmazingAnimals/story?id=4475252&page=1

For the rest of the week, you can watch the clips from “The Martha Stewart Show.” Go here, click on March 24 and then go to the second set of videos on the right — “Pet Emergencies” and “Giving Medicine to Pets.”