dogs

This Is How My Late Wife Grace Handled the Euthanizing of a Dog…

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

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.

Well, So Much For the PETA Vote!

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

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.

Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Lya Battle, “Our Lady of the Strays”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

John Hammond, as every fan of Michael Crichton, “Jurassic Park” and dinosaurs knows, built an aspirational cloned dinosaur park on a Costa Rican island, and thanks to chaos theory and “Newman,” it turned out to be a deadly disaster. But the InGen founder wasn’t too far off; he just chose the wrong species. In Costa Rica’s Central Valley and its surrounding highlands, a woman named Lya Battle has been presiding over a farm inherited from her dog-loving father (who shot her mother, but that’s another story) known locally as Territorio de Zaguates (“kingdom of strays”). She and her staff take care of, feed and love nearly 1000 stray dogs, which Costa Rica, like most non-affluent countries has far more of than it does pet dogs. (There are an estimated one million strays.) Lya boasts that she knows the name of every one of them on her farm. Here’s another photo:

Netflix featured the Lya and the Territorio in the second episode of its series “Dogs;” National Geographic has featured her story, and I learned about the amazing dog haven from an old episode of Jack Hanna’s nature series.

Lya’s Territorio takes responsibility for spaying and neutering every new dog arrival. It operates like a typical shelter, providing food and medical attention, except that the dogs run free. The most stunning scene is when all 900-plus dogs “go for a walk,” with staff leading them into the hills and forests in a noisy, barking pack.

You can get a sense of what this is like from this video…

Apparently My Dog Thinks I’m Woke

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Times opinion editor Alicia P.Q. Wittmeyer used a podcast to explain how the great political divide affects dogs. Training styles and methods can be as much about identity as efficacy, she has realized. “Are you imposing colonial concepts on your dogs? Are you harming their mental health? Is your style of training woke?”

Alicia’s rescue dog likes to chase joggers. “There are a few ways to deal with your dog having a jogger chasing problem,” she says. “And these solutions maybe fall into one of two camps, positive reinforcement training or balanced training. Positive training is a style of dog training that basically says, we’re not going to make your dog physically uncomfortable in order to get it to behave the way you want. So what it argues for doing is rewarding behavior you like, and basically managing your dog so that it can’t engage in behavior you don’t like, and just kind of ignoring it.”

Balanced training, however, or what I would call Skinnerian training, involves negative reinforcement. “If your dog is doing something that you don’t like,” Alicia explains, “to discourage that, we want to make it uncomfortable for the dog to do that. We want to give some kind of negative stimulus. Sometimes that might be a noise, or sometimes like a squirt of water to the face.”

“But sometimes it’s more physical discomfort than that. That means punishing your dog. And usually that punishment comes in the form of something called an e-collar, a tool that will give your dog an electricity stimulus.”

Continue reading →

Warped Dog-Owner Ethics From “The Atlantic”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Ann Althouse, who reads a magazine I gave up on when it went full Trump-Deranged, flagged an article called “Too Many People Own Dogs: If you love dogs, maybe don’t get one.” Ann belongs to a dog-loving family so she has some credibility in the area, but the author, Rose Horowitch, who talks about ethics a lot in the article, is seriously confused, and I’m surprised Ann doesn’t see it.

The article begins with a discussion of dogs on Prozac and how anxious people make their dogs anxious. First, the average dog owner is not going to put a dog on Prozac. It is true that dogs, being natural empaths, often mirror the moods of their owners; on the other hand, dogs without behavioral issues make anxious people less so. Dogs also want a job, and if keeping an anxious adult from freaking out is their role, that’s fine with them.

Continue reading →

Equal Time: A Dog’s Life Ethics Update

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Having just posted about the mistreatment of cats, it is only fair to note some recent stories involving canine-human interactions.

1. At Gravelly Hill in Caterham, Surrey (that’s in England), a dog-walker was apparently attacked by the dogs she was caring for and mauled to death. There is some question how many dogs she was walking, but it may have been as many as nine. “Eight dogs have been detained” is how some news reports put it. Other reports say that none of the dogs involved were believed to be “dangerous breeds,” meaning none were pit bull breeds or looked like them (which is all a dog needs to be considered a pit bull: looking kind-of, sort-of like what someone thinks a pit bull looks like, meaning that my first Jack Russell which a silly twit started screaming about because she thought he was a pit bull was a pit bull).

Among the culprits were, police believe, a collie, a Leonberger, a cokapoo and two dachshunds. (I’m betting on the dachshunds as the ringleaders.) A Leonberger is a giant breed, typically weighing at least 150 pounds—I’d say a dog that big is potentially “dangerous.” In fact, any dog is dangerous if its in a pack.

Walking that many dogs, whether it was seven or nine, is irresponsible. It’s not fair to the dogs, and obviously perilous to the walker: I’m surprised there haven’t been more tragedies like this. The owners of the dogs are also implicated for entrusting their dogs to over-burdened caretakers.

Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “At Least This Time They Didn’t Blame Pitbulls…”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Happy Boxing Day, for those of you who have servants, butler and and the like! Do make sure your underlings enjoy a Christmas-like experience a day late, after caring for you and your family yesterday!

Ethics Alarms will kick off its Boxing Day festivities with another terrific Comment of the Day by Mrs, Q. I’m hopping it over two other COTD in waiting, in part because I feel guilty: her post was stuck in moderation because I was “making a bit merry yesterday” (Source?) and neglected the blog comments. I apologize to Mrs.Q and my readers. Her comment was stuck because it included many invaluable links to additional information.

She addressed the horrible incident discussed in yesterday’s commentary regarding a fatal dog attack last week that took the life of a couple’s newborn child. Mrs. Q concentrates her ethics marksmanship on an aspect of the story that I mentioned, but only broadly: the parents’ accountability for the tragedy.

Here is Mrs. Q’s Comment of the Day on the post, “At Least This Time They Didn’t Blame Pitbulls…“

***

Perhaps I’m being harsh, but I do think the parents and every parent or guardian this happens to, should be charged.

We have an incredibly irresponsible ethos going on in the world of dog ownership. People who willingly choose to have a dog, of any size dog, around small children, without educating themselves on danger behavior signals, is complicit in spreading such violence.

The killings of children is just a part of it. 50% of kids under 12 have been bitten by dogs. Most dog bites children experience happen over 70% of the time on the face and neck. Continue reading →

At Least This Time They Didn’t Blame Pitbulls…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This is such a horrible Christmas story that even my fecund imagination couldn’t devise an appropriate graphic for it, yet attention should be paid.

On December 23 in Cave Spring, Arkansas, a family’s dog attacked and killed a four-day old infant girl. The dog bit the baby’s head, fatally injuring  the infant’s skull. When I read the story, my second thought after the obvious first one was “Now watch: this will be called another pit bull attack.” Amazingly, it wasn’t: the dog was a Siberian Husky. That didn’t stop the news media from attaching alleged pit bull horror stories to this one, like the attack by two Staffordshire terriers, one of several breeds called pit bulls, that killed two small children and injured their mother in October. I did learn something from the various articles: 32% of all fatalities from dog bites in the U.S. are children 4 years-old and under. Continue reading →

Here’s One Way Websites Lose Credibility On Ethics Alarms…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

…Publishing ignorant “pit bull” hysteria.

I like “Not the Bee,” an oddity-collecting, usually political website that up until today sent me a daily bulletin. Today, however, the site decided to join the ranks of those who spread ill-informed anti-pit bull breeds propaganda. I saw a new wave of this coming: a recent news story had recounted how two “pit bulls” in Tennessee had killed a five-month old and a two-year-old and attacked the mother, wounding her grievously. “Not the Bee’s” appeal to authority is conservative pundit Michael Knowles, who as far as I can determine, has no special expertise about dogs whatsoever. Nonethless, NTB quotes a Knowles tweet [“I know some people like them, but we should obviously kill all the pit bulls.”] and headlines its irresponisble (and damaging) story, “Michael Knowles is 100% correct about pit bulls and I could care less how much you think I’m a monster for saying so.”

No, I don’t think the NTB writer (Jesse James) is a monster; he just doesn’t know what he’s talking about. His screed relied heavily on this chart…

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Ann Althouse

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Bad, bad Ann. I’m very disappointed and surprised. In a post this morning, the usually reliable if eccentric law professor bloggress highlighted the anti-“pit bull” propaganda of DogsBite.org, an Ethics Alarms Unethical Website of the Month, and a vile purveyor of bad information that shares responsibility for the destructive “dangerous breed” laws around the country, discriminatory home-owners insurance rates, and the deaths of thousands and upon thousands of innocent, loving dogs.

Like the execrable website and the incompetent Times article it highlights, Althouse never clarifies the critical fact that there is no such breed as “a pit bull.” American Pit Bull Terriers, American Staffordshire Terriers,  Staffordshire Bull Terrier, and any mixture thereof, plus a number of breeds like American Bullys, Corso Canes, Doggo de Argentino, and especially American Bull Dogs are all lumped together as “pit bulls” by ignorant reporters and police, and even veterinarians, making the website’s assertion that a disproportionate number of dog attacks come from that “breed” a statistical whopper. Yet Althouse, whose husband once had a blog dedicated to dog photos and who is a dog-lover herself, just goes along with the deception, and worse for a lawyer, never points out the “evidence” is absurdly flawed. If you combine many breeds into a single “breed,” of course that “breed” will have a disproportionate share of whatever dog incident one is counting.

Continue reading →