pet connection

First, I have to say that I was surely among the many disappointed people in this world when NPRs Scott Simon got married, not to me.  But, I’m happy he did, because marriage and parenthood has made him a better listen for us all. (Listen to his essay on Mother’s Day.)

This morning I listened to him interview Jules and Kate Feiffer about their children’s book, “Which Puppy?” I’ve always loved Jules Feiffer’s work, and the book sounds so adorable once I finished with my errands I ordered it.

From NPR:

“I watched [now-Pres. Obama's election=night speech], and … the next day, my editor contacted me and asked if I had any ideas for a story,” Kate Feiffer tells Scott Simon.

It turns out she did: Her idea was to write a book about a menagerie of animals — including a kitten, a turtle who takes barking lessons and a Guinea pig who says she can tell time with her tail — who compete to be the new White House pet.

“I had to write it very quickly, because we wanted to get it out before the first 100 days of the administration,” says Kate Feiffer.

But the challenge of working under such a compressed schedule meant Feiffer had to scramble to find an illustrator. Luckily, she had someone in her family who worked in the field; her father, Jules Feiffer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, illustrator and playwright.

Story and audio here.  Here’s the book at Powell’s.  This morning’s “Weekend Edition Saturday” also had a wonderful story on marine mommies, here.

After some technical difficulties this afternoon, my computer is up and running. All it took was Jerry glaring at it, and it begged forgiveness and promised not to give me any more trouble. So now that we’ve had dinner with Christie, I’m here with a late-night report of the first session I attended this morning (after breakfast with Christie and Terrierman at my infamous Eliot Spitzer- and J. Edgar Hoover-linked hotel, the Renaissance Mayflower). This session was aimed primarily at shelter workers, so rather than blogging it verbatim, I’m doing a little editing and occasionally adding commentary.

The two-hour session featured three speakers: Sue Cosby, executive director of the Animal Welfare Association in New Jersey (and fellow Twitterer); Bonney Brown, executive director of Nevada Humane Society; and Mike Fry, executive director of Animal Ark in Minnesota. They shared their strategies for keeping animals moving through the shelter system, limiting disease, increasing adoptability through socialization and marketing, and keeping animals with their people.

Here’s Cosby:

The most important thing you need to think about with no-kill sheltering is a sense of urgency for the animals coming into your shelter. Decide on a shelter model. Who are you taking in? Come up with a business plan on who you can/must take in and who else can take them. Work with rescue groups to take animals off your books, so to speak.

That’s a radical change from so many shelters that aren’t willing to work with purebred or other rescue groups. I can hear them screaming now that shelters working with rescue groups aren’t playing fair and are manipulating their numbers by doing so. Fail. Anyway, back to Cosby.

Feral cats don’t have any option when they come into your shelter. If you’re not re-releasing them because you’re not allowed to by law, you need to proactively get into the community and prevent those cats from coming into your shelter to begin with.

When I spoke with Alley Cat Allies a couple of years ago, Becky Robinson estimated that 70 percent of the cats in shelters were feral. That’s what helps to drive up the numbers of animals euthanized–when communities don’t institute TNR programs and instead prefer to euthanize feral cats. As a side note, one of the books in our goodie bags included TNR Past Present and Future: A History of the Trap-Neuter-Return Movement by Ellen Perry Berkeley. I’ve just skimmed it, but it looks like an excellent read and, among other things, addresses the belief that feral cats are a danger to songbirds. Check it out. Next, Cosby addresses the issue of vaccination. We’re all aware of the concern over excessive vaccination, but for shelter animals she has a different point of view.

Vaccinate immediately upon entry. Animals are not dying in shelters from overvaccination. Vaccination keeps them healthy. Shelters are often shut down from vaccine-preventable diseases. Put effort into keeping the shelter clean and animals healthy.

Toward that end, she recommends using disposable litter boxes and disposable food and water dishes. French fry trays make good food dishes and styrofoam soup cups make good water containers. What about the environment? Cosby would rather save a cat’s life today and figure out later how to do it in a more environmentally friendly way. She notes that no one likes to scrub litter boxes, so using disposable ones is a better way to prevent the spread of disease. Another favorite disease-prevention tool: gloves, gloves and more gloves.

We’d rather buy gloves than antibiotics and euthanasia solution. Handle every animal as though it’s diseased when it comes into your shelter. Spend your efforts on keeping animals safe, healthy and happy. Provide opportunities for people to stay clean in your shelter.

In Cosby’s shelter, cleanliness is next to catliness. Her advice sounds obvious, but of course that’s where most of us run into problems with anything: thinking that what we know is obvious to everyone else as well. She advises using appropriate disinfectants–Lysol is harmful to cats, for instance–and keep hand sanitizer everywhere. At this point, she demonstrated just how long it was necessary to rub sanitizer on damp hands for it to be effective. It went on for at least a minute. Good to know in these flu-ridden times. She goes on to discuss privacy issues, and no, we’re not talking Roe v. Wade or the constitutionality of school strip searches.

Don’t house dogs and cats together; the dogs will scare the cats and they won’t act adoptable. Give cats a nice, quiet room and blankets, towels and hiding places like boxes. This is for animals just coming in; give them some chill time. Teach staff how to recognize stress and disease and when there might be a problem. Be creative in coming up with ways to give animals privacy.

Other factors to consider: The question is not is this animal adoptable but is this animal savable? Upper respiratory infections, fungal infections, injured/hit by car, mange, parvovirus, panleukopenia, FIV/FeLV–Cosby says in most cases these animals are savable. Her goal is to build an isolation area with lots of big windows so the public can see all the animals that are available and show them what their donations are doing.

Be able to say to the public: Look at the animals we’re saving right now. Make those animals available for rescue and adoption. The power is not what you do in the four walls of your shelter; it’s what the community does.

After discussing her shelter’s Free to Great Home program, which adopts animals older than 8 years or that have expensive medical problems at no charge, she ended with advice on how to know when to euthanize. Hint: it’s not when animals look bad or sound bad. It’s only when they’re diagnosed bad: they are irremediably suffering, or their condition is unmanageable or has a poor or grave prognosis.

I had hoped to finish this tonight, but it’s almost midnight, I’m tired, and I want to do justice to Bonney Brown and Mike Fry, so more tomorrow.

Last night I went to a friend’s annual Academy Awards party. The hosts have a number of contests and prizes, and the most hotly contested is “Most Creative Dish.” Everyone brings a dish that is named or based on a nominated movie or actor.  This year I took a turn from my dog’s treats.  If you’ve ever baked healthy treats for your dog (and if you haven’t, I love Liz Palika’s The Ultimate Dog Treat Cookbook, Howell, $14.99), you may own cookie cutters shaped like dog bones. Your dog doesn’t care what shape the treats are and would happily eat them if they looked like poop. The shape is something we use because we like it.

Using that cookie cutter, I baked sugar cookies. Some of them were layered with vanilla frosting in-between two, like an Oreo, and some I left plain. I called them Milk Boners, cream-filled or naked.

Heh heh.

I didn’t win, but the cookies garnered some votes.  Some luscious Thai-type chicken dish won; it tasted terrific and was served on a platter with a bamboo hut.  Compared to that, it’s easy to see why some sugar cookies didn’t win. It took me so long to make all the cutout cookies that we never made it to the dog park <oops> so a couple of dogs are feeling their oats today. Nonetheless, the Milk Boners made a lot of people laugh, and that was good enough for me.

Baking was also a personal triumph, since the Counter-Surfing Setter did not manage to illicitly steal one single cookie. Not one!  Why? Because I have finally remembered not to leave food on the edge of the counter. If you deny access to Counter- Surfing Setters, you deny them reinforcement. This is not something people who have only had dogs with four-inch long legs think about, but given enough experience you can train yourself. And once you have successfully trained yourself, treat yourself with a bone-shaped cookie.

The VIN News Service takes up the issues surrounding the techniques of Cesar Millan, whose TV show and books have made him the hottest thing in dog-training in decades.  Timothy Kirn writes:

Cesar Millan, television’s ‘Dog Whisperer,’ has legions of fans, including some dog trainers. But a group of veterinary behaviorists is not among them.

The American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior (AVSAB) issued a position paper aimed at countering some of the pervasive influence of his show, which airs on the National Geographic Channel, and of Millan’s training approach, which is based on what the position statement calls outdated dominance theory.

[...]

Though Millan has been criticized by a number of different groups and individuals, he has supporters. {…] “I have never seen Mr. Millan be abusive,” says Martin Deeley, executive director of the International Association of Canine Professionals.

Millan does not use coercive techniques exclusively, but also uses positive reinforcement, says Deeley, who has worked with Millan and knows him well.

Raised by Wolves blogger (and regular PetConnection commenter) Heather Houlahan was interviewed for and is quoted in the piece.  On the whole, it’s a pretty good overview of a complex and contentious situation that leaves the dog-owning public wondering exactly which trainers have it right.

Which brings up that old joke in dog-training circles: The only thing two dog trainers will agree on is that a third dog trainer is wrong.

I used to love the serendipity of the card catalog and now I find the same pleasure in surfing the web. I have the assignment of planning the sessions for the annual Cat Writers Association conference this year, so I’ve been looking for fiction writers to contact who have a clear interest in dogs or cats. There’s Rita Mae Brown, of course, CWA members Clea Simon and Susan Conant, and Jeffery Deaver. One of my favorite mystery writers is Laura Lippman, who has two canine characters: Esskay, a greyhound, and Miata, a Doberman. So I Googled her name and dogs and found an essay she’d written for an old issue of Mystery Readers Journal. It starts out:

I write rovers a clef.

There are two characters inspired by real-life dogs in my mysteries. Most people know only one: Esskay, a rescued racing greyhound introduced in my second book, Charm City (Avon, 1997). In describing the first meeting between private investigator Tess Monaghan and Esskay, I fell back on real life and simply transcribed my first encounter with Dulcie, the greyhound who came into our family five years ago.

“It was a dog, a bony, ugly dog with dull black fur and raw patches on its hindquarters. The brown eyes were vague and unfocused… the shoulders hunched in an uncanny imitation of Richard Nixon.”

Okay, not quite love at first sight. But let me tell you, putting ointment on a dog’s bedsores accelerates the bonding experience.

Read the rest, and a couple of other essays on cats and dogs of mystery, here.