A Fine Kettle of Fish

One of my aquaintances sent me a link regarding the state of the Pet Food industry a while back and I found it absolutely riveting. With all the different schools of thought on the nutritional needs of dogs in the modern age, this is a timely piece; well researched and heavily referenced.

There is a lot to think about regarding the safety of the foods our dogs eat, with the threats of disease from protein sources and contaminants from improper sanitation. It's some scary stuff.

Anyway, here it is. Spread it far and wide.

http://leda.law.harvard.edu/leda/data/784/Patrick06.html

Riddle me THIS, Batman!

At one end of the leash, a dog; the other end, a VOTER. It is my constitutional right to own a gun, but some freak without a clue wants to legislate the breed of dog I own? Indeed.

What is it with people who think they can legislate common sense or heaven forbid, MORALITY! Each of us is endowed with the lessons of our ancestors, but there comes a time when we are assumed responsible for our actions. Michael Vick although a product of an environment very dissimilar to my own, engenders what people of his socio-economic background view as hope for themselves, for their futures. He chose to exploit his celebrity in ways profoundly opposed to those ideals set forth by polite society. In so doing, he further augments the deliberate attempts of a few individuals to extinguish a breed of dog by virtue of it's bad press. Remember the dogs who died because they WOULD NOT FIGHT. In horrible ways.

What he did was indeed wrong, under any measure, by any 'polite society'.

How does this matter to you?

We will develop this topic further as time and interest allows with the requisite links and content that is in direct relation to the dwindling of rights in this country and abroad.

Have a Little Faith...

09/22/2006 I am reminded of a excerpt written by Donald McCaig out of his book "Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men". It is about a dog named Sirrah and a conversation Mr. McCaig conducted with the dog from a dream-state many years after Sirrah's death. I took away from the story a confirmation of my profound belief in the cognizance of dogs and a disturbing realization that that particular conversation is relevent to me, to anyone who has owned and disappointed a dog. I often wonder what such a conversation would reveal with one of my own dogs. Would they think me unfair? Would they languish in their respect and admiration of me? One thing I am certain of is their attention to me. Do they do it because I am a super owner? No, I think it is the dogs' nature to throw his lot in with man (or Woman) and accept that which they cannot change. I don't know about having the wisdom to know the difference, but I can attest to to memory of a grand gun dog who 'quit' on her drunken handler in such obvious disgust of his careless blunders afield she refused to work for him again. He sold her, as opposed to shooting her which at the time would not have been uncommon. She lived to teach me how to aim true and enjoy the communion of her silent companionship. She was a marvelous teacher in patience and we remained a team until her disappearance in 1979 under 'mysterious' circumstances. Her name was Catt and although no liturgies will be written over either her life or her passing, she had much to teach in the way of humility. I have no such misgivings with my son. He is human after all and young enough to not have developed the dubious talent of disguising his emotions. With him it is never a guess, he either is or isn't angry. He either is or isn't sad. What makes dogs special is the degree of observational skills one develops in close communication with them. An art certainly lost as our dependency on dogs to help us in our daily work or to assist in the deliverance from starvation passes with the advances in medicine, agriculture and technology. The machinations of the human animal have diverted our attentions from our natural world, the world of our ancestors and we as a species suffer from an acute sort of blindness as a result. As Mr. McCaig suggests, amongst other minds far greater than my own; dogs literally helped us to evolve to the state of mind and technical prowess that we currently enjoy. Without their uncanny and timely assistance, we may not necessarily have perished as a species, but their presence at our early hearths warned us of danger, either by their abrupt disappearance from our fires, or the warnings they provided in their defense of these resources. On the hunt, we followed the packs, emulated their ways and thrived. How do we repay them? We don't acknowledge their contributions to our successful survival, we control and manipulate them from their 'natural' state into something that looks like a parody of itself. We try to legislate them out of existence with our Breed Specific Legislation and other insidious Anti-Dog laws. We restrict their access to places under the guise of health ordinances or the risk of liability and we shun them to dark places we know exist but are not willing to acknowledge let alone change. This country executes dogs by the millions each year because they have lost their importance. They have either become the ultimate display of discretionary income with Dog Show Pagentry and as Mr. McCaig suggests, Victorian excess, or they have become the new Ford Model T. The first disposable car. People churn out puppies without a care past the dollars they line their pockets with. No value is placed on their appropriate placement, no value placed on their ability to contribute in a meaningful way.

Ok, so THIS is Christmas?

09/21/06Well, here it is, Johnny. My second post on my very first Blog. I'm supposed to be writing a letter for a friend to help her get reinstated in a position that she inherited from moi. Selfish biotch that I am, I am fulfilling my warped need for others to feel the lash of my ascerbic pen. But not in this post, maybe another after someone makes the fatal mistake of twisting my sensibilities to the point I want to scribble with blue fountain ink all over their arses. Since I'll probably NEVER get published in a traditional venue, or even a respectable one, I can exercise my ambitions harmlessly here. Credibility is a terrible thing to waste... Anyway...

This thing is finally going to make it to the BLOG. Oh my. A bit shy of a year and a month since I WROTE the damn thing. Sigh. I am sooooooo lazy sometimes. But hey, we all need a respite from the cold hard fact of reality. You know, like jobs, kids, men (ugh, don't get me started) and stuff. How does this relate to dogs? It doesn't but I got you to read it anyway!

My son is upstairs wrestling with Scoot the Lava Cat and Nobb the kitten-from-hell in our new diggs in Carroll County, Maryland. I needed a change of scenery, he needed a stable environment in which to flourish and grow into a petty dictator with world domination in his horizon. So here we are, together with the muttley crew, Cotton; to whom a legacy will be written here and elsewhere, otherwise known as "The Comedic Exploits of Adventure Boy and Wonder Dog", Franklin-Stein the Pug and ButterBall the Bullish on everything Bull Terrorist. I have a compulsion to write about the current state of DOG in Carroll County, but today is reserved for unfinished business and setting a plan....