dogs

Ethics Quiz: Rep. Fine’s “Islamaphobic” Quote

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Oh, I find this fascinating, especially in light of the previous post.

Nerdeen Kiswani, a Palestinian Muslim New Yorker and activist, said in a social media post that dog poop littered snowdrifts in the city proved that dogs should have no place in society as indoor pets because, she wrote, “like we’ve said all along, they are unclean.”

Responding to this obnoxious assertion of foreign values and priorities over American ones, Representative Randy Fine (R-Fla.) replied, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”

Naturally the Mad Left exploded with horror and indignation, with the usual calls for the insensitive Republican’s resignation and worse. But the truth is, if we are being honest about our own culture and priorities, if every Muslim in the United States joined in a mass ultimatum stating, “This is non-negotiable. Either the United States gives up its dogs as house pets, or we’re leaving!” the overwhelming majority of Americans—including me—would say, “Gee, that’s a shame. Well, bye! Good luck in your future endeavors!”

The Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Was it unethical for Rep. Fine to say what he did?

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Confronting My Biases #26: Anti-Dog Signs…and One More Seasonal Complaint

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

First the complaint…

I virtually never return Christmas gifts. I cannot remember the last time I did. This stems from a Christmas childhood trauma. My poor father, who loved my mother dearly, would always pick out for her major Christmas gift a robe, a night gown, a blouse or dress that either didn’t fit, that was identical to one she already had, or that she hated. My mother, for all her wonderful traits, never gave him a break either: she would open the gift and immediately register disappointment. And Dad was always crushed. It got so he would make a joke about it, handing over a package he had lovingly wrapped while saying, “Well, Merry Christmas, let’s see what’s wrong with this.”

As a result, I have never reacted with anything but unalloyed joy when someone gives me a gift. Whatever it is, I love it. It could be chocolate-covered ape placenta, and I will still say, “Oh, this is wonderful! I’ve always wanted to try it!”

Nevertheless, the current practice among retail stores to charge “return fees,” some as high as $9.00 per item, is despicable as well as dumb. If stores want to drive people to Amazon, that’s the way to do it. If I ever did have to return a gift, and I won’t, especially now that there is almost nobody who is likely to give me one since my son/daughter has “cancelled” me for some reason, a store charging me for the privilege would land on my blacklist forever. It is also not consistent with the spirit of the season: I bet Kris Kringle would never let Mr. Macy do that without earning a cane to the noggin.

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Two More Reasons Why We Can’t Have Nice Things…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

1. Once, a guilty pleasure of surfing the web and social media was seeing amusing videos of dogs and cats, and other animals too, behaving anthropomorphically, spectacularly, or adorably. Now, “thanks” to artificial intelligence, no such video can be trusted. The more remarkable it seems, the less trustworthy it is. Unethical people seeking views on Facebook and elsewhere post these fake videos as real, because viewers knowing they are staged and manufactured robs them of most, if not all, their entertainment value.

Above is a screen shot from one of the suddenly ubiquitous videos showing dogs frightening other dogs with Halloween masks. The link to the video, which WordPress wouldn’t let me embed, is here. It’s fake. Dogs, in my experience, are seldom fooled by masks. No dog would tolerate having a mask like that fastened to its head. No dog would go along with the gag and creep up on a sleeping canine companion. And no American Bully could leap like that all the way to the sofa.

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Ethics Hero: Animal Care Centers of New York City

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

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.

Spuds approves.

Ethics Quiz: Mets Dog

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

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?

Oh Fine, Another Ignorant “Pit Bull” Freakout…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

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.:

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Goodbye, Elphie, and Thanks

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

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.

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Talking Dog Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

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?”

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From the Unethical Expert File: A Pet Expert Proves She Knows Nothing About Pets

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

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:

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Now THIS Is An Unethical Animal Shelter!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

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….

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