pet connection

I don’t have a problem with PETA advocating for animal rights, although I do not agree with their agenda which, if followed to its simple, logical conclusion, would mean the eventual end of all domestic animals, including pets.

This is America, after all, and you can advocate for any point of view you want. What I have long had a problem with is PETA jumping into every animal-related issue and neglecting to mention that agenda, which is, in PETA’s words, that “animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on or use for entertainment.”

That’s why, like Pet Connection BFF Dr. Patty Khuly, I have a problem with PETA demanding the reform of horse-racing, when in fact what they surely want is abolition. I felt the same way when PETA showed up in support for the Michael Vick dogs, even though PETA’s Ingrid Newkirk has written in favor of pit bull bans. Again, she’s entitled to her opinion, but her organization needs to be consistently open about these views in their outreach to animal lovers, especially the majority of us who don’t share them. This is even more important when fund-raising is involved.

As it stands, what PETA has put out regarding horse-racing is disingenuous.

On Dolittler, Dr. Khuly writes in response to a PETA e-mail (which she reproduces in her post):

1-How does sanctioning the jockey fit into this? Since Sunday when this news broke (sans e-mail), I’ve been marveling at PETA’s dumbfoudingly ridiculous jab at the jockey. What’s that all about? Almost all those jockeys whipped their horses. Why not call for a uniform suspension of all jockeys?

2-And the trainer? Show me one that bests Big Brown’s for his well-documented, disgusting, horse-doping behavior. After examining this guy’s pedigree, you’ll never convince me that Eight Belles’ trainer deserves a special sanction over all the other guys in his field—just because his horse was the one to go down.

3-And finally, am I really to believe that PETA seeks to reform the sport? If their approach to pets is any measure, it’s clear to me they’d love nothing better than to see the entire shebang shut down overnight and its animals summarily dispatched by a bevy of vets wielding pink juice.

But they don’t say so. Nope—they won’t. They’d rather have you believe their aims are to make the sport safer. Their target? The average animal lover who wants to believe they’re helping animals wherever they can…even if it takes sending PETA a few bucks to help make it happen.

Look, horse-racing has had years — decades, really — to work on its downward spiral, and it hasn’t. Let’s take it all the way back to the first time it lost lots of fans: The day Ruffian died. And then … Go For Wand in the Breeders Cup (worst catatrophic breakdown I’ve ever seen) … more fans gone, unable to stomach the carnage. Barbaro, of course, and now Eight Belles. Plus thousands and thousands of cheap claimers no one ever paid attention to, dying on the days when you could count track attendance in the hundreds, not the hundreds of thousands as on Derby Day.

Instead of reforming, American horse-racing chose to look the other way on rampant drug use that keeps horses who shouldn’t be running on the track. It chose to embrace and accelerate the “quick return on investment” trends by concentrating faster, more fragile breeding lines, and by pushing young horses to the breaking point, literally. It stuck to its BS traditions instead of actively seeking changes that would make the sport safer for horses and jockeys alike, such as moving away from fast, hard dirt tracks towards more racing on turf and synthetic tracks.

Instead of working to keep or even grow a base of fans, racing decided to double-down on a losing bet, chasing a smaller and smaller pool of dying off horse-racing gamblers (younger gamblers play online poker or go to casinos) and demanding of state legislatures that racetracks be allowed to put in slot machines to prop up the falling profits.

Much as I loathe PETA’s opportunistic concern for race horses — where were they the day before the Derby, when I was writing about these issues? — horse-racing brought this on itself. They had a chance to make changes after Barbaro, but they haven’t done much. (Especially with regard to drug use … nada.)

Horse-racing is not getting it even yet, but they’d damn well better, and soon.

Unlike PETA, Dr. Khuly and I truly are calling for reform, not secretly hoping for an end to horse-racing. You can start by refusing to watch any more Triple Crown races. And letting the tracks, the networks and the sponsors know why.

Newsweek Online has a good piece on the heated debate between those who see shelters killing instead of placing pets as lacking in community engagement and vision and those who see the killing as the only way to cope with the animals made homeless as a result of human irresponsibility:

[M]any animal lovers don’t realize is that PETA itself may have put down some of those unwanted [pets]. The organization has practiced euthanasia for years. Since 1998 PETA has killed more than 17,000 animals, nearly 85 percent of all those it has rescued. … Shelters around the country kill 4 million animals every year; by some estimates, more than 80 percent of them are healthy. In recent years those grim statistics have split the animal rights community. Ironically, PETA has emerged as a strong proponent of euthanasia. In defense of its policy PETA has insisted that euthanasia is a necessary evil in a world full of unwanted pets. But while the group has some well-known allies, including the Humane Society of the United States, a growing number of animal rights activists claim to have found a better, more humane way.

[...] Bonney Brown, executive director of the Nevada Humane Society, says that in 2007, the first year her group went “no-kill,” her shelters managed to save 90 percent of the 8,000 animals they took in. Among other strategies, the organization ramped up its volunteer force, from 30 to 1,700, expanded its hours so that people could come in after work and engaged in extensive media outreach.

Here’s the rest.

We drew from our e-newsletter subscriber list on April 1 for the winner of the first of our monthly prize drawings for a $1,000 retail value collection of goodies.

Premier Pet was the first company to step forward with a donation, putting together a $500 basket of the tools top trainers love for the winner, and another identical $500 basket for the local rescue group or shelter of the winner’s choice.

B.J. Hodge of South Lake Tahoe won the goodies. And the matching gift is going to Homeward Bound Golden Retriever Rescue, per B.J.’s direction. This is a great organization! I’ve known many people who’ve adopted from them, and I’ve even fostered for them a couple of times . I couldn’t be happier to see a $500 gift basket heading their way. And B.J.’s, too. Congratulations to them both, and thanks to Premier for the donation!

Our next drawing is on May 1, and features a donation of $500’s worth of grooming products from the Oster company, plus a $500 Petsmart gift certificate. That $1,000 worth of the best for your pet, and all you have to do to be eligible is sign up for our FREE monthly e-newsletter.

What are you waiting for? Sign up!

We can always hope so!

Best Friends reports (thanks,Kathleen) that this Friday (check for local times), Oprah will do a show on puppy-mills, those cruel mass-production facilities that treat pets like factory-farmed livestock (which is sick enough for livestock!) and sell their often sick, unsocialized and often impossible to house-trained puppies through retail pet stores and Internet sites. (Why would these puppies by so difficult to house-train, you ask? Because they grow up ankle-deep in their own mess, and come to think of that as normal.)

But the puppies get out of the living hell of the mills. Their parents never do. They are bred again and again and again, until they can’t be bred any more. And then they’re auctioned off, or even killed and fed back to the other dogs.

Yes, this is the cruelty you’re often supporting when you buy a pet-store puppy. Read Dr. Patty Khuly, on what a good veterinarian thinks of this situation:

How horrible must it be to live 3/4 of your life in a glorified duffel bag? Not to mention the real crime: being born.

Teacups are big business. While undoubtedly cute and often surprisingly good-natured, most owners don’t know the trouble that goes into crafting these hamster-sized dogs.

For each pup conceived, we’ll never know the percentage that makes it to market. But I’d wager it’s not even 10%. Now you know the real reason for the $1000 minimum on these pups (in Miami the average is more like $1500). Supply and demand. (I didn’t go to business school for nothing, though my Wharton classmates might argue to the contrary.)

I could go on for a long time in this vein. The only other subject that gets me going quite so hotly is the sale of these teacup pups in retail outlets designed to lure the fashionable and uneducated (human traits not mutually exclusive, I’d hasten to opine).

As you probably already suspect, the puppy mill industry and puppy retailers are in cahoots. Sometimes, they are one and the same—vertically integrated, as it were. More often, a network of ambitious backyard breeders or faraway mill-style operation is behind the pristine storefronts on fashionable streets hawking pups at the rate of its other retailers` Gucci knockoffs.

Teacups bred in these conditions are not only intrinsically sickly for their teeny-tininess, they are often housed in unfriendly environments (among their many pseudo-brethren) in cost-effective conditions.

And here’s what Christie has written for her Your Whole Pet column on the San Francisco Chronicle’s SFGate.com Web site:

Seeing a golden retriever so scared of people that she shakes is sobering for anyone familiar with the breed’s usually happy-go-lucky, ball-chasing, people-loving nature. But Sunshine had reason to be afraid: Until that day, she’d spent her entire life inside a wire cage, pumping out puppies for the puppy-mill trade.

Puppy mills are the factory farms of dog breeding, big commercial operations that produce puppies that are then distributed nationwide to pet stores and sold directly to consumers on the Web. The dogs are kept in small cages — which USDA regulations require to be no more than a few inches bigger than the dog — and females have puppies every time they come in season for their entire lives.

The commercial mass breeding of dogs is not illegal, underground or small scale. Stephanie Shain, the outreach director of the Humane Society of the United States, says that of the 7 to 9 million dogs acquired in this country each year, between 2 and 4 million come from puppy mills. Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council figures suggest that around 300,000 to 400,000 puppies are sold in pet stores annually — a figure HSUS puts at closer to 500,000. A report from the American Veterinary Medical Association indicated that more than 200,000 American families bought puppies online in 2004.

I’ll be watching Oprah (I usually TiVo it). I hope a lot of people who are even now thinking about buying a puppy from an puppy-mill outlet or Internet site will be watching, too.

People who buy these dogs are the reason this cruelty continues. The only way to stop puppy mills is to stop buying the puppies.

Oprah, tell it like it is.  And we’re sorry about Sophie. Save some dogs in her sweet memory.

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Elsewhere: Mutts blogger John Woestendiek alllllmost gets taken in by a pet-related April Fool’s joke. Your laugh for the day.  Me, I already got taken in once. But I’m not ‘fessing up. … Lance Mackey’s Zorro is expected to recover, but will likely never race again. The idiot who ran into Mackey’s team with a snowmobile had come forward. Turns out — what a surprise! — “alchohol was involved.” … When I first read the headline that Switzerland was to ban cat fur products, I figured the ban was would be on the importing of such things. But no: In Switzerland is is currently legal to hunt cats and sell their hides. Ugh. Story here.

As I’ve said about a million times to at least that many people, I’m pretty clear where PETA stands: Better dead than fed. You can fool a lot of Hollywood ninnies and con a lot of nice people who believe PETA’s direct-mail and Web nonsense, but PETA wants nothing more than for every domesticated animal to disappear. And they’re quite happy to help the cause by killing animals themselves, putting the needle to 97 percent of the unfortunate animals who end up in PETA’s slaughterhouseshelter.

I don’t support PETA, and I think only sheer laziness explains why the media keeps calling them for comment on any animal issue.

Why is anyone still listening to PETA?

But my view on the Humane Society of the Unites States is a lot more complex. I’ve known and respected many of their staffers for more than a quarter-century, and I’ve on balance agreed with the organization more then I’ve disagreed with them on a wide spectrum of issues. Not to mention: I see in them the ability to recognize a better way, which is very difficult sometimes for a large organization to do.

That’s why I was delighted to read this, on HSUS top dog Wayne Pacelle’s blog: (more…)