Analytics

Every once in a while, a blogger finds their way to this site. I don’t know how they find me, but they do, wanting to author an article for you. I’ve agreed a couple of times, only to regret it. I’ve decided that if someone is going to write something stupid on my website, it was going to be me, which I do quite frequently.

I infrequently ponder who might be my readers and in what numbers they visit me. The site analytics tell me that this site is visited, on average, fifty times a day. The next question is why?

I would like to think that I can impart some wisdom to keep animal welfare workers out of trouble, or people are visiting to see my paintings in the gallery. To see if I have gotten any better. The problem is that you have to look at a lot of bad paintings to find the one or two that I could be really proud of. Some might disagree and claim that their 12-year-old can do better. That is hurtful thinking, but probably true.

Maybe it is an ex-employee looking me up to see if I have died yet. Maybe it is one of those humane societies that I worked with to see if I have written anything bad about them. It could be an ex-wife who is checking to see if I am still saying stupid things; which I am.

I am hoping that someone new to animal welfare accidentally finds this site and can learn from my experiences. Our field is a challenging one and the challenges have even gotten harder. COVID drove people to adopt pets when they were working from home, and then gave them up when it was time to go back in to work. Inflation grew so much that people could not afford to feed themselves and chose to give up their pets. Cities and counties had to adjust budgets to deal with the invasion of illegal immigrants coming into our Country. In many ways, times have gotten harder for animal shelters who are forced to do more with less funding. That is why I speak out against organizations who are trying to bully animal shelters to adopt out more animals when the adoption market is dry.

I’ve always encouraged being good stewards and showing integrity. Keep up the good fight and do what you can to give homeless animals a new future. Feel free to check in every once in a while to enjoy a friendly chat from time to time; although it is one-sided. Don’t forget to bring your coffee.

Don’t get angry with me when I change topics away from animal welfare issues. As I have gotten older, I have been nurturing my soul. I found Christ a long time ago while serving in Thailand. I have made the mistake of not mentioning Him before. I will not make that mistake any longer. He is my life and He directs my way. Throughout my entire career, I always knew that God had my back.

I never turned on the comment feature on the website because the world is full of mean people and I pay enough money for the site that I don’t want to listen to them. I figured that if you really needed to find me, it doesn’t take much work to drop me an email. If you are experiencing difficult times, my email address is in the menu. If I can’t offer solid advice, I can always pray for you.

Doctrine

Doctrine is those things that you hold firmly.  It is the thing that you build your principles upon.  Sadly, it is also the thing that divides us.  False doctrine is something that erodes us.  It goes beyond faith, it becomes who we are.

Every animal shelter would have a principle for how we treat the animals in our care.  That doctrine should insure that each animal is receiving adequate care.  That principle should also extend to how we treat the animal when an animal is suffering and we are unable to provide it with the care that it needs.

Animal shelters need to document these principles so that everyone in the organization will understand our doctrines.  Many times, our doctrines are what paves our path to humane treatment of the animals in our care.  It is upon these doctrines that we submit our annual budget request.

Being on the Right Side of Animal Rights

As much as I lambast animal rights organizations for bullying animal shelters for not adopting aggressive dogs so as to meet a 90% statistical number; I find myself on the same side wth them when it comes to wild animals.  I think all roadside zoos should be shut down.

Although my college background is in wildlife resources, I am against State laws that require that trappers only have to check their traplines once every three days.  I can’t imagine an animal being stuck in a leg hold trap for three days.  I can’t imagine an animal having to be in a leg hold trap for even three hours.  Whenever I am given the opportunity to update a city or county animal ordinance, I always work in a prohibition on leg hold traps. There is no use for them in populated or unpopulated areas.  They are a danger to domestic pets and they are intended to harm another living thing.

While I am bandstanding, wild species should never be a backyard pet.  For a while idiots were allowed to purchase ligers, half lion and half tiger.  There are probably still people keeping these animals in their backyards.  The real dumb ones probably have them running around in their houses.  The problem with natural selection is that instead of wiping out the person with deleterious genes (for stupidity) is when a child becomes injured due to someone else’s gene pool.

I worked with someone conducting college research on taking coyote puppies and attempting to domesticate them.  They hand-raised them from birth; only to find that the animals were coded from birth to be wild.  The human species is not smart enough to figure out that wild animals are coded with DNA to be wild.  It is inhumane to make them any different than what they are coded for.

Protests

In the mid-1990s, a woman called our local media and announced that there was going to be a major protest at the County Animal Shelter. The media showed up, and a single protester walked outside our doors with a sign that said, “Save Pookie, Neuter David Flagler.”

In all of my years in animal control, I have to say that was my favorite sign—not that I had many to choose from. Pookie was a Rottweiler who attempted to eat the neighbor’s child. The child was climbing the chain-link fence that separated the two yards, and Pookie grabbed the tip of the child’s shoe and attempted to pull the child through the fence.

Given the circumstances, I deemed Pookie dangerous. My decision was overturned in court when the audience showed up wearing t-shirts supporting Pookie. Then and now, we live in a climate that supports the underdog.

We go, almost daily, reading about protests in our communities. The latest one in my community had 200 protesters, but the media could not discern what they were protesting. It doesn’t matter, people protest everything…. Immigration, transgenders in women’s sports, Trump cleaning out the waste in government spending. We have such a large pallet of causes that it no longer matters, we’re just going from one complaint to another.

All of these protests later, I regret not getting my hands on that first protest sign because Pookie was saved and eventually Flagler got neutered. As I think back, I was probably already neutered at that time. But anyway, it was a comforting thought.

Respecting the Dead

I’ve always said that how you treat a dead animal indicates how you treat a live one.  I bring up this issue today when several of our local police officers were discovered cutting up a dead homeless person.  Pretty outrageous.  They didn’t even cut off their body cameras; pretty stupid as well.  I have a lot of respect for police officers, but these guys do not measure up to the level I expect of their position.

Acronyms

Acronyms are undermining society. This should not be a surprise because social media is at the root of the new language that sprung forth from our cell phones. At least once a week, I’ve been stumped (ALOAWIBS) (LOL) when I come across an unknown acronym.

As professionals, you would think that we would avoid the overuse of acronyms, but we are just as bad as the rest of the social media world. For example, anyone outside the animal welfare world would not know what HBC (Hit By Car) means. We would say the animal was dead, but no, we have to say “dead on arrival” (DOA). It gets confusing when dispatch wants to know if our DOA was HBC. You get the point.

It is a confusing world. On a lark, I Googled to see if there is an app that can help us out. Much to my surprise, there is. The app that I found can only be used on iPhones. Who decided that people who have Apple phones need the acronyms finder more than Android users? Then it hit me, iPhone users are more likely to overuse acronyms. As an Android user, when I come across an acronym that I don’t recognize, I just move on. If the person has to use an acronym to make their point, then the point isn’t all that important.

Soon, I am sure, that there will be an app that help people invent new acronyms. I am hoping that the Android version comes out first. I could shorten my emails with acronyms of my choosing.

Of course, it might be a mistake to ignore acronyms in all places; especially hospitals. I can see why hospital staff might shorten their language in an emergency. However, after the emergency, it would be nice if they moved back to a “normal” language.

We have been using acronyms for so long that some of them are becoming quite annoying. I could live without LOL or RLOL, which really should be ROTFLOL. If you don’t know what any of those mean, you are not missing much. Actually, you aren’t missing anything.

Some in the world would say that I’m wrong. I get that quite often. What would the world be like without a few LOLs in our life?

Say What?

In looking at my last post, no one can accuse me of smooth-talking. So? What do I do with it? Do I throw it out or do I try to sift through it? Let’s try again.

Animal Welfare is looking at each individual animal and attempts to do what is best for it given current resources. Animal Rights is looking at the plight of groups of animals and shifting the mindset of society to raise the animal’s plight to higher importance.

From an Animal Welfare approach you look at the condition of an animal and determine if you can improve the animal’s condition given the resources at hand. It becomes most noticeable when determining whether an organization should treat a medically compromised animal. What factors do you consider? Probably the most important factor is if there is any home where the animal’s owner will show up and assume financial responsibility for the animal. Organizations with limited budgets will be more likely to treat an injured animal if the animal is wearing some form of identification, hinting that an owner might be out looking for their pet. The difficulty is trying to get inside the mind of that owner as to what they would accept as a reasonable amount that they would pay out for their pet.

When treating an injured animal, the organization has to decide if care for the one animal outweighs the care for the other animals in your care. The one notion that people cannot get their heads around is that animal shelters do not have unlimited resources. I have witnessed many incidents in which an animal’s owner would surrender their pet, as a stray, to the animal shelter because they didn’t want to pay the cost for the medical treatment that their pet needed. These folks seem to be the least understanding when the shelter decides that the cost of treatment is beyond them as well. People think that the shelter should throw any amount of funds so that the owner can come return later to adopt back their own pet. So, seeing an ID on the animal is not always an indication that someone is out there in the world to accept financial responsibility of the pet. It does, however, give shelter staff hope and I am more likely to hold the animal longer at the shelter and offer up more money to help the animal with ID.

From an animal rights perspective, the decision to treat the animal is easy. All animals deserve the right to live. The only exception is the animal is demonstrating that it is in such pain and the animal would be better off being put to sleep. Animal rights folks would browbeat anyone standing in the way to prevent treatment. The animal rights folks would just as likely treat a potentially dangerous animal as it would any other.

From an animal welfare perspective, a shelter might hold off on treatment of an animal that doesn’t offer any return on investment. In other words, is the animal adoptable, or after a long stay you are going to have to euthanize the animal anyway? And then you are out the funds that you could have used to save other animals. From an animal rights perspective, you see that one animal representing every other animal and that if you don’t save the one, then that is your attitude towards all the rest. In the case of potentially dangerous animals, the animal rights folks have me pegged. I would rather keep a dangerous dog comfortable during its stray holding period than throw a bunch of money towards it when I have no notion of returning the animal back into the community.

From an outside perspective, one group makes the decision and moves on to help the animals that they are capable of helping. From the other perspective, the groups sees that failure to help that one animal is evidence that other animals won’t be helped either. As such, animal rights groups will attempt to teach you a lesson and go public to try to turn your community against you. The best beating, in their minds, is from the people who fund your organization.

Animal Rights groups cannot wrap their heads around the fact that animal shelters have limited resources. They are not smart enough to understand that communities that fund the animal shelter also have limited resources. Time after time, when I was fighting for funding for my shelter, I heard other voices crying out that funding that was allocated to me would take away from allocations to children in the community. Animal Rights folks can’t understand the competition that animal shelters face for funding.

An Animal Rights group might offer limited funding to push their efforts, but they expect the animal shelter to continue funding the project after it gets off to a good start. The problem is that communities are more sensitive to the economy than are the animal right folks. If the economy is hard now, it is likely to be worse when the pilot program ends. You can’t make a promise to fund a project two or three years down the road when you can’t afford it now.

Notwithstanding the economic climate; the animal rights folks will feel slighted because they feel their cause is higher than any other that communities might face in the future. As such, they will make a public spectacle to bloody the community leaders and the animal shelter staff. I have had to fight this battle many times in my career and for that reason, I don’t think much of animal rights groups. If there is any message to send them; despite what they feel are their priorities, in budget deliberations, children trumps animals every time. Animal Rights folks believe that their cause is the only one that matters; that is their world. Communities have to deal with a much larger world.

A public animal shelter rarely gains financially when they become No-Kill. Animal Rights groups, on the other hand, can access private funding for punishing animal shelters into submission. In the end, public animal shelters have to go through great financial hardship when pushing the No-Kill agenda, but the taskmasters are financially rewarded. There is example after example of governmental organizations spending tons of money to gain and hang on to their No-Kill status. Read about the City of Austin going through it. Just ask Google: Mainly, no-kill created shelter overcrowding, forced shelter staff to reduce the quality of care for their animals, and came at a great expense. Was it worth it? Depends on who you ask. It mostly depends on the amount of available cash that a city has to spend on such efforts. Most cities could not have pulled off what Austin did… none that I ever worked in. That doesn’t mean that we didn’t have our own success stories. I found that the most successful programs that we pulled off were ones in which we made it financially feasible for animal rescue groups to join our cause.

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Why do I bother with this now? As a governmental employee, I had to wear a muzzle throughout my career. When I retired, I was able to throw off my muzzle and speak my truth, even if it first appeared as gibberish on paper. At least, it is unfiltered gibberish. And, I hate bullies. When I see bullies, in any form, I’ll lash out. Animal Rights groups are eager to bully an animal shelter into compliance. Sometimes it is justified but usually, it isn’t

Animal Welfare vs. Animal Rights

I have a tremendous appreciation for animal welfare organizations and little appreciation for animal rights organizations. It recently dawned on me as to how I can distinguish between the two. I am quite surprised as to how it took me so long. Much of it has to do with the evolution of an organization.

Most of us start out wanting to help animals; it is a noble task. We become so effective at helping animals that we are motivated to want to change society to help animals. When we take on this task, we have to assure ourselves that the task is noble and the cause is righteous.

Today, we frequently see folks taking on causes that are not accepted as righteous. All of the bullying in the world will not make a cause righteous; if anything, it makes it worse.

We frequently see this in the animal welfare movement when other organizations or people want to force their ideology upon us. Oddly, if forced upon us long enough the cause actually might shift to righteousness. No-Kill was shoved down our throats long enough that we began to see the benefits of drinking that in. It still becomes problematic when the goal of becoming No-Kill is just a statistical issue and not a moral issue.

I can remember back when the board of a major humane society would call me at night telling me that I was doing a disservice to my community by not killing 90% of the animals that came into my care. Now, we are assaulted if we are forced to kill over 10% of our animals. The humane society lost its contract with the county due to its large euthanasia numbers and it felt that its cause was righteous because the board members were convinced that 90% of the animals were too dangerous to put on the streets of the community. Well, looking back at that, we see that they caved to stupidity.

But, is the 10% that we deal with today also an effort in stupidity? It’s just a number! It is just a statistic! Well, it is not. That number represents everything to animal rights organizations. It is the difference between calling shelter staff saviors or killers. It has become a number that keeps the bad guys bad and the good guys good.

How important is that number? Are we willing to adopt out dangerous animals just to meet our statistical goal, so that we can look like the good guys on paper? Are we willing to turn domestic cats out into a cold winter, so that we can call ourselves no-kill? What is it worth to us? Are we willing to be inhumane so as to meet a statistical number? If the answer is yes, then you might want to look again at your mission statement.

It is possible to reduce euthanasia to zero.  Is that helping or hurting your community?  What about the animals?

I recently watched one of my favorite organizations move from animal welfare to animal rights. I grieve for them and for the rest of us.

Trap, Neuter, and Release (TNR) Programs

One of our local cities forfeited a million-dollar grant to reduce the city’s feral cat program through a program of trapping, neutering, and releasing (TNR) the sterile cats back into the community. There are two sides to this issue and from my perspective, I’ve never seen a positive long-term outcome with TNR programs. Unless feeling good is your desired outcome. Sure, a number of years ago, organizations touted success stories, but many of those proved unfounded over time.

Communities began seeing surplus cats in communities because many people saw cats as too independent to be considered pets; so they didn’t invest in spaying or neutering their cats that seem to come and go from their households. When things are going well for cats, they like to breed. Most species are the same way. The offspring of these “domestic” cats started becoming feral. A feral population is dependent on the carrying capacity of the community. As food became scarce, the cats would stop breeding.

“Little Old Ladies” upset the carrying capacity of the community by setting out food for the cats to eat. The cats would start to breed again until they exceeded the carrying capacity again. Like raccoon populations, disease would wipe out the population when the population is stressed with too many animals. Raccoons are usually on a seven-year cycle.

The problem with TNR programs is that in addition to spaying and neutering the cats, the cats are offered vaccinations, thus reducing the possibility of death through disease. Another problem with managing feral cat problems is that an excess removal of cats allows vermin to increase. I recall that in one neighborhood that was aggressively against cats discovered that rats grew in population corresponding to the removal of the cats. Anytime you are messing with animal populations, you are messing with Mother Nature.

Cats became a growing concern in animal shelters wanting to become no-kill. It seemed at the rate that cat’s breed, that having a 90% release rate was looking like a passing dream. Some shelters, to meet their no-kill goal, started taking the cats surrendered at the shelter and treating them as part of a TNR solution. They were taking the cats surrendered by their owners and sterilizing them and then releasing them back into the community. The trick was to release them into an area where the owners would not know what they had done. Some believed that throwing a domestic cat in the wild to starve to death was inhumane. No one reported on the impact of these starving cats. So they may or may not have survived. The point was that by doing this, the shelter could boast that they have reached no-kill. Many began to say that TNR stood for Trap, Neuter, and Re-abandon.

The notion, if people continued to feed feral cats, it was better to feed a sterile cat than a fertile cat. Or so we thought. It seems that over time, populations adjust. Even in a population of sterile cats, if the carry capacity increases, the population will adjust for that increase. Cats from other areas will move in. Thus the reason that TNR programs fail. They are good for a while, but if left unattended the fertile cats take over again and they do so quickly.

No-kill is a constant goal for animal shelters and even a short time win looks good for statistics and that is what no-kill is all about is finding other solutions for the animals in our shelters because killing an animal just doesn’t seem like a good solution. I have always advocated that the best solution to killing animals is to prevent their births. Not enough is being done to sterilize every pet. Shelters continue to adopt intact animals…. stupid….. very stupid. Pet owners cannot be trusted to take care of sterilizing their newly adopted pet. Trust me, I have years and years of experience in this area.  It is shocking the number of men who tie their testicles to that of their dog’s.

So? Is TNR worthwhile? It is a short-term solution to a bigger program. It makes us feel good by helping with our statistics and staff doesn’t have to perform euthanasia. It provides additional business for our local veterinarians. While you are doing it, it’ll feel good. A few years down the road, you’ll look back and wonder if you had made any impact at all.

Mother Nature maintains everything in a balance. The best way to upset that balance is to introduce humans into the equation (something that I picked up in college and later realized in life). For TNR to be successful over a long period of time, you’ll have to continue your efforts. As we have discovered that TNR usually has an immediate impact that you can feel good about; but, when you stop TNR, the feral population will rebound.

Ribbons

Have you ever watched a movie in which a person in their dress military uniform comes into the room with a chest full of decorations? Your first reaction is that the person has witnessed a lot of action in the military. That may or may not be the case. The first ribbon you get in the military is the one that shows you survived boot camp. It’s probably the only ribbon that you feel that you have earned. My second ribbon was the Marksman Ribbon. The idea is to hit your LARGE target 90 times using 90 bullets. My target had 104 holes, so I earned the Marksman Ribbon. I later discovered that the shooter next to me was shooting into my target. Shooting at the wrong target doesn’t count towards your own Marksman Ribbon. It is nearly impossible to not pick up an Outstanding Unit Citation Ribbon. They are handed out like candy and I can no longer remember how I earned mine. Granted, I was only in the military for four years, but the most prodigious ribbon was the Philippines Presidential Ribbon. I know, you probably think that I saved the President’s life, but I am not sure that I did. While serving in the Philippines, I donated blood to the Red Cross and earned that ribbon. My father should have been the one to receive that ribbon because he took all of his kids down to donate blood on a regular basis. Donating in the Philippines just seemed like the natural thing to do. I probably earned other ribbons, but I didn’t keep track, I don’t think the military did either. You could just go down to the BX and buy whatever ribbons suited you.

This thought path that has taken me, and now you, reminded me of a guy that I went to college with. He got a job as a part-time law enforcement officer in a small town near the college. The town was nothing more than a speed trap along the highway. The guy’s boss went on vacation and for a short time, he became the Chief of Police. When I saw this guy wearing his uniform, I started laughing. I know, you should respect law enforcement authority but this guy was dressed exactly as a Latin American dictator: five stars, ceremonial ropes hanging from his shoulders, and, of course, dark sunglasses. He was proof positive that the uniform doesn’t make the man.

So, at this point, I try to turn this story into something that represents a message for animal welfare workers. The descriptions that we give the public are often undeserved depictions of the animals in our care. Many animal rescue groups lie about the animals, so that they can get them adopted. The pressure of becoming no-kill has caused many organizations to lose their integrity. It became so bad in Virginia that laws had to be created to make it illegal to provide a false narrative about an animal for adoption.

Many communities have pet lemon laws that make it imperative that we be honest when dealing with prospective pet owners.  There is nothing better than a Letter to the Editor in your local newspaper to put you in your place.

We have become a nation of false narratives and many animal shelters have jumped into lying as a matter of daily operations. It has become so ingrained in our society that we can no longer encourage people to adopt our animals because we have gained so much mistrust in the communities that we serve. No-kill is a good thing, but not at the loss of your organization’s integrity. The real harm comes when our staff so freely gives out false claims that they can no longer identify truth from fiction. Organizational leaders need to listen to what their staff and volunteers are telling people and take action when they are not being honest.