Animals

Sign the petition to have the kitten murderer tried as an adult…

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Do you remember the haunting and troubling story about the 17-year old girl that cooked her friend’s two-month old kitten in the oven? Well now’s your chance to ensure that justice is served by signing the petition to have Cheyenne Cherry tried as adult.

This same woman also has an alleged prior dognapping charge of stealing someone’s small Yorkie and threatening to shoot the dog in the head with a bebe-gun… and then returning the dog for a $500 reward.

The New York Daily News broke the animal-cruelty story and is also behind the demand to have courts file adult criminal charges against Cheyenne Cherry. Below is the link in which to sign the petition… click on it and the petition site will come up.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/tell-a-friend/4426200

Please help make a statement by signing it, and by all means, please cross-post.


Merciless

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I am usually out of bed by 7:00 each morning and on my laptop writing by 7:05. I start to format the morning’s script for the news show and at the same time balance multiple browsers: FaceBook, Twitter, email, Huffington Post, and the NY Daily News. The latter is my way of tapping into the The NY Post without really accessing the Post online. Unlike the Post, NY Daily News is somewhat balanced, colorful, and offers a raw look at all the news happening in my city. They also happen to have an in-your-face reporting style when it comes to NYC’s animals, which let’s face it, is why I really read them. They cover dog fighting busts, dog maulings and shed a very necessary light on cruelty cases.

But still, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw and read this morning. A 17-year old Bronx girl roasted her ex-roommate’s kitten to death in a stove – then played it off as a joke when she was busted by authorities. I just don’t get it. I don’t get how a budding, young teenager who has the whole world at her fingertips, could be so heartless, so merciless, so cruel. I cannot even wrap my mind around it.

Countering SunSentinel.com’s Pit Bull Ban Proposal

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Originally published on Examiner.com.

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I take great issue with SunSentinel.com’s recent article by Gary Stein, Ban pit bulls – they don’t belong here.

I fervently oppose a pit bull ban in Florida, or any other state for that matter. Secondly, Mr. Stein failed to support his views with any credible evidence about breed specific legislation.

Pit bulls are a misunderstood breed.

All across the United States breed specific legislation, which is more commonly referred to as “BSL,” is being enacted against pit bulls.

There is a lot of controversy and opacity surrounding BSL. The legislation has been fueled by hysteria and ignorance about the breed, and the media has heavy-handedly portrayed pit bulls as vicious, child-mauling monsters.

People like myself who are against BSL believe that placing the blame on pit bulls alone is meaningless. The breed of dog responsible for the most serious bites and attacks changes from year to year. In the 70’s it was the Doberman Pinscher, followed by the German shepherd in the 80’s and the Rottweiler in the 90’s.

Randall Lockwood, a senior vice-president of the A.S.P.C.A. and one of the country’s leading dogbite experts, told Malcolm Gladwell in his 2006 New Yorker article, Troublemakers, that he’s seen virtually every breed involved in fatalities, including Pomeranians and everything else. “I don’t think I even saw my first pit-bull case until the middle to late nineteen-eighties, and I didn’t start seeing Rottweilers until I’d already looked at a few hundred fatal dog attacks. Now those dogs make up the preponderance of fatalities. The point is that it changes over time. It’s a reflection of what the dog of choice is among people who want to own an aggressive dog,” he said.

Mr. Gladwell points out that when we say that pit bulls are dangerous, we are making a generalization, just as insurance companies use generalizations when they charge young men more for car insurance than the rest of us (even though many young men are perfectly good drivers), and doctors use generalizations when they tell overweight middle-aged men to get their cholesterol checked (even though many overweight middle-aged men won’t experience heart trouble).

Thus the opacity that I referred to earlier. Mr. Gladwell also points out that pit-bull bans involve a category problem, too, because pit bulls, as it happens, aren’t a single breed. The term refers to several breeds of dog in the Molosser family. The breeds most often placed in this category are the American Pit Bull Terrier, the American Staffordshire Terrier, and Staffordshire Bull Terrier. These three breeds share a square and muscular body, a short snout, and a sleek, short-haired coat.

The Humane Society of the United States stipulates that while breed may be one factor that contributes to a dog’s temperament, it alone cannot be used to predict whether a dog may pose a danger to his or her community. A September 2000 study published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association further illustrates this point. The report details dog bite related fatalities in the United States from 1979 through 1998, and reveals that over the nineteen years examined in the study at least 25 different breeds or crossbreeds of dogs were involved in fatally wounding human beings. Breeds cited, range from oft-maligned pit bulls and Rottweilers to the legendary “forever loyal” breed of St. Bernards. The study was conducted by a group of veterinarians, medical doctors, and psychology and public health experts.

It is estimated that there are over 4.5 million dog bites each year. However, according to the HSUS, this is just an estimate since there is no central reporting agency for dog bites.

Mr. Gladwell cites a 1991 study in Denver that compared 178 dogs with a history of biting people with a random sample of 178 dogs with no history of biting. The breeds were scattered: German shepherds, Akitas, and Chow Chows were among those most heavily represented. (There were no pit bulls among the biting dogs in the study, because Denver banned pit bulls in 1989.) But a number of other, more stable factors stand out. The biters were 6.2 times as likely to be male than female, and 2.6 times as likely to be intact than neutered. The Denver study also found that biters were 2.8 times as likely to be chained as unchained.

The study concludes that about 20 percent of the dogs involved in fatalities were chained at the time, and had a history of long-term chaining, while Mr. Lockwood points out that the animals in the study did not have an opportunity to become socialized to people. “They don’t necessarily even know that children are small human beings. They tend to see them as prey,” he said.

Mr. Gladwell’s Troublemakers is an in-depth account of what pit bulls can teach us about profiling. It is the type of article that one expects from The New Yorker: a researched, thought-out, well-considered analysis of the facts. It is also the type of article that one would expect to come out of the Sun Sentinel, a paper owned by the Tribune Company. Unfortunately, not only did Mr. Stein fail to support his views with any credible statistics, his work is littered with grammatical errors, too.

As a writer I have a hard time taking seriously the work of a “journalist” or fellow writer who hasn’t taken the time to use the spell check on his computer or learned the basic grammatical rules of the English language. It would seem that, regardless of one’s opinions, feelings or politics, this would be the very first step in publishing an opinion-based editorial.

But at the end of the day what matters is respect for life. Not just human life, but that of animals, too. And yes, that includes pit bulls.

So if you haven’t participated in Mr. Stein’s unfounded survey and you’d like to vote “No, pit bulls are good pets that unofrtunately suffer from a bad reputation,” then please click here.

Saving money & the earth

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Let’s face it, as much as women hate cleaning, it’s a great stress reducer, not to mention an effective way to burn calories, too. Before I used to clean with Seventh Generation Products my allergies while cleaning made the experience deplorable. My mother always used to say I was allergic to cleaning. If only I was!

Even though dust can make even the most allergen-free sneeze from time to time, I am a firm believer that using cleaning products heavy with chemicals is also part of the problem. And that is why I no longer do.

My husband and I are HUGE fans of Seventh Generation Products. It has become quite the staple under the sink with other cleaning supplies that it’s hard to imagine what the old days were like when I cleaned with products like Windex and KitchenAid.

I came across this coupon to share with everyone. Their products might be a bit pricier than some of the run-of-the-mill products you’re used to, but buying socially responsible cleaning products that are gentle and non-irritating (if you have kids that’s a plus) as well as easy on the environment and free of animal-testing, will save you money in the long run.

The Gloves That Got Me

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It’s been a while since I’ve posted. What can I say, I got married and have been having a ball. Seriously, I have. But I also had to take a step back and prioritize my priorities – if there even is such a thing.

While I have always been an “animal lover,” this past year has been an awakening for me in the animal rights and rescue movement, one of which I think I have been emotionally committed to, but am now physically, too. Friends often ask me when I became “like this.” The question, I believe, is a delicate way of not really knowing what to call it.

Though I haven’t eaten meat since I was 18, I only gave up chicken and turkey this year. In Nigeria, where I was born and raised, I was vaguely aware that animals were not treated kindly, and that affected me. Even my family’s dogs, German Shepherds, were banished to the outdoors to sleep at night. Goats were hung and slaughtered under the large tree adjacent to the sandbox that I played in. As a result, it was a constant struggle to get me to eat goat meat. That explains the vegetarianism.

When I was 24, I saw a man beat a stray dog with a wooden pole in the streets of Casablanca. I pleaded with him to stop in broken-Moroccan (French and Arabic), which only enraged him more. “A woman telling me what to do? An American, no less,” is what I imagined did it. That explains my growing interest in Dominion and how it pertains to animals — and those who know me, know I am not a religious person. Convincing other cultures, where often animals are far worse off than they are in the United States, that an animal has rights, as I tried with the Moroccan man, does not work. Matthew Scully, the author of Dominion, The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy says that only conscience, perhaps only the fear of God Almighty, could make such a man draw back.

Not long ago my mother gave me a stack of papers that my late-grandmother had kept of all my letters, cards and writings over the years. Within the papers, I found what is perhaps most telling about my awakening: A fiction story I wrote in elementary school about an injured frog that a little girl discovers while walking home from school one day. The girl brings the frog home in her coat pocket and conceals it in an empty shoe box for fear of her father finding out. She begins to nurse him back to health, or in the frog’s case, until he can hop again. She encounters a few close calls with her older brother who threatens to tell, and another with one of the household cats. Eventually the frog heals and she releases him into the wild in the woods behind the school yard. This explains my role in animal rescue. I was doing it at a tender age even in my subconscious, and am still doing it today.

So what does this all have to do with this blog which is about getting me to write rather than shop? It means that there is a good chance this blog could take a meandering course. So if you’re an old reader I hope you will forgive me, and if you’re a new one, I hope you will stay. While I will still shop and blog about the frivolousness of doing so, there is a good chance it won’t be about python-embossed Jimmy Choo’s. The move towards cutting all meat out of my diet is slowly being followed by converting my wardrobe and beauty essentials to socially-responsible, sustainable, vegan-friendly products.

It occurred to me that this was necessary when I bought a pair of Carolina Amato leather driver gloves late last year. They were gorgeous, fun and bold. But I overlooked the fact that they were made out of goat leather. When they arrived in the mail there was no denying that the gloves had the distinct, pungent smell of death. I put them on and cried. First, because I knew they had to go back, and second, because a new kind of awareness about shopping had been born.

Cats & Dogs in Need of Homes… ASAP!

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Krypto is a pit-lab mix who is deaf. He desperately needs someone to be his lifelong guide.

I received horrible news last night from a colleague I used to work with at Animal Haven, a non-profit animal shelter in New York City. Animal Haven recently went from being a no-kill shelter to a limited-intake adoption center with the possibility of humane euthanasia. I am posting this note in hopes of reaching someone who may be in the market to adopt, at this point rescue, a cat or dog.

Please, please, please contact me directly if you or someone you know can provide a good home to these animals. Or contact the shelter directly at 212-274-8511.

Ella’s Blog

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As I wrote in an earlier post, we recently rescued a pitbull who we named Ella. A victim of animal cruelty, she was left in the entrance to Brooklyn Animal Care & Control (a high kill shelter) in late March with two broken front legs.

We’ve been hit by many challenges with this new family member coming into our lives. Some of them foreseeable, some of them not. Besides having to potty train her, like you would any dog who has spent time in an animal shelter, Ella was home only one week before we learned that the surgery on her front legs failed.

Ella’s is now back at 5th Ave. Vet Hospital having surgery for the third time. She has been gone from the apartment, (which has become so eerily quiet without her), since Wednesday.

We have carved out Ella’s own little spot on the blogosphere, which will be devoted solely to her. And because she loves to be the center of everyone’s attention, we know she would be pleased. For updates on Ella, please feel free to stop by from time to time. http://ellaselbows.com/

Our Pitbull Rescue

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I haven’t done a whole lot of blogging lately. I’ve been consumed with purchasing wee-wee pads, a high-tech doggie stroller, and a custom-made canine harness for our new dog.

We were one week into giving a dog who has had a very hard life, a new home, when Jason and I got thrown for a loop. As a result, many people have been inquiring about her and sending their well wishes… so this post is an attempt to tell her story, and bring everyone up-to-date.

We learned about the injured dog in late March immediately following her rescue by Mayor’s Alliance for New York City’s Animals. She was left in front of Brooklyn Animal Care & Control (a high kill shelter) with two fractured elbows and a broken tail. Had it not been for the remarkable Siobhan Healy with Mayor’s Alliance, the dog wouldn’t even be here right now because she would have been put down that day.

We met her for the first time in early April as she was recovering post-op at a vet’s office in Murray Hill. We prepared all month for her arrival home and decided to name her Ella, after her broken elbows, and after Eleanor, the woman my fiancee Jason and I know one another because of. But we knew when she came home that Ella was only halfway there. She would need aggressive physical therapy, and because Ella was born with a severe heart murmur, she would need more surgery for that, too.

Ella learned to sit this way as a result of having to live with broken legs.

Ella came home the first weekend in May. We learned right away that she wasn’t house broken. After all, she had spent the majority of her life in a cage at vet’s offices around NYC. But she hobbled around some and delighted Jason and I with her voracious appetite and snorts and grunts and groans. Despite her injuries she was a happy dog, and an instant celebrity in the big, dog-friendly building that we live in.

About one week into life with this new family members, we noticed that one of Ella’s elbows looked funny – she had excess skin and tissue that extended beyond the point of an elbow – but we assumed it was just how she healed from the surgery. Feeling good and feeling proud to have such a determined and beautiful dog, we took Ella to her first hydrotherapy and acupuncture appointment in the neighborhood. The first set of x-rays were taken there since the surgery in March, and they showed that the pin holding the plate to her bone had come loose and could protrude through the skin at any moment. That was last Sunday.

The following morning on the way to 5th Avenue Vet Hospital, while Jason was driving alone with Ella in the backseat, the pin came through. Upon arrival at the vet hospital, they whisked her away and what ensued were back-to-back, three hour surgeries on her elbows. The left elbow on Monday, which went well, and the right elbow on Tuesday, which didn’t go as well.

We weren’t allowed to visit with Ella until Wednesday night. They needed to monitor her coming off the anesthesia and IV meds without her getting excited or stressed from seeing use. But the following night, we walked hand-in-hand and got into our car to pick her up. The excitement we felt then was mixed with uncertainty, sort of like the night before Christmas meets a box of chocolates.

Ella recovering from the second surgeries she had on eher elbows.

So Ella’s home now and we’re back at square one. This time, she’s not recovering at a vets office, but in our small apartment, which is actually ideal since she’s not supposed to walk around. And unfortunately, we’re also back at square one with the house training, too! On top of all that she’s been through, Ella is also in heat! Not fun, I know. She hasn’t been spayed up until this point because every time she’s been at the hospital, the anesthesia’s Ella got were for more important operations.

In order for Ella to get her heart surgery done, and to be spayed, the take-two on the elbow surgery HAS to work. So what this means for Jason and me is pretty much no life, and to be extra good care-givers, which we are willing to do, because we know this dog wants to be alive.

So many people say Ella is lucky to have us. And she is, we know that. But we also feel we are lucky to have her. Ella is an unfortunate example of animal abuse and a symbol of something for which we are both passionate about, animal rights. She has taught us so much in such a short period of time, and has also brought us closer together in a whole new way.

In the interim, as we plan our lives around a handicapped dog, I find myself saying tiny prayers, something I have not done a lot of in my life. ‘I hope she heals. I hope she is at our wedding. I hope she learns to tell us when she has to poop. I hope the stroller arrives in the mail today,’ and the list goes on…

Ah, the stroller… how much easier life will be when we don’t have to carry a 45 pound dog around town. Sure, people will point, and they will snicker, but what matters most is that some people will learn something, too. And for that reason alone, Ella is a gift.