Animals

Mylostone – First Farm

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This Mylostone is a particularly personal one for me. As a vegetarian, it meant a lot to me to be able to introduce my son Mylo to farm animals. I apologize ahead of time if what I’m about to write offends you, but since becoming a vegetarian, I’ve always wondered how parents take their children to farms to feed and admire the cows, chickens and goats to then turn around and feed those same animals to them for dinner. My own folks included.

I’ve always intended to write in more detail about our decision to raise our children vegetarian but have sadly not gotten around to that post, (and others for that matter). My husband Jason is only vegetarian 75% of the time, but I am immensely grateful that I have his full support in bringing up Mylo as one. As he said to my parents when we explained to them of our wishes, “How can you really argue with a lifestyle that is healthy, environmentally responsible and compassionate.”

So you could imagine my delight at seeing my son hand-feed this bully billy goat a carrot in my hometown of Northport, NY — at the same farm I grew up visiting no less!

I Rescued A Pigeon Today

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Yep. You heard me. As if the four dogs on the euthanasia list that I pulled out of the pound and sent to forever homes down south weren’t enough (I just made that sound innocuous and easy but it isn’t).

Back to the pigeon.

I was on my way to a meeting down in DUMBO (down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass, for those who don’t know), when I passed a small pigeon who was hopping and chirping along. I noticed he looked a little raggedy. I happened towards him but he didn’t fly away. His wings looked clipped and he was missing at least a third of his feathers.

My hands were tied. I couldn’t exactly pick him up and bring him to the meeting with me, so I snapped this photo and walked away.

This busted up little fella broke my heart.

Later, I told a friend about the bird and she said, “let’s go get him.” She gave me the green light I needed to do the right thing. (Thanks Mary).

We went back to the spot with an over-sized cardboard box and surgical gloves and the little guy was still there. Only this time he had company. His buddy (or mama pigeon) was hovering real close and trying to protect him from us.

I’ve always loved that birds travel in two’s and so I hated having to split them up. But I hated even more the thought of some jerk coming by and kicking him out of the way, or that an SUV might run him over. So I scooped him up, made my case for a free hotdog bun from the non-English speaking hotdog-cart-lady, finished up at another meeting and then schlepped the big cardboard box with said small pigeon on the subway during rush hour to a vet hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Thanks to PJ of Empty Cages Collective, he will be examined by Dr. Pilny tomorrow morning.

Over the past few days I’ve received very generous donations for the dogs I’ve pulled out of the shelter and so I did the same for PJ’s rescue group. In this case, what goes around comes around and hopefully flies around, again.

Annie the Mini-Pin

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I started fostering dogs in 2009, a year after I vowed in front of 140 of our closest friends and family during our wedding, to not bring home any more animals until we have a home with a yard. First came Max, then Orly, followed by Four, Benny, Lucy, and finally, Jonny. Six dogs in seven months shared three things in common. They were all pit bulls. They were all homeless. And they were all in dire need of getting out of a high-kill animal shelter where they wound up through no fault of their own.

Sure my husband Jason delights in reminding me that I have broken one of my wedding vows, but lucky for me, and the dogs, he has been amazingly supportive. And then I got pregnant. It was during the end of my second trimester last year, after a particularly unfortunate foster dog named Jonny, now called Sunny, got his forever home, that we took a break from animal rescue.

That was…

Until I recently saw a shaking and terrified Miniature Pinscher being dragged through the front doors of Brooklyn Animal Care & Control. Her people were about to pay the $35 fee to relinquish her because they no longer had time. I was eventually able to talk them out of leaving her at the kill-shelter, but not without giving them my phone number. One week later, here she is.

Annie dutifully waiting to be examined by a vet.

Annie is about 3 1/2 years old and is a very timid girl who never got walked (look at her nails in the photo), was most likely bred and only gets excited when she sees a crate. Sad, right? Well sad no more.

After some proper vet care and some much-needed TLC, this little girl will be ready for her forever home! Annie is great with dogs, cats and even babies. I tested her out on mine. Do you have space in your heart and home for this little orphan Annie? Please feel free to share her story with your friends…

The Mini-Pin meets a Great Dane.

From Euth List to Forever Home

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Update

I received the below email last night from Karin right before I went to bed. Norwood, is now called Marley.

I can never thank you enough for bringing me Marley. We are soooo happy together. Turns out he is a HUGE mushpot. I start to rub to his ears and he literally falls to the ground like a ton of bricks. I have to video tape it and send it to you. It makes me laugh every time. We went out in the rain early this morning to go to the bathroom and then came back inside and we both fell asleep on the couch together until my friend woke us up about 20 minutes later. Amazingly enough the thunder & rain did not bother him at all. He’s very playful and not much seems to bother him. He loves to chase bumblebee’s, smell flowers, and is so gentle with his toys. What a difference a few days make. I can’t wait for his kennel cough and neuter to be over with so I can take him to the doggie parks.

—

Norwood is a two-year old pitbull who recently found himself on the euthanasia list at Manhattan Animal Care & Control for contracting kennel cough. Karin Jordan of Keyport, New Jersey looked into those eyes and saw so much more than a silly cold and asked me to save him for her. There is nothing I like more than pairing pitties with parents so it was a no-brainer on my part.

Norwood’s shelter mug shot.

I have met many pitbulls at ACC who are gloom and doom. After all, it’s a tough place to end up for an unwanted animal. But not Norwood. This gorgeous guy really blew me away when I went to get him out yesterday. The boy, despite his URI, had bounds of playful energy, even in the 8×8 discharge room. His tail was wagging throughout and he greeted Karin with a huge hug. He’s a spirited little fella who I have no doubt will mold beautifully to the rhythms of Karin’s life. I am so thrilled that they found one another!

Karin and her new pup.

NYC AC&C New Hope Liaison Fired for Doing Her Job Well

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I was away on vacation when friend and fellow animal rescuer, Emily Tanen, was fired from her job as the New Hope Liaison at New York City’s Animal Care & Control.

Emily Tanen was fired from her job at AC&C for caring too much.

Because of the photos Emily took of at-risk dogs she then promoted via social media sites like Facebook, hundreds of dogs found forever homes and escaped being killed at the overcrowded city shelter. However according to AC&C, who is contracted by the Department of Health, Emily violated her contract by having people pose with the dogs in the photos.

One of Emily’s many heartbreaking albeit lifesaving photos.

While I am so sad for what Emily’s absence will mean for NYC’s homeless dogs – especially pitbulls – I have no doubt that she will go on to do tremendous and beautiful things.

Fellow writer and friend Michael Mullins covers the story in depth here.

Why I Hate the Kentucky Derby

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It’s springtime. The air is filled with the sweet smell of flowers and fresh starts. But because the first weekend in May is marked by the Kentucky Derby, followed by the Preakness Stakes a couple of weeks later, year after year I find myself struggling to get through this season.

I loathe the Kentucky Derby. Correction: I don’t just loathe the Kentucky Derby. I hate the ENTIRE race horse industry.

But I didn’t always.

In college a somewhat dorky albeit really funny boy invited me to a Kentucky Derby party in Camden, Maine. I shocked all my friends and practically the entire campus when I accepted.  It was a chance to put on a pretty dress, get out of the tiny town our school was in and drink Mint Juleps for the day – all while laughing my ass off with this boy.

I sipped on minty bourbon alright and watched in awe as these gallant creatures darted around the track. A horse named Real Quiet won the grand prize, a lush blanket of 554 red roses for him and oodles of money for his owner, but it was the horses that didn’t win that I couldn’t get out of my head. “What about them?” I asked aloud. “They get turned into meat,” my date told me.

Buzzkill.

What I had learned made ME “Real Quiet,” and so we made the two-hour trip back to school in near silence.

That was my first Kentucky Derby party and also my last.

It’s not that I love animals, even though I do. It’s that as far back as when I was a toddler in Nigeria, I was acutely aware of the injustices done to them, and it has always haunted me.

The Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, Belmont Stakes and all of  your local thoroughbred race tracks directly contribute to the horse slaughter industry.

Of the racehorse industry, William C. Rhoden wrote the following in the New York Times:

The most significant source of racehorse deaths is the slaughter industry, one driven by overbreeding and demand from the lucrative global meat market. According to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, more than 100,000 American horses are slaughtered each year in Canada and Mexico to satisfy horse meat markets in Europe and Asia.

Breeding operations produce thousands of so-called surplus thoroughbreds. What happens to the excess, the often anonymous horses? Some are sold to owners who take them overseas. Some wind up racing in Japan. Some wind up in slaughterhouses.

I’d like to point out that thoroughbred race horse, Real Quiet, the same horse that won the Kentucky Derby in 1998 and forever changed my view of this brutal sport, died this past September at age 15. While he didn’t go off to slaughter, he also didn’t retire at pasture. Tired and broken down, he spent the rest of his life as a breeding stallion.

Real Quiet

Elephant Stomps on GoDaddy CEO

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Well, not exactly, but GoDaddy.com CEO’s recent killing of an African elephant DID stomp on his business.

I’ve always been looking for a reason to jump ship from the web-hosting company where I own eight domain names, including this one. And if their Super Bowl commercials featuring scantily-clad women wasn’t reason enough, then shooting an elephant sure as heck is.

The company’s CEO, Bob Parsons, recently shot an elephant in Zimbabwe and posted the graphic, misspelled subtitled footage in a video for the whole world to see, and then dubbed it a “humanitarian” expedition.

Note that I’m intentionally NOT linking to the video which shows the CEO and other hunters looking over a farmer’s damaged crops, shooting at elephants in the night. The subtitle which was evidently not spell checked reads: “Team waits until the elephant are close then turns on lights duct tapped to their rifles & opens fire.” Parsons is then shown smiling while posing with the dead bull. The video depicts “hungry villagers” the next morning stripping the dead animal of its flesh while donning GoDaddy.com hats. The most boorish part of the video is set to AC/DC’s “Hell’s Bells,” and is nothing more than an unscrupulous, self-promoting plug for the company.

If only this poor elephant could rise from the dead and wipe that grin off Bob Parsons face.

Parsons, who’s second elephant hunt this was, told myFox Phoenix that he is not ashamed of what he did. “All these people that are complaining that this shouldn’t happen, that these people who are starving to death otherwise shouldn’t eat these elephants, you probably see them driving through at McDonald’s or cutting a steak. These people [Zimbabwe villagers] don’t have that option.”

While I don’t condone the killing of any animal for human consumption, whether it be cows at slaughterhouses to hunting elephants, what I think is worth questioning is the need for an American CEO to carry out this gruesome task for the African villagers while shamelessly promoting his company.

After reading that Namecheap.com, a GoDaddy.com competitor, recently ran a promotion to raise money for the endangered elephants in Africa I decided it was time to leave GoDaddy. Coupon code (BYEBYEGD) allowed up to 10 domain transfers at just $4.99 per domain, $1 per domain of which was transferred to Save the Elephants. Namecheap raised $20,433 for the elephants in Africa.

Even though I missed out on Namecheap’s promotion (and boy do I love a good deal), it’s still worth jumping. To join me in transferring your domain from GoDaddy.com to Namecheap.com, click here.

What Parsons does not know is that elephants are extremely intelligent, sensitive animals, and that there are strategies that exist to protect them which combine community and creativity. As Stephanie Feldstein wrote on Change.org last November, conservationists and farmers have devised plenty of clever and harmless methods of keeping elephants away from crops.

For example, draped fences made out of string first dipped in chili-infused grease (because elephants don’t like chili peppers), or elaborate cowbell systems that trigger wires to warn when the intruders arrive, are just two ways to preserve villagers’ crops and preserve an ancient species who is highly social and intelligent.

It’s doubtful, but perhaps next year Parsons will trade in his rifle for a cowbell.

Jonny Be Good

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This post has been sitting in my drafts folder for almost a year. And today I am finally doing something about it.

It was late summer 2009. I was at Animal Care & Control in Brooklyn playing God for the day. I had just started rescuing and fostering for United Action for Animals, a friend’s New York City-based animal welfare group.

I walked past his cage, we locked eyes and I fell in love. His name was Jonny. He was the victim of an almost-overnight ban on pitbulls in New York City Public Housing Authority buildings (otherwise known as “the projects.”) Jonny was handsome, goofy and VERY strong. My dog Ella had just gotten out of being in casts though, and so it was imperative to pull a pit who would NOT want to rough house with her. Jonny didn’t make the cut.

Shortly after I walked away from being Jonny’s ticket out of a death sentence, I met a young man in my neighborhood who told me he wanted a dog like Ella. I took him to the shelter to meet the pitbull I was so drawn to and they hit it off. Because space and time is of the essence when saving an animal from a high-kill shelter, Jonny was adopted out to this man through my friend’s organization.

I always had a bad feeling about the adoption for many reasons that I can’t detail here. But at the same time, I take full responsibility for adopting Jonny out to the wrong home.

I was almost 5 months pregnant when we got the dreaded phone call from AC&C. Jonny had been picked up as a stray. He was emaciated and throwing up at the shelter. They rushed him to the hospital where he had surgery to remove objects that were obstructing his stomach and keeping him from digesting food.

Emaciated Jonny recovering in our Brooklyn apartment.

A couple of days later we picked Jonny up from the hospital, but we were not in a position at the time to do a long-term foster. Thanks to my amazing mother-in-law, she offered to take Jonny up to her home in Connecticut.

Days later while she was walking with him off leash through her secluded, neighborhood lakeside community, Jonny met the woman who would give him his third and final home.

The couple were from New Jersey and spent weekends at their house on the lake in Connecticut. Their dog had died the previous year and the wife was about to retire. When she saw Jonny and learned from my MIL that he needed a forever home, she called it fate.

I often think back to mine and Jonny’s first-chance meeting. How we locked eyes and something inside of me surged. I think about what his life might have been like with the young man, how he was loved but not properly cared for. I remember how hard I cried when we picked him up from the hospital. I think about how I stroked him and whispered “sorry” into his ears over and over and over again. I think about my petite and serene MIL with this massive pitbull, and how grateful I am that she extended her home to such a powerful dog.

He was the dog I wanted to save but couldn’t, and then ultimately did.

Jonny, now called Sunny, at home in Conneticut.

Swimming With Dolphins

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I decided to write this post after I recently came across a fellow mom blog who had a detailed bucket list of things she would like to do in her life before she kicks it. Swimming with dolphins was one of them.

I’m not linking to this woman’s blog, who happens to be a TV news reporter, as she doesn’t need to be attacked by animal rights activists. But as a fellow parent who’s job it is to teach our children compassion and as a fellow writer and sometimes journalist who’s job requires being a savvy researcher, I was disappointed to see that swimming with dolphins was up there with visiting another country and opening a 401(k).

I don’t think people understand that more harm than good is being done when you swim with dolphins who are in captive environments. So here it is folks…

For starters, the capturing of dolphins is traumatic and stressful and often results in injury and death.

Dolphins are trained to look as if they perform because they like it. This isn’t the case. Tailwalking and playing ball are trained behaviors that do not occur in the wild. Dolphins perform because they have been deprived of food. Hold food in front of me when I am famished and I too would jump through hoops to get to it.

Most captive dolphins are confined in minuscule tanks containing chemically treated artificial seawater. Dolphins in a tank are severely restricted in using their highly developed sonar, which is one of the most damaging aspects of captivity. It is similar to forcing a person to live in a maze of mirrors for the rest of their life – their image always bouncing back with no clear direction in sight.

Perhaps the saddest part of dolphin captivity is how short their lives are. The average life span of a dolphin in the wild is 45 years; yet half of all captured dolphins die within their first two years of captivity. The survivors last an average of only five years in captivity.

Wild dolphins can swim 40 to 100 miles per day – in pools they go around in circles.

The truth behind swimming with dolphins could help set them free.

These are simple facts that people and especially parents, should know. If you think it would be cute to get snapshots of your spawn swimming with dolphins during your next vacation to Atlantis in the Bahamas, please, think again.

Bittman Bites Down on Agribusiness

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I recently read a post by Mark Bittman about the new bills that were recently introduced by Florida and Iowa that aim to crack down on people who shoot photographs and videos of agricultural operations. In other words, big-farma is fed up with the undercover work exposing the vast inhumane treatment and suffering of farm animals.

Bittman writes:

The Florida bill would require anyone wishing to photograph a farm to first secure written permission from the owner. And what if they don’t? First-degree felony. The implicit goal here is to deter and criminalize damning undercover exposés like this one. The bill would also make it illegal for an agenda-less passerby to snap a picture of a farm from the side of the road, but my best guess is that those “crimes” might not be prosecuted quite so diligently.

As for the Iowa bill, we get this gem from the Animal Agriculture Alliance (AAA): “It is imperative that activists be held accountable for their actions to undermine farmers, ranchers and meat processors through use of videos depicting alleged mistreatment of animals for the purposes of gaining media attention and fundraising—all in an effort to drive their vegan agenda.”

If activists, radical vegans, or whatever you want to call them, break the law by sneaking onto private property to document animal or farm worker abuses, then yes, they should be held accountable for their actions – though unless I’m misinformed, that’s what trespass law is for. But these people shouldn’t have to sneak the cameras into the farms that are torturing animals or mistreating workers: the cameras should already be there. It should be the state’s responsibility to find and monitor the few farmers that are giving the rest of them a bad name. You want to quiet the crazy vegans with the video cameras? Do their job for them.

It’s so true. Quiet the crazies by making it a state law to monitor the farmers that practice inhumane farming.

While most vegans advocate for plant-based diets, most vegetarians, myself included, understand that man can’t live on plants alone. I think it is a waste of time to even lobby for that. But as meat eaters, I think it is incumbent on man to come up with more humane ways to end these creatures’ lives.

As an animal welfare advocate who does not eat meat, I would be honored to live to see that day. According to animal rights philosopher Peter Singer, I will.

If what Singer says is true, that by 2020 all farm animals will be able to stand up, lie down, walk around, and stretch their limbs, then who knows, I may even start eating meat again.

Ok, so I’m probably exaggerating but it’s my way of trying to remain level-headed about something that deep-down inside, I am raging about.