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.

February 5, 2025

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?

December 24, 2024January 21, 2025

Integrity

“Integrity is a quality of being honest and having strong moral principles. It refers to firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values. People with integrity follow moral and ethical principles in life, including professional areas of work such as decision-making, interacting with colleagues and serving customers or clients.” If you still believe anything that the internet says.

Some says that, “Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is watching.” But, God is always watching. Integrity is a rare thing. We are all born with equal amounts of integrity, but as we grow older we begin losing our integrity. Some lose it faster than others. The problem with integrity is that once you lose it, you never get back; over time, losing more of it becomes easier and easier.

Mainstream media may never be trusted again, because they have lost their integrity. The easiest way to keep from losing your integrity is to fear God. If God is always watching, then maybe you don’t want Him looking down on you in disappointment. If you have not cut all of your ties with God, you might feel guilt when cheating in life. It is His way to drive you in the right direction.

If you can’t find your way to fearing God, then imagine wearing a polygraph in all of your dealings with the business of your life.

Trustworthy is the first law of being a Boy Scout. You are to, “Tell the truth and keep promises. People can depend on you.” The world needs more Boy Scouts.

What does this have to do with working in animal welfare? EVERYTHING!

Bible passages:

Job 2:3

And the Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil? He still holds fast his integrity, although you incited me against him to destroy him without reason.”

Ps 7:8

The Lord judges the peoples; judge me, O Lord, according to my righteousness and according to the integrity that is in me.

Pr 11:3

The integrity of the upright guides them, but the crookedness of the treacherous destroys them.

Pr 19:1

Better is a poor person who walks in his integrity than one who is crooked in speech and is a fool.

November 18, 2023March 10, 2024

Pack Behavior

The best way to cement your next budget is to have a pack of dogs running loose in your community. There is an interesting dynamic that exists where two or more dogs begin hanging out together on a regular basis. As the pack grows, the pack takes on more confidence. As the confidence in a pack grows, it risks becoming more aggressive. It only takes one dog to turn aggressive in any situation to trigger the remaining dogs to become vicious.

It takes a few incidents of vicious dogs running loose for a community to gain an appreciation for their local Animal Control department. Add in a few fatalities and you can even gain new equipment, like tranquilizer guns and traps, for your Animal Control Officers.

Down through the years, we have witnessed humans taking on pack behavior. We see it in looting, protests, and in our youth. Given the increase in human hostility, you can be thankful for the Police Officers who protect us. Oops, didn’t we go through a period of defunding our Police? Boy was that stupid.

Just a few minutes into our nightly news programming to see that humanity has lost its ability of self-control. With fewer people being held accountable, more people are manifesting their rage in public.

If you have read any of my earlier blogs, you know that I think social media is going to be our downfall. Social media tends to wind us up and then is used to direct people to locations to let loose their rage. It seems that the intelligence of any crowd is determined by the dumbest person in the crowd. That is the person who acts out and triggers the rest of the crowd to become a mass of stupidity.

You can always predict one of these pending acts of stupidity when you see people wearing face masks. No longer are the face masks needed for COVID, but are now needed to protect the identity of someone preparing to do something majorly stupid. Why else would that gather with other like-minded people?

You can witness the parenting of children when you see flash mobs robbing stores or attacking people by our youth. A recent incident of ten children, between 13 and 17 years of age, killing a schoolmate over some stupid thing. Parents have given up their parenting responsibility to the schools that are really doing a poor job. In fact, the schools are exacerbating the problem. Instead of teaching our children life skills, they are taught to become outraged over preferred pronouns.

Animal Control officers have vast experience in handling dog packs. The trick is to break up the pack and drive the animals home where they can deal with their owners. The Police could learn from Animal Control when humans are the plague of our communities.

Dealing with pack behavior

I’ve always felt that using paintball guns using a mixture of pepper, skunk oil, and dye-pack ink would ensure that the pepper would stop their activity, the skunk oil would make them rethink their pack behavior, and the dye would evidence the animal’s involvement of being caught “in the act.” If this method became effective for Animal Control Officers, Police could later adopt it for their own use.

June 26, 2022November 28, 2022

The Problem with Long-term Dogs

With the advent of the No Kill Movement, animal shelters began holding animals much longer so as to facilitate positive outcomes. Animals were no longer kept for days or weeks but held for months or years. We began to see new dynamics arise within our walls.

Animals do not respond to long-term confinement the same. Some accepted their fate, but others did not. We had to begin wondering if the decisions to hold an animal were in the animal’s best interest. We called it, “cage crazy” when an animal becomes more aggressive the longer that we hold the animal.

Cage crazy comes in many varies. In Roanoke, we witnessed several dogs acting aggressive toward our staff but were gentle toward a couple of volunteers who walked them. The dogs were too aggressive for adoption. The decision to euthanize the dogs created an outcry from the volunteers. Our decision to euthanize the dogs was a good decision, but our mistake was not videotaping the dogs to support that decision.

The pressure to hold dogs, even aggressive dogs, forces animal shelters to make bad decisions. Those bad decisions put animal shelter employees at risk when public safety should be our primary focus. When shelter staff can no longer safely interact with an animal, the quality of care for that animal is greatly diminished and we have to ask ourselves if we are providing humane care.

The decision to hold an animal should be based on a shelter’s ability to meet the needs of that animal and insure the safety of its staff. The decision should not be made so as to keep a couple of volunteers happy. We need to keep reminding ourselves that the primary mission of an animal shelter is to protect the community. When animal shelters switch their priority to insuring that every animal gets adopted, it then places its community at risk.

I have mentioned previously that in Virginia, it became so common for shelters to lie to potential adopters about an animal’s past behavior that the Commonwealth had to create a law that prohibited lying. Shelters were willing to give up their integrity so as to claim that they were a No-Kill Organization. The fact is, that it was actually better for potential pet owners to avoid getting their pet from an animal shelter in Virginia because you couldn’t trust what they told you. On top of that, the adopters were criticized on social media for returning the aggressive animal back to the shelter.

The fact is, that few shelters know the past history of an animal. The people who know are the ones that turned in their pet as a stray. If animal shelters decide to commit to long holding times for animals, then they must be willing to share what little knowledge that they have gained about the animal. Many jurisdictions have created Pet Lemon Laws that protect an adopter from purchasing a pet from their shelter. We have learned that what people imagine in their minds as to what it is like to be a pet owner often doesn’t meet the reality of bringing a pet home.

In recent years, animal shelters were sued because they thought it was more important to adopt an animal than to keep the children in a family safe. Being truthful about an animal should be an animal shelter’s only option.