Finding its facilities with a surplus of pit bull breeds and pit bull mixes to find homes for, the Animal Care Centers of New York City hit on a creative solution. It released a video that opens with “We’ve never seen this many doodles at our shelter before.” What follows is a series of photos and video clips of “doodles” that are really obvious pit bull mixes wearing curly wigs.
“Doodles,” for the dog-challenged, refers to the popular designer breeds and other mixes of non-poodle dog breeds with poodles, usually creating digs with hypoallergenic coats. Labradoodles are poodles crossed with Labrador Retrievers, Sheepadoodles are English Sheep Dog-poodle mixes, and Golden Doodles, the most popular of all, are poodles bred with Golden Retrievers.
The video mocks the “doodles” craze while also placing their much maligned (and unjustly so) pit bulls and pit bull mixes in a benign light. And mirabale dictu, it worked! Families who never would have considered adopting a pit bull type dogs came to the shelter and did so, and the staff at the shelters believe that the video is being widely circulated, helping to dispel the wide-spread fear of and bias against these loving, sweet tempered dogs perpetuated by ignorant anti-pit bigots.
Fans coming off the subway for a Mets game at Citi Field for 16 years have encountered Mets Dog, a canine decked in orange and blue gear, a cowboy hat, bandana, a pipe in his mouth and sunglasses. The current version, Sushi, will shake your hand in exchange for dollars. Fans line up to take photos of the dog. Her owner, Norberto Fernandez, stands nearby. Sushi doesn’t pant, and hardly moves for hours at a time, with no apparent access to food or water.
“The fact that that dog hasn’t died is kind of amazing,” said Christina Shusterich, an NYC-based dog behavior specialist, who reviewed numerous images and videos of the dog. Protests over Mets Dog are proliferating in social media. “Dogs don’t just sit still, especially in the hot sun with no shade, no water, no food,” says Belkis Cardona-Rivera, who works in the pet industry and founded a Facebook group that claims Sushi is being abused. “This is animal cruelty. This is not normal. For me, that’s not cute at all. That’s not normal dog behavior.”
Yet the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), among other agencies, has investigated and found no grounds to remove Mets Dog from her owner’s care. Meanwhile, the Mets wash their metaphorical hands of the issue. “The New York Mets organization is in no way affiliated with this individual and their dog and do not condone their behavior,” the team said in a statement.
Controversies abound. Many are certain that Fernandez, who claims to be a dog trainer, must use an electric collar to get the dog to stay so still and keep a pipe in his mouth. Yet Sushi appears to be in good health and loved, and she undoubtedly better off than many dogs that are neglected by their owners. She has a job. She has friends.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is this:
Is Mets Dog being cruelly treated? Should Fernandez be prevented from presenting his canine panhandling spectacle? Or is this “Ick!” rather than unethical?
This has been a continuing topic on Ethics Alarms: the longest-running EA post in terms of comments is this one, about the too-often quoted Dogsbite.org. Today’s hysterical purveyor of anti-pit bull propaganda is the conservative site Not the Bee, which I occasionally find useful as a resource but which is marred by ethically dubious commentary as often as not. It already made Ethics Alarms with an earlier pit bull bigotry post, in 2024.
The current post begins, “So are we allowed to talk honestly about this problem yet or nah?” My answer is “nah” if the “problem” is the alleged natural viciousness of pit bulls and the “we” are people like the author who obviously don’t know what they are talking about. A one-year-old girl was attacked and killed by the family dog which all news sources are calling a “pit bull.” A tragedy, of course, but Not The Bee posts this chart, from another incompetent site which took it from (Gee, what a surprise) Dogsbite.org.:
My sister had to have her beloved Havanese Elphie (short for Elphaba, the character in “Wicked”) euthanized early this morning just after midnight. That’s not Elphie above, but it’s close: I don’t have a picture of her.
I’ve dreaded this day for my little sister almost from the moment she brought Elphie home as a puppy 16 years ago. My sister not only had never owned (or lived with) a dog before; she had been phobic about dogs her entire life, an unfortunate mindset she inherited from my mother. But true to her defiant, determined character, once my sister, divorced after a miserable marriage, knew that both of her children would be moving far away from the D.C. area, she set out to become a dog owner. “I’m not going to come home to an empty house every day,” she told me, “and for once, I want to have someone close who is always happy to see me.”
She researched dogs for a full year (“Dogs 101” on the Animal Planet channel was a crucial resource), ultimately deciding on the Havanese, the Cuban bichon, as the ideal “starter dog.” It was a wise choice, as the breed is small, friendly, devoted to its owner and innately adorable. I was amazed how quickly the little dog made a positive difference in my sister’s life and whole outlook on life. Always insecure and prone to depression, she seemed happy literally for the first time since childhood. Within months my sister went from being a dog owner to a dog nut, learning all the breeds, bonding with the last two dogs Grace and I owned (sweet Rugby and then Spuds), and vastly enlarging her circle of friends by meeting the other dog owners in her neighborhood, and my sister had never had a large number of friends before, and often none at all.
I must confess that one reason for this post is to entice one of Ethics Alarms’ stars, the perceptive and sharp metaphorical-penned Mrs. Q, into commenting, since she is our resident canine authority (among other things).
The New York Times recently published a feature [Gift link!]about a new fad among dog-owners: multi-colored buttons one can lay out on one’s floor. The buttons can be set to emit the dog-owner’s voice saying a single word like OUTSIDE, WATER, PLAY, FRIEND, AFRAID, WALK, BALL and so on. Dogs learn to step on the buttons to emit the desired word…
Voilà! Talking dogs.
Well, maybe. Researchers disagree whether the dogs are really using the buttons to communicate or just giving a Skinnerian response when they figure out that, for example, pressing a particular button will result in a treat. Dogs using the buttons are all over YouTube and other platforms on the web: that’s Bunny the Sheepadoodle above, who supposedly makes complex remarks and even existential ones, like “DOG WHY?”
Why would TIME magazine print such self-evident junk? Oh, I know, I know…it’s about dogs and cats, so it is guaranteed clickbait, she’s written a book, so she must be an “expert” and if you can’t believe an ethicist, who can you believe? “The Case Against Pets” is intellectually dishonest, silly, and violates the Ethics Alarms principle that advocating an impossible course of action is unethical no matter how wonderful it would be if it could happen. (My favorite: pacifism.)
The author is Jessica Pierce, a bioethicist and the author of several books, including the one this thing is obviously meant to hype, “A Dog’s World: Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World without Humans.” Boy, talk about a title signaling a dumb book! Next up: “Imagining the Lives of Dogs If They Could Graduate From Law School.”
Has this woman actually ever owned a dog? She says she has pets: I’m betting that it’s a hissing cockroach. Here are some of her assertions:
Kristie Periera was told by veterinarians that her beagle-mix puppy Beau had serious neurological problems and advised that her most humane option was to have little Beau euthanized. Despite her determination to fight for the puppy despite the likely expense and slim chances of success, she was persuaded to end Beau’s suffering by colleagues at the shelter where she worked, the Lost Dog and Cat Rescue in Maryland. The little dog was scheduled to be euthanized in late March 2023, but Kristie was told she couldn’t be with him, as the shelter had a policy of not allowing owners to witness their pets’ demise.
As an aside, I have never heard of such a policy, and I would immediately question the competence and motives of any shelter that had one. Sounds like a dog trafficking operation to me….
Ugh. More ignorant pit bull hysteria, as usual spread by someone who knows little or nothing about dogs.
“Not the Bee” is supposed to be a site the highlights bizarre events from a conservative perspective, so how its concluded that advocating a “pit bull ban” was a legitimate topic escapes me. However, people using false and misleading statistics to stampede lawmakers happens to be a topic of great interest to an ethicist. I’ve written about this annoying and recurring phenomenon before, many times. The primary post about the pit bull breed-deranged website Dogsbite.org, an Unethical Website of the Month back in 2015, and one of the all-time Ethics Alarms comment champions with 354 comments so far.
Ian Haworth wrote the irresponsible Not The Bee piece today, “Is it time to ban pit bulls?” I should title this post, “Is it time for people who write about pit bulls to learn what a pit bull is?” As soon as this article began, I knew readers were in the grip of someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about:
Some of the comments on this post compel me to cross-post the following story from Facebook, as I continue to try to deal with the sudden loss of my wife on Leap Year. The contrast with Kristi Noem’s cruel and impulsive shooting of a young dog that displeased her didn’t occur to me for some reason until I read the recent posts of readers here.
Today I was driving home from the vet’s with Spuds and his newly drained ear, and “I Will,” Paul’s sweet little song from the White Album came on the radio. (“Who knows how long I’ve loved you…”)
Grace envied singers and always wanted to sing herself, but was convinced that she couldn’t…I tried to tell her that she didn’t have a bad voice and should take some coaching, but she wouldn’t do it. When she wanted to sing, only with me, she deliberately used a fake voice, either a high falsetto or sometimes a weird guttural voice that sounded eerily like Pazuzu in “The Exorcist.”
Grace shared her mother’s and oldest sister Edie’s deep connection to animals: all three loved them so much the animals could sense it. If one of our dogs or Kibber the cat had some wound or problem to be tended to, they would only let Grace do it: it was almost mystical.
When our beloved 160 lb. English Mastiff, Patience, had her cancer return in her seventh year (Grace paid $12,000 for her treatment when the cancer first appeared and didn’t tell me for years…I didn’t mind: Patience was worth it, and it bought her another year), the sweet, sensitive dog was so brave…she had no appetite and was fading away, but she always wagged her huge tail when Grace came near. One day, as we knew Patience was running out of time, I returned from an errand to find Grace lying on the floor with her head at Patience’s ear. She was singing softly in her real voice, “I Will” to Patience as the dog slowly wagged her tail. Grace had tears pouring down her face, and pretty soon, so did I.
Over the next few days, Grace sang that song to Patience every time she seemed uncomfortable or agitated, usually beginning with, “Don’t be afraid!” and then, softly, “Who knows how long I’ve loves you…” And Patience would look into her eyes, and wag.
Three days later, we called a vet who made house visits to come and end our dog’s suffering. We probably waited too long. Patience had to tell us it was time by wandering out of our back yard down the hill into the bamboo; I had to persuade her to come back. She had gone off to die. As the vet fed the fatal drug into the vein in Patience’s leg, Grace was lying right by Patience’s side with her arm around her. She sang “Who knows how long I’ve loved you” until that big tail stopped, and Patience was gone.
I’m so glad that Grace never heard the Kristi Noem story.
To many analysts, South Dakota governor Krtisti Noem checked all the right boxes to be Donald Trump’s running mate. She’s a hard-right conservative, a successful and popular governor, an effective speaker, attractive, and a woman. (I must interject here that I find it just a bit hypocritical that the GOP, as it derides and condemns the diversity fad as it makes tribal membership more important than merit, skill, competence and experience, that Trump is almost certainly going to choose a woman or a black man as his VP. The least he could do to defy the Left is pick a Jew…). Noem seemed to be leading the race to be Trump’s second-in-command, in the view of many experts.
And then, as Frank and Nancy would say, she went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid like ‘I shot my dog because I couldn’t be bothered to train it.’
“Ethics Dunce” doesn’t adequately describe what Noem’s new book “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward,” which will be released in May, reveals about her. Yes, she’s notably missing some key ethics alarms and some pretty basic ones at that, like “Be kind to animals, because they are innocents,” one of my late wife’s mantras. Noem is also, however, lacking in basic understanding of public sensibilities and has the political instincts of a Kamikaze pilot.
“I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here,” Noem wrote after detailing the horrible story of how she lured “Cricket,” a 14-month old wire-haired pointer, to a gravel pit and shot her because the dog had failed her first pheasant hunting attempt. This wasn’t “Old Yeller”: Cricket wasn’t sick, or dangerous, or old. Cricket, as Noem’s account makes clear, just hadn’t been trained….you know, like Joe Biden’s “bad” German Shepherd, Commander.
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