Friday, January 27, 2012

Mark Twain: Do not steal the kittens!

This is an actual note left by Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens) to potential burglars. Click on the link below to be taken to the Letters of Note blog.

Besides being a brilliant writer, Twain was very fond of cats.

To the next Burglar

Friday, January 13, 2012

Yesterday's Animal Shelter Commission meeting

I'm kind of glad I wasn't able to go.

According to this Dallas Observer article, the proceedings were just as painful as ever.

Some highlights of the meeting:

The shelter is still short 30 employees, as it has been since October 2011. Joey Zapata's excuse: "they want to make sure they get the right people". So why did they shitcan some of the better employees last year?
Animals are still disappearing from cages. Joey Zapata blamed the public for this.
The shelter is still euthanizing around 75% of animals admitted for "shelter".
Dwaine Caraway is now contributing.
The Shelter Commission gave the Dallas Companion Animal Project "approval to move forward". Huh?

I see nothing in place that will improve things one bit, especially when you look at DCAP's faults. They're in bed with the HSUS, run by a professional committee-sitter, and have an Advisory Board full of folks with NO experience in transforming kill shelters into no-kill shelters.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Dallas goes into overdrive to stop shelter killing. (Backwards.)

By the looks of the city of Dallas' Companion Animal Project (aka DCAP), I don't think they could be getting any further away from lowering the shelter kill rate.

Let's look at the DCAP Facebook page. Instead of announcing any changes to the current m.o. down at Dallas Animal Services, we've been treated to excerpts from Wayne Pacelle's worst-selling book The Bond. From the Dec 29 posting:

From "The Bond": "Right now, slightly less than 25% of all dogs in American households come from shelters or rescue groups. That means that roughly three out of every four dogs come from other sources - from pet stores, puppy mills, small-scale breeders, or friends adopting out litters. There's still a stigma associated with shelters, the vague, sometimes snobbish, and always uninformed view that something is wrong with shelter animals." Here is what each of us can do: tell our friends to adopt from shelters or rescue groups! The dogs in shelters are just as wonderful as those in pet stores!

That's right, DCAP! Just tell her our friends to adopt from shelters and everything will be hunky-dory.

Over at thte DCAP Web site, the Advisory Board just gets weirder and weirder. New members include:

An architect, whose usefulness totally evades me. He is also often photographed with his purebred bulldog - a breed that's been infamously overbred over the decades.
Someone who runs an SCPA in Virginia (like that'll do a lot of good).
Someone who's stinkin' rich and owns Six Flags - a place that relies on smaller local rescue groups to help them manage their feral cats.
Someone who's already professionally committee-sitting (ie., no dirty work please, it'll fuck up my manicure) on another local animal "advocate" group.

Let's see what goes down at the Animal Shelter Commission meeting this afternoon.