Animals

 Per Stephanie Kirchgaessner in The Guardian, 14 October 2024: Douglas Hamlin, who was appointed to lead the NRA this summer in the wake of a long-running corruption scandal at the gun rights group, was involved decades ago in the sadistic killing of a fraternity house cat named BK, according to several local media reports at the time. ...

I have just a few more weeks (until July 31st) to reach my fundraising goal. Please donate any amount you can - just as RESCUE saves one life at a time, we reach our goal one dollar at a time. If you are unable to make a donation, please reach out to another animal loving friend, family member or co-worker and ask them to support our efforts. Just this morning Maricopa County Animal Care & Control announced that: ...

In James Dobson’s 1978 book, The Strong-Willed Child, he writes about using a belt to beat his dachshund into submission: Please don't misunderstand me. Siggie is a member of our family and we love him dearly. And despite his anarchistic nature, I have finally taught him to obey a few simple commands. However, we had some classic battles before he reluctantly yielded to my authority. The greatest confrontation occurred a few years ago when I had been in Miami for a three-day conference. I returned to observe that Siggie had become boss of the house while I was gone. But I didn't realize until later that evening just how strongly he felt about his new position as Captain. At eleven o'clock that night, I told Siggie to go get into his bed, which is a permanent enclosure in the family room. For six years I had given him that order at the end of each day, and for six years Siggie had obeyed. On this occasion, however, he refused to budge. You see, he was in the bathroom, seated comfortably on the furry lid of the toilet seat. That is his favorite spot in the house, because it allows him to bask in the warmth of a nearby electric heater... When I told Sigmund to leave his warm seat and go to bed, he flattened his ears and slowly turned his head toward me. He deliberately braced himself by placing one paw on the edge of the furry lid, then hunched his shoulders, raised his lips to reveal the molars on both sides, and uttered his most threatening growl. That was Siggie's way of saying. "Get lost!" I had seen this defiant mood before, and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me "reason" with Mr. Freud. What developed next is impossible to describe. That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt. I am embarrassed by the memory of the entire scene. Inch by inch I moved him toward the family room and his bed. As a final desperate maneuver, Siggie backed into the corner for one last snarling stand. I eventually got him to bed, only because I outweighed him 200 to 12! Dobson's book is a promotion of corporal punishment in child rearing. This story is complementary to Jerry Falwell's cat-killing story, written at a time when Christian fundamentalists didn't seem overly concerned about abuse of animals--the 1970s.  It's also complementary to the story of Mike Huckabee's son killing a dog, and Mormon Mitt Romney's dog abuse story. Thankfully, most of us today recognize that abusing animals is a sign of psychopathy. UPDATED: To lengthen quote and correct source book title, as per Snopes.  The original 1978 hardcover version of the book is available for $0.01 on Amazon.com Marketplace. Historical Comments Bartimaeus (2010-09-28): They probably thought Sigmund's behavior was "cute" up to the point that he started biting them. Sad that he did not realize he was creating a monster and then resorted to physical violence as his first and only option. Even more disturbing that he uses it as an example for raising children. Here is an interesting post by someone who actually understands dogs better than most, just for a little contrast; http://cynography.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2010-09-16T18%3A49%3A00-04%3A00&max-results=7 ...

I have about 5 weeks to reach my fund-raising goal for this year's Bowlarama.Please visit my donation page and make a donation, big or small. All money goes to the care and feeding of cats and dogs rescued from the euthanasia list at the county pound. Phoenix area people know that area shelters are taking in record numbers of animals so far this year. RESCUE helps reduce euthanasia rates at the county pound. All three of our dogs were given a second change by RESCUE. I've attached pictures of a few others that are currently in RESCUE's care, waiting for their forever homes.Did you know that the number one killer of healthy dogs in this country is "euthanasia?" RESCUE is the last voice for dogs and cats awaiting this terrible fate at Animal Control and the Humane Society. RESCUE is a "no kill" organization and animals stay with RESCUE for as long as it takes to find them a home that meets their needs. RESCUE has only one paid staff member and over 275 volunteers. Our veterinary, boarding and food expenses run about $9-12,000 a month. RESCUE has saved and placed over 9,400+ dogs and cats, and for every animal we adopt, we are back to save another.

Today I went to hear Bruce Wagman speak on the subject of “Many Species of Animal Law” at ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. Wagman, an attorney with Schiff Hardin who is also an outside litigator for the Animal Legal Defense Fund, has litigated cases involving animals for 18 years, written a case book on animal law, and teaches animal law courses at several law schools as an adjunct faculty member. He was introduced by ASU Law School Dean Paul Berman and Arizona Court of Appeals Judge Pat Norris. Wagman began by defining “animal law” as any law where the status of an animal matters–psychological, biological, welfare, etc. status of the animal, as opposed to its value as property. He suggested that animal law attorneys “may be the only lawyers on earth whose clients are all innocent." He divided his talk up into multiple “species” of animal law. Species 1: Companion Animal Issues He said this makes up the majority of his cases, and includes injuries by or to animals, including veterinary malpractice. The challenge is to get courts to recognize that animals are not merely property, since historically companion animals have been viewed as property with low or even zero market value. In cases where an animal is injured or killed, the market value doesn’t recognize the interests of the animal or other kinds of value that companion animals give. Under the American Law Institute’s Restatements of the Law, however, there is a notion of “special property” (or “peculiar property” in California’s statutes) which allows quantification of other kinds of worth to an animal owner, for instance if the animal is a therapy dog. There are no emotional stress damages available. Other sorts of companion animal cases include custody disputes, which often occur as a result of one partner just trying to inflict distress on another rather than having actual interest in the animal. Wagman said that courts are beginning to take a better look at the interests of the animal in such cases, and be willing to appoint a guardian ad litem, as occurred in the Michael Vick case and in another case in Tennessee where there was a dispute over custody of a dog between a dead man’s girlfriend and parents. There are dangerous dog issues, where an attorney may be fighting against the classification of a dog as a dangerous or vicious animal, or against its euthanasia–what he called “capital cases” for animals. In three counties surrounding San Francisco, what happens in the case of a dog biting another dog that requires stitches varies dramatically. In one county, the dog gets a period of probation. In another, the dog gets labeled as a dangerous or vicious dog, which requires the owner to meet various conditions of housing the dog, having a certain height of fence, carry additional insurance, and so forth. And in Santa Clara County, the dog gets euthanized. He pointed out that that county’s statute has an exemption for “mitigating circumstances” which he’s successfully used to prevent dogs from being euthanized. Finally, there are wills and trusts–he said he doesn’t do that sort of work, but that 48 states now have mechanisms for having trusts for animals. He said he considers companion animals to be a sort of “gateway animal” for getting recognition of animals in the law, and noted that we tend to be “speciesists” who would feel very different about snakes vs. Labrador Retrievers. [IMO, this is rational to the extent that animals differ in cognitive capacities, and I note that at no point did he discuss litigating on behalf of cockroaches against pest control companies.] Species 2: Farm animal issues–legislation and litigation. His second species of animal law was about animals killed for food–about 10 billion per year in the United States. He said the goal here is not to stop the killing, but just to improve the living conditions of animals before they’re killed for food. This is problematic, however, because the animal cruelty statutes are criminal rather than civil (with an exception in North Carolina that will be discussed with regard to Species 3 of animal law), and that the criminal law for animal cruelty excludes farm animals in 35 states. He discussed a few of the more abusive methods of animal treatment in factory farming–calf crates, in which calves are placed for about the first 60 days of life, gestation crates for pigs (outlawed in Arizona since 2006, as well as illegal in Florida, Oregon, Colorado, and California), and battery cages for chickens. He also discussed downer animals–animals which are either so seriously injured or ill that they are unable to move, which the meat industry wants to drag in that condition to slaughter. Wagman raised the concern that such animals, if sick, could potentially spread illness to humans, and listed a bunch of diseases that could potentially so spread, with BSE (mad cow) at the top of the list along with avian flu. Of these, only BSE has been documented to spread to humans, and the industry position is that there should be no restrictions on downer pigs unless and until a human actually gets sick. The state of California passed a law that said that all downer animals must be euthanized on the spot; the meat industry sued and overturned the statute in federal district court, but the 9th Circuit just reversed it last week (National Meat Association v. Brown). Species 3: Animal hoarding–private ownership, breeders, and the sanctuary that is not Wagman said that there have been 250,000 documented cases of animal hoarding, and that they are difficult cases to work with in multiple ways. He said he believes such cases involve mental illness, but while the APA has a diagnosis for “hoarding” behavior, it excludes animal hoarding which is considered to be different. How many animals constitutes hoarding? He said he likes to say “more than eight,” because he has eight animals at home. Hoarders characteristics include possessing more animals than they can care for, having a sense of being persecuted, and living in deplorable conditions. He discussed two cases that he litigated, ALDF v. Barbara & Robert Woodley, and ALDF v. Janie Conyers, which involved over 500 animals between them. The former case, in North Carolina, was able to use North Carolina statute 19a, which allows a civil cause of action for animal cruelty. Wagman had some horrifying photos from the Woodley case. They had hundreds of dogs in their home living in their own feces, where ammonia levels were 20 times the USDA maximum allowed in a pig facility. These ammonia levels caused blindness in the dogs, as well as chemical burns to bare skin that contacted the floor, such as dogs’ scrotums. Multiple dogs were kept in wooden boxes with lids on them, and never let out. Mrs. Woodley’s favorite dog, Buddy, not only had his eyes burned to blindness from ammonia, but the bone in the dog’s jaw deteriorated from malnutrition. Local officials had known of Woodley’s problem for 20 years, but considered themselves powerless to do anything about it, since the scale of the problem was so large–the local shelter had only eight kennels, while the Woodleys had about 450 animals. The ALDF had to coordinate a massive effort to manage the rescue of the animals through their case. Conyers was an AKC poodle breeder who had 106 poodles living in their own feces. Wagman said that animal psychological suffering is difficult to show, but it can be done; demonstrating physiological suffering is easier, with objective criteria like the ammonia levels and physical injuries to animals. There is no law against hoarding (except in Hawaii), just the criminal abuse statutes (and civil in NC). In the hoarding cases the abuse is typically neglect rather than active abuse. Species 4: Exotic animal ownership Wagman has handled about 10 chimpanzee cases. One was a case involving a couple in West Covina, California who had a chimp named Moe for 35 years that bit two people. He argued for a guardian ad litem to determine what was in the best interests of the chimp, and arranged to get Jane Goodall and Roger Fouts for that role. The court looked upon it favorably, but the couple came to an out-of-court settlement. He also briefly discussed the Stamford, Connecticut case of Travis, the 200-pound chimpanzee who attacked a woman that was in the news last year. He argued that there should be a legislative fix to ban exotic animal ownership completely–they’re wild animals. [A complete ban seems to me too much–there should be exceptions for research, conservation, breeding programs for endangered species, and so forth. And shouldn’t it be possible to domesticate other wild animals?] Connecticut has taken the step of banning chimp ownership. Species 5: Shelter practices - euthanasia, veterinary care, adequate food, water, and sanitation, and hold periods Animal shelters have an overwhelming job, said Wagman. The County of Los Angeles, which he sued, operates seven shelters which handle tens of thousands of animals per year. California law says that all animals must get veterinary care and be held for five days, and allowing animal suffering without treatment is not permissible. The shelters’ own records showed that they weren’t meeting that standard for thousands of animals, but they’re now working to meet them and having their activity monitored for compliance. A similar set of cases occurred in Kentucky, when the state transferred all shelter responsibility to the counties. Although the standards of care were minimal, they weren’t meeting it, and there were nutrition, veterinary care, and euthanasia issues. Upon getting notice, they quickly took action to remedy. In Georgia, by contrast, there is a statute that prohibits the use of gas chambers for euthanization at shelters, but the Commissioner of Agriculture sent out letters to the shelters asking that they purchase gas chambers for euthanization. Gas chambers apparently have very ugly results in some cases, such as with unhealthy dogs. A lawsuit against the state of Georgia for its failure to comply with its own statute resulted an an injunction, which they then immediately violated by sending out more letters asking for gas chamber purchases. After obtaining a contempt ruling from the court, they finally got compliance. Species 6: Entertainment Wagman called this category both the most obvious and the most hidden. The use of animals in entertainment is obvious, but what is not obvious is what goes on behind the scenes, the knowledge of which drains the fun out of the entertainment. Circuses, zoos, film and TV ads, animal fighting, public appearances, racing and rodeos, and hunting and fishing are all cases of animals used for entertainment. Wagman first discussed elephants in circuses, commenting on a recent Ringling Brothers case which was tossed out on an issue of standing. The case involved the use of bullhooks for elephant training, which injures the animals. The defense didn’t deny use of bullhooks, but claimed that they only use them as “guides." Elephant treatment in zoos is also problematic, since standing around on hard surfaces causes painful arthritis. In the wild, elephants are awake 21 hours a day and may move 35 miles per day. Wagman discussed dog fighting, and said that the Michael Vick case was a wakeup call for America to the reality of dog fighting, which exists in every state and most major cities. He argued that the use of great apes in film and television should be banned, because of how the training process works. He said that while trainers claim to use only positive reinforcement training, an undercover person who volunteered for a year and a half with trainer Sid Yost found otherwise. A young chimpanzee is immediately treated to beating and punching to get them to comply. Their performance lifetime is about 3-5 years, after which they become to strong to conrol, and end up in private homes, in research, or in zoos, often all alone in barren cases. Wagman pointed out that the common use of a “smiling” chimpanzee is actually a fear grimace. He does lots of work for sanctuaries, of which there are nine in the U.S. for chimpanzees (including chimpsanctuarynw.org). Regarding hunting, he distinguished traditional hunting from canned hunting and Internet hunting. Hunting is protected in most states, including in many state constitutions. Canned hunting ranches, where animals are fed by hand by humans before they are flushed out into open areas to be shot, are not considered to be hunting by most traditional hunters. [But is considered hunting by our former Vice President, Dick Cheney.] Internet hunting, where a rifle can be fired at live animals over the Internet, has been banned in 30 states. He mentioned mountain lion hunting in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where mountain lions have become fairly scarce. A lawsuit was filed to try to stop the hunting on grounds of near-extinction of the animals, but the injunction was denied on the grounds that there were unlikely to be any mountain lions even found and killed. Two mountain lions were killed shortly thereafter in fairly quick succession, and even though there was a law that prohibited killing female mountain lions with cubs, the second one killed had a cub, and there was no prosecution. Some Adidas shoes are made with kangaroo skin, and the state of California has banned the importation of kangaroo skin, which Adidas ignored. Adidas was sued as a result, and they lost at the California Supreme Court–but they responded by persuading the legislature to repeal the ban rather than changing their practices. Species 7: Species and breed-specific legislation and ADA breedism case. A variety of dog breeds have been considered at various times and places to be “bad dogs” that create a special danger. After WWII, it was German Shepherds and Dobermans. All cases to stop such breed-specific legislation have failed, because the “rational relation” standard is met by only a single case of harm. A case in progress right now in Concord, California involves Theresa Huerta, a woman suing under the Americans with Disabilities Act to keep her pit bull therapy dog from being euthanized. Wagman concluded by saying that his overall objective is to keep the public and the courts focused on the real issue, which is ending blatant cases of animal abuse. Animal law is a growing field, and there’s an annual animal law conference in Portland that’s now in its fifth year. ...

I caught these two male dogs in the front yard this afternoon--they wandered in while the gate was open, and I closed it to catch them.  No collars, no tags, and the pit mix was unneutered (didn't check the Spitz mix or whatever he is).  At first they were very skittish, but after they finally approached me, both wanted my constant attention.  They were both quickly picked up by the Maricopa County pound--I'm sure they'll get taken to the east side. As I was closing the gate to catch these guys, I heard a car honk its horn and a dog yelp, and looked up to see the car drive away as a man, woman, and dog stood on the sidewalk, the dog limping.  I asked the man if the dog had just been hit, and if it was his dog, and he answered yes to both.  They walked off, the dog limping (and off leash, with no collar or tags). Please, if you own animals, be a responsible pet owner. Historical Comments Anonymous (2010-04-07): It's absolutely no sense to own an animal if you're going to be irresponsible for them like that one guy is. Animals are not things and objects, but real flesh and blood organisms. Haven't that guy ever know that? ...

Although we’ve seen quite a few, our fifth stray dog of 2009 that we actually caught and turned in came only yesterday, almost ten months after the fourth. The frequency dropped way off after the first couple of months of the year–a sign of economic recovery, perhaps? (I wonder what the fact that we now regularly see coyotes in our neighborhood means…) We found this beautiful brindle-coated female dog at Shawnee Park in Chandler, running around loose with a collar and no tags, while we were out with a dog from Arizona RESCUE (Scout, a Dane mix, another great dog). Nobody in the area knew who she belonged to, so we took her to the east side pound and put her picture up on Pets911. ...

There is a new contest for animal rescues and shelters to win big money. Please visit the Mutt Madness Contest, and vote for RESCUE (third bracket down on the left). You do have to register and vote in each bracket, but there is a grand prize of $50,000!!! Voting for the first round ends October 25th. If they win this round, they receive $1,000 and advance to the next round. Please vote today and ask others to vote!

This blog is entering its fifth year today, and the content will be shifting a bit now that I am returning to school. Today was my first day of new graduate student orientation before classes begin next week; I’m a Ph.D. student in Arizona State University’s Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology program, which is beginning its second year. This is an interdisciplinary program within the Graduate College and allied with the School of Life Sciences, so today’s orientation was with new graduate students from other programs in SoLS. SoLS has 250 graduate students in 11 programs, of which 49 are entering this semester. (I chatted a bit with a couple of new graduate students in neuroscience.) There seems to be a wealth of supporting organizations and structures to SoLS programs to assist in getting funding, doing research, participating in education and public outreach, and dealing with administrivia. I’ll be delving into as much of it as I can, and periodically reporting on items of particular interest here. From today’s orientation, a few items that are part of SoLS education and public outreach are worthy of note. ASU has an “Ask-a-Biologist” program online, which you can also follow via Twitter. That program is intended for students in grades K-12, and is projected to hit a million visitors this year. There’s also the Science Studio Podcasts for adult education. And the International Institute for Species Exploration website. There’s also a program run by SoLS graduate students called Graduate Partners in Science Education, where graduate student volunteers work with underprivileged and at-risk junior high school students on field biology research projects. My current aim in the HSDST program is to build upon my past graduate experience in philosophy and cognitive science, my career in Internet services and information security, my interest in skeptical inquiry and critical thinking, and my interest in law to explore the concepts of trust and reputation as they pertain to online and digital media. At the moment, I’m signed up for a seminar on “Law, Science, and Technology,” a seminar on “Human and Social Dimensions of Climate Change,” the HSDST Core Seminar and Colloquium, and a course with one of my favorite undergraduate philosophy professors on Advanced Logic (that’s my “just for fun” class). Tomorrow’s a reception for all of the new graduate students at ASU’s Tempe campus, and later in the week I have some training on fire and lab safety–and next week, it’s back to class. ...

There are just 11 days left to raise money for Bowl-a-Rama. We have one more fundraising event this Thursday, July 23rd at Rosita’s in Tempe or Mesa. Please come out, enjoy a great meal and support RESCUE. 15% of your purchase is donated back to RESCUE!!! Pictured is the flyer for the event (you’ll need it in order for us to receive the proceeds). I can email the flyer to you if you are interested, just ask me in the comments. All are welcome for lunch, dinner, dine in or take out. Jim & I will be at the Tempe location around 6:00pm, please stop by.