pet connection

I’ve been asked to discuss my SFGate.com column about Michael Vick and what he did to his dogs on the radio show Live from the Left Coast with Angie Coiro — I guested, along with Marion Nestle, on her show about the most recent Nutro pet food recalls earlier this year — this evening at around 6:40 PM Pacific Time.

You can listen to the show in the San Francisco Bay Area at 960 AM, or on the Internet at www.green960.com.

They also run an open discussion during the show as well, at www.lftlc.com/live.

Hope you can tune in!

I know you’re all jealous of my life. Don’t try to hide it. Jetting from one exotic location to another, mingling with the pretty people, entre to the most exclusive events, access to the power brokers… who wouldn’t envy me?

Perhaps anyone who could have been a fly on the wall when I had to stop an interview in mid-stream yesterday to unwind all the Borzoi hair from the base of the keys on my keyboard. Two years of accumulation meant I’d hit critical mass and lost the “S” and the shift keys.

Fortunately I was interviewing someone who is as much a dog person as they come, Marthina McClay of Our Pack, the rescue group that turned ex-Vick dog Leo into a therapy dog.

I was interviewing her for my column on SFGate.com, but she made some great comments that won’t fit into that piece, so I thought I’d share them with you here. Believe me, they make better reading than the story of how I had to use a knitting needle to untangle Borzoi hair from my keyboard.

I asked her about Michael Vick talking to at-risk youth about dog fighting on behalf of HSUS. She responded by telling me about a visit Leo made to a school for youth who have been in trouble with the law in San Jose, Calif. — some of them with dog fighting in their backgrounds:

We heard the kids going, “Oh, that’s a bad ass pit bull,” when we walked in. It’s like a cool thing to have a pit bull.

When we got into the classroom, I just took off Leo’s leash and let him walk around and do his thing. I let Leo speak for himself. He just connected with everyone, these kids. They went from hard to soft within 20 minutes.

Then the teacher said, “By the way, would you guys like to know where this dog came from?”

The kids said, “Where?”

She told them, “This dog used to belong to Michael Vick.”

You could hear a pin drop. Their mouths were open, their eyes were riveted on this dog. They said, “What?” They couldn’t believe it.

I could hear one of the kids being interviewed by a reporter from the Washington Post, and he said he’d assumed a dog like this, a Vick dog, would be aggressive and mean. Instead, he said, he’s a nice, sweet, friendly dog. “I really like him,” he said.

We’re not a farming culture anymore. We have lost our connection with animals. We almost never work hand in hand with our dogs anymore. We go to work in an office or cubicle, or we go to school, but there’s nothing to give us that feeling of how we fit into the world of animals.

So you bring a dog into the classroom and say, “Would you really want something like that to happen to this dog?” Before Leo showed up, I don’t think they cared. The Vick dogs were distant and not connected to them. But after they met Leo, all that changed. It mattered to them.

So what I’m saying is, don’t bring Vick to talk to at risk kids. Bring his dogs. His dogs will do a lot more for people who need to see the light that these are sentient, feeling, loving beings, and that it’s our job to care for them, than Vick can ever do.

By the way, Marthina told me that Leo has found his forever home… with her. As if anyone thought it would end any differently.

The closure of the Bay Bridge here in San Francisco has made our city streets impassable and probably prevented a fairly large number of the Humane Society of the United States’ natural constituency as well as their foes from turning up tonight.

I’ll be liveblogging the town hall meeting, so just a couple of reminders: This is live, so there will be typos. Only things in quotations marks are direct quotes; everything else is a paraphrase. I’ll update now and then, so if you come across this post while the event is still in progress, just hit “refresh” to see new material.

Here we go. :)

(more…)

I’m a military brat; my Dad spent a career in the US Coast Guard. I’ve served in the US Navy and the US Marine Corps, and my husband is a retired Marine.  But all that patriotism hasn’t blinded me to the fact that the military can make mistakes just as anyone can.

The US Marine Corps’ latest dog policy is a mistake, plain and simple. Over the past few months the news — via the internet, newspapers, and TV — has stated that the US Marine Corps is waging war on aggressive and/or dangerous dogs.  That’s only partially true.

The US Marine Corps has begun waging war on pit bulls, pittie mixes, Rottweilers, rottie mixes and wolf hybrids. The news originally stated that families living in base housing who have these breeds or mixes will have to have their dog earn an AKC Canine Good Citizen title to remain on base. This is not addressing only those dogs who have been reported as aggressive; no, it’s breed specific legislation and is targeting only these breeds.

The CGC is a wonderful program and all of my trainers at Kindred Spirits Dog Training are CGC evaluators, we do CGC tests, and we love the new AKC puppy STAR program. But this is not what the CGC was designed for.

So a proverbial war is raging. At some bases the ASPCA SAFER program is being tried to see if it will work better than the CGC, and at other bases there are discussions about the American Temperament Test Society test.

While everyone is arguing and debating what should have been done or what needs to be done now, Kindred Spirits just stepped up to the plate and said, “We need to keep these dogs in their homes. Period.”

So we are holding free screening sessions for the dogs living on base. The service member of his or her spouse can bring the dog to our training yard during an evaluation session and we’ll take a look at the dog’s level of training or lack thereof.

If the dog appears capable of passing the CGC we’ll do it right then and there for no charge or we’ll schedule the dog for the test. If the dog is pretty close to being ready but not quite, we’ll give the owner some pointers and tell him to call us when he’s ready. Or, if the dog needs training, we’ll schedule him for a basic training class.

Our first two dogs just passed the test last night. Sam, and black and white pittie mix and Titan, a red and white pittie mix, passed the CGC after a few weeks of training. Their owners stepped up to the plate, took the coaching from us seriously, and did an awesome job. All of us at Kindred Spirits are so proud of them.

Personally I do not believe in breed specific legislation. I don’t believe groups of anyone — people or dogs — should be lumped together and judged by the actions of a few. But I also don’t want to take the time to argue with the US Marine Corps while these families might be losing their dogs. Some families have already panicked and taken their dogs to one of the local shelters or rescue groups.

Many of the owners who have contacted us are dealing with jobs and raising a family by themselves while their spouses are in Iraq or Afghanistan, and now they’re facing losing their dog.  Nope, not gonna happen while my trainers and I can do something about it.

So, if you live near Camp Pendleton and know a family living on base with one of these breeds, send them to our website. If you train dogs and live near a Marine Corps base, contact animal control on the base and offer your help. They need it.

It was really only a matter of time before Michael Vick got his endorsements back, once the NFL decided having an admitted dog torturer and killer on its roster was a super-groovy good idea. Nike has taken Vick back to its bosom. From Yahoo Sports:

Michael Vick is back with Nike two years after the company severed ties over the quarterback’s involvement in a dogfighting ring.

“Mike has a long-standing, great relationship with Nike, and he looks forward to continuing that relationship,” his agent, Joel Segal, said Wednesday.

Segal would not reveal terms of the agreement. Nike declined a request for comment.

The deal was announced during a panel discussion at the Sports Sponsorship Symposium by Michael Principe, the managing director of BEST, the agency that represents Vick.

The endorsement is the latest step forward for Vick as he seeks to rehabilitate his career and his image after serving 18 months in federal prison. On Sunday, Vick played his first regular-season game since December 2006.

“It is quite evident that athletes that run afoul of the law are by no means relegated to obscurity when it comes to pitching products,” said David Carter, a professor of sports marketing at the University of Southern California.

Why is Nike doing that? Because apparently we don’t care enough about what Michael Vick did to those dogs:

Nike, which signed Vick as a rookie in 2001, terminated his contract in August 2007 after the Atlanta Falcons star filed a plea agreement admitting his involvement in the dogfighting ring. At the time, Nike called cruelty to animals “inhumane, abhorrent and unacceptable” and halted release of his fifth signature shoe, the Air Zoom Vick V.

Back when Vick first signed with the Eagles, Carter had said he was “too toxic for most companies to even consider taking a chance on him.” What’s changed? As Carter noted Wednesday, there has been little backlash to the quarterback’s return to the NFL.

Protests have been limited, and the Eagles’ sponsors have stood by them. That experience could make companies less wary about adding Vick as an endorser, though the biggest determinant might be no different from any other athlete: how well he performs on the field.

So Nike only does the right thing if they have no choice. Got it. Way to go, you mavericky shoe-making juggernaut, you. There’s nothing like a guy who has killed and tortured dogs with his own hands, while laughing about their agony, to sell stuff for a red-blooded American sporting goods firm.