pet connection

Sometimes there are comments that are just too good to stay there. From regular JenniferJ, here’s one of them:

There are certain attitudes, biases, assumptions and cliches that just won’t shift, no matter what real world, documented evidence or reasoned argument is put before them.

—Pets are a luxury, if you ever can’t afford something for your pet, you’re bad and unworthy and don’t deserve a pet.

—S/N is the MOST important measure of pet owner responsibility. Whether you could not afford the procedure or have a health screened titled dog you’ve chosen not to alter, you are bad and irresponsible

—Being intact is cruel. Sorry, being intact, with normal healthy organs is cruel? Nope. But intact pets do need a bit different management and those organs are inconvienent for many owners and after a certain age, the pet will be fine without them. so long as the decision is between a vet and owner I sure as hell have no issue with spay/neuter. Most of my pets are or will be altered, but a male dog in possession of his testicles does not equal suffering

—If you breed a litter you have automatically killed the same number of pets in the shelter. Does not matter that there are more than enough homes and if shelter were able to gain just a small amount more market share, 5-10% depending on regional circumstances, we could get all placeable pets into homes.

—there is no such thing as a responsible breeder, they’re all the same

—All the opposition to MSN is from the wicked breeders

—Breeders ALL make a lot of money (HaH! Ha hahahha We could have bought another HOUSE on what has gone into the dogs over 20 years. I am NOT exaggerating )

—Feral cats are all the fault of bad owners, they are all only one generation out of homes and if we make the bad owners spay and neuter them then the feral problem will magically disappear. And if you click your heels together and wish really hard…

—Those kittens flooding the shelters every spring all come from bad owners cats, because feral cats don’t have kittens where you can find them and remember, the moms weren’t really feral.

—TNR does not work. And even if it works, it’s cruel because the cats would be better of dead than be at risk outdoors. And even if being outside is not cruel, they kill wildlife.

Side note here: Yes, they do kill wildlife. Not to the extent that they are blamed probably. Feral colonies do not belong near endangered species breeding grounds etc.. But in most urban and suburban settings the real killer is development. I’m rural and help manage a colony and because the wildlife has natural habitat, it is thriving in spite of the cats. plus as ferals age, they tend to eshew the birds for the kibble, word.

And even if cats are responsible for every crime they are accused of A century of catch and kill has utterly failed to eliminate ferals. TNR has documented success in reducing numbers and numbers of kittens. Go with what works folks!

—If you ever go into a shelter and see the animals there, you would never breed, oppose MSN blah blah… Sorry, I’ve been in a lot of shelters. Like MANY dedicated breeders I pull dogs from shelters and rescue other breeds and mixes and species when they cross my path.

—Pets are all interchangeble. If the person who wants a small lap dog can’t find one they will be happy to come adopt an 85 lb lag mix or a cat instead.

—People who buy a pet are evil or ignorant. people who adopt acquire automatic virtue. Does not matter what kind of home they actually are.

There are more but you get the idea. And it does not matter what arguments are brought forth or how much hard evidence you present.

Being that rock solid sure of a conviction must be nice for them, but it’s not constructive. We need real-world solutions and strategies that actually work. If something has failed for decades, it’s failed, time to move on and evolve.

Amen, Jen!

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.

Our next PetConnection giveaway (sign up for the Nov. 1 drawing) — Aspen pet-care products worth $250 — marks the first time we will choose four winners, one for each gift basket.  I’ll put up all the details this weekend, but I do know that some of the products really caught my eye at Global Pet Expo, the big annual pet-industry trade show.

But more details later about that, as I said.  Instead, I was thinking about what our ever-professional contact at Aspen, Kelly Nelson, wrote recently in sending over the information on the prizes. “TGIF!!!,” she wrote. “What a whip of week!”

That phrase has really stuck with me, and this has been one whip of a week.

If I weren’t so darn busy, I would stay in bed and pull the covers over my head.

It started Sunday when my brother hit some road debris on the Interstate. His car’s front tires shredded under him, but he was able to pull to the shoulder without further damage or — most importantly — without any injury to himself. But the arrangement of the tow truck, the moving of people and vehicles here and there, the decisions (two tires, or all four?) just seemed to be a yawning vortex of time-suck that the whole family was dragged into. And the expense — not covered by insurance — was considerable, $1,100 to put four new shoes on the T-bird, plus alignments of various sorts. My brother’s a teacher, and that kind of dough is never easy to turn over. But what can you do?

The news wasn’t better on Monday, even if I wasn’t personally involved. And all animal-related, in one way or another:

• The ongoing deaths of babies in China proves for sure that certain elements in the Chinese manufacturing community and the government didn’t care about the death of thousands of pets from adulterated ingredients in 2007. They don’t care about their own children, so you know they didn’t care about our pets … or American children, for that matter. The Wild West of Chinese capitalism continues to run amok, and the powers that be there don’t care about anything  except money. (Here’s the latest.)
• The leveling of entire communities along the Texas/Louisiana coast, by the one-two punch of hurricanes Gustav and Ike. These people are suffering, and so are many animals, domestic and wild, and this will continue for a long, long time, no matter how much help they get.
• The financial meltdown on Wall Street, which means the housing market isn’t getting any better any time soon.  When people leave their homes, their pets suffer, too. This week I’ve already gotten an significant uptick of e-mail (some meant for me, some meant for the rescue group of the same name in the Kansas City area) from people who are looking for options that will let them keep their pets when they lose their homes — or looking for places to take their pets when they can’t find pet-friendly housing. Not to mention: With so many people living on the razor’s edge of solvency, it’s easy to predict that even for those who can keep their pets, there may be sacrifices in terms of the care those animals get.

There’s more behind my malaise, but that the most of it.  Whip of a week? You betcha.

But then …

Our editor at Universal Press, Greg Melvin, rescued a feral kitten over the weekend. He was helping to handle a death in the family, on a farm a few states away. One of the barn cats had a litter with her, and she and her babies were all too wild to be pets, except one little kitten who walked right up to Greg and started purring. That little guy earned himself a plane ride back to Missouri and a great new home. Greg and his veterinarian are working to get the newly named Harry through the next couple of days. The kitten is loaded with every imaginable parasite and extremely malnourished. Dr. Becker and I both talked to Greg yesterday, to answer questions and offer encouragement.

Greg promises kitten pictures later just sent me a pic!

The Saving of Harry has been the only bright spot on what has been and likely will continue to be a Whip of Week. Never will I be so glad to see Friday come along.

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…)

You couldn’t get me to go to the Olympics if you gave me a private jet to get there and presidential box to watch from. (And no, TV execs, I won’t be watching on TV, either. I’m boycotting.) On top of everything else (EE=the product tampering, the poison, the pollution and the political leadership) Chinese officials are now slaughtering cats by the thousands to clean up Beijing for the games. From the Daily Mail (UK):

Thousands of pet cats in Beijing are being abandoned by their owners and sent to die in secretive government pounds as China mounts an aggressive drive to clean up the capital in preparation for the Olympic Games.

Hundreds of cats a day are being rounded and crammed into cages so small they cannot even turn around.

Then they are trucked to what animal welfare groups describe as death camps on the edges of the city.

The cull comes in the wake of a government campaign warning of the diseases cats carry and ordering residents to help clear the streets of them.

And yes, this is the same government that clubbed dogs to death, all to present a pretty face for the Olympics: (more…)