pet connection

Harness racing has been going on at Cal Expo, the California state fair grounds, for decades. My first job there, at 15, was as a junior apprentice pizza maker, and I still remember exactly how many pepperoni slices I was to count onto every pie — 16.

In those days, the harness racers used to draw pretty decent crowds and even had races that counted, setting world records for the pacing mile. The Cal Expo facility was still relatively new, and although designed to look like a government bunker and built on what was likely a low-bid state contract, there seemed to be some effort put into making the place inviting.

No more.

With government budgets the way they are, the racetrack isn’t holding up too well. The whole place looks sad and run down, and the “feature” race was for $4,500 claimers. To judge by the scene around the winner’s circle, most of the people in attendance — a couple hundred, tops, not counting those in the simulcast center, betting on races elsewhere — were either horse owners or the relatives of the drivers and trainers. The rest of the crowd was mostly a smattering of people in their late teens and early twenties, lured by the cheap evening — and they weren’t even paying attention to the races.

Pretty clear that if it weren’t for simulcast wagering, there wouldn’t be races at Cal Expo at all.

Still, my brother and I had a good time. For us it was like having our own personal race track — a picnic table next to the winner’s circle and our own parimutuel clerk, no lines. The nasty track food wasn’t worth the risk to try, but the outrider remembered me from the night at the river, and we chatted between races. Really, we should go more often. My house is so close to the fairgrounds that I can see the glow from the night-racing lights from my back deck.

But, I’m burying the lede, as we used to say in the journalism business (or what’s left of it, anyway).

My brother Joe is an amazing handicapper, and I have never been to the track when he hasn’t walked out ahead. He reads the chart and has his own system, and tends to prefer class-droppers and closers. (I have no facility and not much interest in gambling, so I generally don’t play. I’m there to watch horses. I read the charts and handicap the races, but I rarely put money down.)

He was hot last night, cashed tickets after every race except one and walked out with enough money that our budget-crunched and canceled trip to Del Mar, originally scheduled for next weekend, is back on again. (We were planning to just eat the tickets we bought, for the races and for a Padres game. Now we’ll be using them after all.)

We’ll be driving a tester I’ve long looked forward to seeing, the Mini Cooper Clubman, and we’ll be hooking up with some of our owner and trainer friends.

I suppose I should be somewhat alarmed that my brother’s such a good horse-player, but surprisingly, I am not. (I guess it’s only a problem if you’re a BAD horse-player!)

We’re off to Del Mar.

Last night as I often do in the summer, I took the three retrievers (Heather now back in the mix thanks to her life jacket) and met my friend Don and his dogs at the river. There’s a spot that’s popular with dog-lovers, a rocky beach with a natural cove, where the water is shallow and the current not as strong as beyond the protecting point that’s the southern edge of the cove.

The beach is a quarter-mile upstream from the sandy one long beloved by drunken revelers, many of them teens, and among the river regulars there’s a unstated understanding: Dogs on the rocky beach, people on the sandy beach.

Do I have to tell you which beach is a bigger mess? If I do, here’s a hint: Beer cans and disposable diapers.

I usually avoid the river on summer weekends, unless I get there before 7 a.m. The crowds are just too big, and there’s too much drinking, too much pot-smoking, and too many children playing in the river without life jackets for me. (My heavens, what is the matter with some parents? Take your toddler to the beach, let her play in the river without a life jacket and then ignore her while you drink and smoke pot? Aiiiyeeeee!)

Last night the dog-lovers were out in force, probably because we’d all stayed away over the weekend. Tennis balls were flying into the water, and so many black retrievers that we could tell them apart in the water only by the color of their colors. (Heather, in her red life jacket, stood out.)

Then Daisy’s dad said, “Wow, look at those big dogs,” and pointed across the river.

We all looked, and were surprised to see two horse with riders walking across the river. At this time of year, where they were crossing is shallow, but the current so strong a man can’t stand up. The horses managed it easily, though, picking their way across and making landfall just north of us.

Then, to my horror, the riders turned and headed for the dog beach. I called my dogs out of the water and got them collared, and yelled for everyone else to do the same. I’ve been around horses all my life, and I knew this was a dangerous situation. I couldn’t figure out what the riders were thinking, walking their horses into an area with so many dogs, most of whom had likely never seen a horse.

I yelled at the riders, and they waved me off. “These horses won’t spook,” the said, and they stopped on the beach.

One dog barked at the horses, and ran up to sniff the rear hoof of the closest one. I waited the kick to the head that was surely coming, but the horse just swung his head around and looked at the dog, as if to say, “How rude!”

“These are track ponies,” said the man on the paint gelding, gesturing in the general direction of the state fairground, where the harness racing meet is running, the track dark on Monday. “I’m the outrider.” (In case you’re not up on your horse-racing, here’s an article on what outriders do. And the track ponies are always called ponies, even though they’re horses!)

“And I’m a driver,” said the other man, on a red roan who turned out, even more amazing, to be a stallion. “This boy doesn’t know he’s a stallion,” said the man.

I patted the horses, and observed that they were fit and well-groomed, with well-cared-for tack, perfectly fitted. These horses redefined the common — and commonly misused — claim of “bomb-proof” seen in a million “for sale” ads, and at that moment I would have given cash money to have such a fit, healthy and well-mannered trail horse.

But I’m guessing a good track pony is worth his weight in gold, so I wouldn’t even think to offer.

The dozen or so retrievers, for their part, soon decided that the horses weren’t half as interesting as retrieving tennis balls and were soon all back in the water.

The outrider said the paint would kill for peppermints, so I called my brother when I got home. We’ll be going to the harness races Friday night with some peppermints, to see the track ponies at work.

I was waiting for Gina to post this, as I hate to be all “go read this” about my own stuff, but she’s swamped with work today, so here I am.

I’m particularly proud of my column in SFGate.com this morning, even though it probably won’t be the most popular of my articles there. It’s about snakes, but it’s not about how to care for them, or what species make good pets, or about their diets or health or anything like that.

It’s about what happens to kids, especially little girls, who get directed away from the creepy crawly things and towards kittens, bunnies, and puppies. It’s about parents who shudder in horror when their child shows up with a tiny snake clutched in their hands.

And it’s about how I learned to see the world in a whole new way when I first started doing editorial work for kingsnake.com, the oldest and largest reptile web site in the world, and got to know people to whom that never happened, or if it did, it didn’t work:

Many of the people I met never lost that childhood wonder at the natural world. They would devote endless hours to creating habitats for animals that evolved in environments ranging from the driest deserts to tropical rainforests, sometimes having to learn by trial and error what even the experts didn’t know about their snakes. They became obsessive observers of their animals, noting the slightest deviation in activity levels or appetites, their interest and their patience apparently endless.

I also became aware of how much prejudice exists against snakes and the people who keep them. Snakes in our culture have often been relegated to roles as scary monsters in horror flicks and the “ewww gross” segment on nature shows.

I spoke to a couple of local people I found through kingsnake.com: Rolf, an easy-going guy who owned boas and pythons, and defied every stereotype of the anti-social, slightly weird snake owner, and Natalie, a woman not much out of her teens who had been wandering the hills of Marin since she was a little girl, looking for snakes:

Rolf told me that he grew up all over the Northern California coast, mostly in rural areas, where, from the time he was four or five years old, he remembers always being in the middle of a forest, field, or a stream or a creek. “All children look and see things that are interesting, and I always had been involved with these little animals,” he said, “You see them. They see you. They go and hide. I can see the rocks and the trees and the water, but I can’t see these little bits of life that I know are there. Where are they going? What are they doing?”

[....]

Marin County’s Natalie McNear fits the snake-owner stereotype a bit more. In a phone interview, she described herself as a loner, happiest when by herself in the fields and forests. But simply by being a woman who loves snakes she challenges stereotypes, too.

“I’ve been going outside and looking for snakes ever since I was a little kid,” said the twenty-year-old, who worked at a North Bay reptile store during high school. “I would catch bugs and snakes and everything else that other girls thought were gross.”

[....]

McNear’s quiet observations haven’t just been of her snakes; she’s noticed a thing or two about how people feel about the animals as well. “(Snakes are) probably one of the most misunderstood animals that people keep as pets,” she said “A lot of people are afraid of them.”

I got to talk about two of the best books I’ve ever read about snakes and nature, and raise the larger question about why even those of us who seriously, really don’t like snakes should re-consider our prejudices against those who do.

Much of what we know about snakes and other small and elusive species comes from the hard work of field biologists like Kate Jackson, the author of “Mean and Lowly Things: Snakes, Science, and Survival in the Congo.” Jackson, just like Natalie McNear, was once a little girl lying on her belly in the grass, looking for snakes. Today, she’s a biology professor and one of the first herpetologists to slog through the swampy forests of the Northern Congo, studying and cataloguing the reptiles and amphibians she found there.

[....]

(Cornell University Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) Harry Greene opens the final section of (his book) “Snakes” with this quotation from Sengalese conservationist Baba Dioum:

In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.

My purpose here is not to convince you to love snakes. I still don’t, and even Rolf and McNear say what they feel for their snakes is more respect and fascination than love. But I think Dioum is right, that we only save what we care about, and we only care about what we learn to understand.

Every day, hundreds of parents, older sisters and babysitters respond with a shudder and “get that thing out of this house!” when a child shows up with a harmless garden snake in his or her hands. What if instead we taught ourselves to understand and respect people’s interest in snakes and those other “mean and lowly” creatures? Wouldn’t doing that not only help kids to retain, but us to reclaim, some of that sense of wonder at the natural world and the desire to preserve it for the future?

I hope you’ll read the article, even if you don’t like snakes — in fact, especially if you don’t. And let me know if it worked or not; did I get you to think about them, and the people who love them, in a new way?

We have seen turtles mating. Twice. That is all.

Well, okay, a few more details. Turtles (tut’ls in local parlance) mate on the surface of the water. Given the wave action we’ve been seeing, that must be akin to having sex on a roller coaster. Lots of fin flailing goes on. Mating season lasts from April through July.

Our friend Wayne spotted them as we were riding on the bow of Ocean Frontiers‘ Nauticat, headed for our second dive of the day. George, our captain, stopped the boat so we could get a better look–at a respectful distance, of course. We then moved on to the dive site, Kathleen’s Reef, which for the day was renamed Turtle Love Nest.

During that dive, we saw a green sea turtle, but he didn’t appear to be basking in the afterglow. Hard to tell with turtles. They always wear something of a self-satisfied expression. Based on his size, though, we suspect that he’s not yet old enough for the mating game. Other sightings of note include a porcupine fish, a file fish, and a couple of trunk fish. Topside, we’ve seen lots of chickens. A trip to the Botanic Garden to see the blue iguanas is on tap for later this week.

We saw the second pairing this morning. George says he’s seen five or six this season. Maybe the Nauticat should be renamed the Love Boat.

I’ve been working on a story about the abrupt closing of the San Francisco SPCA’s Hearing Dog Program, and the more I dig into it, the less I understand what’s happening at what was once the best and brightest shelter in the country.

SF Weekly is reporting that the SF SPCA, which is a private shelter that does not do animal control, has all but abandoned its “no kill” mission — the same mission that once made it one of the richest shelters in the country, due to huge donor support — and has implemented new guidelines making it easier for its staff to kill pets with borderline and treatable health and behavior problems. The described two animals recently killed at the shelter, a six-month-old puppy named Isaac, and a feral kitten named Tulane, who started out his life at the SF SPCA and was adopted into a home:

Tulane appeared to be a good adoption candidate, according to his medical log. Volunteers reported he enjoyed having his head petted, and purred contentedly when sitting in their laps.

The person who adopted Tulane already had a domesticated cat the kitten got along with. But Tulane never formed a bond with his adopter. On May 2, more than a year after the adoption, that person returned a very different cat to the SF/SPCA. Now 18 months old, Tulane demonstrated fearful and aggressive behavior and was categorized as “completely feral,” according to the log. He was put in a cage where he ran in tight circles, knocking over his food bowl. Veterinary staff assumed the spilled food meant Tulane wasn’t eating, even though at least two employees say there was fresh crap in his litter box.

The SF/SPCA’s feral team was making plans to return Tulane to a managed feral colony where they thought he would be happier and would likely eat better. But before arrangements were made, veterinary staff decided, without a full medical examination, that the cat’s failure to eat was a symptom of a serious condition. Tulane was euthanized.

Why the big rush, that the paper says cost Isaac, Tulane, and other animals their lives?

The reason for the new euthanasia policies is, in part, money. The SF/SPCA is scrambling to find funding to complete its controversial $30 million, for-profit animal hospital, the Leanne B. Roberts Animal Care Center. The project is only half complete, and with the looming specter of hiring staff, new equipment costs, and opening expenses, there has been an emphasis on saving money around the shelter, where it costs an estimated $43 a day to house a healthy cat. Since president Jan McHugh-Smith was hired a year ago, she has scaled back or eliminated internationally known behavior and medical services that had saved thousands of animals over the years.

Employees and volunteers were alarmed at the recent closure of the 30-year-old Hearing Dog Program, along with major changes to adoption policies, cutbacks to the Cat Behavior Program, and the loss of the volunteer Affection Eaters program, which might have been able to help Tulane.

The cutbacks and new policies have caused at least seven staffers to quit, as well as an uncertain number of volunteers. Some of them have organized into two groups who are vowing to expose the new policies even if it means that donors, the lifeblood of the nonprofit, stop cutting checks.

And it’s not only the legendary Hearing Dog Program that’s been shut down:

McHugh-Smith has also made controversial changes to the Cat Behavior Program. Longtime SF/SPCA cat behaviorists Dilara Parry and Mikel Delgado, who were the most prominent standard-bearers of the now-defunct no-kill policies, gave their notice in April, claiming management had been continually undermining them. And, Delgado says, there had been a shift in the policy that every treatable animal should be given a chance at adoption.

“The cat behavior staff had to struggle to keep this program together, especially over the last year,” says Delgado, who is a certified cat behavior consultant. “This was physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausting.”

Management made it clear that less time and money would be spent on marginal animals, Delgado says, and services were vanishing. The volunteer-run Affection Eaters program, which helped traumatized cats regain their appetites in the shelter, quietly disappeared.

The SF Weekly piece is painful reading for someone, like me, who was involved with the shelter in the early days of its no-kill transition under the guidance of then-director Richard Avanzino, now the head of Maddie’s Fund, a national organization dedicated to funding community efforts to become no-kill.

I have a series of interviews with people involved with the story set up over the next few days, and am not really sure where this will go, but the SF Weekly report clearly lays the blame at the feet of the SPCA staff who are hellbent on pushing through the hospital project, now careening widly over-budget.

Read the full story here.