pet connection

I don’t watch a lot of television, but Melissa Treuman, who is in her professional life the community relations manager for the ASPCA, forwarded an alert today about a Verizon ad. I hadn’t seen the ad, so I went looking for it on YouTube.

It shows a young man climbing the fence into a junkyard guarded by two ravening pit bulls, whose menace he risks just to get his hands on some piece of electronic junk I decline to name. Tag line: “Dare to touch one.”

I have a suggestion for Verizon: How about you make an ad in which we see all the Michael Vick dogs being petted and cuddled by their people, or doing therapy work? Talk about “Dare to touch one.” That would pack one hell of a punch, yo.

In their official statement, the ASPCA said:

We are disappointed that Verizon has chosen to perpetuate an unfortunate stereotype of Pit Bulls.  Our own ASPCA “Adopt-A-Bull” program has demonstrated that these dogs can make wonderful additions to a family.   The public also showed their support for the evaluation and rehabilitation of the Pit Bulls rescued from the Michael Vick case, suggesting that they are ahead of the corporate world in their understanding of Pit Bulls.

So I’m with the ASPCA and the 4758978 pro-pit bull, anti-BSL groups out there in the vastness of the Internetz even now screaming, “Verizon, are you really this ignorant?”

The forwarded alert suggested that you let Verizon know just what you think of this ad, and to make that easy, she’s included some key email addresses at the company. It also reminds us:

As always, please be polite and courteous. Our dogs are counting on us to be their voice.

Email addresses under the jump. Do it for the dogs. ETA: Check the comments for updated comment info!

(more…)

When Heather was young, she could swim forever. When we lived for a few months in a beach house on the Gulf of Mexico, Heather was wet or damp pretty much all the time. (Pictured: Young Heather and Ben (now at the Bridge) on the beach at Alligator Point, Fla., in January of 2001.)

But last summer, at the age of 10, she got out a little farther than was safe for an old dog and almost got herself into the kind of trouble that could have led to her drowning. It was a very close call, and I couldn’t bear the thought of standing helplessly by while she slipped under the water for good. This summer, at the age of 11, Heather has been left out of the river runs. She’d sink sadly into her bed and look away while I whistled up the two younger dogs and took off for the beach.

It was breaking both of our hearts.

But my friend Alyce, who owns Heather’s brother Bogey, had the brilliant idea to get Bogey a life vest. She said Bogey quickly figured out that he could just sort of bob in the water with the vest to hold him up, and paddle to get where he wanted. It was a complete success, so I ordered the same model from Cabela’s for Heather, too.

It’s the best $50 I have ever spent on any pet-related item. Like her brother, Heather soon figured out that the jacket would keep her on the top of the water, allowing her to swim with little effort, and to rest when she needed to. Her joy at being back in the water, and at being able to swim without getting quickly exhausted, was obvious and contagious. My friend Don, who with his dogs always meets us for these river runs, could not get over the change in Heather.

A buzz cut and a life jacket, and she’s a new dog.

There’s nothing like a happy old dog. Check it out for yourself and see if her grin doesn’t make you grin, too:

In the middle of a long, prominent and generally favorable profile of HSUS top dog Wayne Pacelle in the Los Angeles Times, these two paragraphs made me snort coffee:

“He’s a very charming man, and that never hurts,” said Ingrid Newkirk, the co-founder of PETA, who has known Pacelle for 20 years. “I’m a rather abrasive sort.”

But Newkirk wishes he would do more. “I am keen that he really go after the pet food manufacturers who still test on animals,” she said. “Wayne has a slower approach.”

For an organization that kills 90 percent of the animal they take in to their shelter, PETA’s advocacy on the pet-food issue (which I happen know a little about, heh), is fascinating. Not only were the national animal advocacy groups — with the sole exception of the ASPCA and their Animal Poison Control Center’s Dr. Steve Hansen — caught completely flat-footed by the killing of thousands of pets by tainted pet foods, but PETA doesn’t seem to understand that the death of animals in the Menu Foods labs is what revealed there was a problem with the foods in the first place.

Those were the only animals confirmed dead by government and industry for the longest time, the infamous “16 dead” the FDA wouldn’t increase despite thousands and thousands of reports of pet deaths to the FDA and information from our PetConnection database and from the veterinarians of the Veterinary Information Network.

And despite PETA’s longstanding spittle-spewing hatred of Procter & Gamble’s Iams division, the recall was triggered, according to Congressional testimony, when Iams laid down the law to Menu Foods and told them that if they didn’t start the recalls, Iams would.

So, let’s recap:

• Ingredients that tested fine in laboratory analysis kill animals in a real-life feeding test.
• A company PETA loathes has the corporate cahones to force its reluctant contract manufacturer to trigger six weeks of product recalls that are unprecedented in U.S. history, and that foreshadow an ongoing and yet to be dealt with import crisis in the U.S. food supply.
• PETA wants pet food companies to abandon animal testing.

This, on top of their ongoing efforts to link community no-kill solutions with animal hoarding. This, on top of their attacks on the work of Dr. Jean Dodds to make rabies prevention safer for animals.

You look at it all, and you gotta ask:

Why is anyone still listening to PETA?

***

Interesting tidbit from the LAT Wayne Pacelle piece:

Pacelle said he knows he frequently veers away from what he calls the animal movement’s “orthodoxy.” He’s not against “responsible” dog and cat breeding. [emphasis mine] And he never refers to himself as an animal rights activist, always an animal protection “advocate.”

“The whole ‘rights’ thing is fraught with so much. I’m not sure I believe in any natural right,” he said. “It’s really about human behavior and less about the animals. Animals for the most part just need to be left alone.”

That sound you hear? Ingrid Newkirk’s head exploding.

And by the way, I can’t wait to vote Yes on California Proposition 2, which is why Pacelle is spending so much time in California. It’s a small step, but an important one away from industrialized agriculture, from the anything-goes-and-agribiz-knows practices that have led our food system down the wrong road for decades. As for the factory-farming of food animals, it’s more than animal cruelty: It’s an environmental disaster and a misuse of our precious oil reserves, and it produces food that has to be handled with extreme caution because it has become a bio-hazard.

I believe in the respectful humane handling of food animals. For their benefit, and for ours. And what we got now ain’t close.

Update: Was the L.A. Times reporter a little too charmed by Wayne Pacelle? Nathan Winograd suggests that she was.

This is a true story.

This morning I was walking Rebel and Kyrie, when a man, dogless, asked me what kind of dogs they were.

“This is Kyrie,” I said. “She’s a Borzoi, a Russian Wolfhound. And this is Rebel. He’s a Scottish Deerhound.”

The man’s face darkened. “Rebel?”

I nodded. “Yes… why?”

His face got red and angry. “I’ll never understand why people think it’s acceptable in this day and age to fly Confederate flags or name their dogs Rebel,” he ranted. “It’s racist, it’s insulting to anyone with a….” Anyway, you get the picture. I mean, it’s not like I was taking notes.

When he was done, I shook my head. “Rebel is a Scottish Deerhound. You need to think Braveheart, not Robert E. Lee.”

He looked at me, then at Rebel. And then in the immortal words of Roseanne Roseannadanna, he said, “Oh. Never mind,” and walked away.

Long ago, I decided that big charities of any sort are pretty much the same: They raise a lot of money to raise a lot more money to raise a lot more money, and relatively little of any of it goes to the programs and services those tear-jerking entreaties tell you about. 

Big national animal-advocacy groups are among the worst offenders, based on a study by the Los Angeles Times looking at the money raised vs. the return:

Ever wonder where your donations go when you give to charity by mail or over the phone? On average, commercial fundraisers deliver just 46 cents of each donated dollar to the charity. While some charities enjoy much better success, ineffective fundraisers can eat up the majority of money raised.

To see how your favorite charities or causes did from 1997-2006, search our database. It includes all for-profit fundraising campaigns exclusive to California, as well as any national campaigns that took place in the state.

The LAT-listed animal-related charities in terms of “High Revenue/Low Return” include:

• The Humane Society of the United States: 11.3 percent net return
• National Wildlife Federation: 16.6 percent
• Defenders of Wildlife: 18 percent
• PETA: 28.3 percent

Terrierman is all over this like, well, a terrier:

Back in November of 2007, I wrote a piece on this blog entitled Why the Humane Society Will Never Change in which I asked:

“Would people donate [to HSUS] if they knew 70 cents out of every dollar they gave to HSUS was spent to send out more direct mail? NO. …. Would folks continue to donate to HSUS if they knew the organization did almost nothing to help fund local animal shelters? NO.”In another post, I detailed the mechanics of the HSUS’ direct mail machine in which I concluded that:

“I think, if you follow my narrative, you will see I am really quite conservative when I say 70 to 75 cents out of every dollar most folks give to HSUS will simply go to paying for more direct mail. The real figure, for the average donor to HSUS, is well over 100 percent.”

He repeats an earlier challenge:

“If Wayne Pacelle or anyone at HSUS wants to go over specific HSUS numbers with me, I am more than happy to do so, as I work right around the corner from their office in Washington, D.C., and I would be only too happy to drop by to
pick up a copy of their accounting ledgers.

In fact, if Mr. Pacelle will give me a copy of their raw direct mail expense and income data (not the processed IRS-990 data, but the real numbers showing the costs of postage, printing, paper, creative consultants, cost of caging operations, etc), I will buy him lunch and we can go over the data and run a cohort analysis to figure out how long it takes for a HSUS member to ‘go green’ and get out of the red.

My only stipulation is that after I run the data, I can publicize it. After all, who
knew truth to suffer in a free and open investigation?

If am wrong about the fact that 70-75% of all HSUS direct mail money is going out to pay for more direct mail, I will be more than happy to report my error. After all, as Charles Barkley so famously said, ‘I could be wrong . . . but I doubt it.’”

Looking at the LAT’s list is truly enough to make you swear off donating money to any group that asks for it. Actually, that’s not a bad idea: Do your own research and make your donations accordingly. Direct-mail is not about making a sound, rational judgment, but rather on appealing to your emotion. Toss it all in the recyling bin!

And if the Terrierman ever does get the head of a national animal-advocacy group to go toe to toe with him, I want a ringside seat.