Oh. Best blog ever.
Someone Woke Up on the Wrong Side of the New Year
And we know who, don’t we? Yes, Mr. Mike crankily head bobbed me the moment I walked into his room on 1 Jan. He has been ticked off at me most of the winter, due to my usual winter habit of withholding the sun from him and making the skies all gray and low…
(thanks Pet Connection!)
When I spend time on rescue forums, I’m always astounded and saddened by the vitriol aimed at pet owners either looking for support during a crisis, or who are looking for temporary care for their pets rather than resorting to leaving them at the pound.
This lack of sensitivity and ‘holier than thou attitude’, although exciting reading for other flame-throwers, does little to help these struggling owners. With assumptions made about their situation and having been branded ‘irresponsible’ for needing support, we chastise them for not making better provisions, for making ‘bad’ decisions and offer criticism instead of solutions. And these are just people perusing their options online – imagine how they’re regarded when they arrive at the shelter with pet in hand!
So why do we love to roast someone in dire straits? Merritt Clifton from Animal People says it harks back to our colonial roots;
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British expatriates in the late 19th and early 20th centuries founded hundreds of humane societies all around the world, many of which still exist, without having had the slightest visible influence on their surroundings, because they simply fail to interact.
Some “go missionary.” They rant, rave, rail, sometimes persuade, sometimes alienate, cannot be faulted for lack of interactive intent, and yet often do not succeed because they convey the attitude that knowing more about animal care equals moral superiority.
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In short, we alienate those around us and reduce our overall effectiveness by treating people who know less than us as inferior and anyone who’s unfortunate enough to wind up in trouble as somehow deserving of their misfortune. It’s the Just World Theory played out in real-time, but then defended by the idea that ‘we’re in it for the animals not the people’.
Trouble is, animal welfare and owner welfare are unreservedly intertwined. If our aim is to ‘reduce abandonment’ it makes little sense to scold those owners actually looking for help. By viewing everyone who is forced to give up a pet as ‘irresponsible’ and undeserving of support, we fail to give that pet the best chance to stay in its existing home and certainly then, the animal’s welfare is in danger.
So what can we offer people who are affected by a crisis? Often all they need to get their life together is time. Whether it be the loss of a home, problems finding pet-friendly accommodation, the loss of a job or the illness of a family member, you have a situation that requires sympathy and support, not lectures. And certainly we should be working to ensure that the loss of a loved family pet is not added to this disaster.
‘Bridge fostering’ is the term used to describe temporarily housing for the animals of people who need time to recover from a crisis. It has only found acceptance in Australia over the last few years in supporting victims of domestic violence, but many of 2009’s shelter surrenders of ‘foreclosure’ and ‘rental crisis’ pets could be prevented through ‘bridge fostering’ programs.
A foster home of 60 to 90 days can give the pet owner the time he or she needs to find a new job, find new accommodations that will allow pets or sort out their personal crisis. If the pet is not reclaimed within the designated time, then the contract specifies the animal can be made available for adoption – but these contract should be flexible and designed to find the best outcome for pet and owner.
A common argument against these kinds of programs is that giving temporary homes to pets that aren’t in the pound system is somehow disadvantaging death row or ‘truly needy’ animals. But caring for an animal who’s already lost it’s home is no more noble than caring for one that is about to lose it’s home should its owner not be able to find the resources to keep it. Add to that the knowledge that fostering is not a zero sum game; there is a huge pool of potential foster carers that would appreciate the convenience of caring for an animal for only one or two months, rather than indefinitely until the animal is rehomed. They also may rather people weren’t coming to their homes to view pets or not want to be burdened with screening adopters.
For every pet that is kept out of rescue is one home we don’t have to find. It’s one home we don’t have to ‘waste’ saving a pet that already has a home. And all it takes is changing our attitude towards people in crisis – helping them is the simplest way to help their animals.
I know we’ve been over this again and again and again, but once the animal welfare groups have been granted compulsory registration legislation and it not only fails, but increases killing, they can then force the governments hand to compulsory desexing.
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Queensland cat lovers will soon be forced to take responsibility for their moggies – as councils bring in new laws to make registration compulsory.
From July 1 all 11 southeast Queensland councils including Brisbane will make cat owners register their animals with collars and identification tags.
All new cats will also have to be microchipped before they are sold.
RSPCA spokesman Michael Beatty welcomed the move, saying it would help stop tens of thousands of stray cats and kittens being put down each year, but he said more was needed to be done in the future, including mandatory desexing.
“If we can’t reunite animals with their owners, they are put to sleep,” he said. “Registration can help us prevent this, but desexing cats would save a lot of unwanted kittens being destroyed.”
Last year Brisbane Lord Mayor Campbell Newman refused to introduce cat registration or de-sexing, but now the council has no choice. ref
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But if you’re a dog person, why should you care?
Because this isn’t about good policy; anyone whos done any research into cat populations is able to see legislation that targets pet owners doesn’t solve the problem and actually leads to an increase in killing as strays are rounded up for being ownerless. This is about what the community will buy into.
A lot of Australians don’t care about cats. A huge number don’t care about stray and feral cats. So when the kill rates surge the RSPCA can just say they’re wiping out an ’introduced species’ that kill natives, and wouldn’t make good pets anyway… blah… blah.
It’s a policy not based on life saving, but on what will be accepted. And once a state has compulsory desexing/registration for cats – of course dogs will be next.
So how do you feel about a situation where a medical procedure will undertaken on your animal, not because your vet says its the right thing for you and your pet, but because the government does?
From Dolitter blog:
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In my view, it’s the disease of short-sighted animal welfare advocacy that’s at the root of this infection; one which pits veterinarians, breeders, and independent-minded animal welfarists against those who would advocate population control over the individual needs of our pets.
No longer would the decision of your pet’s spay/neuter status be one made individually or with consideration of your veterinarian’s specific advice. No, it’ll be a decision left to our state’s legislature, most of whom I can only hope are good ol’ boys whose huntin’ dogs testicles are as precious to them as any gemstone of their exact proportions.
So you know, the FVMA (Florida Veterinary Medical Association) has not yet developed a specific policy statement, but it will almost certainly side with those advocating for the veterinarian’s role to remain as it stands: spay/neuter is NOT a decision best left to the likes of our legislators, whose understanding of this issue is as deep as Lake Okeechobee after a long drought.
For my part, on behalf of the South Florida chapter of the AVMA, (SFVMA) I’m currently drafting a response to the bill, carefully incorporating the points offered by the Veterinary News Network (of which I am a member/reporter). Sorry if this is long but it’s everything you need to know from most veterinarians’ point of view on this important topic (skip it if you’re already well-versed):
Message Points for VNN Reporters
Source: www.MyVNN.com
1) The American College of Theriogenologists (ACT) and The Society for Theriogenology (SFT) believe that companion animals who are not intended for breeding should be neutered.
2) In these message points, the term “neutering” will be used to refer to both the spaying of female pets (ovariohysterectomy) and the neutering of male pets (castration).
3) Both groups also believe that the decision to spay or neuter is a decision that the pet owner and veterinarian should make on a case by case basis. In general, mandatory spay/neuter laws are not in the best interest of the pet or the owner.
4) The benefits of neutering are well documented and include population control, decreased roaming, decreased aggression and decreased risks of mammary, ovarian, or testicular cancers.
a. As an example, spayed female pets are unlikely to develop mammary cancer, a common small animal neoplasia. This cancer is malignant 60% of the time in dogs and 90% of the time in cats.
5) Less well known are the disadvantages of neutering surgeries. They include increased risk of obesity, diabetes, increased risk of certain cancers, endocrine disorders, and even increased incidence of hip dysplasia.
a. Other research has shown that intact cats of both sexes experience a decrease in shyness when compared to neutered cats.
b. Additionally, there appears to be a decreased incidence of cognitive dysfunction in intact dogs of both sexes.
6) Mandatory spay/neuter programs (MSN), while well intentioned, are often responsible for decreases in licensing of animals and routine vaccinations in areas where MSN has been implemented.
7) Owners of intact animals are less likely to seek veterinary assistance because of a fear of being reported to local authorities or a fear of fines associated with their intact animal.
8) If owners avoid veterinary care, public health could be at risk due to decreased rabies vaccinations and routine prophylactic de-worming of our pets.
9) Some pets may possess medical conditions that could result in complications during anesthesia or surgery. Therefore, a mandate of spaying or neutering, especially at a specific age, is not in the best interest of the pet.
10) The pet overpopulation problem will not be resolved by mandating obligatory neutering of our pets. The problem is multi-factorial and must be attacked on a variety of levels.
a. Countries in the European Union where neutering is illegal do not have significant pet overpopulation problems.
11) Most pets in the US are relinquished because of behavioral issues or economic/life changing conditions of the owner.
a. Accurate data on numbers of relinquished dogs and cats is essential to enable humane organizations and governments to help resolve reasons why pets are relinquished and/or abandoned.
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The K9 Unit in Chicago has a pit bull problem. In a team which includes german shepherds and a blood hound, the pit bull is standing out as hard to train because they’re just too nice;
A pit bull named Elliot Ness is anything but untouchable. Loving and friendly, these traits keep most pit bulls from being good police dogs.
“The main problem we’re finding with pit bulls is that they’re too darn nice. All they want to do is just sit at your feet or crawl in your lap. They’re very nice dogs,” said Deborah Thedos, Cook County K9 Unit.
Police officers main contact with pit bulls is when they break up dog fighting rings. When encountering these dogs they found that they were anything but vicious.
“We knew from the get-go that these dogs, they aren’t made this way,” said Sheriff Tom Dart, Cook County.
For Elliot Ness’s partner the pit bull is much more than just a dog.
“He’s my best friend. He’s my friend. He’s my baby and he knows it.”
Thanks to Caveat for the tip.
It seems like a solid argument; if we don’t stop the leak, then we’ll never be able to stop mopping the floor. And this is the justification used when animal welfare groups set about to develop regulations to help stamp out over-breeding by backyard breeders and puppy farms.
Of course everyone wants to see an end to the mistreatment of dogs, and for every dog to be bred and brought up in a way which sees it become a satisfactory family pet. But is over population the problem and does it really lead to shelter deaths?
If we truly have a ‘dog overpopulation problem’, then there wouldn’t be a market for new puppies. Breeders would be dropping their prices exponentially to move stock and would be breeding less often if they found themselves with excess animals. But a quick look on Pet Link shows over 100 listings for litters today alone. And it’s just lunchtime! American bulldogs are selling for $1,000 – $1,200. Pom puppies are $500. Cavalier x’s are $450 – $600. And it’s estimated another 500,000 pups are sold through pet shops nationally. So it seems there is no lack of homes for puppies.
So if it’s not oversupply, it must be a huge number of ‘irresponsible owners’ buying the wrong pet, or cute puppies, and then dumping them, right?
According to the Pet Net website there was a little over 2 million, dogs and owned cats in NSW/ACT in 2005. The number of dogs and cats killed in NSW last year was 33,000. Lets assume for one moment that as many pets are rehomed as killed (though it’s often the case that many more pets are killed than rehomed), and that’s around 66,000 dogs and cats entering the pound system.
Which means only 3% of the pet population of NSW winding up in care. Which pretty much reflects The National People and Pets Survey 2006 which found that less than 5% of dogs and cats ever need the services of a pound or shelter.
Why should we consider 3% abandonment acceptable? Because like employment and it is not realistic to aim for 100% nor is it desirable.
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The natural rate of unemployment is the healthy unemployment rate that will always occur in an economy, unless it is severely overheated. It is not possible for the entire labour force to be employed at any one time. The natural rate of unemployment can vary over time. In the late 1960s and 1970s the natural rate was between 1% and 2%. Currently, the natural rate of unemployment is considered to be around 5% ref
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We will always need shelters for a small percentage of the community, who due to crisis, situation or behaviour need support of a pound or rescue and that is actually a really positive thing. That is what shelters are for. But there is absolutely no “surrender crisis” or “puppy overpopulation problem*” in Australia.
So then, why are there so many pound deaths?
Simply, there is only one cause of pound deaths. The pounds themselves.
As usual Pet Connection puts it beautifully;
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If we have learned anything in this post-Redemption era it’s that dogs die in shelters not because of ‘irresponsible pet owners’ or ‘greedy breeders’ but because of the shelters’ own policies and actions.
This repressive, white-lipped scorn of breeders springs from exactly the same ideology that gives us rescue groups and shelters that can barely find a home they consider good enough to adopt a pet to. Which are usually run by the exact same people who mourn and lament and rend their garments about how all the irresponsible bad pet owners are the ones making them kill all these poor dogs and cats, and swearing we cannot adopt our way out of ‘pet overpopulation’, and wielding shelter kill statistics like a club to punish pet owners who don’t treat their animals in exactly the way they’d like them to.
The whole thing is just a big huge heap of propaganda. Owning dogs is not a zero sum game. People often have dogs from breeders and shelters or rescue groups at the same time. Dogs are like potato chips to most of us, and once we have one, wherever we get her, we’re likely to get another. If we want to increase the number of shelter adoptions, and I know I do, we’d have a lot more luck doing that if we promoted shelter dogs instead of telling home-based breeders they’re bad and wrong for doing what dog lovers have done for thousands of years, breed their dogs.
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All this energy being expended trying to chase down the source of abandoned pets is overlooking the fact that we’ve not been ‘mopping the floor’ at all. We’ve instead locked the door, turned our back and let the room fill to waist deep.
Pounds who won’t take phone calls from the public because they haven’t got the resources to deal with enquiries from potential adopters. Pounds who believe that no one would want the pets they have. ‘Super pounds’ which take animals found in one area and move them hundreds of kilometres from where they were lost making it difficult for people to be reunited with their pets. Laws which see huge fines for people unfortunate enough to have an animal escape. Pounds who won’t release to rescue groups. Pounds who make no effort to work with volunteers or foster carers. Pounds releasing undesexed animals to the public. Pounds who drive policies which see semi-owned cats who had been living peacefully in their communities, impounded and killed. Restrictive adoption criteria. Rude staff. Inconvenient opening hours and locations. A depressing environment. The general feeling that the public are to be resented and are an inconvenience, rather than designing the function of animal management to be supporting pet owners.
All of these factors contribute to our huge kill rates and our comparatively low levels of rehoming. If it were any other industry we’d call it poor performance. But in rescue we look to blame the community for needing us at all – rather than improve our statistics or the experience with dealing with us.
Of course hundreds of animals flooding shelters each week seems insurmountable – we’ve never put ourselves in a position to succeed because we’ve been too busy blaming outside factors for the situation we’re in. The truth is our situation and the situation for animals is never going to get any better until we stop looking for someone to blame and start doing things that actually work.
*Cats are different. There is a cat overpopulation problem which is exasperated by council ‘catch and kill’ policies and other stupid legislation.
There was a spider at the front of our house. Suspended between two trees I only started noticing her because she was big, and growing more enormous every day. Unlike other spiders, she was granted a protection order (ie. Andy, my partner, was under strict instructions not to knock her down) as I thought she looked kinda sweet . Unfortunately, two weeks ago when Andy was gardening a branch fell and knocked down her web, so I took this photo of her in case she was too old to rebuild.
Now this photo doesn’t really do her justice. She was FREAKING HUGE. I’d have put a matchbox or something near her to give an idea of size, but as cute as she is I was genuinely worried for my digits. But trust me when I say, she was just slightly smaller than my whole hand.
Despite her formidable scariness (yes, yes I know; she’s more afraid of me), I was really sad when she didn’t repair her web. Weeks passed and we figured we’d lead to her demise :(
Well, how pleased was I today! She’s moved to another place in the garden and in fact looks much happier and in a nice sheltered spot. In fact I’m pretty sure she was smiling. But it may have been a grin; “no really, come closer with that camera”.
I’ve googled her and she’s a Golden Orb Weaver. With the description;
The golden orb weavers are one of the largest spiders found in Australia.
Their webs with diameters of over 1 meter can be found hanging off sign posts, in or between trees. The web is extremely strong. So strong that even small birds stick in the net.
So imagine this – you’re walking through the bush and walk through a really, really strong spider web. You think gee, I hope there’s not a spider. Except there is… and it’s a big as your head.
One of the things we humans are loathe to do, is turn away from a good old fashion flame war. Gathering up all our indignation and spittle, we fly in the face of anyone who dares mention us online in anything but a glowing fashion. But does our tendency to take things personally, interfere with peoples’ perception of us as considered individuals and stable organisations?
If you’re like me and have blogged in anger, or made the mistake of a late night, drunken forum post… then you’ll know first hand how peoples’ opinion of us can be irreparably damaged by a few incautiously chosen sentences. There is an assumption that everything online has been thoughtfully considered; if someone has a bit of a breakdown in front of you in person, you’re likely to cut them some slack for being overly emotional, or just a bit pissy. But when it’s done online there’s no such compassion – and it’s written in history forever.
So how does a corporate, who has many staff and representatives speaking on their behalf, and who is the focus of much online activity handle the social network? They can’t just say nothing or gag everyone but their PR staff (many corporations have been burned this way for being too non-genuine), but they also don’t want to find themselves wrestling pigs.
Well, take a look at the United States Air Force’s Web Posting Response Assessment chart. It’s a fantastic way to manage your online persona and is very, *ahem* military;
(Click the image to download the readable PDF version)
They could teach us all a little about engaging with the social networks in constructive ways and, probably much more importantly, when it’s better to just let the pigs go for it and simply say nothing at all…
After concerns by the RSPCA that compulsory registration would see 70% of cats killed in Alice Springs, it seems today that even those driving the new legislation admit that it’s not actually able to get people to be more responsible.
Mammoth fail!
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Just two dozen cats have been registered and tagged under the Alice Springs Town Council’s new legislation to keep track of the town’s moggies.
Outspoken environmentalist Mal Crowley said the pricey $133 fee would make little difference to negligent cat owners and only people who already took care of their cats would pay.
He said: “People who don’t look after their cat aren’t going to get it registered, they can just go and get another from the pound.”
Registration for a cat costs $133, which covers microchipping.
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$133! No wonder people have effectively told them to go swivel. A good animal management system should be affordable, make easy for people to find lost pets and support the community in being good owners. Not so expensive that it’s completely out of the reach of most (especially when added to the cost of desexing which is a requirement for this registration) and sees the community actually do less than they did before.
Stay tuned for many, many more breeding cats as owners, fearing fines, fail to take any ownership at all. Rest assured they’ll still feed their cat, they just won’t let it inside or take it to the vet or anything…
And lets hope rangers have got nothing better to do than trap cats as their new laws effectively make roaming an offence. And since dodging the new fines means people don’t put any form of identification on their pets, or come to collect them, the euthanasia techs will be busy, busy busy…
But that’s ok, because this wasn’t ever really about good law or protecting pets and owners, but giving those in power more power to kill stray animals.
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Mr Crowley said although flawed, he was glad the legislation was in place.
He said: “Something definitely needed to be done about all the cats that are in town.
“The problem with cats is that they can take care of themselves — which means hunting the local wildlife.
“I think it’s good making the owners accountable, but it’s flawed.
“People think I’ve got a problem with cats. That’s not true.
“I’ve got a problem with people who don’t look after their cats and let them wander.”
Who is Mal Crowley? I hear you ask. Well, you can find out more on him here. He has no problems with cats at all. None.
Owners of cats that are not registered face large fines if their cat is trapped.
Eleven cats have been trapped and taken out to the pound since the legislation came into force.
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Compulsory registration = A bad idea. Terrible. Awful.
This months PetRescue newsletter was the most fun I’ve ever had…
We got to make our very own lol cats —->
We got to talk about things that make a cat happy and cat foster caring.
But the coolest thing?
Getting to write about TNR in a this is the greatest thing ever!!! kinda way;
At this time of year you don’t have to look very hard to find a Kittens! Free To Good Home notice.
With spring and summer comes a rush of kittens which sees mums and litters dropped off at shelters with heartbreaking frequency. Some shelters receive over 400 kittens a week during these peak times.
But why? Well, cats are very good at breeding. They can get pregnant from around 4 months old and can have two litters a year of 4-6 kittens. It’s not hard to see how quickly numbers add up!
Also since most of these mum cats are themselves ‘orphans’ (strays who’ve never had a real owner) they are missed by desexing campaigns and often have a couple of litters before they finally wind up at the shelter. So the cat population stays pretty much the same every single year and shelters kill hundreds of thousands of kittens annually.
Cat desexing is obviously the answer to less litters, but as cat lovers we need to go even further than just desexing our own cats. We need to take care of the orphan cats in the community who have no real family. We need to keep them from becoming young mums. We need to care for our Community Cats!
Consider this: there’s an estimated 500,000 orphan cats in Victoria alone. That’s an awful lot breeding and breeding each year. But there are also five million people in Victoria – if everyone who loved cats desexed one ‘extra’, as well as their own, we’d be well on our way to no breeding cats. Imagine how great that would be! A year where hardly any new kittens were born and there was none killed at the pound.
The reason desexing our Community Cats works is because each of these cat orphans has a ‘territory’ that it protects from other cats. If you happen to feed your orphan, or if it can find shelter on your property, it will fight even harder to keep its ‘home’ safe from other cat intruders. By contrast, if you remove this cat and take it to a shelter, it will be quickly replaced by another undesexed cat. The official name for this kind of desexing is ‘Trap, Neuter and Return’, and it’s how they’ve started to manage the cat populations in other countries like the US, UK and New Zealand, with great success.
That’s why we’re asking you to make 2009 the year you desex your Community Cat.
It doesn’t matter if it’s the local stray or the cat you occasionally feed. What’s important is that you’ve desexed this orphan. It’s a slightly different kind of donation to that animal rescue normally request, but it’s a seriously important one that will make an enormous difference!
I genuinely think cats get a bum deal in Australia – it’s brilliant to be able to get the word out to over 30,000 pet lovers that the end to cat overpopulation is simple, it’s not about killing… and it’s in our hands.
* Harblz: cats, regardless of gender, are assumed to have harblz. All cats, concerned by plight of their fellow cats, are happy to sacrifice their harblz for the good of catkind.
An article on dog attacks which actually contains information from a dog behaviour expert looks like this:
Dogs that attack people should not necessarily be euthanased, a Sydney animal behaviour expert says.
Commenting on a dog attack that killed a young girl in a small town in southern New South Wales, Kirsty Seksel from the Sydney Animal Behaviour Centre says under certain circumstances, all dogs are potentially harmful.
“The key rule is that no child under the age of eight should be left unsupervised with any dogs, ever,” she said.
“What we usually say to people is supervision means one adult for the child and one adult for the dog, especially if the dog hasn’t been exposed to children before.”
Ms Seksel said any dog attack was a tragedy, but they often happened because dogs felt frightened.
“Children are very unpredictable,” she said.
“They act differently to adults.
“They are shorter, they have high-pitched voices.”
Children sometimes injured dogs without meaning to, she said.
“We’ve had cases where dogs have bitten kids that have poked pencils into their ear or put sparklers up the dog’s nose.”
Police have asked for the four mixed-breed dogs involved in today’s attack to be euthanased.
Ms Seksel said euthanasia was not necessarily the best solution to the problem.
“There’s a lot more to it than saying ‘Oh, it’s a bad dog’.
“It’s not necessarily that bigger dogs are nastier dogs.
“It just means there is potential to do greater damage purely because of their size.
“People sometimes forget that small dogs can also inflict wounds,” she said.
No quite so melodramatic as the ‘kill the child-eating dogs‘ articles that are getting so much attention; but there you go.
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