(Beth Clifton collage)

With partner Cheryl Craig,  planned transition

CALEDONIA,  Mississippi––Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary founder Kay McElroy,  74,  died at the sanctuary after a multi-year illness on January 3,  2019.

“In the final weeks of her life, as McElroy’s illness progressed, she was confined to her bedroom. From there, she could look out and watch the animals she had nurtured for the better part of three decades,”  wrote Slim Smith of the Caledonia Dispatch.

McElroy had turned the day-to-day Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary operations over to successor Nancy Gschwendtner,  57,  three years earlier.  Gschwendtner heads a listed staff of 10.

Nancy Gschwendtner

“Wanted to stay close to the animals”

“She was very, very sick,”  Gschwendtner told Smith.  “Most people would have gone to a nursing facility by then,  but Kay wanted to stay close to the animals she loved and cared for.  So that’s what she did,  right up to the end.”

“Kay and I talked about what would happen when we were gone and made plans for that day,”  Cheryl Craig,  her companion of 42 years,  assured Smith.  “Everything has been put in the name of the sanctuary and the board of directors will continue to run it after we’re both gone.”

“She lived across the street from my grandparents’ house back in Oklahoma,”  continued Craig, 73.  “She went to my birthday party when I was two.”

The first Cedarhill cat.

Taught in Watts

McElroy “grew up on a small farm in Adair, Oklahoma,”  wrote Seth Putnam of the Caledonia Dispatch in a 2010 profile.  “Her graduating class had 17 students in it.  After high school, she earned her degree in education and shipped off to California to work with students in Watts, California,  the site of brutal riots in 1965 and 1992.”

McElroy taught for a decade,  then joined Craig in a medical data management business.  Relocating to Mississippi,  in 1987 they traded a 1947 Farmall D tractor for a neglected puma cub,  intending to relay the cub to a quality zoo or sanctuary.

Failing to find such a situation,  McElroy started the Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary instead,  incorporated nonprofit in 1990.

Recalled Craig,  “I remember standing out on the hill here and listening to Kay talk about what it would be.  It was mostly trees then.  But she looked out and would say,  ‘Okay. We’re going to build this there.  We’ll do this there.  Over there,  we’ll do this.’  She had a vision for what it would be.  Then we made it happen.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

No breeding, no display

From the beginning,  McElroy told ANIMALS 24-7 in 1992,  she intended to work small and demonstrate how she believed a sanctuary should operate,  emphasizing as fundamental criteria that there should be no breeding whatever,  no sales or transfers of animals who arrived to receive care-for-life,  and no display of animals to the public,  including no donor visits,  though she did welcome media visits as an opportunity to educate against the exotic pet traffic.

“Sanctuaries are for animals,”  McElroy often said.  “Zoos are for people.  I’m not interested in running a zoo.”

Also,  McElroy resisted pressure to take in more animals than her facilities and budget could accommodate.  When the Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary ran into financial trouble from time to time,  as most sanctuaries do,  McElroy escalated fundraising––which she did almost entirely by herself––but did not open to paying visitors,  and did not accept animals offered with stipends unless she had space already available.

Kay McElroy

Formed first sanctuary association

In recent years Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary revenue and expenditures appear to have stabilized at just over half a million dollars per year each,  according to IRS Form 990 filings.

McElroy and several other allied sanctuarians by 1992 had established a shared waiting list for big cats in need of accommodation.

By then McElroy had also begun advocating for the formation of an accrediting body for animal sanctuaries,  modeled after the American Zoo Association and the accrediting organizations that regulate health care professionals.

Kay McElroy

McElroy hosted the organizing meeting of the first such accrediting organization,  The Association of Sanctuaries (TAOS),  in 1992.  It was later absorbed into the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries.

And second, and third

The Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary meanwhile became the first TAOS-accredited sanctuary,  but within four years McElroy and several other TAOS founding members split with the rest to form the American Sanctuary Association,  which still exists.

Another American Sanctuary Association cofounder,  Carol Asvestas,  drafted an updated set of proposed accreditation standards,  but resigned in mid-2002 amid intense disagreement over various points to found a third accreditation body,  Animal Centers of Excellence.

School tour visits the Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary.
(Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary photo)

Conflict over breeding & viewing

Among the points of conflict were that Asvestas opposed cooperation with captive breeding programs for endangered species,  which were and are a part of the work of many nature centers that provide lifetime care of injured animals who cannot be returned to the wild.

Asvestas also opposed most approaches to allowing visitors to see sanctuary animals,  though not guided tours arranged by appointment.

While the idea that sanctuary animals should not be exhibited to the public is among the basic distinctions between legitimate sanctuaries and roadside zoos,  most sanctuaries find that allowing some visitation is essential to fundraising.

In addition,  though the mere existence of substandard roadside zoos demonstrates that frequent public visitation does not ensure good animal care,  visitor traffic tends to keep the conditions at animal care facilities under a closer watch than just annual or semi-annual inspections.

Kay McElroy

Animal Centers of Excellence

Joining Asvestas in the new organization,  but without leaving the American Sanctuary Association,  were McElroy,  Austin Zoo director Cindy Carrochio,  and Sumner Matthes of Sarasota In Defense of Animals.

Animal Centers of Excellence boasted membership standards stricter in many ways than those of TAOS and the Association of Sanctuaries.  Few sanctuaries could meet them,  and fewer tried.

Animal Centers of Excellence vanished even before Wild Animal Orphanage failed, following a rocky attempted leadership transition in 2010.

Sarasota In Defense of Animals cofounder Sumner Matthes died at age 80 in April 2011.  His widow Elise later closed their sanctuary.

Carrochio left the Austin Zoo in 2006,  relocating to Costa Rica amid multiple controversies over her management.  Headed since 2007 by Patti Clark,  the Austin Zoo is again embroiled in controversy as result of a long-running conflict between Clark and six former zookeepers,  aligned with several former board members.

Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary cats at feeding time.  (Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary photo)

Fire

McElroy carried on at the Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary with few visible issues,  other than the perennial struggle to raise funds.

There was also a catastrophic dawn fire two days after Christmas 2008 that razed a doublewide trailer McElroy had converted from staff housing to accommodate 50 domestic cats,  all of the age 10 or older.  Only two of the resident cats survived.

Vowing to never again use trailer housing,  McElroy replaced all of the Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary domestic cat facilities with a 48-foot-square building on a concrete slab,  with enclosed semi-outdoor cat runs on three sides.

The Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary by then was home to 12 tigers,  five lions,  four pumas,  two bobcats,  a wolf,  about 200 domestic cats, 30 dogs and six horses.

Vernon Weir.  (Facebook photo)

“Transition has been smooth”

“I knew Kay for about 25 years,”  American Sanctuary Association director Vernon Weir told ANIMALS 24-7.  “Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary has been an accredited member of the American Sanctuary Association (ASA) since our founding 21 years ago.

“She was very ill the last few years of her life,  but she had very wisely turned over a lot of the daily animal care and management of the sanctuary to key staff members,”  Weir affirmed.  “That helped assure that when Kay’s final day came the sanctuary transition would be smooth.  And it has been.  The sanctuary goes on as before.  To secure the financial future of Cedarhill,  at least 11 years ago Kay began working on expanding the number of their donors and members and created an endowment fund.  The animals and sanctuary she loved so much still stands as a tribute to her success.

Bobcat at Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary.
(Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary photo)

“All cats,  big & small”

“Kay rescued a variety of animal species but her specialty was cats,”  Weir continued.  “All cats,  big and small,  exotic and native,  domestic and wild.  ASA is very much involved in finding sanctuary space for animals who need help,  and Kay was always willing to do all she could to assist us.

“If she didn’t have an open space sometimes she would make new space.  She hated to tell me ‘Sorry,  I just can’t help right now.’  But then she would assist me in making more phone calls to other cat sanctuaries.  In the end,  we always found somewhere for them to go,  but only to good sanctuaries that we knew.”

Weir further recalled that,  “In the 1990s and early 2000s,  Kay was also involved in passing Mississippi state legislation that improved the lives of all animals — especially a 1997 law that restricted private ownership of exotic cats and other dangerous animals. Prior to that, Mississippi was a haven for owners, breeders and sellers of these animals.”

Bobcat kitten at Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary.
(Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary photo)

Downsized?

In recent years,  as McElroy’s health failed,  published animal inventories indicate that the Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary downsized somewhat,  from more than 300 animals to about 250,  still including 12 resident tigers,  as of January 2019,  but only two lions;  three bobcats,  but no longer any pumas;  still about 200 domestic cats;  a variety of equines;  seven pigs;  and ten dogs,  apparently not counting fosters,  down from 30.

Mississippi State University professor of veterinary medicine and neurosurgery Andy Shores and Bonnie Blake ,  DVM,  of Boswell’s Animal Clinic in Columbus,  Mississippi,  vouched to Smith of the Caledonia Dispatch for the ongoing quality of care at the Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary.

Nancy Gschwendtner

Changes

Will the Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary decline post-McElroy?

“Not on my watch,”  vowed Gschwendtner,  to Smith.  “I’m not going to let Kay down.”

But the Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary has already changed in several respects.

Since Gschwendtner became executive director,  the sanctuary has annually raffled off overnight visits.

Beth & Merritt Clifton
(Anthony Marr photo)

And the Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary now fosters dogs––many of them pit bulls and other high-risk breeds––for Sweet Paws Rescue,  a Massachusetts-based organization that since 2011 has brought dogs north from Alabama and Mississippi for adoption.

Please donate to support our work: 

http://www.animals24-7.org/donate/ 

(Beth Clifton collage)

Neither Rotts nor pits should ever be considered “safe”

FRESNO, California––The March 22,  2019 fatal mauling of a one-year-old boy in his grandparents’ front yard in one important respect much resembled three of the six previous dog attack fatalities in Fresno and Fresno County since 2005.

As in three of the six previous fatalities,  neighbors told media that they had repeatedly reported the killer dogs to police and animal control for running at large and other dangerous behavior,  even as the authorities insisted they had no previous record of complaints.

Animal control officer Fred Flintstone rushes to impound a pet rock.

“Animal control has been called––I’ve called them”

Theresa Davis,  a neighbor of the dogs who killed the one-year-old,  emphasized to Jason Oliveira and Christina Fan of KFSN television news that over eight or nine years she had tried everything she could think of to prevent such an incident,  as the dogs repeatedly dug out of their owners’ property

“We have a kennel.  We put the dogs in the kennel with a padlock––and animal control has been called.  I’ve called them,”  Davis said.

In another respect,  the fatal attack on the one-year-old differed from all six of the previous Fresno dog attack fatalities since 2005.  All six of those attacks were by pit bulls,  but the two marauding dogs who killed the one-year-old––who slipped outside only momentarily before both grandparents responded––were Rottweilers.

(Beth Clifton photo)

The one-year-old’s grandmother was also injured in her efforts to fend off the Rottweilers,  who were later euthanized.

No isolated incident

While Rottweilers kill and disfigure far fewer victims than pit bulls,  chiefly because there are far fewer Rottweilers,  the Fresno death was scarcely an isolated incident.

Rottweilers likewise ambushed two children,  ages 7 and 9,  after their school bus dropped them off near their home outside of Marietta,  Georgia on December 10,  2018.  The children’s grandmother,  Esta Currier,  73,  was killed while trying to protect them.  Both children were also injured.  Police shot all four Rottweilers at the scene,  killing three outright while the fourth was euthanized when caught.

M.J. Raya

A Rottweiler killed 3-month-old Gaia Nova on May 5,  2018 in Sherman Oaks,  California,  while her grandmother stepped out of the room momentarily to fetch the baby’s bottle.  Two other dogs in the home were apparently not directly involved.

Never left unguarded

One-year-old M.J. Raya,  of Phoenix,  Arizona,  was never left unguarded for even one second on June 9,  2017,  while his grandmother baby-sat for him and did laundry.  But she put M.J. down momentarily to open a door.

That was just long enough for the family Rottweiler to burst in,  grab M.J.,  drag him outside,  and kill him.  The dog was still mauling the body when killed by police gunfire.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Children,  grandmothers––and Rottweilers

The Fresno 1-year-old,  Gaia Nova,  Esta Currier,  and M.J. Raya all died in what would have been fairly typical pit bull attacks on children,  except that all four attacks involved children in care of a grandmother,  the dog in each case was not a pit bull but a Rottweiler,  and the attack was even more typical of Rottweiler-inflicted deaths.

The Fresno one-year-old was the 113th fatality inflicted by a Rottweiler in the U.S. and Canada in just under 40 years.

Of the 113 people killed by Rottweilers since 1978,  85 were children of 11 years or younger;  80 were children of eight years or younger;  72 were children younger than age six.

Medically induced coma

Several other typical Rottweiler attacks were in the news at the same time as the M.J. Raya fatality.

Kaden Mitchell,  age seven,  of Niagara Falls,  New York,  was put into a medically induced coma and suffered a stroke after two Rottweilers mauled him on June 7,  2017.  Mitchell as of June 20,  2017 was out of the coma,  with two surgically re-attached ears,  and beginning to learn to walk again.

In Surrey,  British Columbia,  Canada,  passer-by Yun Qi suffered severe injuries to both arms in fighting off a neutered Rottweiler to rescue a four-year-old girl.  Yun Qi’s elderly father came to his son’s rescue,  using a bicycle to block the Rottweiler’s further attacks.

Jenna Allen and her Rottweilers.
(Facebook images)

Convicted

But a slightly less typical Rottweiler attack was also in the news.  Jenna Allen,  31,  of Plainfield,  Connecticut,  was on June 6, 2017 found guilty of reckless endangerment,  possession of a nuisance dog and failure to comply with dog licensing requirements for the December 3,  2014 mauling of home health aide Lynne Denning.  Denning had been left with her elderly patient,  five Rottweilers,  and a golden retriever.

Assistant State’s Attorney Bonnie Bentley told the court that “some of Allen’s dogs had previously killed two cats and a pair of puppies and injured two people,  including a home health aide who worked in Allen’s home before Denning,”  reported John Penney of the Norwich Bulletin.

Allen was on August 4,  2017 sentenced to serve 60 days in jail,  but appealed and was released on bond.

(Jeffrey Sloan photo)

“Service” Rott contributed to death of epileptic

Also in the first week of June 2017,  ANIMALS 24-7 received information confirming the involvement of a Rottweiler “service dog” in the May 24,  2015 death of Anthony G. Wind,  26,  an epileptic,  in Rochester,  New York.  The “service” Rottweiler was adopted by Wind’s girlfriend,  a shelter worker,  after having been found dangerous by a Georgia court,  only to be exported to New York.

The Rottweiler who participated in killing Anthony G. Wind.

Before Wind died,  ANIMALS 24-7 learned,  he had been attacked four times previously during epileptic seizures,  losing part of an ear on one occasion.

These attacks too resembled pit bull behavior.  But often as Rottweilers kill and maim people,  their attack patterns against human victims are significantly different.

The pit bull attack profile

Altogether,  since the ANIMALS 24-7 log of fatal and disfiguring dog attacks was begun in 1982,  6,456 pit bulls have participated in attacks on 2,431 children and 2,883 adults that resulted in 454 deaths (8.5% of the victims) and 4,409 disfigurements.  Another 451 victims of the same incidents (also 8.5% of the victims) suffered less serious injuries.

Among 144 dog breeds and identified mixes involved in at least one fatal or disfiguring attack,  only boxers,  bull mastiffs,  and Cane Corsos share with pit bulls the tendency to kill or disfigure adults more often than children.

This shared lack of inhibition about attacking victims bigger than themselves reflects these dogs’ history of having been bred and used for centuries chiefly for use in fighting and baiting,  mostly against bulls,  bears,   and other dogs as large as themselves,  or larger.

16-month-old Cassandra Garcia was killed by her parents’ Rottweiler in August 2015.

Not surprisingly,  pit bulls also account for about 92% of the fatal attacks on other dogs,  hoofed animals,  poultry,  and wildlife,  and 88% of the fatal attacks on cats.

How the Rottweiler attack profile differs

The Rottweiler attack pattern is contrastingly normal except in the frequency with which victims are killed.  Since 1982,  714 Rottweilers have participated in fatal or disfiguring attacks on 365 children and 210 adults,  killing 113 people (16% of their victims) and disfiguring 413.  Among the 575 total victims,  49 (8.5%) escaped more serious injury.

Both pit bulls and Rottweilers are about 10 times more likely to kill or disfigure someone than the average dog.  Pit bulls,  currently about 5.6% of the U.S. and Canadian dog population,  account for 58% of all dog attack deaths.  Rottweilers,  1.7% of the dog population,  account for 15% of all dog attack deaths.

Between them,  pit bulls and Rottweilers,  just 7.3% of the dog population combined,  account for 73% of all human fatalities from dog attack.

(Beth Clifton photo)

Rottweilers also kill other animals much more often than the average dog,  but not appreciably more often than other non-pit bulls of dangerous reputation,  including huskies,  Akitas,  and chows.

Where did Rottweilers come from?

Rottweiler attack history further differs from pit bull attack history in that Rottweilers,  until surprisingly recently,  were rarely even mentioned as a dangerous breed.

Pit bulls,  because of their use in fighting and baiting,  have been recognized as dangerous at least since the 18th century.  Historical research has established that pit bulls have accounted for half or more of all dog attack fatalities in the U.S. in every 10-year time frame since 1834,  and probably did before that,  too,  but pushing the data log back further is inhibited by lack of published records.

Rottweiler cart dogs circa 1920.

No accessible record of Rottweilers before 1882

Rottweilers by contrast were rarely––if ever––even identified by name until a dog called a Rottweiler,  today remembered by the official American Kennel Club breed history as a “very poor representative of the breed,”  was exhibited at an 1882 show in Heilbronn,  Germany.

Neither NewspaperArchive.com,  offering microfilm of newspapers going back to 1607,  nor the Culturomics Ngram Viewer,  offering word indexes of books published since 1800,  shows any prior mention of a Rottweiler dog.

Nazi Doberman circa 1940.

The next record of Rottweilers appears to be their use as foundation stock by German tax collector Karl Friedrich Louis Dobermann,  who circa 1890 combined Rottweilers with hounds to produce the dog breed now known as the Doberman.

Very distant descendants of Roman molossers

Rottweiler breed clubs first formed in Germany in 1914––the year in which The New York Times first mentioned Rottweilers––have long advanced a claim that Rotts are descended from the molosser dogs used by the Roman legions to herd the cattle and sheep they kept as their food supply,  and to help in attacking barbarian invaders.

Rottweilers are said to have remained in use throughout the Middle Ages as livestock herding and guarding dogs.  But more than 1,400 years and perhaps 700 dog generations elapsed between the end of Roman occupation of Germany and the earliest documentation of dogs called Rottweilers.  During that time the Roman molossers had ample opportunity to mix and mingle with every other sort of dog in Europe.  By 1882 the Roman influence would have been diluted beyond recognition.

Rottweiler cart dogs circa 1914.

Cart dogs

The first documentation of Rottweiler-like dogs in a more-or-less unbroken line to the dogs of today indicates that some may have been used much like the ancestors of modern pit bulls,  to assist butchers in cornering and holding animals for slaughter.

But Rottweiler history split from pit bull history in that while pit bull ancestors were increasingly used in baiting competitions,  presumed Rottweiler ancestors became best known as cart-and-sled-pullers.

Apparent historical image of unknown origin.

Dangerous behavior would have been discouraged in cart-and-sled-pullers,  who would have been working in close proximity to many other dogs,  humans,  horses,  and other animals.

Novelty dogs

This leads to the supposition that the “Rottweilers” said to have existed in Europe before the time of Herr Dobermann were large black-and-tan dogs who physically resembled Rottweilers,  more than behavioral ancestors of those who have in recent times become notorious for surly demeanor,  even when not actually mauling anyone.

Brought to the U.S. and exhibited as a canine novelty after World War I,  said in exhibition publicity to have been used as “police dogs” at a time when there were few actual police dogs,  Rottweilers remained rare in both Germany and the U.S. at the outbreak of World War II.

War dogs?

Rottweilers were,  nonetheless,  the only “bully” breed among the 18 breeds accepted by the U.S. military during World War II for training as war dogs.  Yet relatively few dogs of any breed were actually deployed in World War II.

There do not appear to be any Rottweilers among the 157 photos of the dogs who did see military service depicted in Loyal Forces:  The American Animals of World War II by Toni M. Kiser & Lindsey F. Barnes (2013).

As recently as 1960,  according to American Kennel Club data,  there were still fewer than 500 registered Rottweilers in the U.S.,  with perhaps 100 more in Canada.

Rottweiler.
(Beth Clifton photo)

First fatality was an infant

Probably because Rottweilers remained few,  and were kept almost entirely within the small coterie of Rottweiler fanciers,  none are known to have seriously harmed anyone in either the U.S. or Canada until January 24,  1978,  when two Rottweilers said to have been kept as “hunting dogs” killed one-year-old Vincent Madrigal in St. Helena,  California.

The next known Rottweiler mauling came in April 1982,  when two free-roaming Rottweilers belonging to Manfred and Vera Mayerhofer,  of Lethbridge,  Alberta,  Canada,  tore an arm off of eight-year-old Shawn Fraser.  Running on,  the Rottweilers then mauled Susan Tolnai and her four-year-old son Paul.

The attacks led to the first criminal charges ever brought in Canada as result of dog violence.  The Mayerhofers were each fined $2,000 and put on probation for two years,  during which time they were prohibited from keeping dogs.

Rottweiler.  (Beth Clifton photo)

Second fatality was also infant

The first fatal Rottweiler attack in North America came one year later,  in 1983,  when a Rott belonging to hairdresser and Norwegian immigrant Britt Rognaldsen,  36,  pulled her 35-day-old daughter Cara from her crib and killed her.

Rognaldsen was sentenced to a year in jail and fined $2,000 for misdemeanor criminal negligence in 1984,  but appealed and was convicted again by jury in 1988.   The Dallas Morning News reported then that Rognaldsen was also facing deportation because of convictions for drug possession.

Dogsbite.org lists as the third Rottweiler fatality in North America the Halloween 1985 mauling of Santina Saba,  one month old,  in Suffolk County,  Massachusetts by three Rotts kept by her family.  This death does not appear to have received any media coverage.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Four more deaths

The contrastingly high-profile Rognaldsen case was still before the courts when on September 27,  1987 two-year-old Shannon Tucker was killed by both a pit bull and a Rottweiler who escaped from neighbor Kenneth Ferguson’s yard and invaded her play area behind her mother’s condominium in Columbus,  Ohio.

Sixteen-month-old Melissa Boyse,  of Kent,  Washington, was killed by a sudden head bite from her family’s Rottweiler on May 2,  1988.  Her father Scott Boyse told media it was a “freak accident.”

Just over two years later,  on October 20,  1989,  20-year-old jogger Hoke Lane Prevette became the first adult Rottweiler fatality in North America,  killed in Forsyth County,  North Carolina,  by two Rottweilers belonging to Thomas Ellis Powell.

Almost a year after that,  in July 1990,  a pit/Rottweiler cross killed five-year-old Jason Lee Wilson outside his South Carolina home.  As in all three of the 2018 and 2019 Rottweiler fatalities,  the dog was still mauling the body when shot by police.

Guard dogs

The seven fatalities,  including six in six years, should have warned the public (even if the Saba death went unpublicized) that whatever Rottweilers might have been in the past,  they had become deadly dangerous,  and for that reason were to be avoided.

Unfortunately,  certain segments of the public were––and are––under the illusion that deadly dangerous dogs are good guard dogs,  though the guard dogs favored by night watchmen throughout history have been dogs who point and bark,  not those who charge and bite strangers with no questions asked.

The Book of the Rottweiler (1981) helped to popularize Rotts.

The illusion further persists that though trespassing is only a misdemeanor carrying a light fine throughout the U.S.,  live dismemberment by dog is an appropriate penalty if the dog reaches the alleged intruder before police do.

Deaths stoked popularity

American Kennel Club registrations of Rottweilers soared 991% during the 1980s,  then rose faster as more attacks drew more publicity.

For a brief time,  between 1993 and 1996,  Rottweilers killed as many people as pit bulls.  Altogether,  between 1993 and 2000,  Rottweilers killed 31 people,  while becoming the dog most often registered by the American Kennel Club.

The pace of fatal and disfiguring Rottweiler attacks has not slowed since then.  Pit bull fatalities have again come to far outnumber Rottweiler fatalities only because during the same years that Rottweilers rose from well under 1% of the U.S. dog population to 1.8%,  pit bulls rose from under 2% to 5.6%.

Jonathan Christopher Williams

Changing humane advice

Rottweiler violence has meanwhile contributed significantly to several evolving changes of public attitude toward dogs.

First,  for decades humane educators taught school children that the appropriate response to finding a lost dog was to check the dog for a tag or license;  put the dog on a lead;  take the dog around the neighborhood to see if anyone’s dog is lost;  and then call animal control or the humane society if the dog’s home has not been found.

This advice changed after Jonathan Christopher Williams,  7,  of Greenville,  North Carolina,  followed it in February 1992 and was killed by the Rottweiler he was trying to take home.  The Rottweiler belonged to Willie Curry Jr.,  who a year later was sentenced to time already served plus a fine of $148 for having allowed the Rott to roam.

Rottweiler.  (Beth Clifton photo)

Buried-wire fencing

Buried-wire “invisible” fencing was once considered a safe alternative to putting up high board or wire fences to keep dogs at home.  This mostly ended after Joey Jacobs,  then age 9,  on December 29,  1993 saved two younger friends’  lives,  losing both of his own ears,  by holding off a Rottweiler belonging to neighbor Ursula Baroni,  after the dog charged through a buried-wire to attack them.  Buried-wire fences are still sold,  but now with extensive warnings that they are not meant to contain dangerous dogs.

Anthony Riggs & the Rottweiler who killed him.

Shelter dogs

Most recently,  on November 13,  2015,  a Rottweiler adopted only hours before from the Jackson-Madison animal shelter in Tennessee killed Anthony Riggs,  57,  who had extensive previous experience with Rottweilers and had firearms nearby,  but was apparently disabled by the dog’s attack before he could defend himself.

The attack was among at least 49 fatalities inflicted by dogs from animal shelters since 2007,  compared to five in the preceding 20 years and none in the 130 years before that,  which have cumulatively eroded the hard-earned reputation of animal shelters as safe places to adopt dogs.

Beth & Merritt Clifton
(Anthony Marr photo)

Not surprisingly,  shelter adoptions across the U.S. are now averaging about 25% fewer per year than at peak,  in the 1985-2010 time frame.

(See also The Rottweilers in my life,  by Beth Clifton.)

Please help us continue speaking truth to power: 

http://www.animals24-7.org/donate/

(Beth Clifton collage)

“Killer buyers,”  associates of killer-buyers,  & partners in questionable rescues

            FORT POLK,  Louisiana––Thompson Horse Lot owner Gary Thompson,  64,  of Pitkin,  Louisiana,  who held a controversial contract to remove an estimated 700 to 750 wild horses from the 198,000-acre Fort Polk military installation,  is facing 18 counts of cruelty to animals for alleged severe neglect of horses.

(Beth Clifton collage)

(See The Fort Polk horses: last stand of the U.S. cavalry)

            Vernon Parish Sheriff Sam Craft on March 20,  2019 announced that Thompson had been arrested,  a week after a joint investigation by the Vernon Parish Sheriff’s Office and the Louisiana Livestock Brand Commission brought the impoundment of 18 of the 40 horses found at Thompson Horse Lot when the investigators executed a search warrant.

Another 22 horses were left at Thompson Horse Lot following a veterinary inspection,  reported Patrick Deaville of KPLC-7 News.

Gary Thompson

“Brand Commission investigating”

“The Brand Commission is investigating the dates and locations of the purchase of the animals,”  Deaville said at the time.

“Bond was set at $18,000,”  Craft said after Thompson’s arrest.  “Thompson posted bond and was released.”

Elaborated the Paulick Report,  an online periodical chiefly serving the horse racing industry,  “The investigation was launched, according to law enforcement,  after numerous complaints of animal cruelty [were made] against Thompson Horse Lot, long known for its Facebook-based operation offering followers an opportunity to purchase horses or ‘bail’ animals the lot claimed were at risk for being sent to slaughter.”

(William Gore/US Army photo)

Fort Polk & Peason Ridge

Thompson Horse Lot itself is believed by advocates for the Fort Polk wild horses to be a major conduit of wild horses to slaughter.

The Thompson Horse Lot raid and subsequent arrest of Gary Thompson came about two and a half months after hunters discovered the remains of five wild horses who had been massacred by persons unknown,  for reasons unknown,  on the Peason Ridge Military Training Area,  a tract of land near Fort Polk from which wild horses have also been removed in recent years,  ostensibly for adoption,  but have allegedly been sold to slaughter instead.

Jacob Thompson

Texas State University contract

Gary Thompson,  his son Jacob Thompson,  and other members of the Thompson family became involved in the Fort Polk/Peason Ridge wild horse issue after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in September 2017 awarded contracts cumulatively worth $1.75 million to the Texas State University Integrated Natural & Cultural Resources Team,  headquartered at Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches,  Texas,  about two and a half hours’ drive to the northwest.

The funding was chiefly to “conduct archaeological surveys and support the management of cultural resources at U.S. Air Force bases and training facilities in eight states,”  according a Stephen F. Austin University media release.

$80,850 of the sum,  however,  was allocated to removing the Fort Polk and Peason Ridge wild horses from the military property.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Jacob Thompson Cattle LLC

Wrote Lake Charles American Press reporter Pamela Sleezer,  “Texas State University sought bids from local contractors surrounding Fort Polk,  who would perform the hands-on task of rounding up the horses,  but according to sources,  the only bid” came from Jacob Thompson Cattle LLC,  which operates the Thompson Horse Lot.

The Thompson Horse Lot is located about 15 miles from the Fort Polk main gate.

Jacob Thompson and other members of the Thompson family had been almost continuously in trouble since 2005 for alleged offenses involving livestock transactions occurring in Louisiana, Texas,  Oklahoma,  and Mississippi.

Jacob Thompson & horse.
(Facebook photo)

Racketeering

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi,  for example,  in April 2014 ordered Jacob Thompson and three other members of the Thompson family to pay $245,404 to the Southeast Mississippi Livestock Association and the Livestock Producers Association for alleged violations of the Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act and the Packers & Stockyards Act.

Pleading guilty in April 2016 to first degree felony theft of livestock and second degree felony theft of property,  originating from an unrelated case,  Jacob Thompson was sentenced in Hopkins County, Texas to serve 10 years on probation for the first degree felony and 10 years deferred probation for the second degree felony.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Selling livestock without a permit

In January 2018,  Jacob Thompson “was fined $3,150 for violating five Louisiana regulations including selling livestock without a permit,”  Louisiana Department of Agriculture & Forestry spokesperson Veronica Mosgrove confirmed to Janet McConnaughey of Associated Press.

Two other members of the Thompson family,  one of whom was previously convicted with Jacob Thompson,  were reportedly arrested for alleged livestock theft in Allen Parish,  Louisiana,  as recently as June 1,  2018.

Todd Ahlman. (Texas State University photo)

“Put up for adoption through nonprofits”

“The agreement with Thompson’s Horse Lot is to capture the horses,  then put them up for adoption through nonprofit groups,”  reported Lauren Lanmon of KXAN-TV in San Marcos,  Texas on June 18,  2018.  “However,  if nonprofit groups are unable to adopt the horses and members of the public don’t step up,  the horses are sold at auction and likely slaughtered.”

Todd Ahlman,  director of the Stephen F. Austin University Center for Archaeological Studies,  repeatedly insisted to media that all of the horses collected by the Thompsons were “adopted to nonprofit horse rescue groups,”  not sold to slaughter.

But Louisiana animal advocates discovered considerable circumstantial evidence to the contrary.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Meridian Falls Ranch

Among the three “nonprofit horse rescue groups” receiving horses from Fort Polk,  for instance,  was Meridian Falls Ranch,  of Buffalo, Texas,  incorporated in August 2015 by Shandi Ann Lebron.  Lebron,  like Jacob Thompson,  had a multi-count history of arrests for alleged offenses involving livestock.

Forty-four horses rounded up at Fort Polk and Peason Ridge in May and June 2018 were reportedly transferred through Meridian Falls Ranch to the Elkhart Horse Auction in Elkhart, Texas.

Reported Pamela Sleezer of the Lake Charles American Press on August 5,  2018,  “Earlier this year, TSU ended its contract with Fort Polk,  which resulted in [Jacob] Thompson losing his contract to round up the horses.”

But that left many and perhaps most of the 200 horses removed from Fort Polk and Peason Ridge in 2018 still unaccounted for.

Hal Parker

Hal Parker

Gary Thompson was the second longtime horse trader and purported conduit of horses to rescue to be arrested for alleged cruelty in Louisiana during the first few months of 2019.

The first,  Thompson associate Hal Parker,  60,  was arrested in Marion,  Union Parish,  on February 19,  2019,  charged with four counts of cruelty to animals and one count of horse theft.

Union Parish is about three hours’ drive northeast of Fort Polk,  near the Arkansas state line.

Parker “was taken into custody following a five-week investigation into his involvement in acquiring horses,  mostly thoroughbreds,  from auction houses known for selling animals for slaughter,  that Parker would then re-sell,  according to a Union Parish Sheriff’s Office press release,”  wrote Eric Mitchell of Bloodhorse.

Hal Parker & Dina Alborano
(Facebook photo)

“Paid for horse never received”

The theft charge,  Mitchell said,  is “related to allegations that a woman in Iowa paid for a horse she never received,  according to the sheriff’s office.  Parker’s bond was set at $250,000.”

Union Parish Sheriff Dusty Gates told media that his office “began investigating Parker,.”  Mitchell summarized,  “after the National Thoroughbred Welfare Organization published an online article on August 29,  2018,  about the efforts of a rescue organization named ICareIHelp,”  operated by Dina Alborano of Trenton,  New Jersey,  “to raise money online in order to buy horses from kill pen auctions.”

Alborano,  52,  a regionally noted runner at the 5-kilometer and 10-kilometer distances from age 9 until her mid-thirties,  “had a meteoric rise in the world of thoroughbred horse rescue after a January 16, 2018 article written about her by veteran racing writer Steve Haskin,”  recounted Victoria Keith of the National Thoroughbred Welfare Organization,  in the August 2018 exposé that Gates cited,  published by the Paulick Report.

(Beth Clifton collage)

“Questions bubbling to the surface”

“But questions about Alborano and ICareIHelp started bubbling to the surface,”  Keith wrote.  “The first was that ICareIHelp was not a non-profit,  as stated on its website.  More disturbing, however,  was that Alborano had chosen as the quarantine and care provider for her organization a man named Hal Parker.  Hal Parker is a former employee of the Stanley Brothers, one of the largest and most notorious kill buyer organizations in the country.

“After leaving the Stanleys,”  Keith charged,  “Parker continued extorting horses via his Facebook pages for various owners and perhaps himself.  He partnered with Alborano in late 2017 and worked almost exclusively for ICareIHelp until recently,  when he also started fronting for Thompson’s Horse Lot.”

Horses found in Parker’s possession,  at multiple locations,  were reportedly malnourished and suffering from a variety of contagious diseases,  including strangles.

(Yelp photo)

Horses unaccounted for

Of 181 horses Parker is believed to have acquired from kill pens in the name of rescue,  55 could not be accounted for.

“According to the sheriff’s office press release,”  Mitchell of Bloodhorse continued,  “investigators found that Parker and ICareIHelp would appeal for money in order to rescue thoroughbreds from kill pens and then advertise the horses for resale on the organization’s website, ‘complete with photographs showing healthy horses.  Those horses were then delivered,  often in emaciated conditions or with diseases,’  the sheriff’s office release stated.”

Added Mitchell,  “State vets visited the properties where Parker kept horses and filed disease investigation reports at least seven times between February and August of 2018,  according to public records supplied to BloodHorse by the Louisiana Department of Agriculture & Forestry.”

Victoria Keith exposed ICareIHelp.
(Facebook photo)

ICareIHelp “no longer actively rescuing”

The ICareIHelp web site currently states,  “icareihelp is no longer actively rescuing, as we are no longer accepting donations.”

Concluded Victoria Keith,  “Most horse rescues and individuals knowledgeable about rescue believe that it’s generally unwise to purchase or ‘bail’ horses from a kill pen.  It doesn’t make those individuals heartless.  They detest seeing the horses being extorted on social media,  but they know that if they pay the kill buyers then that money will be used to buy and extort the next batch of horses.  It’s a vicious and painful cycle for the horses and horse lovers,  and big business for kill buyers.  The extortion business pays them double,  triple, or even quadruple what they are paid by the slaughter plant.  Slaughter buyers will never stop extorting horses until their clients stop ‘bailing’ them.

Beth & Merritt Clifton
(Anthony Marr photo)

“In the meantime,”  Keith finished, “legitimate rescues are paying the price. Donations are down,  adoptions are down, and the price to outbid slaughter buyers at livestock auctions has increased so high that it’s driven most rescues and private buyers out of the livestock auction market.”

Please help us continue speaking truth to power: 

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(Beth Clifton collage)

by Karen Davis, Ph.D.

Lantern Books (One Union Square West, 
Suite 201,  New York,  NY  10003),  2001.
192 pages,  paperback.  

$14.95 c/o https://www.upc-online.org/merchandise/book.html

Reviewed by Merritt Clifton

            Looking back nearly 30 years to 1990,  the two most significant animal advocacy events of the year were––as expected––the first March for the Animals in Washington D.C.,  led by the late Tom Regan (1938-2017), and,  almost completely overlooked at the time,  the incorporation of United Poultry Concerns by Karen Davis.

            The March for the Animals,  followed six years later by a debacle of the same name,  ending in low participation and much allegedly missing money,  was in effect the beginning of the end of the vivisection-focused first phase of the modern animal rights movement.

That was the phase in which the issues were seen in simple terms of good guys and bad guys,  and the bad guys were someone else,  doing awful things in either an academic ivory tower or Dr. Frankenstein’s castle.

March for the Animals, 1990.
(Tom Regan Archive photo)

Where the animal rights movement turned a corner

The formation of United Poultry Concerns marked the start of the second phase,  in which activists shifted their attention to what they could personally do to set an example and make a difference,  for example by fixing feral cats,  getting involved in electoral politics,  and going vegetarian or vegan.

There were active vegetarian communes in the U.S. more than seventy years before anyone founded a humane society,  and there were many other farm animal advocacy organizations before United Poultry Concerns.  Already integral to the animal rights movement were the Farm Animal Rights Movement,  founded by Alex Hershaft in 1981,  the Humane Farming Association,  founded by Brad Miller in 1985,  and Farm Sanctuary,  begun by Gene Baur in 1986.

Henry Spira  (United Poultry Concerns photo)

Spira, Singer, Mason, Robbins

Henry Spira,  the most accomplished anti-vivisection crusader of all time, had argued since 1985 that the movement should logically refocus on diet,  since that would be the next opportunity to effect a steep reduction in what he termed  the universe of suffering.

Neither was Davis the first to point out that chickens and other poultry,  doing more than 95% of all the human-caused animal suffering and dying in the world,  hold a far higher moral claim on humane movement consciousness than they have ever received.  Spira recited that statistic like a mantra while pushing poultry baron Frank Perdue in futile hope of getting him to make reforms.  Peter Singer,  Jim Mason,  and John Robbins had already pointed out the numbers in Animal Liberation,  Animal Factories,  and Diet For A New America.

Karen Davis
(United Poultry Concerns photo)

Big groups backed away

But none of them won strong big-group support for campaigns on behalf of poultry.

The Humane Society of the U.S. began one campaign decrying the “breakfast of cruelty,”  featuring bacon and eggs,  then backed away as if splashed with hot grease.

American SPCA president John Kullberg in 1991 spoke out in favor of vegetarianism and got fired.

Who would stand up for the chickens,  turkeys,  ducks,  and geese?

Not I,   said one big-group executive after another.

Karen Davis

“Then I will,”  said Davis,  flapping her arms and thrusting her beak at Vegetarian Times founder Paul Obis during the 1990 National Animal Rights Conference,  hosted by FARM in Alexandria,  Virginia.

The Little Red Hen

Davis was one furious Little Red Hen (with jet-black hair) on that occasion,  after Obis,  who sold Vegetarian Times soon afterward and died in 2018 at age 66,  accepted an ad for a prepackaged chicken pilaf mix.

Except for Obis,  who could not escape down the hall no matter how he tried,  and Spira,  who encouraged Davis,  hardly anyone took the Little Red Hen seriously at first.  She had no money,  no major political connections,  and was even by her own admission an extreme eccentric,  reportedly allowing rescued chickens to run in and out her windows and across her desk in the middle of the few very important mass media interviews that came her way.

Karen Davis & friends.
(United Poultry Concerns photo)

The right person for the job

            But the Little Red Hen turned out to be the right person for the job.  Reporters left those strange interviews saying to themselves,  and others, in calls seeking further perspective,  “Karen Davis is a chicken!  She is telling us what chickens would,  if they could.”

            They couldn’t help realizing that chickens are much more intelligent and sensitive than they had ever imagined.  They found Davis likably charismatic,  perhaps because of her oddness,  and eventually she began getting more media attention than many of the supposed movement superstars.

            More important,  some reporters confessed that they could no longer eat chicken.   Somehow the Little Red Hen had gotten to them.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Expanding the circle of compassion

            Those who know chickens really well are aware that they do not limit their circle of compassion to their own kind.  Chickens can practice cannibalism,  and roosters notoriously fight to the death,  yet a hen will faithfully sit on any eggs she is given,  and will mother the hatchings to the best of her ability,  whether they are close relatives,  reptiles,  or even a neonatal kitten placed in the nest to keep warm––and not because hens are too stupid to know the difference.

            On the contrary,  many hens will somehow know enough to lead ducklings and goslings to water,  will lead other birds to whatever they need,  and will even try to lead a kitten to kibble,  skipping the nursing stage perhaps because they simply lack the means to nurse.

United Poultry Concerns founder Karen Davis with white domestic turkey.
(UPC photo)

Speaking for turkeys

Such an instinct may be why The Little Red Hen wrote More Than A Meal on behalf of turkeys,  and made it her best of many good books.

Davis did some first-rate investigative reporting to chase down the origins of myths about turkeys,  and the origins of turkeys themselves.  Her writing is passionate,  yet not shrill.

For me,  reading More Than A Meal first on a 2001 flight from San Francisco to Seattle,  it was a page-turner,  opened at takeoff and completed right at landing.

(Beth Clifton photo)

Reached a turkey biologist

As we taxied to the gate, the young man across the aisle and one row back tapped me on the shoulder,  and asked if he could have the title,  in order to buy his own copy.  He had been reading along with me,  he explained,  and got hooked.

Handing him my card,  I expected to hear that he was an animal rights advocate and militant vegan.

Not at all.  He was a second-generation wildlife biologist.  His dad was restoring huntable turkey populations not far from Davis’ home in Virginia.

Beth & Merritt Clifton
(Anthony Marr photo)

Still,  the young man never knew before that there was so much to know about turkeys,  and he sounded as if the Little Red Hen had ensured that he would never see turkeys the same way again.

Please help us continue speaking truth to power: 

http://www.animals24-7.org/donate/

(Beth Clifton collage)

Alleged poacher tried to recover net confiscated by Sea Shepherd Conservation Society

            SAN FELIPE,  Baja California, Mexico––An alleged poacher and two apparently uninvolved passers-by were reportedly hit by gunfire in a March 28,  2019 confrontation with Mexican marines in San Felipe,  Baja California,  Mexico.

The shooting incident was among the most violent yet in the long-running fight against gill netting for endangered totoaba fish,  which has also pushed the tiny vaquita porpoise to the verge of extinction,  as an unwanted bycatch.

Totoaba poachers.  (Sea Shepherd Conservation Society photo)

Suspect tried to recover gill nets

Recounted Mexico News Daily,  “The Secretariat of the Navy said in a statement that a man was accidentally shot as he tried to escape in a pickup truck that was towing a boat.”

The boat had just been used by alleged poachers to recover illegally deployed gill nets that had been impounded by Sea Shepherd Conservation Society crew members from the Sea of Cortez vaquita porpoise reserve in the upper Gulf of California.

Operating under the campaign names Operation Milagro and Operation Ghost Net,  the Sea Shepherds have been patrolling the Sea of Cortez since 2014 to protect both vaquita and totoaba.

Totoaba & chano.
(Beth Clifton collage)

Shot three times

The Sea Shepherds apparently brought the confiscated nets to shore at San Felipe.  The alleged poachers then seized the nets and tried to abscond the scene,  but collided with a Mexican Navy vehicle,  triggering the shooting.

“According to local media,”   Mexico News Daily said,  “the wounded man was 37-year-old Enrique García Sandez.  He was taken to a local clinic,  but later transferred to a hospital in Mexicali with serious injuries.”

The San Felipe news web site La Voz de la Frontera reported that Garcia Sandez was hit in the left arm,  the right leg,  and the scalp.

Added Mexico News Daily,  “The news website El Imparcial reported that a 65-year-old woman and a 17-year-old were also injured in the confrontation.  The l7-year-old,  Ricardo Zúñiga,  was treated at a Mexicali hospital.  Rosa María Zaragoza González,  65,  was in the street during the clash and was grazed by a stray bullet . She was treated for the injury at a San Felipe clinic.”

Protesters outside Mexican Navy base in San Felipe.

Molotov cocktails

The shooting incited a violent protest in front of the Mexican Navy base at San Felipe.  The The Secretariat of the Navy told media that a vehicle and two small boats were set on fire by Molotov cocktails.  La Voz de la Frontera broadcast footage of demonstrators standing about a block away from a column of black smoke.

The protesters argued that they and the injured suspects are not poachers.

“Legal fishermen have nothing to do with the disorder that’s going on in the Port of San Felipe right now,”  spokesperson for the protesters Ramón Franco Díaz told La Voz de la Frontera.

Diaz “said that these legal fishermen, who are simply trying to catch ‘chano’ [a smaller croaker species] to feed their families,  should not be conflated with totoaba poachers,”  translated Mike Gaworecki for Mongabay.

Members of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society retrieve a dead vaquita.
(Sea Shepherd Conservation Society photo)

Dead vaquita was first seen in 2019

The latest confrontation came “a week after the federal government announced that it will strengthen the fight against illegal fishing and use buoys to mark the reserve of the vaquita porpoise as part of a new strategy to protect the highly-endangered mammal from extinction,”  recalled Mexico News Daily.

The crackdown followed the March 12,  2019 Sea Shepherd discovery of a dead vaquita,  reported Kendal Blust of La Voz de la Frontera––the first vaquita seen in 2019,  dead or alive.  As few as half a dozen are believed to remain,  after the confirmed death of a female and suspected death of a baby during attempted captures for breeding undertaken in October and November of 2017.

(See Vaquita captures suspended after death of female of breeding age)

Totoaba speculation

Totoaba,  the fish species targeted by the alleged poachers,  known in the U.S. as “bigeye croaker,”  have swim bladders much coveted by commodity speculators in China as a substitute for a fished-out Chinese coastal species,  the bahaba,  University of Hong Kong biology professor Yvonne Sadovy told Guinn Guilford of Quartz in 2015.

Responding to runaway inflation in 2009-2010,  Sadovy explained,  Chinese investors sought to stash cash in commodity investments.  Historically valued body parts of rare animals looked like a good investment to the unscrupulous,  who bet that the increasing scarcity of endangered species would keep prices high,  even though possession and import of body parts of internationally protected species is as illegal in China as almost anywhere else.

Confiscated totoaba swim bladders.

Pregnant suspect

“The illegal totoaba trade is similar to other wildlife trafficking,”  explained MAREX,  an online periodical whose name is abbreviated from The Marine Executive,  “and it is believed to involve organized crime.  Earlier this month,  customs officials in Shanghai caught a pregnant woman who was attempting to smuggle 122 totoaba swim bladders through Shanghai Pudong International Airport.  The 20-year-old suspect had arrived on a flight from Mexico and was waiting for a connecting flight” to Jiangmen,  in Guangdong province,  the primary market for the contraband.

Altogether,  Chinese authorities reportedly arrested 11 people for smuggling nearly 20,000 totoaba swim bladders over three years,  worth an estimated $119 million.

An individual named Liang Weihua was said to have routed the swim bladders through Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, it said, adding that the case is currently under further investigation.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Two years of violence

The shooting at San Felipe came just over two years after fishers from Golfo de Santa Clara on the night of March 8,  2017 “burned 15 official vehicles,  damaged federal offices,  set fire to the Federal Office of Environmental Protection’s boats,  stole a vessel that had been impounded by authorities of the Navy Secretariat,  and injured inspectors in the sector,”  reported Amalia Escobar,  Hermosillo correspondent for El Universal.

“The Federal Office of Environmental Protection (Profepa) filed a criminal complaint against those responsible,”  Escobar continued.  “The complaint details that 10 employees of Profepa and the National Commission of Protected Areas (Conanp),  as well as 18 officers of the National Aquaculture and Fisheries Commission (Conapesca) were assaulted.  Three Profepa inspectors who were beaten managed to leave the village together,”  Escobar added,  “with two other companions,  and managed to find shelter in nearby San Luis Rio Colorado.”

Inset: Paul Watson.  (Beth Clifton collage)

(See Fishers’ riot may hasten extinction of the vaquita porpoise)

Watson blames boycott

The destruction of equipment  crippled marine conservation efforts for months throughout the Colorado River delta area of the Gulf of California,  also known as the Sea of Cortez.

Sea Shepherd Conservation Society founder Paul Watson in December 2017 blamed that incident and much ensuing violence on what he termed a misdirected international boycott of Mexican shrimp,  called on behalf of the endangered vaquita porpoise by the Animal Welfare Institute,  the Natural Resources Defense Council,  and the Center for Biological Diversity.

(Beth Clifton collage)

(See Why has Paul Watson asked 58 groups to drop a boycott of Mexican shrimp?)

            “Since then,”  Watson elaborated in July 2018,  “Sea Shepherd has had drones shot down and Molotov cocktails thrown at the organization’s vessels.  Poachers have also shot directly at a Sea Shepherd ship,  the Sharpie,  forcing Mexican federal law enforcement agents embedded on board to return fire,  fortunately with no injuries on either side.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

(See Vaquita: Trump’s Trojan Horse in war on Endangered Species Act?)

            The Sharpie,  formerly the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Bainbridge Island,  joined two other former U.S. Coast Guard cutters,  the Farley Mowat and the John Paul DeJoria,  in the Sea of Cortez in December 2017. 

Beth & Merritt Clifton
(Anthony Marr photo)

Please donate to help support our work: 

www.animals24-7.org/donate/ 

(Beth Clifton collage)

And why killing dogs, rats,  pigs,  goats,  mice & mongooses too would be mainly make-work for exterminators

            SANTA CRUZ,  California––Appealing for funding to kill cats,  dogs,  rats,  pigs,  goats,  and mongooses on at least 107 islands belonging to 34 nations,  in the name of promoting biodiversity,  the previously obscure 25-year-old organization Island Conservation scored a double coup on March 27,  2019.

First,  the appeal concept,  a paper entitled “Globally important islands where eradicating invasive mammals will benefit highly threatened vertebrates,”  was published by the Public Library of Science online journal PLOS One.  This lent the imprimatur of science to what is in truth a values-based argument for a make-work project on behalf of at least some of the authors,  and a shaky argument at that.

(Beth Clifton photo)

Scare tactics

Second,  the PLOS One paper was abstracted and globally amplified by mass media under headlines such as “Should cats be culled to stop extinctions?,”  the version offered by Helen Briggs of BBC News.

Such headlines framed the paper as generations of cat-hating birders have framed the underlying arguments since the 19th century,  as a matter of cats and a handful of other species allegedly jeopardizing biodiversity,  mostly of rare birds.

This argument has long been a big fundraiser for organizations such as the American Bird Conservancy.  It may be an effective scare tactic among people who have not already taken sides,  pro-cat or anti-cat,  at a time when the notion that we are in the midst of a so-called “Sixth Extinction” enjoys general currency and is seldom challenged in mass media except by climate change denialists.

E.O. Wilson
(Harvard University photo)

The first premise is wrong

Yet the “Sixth Extinction” hypothesis,  popularized by entomologist E.O. Wilson in 1997,  was and is wholly based on mathematical modeling,  using input data now decades obsolete.

Over the 52 years since then,  the numbers of identified species have exponentially increased,  the numbers of known extinctions have been dwarfed by the numbers of rediscoveries of species believed to have been extinct,  and––despite well-publicized declines of large,  charismatic megafauna in the oceans and Southern Hemisphere––net biodiversity has increased on every continent if one counts non-native species.

Which are the majority of species in most habitats.

Whole Earth Catalog founding editor Stewart Brand used this graph in a 2015 essay for Aeon entitled “We are not edging up to a mass extinction.”

Self-serving economic arguments

For several generations now,  most arguments against doing things to protect endangered species and prevent a supposed “Sixth Extinction” have been based not on refuting the weak arguments that a “Sixth Extinction” is happening in the first place,  or considering that the recommended responses may not be effective,  but instead on self-serving short-term cost/benefit analyses advanced by various ecologically destructive industries,  hellbent on escaping regulation.

The self-serving nature of most of the arguments made against controversial approaches to protecting endangered species,  always offered in contexts involving economic interests,  superficially seems to lend moral force to arguments for undertaking drastic measures immediately,  to prevent the catastrophe presumably looming,  even if the drastic measures might accomplish nothing at all.

Mongoose.  (Beth Clifton collage)

Concealed self-interest

The purported urgent need to respond to the alleged “extinction crisis” meanwhile obscures the reality that the people and organizations pushing drastic measures also tend to have a significant economic interest as stake.  Saving endangered species is in itself a big business,  involving billions of dollars and tens of thousands of workers.

Killing island populations of cats,  dogs,  rats,  pigs,  goats,  and mongooses by any means possible,  no matter how ecologically destructive the methods may be,  is a drastic measure,  employing lots of technicians and scientists,  but not really well-considered,  even as a means of saving biodiversity in the specific habitat where the killing is done.

Map of New Zealand. While Compound 1080 has been sprayed only in the teal blue areas, brush possums (inset) are persecuted everywhere.

New Zealand

A case in point is the ongoing saturation of New Zealand forests with the pesticide Compound 1080,  as part of a national putsch against “invasive predators” that is in truth designed to diminish biodiversity by exterminating “non-native” mammals,  including brush possums,  cats,  rats,  and rabbits,  to benefit “native” birds.

Not all mammals are targeted,  however.  Livestock and hoofed species favored by hunters are supposedly exempt,  regardless of their considerable impact on bird habitat.

But it is not really possible to exterminate one category of animal with mass deployment of a broad-spectrum pesticide without catastrophically harming others.

Himalayan mountain tahr
(Wikipedia)

Killed 98% of non-target deer

An investigation commissioned by the Marlborough branch of the New Zealand Deerstalkers Association on March 21,  2019 extracted from the New Zealand Department of Conservation an admission that an October 2017 deployment of Compound 1080 over a highland farm called Molesworth Station killed 97% of the non-target deer there,  perhaps as many as 4,000.

Undeterred,  the New Zealand Department of Conservation authorized a scheme to kill 300 feral Himalayan tahr,  an endangered species in their native habitat,  to feed to kea,  a native carrion-eating parrot,  while keas’ usual prey is depleted in the wake of Compound 1080 drops in the hills behind Whataroa.

Ironically,  kea became scarce in the first place because farmers persecuted them as seasonal lamb predators,  and the New Zealand government even paid bounties on them.

Kea.  (Beth Clifton collage)

Focal points of paper can backfire

Fourteen people are listed as co-authors of “Globally important islands where eradicating invasive mammals will benefit highly threatened vertebrates.”

Altogether,  “Fifty authors representing more than forty institutions from around the world contributed to publishing this paper,”  according to Island Conservation publicist Sally Esposito.

The paper is long,  as PLOS One papers go,  at 6,194 words,  but if 14 people were genuinely co-authors,  their average contribution was about half a page;  if 50 people contributed,  their average contribution might have been just a paragraph.

Among all this claimed input,  none of the participants seem to have realized that their focal points could be turned around and cited as arguments for not funding their intended extermination campaign,  even if their input data is accepted without dispute.

(Beth Clifton collage)

75% of extinctions have occurred on islands

Most of “Globally important islands where eradicating invasive mammals will benefit highly threatened vertebrates” is unfortunately written with the quotable fluency of gravel rattling out of a dump truck.  Publicist Esposito,  however,  in her media statement did a reasonably good job of translating the noise into English.

Compiling the paper was led,  Esposito said,  “by conservation biologists from Island Conservation,  the Coastal & Conservation Action Laboratory at the University of California at Santa Cruz,  BirdLife International,  and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Species Survival Commission Invasive Species Specialist Group.

“There are approximately 465,000 islands in the world,”  Esposito summarized in bullet point, “yet they comprise just 5.3% of the Earth’s terrestrial area.  Islands have hosted 75% of known bird,  mammal,  amphibian and reptile extinctions since 1500.

(Trish Robbins photo)

Critical refuges?

“Islands provide critical refuges for highly-threatened species,”  Esposito continued,  “currently supporting 36% of bird,  mammal,  amphibian and reptile species that are classified as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List.”

Not acknowledged is that many and perhaps most of these species occupy habitat so limited that they were probably critically endangered from the beginning of their existence.

“Many islands’ species are threatened as a direct consequence of invasive alien species,”  Esposito paraphrased.  “Cats and rats are the most damaging invasive species known on islands,”  a comment taking surprisingly little notice of human activity.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Average success rate of 85%?

The paper,  “Globally important islands where eradicating invasive mammals will benefit highly threatened vertebrates,”  contends,  Esposito said,  that “Eradication of invasive mammals from islands is a proven conservation tool”;  “more than 1,200 invasive mammal eradications have been attempted on islands worldwide,  with an average success rate of 85%”;  and that “Larger more remote and technically challenging islands are being successfully cleared of invasive species populations each year.”

All of this is contradicted by other scientific literature favoring eradication of “invasive species,”  especially cats and rats.

For example,  “A Review of Feral Cat Eradication on Islands,”  by eight co-authors,  published in 2004 in the journal Conservation Biology,  lamented that while feral cats had been extirpated from 48 islands in 30 years of effort,  “cats have been successfully removed from only 10 islands larger than 10 square kilometers in size,”  representing a 21% success rate.

To be sure,  though,  the efficiency of cat purges may have improved over the past 15 years.

Albatross & chick.
(Mouse Free Marion photo)

Exterminating four species to maybe save five,  for a while

“Globally important islands where eradicating invasive mammals will benefit highly threatened vertebrates,”  added Esposito,  “highlighted restoration opportunities including Floreana Island, Galápagos Archipelago, Ecuador;  Gough Island, Tristan da Cunha Archipelago,  United Kingdom Overseas Territories; and Alejandro Selkirk Island, Juan Fernandez Archipelago,  Chile.”

According to the paper,  extirpating cats,  rats,  mice,  and goats from these three islands “would remove the threat of non-native predation” allegedly threatening two species of petrel,  one endangered species of albatross,  one critically endangered bunting,  and one critically endangered songbird.

On Floreana Island,  eradicating cats and rats “will also allow for the reintroduction of 13 locally extinct species.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

How 292 islands were narrowed to 107

How was this determined?

Asserts the paper itself,  “Based on extinction risk,  irreplaceability,  severity of impact from invasive species, and technical feasibility of eradication,  we identified and ranked 292 of the most important islands where eradicating invasive mammals would benefit highly threatened vertebrates.

“When socio-political feasibility was considered,  we identified 169 of these islands where eradication planning or operation could be initiated by 2020 or 2030 and would improve the survival prospects of 9.4% of the Earth’s most highly threatened terrestrial insular vertebrates (111 of 1,184 species).

“Of these, 107 islands in 34 countries and territories could have eradication projects initiated by 2020.  Concentrating efforts to eradicate invasive mammals on these 107 islands would benefit 151 populations of 80 highly threatened vertebrates and make a major contribution towards achieving global conservation targets adopted by the world’s nations.”

(Beth Clifton photo)

Predation is usually not the first or greatest threat

Those are bold but largely unsupported claims.  “Globally important islands where eradicating invasive mammals will benefit highly threatened vertebrates” says practically nothing about the many threats to the species at risk from sources other than predation.

And predation is often not the main factor,  if even a factor,  in driving those species to endangerment.

In all likelihood,  factors such as climate change,  diminished gene pools,  loss of food sources, and disease have already condemned most of the critically endangered species to extinction,  regardless of any and all heroic last-ditch measures that might be undertaken on their behalf.

Bramble Cay melomys.
(Beth Clifton collage)

Consider the Bramble Cay melomys

For example,  wrote Countdown to Extinction editor John R. Platt on March 21,  2019,  beneath the headline “Climate Change Claims Its First Mammal Extinction,”  a tiny rodent called the Bramble Cay melomys,  last seen in 2009,   “lived in just a single habitat,  a small reef island at the northern tip of the Great Barrier Reef,  near Papua New Guinea.  The sandy cay—which only measures about 1,100 feet by 500 feet and rises just three feet above sea level—has in recent years been buffeted by storm surges from extreme weather events.  The heavy waters have reportedly wiped out about 97% of the land mass’s vegetation—the melomys’s only source of food.”

Killing such vulnerable species’ predators might buy some of them a little more time,  but they are nonetheless barely hanging on,  in habitat that has substantially changed from the conditions in which they evolved.

(Beth Clifton photo)

Killing cats,  rats,  or goats will not bring back a lost marine food web

Because of global warming,  for instance,  oceanic currents have shifted;  more acidic waters are inhibiting the ability of crustaceans and shellfish to build shells,  but jellyfish are more abundant than they have been in millions of years;  and different plants are favored on the islands in question.  These three factors alone have permanently altered the food webs upon which many critically endangered species depend.

No amount of killing “invasive predators” is going to bring back a lost marine food web.

Not only are remnant species doomed by habitat change,  but reintroducing species to habitat that no longer suits their needs is foredoomed to failure as well,  at significant cost meanwhile in animal suffering.

Meanwhile,  extirpating species who are thriving in the altered habitat in hopes of recovering others who are not,  and likely never will again,  is a cruel exercise in futility.

Rat & pinky rats.  (Dave Pauli photo)

But suppose the paper’s authors are right?

But,  for the sake of argument,  let us suppose that the authors of “Globally important islands where eradicating invasive mammals will benefit highly threatened vertebrates” are entirely correct in their assessment of how much they could accomplish to preserve vanishing species if funded to kill “invasive predators” to their hearts’ content.

What would this mean,  relative to the greater picture of species and habitat conservation?

The most hostile opponents of endangered species protection,  for example in the energy industry,  might welcome the news,  and even donate toward killing cats,  rats,  dogs,  pigs,  goats,  mice,  and mongooses,  because the purported 9.4% of the world’s most endangered species that the killing might save are not the species interfering with oil drilling,  building pipelines,  clearing rainforests to plant palm oil plantations,  shipping crude oil through treacherous waters,  and operating nuclear reactors.

Grizzly bear & buffalo berries.
(Beth Clifton collage)

Endangered species not all equal in ecological importance

Saving that 9.4% of endangered species,  however,  might make an impressive “offset”––on paper––for the loss of perhaps 5% of endangered species as result of reckless mainland and offshore energy development schemes.

Consider,  though,  that the 9.4% of endangered species on the “globally important islands” are all very few in number,  of limited range,  make little contribution to the survival of other species,  and are of miniscule biomass and biological needs compared to the great whales,  grizzly bears,  sage grouse,  orangutans,  and myriad other species put at risk by energy development.

All endangered species are not equal in ecological importance.  Saving the 9.4% spotlighted by “Globally important islands where eradicating invasive mammals will benefit highly threatened vertebrates” could not begin to compensate for the losses to mainland and offshore ecosystems if such trade-offs benefiting industry and economic development were to be made.

(Beth Clifton photo)

Wildlife overpasses

Even excluding the possibility of cynical trade-offs,  however,  the resources available for species and habitat conservation are limited.  Every cent spent to save the 9.4% of endangered species on remote islands from cats,  rats,  dogs,  pigs,  goats,  mice,  and mongooses is a cent not spent to save the other 90.6% of endangered species.

Many of the other 90.6% have a much better prognosis for longterm survival if their critical habitat is protected by relatively simple,  inexpensive,  and less ecologically risky measures––including just not doing things that destroy the habitat.

Dollar for dollar spent,  building wildlife overpasses and purchasing land to enable species including grizzly bears,  bison,  elk,  bighorn sheep,  and pronghorn to migrate safely throughout the Rocky Mountains region,  to cite just one example,  probably has more potential to benefit more species at risk––including all the many small species whose existence depends on the activity of the large,  charismatic megafauna­­––than anything that can be done for island species whose entire habitat is at imminent risk.

Edward Howe Forbush

Descended from Edward Howe Forbush

In gist,  despite having been published with the trappings of science,  “Globally important islands where eradicating invasive mammals will benefit highly threatened vertebrates” is just the latest of a long series of screeds descended philosophically from the 1916 Edward Howe Forbush tract The Domestic Cat:  Bird Killer,  Mouser & Destroyer of Wild Life;  Means of Utilizing and Controlling It.

Forbush (1858-1929) was a late 19th and early 20th century Massachusetts state ornithologist,  whose enduring influence has been huge,  but whose inveterate hatred of cats was based largely on his own scientific ineptitude.

(Beth Clifton photo)

Blamed cats for gull predation

Among other conspicuous errors, Forbush wrongly blamed cats who were never there in the first place for the decline of roseate terns on Muskeget Island,  off Nantucket.  The predation that Forbush misattributed to cats was later established to have been caused by gull predation.

Forbush also conflated the Quebecois slang term for raccoons,  chat sauvage,  and descriptions of raccoon behavior,  with second hand anecdotal accounts of cat behavior,  and conflated bobcats with domestic cats.

Much that Forbush recommended was attempted,  in the name of saving rare birds,  including killing thousands of cats,  but the recovery of most of those bird species,  including roseate terns,  awaited much better science,  conducted generations later with much less hyperbole.

(See How a birder’s mistakes incited 100 years of cat hatred.)

(Beth Clifton collage)

Paper inadvertently suggests that maybe cats et al are not really a big problem after all

In one sense,  though,  “Globally important islands where eradicating invasive mammals will benefit highly threatened vertebrates” represents a retreat from Forbush,  if perhaps an unwitting retreat.

While ailurophobes from Forbush to the present national policymakers in Australia and New Zealand have argued that cats menace birds and other wildlife anywhere and everywhere,  the authors of “Globally important islands…” expand the purported threat to include dogs,  rats,  goats,  pigs,  mice,  and mongooses,  yet narrow the scene of the alleged crimes to much less than 1% of terrestrial habitat.

Beth & Merritt Clifton
(Anthony Marr photo)

This suggests some recognition that these so-called “invasive” species are much less a threat to biodiversity than has been widely advertised,  and are perhaps not really any threat at all.

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(Beth Clifton photo)

Dear friends of ANIMALS 24-7:

Who starts out every day thinking of you?

We hope you have someone special who does.

Beth and I do.  We produce ANIMALS 24-7 together.  We team up on the research,  I do most of the writing.  Beth does the art and photography.

And we begin each day thinking of you.

Our first conversation,  most mornings over coffee,  centers on what you are reading and what you might want to read about next.  We look at our readership numbers for recent articles and those that are read again and again for months or even years.  We look at your comments and “Feedback” messages, including your requests and suggestions for coverage.

(Beth Clifton photo)

What do you most want to know about?

Then we look at the day’s possible article topics,  from among hundreds of animal-related news issues developing worldwide.

What will you most want to know about,  that we should spend the day or several days investigating, to give you inside information and perspective that you will not get anywhere else?

Some of you we know personally,  from our decades of reporting for people who care about animals.  Some of you have contributed information to articles.  Some have been subjects of articles.

Many of you,  though,  are people we have never met.  We may recognize your names,  perhaps as longtime readers and donors, or perhaps as relative newcomers to ANIMALS 24-7,  who just signed up recently to get our daily alerts about newly posted articles.

(Beth Clifton photo)

We begin our day thinking of you

But even if we know nothing about you,  except that you care enough about animals to have come to ANIMALS 24-7,  we begin our work day thinking of you.

We know that practically all of our readers,  young,  old,  and in between, have been helping animals and advocating for animals for most of their lives:  typically, for ten, twenty, or thirty years.  Some of you have been involved for 50 years or longer.

We know that most of you are very concerned that the animal advocacy movement you grew up with has gone astray,  whether that movement was the animal welfare movement of the 1950s and 1960s,  the humane movement of earlier times, the animal rights movement of the 1970s and 1980s,  the no-kill movement of the 1990s,  or the vegan movement of more recent years.

(Beth Clifton photo)

Many of you have lost animals to pit bulls,  or have been injured yourselves

Most of you are intensely worried about misplaced advocacy for dangerous dogs, especially pit bulls,  that is getting tens of thousands of other dogs,  cats,  and other animals killed each year, along with several dozen people,  and is increasingly alienating much of the public.

Many of you have lost animals to pit bulls,  or have been injured by pit bulls yourselves.

Most of you are also intensely worried about misappropriation and misuse of donated resources meant to help animals,  by charlatans whose chief interest in animal advocacy is to exploit your good intentions and take advantage of young volunteers,  pocketing easy money or spending it to feed addictions.

(Beth Clifton photo)

Too many “animal advocacy” groups partner with animal use industries

Quite a few of you are further worried about the tendency of too many animal advocacy organizations either to partner with animal use industries,  for the money in that, or to espouse intolerant,  inflexible positions that drive people away from the animal cause instead of welcoming more people in.  You have found an effective balance in your own lives,  without compromising your values and beliefs,  and wonder why people who are paid six figures a year to show some leadership cannot do the same.

Many of you are reminded every time you visit the supermarket that some of the big national organizations you once might have trusted are now endorsing the slaughter industry, in one way or another,  while some giant corporations, whose only real interest is in making money,  are now advancing vegetarianism and veganism,  putting plant-based food products on the shelves right alongside traditional products from slaughtered animals––where the plant-based products often outsell the dead meat!

(Beth Clifton photo)

Animal issues can be complicated

You know that animal issues can be complicated.  You look to us to help you sort out what is what.  We begin each day thinking about how we can live up to your trust.

Later each day, though, we wonder how we are going to pay the bills to keep ANIMALS 24-7 up and running, and keep ourselves on the job,  24-7,  all day every day and usually late into the night.

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Tiger gets the last laugh on “Joe Exotic.”  (Beth Clifton collage)

Guilty on 17 counts,  including soliciting murder of Big Cat Rescue founder Carole Baskin

            OKLAHOMA CITY,  Oklahoma––A federal court jury on April 2,  2019 convicted self-styled “Joe Exotic” Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage,  56,   formerly known as Joe Schreibvogel,  on two counts of having solicited the murder of Big Cat Rescue founder Carole Baskin in 2018.

“Joe Exotic” was also convicted on nine counts of violating the Endangered Species Act,  by shotgunning five tigers in October 2017 and by illegally offering tiger cubs for sale between November 2016 and March 2018.

(Nina Fornalski photo)

“Leaping lemurs!”

“Joe Exotic” was additionally convicted on eight counts of violating the Lacey Act by falsifying wildlife transaction records pertaining to the sale of tigers,  lions,  and a baby lemur.

Said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert J. Troester,  who led the prosecution,  “The self-described Tiger King was not above the law.  Rather, the jury only needed a few hours of deliberation before finding him guilty.  We are thankful for the jury’s careful attention,  deliberation and verdict in this case.”

Two lion/tiger hybrids bred by Joe Schreibvogel, aka Joseph Maldonado, aka Joe Exotic.

20 years,  with time off for good behavior?

U.S. District Judge Scott Palk has not yet set a sentencing date for “Joe Exotic,”  who could potentially be sent to federal prison for more than 20 years.

The prosecution charged that “Joe Exotic” offered an undercover FBI agent $10,000 in December 2017 to kill Baskin.  A 47-minute recording of the discussion between “Joe Exotic” and the FBI agent was played for the jury on March 29,  2019.

Allegedly suggested Maldonado-Passage,  “Just,  like,  follow her into a mall parking lot and just cap her and drive off.”

Big Cat Rescue founder Carole Baskin.

$3,000 down payment

The FBI investigation began after “Joe Exotic” in November 2017,  Maldonado-Passage gave $3,000 to a worker at his Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in Wynnewood,  Oklahoma,  as a down payment on a contract to kill Baskin.  The worker contacted the FBI instead.

Testifying in his own defense,  “Joe Exotic” claimed he had never actually wanted Baskin to be killed.

“Joe Exotic” shoots Carole Baskin in effigy.
(Big Cat Rescue screen shot)

Shot & hanged Baskin in videos

However,  “Joe Exotic” had repeatedly threatened Baskin on social media,  including by posting a video of him shooting a blow-up doll dressed to look like her,  and posting an image of himself hanging Baskin in effigy,  along with an effigy labeled “PETA.”

“Joe Exotic” hangs Carole Baskin and PETA in effigy.  (PETA photo)

Baskin herself,  PETA,  and the Humane Society of the U.S. all issued statements exulting that “Joe Exotic” had been convicted,  pointing toward their many past investigations and exposés of his activities involving exotic animals.

Other than local newspaper coverage,  however,  ANIMALS 24-7 in October 2002 produced the first exposé of “Joe Exotic,”  and the first to link together what even then was a long and tangled history.

“Joe Exotic” announces his 2016 run for U.S. President.  (YouTube image)

“World will be safer with this man behind bars”

“We’ve already succeeded in getting 39 tigers,  three bears,  two baboons,  and two chimpanzees out of his hands and into reputable sanctuaries,”  said PETA spokesperson Michelle Kretzer.  “The world will be a safer place for all living beings with this man behind bars,”  Kretzer added,  “where he can no longer harm animals or animal advocates.”

Said Baskin,  via Facebook,  “I am grateful that justice was served and Joe Schreibvogel-Maldonado-Passage hopefully will serve time in prison and no longer present a threat either to me or to his former big cats.  While media attention regarding this trial has primarily focused on the murder for hire charges,  there is a much larger significance to the wildlife charges,”  Baskin emphasized.

(Beth Clifton collage)

“Cruel cub petting schemes”

“For years,  a network of big cat owners like Passage who have engaged in cruel cub petting schemes and the exhibition of big cats have also been engaging in the illegal sale of tigers and other animals back and forth among themselves,  simply by checking the box on the USDA transfer form that says ‘donated’ instead of ‘sale’ and quietly paying cash for the animals,”  Baskin charged.

“During the trial,”  Baskin continued,  “several big cat owners were specifically mentioned as people Passage had sold tigers to.  We believe this illegal practice is common among cub breeders and exhibitors.”

Baskin named Bhagavan Antle,  Tim Stark,  Bill Meadows,  Mario Tabraue,  Kathy Stearns, Robert Engesser,  Jeff Lowe and Omar Villareal as “some of the most notorious” of the exhibitors,  but did not specifically name them in connection with illegal transactions.

Tiger cub handling at Dade City’s Wild Things.  (PETA photo)

Dade City’s Wild Things

There is,  however,  considerable on-the-record history linking “Joe Exotic” and Stearns,  another longtime alleged wildlife exhibition scofflaw whose Dade City’s Wild Things was also a target of exposés by the Baskins.

The Baskins had been critical of Dade City’s Wild Things practically since it opened in 2007,  during which time it was cited more than 40 times for alleged Animal Welfare Act violations.

Dade City’s Wild Things nonetheless continued to offer a swim-with-tigers attraction while appealing an administrative judge’s order to stop it,  as a hazard to both the humans and the tigers involved.

Tiger cub at Dade City’s Wild Things swimming attraction.  (PETA photo)

Tigers moved to Oklahoma

In July 2017 a federal judge ordered Dade City’s Wild Things “not to remove or relocate any of its 22 tigers,”  reported Tampa Bay Times staff writer Tracey McManus,  pending resolution of a PETA lawsuit alleging violations of the Endangered Species Act.

Only days later,  McManus continued,  “19 of the Dade City tigers pulled into the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in Oklahoma after a 1,200-mile journey on a cattle truck.  G.W. Exotic Animal Park entertainment director Joe Maldonado [“Joe Exotic”] confirmed 19 of Stearns’ tigers arrived at his facility.  He said a pregnant tiger gave birth during the haul,  and all three cubs died.  He did not know the whereabouts of the other three tigers cited in the court order.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

“Not isolated act of crazy bad apple”

Said Baskin in a September 2018 videotaped statement,  after the charges of which “Joe Exotic” has now been convicted were first filed,  “It is important to understand that this is not the isolated act of one crazy bad apple.  A significant part of our mission has been to stop mistreatment and exploitation of big cats at roadside zoos,  particularly those who rip tiger cubs from their mothers at birth to charge the public to pet and take photos with them.

“Because Big Cat Rescue has been a leader in working to stop what we view as abuse of big cats and been very effective in our work,”  Baskin explained then,  “I have received multiple death threats over the years,  including at one point a number of snakes placed in my mailbox.”

Howard & Carole Baskin with one of the Big Cat Rescue tigers.  (Beth Clifton photo)

“Big Cat Rescue Entertainment”

“Maldonado ran,  in our view,”  Baskin continued,  “one of the most notorious cub-petting roadside zoos in the country.  Years ago he also operated a traveling exhibit that would bring cubs to malls throughout the Midwest and Southwest.  When Big Cat Rescue educated the malls about the miserable life this created for the cubs,  and the malls started cancelling Maldonado’s traveling exhibit,  Maldonado retaliated by renaming his traveling show ‘Big Cat Rescue Entertainment’ in order to confuse the public into thinking the show was operated by Big Cat Rescue.

“In 2011,”  Baskin recounted,  “Big Cat Rescue sued for violations of its intellectual property rights,  and in 2013 was granted a consent judgment for over $1 million.”

“Joe Exotic” in 2016 presidential campaign video.

Claimed bankruptcy after losing trademark case 

The trademark violation case could have put “Joe Exotic” out of the wildlife exhibition business,  had they ever been able to collect a federal court judgement against him.

Instead,  reported Andrew Knittle of The Oklahoman,  “‘Joe Exotic’ filed for bankruptcy protection.  Joe Schreibvogel, who also goes by the names Aarron Alex and Cody Ryan,”  not mentioned in the federal solicitation-of-murder-for-hire indictment,  “listed debts totaling $1.2 million, most of which are traceable to the judgment handed down by a judge in Florida,”  while claiming as assets only several vehicles and 43 tigers and five black bears,  said to be “personal property worth an ‘unknown’ sum of money.”

Candidate & Trump supporter

Maldonado-Passage meanwhile made an abortive run for U.S. President on the Oklahoma state ballot in 2016,  and then was a Libertarian candidate for Oklahoma governor in 2018.

A video announcing his presidential candidacy emphasized that he was openly gay,  broke,  and had a history of drug use.

Sarah Stewart of KFOR-TV in Oklahoma City in November 2015 reported that she “caught up with Maldonado and his husband,”  the late Travis Maldonado,  “at Will Rogers World Airport as they were flying out to Ohio” to attend a Donald Trump rally.

“Although he’s never held public office,”  Stewart observed,  “he says he’s always been involved in politics and was a police chief at one point in time.”

Never a cop

Baskin’s husband,  attorney Howard Baskin,  in 2011 investigated the claim that “Joe Exotic” was ever a police chief,  or even a police officer.

“Joe says he is a former police chief in Colony,  Texas,”  Howard Baskin summarized.

“The Colony website,”  Howard Baskin found,  “contains the list of past and present police chiefs,”  six in all at that time,  none of whom were “Joe Exotic.”

“The policeman we spoke with by phone at The Colony police department advised that Joe Schreibvogel was never an officer there,” Howard Baskin wrote.

“Joe Exotic” in another of his self-promotional poses.

Never a rock star, either

“Joe Exotic” was also never a rock star,  or indeed a singing star of any sort,  but he has posed as such.

“Informant information,”  Carole Baskin posted to Facebook on January 18,  2018,  “indicates he has paid singer Vince Johnson to sing some if not all of the songs” that “Joe Exotic” claimed to have written and recorded.

“Then Joe makes a video lip syncing the song and claims it is him singing,”  Baskin said.

Travis Maldonado.
(GoFundMe photo)

Partner shot himself

Travis Maldonado,  23,  on October 6,  2017 shot himself at the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park.

Reported The Oklahoman,  “Travis Maldonado had a marijuana-smoking pipe in his pants pocket and a small amount of marijuana on him when he apparently shot himself in the head,”  trying to demonstrate that a gun would not fire,  even with a bullet in the chamber,  if the magazine was out.

Maldonado died almost 20 years to the day after the death of Garold Schreibvogel,  brother of “Joe Exotic.”   The two operated an exotic pet store called Super Pet in Arlington,  Texas,  until Garold was killed in an October 1997 truck crash.

“Joe Exotic,”  as Joe Schreibvogel,  was also identified by the Dallas Morning News as co-operator,  with a man named Jim Claytor,  of a wildlife rescue service called Nature’s Hope.

Emu. (Dave Pauli photo)

Shot emus

In February 1999,  police in Plano,  Texas,  found 69 dead emus and about 160 others cannibalizing their remains on the property of housing developer and former emu speculator Kuo-Wei Lee.

Schreibvogel and Claytor took possession of the survivors and hauled most of them to a ranch about 50 miles away,  to await relocation to permanent sanctuary.  When they could not catch all of the emus,  Schreibvogel and Claytor allegedly shot at least six of them.

SPCA of Texas chief cruelty investigator Bobby French videotaped the shootings,  but the Ellis County grand jury refused to indict Schreibvogel and Claytor.  Schreibvogel then filed a defamation suit against the SPCA of Texas,  claiming that their release of the video to news media had hurt sales at Super Pet.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Moved from Texas to Oklahoma

Schreibvogel sold Super Pet soon afterward,  and in October 1999 opened the G.W. Exotic Animal Foundation,  the original name of the animal exhibition facility in Wynnewood,  Oklahoma,  in his brother’s memory.

Within two years Schreibvogel ran into trouble with the Oklahoma Wildlife Department for allegedly operating unsafe road shows.

“We know we have some young kids being put in enclosures with large animals,”  charged Oklahoma assistant attorney general Elizabeth Sharrock in July 2002,  but Schreibvogel won a temporary injunction that allowed the road shows to continue.

Sharrock,  a Great Dane rescuer,  left public office in 2005.  Schreibvogel was still doing road shows.

Tigers escaping over the Rainbow Bridge.
(Merritt Clifton collage)

23 dead tiger cubs in seven months

Noted Bob Ducette of The Oklahoman,  “The animal park has been a destination of choice for state officials and other entities needing a place to house animals who don’t normally live in Oklahoma.”

But that relationship did not protect “Joe Exotic” for much longer.

McManus of The Oklahoman recalled that “In 2006,  the USDA suspended G.W. Exotic’s exhibitor’s license and ordered a $25,000 fine to settle repeated violations,  including failure to provide animals clean water,  failure to provide structurally sound facilities and not having trained employees.  The federal agency in 2010 opened an investigation into the deaths of 23 tiger cubs over a seven-month period under Maldonado’s care,  and in 2013 investigated the deaths of two others.”

(Beth Clifton photo)

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(Beth Clifton collage)

Fewer ordinary bites but more maulings & deaths sends payouts soaring 40% in five years

            CHICAGO,  Illinois––U.S. children under one year of age were rushed to emergency rooms due to dog attack almost twice as often in 2018 as in 2001.

At least 3,125 babies made the terrifying trip to an emergency room after a dog mauling in 2018,  up from 1,794 in 2001.

The average insurance payout for a dog attack claim increased to $39,017 in 2018,  up 5.3% from the previous record average payout of $37,051 in 2017,  and has increased 15% in just two years.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Bad news buried in Dog Bite Prevention Week publicity

The total insurance industry payout for dog attacks is up 40% since 2013,  from $483 million to $675 million,  though down in 2018 from the record $684 million total payout in 2017.

National Dog Bite Prevention Coalition partners State Farm Insurance,  the Insurance Information Institute,  American Humane,  and celebrity dog trainer Victoria Stilwell acknowledged but buried the data in an April 4,  2019 media release heralding National Dog Bite Prevention Week,  April 7-13.

Instead,  the National Dog Bite Prevention Coalition members celebrated a 9% decrease in total dog bite insurance claims in 2018.

(Beth Clifton photo)

Shibboleths

The 17,297 insurance claims filed for dog bite injuries in 2018 were the fewest since 2012,  following four consecutive years of more than 18,000 claims per year.

However,  the increasing average payout per claim confirms that while ordinary dog bites may be fewer,  there are more bites each year of severity levels 4,  5,  and 6 on the Ian Dunbar scale,  meaning multiple injuries,  life-changing harm,  and fatalities.

The National Dog Bite Prevention Coalition mantra for 2019 continues to be shibboleths dating back to the first Dog Bite Prevention Week,  introduced by the U.S. Postal Service in 1956,  asserting that “Any dog can bite.  Active supervision,  proper socialization and learning how to read a dog’s body language are the keys to reducing bites.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

Any dog can bite,  but bully breeds do most of the mauling

But while any dog can bite,  pit bulls alone––now at an all-time high of 5.3% of the dog population,  a little more than one dog in 20,  inflicted 73 of the 99 dog attack deaths occurring in the U.S. and Canada in 2017 and 2018.

Pit bulls also inflicted 444 of the 759 total dog attack fatalities occurring in the U.S. and Canada from 1982 through 2018 (58%),  and inflicted 76% of the 5,668 disfiguring injuries.

Add in attacks by Rottweilers,  bullmastiffs,  boxers,  and other “bully” breeds closely related to pit bulls,  and 77% of dog attack fatalities plus 88% of dog attack disfigurements have been inflicted by 16.2% of the dog population.

(Brooke Freimuth photo)

Most dangerous non-bullies

Include attacks by Akitas,  German shepherds,  huskies,  Malamutes,  Malinois,  wolf hybrids,  and other breeds that have been passed off as wolf hybrids,  along with chows,  and just 25% of the U.S. and Canadian dog population inflict 90% of the dog attack fatalities and 95% of the disfigurements.

The National Dog Bite Prevention Coalition acknowledged that “Dog bites and other dog-related injuries accounted for nearly one third of all homeowners’ liability claim dollars paid out in 2018,  according to the Insurance Information Institute and State Farm, the largest writer of homeowners’ insurance in the United States.”

Not acknowledged,  however,  was that unrestrained proliferation of high-risk breeds,  especially pit bulls,  is the biggest reason why.

State Farm policies in truth oblige everyone with a dog to pay for pit bull excesses.

What insuring pit bulls costs homeowners

At least 13 national insurance underwriting companies will not insure pit bulls.  Many insurance groups also “red line” or charge higher premiums to insure homeowners and renters who keep the high-risk breeds,  so as not to oblige owners of other dogs to subsidize the owners of high-risk breeds.

State Farm,  however,  is “one of the few insurance companies that does not exclude homeowner or renter insurance coverage because of the breed of dog owned,”  boasted a State Farm media release during Dog Bite Prevention Week 2018.

What does that cost State Farm policy holders?

State Farm claim (top) & reality shown by ANIMALS 24-7 data (on fence).
(Beth Clifton collage)

The numbers

State Farm currently has 10.1% of the U.S. property-and-casualty insurance market,  according to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

State Farm in 2018 paid out $123 million,  the second most in the history of the company and 18.2% of the national total,  to settle 3,280 dog bite and injury claims.

This was a substantial reduction from the record $132 million that State Farm paid out in 2017 to settle dog attack claims,  18.9% of the national total.

The difference between State Farm payouts in dog attack cases in 2018,  as compared to 2017,   may reflect in part that dog attack fatalities fell from a record 57 in 2017,  40 by pit bulls,  to 42 in 2018,  33 by pit bulls.

But State Farm insurees are nonetheless still paying premiums to insure their dogs that appear to be nearly twice as high as would be necessary if the insurees were not subsidizing pit bull owners.

(Beth Clifton photo)

Altogether,  State Farm “has paid over $1 billion for dog-related injury claims” since 2008,  the company acknowledged during Dog Bite Prevention Week 2018.

The total is now about $1.125 billion.

Please donate to help support our unique investigative work: 

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(Beth Clifton collage)

Busts plummet as pit bull advocacy has all but legalized dogfighting

            NEW YORK CITY,  N.Y.––Designated National Dog Fighting Awareness Day by the American SPCA,  April 8,  2019 and the next several days appear to have passed without a single dogfighting bust or other noteworthy event pertaining to dogfighting occurring anywhere in the United States.

Indeed,  more than 100 days into 2019,  there have apparently been only three alleged dogfighting busts of note in the U.S. all year,  all in March:  two in Portsmouth,  Virginia,  and one in Detroit,  the biggest of 2019 so far,  in which 35 pit bulls were impounded from four properties.

As Patch staff writer John Barker observed from Gwinnett County,  Georgia in 2018,  “National Dog Fighting Awareness Day came and went without much hoopla,”  including––in both 2018 and 2019––barely any publicity directed toward mass media and the pubic from the ASPCA itself.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Why was “National Dogfighting Awareness Day” declared?

Timed each year to coincide with the start of National Dog Bite Prevention Week,  National Dog Fighting Awareness Day may have been concocted to hitch a ride on attention to the much older and bigger event,  co-sponsored by the American Humane Association since 1956.

The ASPCA,  founded in New York City in 1866,  and the American Humane Association,  founded in Albany,  New York in 1877,  have after all had a very long rivalry.

Or perhaps National Dog Fighting Awareness Day was meant to build sympathy for pit bulls,  by default the main subject of National Dog Bite Prevention Week,  even as the AHA and the other co-sponsors––State Farm Insurance,  the Insurance Information Institute,  and celebrity dog trainer Victoria Stilwell––downplay to the point of dismissal the breed-specific reality that pit bulls over the past decade have accounted for more than 70% of all fatal and disfiguring dog attacks.

(See Dog attacks on babies double, but State Farm hails fewer claims.)

The HEART Act?

According to ASPCAPro,  however,  an electronic newsletter distributed to animal shelter personnel,  the focal purpose of National Dog Fighting Awareness Day was to promote something called “The HEART Act,”  described as “an important piece of legislation that will help victims of dogfighting by decreasing their length of stay in shelters and allowing them to be rehabilitated and re-homed faster.”

In other words,  “The HEART Act”  is meant to expedite the transfer into unwitting families and communities pit bulls who have been bred,  raised,  trained,  and sometimes already used specifically to kill other animals.

To put that into perspective,  consider that the sum of pit bulls known to have been impounded in dogfighting cases since ANIMALS 24-7 began logging the impoundments in 1997 is 14,653,  plus unknown numbers impounded in 2003-2004:  an average of 733 per year over the 20 years for which data is available.

(Beth Clifton collage)

“Prevention of Cruelty to Animals” means all animals

Consider also that the full name of the ASPCA is “The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.”

Founder Henry Bergh made a priority of prosecuting animal fighting in all forms,  not just dogfighting.  Some of Bergh’s most storied arrests were of people who made contests of setting dogs on captive rats.  Bergh recognized that every sentient species suffers when ripped limb from limb and disemboweled,  including rats,  not just pit bulls done in by each other.

Presumably the ASPCA of today shares Bergh’s perspective,  at least in abstract.

Numbers,  however,  suggest that the present ASPCA leadership has rather different priorities.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Perspective

Pit bulls,  about 20% of them rehomed by animal shelters,  killed approximately 14,850 other dogs,  8,850 cats,  and 13,662 other animals in 2018 alone,  injuring tens of thousands of others,  even without the help of ASPCA-pushed “HEART Acts” to accelerate the mayhem.

(See Pit bulls killed 30 times more animals in 2018 than human crime.)

Just under 4,000 pit bulls––3,991,  to be exact,  an average of 665 per year––are known to have been impounded in U.S. dogfighting cases since 2013.

Over the same six years,  pit bulls have killed approximately 61,668 other dogs,  21,978 cats,  and 59,226 other animals.

Who has a heart for those victims?

36% drop––at least––in dogfighting impoundments

To put dogfighting further into perspective as a source of animal suffering,  relative to routine pit bull behavior,  consider that the ASPCA in January 2019 claimed,  according to Bill Cummings of the Connecticut Post,  that “over the past eight years it has assisted with 200 dogfighting cases in 24 states,”  involving the impoundment of nearly 5,000 pit bulls,  including 400 pit bulls impounded in 12 states in 2018 alone.

Those numbers actually better coincide with the data that ANIMALS 24-7 extracted from media accounts for the eight years 2010-2017,  than with the 2011-2018 data.

Either way,  however,  the ASPCA statement suggests a 36% drop in dogfighting impoundments by the end of the time frame in question from the average of the preceding seven years.

(Beth Clifton collage)

95% decline in dogfighting bust reportage

The ANIMALS 24-7 data suggests an even steeper drop than that,  even taking into account that the numbers of people arrested and dogs impounded often fluctuate greatly from one year to the next.

Reported dogfighting busts peaked at 84 in 2009,  not exceeding 45 in any year since.

Arrests in connection with dogfighting peaked at 297 in 2000,  last topping 100 in 2015.

Pit bull impoundments from alleged dogfighting venues soared above 1,100 for three years in a row following the April 2007 arrest of football star Michael Vick on dogfighting charges,  but have reached or even approached 1,000 only twice since,  in 2013 and 2016,  and fell to less than half as many in both 2017 and 2018.

Coverage of dogfighting busts by mass media documented by www.NewsLibrary.com dropped from 397 reports in 2007 to just 22 in 2018:  a 95% drop.

Data up to April 8, 2019, National Dog Fighting Awareness Day.

Ten cases per year

Connecticut Post reporter Bill Cummings in his January 18,  2019 article “Dogfighting still a ‘blood’ sport in Connecticut,”  wrote that University of Connecticut law professor Jessica Rubin “said her research shows that 110 charges for dogfighting related offenses were filed in Connecticut between 2007 and 2017,”  for an average of 10 cases per year.

Nationally,  over the same 11 years,  1,546 alleged dogfighters were charged with related offenses as result of 544 busts,  an average of almost exactly three sets of charges per bust.

This suggests that Connecticut courts handle the outcome of slightly more than three dogfighting busts per year––which would make dogfighting only about three times more common in Connecticut than people getting killed by dogs,  three of the four killed in the past five years having been killed by pit bulls.

The city of Los Angeles,  meanwhile,  reportedly has not prosecuted a dogfighting case since 2010,  but had a dog attack fatality––by pit bull––as recently as 2017.

(See Pit bulls, “outliers” & Humane Society of the U.S. prez Wayne Pacelle.)

(Beth Clifton collage)

Dogfighting & the Ku Klux Klan

To be sure,  not every dogfighting case comes to the attention of either mass media,  the ASPCA,  or law enforcement.  Illegal in all 50 U.S. states,  and prohibited by federal law as well,  dogfighting has been a clandestine activity almost everywhere within U.S. territory for more than 150 years.

Organized dogfighting for much of that time was conducted largely as a fundraising entertainment hosted by secret societies associated with the Ku Klux Klan,  protected by KKK infiltration of law enforcement.

This,  incidentally,  is an aspect of dogfighting of which the ASPCA seems never to have promoted awareness,  though the American Humane Association did to some extent,  even at the height of overt KKK political influence in the early 20th century.

Over the past half century,  since the break-up of the “old Klan,”  which posed as a network of social clubs and community service clubs,  organized dogfighting has continued as a pursuit of prison-based gangs,  drug traffickers,  and other criminal elements,  who mostly stay out of sight.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Undoing effective legislation

But instead of flushing dogfighters into the light,  the ASPCA,  the Humane Society of the U.S.,  the Best Friends Animal Society,  the American Humane Association,  and other politically engaged supposed animal advocacy organizations have for decades sought to undo the very legislation––bans on the possession,  sale,  and transfer of pit bulls––which does most to suppress dogfighting.

Since no other type of dog has ever proved inclined to fight other dogs to the death for the entertainment of sadists and gamblers,  mere possession and breeding of pit bulls was for generations a surefire indication of involvement in dogfighting.

Few people beyond dogfighters who tried to sell their culls as pets––notably John P. Colby of Newburyport,  Massachusetts and Charles Lawton of New Orleans––even pretended that pit bulls could be safe pets.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Pit bull glut

As pit bulls spread from almost exclusive possession by dogfighters,  however,  into widespread use to guard marijuana “grow” operations and crack houses,  disregard of spay/neuter by scofflaw owners caused pit bull intake at U.S. animal shelters to rise from 2% of the dogs circa 1986 to 5% by 1993,  23% by 2003,  and more than a third by 2013.

Pit bulls now glut animal shelters,  rescue fostering programs,  and sanctuaries to the point that as of June 2018 more than 40% of the U.S. pit bull population were without permanent homes.

Yet the ASPCA,  the Humane Society of the U.S.,  the Best Friends Animal Society,  Maddie’s Fund,  and several thousand other organizations continue to promote pit bull breeding by pouring multi-millions of dollars per year into trying to encourage pit bull adoptions,  including through translocating pit bulls with known histories of dangerous behavior from one place to another.

(See 2018 dog breed survey: at least 41% of U.S. pit bull population are seeking homes.)

(Beth Clifton collage)

Denying the risks

            Much of the effort by the ASPCA et al amounts to trying to popularize pit bulls by denying the risks associated with pit bull behavior.

(See Did ASPCA discover certifying SAFER dog screening might be dangerous?)

            This approach helps to sell much of the public on acquiring pit bulls as pets,  but not necessarily on adopting pit bulls from animal shelters.  Shelter dogs by definition have already flunked out of one or more homes,  coming with either problematic or unknown histories.

Aware of that,  would-be pit bull owners patronize breeders instead.  Because the same proclivities that make pit bulls dangerous in the first place make them very difficult to raise en masse in crowded puppy mills,  producing pit bulls long since became the mainstay of the backyard breeding industry.  This by itself helps to feed the pit bull surplus––and then about a third of all the pit bulls in the U.S. flunk out of their homes each year,  at an average age of about 18 months.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Dogfighting in the name of rescue

Dogfighters,  meanwhile,  appear to have learned that most of the humane community,  including humane law enforcement,  is so invested in a see-no-evil,  hear-no-evil,  say-no-evil approach to pit bull issues that the easiest way to operate is to pretend to be involved in doing pit bull rescue.

This approach was pioneered by a California couple named Cesar and Mercedes Cerda,  who were arrested in 1998 and sent to prison for related offenses.  They appear to have been ahead of their time.

The formula today appears to be to get IRS 501(c)(3) nonprofit status,  set up a Facebook page advertising some “bait dogs,”  and if a drone pilot happens to videotape dozens of chained pit bulls,  the matter will go no farther.

(See How to tell a “bait dog” from “click bait”.)

            Moving pit bulls interstate to be fought need no longer be hidden,  when the transport can be passed off as rescue work.

Dogfighting training paraphernalia is now easily passed off as just part of preparing pit bulls for exhibition or weight-pulling contests,  often sponsored by “rescues.”

Michael Vick

How dogfighting has been legalized

Cultural indications,  such as references to dogfighting in popular entertainment and advertising,  suggest that dogfighting today is still just as big as it was when Michael Vick was arrested,  tried,  and convicted.

Arrests,  trials,  and convictions of dogfighters,  however,  have fallen to as few as they are now because,  for all practical purposes,  almost everything historically associated with dogfighting has been legalized through the efforts of the alleged humane community except for the fights themselves.

Dogfighters and attendees at dogfights can still be prosecuted if caught in the act.  Reality,  though,  is that most convictions won in connection with dogfighting are for illegal possession of drugs and firearms,  parole violations,  and neglect of pit bulls,  not actually for dogfighting or breeding and raising dogs to fight.

(Beth Clifton collage)

What could be done instead of “Much Ado About Nothing”

The lackluster celebration of National Dog Fighting Awareness Day could have been dramatized as “Much Ado About Nothing,”  if that title had not already been claimed by William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare,  as it happens,  struggled to promote his plays at the Globe Theatre in the shadow of the Paris Gardens,  the London dogfighting and bear-baiting emporium that was the preferred entertainment venue of Queen Elizabeth I.

Yet business might be brisk for National Dog Bite Prevention Week,  if the co-sponsors would take pit bull proliferation by the horns,  take the bullhorns away from pit bull pushers and apologists,  and seize upon the educable moments presented by incident after incident to try to undo the damage done by promoting the pretense that dogs bred since Elizabethan times to kill and maim are behaviorally just like any others.

(Beth Clifton collage)

ASPCA repeals pit bull ban by 125 votes

Instead,  just ahead of National Dog Bite Prevention Week,  the ASPCA celebrated having joined with local pit bull advocates to repeal the pit bull ban that had been in place since 1987 in Liberty,  Missouri,  a suburb of Kansas City.

Voters passed the repeal by a margin of 52% to 48%.  The pro-repeal side won about 1,610 votes,  of 3,097 cast,  in a community of about 30,000 people.

In other words,  about 125 votes decided the issue.

“We came in two weeks ago and initiated the canvassing effort,”  exulted ASPCA government relations outreach manager Kathryn Kopanke.

Local officials two days later broke ground for a new $2.6 million animal shelter,  almost certainly soon to be as filled with abandoned and impounded pit bulls as every other shelter in the greater Kansas City area.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Yakima mauling

Even as the votes were counted in Liberty,  Missouri,  a three-year-old boy in Yakima County,  Washington was mauled by a pit bull found at large and brought home by his mother.

A neighbor shot the pit bull before Yakima County sheriff’s deputies arrived.  The three-year-old was rushed to Seattle for emergency facial surgery.

Responding to three serious attacks,  the city of Yakima prohibited pit bulls from 1987 until September 2018,  when the Yakima Humane Society forced a repeal by threatening to give up the community animal control housing contract.

(Beth Clifton photo)

The victim,  however,  lived in an unincorporated area just west of the city of Yakima,  where pit bulls had always been allowed.

Please help us continue to speak truth to power: 

http://www.animals24-7.org/donate/

(Beth Clifton collage)

90% “live release” mandate failed catastrophically in less than 90 days

            PUEBLO,  Colorado––“You can’t manage an animal shelter to a number,”  Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region president Jan McHugh-Smith told Pueblo Chieftan reporter Anthony A. Mestas,  hours after her organization returned to running the Community Animal Services of Pueblo shelter on April 9,  2019,  after a catastrophic three-month absence.

In the interim,  a 40-year-old local no-kill organization called PAWS for Life tried to take the Community Animal Services of Pueblo Animal Shelter to no-kill,  following the “No Kill Equation” popularized since 2004 by Nathan Winograd,  founder of the No Kill Advocacy Center in Oakland,  California.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Train wreck

“To describe what happened at the shelter during the first three months of this year as a train wreck is probably being too charitable,”  editorialized the Pueblo Chieftan the same day.

“After the Humane Society spent 16 years as the shelter’s operator,”  the Pueblo Chieftan explained,  “the Pueblo city council made the decision to turn the contract over to PAWS,  which had no previous experience running a public animal shelter.  The Pueblo county commission reluctantly went along with the council’s choice,  which was heavily influenced by a small but vocal group determined to have the local governments operate a ‘no-kill’ shelter.

“PAWS failed spectacularly during its three months on the job,”  the Pueblo Chieftan editors summarized,  “sparking a state investigation and creating an environment in which some animals suffered needlessly.  City and county leaders should be thankful that the Humane Society of Pikes Peak Region has been gracious enough to accept this assignment,  after being unceremoniously shown the door.  Critics relentlessly attacked them on social media as part of an effort to get PAWS the contract,  some even threatening the safety of shelter workers.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

Back on the job

The Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region resumed management of the Pueblo Animal Shelter under 90-day contracts with the Pueblo city and county governments,  pending negotiation of long-term agreements.

The Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region returned to the Community Animal Services of Pueblo shelter only after the Pueblo City Council at an emergency meeting unanimously repealed an ordinance called the Pueblo Animal Protection Act [PAPA],  passed in 2018 by demand of PAWS for Life supporters.  The ordinance had required the Pueblo Animal Shelter to maintain a 90% “live release rate.”

The new contract “stipulates that the Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region will not only operate the shelter,  but also run enforcement of local animal control ordinances,”  noted Pueblo Chieftan reporter Mestas.

(Beth Clifton collage)

“Live release rate is not what we call socially conscious”

“We’ve always been here for the people and the animals,”  McHugh-Smith said,  “and now we get to be coming back to provide the services that this community really needs and deserves.  Our partners from the Denver Dumb Friends League are helping us with staffing and getting the building ready for operation.”

“Animal sheltering is very complex,  and I think that’s what our elected officials have learned,”  McHugh-Smith finished.  “It takes many, many different things to look at to measure the care of the animals.  Just having one focus on a live release rate is not what we call socially conscious sheltering.”

What McHugh-Smith and others call “socially conscious” sheltering,  ANIMALS 24-7 calls simply “responsible sheltering,”  and “responsible rescuing,”  for animal rescuers working outside a shelter environment.  ANIMALS 24-7 hopes that the key concepts,  by any name,  will soon catch on.

Jan McHugh-Smith  (Facebook photo)

McHugh-Smith was early no-kill advocate

A 35-year veteran of humane work,  almost entirely in Colorado,  McHugh-Smith was among the first U.S. animal shelter directors to embrace the goals of the “no kill movement,”  as those goals were originally stated,  early in her 12-year tenure as executive director of the Humane Society of Boulder Valley in Boulder,  Colorado,  1995-2007.

McHugh-Smith left Colorado in February 2007 to head the San Francisco SPCA,  which through a 1994 agreement with the San Francisco Department of Animal Care & Control called the “Adoption Pact” claimed to have made San Francisco the first U.S. “no kill city.”

Frustrated at having had to make steep budget cuts due to budget overruns left by her predecessors,  McHugh-Smith returned to Colorado in March 2010 to become executive director of the Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region.

The late Lynda Foro convened the first No Kill Conference in 1995.  (Beth Clifton collage)

Original no-kill movement emphasized methods, not numbers

The “no kill movement”  jumped off to a promising start,  marked by the first “No Kill Conference,”  held in Phoenix,  Arizona,  in September 1995.

The sixty-odd attendees had mostly been introduced to each other’s existence only a few months earlier by the first edition of The No Kill Directory,  published annually for several years by a long defunct organization called Doing Things for Animals.

(See No Kill Conference & No-Kill Directory founder Lynda Foro, 74.)

Doing Things for Animals,  in partnership with the North Shore Animal League America,  also organized the first “No Kill Conference” and ten more annual teaching and training conferences that followed.

Alexander and Elisabeth Lewyt

Though those eleven conferences,  animal shelter directors around the U.S. and the world learned what were already time-tested,  yet surprisingly little-known techniques for promoting high-volume dog and cat sterilization and increasing adoptions.

Who invented no-kill?

The North Shore Animal League America had developed the now almost universally used approaches to adoption,  beginning when the late Alex and Elisabeth Lewyt took over the shelter management in 1969.

Veterinarian Marvin Mackie had pioneered high-volume dog and cat sterilization surgery at clinics funded by the city of Los Angeles since 1973,  training Jeff Young,  DVM,  among many others,  who have in turn trained several more generations of spay/neuter surgery specialists.

Borrowing ideas from both North Shore and the Los Angeles spay/neuter clinics,  the San Francisco SPCA began putting them together under one roof,  as part of an integrated program,  soon after Richard Avanzino became president in 1976.

(Beth Clifton collage)

(See Who invented no-kill? [It wasn’t Nathan Winograd])

Progress in Pueblo

By the dawn of the 21st century,  the U.S. animal shelter death toll had fallen by half in barely 10 years.

Progress in Pueblo was especially rapid.  Community Animal Services of Pueblo reportedly killed 5,700 dogs and cats in 1999,  a rate of 35.7 per 1,000 of human population.

By 2016 the shelter was killing barely 1,000 dogs and cats per year,  a rate of 6.25 per 1,000 of human population,  about 60% of the rate for the Rocky Mountains region and half the rate for the U.S. as whole.

The initial threshold for achieving no-kill animal control was set at killing fewer than 5.0 dogs and cats per 1,000 of human population,  based on the reality that about that many animals will be irrecoverably sick,  injured,  or dangerous.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Running through the red lights

The front cover of every edition of the No Kill Directory included this definition,  drafted by ANIMALS 24-7 editor Merritt Clifton and ratified in 1995 by all of the original No Kill Conference sponsors and organizers:

“Implicit to the no-kill philosophy is the reality of exceptional situations in which euthanasia is the most humane alternative available.  Those exceptional situations include irrecoverable illness or injury,  dangerous behavior,  and/or the need to decapitate an animal who has bitten someone,  in order to perform rabies testing.  They do not include ‘unadoptable,  too young,  or too old,’   or lack of space.”

From almost the beginning,  unfortunately,  Avanzino,  then-SF/SPCA staff attorney Nathan Winograd (who does not appear to have attended any of the first 11 No Kill Conferences),  and the founders of the Best Friends Animal Society,  who soon started their own breakaway No More Homeless Pets conference series,  argued that the No Kill Directory definition of “no kill” was too complicated to fuel the “no kill movement” as they envisioned it.

Richard Avanzino (left) & ANIMALS 24-7 editor Merritt Clifton.  (Beth Clifton photo)

Dumbed down the formula

Also of note,  only Avanzino had significant experience in open admission sheltering or on the law enforcement side of animal care and control,  and his experience was long behind him.   Animal care and control was a a job the SF/SPCA had done for 100 years,  but Avanzino handed it off to a newly formed city agency in 1984.  While the transition was phased in over five years,  it was completed before Winograd was hired.

Avanzino left the SF/SPCA in 1998 to become first chief executive of the no-kill advocacy organization Maddie’s Fund,  backed to the tune of $350 million by PeopleSoft founders David and Cheryl Duffield.

Much of that money has been put behind promoting a “new” no-kill formula,  in alliance with the Best Friends Animal Society.  The “new” formula is simply the old “euthanasia rate” statistic,  often used in the late 20th century,  turned upside down and called the “live release rate”

The original Morris Animal Refuge, the first animal shelter in the U.S., which started out no-kill in 1858, but was unable to remain no-kill after taking the Philadelphia animal control contract in 1874.

Why “live release rate” kills

Shelters using the “live release rate” are considered “no kill” if they simply rehome 90% of their animal intake,  regardless of what that intake is.

In other words,  a shelter that kills fewer than 5.0 animals per 1,000 of human population,  as the San Francisco shelters did during the last five years of Avanzino’s SF/SPCA tenure,  might not be considered no-kill,  if it promotes spay/neuter and responsible animal care so successfully that intake comes to consist mostly of sick,  injured,  and dangerous animals.

Yet that shelter can still get the no-kill label,  a huge advantage in fundraising,  if it rehomes 90% of the sick,  injured,  and dangerous animals it receives,  irrespective of risk to the public and other animals––or just keeps them in cages until their deaths of “natural causes.”

(Merritt Clifton collage)

Taking chances

Achieving the coveted 90% “live release rate” is even easier if a shelter simply refuses to accept sick,  injured,  and dangerous animals.  Many shelters have taken that approach,  but many others have tried to remain “open admission,”  even though this often leads to taking chances with animal and human health and safety.

Pursuing the 90% “live release rate” has since 2007 contributed to the deaths of 35 humans by 61 rehomed dogs,  44 of them pit bulls;  to about 40% of the U.S. pit bull population languishing in shelters and sanctuaries because they cannot be rehomed;  to dozens of “no kill” shelter failures each and every year,  with as many as 40,000 animals housed in substandard “no kill” facilities at any given time;  and to many of the deadliest disease outbreaks in U.S. animal sheltering history.

(See Casualties of the “save rate”: 40,000 animals at failed no-kill shelters & rescues.)

(Beth Clifton collage)

Gamble failed in Las Vegas

The worst disease outbreak of all came at the Lied Animal Shelter in Las Vegas in February 2007.

Originally handling only Las Vegas animals, the Lied Animal Shelter opened in February 2001. The Lied management almost immediately came under intensive criticism for purportedly killing incoming animals too quickly,  after an incident in which a child’s dog was euthanized by accident.  The shelter was expanded two years later to also hold animals impounded from Clark County, surrounding Las Vegas.

A decade later the shelter tried to go no-kill––prematurely.  Outside personnel were eventually brought in to help euthanize more than 1,000 of the 1,800 animals in custody.

About 150 of the animals were ill,  and 850 were believed to have been exposed to both parvovirus and distemper among the holding kennels for incoming dogs, and panleukopenia among the incoming cats,  along with a bacterial infection never previously found in shelters that caused a fatal hemorrhagic pneumonia.

Similar episodes have occurred around the U.S. and Canada since then,  but with fewer casualties,  chiefly because the afflicted shelters have served much smaller communities,  therefore taking in fewer animals.

(Beth Clifton collage)

“We have a responsibility to prevent & relieve suffering”

“As veterinarians, we have a responsibility to prevent and relieve animal suffering,”  Colorado Veterinary Medical Association president Will French, DVM declared in response to the Pueblo Animal Shelter meltdown.

“The idea of the no-kill movement is misleading,  and often increases animal suffering with unintended consequences,”  French continued,  hammering home a point often made by ANIMALS 24-7 since our first feature article,  Why we cannot adopt our way out of shelter killing,  originally posted in April 2014,  updated in November 2015.

That point has most successfully been made by Colorado spay/neuter veterinarian Jeff Young in a July 2017 guest column for ANIMALS 24-7 entitled We cannot adopt, warehouse or rescue our way out of dog & cat overpopulation!,  now read by more than 170,000 people.

Jeff Young, DVM

“Strongly supports socially conscious animal sheltering”

The Colorado Veterinary Medical Association reinforced French’s words with an April 9,  2019 resolution stating that it “strongly supports the socially conscious animal sheltering movement and opposes the no-kill movement in animal welfare.

“The socially conscious animal community movement strives to create the best outcomes for all animals by treating them respectfully and alleviating suffering,”  the CVMA resolution explained,  defining as fundamental goals of socially conscious animal sheltering that there are “community commitments to:

• Ensure every unwanted or homeless pet has a safe place to go for shelter and care;
• Place every healthy and safe animal;
• Assess the medical and behavioral needs of homeless animals and ensure these needs are thoughtfully addressed;
• Align shelter policy with the needs of the community;
• Alleviate suffering and make appropriate euthanasia decisions;
• Consider the health and wellness of animals for each community when transferring animals;
• Enhance the human-animal bond through thoughtful placements and post-adoption support;
• Foster a culture of transparency, ethical decision-making, mutual respect, continual learning, and collaboration.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

“Causes every veterinarian supports”

These “are causes every veterinarian supports,”  the CVMA resolution said.  “Policies and legislation that remove professional judgement and knowledge in animal welfare and public health are counter to those causes;  we cannot and will not support them.

By contrast,  the CVMA resolution charged,  “The no-kill movement increases animal suffering and threatens public health with unintended consequences:

• Animals in need are turned away from shelters because shelters are not able to meet required live release rates if they are admitted.
• Animals languish in cages until they die to avoid euthanasia.
• Dangerous dogs are placed in the community or remain indefinitely in shelters because of release requirements.
• Shelters can no longer accept lost or homeless animals from the community because cages are full of behaviorally or medically-challenged animals who cannot be placed in homes.
• Animal welfare is at risk because shelters are beyond capacity-of-care.”

Finished the CVMA resolution,  “The CVMA believes a socially conscious sheltering approach provides greater benefits for animals and for the community;  as such, we strongly support socially conscious sheltering and oppose the no-kill movement.”

How the Pueblo debacle unfolded

The Community Animal Services of Pueblo shelter debacle became public,  recounted Pueblo Chieftan reporter Mestas,  when “On March 15,  2019,  authorities executed a search warrant at the facility,”  after a March 6 inspection found problematic conditions,  “as part of an ongoing investigation by the Colorado Department of Agriculture.  Word of personnel changes followed,  including the suspension of shelter director Linda Mitchell and the exits of staff veterinarian Joel Brubaker and the most experienced of the shelter’s animal control officers.”

SoCO Spay and Neuter Association executive director Lisa Buccambuso agreed to replace Mitchell on an interim basis,  but resigned only two days later,  while PAWS For Life surrendered its state-issued license to operate the shelter.

“I quickly witnessed that the need was greater than what I could offer,  and that immediate intervention needed to take place,”  Buccambuso told media.

This pit bull named Luna was offered for adoption by PAWS for Life during the time frame in question, but from PAWS for Life’s own shelter, not the Community Animal Services of Pueblo shelter.

A cat named River & a dog named Luna

That evening,  March 27,  2019,  KOAA News 5 reporter Tom Kackley revealed many of the Colorado Department of Agriculture findings.

“Inspectors said a cat named River was brought in by a person who said the animal had not been fed for a month when brought in on February 16,  2019,”  Kackley began.  “According to the inspection form,  records showed the cat didn’t see the vet until February 25.”

Severely dehydrated,  River died on the exam table.

“A dog was brought in,”  Kackley said,  “when the owner couldn’t pay for treatment of a broken pelvis.  According to the documents,  the dog was not seen by the vet for four days and was still not given the vet-recommended medications.  Inspectors said the dog was found more than a month later lying on the surgery room floor ‘listless and unable to stand.’

Another case,”  Kackley continued,  involved a dog named Luna,  brought in on January 12,  2019 after possibly having been hit by a car.

“According to the state,  records showed a vet didn’t see Luna until January 24,”  Kackley said.

Neapolitan mastiff.  (Beth Clifton collage)

Stepping in it

“In the surgery room,”  Kackley summarized,  “investigators found ‘all rooms in need of cleaning and sanitization.’  The surgery table had hair from ‘multiple animals.’

“Inspectors said a paralyzed Chihuahua had ‘free roam’ of the main surgery room and had urinated all over the floor.  Other animals also were roaming the surgery room and were observed vomiting during the inspection.

“According to the documents,”  Kackley said,  “the exam room was in a similar condition.  A back room was full of puppies with diarrhea and the floor had fecal matter ‘throughout the room, making it difficult to enter and access other animals without stepping in it.’  There was fecal matter on the puppies themselves as well as their bedding and blankets.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

Hazardous handling

Further,  Kackley reported,  “Documents show the shelter initially refused to provide the euthanasia log,  medication log,  and access to the area around the surgery room to investigators.

“Inspectors said a staff member walked a dog who had been impounded for biting a child through a customer service area,  where the dog almost bit a customer service representative in the face.  According to the documents,  records showed the dog was not current on rabies vaccinations.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

Unaltered female & male cats housed together

Further,  the Colorado Department of Agriculture inspections “found healthy animals were sharing the same space with animals being treated for illnesses,  or who were visibly ill,”  Kackley said.  “A female and male cat were housed together,  without either of the animals being spayed or neutered.  Inspectors observed the cats appeared to be six months old,”  old enough for the female to become pregnant.

“Multiple medications were found to be expired, some from as far back as 2006,”  Kackley finished.  “Other medications were specifically made for horses and cattle, which are not housed at the facility.  Inspectors said they also found some labels on the medications had faded away and some medications were not labeled at all.”

Pit bull puppy.
(Beth Clifton photo)

Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region was ousted over euthanasias due to dangerous behavior 

The campaign to oust the Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region from the Community Animal Services of Pueblo shelter and bring in PAWS for Life appears to have gained momentum in April 2017 after activists objected to the scheduled euthanasia of a five-month-old pit bull.

The pit bull’s “behavior since it arrived has been extremely high arousal,  really won’t calm down,  very frontal,  very controlling.  This is all behavior that’s concerning in an adult dog,  and even though this dog is five months old,  it concerns me even more that this puppy is showing this behavior at that young of an age,”  then-Pueblo Animal Services director Julie Justman told Danielle Kreutter of KKTV.

The pit bull puppy was eventually rehomed.

That fracas had barely settled when an organization called Reform Pueblo Animal Services initiated a media campaign in response to the May 2017 euthanasia of a five-year-old border collie mix who had repeatedly demonstrated aggression toward other dogs at the shelter,  and had flunked several behavioral assessments.

(Beth Clifton collage)

“Perfect storm of events”

After PAWS for Life relinquished operation of the Community Animal Services of Pueblo shelter,  the PAWS for Life board of directors in an April 10,  2019 social media statement blamed their failure to run the shelter successfully on a “perfect storm of events,”  and complained of having “been forced to sit quietly while being vilified and threatened by individuals both privately and publicly and through social media,  much of the hatred fostered by state and national organizations that have a far different agenda than what our vision was for the shelter.”

The apparent PAWS for Life choice to take over running the shelter was the Humane Society of Fremont County,  headed since 2014 by Doug Rae.  The Humane Society of Fremont County had not bid on the Community Animal Services of Pueblo sheltering contract,  but Rae indicated before the Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region returned to the shelter that his organization might be interested in it,  if PAWS for Life withdrew.

Doug Rae

Why Doug Rae?

Founded in 1951 by Hazel and Ralph J. Wann, the Humane Society of Fremont County currently handles about 3,000 animals per year, mostly as the animal control housing contractor for Fremont County, the cities of Cañon City and Florence, and the towns of Coal Creek, Rockvale, Westcliffe and Williamsburg.

Rae arrived at the Humane Society of Fremont County after brief and often controversial animal shelter management stints in Phoenix, Maryland;  Philadelphia, Indianapolis;  and Warren, Rhode Island.

Rae in a 2009 interview credited his interest in humane work to having met No Kill Advocacy Center founder Nathan Winograd at a Best Friends No More Homeless Pets conference in 2002.

(See Doug Rae hired at HS of Fremont County, Colorado.)

Rae was not among the eight co-signers of a March 28,  2019 joint statement entitled “Front Range shelter leadership responds to Community Animal Services of Pueblo conditions and closure.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

“Suffering unacceptable”

Opened that statement,  “The suffering that happened at Community Animal Services of Pueblo (CASP), operated by PAWS for Life,  is unacceptable.  In an effort to adhere to a damaging local ordinance,  it appears animals were allowed to suffer and die from their illnesses and injuries rather than being humanely euthanized.  The animal welfare community’s priority is to ensure these animals are properly cared for and that they are protected from situations like this in the future.

“Upon the closure of CASP, animal shelters across the front range worked together to respond to this critical situation and collaborated to help the animals in Pueblo. Animal welfare organizations who either assisted in efforts to transport these pets, accepted animals from Pueblo or are on standby to accept them,  include the [Denver] Dumb Friends League,  Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region,  Foothills Animal Shelter,  Denver Animal Protection,  Humane Society of Boulder Valley, Larimer Humane Society,  Longmont Humane Society,  Aurora Animal Shelter,  Adams County Animal Shelter,  Humane Society of Weld County and Intermountain Humane Society.

Apryl Steele, DVM.

“Regretful example”

“This is a regretful example of how the ‘no kill movement,’  when taken to the extreme,  preys upon compassionate people’s desire to protect animals,”  the joint statement finished.  “Animals deserve respect, nurturing, support, and it is never acceptable to allow them to suffer. Our entire community is deeply saddened by this situation.”

(Beth Clifton photo)

The co-signers included McHugh-Smith,  Denver Dumb Friends League president Apryl Steele,  Larimer Humane Society chief executive Judy Calhoun,  Denver Animal Protection director Alice Nightengale, Humane Society of Boulder Valley chief executive Lisa Pedersen,  Longmont Humane Society chief executive Liz Smokowski,  Intermountain Humane Society chief executive Richard L. P. Solosky, and Humane Society of Weld County executive director Elaine Hicks.

Please help us continue to speak truth to power: 

http://www.animals24-7.org/donate/

(Beth Clifton collage)

Where the Bureau of Land Management does not reign,  it’s the wild west

            ALTURAS, Calif.;  VIRGINIA CITY,  Nevada––Two hundred miles and strategic worlds apart,  on either side of the California/Nevada border,  side-by-side experiments are underway in how to most effectively prevent wild horses from being sold to slaughter when the range they inhabit is not under the jurisdiction of the U.S. federal Bureau of Land Management.

But the experiments,  one relying on legislation and the other on equine birth control, were not really intended to be experiments.

The differing California and Nevada approaches are both promoted by the American Wild Horse Campaign,  and were intended to do essentially the same thing.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Buying time for birth control

Both projects aim at keeping wild horses from being removed from the range and trucked to Mexico or Canada to be killed,  while buying time for birth control applications to stabilize or reduce horse numbers.

The experimental aspect originates from neither project having evolved as the American Wild Horse Campaign had hoped several years ago.

The outcome is that the fate of nearly 1,000 wild horses who were removed in October 2018 from the Devil’s Garden Plateau Wild Horse Territory within the Modoc National Forest may depend on the passage and application of a pending state bill,  California AB 128,  which the American Wild Horse Campaign endorses,  but which the organizations Political Animals and California Horsemen’s Alliance believe will backfire.

(Beth Clifton photo)

From the Devil’s Garden to cryptocurrency

What becomes of about 3,000 more wild horses still at large in the Devil’s Garden Plateau Wild Horse Territory may also depend on whether AB 128 passes and how it is subsequently interpreted by the courts.

The fate of about 3,000 wild horses on 67,000 acres of the Virginia Range owned by the cryptocurrency company Blockchains,  meanwhile,  appears to depend most immediately on whether American Wild Horse Campaign volunteers can dart enough mares with PZP anti-fertility treatments to keep the population from expanding.

Also of concern is the longterm stability of Blockchains as the landowner.  The technology of cryptocurrency itself is barely ten years old,  and the use of cryptocurrency is highly controversial,  likely to be much more closely regulated in coming years than it has been so far.

(Beth Clifton photo)

BLM:  partial protection vs. none

Wild horses on Bureau of Land Management property have since 1971 been managed under Wild & Free-Roaming Horses & Burros Act.

The Wild & Free-Roaming Horses & Burros Act more-or-less guarantees wild equines the right to exist on BLM range,  subject to restrictions on their numbers,  alongside cattle and sheep pastured by ranchers who lease grazing rights.

Annual budget riders attached to Interior Department appropriations bills ensure that Bureau of Land Management horses cannot be sold to slaughter,  at least not directly.

Other federal agencies,  state governments,  Native American tribes,  and private landowners,  however,  may round up and sell wild horses,  who are not protected as wildlife,  at will.

(National Park Service photo)

Stressed habitat

Several generations of Modoc National Forest administrators have voluntarily managed the Devil’s Garden Plateau Wild Horse Territory under Bureau of Land Management guidelines.

But the officially designated appropriate management level of 206 to 402 wild horses,  set in 2013,  had been exceeded by more than tenfold as of October 2018,  critically stressing the carrying capacity of the habitat in the estimation of Modoc National Forest supervisor Amanda McAdams.

McAdams favors “fertility treatment using [the contraceptive] PZP,”  she explained then,  along with “actions to adjust herd sex ratio to 50/50,”  which would slow the rate of horse reproduction.

But the Forest Service had already cut back permitted livestock grazing by 55% in 2014,  50% in 2015,  and more than 50% in 2016,  triggering litigation from ranchers in 2017.  A provisional out-of-court settlement reached in May 2018 required McAdams to steadily reduce the wild horse population and issue regular reports on her progress.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Mapping error

The American Wild Horse Campaign,  meanwhile,  has since March 2014 argued in litigation against a proposed “correction” of Devil’s Garden Wild Horse Territory mapping which would allegedly facilitate a “plan to eliminate about 40 square miles of territory and reduce the horse population by 80%,”  according to an Associated Press summary of the case.

The error,  made in 1991,  inadvertently merged two separate wild horse ranges designated in 1975,  incorporating about 23,000 acres between them that were not designated wild horse range.

The American Wild Horse Campaign has repeatedly charged that the error correction and other Forest Service actions to reduce the Devil’s Garden wild horse herds are linked to schemes to sell wild horses to kill buyers,  who would export the horses to slaughter abroad.

(Beth Clifton collage)

(See 1,000 wild horses expelled from the Devil’s Garden.)

Proposition 6 & AB 128

Technically this would violate Proposition 6,  the California Prohibition of Horse Slaughter and Sale of Horsemeat for Human Consumption Act of 1998.

The 1998 law could be enforced,  however,  only if evidence could be obtained before the horses leave California jurisdiction of specific intent on the part of the Forest Service,  horse transporters,  or horse buyers to send the horses to slaughter for human consumption.

The 1998 law does not address slaughter for animal consumption.  Horses killed for animal consumption are usually shot where they are,  then transported as carcasses.

At urging of the American Wild Horse Campaign and the Humane Society of the U.S.,  California State Assembly member Todd Gloria (D-San Diego) on December 4,  2018 introduced Assembly Bill 128,   purportedly to reinforce Proposition 6.

Political Animals and the California Horsemen’s Alliance,  who led the campaign to pass Proposition 6,  contends AB 128 will do just the opposite,  but told Gloria on April 4,  2019 that they did not even learn of the existence of AB 128 until the last days of March 2018.

Modoc wild horses.  (Beth Clifton collage)

The alleged “Not OK” corral

Lending impetus to efforts to rush AB 128 to passage,  reported Scott Sonner of Associated Press on January 16,  2019,  “The U.S. Forest Service has built a new corral for wild horses in Northern California, which could allow it to bypass federal restrictions and sell the animals for slaughter.  The agency acknowledged in court filings in a potentially precedent-setting legal battle that it built the pen for mustangs gathered in the fall on national forest land along the California-Nevada border because of restrictions on such sales at other federal holding facilities.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Fate of 932 horses up in the air

“The agency denies claims by horse advocates it has made up its mind to sell the more than 250 horses for slaughter,”  Sonner added.  “But it also says it may have no choice because of the high cost of housing the animals and continued ecological impacts it claims overpopulated herds are having on federal rangeland.”

Of the 932 horses removed from the Devil’s Garden in October 2018,  about 260 were taken to the new corral,  Sonner said.  The other 650 horses were transported to Bureau of Land Management holding pens in Susanville,  California,  where they remain under BLM jurisdiction.

(Beth Clifton collage)

What will eventually be done with any of the horses is still a question mark,  and likely to remain a question mark for quite some time.  Neither Proposition 6 nor AB 128 includes built-in foolproof answers.

Gunfight in the statehouse

Wrote Political Animals president Sherry DeBoer to Gloria,  trying to put the brakes on AB 128,  “As the original drafters and campaign directors for Proposition 6,  which outlawed the slaughter of horses for human consumption in 1998,  we must strongly oppose Assembly Bill 128.  This bill will weaken Proposition 6 by reducing the penalty for horse slaughter human consumption from a felony (as provided in Proposition 6) to a simple misdemeanor.

Bill Clinton & Sherry DeBoer.
(Sherry DeBoer photo)

“Reducing the penalty for horse slaughter from a felony to a misdemeanor is not only dysfunctional public policy, we don’t think it is  permitted under California law,”  DeBoer continued,  hinting at a court battle if AB 128 passes.

“Proposition 6 is an initiative statute and specifically did not provide for amendment by the Legislature,”  DeBoer added.  “Therefore any amendments impacting Proposition 6 may only be done by subsequent ballot measure.

“We honor your interest in the protection of horses,  but believe that you have been given inaccurate information by those who brought this bill to you,”  DeBoer finished.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Who’s the sheriff?

Wrote California Horsemen’s Alliance director Gini Richardson to Gloria,  “From one of your press releases available online,  ‘AB 128 protects wild and domestic horses from slaughter by making it illegal to have,  import,  export,  sell,  buy,  give away,  or accept any horse in California for any commercial purpose.  Violations of this being punishable by a misdemeanor.’

“Who is going to enforce,  or ever investigate, your new lessened misdemeanor penalty?  Agents of the Food & Ag Department do not have law enforcement powers,”  Richardson pointed out.

“As an original member of the California Equine Council that worked for the passage of Prop 6,  and also wrote or worked on the other codes that your bill seeks to change or add to other codes,”  Richardson concluded,  “I have to point out that the changes your bill is asking for already exist.”

The outcome for the Modoc National Forest wild horses would appear to be many chapters from resolution.

Preparing PZP vaccine dart for wild horses.  (BLM photo)

They shoot horses with PZP

The Virginia Range wild horse situation,  however,  took a turn toward resolution in mid-April 2019,  after “Nevada state assembly minority leader Jim Wheeler (R-Gardnerville) convinced Democratic governor Steve Sisolak to restore a program to enable volunteer [PZP] darters to work with the Nevada Department of Agriculture,”  wrote Reno Gazette Journal reporter Benjamin Spillman.

“The previous darting program fell apart on October 25,  2017,”  Spillman explained,  “when Nevada Department of Agriculture officials terminated a privately funded agreement that enabled volunteers associated with the American Wild Horse Campaign to manage horse issues on the Virginia Range.  At the time, agriculture officials accused the volunteers of failing to live up to their end of the deal.  Volunteers denied the accusation.

(Beth Clifton photo)

No takers for free mustangs

“After terminating the agreement, the agriculture department board voted to offer the approximately 3,000 free-roaming horses on the range at no cost to anyone willing and able to manage them,”  Spillman wrote.

But,  Spillman said,  “There were no takers,”  contrary to the common belief of horse advocates that killer buyers lurk just behind every clump of sagebrush.

Reality is that the prices paid for horses to be slaughtered are so low,  and the supply of horses cast off by the horse use industries so high,  that if a killer buyer has to catch horses before trucking them away,  there is no profit in the effort.

(Beth Clifton photo)

“Every mare on the range is pregnant”

As many as 400 wild horse foals have been born on the Virginia Range since the original PZP darting campaign was suspended.

Worse,  “Right now, every mare on the range is pregnant,”  American Wild Horse Campaign volunteer Deb Walker told Spillman.

The volunteer-managed PZP darting effort resumed,  Spillman summarized,  after “Wheeler and Jeffrey Berns,  founder of Blockchains LLC,  met with Sisolak” to explain their concern that the horse population on the Blockchains property might double in another year.

Unlike the horses on Bureau of Land Management grazing allotments,  “free-range horses in the Virginia range are considered feral or ‘estray’ livestock and fall under state jurisdiction,”  Spillman explained.  “Prior to agreements with volunteer groups,  horses rounded up from the range were eligible for auction where they could be purchased for slaughter.”

Anthony Marr & wife Shannon Wright.
(Facebook photo)

All the horses to be darted?

Added Geoff Dornan of the Carson City Nevada Appeal,  “Wheeler said Berns has guaranteed his company will ensure all the horses are darted regardless of the budget.”

That concerned British Columbia wild horse advocate Anthony Marr,  a longtime advocate of wild horse contraception “in the absence of the natural [horse] predators,”   he specified to ANIMALS 24-7,  “but if a specific project targets all the horses,  then I cannot support it.

“The ideal long term solution,”  Marr believes,  “is to restore the predators in full,  plus removing the cattle [from shared range].

Anthony Marr & wild horse friend.

“Control mechanism has been removed”

“Nature used to be a perfect system of self regulation,  but no longer,”  Marr said.  “The control mechanism –– the predators,  principally the wolf and the puma –– have been surgically removed.  Left to crippled nature alone,  population control of the wild horse would be by starvation, complete with gross and often irreversible damage to the delicate semi-desert environment,  which would lower the carrying capacity even more,  thus allowing for even fewer horses, leading to even worse roundups.

Beth & Merritt Clifton.
(Anthony Marr photo)

“Whether PZP,  SpayVac or Gonacon is the best [birth control] technique is a minor point,”  Marr continued.  “The major point is whether equine birth control is a necessity,  and it absolutely is.  Birth control opponents’ mantra ‘leave equine population regulation to nature and thus “do nothing’ is not an option.”

Please help us continue speaking truth to power:

 http://www.animals24-7.org/donate/

(Beth & Merritt Clifton collage)

New California law is amended version of bill vetoed in 2006

SACRAMENTO–California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on October 14,  2007 endorsed into law a new set of regulations for pet stores.

As with other legislation adopted in the most populous U.S. state,  the new regulations may become the default standard for the pet industry throughout the U.S.

Whether that would be good remains a subject of bitter debate among California animal advocates.

The new law,  introduced as AB 1347 by Assembly member Anna Caballero, somewhat parallels a bill promoted by the Animal Protection Institute that Schwarzenegger vetoed in 2006.

(Beth Clifton photo)

Would have protected industry but not animals

Said the API victory announcement,  “AB 1347 was brought forth by Petco and the Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council as a result of API’s sponsored legislation introduced in 2006.  The original language in AB 1347 would have protected the pet industry,  but
failed to protect animals in  custody of the industry.  API and other animal protection advocates invested considerable effort in helping to transform AB 1347 into legislation that actually elevates the standards of care for pet shop animals.”

Even in final amended form,  however,  the new regulations were opposed as an alleged roll-back of existing protections by Sherry DeBoer of Political Animals and Virginia Handley of Animal Switchboard,  who helped to lobby through the previous California pet store regulations,  the Farr-Polanco-Lockyer Pet Protection Act of 1992.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Police associations opposed bill

Schwarzenegger signed the new regulations into law despite veto requests from Los Angeles special assistant district attorney Jim Provenza,  and John Lovell,  government relations manager for the California Police Chiefs Association and California Peace Officers Association.

Explained Lovell,  “AB 1347 sets out enforcement instructions to peace officers that are burdensome,  confusing,  and make enforcement of the law problematic.  In effect,  law enforcement is required to give what amounts to a ‘fix it’ ticket,  no matter how
egregious the violations.  If those violations are not remedied,  law enforcement is only permitted to issue an infraction,  which carries no criminal consequence.  If a second violation occurs within 12 months of the first,  only another infraction will ensue.  It is only on the third violation that a misdemeanor can be filed.”

Provenza objected that amendments supposed to have ensured that AB 1347 would not roll back key provisions of the 1992 law were unclear,  containing language “which could be read to prohibit or discourage animal control officers from citing pet stores for
violations.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

“Took water from puppies!”

“They took access to water away from the puppies!” charged DeBoer.  “They did that so the puppies don’t pee.  The shop owners just don’t want to bother cleaning it up or offending customers.”

Section 122352 of the 1992 law stated that “Primary enclosures shall be constructed so they can be routinely maintained to allow animals to stay clean and to provide access to adequate food and water.”  AB 1347 deleted the phrase “and to provide access to adequate food and water.”

Under Section 122155 of the 1992 law,  pet stores still must “Provide dogs with adequate nutrition and potable water,”  but they no longer must provide access to food and water as part of the dogs’ primary habitat.  This means that the water supply system can be only a bowl,  rather than a bottle from which a dog can suck water as
desired,  and leaves inspectors with no way to verify when an empty bowl was last filled.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Space & mobility

The 1992 law also stipulated that “All primary enclosures shall provide adequate space and adequate mobility for the animal or animals housed in the enclosure.”  AB 1347 deleted the phrase “adequate mobility.”

A requirement that “Enclosures shall be observed at least  once daily,  and animal and food wastes,  used bedding, debris, and any other organic wastes shall be removed as necessary” was amended to refer only to “primary enclosures.”

Section 122360 formerly stated that “Nothing in this chapter shall be construed to in any way limit or affect the application or enforcement of any other law that protects consumers or the rights of animals.”

The reference to “the rights of animals” was replaced in AB 1347 with the phrase “animals or the rights of consumers.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

Petco prosecution

The San Diego-based Petco chain,  with more than 850 stores nationwide,  was embarrassed in 2002 when San Francisco city attorney Dennis Herrera sued the firm for what he termed “cruelty and a pattern of brazen violations of health and safety standards.”

Undercover investigations by API and PETA contributed to similar cases filed by the district attorneys of San Diego,  Los Angeles,  Marin,  and San Mateo counties.

(Beth Clifton photo)

In  May 2004 Petco settled the charges by agreeing to pay $661,754 in fines and investigative costs for allegedly neglecting animal care and overcharging customers,  agreed to spend $202,500 to install better equipment in its California stores to eliminate overcharging,  and in a separate settlement with San Francisco,  agreed to pay $50,000,  formally train staff in animal care,  and allow inspection of Petco stores in the city by independent veterinarians.

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Catherine de Medici.
(Beth Clifton collage)

Catherine de Medici might have considered wildlife poisoning schemes medieval

Let me tell you about the birds and bees,  and the cats and the rats,  and the possums and the pigs,  and the chemical-addicted descendants of Catherine de Medici at USDA Wildlife Services,  Threatened Species Strategy of Australia,  and Zero Invasive Predators of New Zealand,  who imagine they can poison their way to a world resembling not chaotic nature,  but an artificially orderly work of art.

Catherine de Medici,  1519-1589,  a leading patron of the arts and for 12 years queen of France,  allegedly poisoned her way to influence while striving continually to make peace among warring Catholic and Huguenot factions,  each of whom imagined the world might be more perfect without the rest.

“Curiosity poison baits.” (Beth Clifton collage)

Practiced tolerance

History credits Catherine de Medici with religious tolerance extending well beyond the norms of her time and place,  as well as with introducing the use of the table fork to France.

Historians also question whether Catherine de Medici ever actually poisoned anyone.  She might merely have taken advantage of the sudden deaths of various of her enemies from viral infections and ingesting contaminated food to whet a murderous reputation that kept suspect people away from her court.

At worst,  however,  Catherine de Medici poisoned her victims one at a time,  for specific reasons having most to do with self-preservation and the safety of her children.

Mass poisoning schemes

USDA Wildlife Services,  Zero Invasive Predators of New Zealand,  and Threatened Species Strategy of Australia are pursuing mass poisoning schemes aimed at eradicating entire allegedly invasive species,  over state-sized islands and even whole continents,  with substances that could kill from thousands to millions of non-target animals as well,  including humans.

These mass poisoning schemes,  moreover,  are not to be confused with the routine use of relatively mild agricultural insecticides and fungicides to protect food crops,  or sporadic use of rodenticides to protect food in storage.

Those practices,  widely recognized as ecologically hazardous since Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962,  have long since been relatively closely monitored and regulated.  The agricultural chemicals of Carson’s time have been replaced and reformulated time and again with updated versions and alternatives meant to do less collateral damage to non-target species,  break down more rapidly and surely within a few days of deployment,  and have fewer lingering effects.

(Beth Clifton photo)

Pesticides & unintended consequence

At that,  even conventional use of agricultural chemicals continues to run afoul of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

For example,  neonicotinoid insecticides,  introduced by the Swiss chemical firm Bayer AG in 1985,  were acclaimed as much less harmful to birds and mammals than insecticides in the much older organophosphate and carbamate chemical families.

Neonicotinoid insecticides over the next 30 years came to be by far the most used category of agricultural chemicals––but proved to be entirely too effective against too many insects,  killing not only those who ravage crops but also those,  especially bees and butterflies,  who pollinate them.

With 40% of invertebrate pollinators in drastic decline,  the European Union restricted use of neonicotinoid insecticides in 2013,  but the U.S. has yet to act,  despite record losses of honey bee colonies in recent years and mountains of studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals confirming the magnitude of the damage.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Curing bacon & sausage

The Natural Resources Defense Council in October 2017 filed a lawsuit seeking to cancel the Environmental Protection Agency registrations of neonicotinoid insecticides,  claiming that they were approved “without consultation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as required under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.”

But the longtime antipathy of the Natural Resources Defense Council toward “non-native” species is part of the cultural and political rationale behind a USDA Wildlife Services scheme to poison feral pigs with sodium nitrite,  euphemistically described in a January 26,  2017 media release as “a preservative used to cure bacon and sausage.”

Indeed,  sodium nitrite is used to cure a variety of pork,  beef,  and fish products,  but the use level is limited by federal law to 156 parts per million of sodium nitrite,  with intent that much less than that should actually be consumed.

One sixteenth of an ounce can kill you

However,  the World Health Organization,  International Agency of Cancer Research,  and a University of Oxford team all warned in October 2015 that consuming processed meats,  including those processed with sodium nitrite,  could lead to markedly elevated risk of contracting colorectal,  pancreatic,  and prostate cancers.

   (See Oscar Mayer leaving town after findings linking hot dogs to cancer.)

These warnings followed more than 50 years of earlier medical warnings,  including attempts to ban sodium nitrite from use in food products altogether.

Sodium nitrite has some medicinal applications,  specifically in killing bacteria,  but a dose of 4.6 grams,  about a sixteenth of an ounce,  is enough to kill either feral pigs of average weight or the average 130-pound adult human.

(From video posted to Facebook by Cami Huth of The Woodlands,  Texas.)

Collateral damage

Focusing on killing pigs,  USDA Wildlife Services intends to experimentally deploy baited doses of sodium nitrate “in early 2018 in dry west Texas and continue around midsummer in humid central Alabama,”  the December 26,  2017 media release said.

What happens when poisoned pigs are scavenged by bobcats,  coyotes,  alligators,  bears,  raccoons,  and birds of prey?

Well,  USDA Wildlife Services kills those species too.

(See USDA Wildlife Services: protecting livestock, crops, & endangered species, or just cover for subsidized hunting?)

What happens when pigs survive poisoning long enough to be shot and consumed by human hunters?

We know what can happen,  from accidents involving accidental sodium nitrite ingestion with mutton soup and milk in China in 2004 and 2011,  which killed three children,  put four people into critical condition,  and altogether sickened about 150 people.

(Beth Clifton collage)

About the feral pig menace

Apart from the widespread but ecologically unfounded view that the only good “non-native” animal is a dead one,  farmers have some reason to be concerned about feral pig proliferation.  Feral pigs can do significant crop damage,  where lack of sturdy field fencing allows them access.  Feral pigs can also transport and transmit diseases afflicting factory-farmed pigs,  as in Georgia,  Ukraine,  Russia,  Lithuania,  Belarus,  Poland,  and the Czech Republic,  where wild boars have contributed to the runaway spread of African swine fever since 2007.

(See Lithuania advised against plan to kill 90% of wild boars to fight African swine fever.)

“First reported in domestic pigs in eastern Africa in 1921,  African swine fever is harmless to humans but kills up to 90% of pigs,  causing internal bleeding and fluid-filled lungs,”  summarized Eric Stokstad in the December 20,  2017 edition of Science.  “Herds with infected animals must be culled to fight it.  The virus spreads through sick animals’ secretions and can survive for long periods on workers’ clothes and shoes or hay,  which helps it move from farm to farm.  It can also leap even farther when people transport contaminated pork,”  Stokstad added, “which will infect pigs or boar if they eat the scraps.”

(Brooke Freimuth photo)

But feral pigs do less harm than pig-dogs

But neither African swine fever,  foot-and-mouth disease,  Japanese encephalitis,  nor any other disease associated with large numbers of free-roaming pigs occurs in the U.S. or Canada at present.  Feral pigs have many predators,  including alligators,  bears,  pumas,  and not least,  the cannibalistic habits of adult boars.

Though associated with declines of some native species,  feral pigs create habitat for others,  notably burrowing animals,  and are rarely ever a threat to humans,  in contrast to pig hunters’ dogs,  mostly pit bulls,  who run amok.

(Beth Clifton photo)

Australia deploys Curiosity to kill cats

The USDA Wildlife Services’ pig-poisoning scheme,  however,  is small potatoes compared to the Threatened Species Strategy of Australia scheme to try to eradicate feral cats,  using a “new” poison called Curiosity,  chemically identified as 1-(4-Aminophenyl)propan-1-one,  nicknamed PAPP.

ANIMALS 24-7 exposed the details of the Australian putsch against cats in January 2017;  see Aussie feds inflated feral cat population 3 to 10 times to push cull policy. 

(Beth Clifton photo)

As Vox Felina blogger Peter Wolf later detailed,  the density of feral cats in Australia is about a third less than the density of Starbucks franchises in Chicago.

Compound 1080

Curiosity,  less lethal to birds than to mammals,  was developed as an alternative to the use of sodium monofluoroacetate,  better known as Compound 1080,  the most poison most widely used in “conservation” programs.

Developed in Germany in 1942,  ostensibly as a rodenticide but also used to kill human prisoners,  Compound 1080 is odorless,  has no taste,  and is lethal if ingested,  inhaled,  or absorbed through skin contact.

(Geoff Geiger photo)

Apart from the Nazi experiments, at least 13 humans have been killed by Compound 1080 accidents and use as a murder weapon.

Nixon banned it;  Reagan brought it back

Manufactured in the U.S. since 1956 by Tull Chemical of Oxford, Alabama,  Compound 1080 was commonly used to kill coyotes until 1972,  when use was prohibited,  by order of then-U.S. president Richard Nixon,  to protect wildlife.  Nixon did not, however, ban manufacturing Compound 1080 for export to nations including Australia,  Israel,  Mexico,  New Zealand,  and South Korea.

In 1985 former U.S. President Ronald Reagan amended Nixon’s order to allow the use of Compound 1080-coated sheep collars,  meant to kill coyotes as they bite the throats of the sheep.

ZIP New Zealand

But even the Threatened Species Strategy of Australia use of Compound 1080 seems sparing compared to that of Zero Invasive Predators of New Zealand,  a scheme pushed by New Zealand conservation minister Maggie Barry to eradicate all “non-native” predatory mammals by 2050,  using methods that Catherine de Medici,  an apostle of the Renaissance,  would probably have considered crudely medieval.

New Zealand has already led the known universe in Compound 1080 deployment since circa 1990,  annually distributing as much as 90% of world output per year in a thus far futile effort to exterminate brush possums.

Despite intensive poisoning,  recently explained Will Harvie,  innovation reporter for The Press of Christchurch,  New Zealand,  brush possums “eventually re-populate treated areas and repeat applications of 1080 poison are needed every three to five years.”

Map of New Zealand. While Compound 1080 has been sprayed only in the teal blue areas, brush possums are persecuted everywhere.

Killing ’em twice as dead

Therefore Zero Invasive Predators,  ZIP for short,  recently doused a nine-square-mile tract “at the confluence of the Jackson and Arawhata rivers,  south of Haast in South Westland,”  Harvie reported,  with about twice the standard volume of Compound 1080.

“There were an estimated 18,400 to 34,500 possums living on that wedge,  according to a survey done in June,”  Harvie wrote.  “Surprisingly,  there were almost no rats in the wedge.”

Two months after the Compound 1080 mega-dosing,  accomplished by helicopter,  and involving baiting all the way to the edges of watercourses instead of leaving a safety buffer to prevent fish kills and other harm to aquatic species,  ZIP boasted that “The complete removal of possums and rats appears to have been successfully achieved within the treatment area.”

Cartoon promoting “Poisoning Paradise,” a video exposé of Compound 1080 use in New Zealand.

Destroying biodiversity to save it

“This is possibly the first time that aerial 1080 has been shown to successfully remove all rats and possums from a site,”  ZIP continued in a project summary.  “If we are successful, and we also successfully develop techniques to prevent possum and rat invaders from re-establishing,  then the large-scale repeated application of aerial 1080 may no longer be necessary to protect New Zealand’s biodiversity.”

Tomtit. (Wikipedia photo)

The ZIP comment may recall,  for some,  the claim of a U.S. major that during the 1968 battle for Bến Tre city,  “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,”  reported by Associated Press correspondent Peter Arnett.

“As 1080 was used,”  Harvey noted,  “other animals were also found dead in the sample bloc – three deer and seven birds,  two of them native tomtits.”

Said ZIP chief executive Al Bramley,  “We’re not pretending those numbers are the only things we killed.”

ZIP is now planning to do similar saturation poisoning over an area four times as large.

Rat & pinky rats.  (Dave Pauli photo)

False analogy to Alberta

Harvie compared the ZIP program to how “The Canadian province of Alberta has successfully defended a line of longitude against invading rats since the 1950s,”  thereby demonstrating,  in his view,  that “it’s possible to keep an area about three times the size of New Zealand essentially rat-free.”

But Harvie concedes that “Alberta has many natural advantages when it comes to rats. Long,  cold winters suppress rat numbers.  Their spread in warmer months is stopped by the tall Rocky Mountains along the west border,  ‘badlands’ along the south border with the U.S.,  and boreal forests in the north.”

Alberta also has abundant predators,  both mammals and birds,  including foxes,  coyotes,  bobcats,  ferrets,  hawks,  owls,  and eagles,  whose usual prey include ground squirrels,  mice,  and prairie dogs,  and has a considerable number of feral cats and barn cats,  as well,  who help to do rat patrol along the relatively open Alberta border with Saskatchewan.

Without the predator help,  it is doubtful that the annual rat inspections done of every building within three miles of the Saskatchewan border could be very effective.

Kea.  (Beth Clifton collage)

Killing kea is not saving them

Meanwhile,  New Zealand pesticide policy critic Jo Pollard, Ph.D.,  charges that the ZIP strategy of poisoning “non-native” species to protect endangered birds is counterproductive––especially to protect kea,  a large alpine parrot.

“Aerial poisoning with food baits laced with sodium monofluoroacetate was found to be killing kea more than 50 years ago and the species is now on the brink of extinction,”  Pollard explains on the EnvirowatchRangitKea web site.

“In Department of Conservation studies over the last decade,  an average of 12% of marked kea have been reported dead immediately after aerial 1080 poisoning,  with a range up to 78%,”  Pollard notes.  “Now,”  with “even more intensive,  more extensive 1080 poisoning,  there seems to be little hope for the species’ survival in the wild.

“According to the Department of Conservation,”  Pollard continues,  “it is pests that are endangering kea.  Therefore the outcome of poisoning will be beneficial.  There are serious flaws with this idea.

Stoat.  (Beth Clifton collage)

Mice,  rats & stoats

“Firstly,  aerial baiting with 1080 poison is very poor at controlling pests,  including mice,  rats and stoats,”  Pollard argues.  “Mouse numbers rise almost immediately afterwards;  it is thought mice may be able to detect the toxin in food baits and that they flourish because competing species are poisoned off.

“Rat numbers are usually (not always) low immediately after poisoning,  but they breed and re-invade rapidly and within months are typically far more numerous than before, often reaching plague levels.  Stoats are sometimes killed,  sometimes not.  They have to eat poisoned prey to die,  because they do not eat the cereal baits.  Survivors and invaders can flourish post-poisoning as numbers of their main prey species––rats and mice––escalate. Surviving stoats are also known to turn to eating native birds after poisoning, when rat numbers have suddenly plummeted.

Merritt & Beth Clifton

“The Department of Conservation’s answer to this problem,”  Pollard writes,  “is to now increase the frequency and intensity of poisoning.  However that strategy does not help with the problem of non-acceptance of poisoned baits by mice.  Whether rat and stoat numbers will be better controlled is unknown.  In previous Department of Conservation operations,  repeated 1080 poisoning has become increasingly less effective because pests have developed behavioral and/or genetic resistance.

“One thing is for sure,”  Pollard concludes.  “Kea and other rare native species will be severely at risk.”

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Suspect Deborah Sue Culwell and the puppies she allegedly dumped.  (Beth Clifton collage)

Unsympathetic suspect, but shelter policies may have been accessories to the alleged crime 

           COACHELLA,  California––Deborah Sue Culwell,  54,   now facing 14 criminal charges for animal abandonment in Riverside County,  California,  did not cull well.

A Napa Auto Parts store surveillance camera on April 18,  2019 caught Culwell in the act of allegedly trying to cull seven three-day-old puppies,  already placed in a plastic bag with the top tied shut,  by driving up to a parking lot recycling center and tossing the bag into a bin in mid-90-degree heat.

Whether the Culwell approach to culling puppies was more cruel than the usual methods used by dogfighters,  backyard breeders,  and others among whom culling puppies is part of a cruel way of life can be debated.

Suspect shown flipping her hair after dumping puppies.

Hair flip

It was,  however,  more blatant,  capped by a defiant hair-flip as Culwell walked back to the white Jeep Wrangler she used to get to the recycling center and then make her getaway.

A homeless man identified only as “John” saw Culwell tossing the bag,  thought her behavior was odd,  found the puppies,  and carried them into the Napa Auto Parts store,  where a clerk called Riverside County Animal Services.

“MeoowzResQ,  a Southern California-based organization specializing in kitten and cat rescue and fostering,  agreed to accept the pups,”  reported KNX 1070.

The unidentified homeless man who rescued the puppies.

“No excuse for dumping puppies”

“There is no excuse for dumping puppies,”  fulminated Riverside County Animal Services commander Chris Mayer.  “Especially in today’s age when we or other shelters would be willing to get these animals to foster parents or rescue partners.  This was a shameful act,”  Mayer emphasized,  in a statement much echoed by many other smugly self-righteous online commentators.

Unclear,  though,  was how Mayer or any of the others imagined that Culwell or anyone else in financial and personal distress was expected to know about the alternatives.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Surrender appointments required

Advises the Riverside County Animal Services web page on “Relinquishing a Pet,”  last updated on Valentine’s Day,  2014,  “The Department of Animal Services provides a relinquishment service to the public for pet owners who are unable to keep their pets.  Each pet will be evaluated at the time of relinquishment.

“After completing an animal history form you will have a consultation with an animal care employee.  It you come in before the designated time for consultations,  you may be asked to come back later.  Refer to the list of times per shelter below.”

In other words,  Riverside County Animal Services either makes no provision for people in crisis to quickly relinquish animals they cannot care for,  or does not publicize that exceptions might be made for people who,  for instance,  have a litter of puppies who might be adoptable if admitted to a shelter.

(Beth Clifton collage)

“Don’t surrender animals if you don’t have money”

Continues the Riverside County Animal Services web page,  “A $118 Commitment Fee applies to all cats and dogs at the time of relinquishment at the shelter.  Additional fees may apply if your dog is not currently licensed.  You may be liable for retroactive or late licensing fees.  Also, please remember to bring your pets medical records and vaccine history.  If you cannot provide proof of current vaccinations,  you will be charged for vaccines needed to surrender your dog or cat to the shelter.”

In short,  if Culwell had taken her seven puppies to the nearest Riverside County Animal Services shelters,  she would have had to bring at least $826 just to get the puppies in the door,  after waiting perhaps several days for a surrender appointment.

Since the puppies were probably neither licensed nor vaccinated,  there might have been additional fees––and,  of course,  there almost certainly would have been questions concerning the whereabouts of the mother dog,  potentially leading to substantially more fees.

The suspect looked inside this bin before tossing the puppies into another bin to the right of it.  (From surveillance video.)

$5,300 to $10,000+ to go to the shelter

As the Culwell case developed,  Culwell––unless she knew about emergency exemptions not mentioned on the Riverside County Animal Services web page––would have had to shell out a minimum of $5,300 and probably more than $10,000 to stay on the right side of the law.

Meanwhile,  Culwell’s behavior and attitude captured by the surveillance camera practically dared a shocked and furious social media audience to catch and expose her,  after Riverside County Animal Services released the surveillance video on Friday,  April 19,  2019.

By Monday morning,  April 22,  2019,  Culwell,  hunted online by tens of thousands of people,  might have at least temporarily become the most detested woman in the world––and that was before anyone other than some of the those trying to bring her to justice knew her name.

Riverside County Animal Services commander Chris Mayer.

Animal control chief personally made the bust

Several social media users claimed to have identified Culwell to Riverside County Animal Services,  but the agency said in a media statement that it had tracked her down by her license plate number,  which was visible in the surveillance video.

“Deborah Sue Culwell of Coachella was arrested late Monday at the end of a three-day search after officers were able to secure an arrest warrant,”  reported Sam Benson Smith of City News Service.

“Once the arrest warrant was signed,”  Smith continued,  “Riverside County Department of Animal Services commander Chris Mayer drove to Culwell’s residence and arrested her around 5:30 p.m. on seven suspected felony charges of animal cruelty.  She also faces seven misdemeanor charges of animal abandonment.”

Not mentioned was why Mayer himself made the bust,  which most large multi-shelter animal control departments would have delegated to the field officers responsible for the district.

But television cameras were rolling.

Dog found at Culwell home.

38 more dogs at home,  seven of them pregnant

Culwell was jailed in Indio,  California,  just south of Coachella,  in lieu of posting $10,000 bond.  Culwell was scheduled to make her first court appearance at the Larson Justice Center in Indio on April 25,  2019.

“ABC News was unable to reach Culwell, and it is unclear if she has an attorney,”  reported Meghan Keneally of ABC.

“Animal Services also found 38 dogs at Culwell’s residence,  all of whom were impounded,  as officers were ‘uncertain who would care for the dogs after she was arrested,’’”  Riverside County Department of Animal Services spokesperson John Welsh told Sam Benson Smith.

“Seven of the dogs found on the scene were pregnant,”  Smith mentioned.

(Riverside County Animal Services photos)

Pups probably terrier mixes

“Most of the dogs appeared to be in somewhat healthy condition,  but some were aggressive or fearful,” said the Riverside County Department of Animal Services.

Riverside County Department of Animal Services hoped that the mother of the seven abandoned puppies might be among them.

The impounded dogs were taken to the Coachella Valley Animal Campus in Thousand Palms. Held as evidence,  the dogs will not be available for adoption until they are either voluntarily surrendered or seized through court proceedings.

Dozens of other media reported on both the puppy-dumping and the Culwell arrest,  without even visibly beginning to investigate why Culwell allegedly tried to cull the seven puppies,  usually identified as “terrier mixes” and probably part Jack Russell,  or why Culwell had 38 dogs in her home even after allegedly dumping the seven pups,  or what real-world alternatives Culwell had if,  for whatever reason,  she felt she needed to immediately reduce the number of animals in her custody.

Jack Russell terrier found in Culwell home.

No other bona fide local “open admission” shelters

Checking the web sites of the several non-Riverside County Department of Animal Services shelters within an hour’s drive of Coachella,  ANIMALS 24-7 found some that claimed to be “open admission,”  but only for residents of their own communities,  and found none that would not have charged Culwell,  or anyone else, substantial surrender fees,  or admit to accepting animals in urgent and immediate need from the public.

38 dogs found inside. (Facebook photo)

Surrender policies apparently adopted to “encourage responsible pet ownership,”  in short,  in Riverside County appear to mandate irresponsible behavior among people who for whatever reason do not have large sums of ready cash and for whatever reason feel they must give up an animal now,  not tomorrow,  the day after,  or sometime next week.

The Culwell case is only the latest of several recently reported in Riverside County involving abandonments of puppies and kittens.  Whether Culwell might have been involved in any of the earlier cases is currently unclear,  as is her apparent motivation for allegedly abandoning the seven puppies while keeping the 38 other dogs.

Amanda Culwell Carrillo & Deborah Sue Culwell.
(Facebook photo)

Who is suspect Deborah Sue Culwell?

ABC News 7 reported that Deborah Sue Culwell “has a lengthy criminal history with convictions ranging from check fraud to drug possession.”

Online records indicate that Deborah Sue Culwell moved into her five-bedroom,  2,000-square-foot street corner Coachilla residence,  built in 1952,  after residing for some time in a smaller house just up the block.

Both houses had been owned by Lynda S. Cagle,  79,  of Indio,  who was apparently in the process of selling the larger house to the Culwell family.

Both houses appear to have been occupied at some point in recent years by members of the Culwell family:  four generations in all.  Among them were Jess Willard Culwell,  80;  Myrle Ann Culwell, 73;  Deborah Sue Culwell herself;  a David Culwell,  55,  who might have been her husband;  Amanda Culwell Carrillo,  her daughter;  Joe A. Carrillo,  her son-in-law;  and a Carrillo child.

Joe & Amanda Carrillo.
(Facebook photo)

Why all the dogs?

ANIMALS 24-7 found no indication that any of the family were involved in any dog-related occupation,  business,  or “rescue,”  or even mentioned or exhibited photographs of pets on Facebook.

But video of the inside of the house where Deborah Sue Culwell was arrested showed no indication,  either,  that any of the other Culwell family were current or recent residents of that particular house,  unless their possessions were exclusively confined to rooms not shown,  and did show many dogs of various small breeds or mixes,  along with extensive property damage evidently done by dogs.

“Tile flooring inside was dirty and cracked,  there were holes in the walls,  and one of the rooms had a couch so damaged that only its wooden frame,  springs,  and a few mangled pieces of fabric were visible,”  summarized Hannah Fry and Hailey Branson-Potts of the Los Angeles Times.

Photos appearing to be of the same dog, posted by Valaria Schultz on her Facebook page, and taken by Mapiya Sky on April 16, 2019.

100 animals found at troubled “rescue” the same day

Amid the media storm surrounding the Culwell case,  only Z1077 FM,  “Community Radio for the California Hi Desert,”  appears to noticed citations issued earlier on April 18,  2019,  the day the seven puppies were abandoned,  to Moonlight Animal Rescue founder Jessica Gregory and Valeria Schultz,  20,  a resident of the property in Joshua Tree,  Riverside County,  about an hour’s drive northeast of Coachella.

Responding to a call about “a civil disturbance between roommates,”  Z1077 FM reported,  sheriff’s deputies “found 20 to 30 cats in the main living area,  as well as cages and animal feces.”

Altogether,  Z1077 FM said,  more than 100 animals were found at the scene.

Alpaca at Moonlight Ranch.
(Facebook photo)

Young mother “cited and released at the scene”

Schultz,  mother of an 18-month-old child,  “was cited and released at the scene for child endangerment,.”  Z1077 FM summarized.

“Child and Family Services provided a safety plan to get the child to a safe and healthy environment, and the woman and child have since moved out of the home.

“Animal Control issued eight administrative citations to Jessica Gregory for county code violations,”  the Z1077 FM report concluded.

Also known as Moonlight Ranch,  the location is listed by AirB&B as a rental campsite six miles from the main entrance to Joshua Tree National Park.

Jessica Gregory is at far left.
(GoFundMe photo)

Troubled history

As either Moonlight Ranch or Moonlight Animal Rescue,  the organization appears to have never filed an IRS Form 990,  detailing income and expenses.

It has,.  however,  had previous issues,  including a December 2016 fire that razed a trailer on the property,  killing four adult goats and three kids,  according to Gregory,  and an October 13,  2018 flash flood that inundated Gregory’s living quarters in mud.

(Beth Clifton photo)

Surrendering the Moonlight Animal Rescue animals to Riverside County Animal Services,  had Gregory felt over her head,  would apparently have cost her in excess of $10,000.

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(Beth Clifton collage)

What the Trump administration plans & what wild horse advocates hope to do about it

            WASHINGTON D.C.––The infamous Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,  riding a white horse,  red horse,  black horse,  and pale horse to sow Pestilence,  War,  Famine,  and Death,  are prophesied to come galloping at wild horses in the guise of Oil,  Gas,  Mining,  and Grazing in mid-summer 2019.

That is when the U.S. federal Bureau of Land Management is expected to release a long awaited new management plan for the 70,000 formerly wild horses and burros now stashed in holding pens,  after having been removed from the range,  plus the estimated 82,000 wild equines still on BLM grazing land in 10 western states.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Trump asks Congress for “full suite of tools”

“President Donald Trump is again asking Congress to remove restrictions forbidding the Bureau of Land Management from using “the full suite of tools” to manage growing wild horse and burro herds,”  summarized Greenwire reporter Scott Streater on April 2,  2019.

“That presumably includes the use of euthanasia in specific instances when horses are too old or sick or cannot be adopted or sold,”  Streater wrote,  “according to BLM’s recently released budget justification document detailing BLM’s $1.2 billion fiscal 2020 budget request.”

But further to that,  Streater explained,  the BLM budget justification asks “that appropriations language restricting BLM from using all of the management options authorized in the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971 be eliminated.”

This would allow the BLM to sell directly to slaughter the wild horses and burros who have been removed from the range and are now deemed surplus.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Congress has balked,  but now?

Language prohibiting the transfer of wild horses to slaughter brokers has been added by Congress to BLM budget authorization bills almost every year since 2003,  when a stealth rider by the late Montana U.S. Senator Conrad Burns (1935-2016),  a Republican,  allowed the BLM to sell “surplus” wild equines “without limitation.”

“President Trump has included similar requests in the last two fiscal budget cycles,”  recalled Streater,  but “Congress,  even with Republicans controlling the House and Senate the first two years of the Trump administration,  has ignored the requests.  Indeed,  the Interior/EPA fiscal 2019 funding package approved in February includes language forbidding ‘the destruction of healthy,  unadopted, wild horses and burros in the care of the Bureau [of Land Management] or its contractors.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

Twice as many horses & burros as ideal

The Bureau of Land Management believes there are now 55,000 more wild horses and burros on the 27 million acres of BLM grazing land than the appropriate management level,  set at about 27,000 since 1971.

The appropriate management level is based on the estimated carrying capacity of BLM range for horses and livestock.

While the numbers of cattle and sheep on BLM land have dropped to less than half of what they were in 1971,  cattle and sheep still outnumber wild equines by a ratio of about two dozen to one,  albeit that the cattle and sheep are usually pastured for only about half of each year,   whereas horses and burros are on the range year round.

Currently just over 61% of the total BLM Wild Horse & Burro Program management budget goes toward the care and feeding of horses and burros who have been removed from the range.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Trump wants to cut BLM funding

“The budget justification notes that Trump wants to cut BLM’s Wild Horse & Burro Program funding to $75.7 million,  from $80.5 million in 2019,”  Streater reported.

The BLM,  however,  wants to spend $40,000 more in 2020 than in 2019 to promote wild horse adoptions.

“That includes a new adoption incentive,”  Streater mentioned.  “The bureau is offering $1,000 to anyone who will adopt one of the thousands of wild horses and burros rounded up from federal rangelands.”

The BLM is also continuing research to develop “sterilization methods,  the use of contraceptives,  and spaying or gelding [horses and burros] before returning them to the range,” Streater finished.

Kitty Block & friend.  (Beth Clifton collage)

HSUS & friends

Not waiting to meet Pestilence,  War,  Famine,  and Death on the floors of the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate,  Humane Society of the U.S. president Kitty Block and Sara Amundson,  president of the subsidiary Humane Society Legislative Fund on April 22,  2019 released their own wild equine management plan.

“Since inception of the program,  the BLM has removed approximately 270,000 wild horses and burros from our public lands,  without any significant use of fertility control tools, and without a plan to ensure the long-term viability and humane treatment of wild horses and burros,”  Block and Amundson charged.

“Three years ago,”  Block and Amundson said,  “HSUS and HSLF started to work cooperatively with other stakeholders on a simple goal – find a responsible way forward.”

Among the “other stakeholders” were the American SPCA,  the wild horse advocacy organization Return to Freedom,  the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association,  the Public Lands Council,  the American Farm Bureau Federation,  and the Society for Range Management.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Four-point plan

The participating organizations agreed upon a four-point plan including “Comprehensive large-scale application of fertility control strategies to help stabilize wild horse and burro populations;  targeted gathers of horses and burros in densely populated areas that cannot sustain large numbers;  relocating horses and burros in holding facilities to large pasture facilities that provide a free-roaming environment;  and promoting the adoption of wild horses and burros into good homes.”

Said Block and Amundson in a joint statement,  “Although this proposal requires some interventions for horses that the humane community has fought in the past,”  specifically the use of fertility control,  “the comprehensive plan, as a whole, is the best path forward to protect America’s horses from an ineffective status quo.”

Agreed American Farm Bureau Federation director of Congressional relations Ryan Yates, “Each of the stakeholders involved in this proposal had to set aside some long-held positions in order to reach this agreement.  While it was difficult for us to cede some tools authorized by the Wild Free Roaming Horse & Burro Act,  including sale-without-restriction,  we are hopeful that this good-faith effort will soon be rewarded with healthy populations range-wide.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

“Threw in the towel”

Friends of Animals president Priscilla Feral,  long the most vehement opponent of contracepting wild horses,  predictably rejected the HSUS-brokered proposal,  formally titled The Path Forward for Management of the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Wild Horses and Burros.

“The ASPCA and HSUS have thrown in the towel when it comes to protecting America’s wild horses by capitulating to the Bureau of Land Management and its wild horse extinction plan,”  Feral charged.

Instead,  Feral argued that Congress should “Limit or restrict entirely cattle and sheep from grazing in wild horse Herd Management Areas;  limit oil,  gas and mining operations in Herd Management Areas;   amend the Wild Horse & Burro Act to allow wild horses to be returned or relocated to Herd Areas in states where wild horses have been wiped out;  protect natural predators such as mountain lions;  and adjust outdated appropriate management levels to accommodate more horses.”

(See Suspension of PZP test means more people could eat a horse and “Can’t fix wild horses? Kill ’em,” say BLM advisors.)

(Beth Clifton collage)

Pestilence,  War,  Famine,  and Death may find more support

Pestilence,  War,  Famine,  and Death all may have stronger constituencies in the pro-oil,  gas,  and mining Trump administration and the U.S. Senate than any aspect of the FoA proposal is likely to find,  even in the unlikely event that it might be favored in the House of Representatives.

Among the 100 U.S. Senators are 20 representing wild horse range states and long aligned with ranchers,  meaning that any proposal opposed by ranchers would need nearly two-thirds support from the rest of the Senate to pass.

Feral also failed to name any “states where wild horses have been wiped out.”  None of the 10 western states included in BLM-managed wild horse range have fewer wild horses now than ten years ago,  let alone 1971.

Rep. Chris Stewart
(Facebook photo)

“A deal with Chris Stewart”

But the American Wild Horse Campaign on April 23, 2019 also rejected the plan offered by Block and Amundson,  terming it “a deal with the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association,  rancher lobbyists,  and Representative Chris Stewart.”

Stewart is a Utah Republican,  first elected in 2013,  whom the American Wild Horse Campaign called “the leading advocate in Congress for the mass removal and destruction of wild horses.”

This is apparently because Stewart in July 2014 introduced legislation,  which did not advance,  to dismantle the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971 and instead allow states and Native American tribes to manage wild horses and burros on all federal land,  not just state and tribal land.

(Beth Clifton collage)

State & tribal management

“States and tribes already successfully manage large quantities of wildlife within their borders,”  Stewart said at the time.  “If horses and burros were under that same jurisdiction,  I’m confident that new ideas and opportunities would be developed to manage the herds more successfully than the federal government.”

Stewart failed to mention that state-level wildlife management consists mostly of selling hunting and fishing permits,  while many tribal governments have historically managed wild horses by selling them to slaughter as a cash crop.

The Yakima Nation,  of south-central Washington,  for instance,  has often sold wild horses to slaughter at least since 1953, when the Walla Walla Union Bulletin reported that the tribe had hired a helicopter to help round up 7,000 horses from the Horse Heaven Hills near Kennewick.

This was among the first recorded uses of helicopters in horse capture.

(American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign photo)

“Extinction limit”?

The Path Forward for Management of the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Wild Horses and Burros,  the American Wild Horse Campaign said,  “would require the removal of an unprecedented 15,000-20,000 wild horses from public lands in fiscal year 2020 alone.  Large-scale removals,  involving cruel and inhumane helicopter roundups,  are envisioned for several additional years to get within 20% of the BLM’s population limit of 27,000 horses on 27 million acres.”

The American Wild Horse Campaign calls this an “extinction limit,”  even though the present wild horse population has grown from fewer.

“The BLM will have control over these horses,”  the American Wild Horse Campaign statement further objected,  “and any improved holding facilities,  like ‘enclosed pastures,’  will be funded by the BLM and at the mercy of annual appropriations.

American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign president Suzanne Roy.
(AHWPC photo)

“PZP is not mandated”

“The only scientifically proven method of humane population management,  PZP fertility control,  is not mandated,”  the American Wild Horse Campaign statement continued.

“The BLM has repeatedly demonstrated its unwillingness to use PZP,”  the American Wild Horse Campaign contended,  though in reality BLM attempts to use PZP have been obstructed chiefly by lawsuits filed by Friends of Animals.

“Instead,”  the American Wild Horse Campaign  continued,  “the BLM has repeatedly demonstrated its preference for more draconian measures,  including surgical sterilization and managing wild horses in non-reproducing and single-sex herds.”

Trying to keep wild horses in single-sex herds was for decades the only non-lethal approach to birth control that was available to the BLM.  Surgical sterilization is an alternative receiving serious BLM attention only since attempts to use PZP have been thwarted by Friends of Animals opposition.

(See Why not spay wild horses? Technique has barely been tested)

(Beth Clifton collage)

“Unscientific population limits”

The American Wild Horse Campaign also objects to what it called “the BLM’s unscientific population limits for wild horses and burros,  for which the National Academy of Sciences found there was no scientific support,  and which are based on restricting these animals to just 12% of BLM lands and then allocating 80% of the forage in the remaining habitat to privately owned livestock.”

Omitted from the American Wild Horse Campaign statement,  as from, the Friends of Animals statement,  is any recognition that whatever the carrying capacity of the western range for wild horses and livestock might have been,  before recent drought years,  global warming has already ensured that the carrying capacity now––and for decades to come––will be substantially less.

Also omitted is acknowledgement that the livestock population on BLM land has already been steeply and repeatedly reduced,  while the wild horse population has continued to grow.

The American Wild Horse Campaign did note that “Removing 15,000-20,000 horses from the range and storing them in holding for just one year could add as much as $50 million to the BLM’s $80 million a year budget,”  which would in turn “make efforts to slaughter these horses in the future more likely.”

PZP developer Jay Kirkpatrick with Laura Leigh. [See Wildlife contraceptive researcher Jay Kirkpatrick, 75.] (Facebook photo)

“Subsidy for slaughter”

Wild Horse Education founder Laura Leigh was already sounding alarms about an impending wild horse apocalypse,  weeks before Scott Streater of Greenwire made the details of the BLM budget justification statement public.

Leigh on March 12,  2019,  for instance,  identified the proposed adoption incentive of $1,000 as potentially a subsidy for brokers in horses for slaughter.

“We expect BLM to present a cost comparison document,  not a range report,  to send to Congress,”  Leigh added on April 5, 2019.  “This will be used to determine how many they can capture, sterilize, release or send to holding.  The report to Congress will create the baseline for the real debate for funding in fiscal year 2020.  That report,  and the real debate, will arrive at the end of summer.

“We expect there to be no increase in funding for monitoring,  range improvements,  barbed wire removal, etc.,”  Leigh predicted.  “There will be an extremely minor increase in the use of temporary fertility control.  There will be massive removals.  We expect 15-20,000 on the 2020 gather schedule.  There will be gelding and spaying.”

Many of Leigh’s predictions were affirmed by BLM deputy director Brian Steed in Congressional testimony given on April 8,  2019.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Repackaging

Leigh dismissed The Path Forward for Management of the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Wild Horses and Burros as “a repackaging of the 2009 ‘Salazar plan’ created by the former Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar,  rebranding a 2009 Bureau of Land Management document.

“This does not address any issue on range,”  Leigh fumed.  “It addresses nothing about the faulty data,  Appropriate Management Levels,  protecting habitat,  fixing boundary lines.  This plan sells your wild horses down river.

“The entire system of public lands grazing is flawed,”  Leigh argued.  “Critical habitat is being lost to hard rock mining and oil and gas without the BLM even making a pretense of trying to identify what is critical to the [wild horse] herd and protecting it.  Any ‘plan’ that fails to address these first and foremost is fundamentally flawed and,  frankly,  spineless.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

Avoiding Armageddon

Even if all of that is true,  though,  reality is that revising public lands policy to favor wild horses over oil,  gas,  mining,  and grazing would require political transitions on the scale of Armageddon.

“In 2013,”  recalled Anthony Marr of Freedom Horse,  “the universally respected National Academy of Sciences (NAS) published a 13-point paper,  which cost $1.2 million dollars to produce, assessing the ways and means by which the Bureau of Land Management managed wild horses and burros.”

Key findings included that “BLM’s population monitoring procedure, upon which management strategies are based,  are not sufficiently ‘rigorous’ to be deemed dependable,  resulting probably in ‘underestimating the actual number of animals on the range.’”

The National Academy of Sciences agreed with the BLM,  Marr summarized,  that “the majority of free-ranging horse populations are growing at up to 15 to 20% a year,  or doubling every four years.”

Anthony Marr & wild horse friend.

“Facilitating high rates of population growth”

But the BLM also found that management practices are “facilitating high rates of population growth,”  Marr continued,  because BLM’s ‘removals hold populations below levels affected by food limits.’  In other words, BLM is over-removing horses from the range.”

The National Academy of Sciences alleged that “Predators will not typically control population growth rates of horses,”  claiming to be unable to “find any examples of wolf predation on free-ranging horses,”  but since pumas,  wolves,  and grizzly bears are mostly excluded from grazing land shared with livestock,  predators in the U.S. have not yet had the opportunity to respond to wild horse population growth.

Pumas,  wolves,  and grizzly bears are all known to prey on wild horses in coastal British Columbia and the Canadian Rocky Mountains,  where the wild horse herds are not protected by law,  have been lightly managed if at all,  and yet have not become a political issue.

This may change in parts of Alberta where predators are few,  wild horse populations are growing,  and sporadic government-directed wild horse roundups began in 2015.

“More or less evasion”

The National Academy of Sciences further found that “The most promising fertility control methods for free-ranging horses or burros are porcine zona pellucida (PZP) vaccines and GonaCon vaccine for females and chemical vasectomy for males,”  Marr reminded.

“The BLM’s reaction to this report has been more or less evasion,”  Marr charged.

Marr then appraised the BLM numbers.

“The 2014 horse/burro population was ~35,000,”  Marr wrote.   “Four years later,  in 2018,  the population was reported as 82,000.  By the doubling-every-4-years formula,  the 2018 population should have been 140,000,  which suggests that the 82,000 figure might be low,  or that repeated round-ups had cut the 140,000 nearly in half,  and that the birth control work done up to 2018 has had some moderating effect.

“But even at 82,000,”  Marr assessed,  the wild horse population on BLM land was still 53,400 over the 26,600 Appropriate Management Level” set originally in 1971.

“Pegasus forbid!”

“If it was 140,000,  it would be 113,400 over the Appropriate Management Level – Pegasus forbid!”  Marr said.

“The crucial question is:  Where to put all these over-AML horses?  Where else but the slaughterhouse?”

Bureau of Land Management holding facilities and subcontractors were able to accommodate the many equines removed from the range until 2018,  Marr pointed out,  but now have no more vacancies.

“Thus all newly rounded-up horses have nowhere to go but the slaughterhouse,”  Marr suggested,  an option he does not favor,  “except about 7% that are adopted.”

Marr believes the wild horse population on BLM land can be returned to the ecologically appropriate management level of now,  not that of 1971,  if the BLM and National Academy of Sciences work together “to scientifically determine the correct AML for [horse + cattle].”

Wild horses dig for water.
(BLM photo)

Increasing carrying capacity

Marr further projects that reducing the livestock population on BLM grazing land by only 10% could allow as many as 175,000 horses to live on the shared range without further roundups and removals.  However,  instead of allowing the horses now on the range to breed up to that carrying capacity,  Marr argues that sterilizing the horses now in holding facilities and returning them to their capture sites will occupy the carrying capacity in a manner that inhibits population growth.

This would in the long run reduce the wild horse population in essentially the same manner that releasing sterilized mosquitoes or fruit flies helps to reduce problematic insect populations,  and in a manner similar to how neuter/return works to control populations of feral cats and street dogs.

“Of course birth control will have to be administered among the entire horse population,  now fully on the range,”  Marr explains,  to maintain the sterilization ratio needed to keep the horse herds from growing.

(BLM photo)

“Contracept & release the captive horses”

“But considering field-darting to be labor intensive,  time-consuming,  expensive and not 100% effective,”  Marr says,  “plus the fact that a first shot requires a booster shot after 30 days,  which entails relocating the horse for the booster,  it would make sense to contracept the captive horses instead.

This could be done “by injection,  followed by the booster shot 30 days hence,  all in the confines and convenience of the holding facilities,  before releasing the horses back to the range,”  Marr suggests.

“Close most if not all of the holding facilities,”  Marr continues,  “while keeping the adoption program intact,  thereby releasing 90% of BLM’s annual budget of $80.6 million back to management on the range.  We are talking about at least $60 million freed up.  Removing 150,000 head of cattle from the range would cost the BLM about $2.5 million,  which now looks downright insignificant in the equation.

(Beth Clifton photo)

“The land will return to the horse”

“The removal of 150,000 head of cattle will reduce the cattle food requirement by 10%,”  Marr calculates,  “which can be transferred to the horses with or without supplemental feeding.  If supplementary feeding is required,”  to avoid over-grazing,  “it could come from the feed the captive horses would have received in the holding facilities.”

Marr further points out that his modeling of how the wild horse and livestock populations can be managed to achieve particular balances can be adjusted,  to allow for keeping more livestock on the range,  if the time frame for achieving the Appropriate Management Level of combined equine and livestock numbers is extended.

Beth & Merritt Clifton.
(Anthony Marr photo)

“In the very long run,”  Marr concuded,  “when veganism impacts beef consumption in a big way,  the land will gradually return to the horse.”

Please donate to support our work: 

http://www.animals24-7.org/donate/ 

(Beth Clifton collage)

Six people with little in common except influencing how humans see animals

Hilda Tresz,  Freddy Mahamba Muliro,  and Joel Celestine Mambou Ndou,  none of them ever famous,  in various ways devoted their lives to great apes.

Wade Hanson spent the last 24 years of his life as a humane officer.

Wallace Broecker for more than 50 years advanced scientific understanding of global warming,  including in how it affects animals,  especially sea life.

Fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld by his own admission never cared much about animals until very late in life,  yet reportedly left $195 million to his cat.

Each contributed to recognition of human ethical obligations toward animals––in Lagerfeld’s case not always intentionally.

Hilda Tresz.  (Facebook photos)

Behavioral enrichment specialist

Hilda Tresz,  56,  a Jane Goodall Institute Global volunteer and representative since 2007,  died in Nepal while on assignment for the Goodall Institute program ChimpanZoo,  Goodall Institute community engagement specialist Ashley Sullivan announced on April 27, 2019.

ChimpanZoo,  explained Sullivan,  “is dedicated to improving the welfare of captive chimpanzees through observational research,  behavioral enrichment,  and environmental education.”

Born and raised in Budapest,  Hungary,  Tresz badgered the director of the Budapest Zoo to give her a job for a year before he finally hired her,  at age 18,  soon after she graduated from high school.

Eight years later,  in 1989,  “At 26, Tresz and her husband packed two suitcases,  one filled entirely with books, left Hungary and came to the U.S.,”  recalled Public Radio International reporter Naomi Gingold in a December 2016 profile.

“She ended up at the Primate Foundation of Arizona,  taking care of 85 chimpanzees,”  Gingold continued.  “And she says the experience changed her life,  from scheming to throwing their poop at her,  to even grooming her when they decided they liked her.  It required an entirely new level of problem solving and patience.  And in the process,  Tresz became a chimp expert.

“Not long after, she moved to the nearby Phoenix Zoo,”  where Tresz eventually developed a worldwide reputation for devising effective methods of behavioral enrichment for chimps.

Freddy Mahamba Muliro

Virunga National Park ranger

Posting to social media from the Democratic Republic of the Congo,  Virunga National Park director Emmanuel de Merode on March 7,  2019 confirmed the death of ranger Freddy Mahamba Muliro during a militia attack on a ranger position in the park’s troubled central sector.

Muliro was the 176th ranger to be killed in the line of duty at Virunga National Park since 2000.  The park,  with a ranger corps of 600,  is home to more than 700 bird species,  both forest and savannah elephants,  hippos,  okapis,  lions,  and most famously,  mountain gorillas.

Joel Celestine Mambou Ndou (left) with a fellow delegate to the 2018 Africa Animal Welfare Conference in Nairobi.  (ANAW photo)

Gabon wildlife educator

Joel Celestine Mambou Ndou,  of the Central Africa National Resources Observatory in Gabon,  died in a traffic accident on December 21,  2018.

“The animal welfare fraternity has lost a partner, a passionate conservationist,  a friend and a brother.  His fun nature and humorous retorts had friends belly-up with laughter,”  memorialized the Africa Network for Animal Welfare,  headquartered in Nairobi,  Kenya.

Recalled Africa Network for Animal Welfare founder and executive director Josphat Ngonyo,  “I have known Joel, as a most passionate,  jovial and an unmatched champion in animal welfare and conservation.”

Ndou participated in the 2017 and 2018 Africa Animal Welfare Conferences,  hosted by ANAW in Nairobi.

Wade Hanson  (CBS News photo)

Humane officer

Wade Hanson,  63,  died on December 23, 2018 at his home in Pine City,  Minnesota.

A U.S. Army veteran,  “Hanson joined the Humane Society of Ramsey County as a humane agent in 1995,”  the Animal Humane Society of Minnesota announced,  “and continued in that role when the organization merged with others to form Animal Humane Society in 2007.  For the last decade, he focused on combating animal abuse and neglect in the northern half of Minnesota.  Hanson until 2018 was one of only two full-time humane agents in the state of Minnesota.”

The ANIMALS 24-7 files document Hanson’s work on a range of sensitive issues,  including alleged puppy mills,  “rescue hoarders,”  and neglect of pets by homeless people.

“Wade daily committed himself — seven days a week,  365 days a year — for 24 years to his job of being a humane agent. That’s who he was,”  recalled Animal Humane Society president and CEO Janelle Dixon. “He never lost sight of the ‘humane’ part of the work and the humanity toward animals,”  Dixon said.

Wallace Broecker.
(Columbia University photo)

Former creationist established science of global warming

Wallace Broecker,  87,  died on February 18,  2019 in New York City from congestive heart failure.

Broecker,  a geochemist,  was for nearly 67 years a faculty member at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory,  a project of Columbia University.

Broecker was often credited with coining the phrase “global warming” in an August 1975 paper published by Science magazine,  entitled “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?”

Broecker himself,  however,  often pointed out that he built on the work of others.

April 28, 1952

First use of the term “global warming”

The earliest use of “global warming” documented by NewspaperArchive was by Frank Romaine of the Register & Tribune Syndicate,  based in Des Moines,  Iowa,  in “Fewer Icebergs,”  a short news item distributed on April 28,  1952.

Wrote Romaine,  “Scientists who are studying global warming trends point out that not a single iceberg was sighted last year (1951) south of Parallel 46.”

Circumstantial evidence,  however,  suggests that Broecker may have been among the scientists whom Romaine referenced––albeit as a then newly arrived intern at what was then the Lamont Geological Observatory,  in Palisades, New York.

Radiocarbon dating

Broecker “grew up in Oak Park,  Illinois,”  according to Columbia University Earth Institute senior science writer Kevin Krajick  “His father,  also named Wallace, ran a gas station.  His mother was the former Edith Smith,”  Krajick wrote.

(Beth Clifton collage)

“Both parents were evangelical Christians who rejected modern geologic theory for the literal Biblical interpretation that the earth is just a few thousand years old.  They also forbade drinking,  dancing and movies,”  Krajick recalled.  “Broecker attended Illinois’ fundamentalist Christian Wheaton College,  then the recent alma mater of preacher Billy Graham.  While still a student,  Broecker married the former Grace Carder,”  a marriage lasting until her death in 2007,  “and spoke of becoming an insurance actuary.”

A fellow student at Wheaton,  however,  Paul Gast,  who later headed the NASA moon rock research program,  encouraged Broecker to accept the internship at Lamont,  under geochemist J. Laurence Kulp,  one of the developers of radiocarbon dating of biological materials.

Many Biblical literalists at the time welcomed radiocarbon dating,  in the belief that it would help to establish the authenticity of relics and refute evolution.

(Beth Clifton collage)

“Theo-chemist”

Broecker, initially ridiculed by fellow students as a “theo-chemist,”  earned a PhD. in geology from Lamont in 1958,  while developing data showing that water from shallow and deep parts of the ocean circulates far more rapidly than was previously believed.

“This in turn implied that the oceans could potentially affect the composition of the atmosphere,  or vice-versa,”  wrote Krajick.

Going on to investigate how the oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the air,  Broecker in his 1975 Science paper argued human activities that release carbon dioxide were already inducing climate change,  masked by the effects of a soon-to-end 40-year global cooling cycle.

Desert sled dogs.  (Beth Clifton collage)

Predicted global warming as we now see it

Broecker “predicted that the cycle would soon reverse,  and then the manmade warming on top of that would become dramatically visible,”  continued Krajiock.  “Right on cue in 1976,  temperatures started ascending along the trajectory Broecker laid out.”

Broecker went on to develop what Krajick called “a grand picture of world ocean circulation,” which normally helps to stabilize global climate.  Disruptions to the flow,  however,  such as those caused by global warming,  can bring on abrupt climate shifts.

Broecker continued to research global warming and ways to respond to it for the rest of his life.  He remarried in 2009 to longtime laboratory colleague Elizabeth Clark, who survives him.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Foil for anti-fur protest left fortune to cat

Fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld,  85,  creative director for the globally distributed Chanel brand for more than 30 years,  died in Paris on February 19,  2019,  reportedly leaving most of his $195 million estate to his cat Choupette,  star of an Instagram account and blog posted by digital marketing guru Ashley Tschudin.

Born on August 15  2011,  Choupette was made a Christmas present to Lagerfeld from model Baptiste Giabiconi,  after Lagerfeld looked after the kitten for a time while Giabiconi was traveling.

Lagerfeld for years before acquiring Choupette was a frequent foil for protest over the use of animal parts in fashion.

Lagerfeld was present in March 2005 when a protester hit Vogue editor Anna Wintour in the face with a pie as she arrived for the Chanel autumn/winter fashion show at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris,  wearing a jacket of pink-dyed Persian lamb,  trimmed with chinchilla.

(Beth Clifton collage)

“I can hardly eat meat”

Ignoring that both Persian lamb and chinchilla come from ranched vegetarian animals,  native to Central Asia and South America,  Lagerfeld fumed to media that fur comes from hunters in the far north who “make a living having learnt nothing else than hunting,  killing those beasts who would kill us if they could.”

“In a meat-eating world,  wearing leather for shoes and clothes and even handbags,  the discussion of fur is childish,”  Lagerfeld went on,  adding that animals should be killed “nicely” if possible.

“I can hardly eat meat,”  Lagerfeld then admitted,  “because it has to look like something that it was not when it was alive.”

In December 2018,  two months before Lagerfeld died,  he and Chanel head of fashion Bruno Pavlovksy told Women’s Wear Daily that the company would no longer use furs or exotic animal skins,  such as python,  crocodile,  lizard and stingray,  because of the difficulty of sourcing such pelts ethically.  Chanel is still using leather from animals killed for the meat industry.

(Beth Clifton photo)

The decision was made “because it’s in the air, but it’s not an air people imposed to us,” Lagerfeld said,  adding “there was not much fur” in the Chanel product line anyhow.

Please donate to support our work: 

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1832 oil painting by Emile-Edouard Mouchy.

USDA says pound animal giveaways to vet schools are not covered by the federal Animal Welfare Act 

            BATON ROUGE,  Louisiana;  TUSKEGEE, Alabama––Recent transfers of shelter animals to the Louisiana State University and Tuskegee University veterinary schools have allegedly been reported by shelter personnel as “adoptions” or transfers to “rescue.”

The disputed transactions appear to illustrate a perverse effect of using “live release rate” as the primary benchmark for animal shelter performance.

Dogs and cats “adopted” or “transferred” for laboratory use may indeed be alive at the time,  and may be counted as “live releases,”  but are not necessarily alive for very much longer.

(Beth Clifton collage)

How long has this been going on?

The numbers of animals known to have been transferred during 2018 from the Companion Animal Alliance in Baton Rouge to Louisiana State University and from the Russell County-Phenix City Animal Shelter to Tuskegee University are fewer than 100.

But this may be a small percentage of all such transfers made over multiple years.

Further,  the alleged motivation and methodology of the transfers could be replicated through arrangements between other shelters and other laboratories many times over,  throughout the U.S.,  with few people becoming aware of the misleading transactions.

This would have the net effect of reversing more than 70 years of progress toward ending the use of shelter dogs and cats in laboratories.

(Beth Clifton collage)

“Pound seizure” drove up euthanasia

High-volume shelter killing,  after short reclaim times,  for owner-surrendered and stray dogs and cats became the U.S. norm in the mid-1940s.  This was partly in response to a boom in pet-keeping paralleling the post-World War II “baby boom,”  which––in an era before the advent of easily accessible and affordable spay/neuter––produced surging shelter intakes of unwanted puppies and kittens.

Use of the term “euthanasia” to describe the killing,  however,  came into widespread use in response to the advent of “pound seizure.”

Universities rapidly expanding involvement in biomedical research in the post-World War II era turned to shelters as a source of dogs and cats for use in experimentation and dissection.

When humane societies balked at allowing animals to be used in painful procedures,  many states passed “pound seizure” laws,  almost all of them now repealed,  requiring any shelter holding an animal control housing contract to surrender animals to laboratories on request.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Dogs & cats euthanized before bunchers could “pull” them

The only way an open-admission shelter with public contracts could avoid surrendering live animals for laboratory use was to euthanize any animal who might be taken,  before the “bunchers” who were the “middle men” between shelters and labs could seize them.

Public opinion research eventually established that a major cause of dog and cat abandonment at large was owner guilt over surrendering animals to shelters,  knowing that they would almost certainly be euthanized,  if not sold to laboratories.

Eighteen states subsequently banned transfers of shelter animals to laboratories,  13 of them between 1976 and 1986.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Is “live release rate” the Titanic of no-kill?

Still legal in the 32 other states,  lab use of shelter animals nonetheless appeared to have receded into history until the Louisiana State University and Tuskegee University cases surfaced.  Unknown,  and perhaps unknowable from existing public records,  is whether they are anomalies and anachronisms,  or perhaps the first visible tip of a menacing iceberg.

Preoccupied with boosting “live release” rates,  shelters today often seek to suppress animal intake by various means,  while preventing dog and cat abandonment is no longer a visible priority.  Thus the factors that impelled decades of shelter opposition to sending dogs and cats to laboratories are today relatively weak.

(See Culwell case: did high surrender fees lead to Coachella puppy-dumping?)

(Companion Animal Alliance photo)

Shelter on the LSU campus

The known transactions between the Companion Animal Alliance and Louisiana State University occurred during the six months before the Companion Animal Alliance moved into a new $12 million shelter on the Louisiana State University campus in November 2018.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) initiated an investigation of animal transfers from the Companion Animal Alliance to the Louisiana State University veterinary school in October 2018,  wrote LSU Reveille reporter Bailey Chauvin,  “after receiving a complaint from former Companion Animal Alliance executive director Desiree Bender.  Shortly after Bender began working at the Companion Animal Alliance in May 2018,  she said,  she was asked to sign an invoice to transfer live dogs to the vet school for a lethal anatomy class.

“Bender refused to sign the invoice,”  Chauvin continued.  “After attempting to bar the transfer of dogs to the vet school in August,  Bender received a call from Veterinary Clinical Sciences assistant professor Wendy Wolfson, who also serves on Companion Animal Alliance board of directors.  Bender said Wolfson attempted to convince her to continue to meet the vet school’s needs, but Bender refused.”

“15 cat bodies with heads”

Bender shared with PETA a portfolio of email correspondence between Comparative Biomedical Sciences Research staff member Allison Vestal-Laborde and Companion Animal Alliance director of shelter operations Amanda Pumilia Forde.

The correspondence showed that the Companion Animal Alliance fired Bender soon after she refused to comply with a request from Vestal-Laborde for “at least 15 cat bodies from which we would need the heads.”

PETA verified the correspondence with a Louisiana state open records act request filed on October 31,  2018,  obtaining 226 pages of what it termed “responsive material.”

But Bender’s response to the order for “at least 15 cat bodies” was not included.

Wrote Chauvin,  “PETA filed a companion complaint with the East Baton Rouge District Attorney’s Office in February.  This complaint alleged the University committed criminal violations of Louisiana’s Public Records Law by failing to provide at least one email that fell under the scope of the records request.

Desiree Bender.  (Facebook photo)

Adopted?  Heads up!

“PETA also asked that the district attorney investigate Companion Animal Alliance listing some of the animals purchased by the vet school for its lethal anatomy courses as ‘adopted.’”

PETA research associate for laboratory investigations Jeremy Beckham told Chauvin that the East Baton Rouge District Attorney’s Office in February 2019 asked Beckham to re-submit the complaint to the East Baton Rouge Police Department,  then requested that the police department conduct an initial investigation and refer the findings back to the District Attorney’s Office.

Jeremy Beckham.  (Facebook photo)

PETA claimed 140 violations of Animal Welfare Act

Meanwhile,  Beckham on February 6,  2019 wrote to USDA Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service director for animal welfare operations Robert Gibbens, DVM,  “According to credible reports obtained by PETA from a whistleblower,  as well as internal correspondence obtained by PETA from Louisiana State University,  it appears that in 2018 LSU unlawfully purchased at least 70 live dogs from a community animal shelter located in Baton Rouge.

“Louisiana State University also appears to have failed to maintain the required acquisition and disposition records for these 70 dogs,”  Beckham charged.

“If PETA’s allegations are substantiated,  [this] would give rise to at least 140 separate violations of the Animal Welfare Act.”

Bender told PETA that Louisiana State University paid the Companion Animal Alliance $40 apiece for live dogs and $20 for the remains of dogs who had been euthanized,  Beckham summarized.

2018 Companion Animal Alliance shelter data. Note absence of a line designating transfers to LSU.

“No invoices, intake forms, or other official records”

“Included among the responsive material,”  obtained by PETA through the open records act request,  Beckham continued,  “were a number of email exchanges,”  chiefly between Alee Vestal-Laborde and Amanda Pumilia,  which “appear to confirm that LSU routinely procured both live and dead animals from the Companion Animal Alliance for use in training and/or research in 2018,  and may be continuing to do so.

“Despite all of this correspondence,  which clearly indicates LSU’s routine procurement of live dogs from the Companion Animal Alliance,  Louisiana State University provided PETA with no invoices,  intake forms,  or other official records documenting the acquisition of these dogs, even though such paperwork should have fallen under the scope of PETA’s request,”  Beckham said.

“On January 15,  2019,  PETA submitted an additional records request for these records,”  Beckham wrote,  “wherein we identified each of the 70 dogs,  individually,  by their unique identification number.  Louisiana State University replied that it had ‘no LSU public records responsive to [PETA’s] request.’ ”

(Beth Clifton collage)

PETA asked for $1.6 million fine

However,  Beckham pointed out,  “7 U.S.C. § 2137 states that it ‘shall be unlawful for any research facility to purchase any dog or cat from any person except an operator of an auction sale subject to section 2142 of this title or a person holding a valid license as a dealer or exhibitor…pursuant to this chapter.’

“As a community animal shelter,  the Companion Animal Alliance does not possess a valid USDA license as a dealer or exhibitor,”  wrote Beckham.  “Second,  even if this were a lawful source, 9 C.F.R. § 2.31 requires that Louisiana State University ‘make,  keep, and maintain records or forms which fully and correctly disclose…information concerning each live dog or cat purchased or acquired,  transported,  euthanized,  sold or disposed of by the research facility.’

“Further,”  Beckham said,  “the correspondence obtained by PETA strongly suggests that Louisiana State University personnel often intended on using and killing the dogs almost immediately after the animals arrived at the facility.

“If this is the case,  Louisiana State University would also be in noncompliance with the Animal Wefare Act requirement that research facilities hold dogs obtained from non-USDA licensed or exempt sources for a period of at least ‘5 full days, not including the day of acquisition…before they may be used by the facility.’”

“If PETA’s allegations are found to be true,”  Beckham concluded,  “we are asking that APHIS assess the maximum penalty for these 140 violations of $1,594,600.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

LSU responds

Responded Louisiana State University communications manager Ginger Guttner,  “The LSU School of Veterinary Medicine obtains euthanized animals from animal shelters;  the cadavers are used to train veterinary students,  whose life work is dedicated to serving and saving animals.  In some cases, live animals are brought to the veterinary school for euthanasia.  In all of these cases, the animals were already scheduled for euthanasia.  In all cases,  the shelter determines which animals will be euthanized and why.  That totally falls on them.”

Agreed Louisiana State University media relations director Ernie Ballard,  “Obtaining animals from animal shelters for use in teaching does not violate the Federal Animal Welfare Act.”

Christel Slaughter.
(Facebook photo)

Companion Animal Alliance responds

Said Companion Animal Alliance board chair Christel Slaughter in a prepared statement, “No animal has ever been euthanized to ‘fill an order’ from the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine.  In accordance with Association of Shelter Veterinarians guidelines,”  Slaughter continued, “CAA procedures allow for cadavers to be delivered to LSU for educational purposes only.

“It is common practice to reimburse shelters for transport costs and incidental expenses,”  Slaughter said.  “However,  the Companion Animal Alliance no longer accepts the $40 per animal reimbursement.

“Last summer,”  Slaughter acknowledged,  “the Companion Animal Alliance board was made aware that,  on occasion,  CAA provided live animals already scheduled for euthanasia to the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine on a limited basis.  However,  no animals were used for educational purposes or teaching while alive.

“While this does not violate the Federal Animal Welfare Act,  the Companion Animal Alliance board voted unanimously on October 7,  2018 to discontinue this practice and establish formal policies to prevent any further causes for concern,”  Slaughter said. “The transfer of living animals to the vet school was altogether discontinued at that meeting,  which took place prior to the move to the new shelter at LSU.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

Did Companion Animal Alliance need Class B permit?

Despite the claimed policy changes,  wrote Chauvin,  “Slaughter said the Companion Animal Alliance was contacted by the USDA on October 29,  2018,  who informed the shelter they needed a Class B license,  the same license they would need to sell live animals to the vet school.”

A “Class B” license holder is a re-seller of animals obtained from any source other than breeding.  “Class A” license holders are breeders.

The “Class A” and “Class B” distinctions were created by the Laboratory Animal Welfare Act of 1966,  which was in 1971 expanded into the present Animal Welfare Act.

While “Class B dealer” was once widely used as a virtual synonym for “supplier of dogs and cats to laboratories,”  most “Class A” and “Class B” dealers today are in the pet industry.

The National Institutes of Health in February 2012 quit funding experiments using cats from random sources,  including pounds,  shelters,  and “Class B” dealers.  This policy was extended to dogs on October 1, 2014.

(Beth Clifton collage)

First USDA-APHIS said “Yes”

Continued Chauvin,  “After Companion Animal Alliance lead veterinarian Sarah Hicks responded to the USDA seeking further clarification,  the USDA sent a letter in November 2018 stating that because the Companion Animal Alliance transfers animals to other rescue groups that adopt those animals out for a fee,  the shelter should apply for the Class B license.”

The Companion Animal Alliance applied for the Class B license in December 2018.

“PETA received a leaked copy of its application in February,”  Chauvin said,  “and began drafting a letter to the USDA urging them to deny the application.  PETA discussed this with news reporters on February 28,  2019,”  Chauvin added,  “and about a week later the Companion Animal Alliance withdrew its application for the license.

“According to a statement on the Companion Animal Alliance website,”  Chauvin recounted, “the shelter withdrew the application after being informed by ‘knowledgeable transport partners and other national animal welfare experts’ that they did not need a Class B license because the Companion Animal Alliance is the public animal shelter for East Baton Rouge Parish.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

Then USDA-APHIS said “No.”

Confirmed USDA-APHIS staff member David M. Neely in an April 2,  2019 response to Hicks,  “APHIS previously sent correspondence notifying you that you may need to obtain a USDA license or registration from our Agency. Based upon further review of information provided by you to APHIS concerning your business model and activities,  you do not require a USDA license or registration.”

In short,  USDA-APHIS accepted the Companion Animal Alliance contention that the transfers of dogs and cats to the Louisiana State University veterinary school,  for which the shelter was reportedly reimbursed about $3,500,  do not constitute sales.

Because those transactions are not “sales,”  the Animal Welfare Act record keeping requirements that pertain to Class B license holders do not apply.

This interpretation of the Animal Welfare Act could enable any shelter,  anywhere,  to “adopt out” or “transfer to rescue” dogs and cats who are actually going to laboratory use,  and count those dogs and cats as “live releases,”  with no risk of getting caught by organizations such as PETA,  Stop Animal Exploitation Now,  and the White Coat Waste Project,  who routinely scrutinize Animal Welfare Act filings.

(Beth Clifton collage)

LSU sues whistleblower

Instead,  discovering clandestine transfers of dogs and cats would occur entirely though “whistleblowers” coming forward with documentation,  at risk to their jobs and careers and possibly exposing themselves to lawsuit.

The Companion Animal Alliance did in fact sue Bender on March 27,  2019,  Rachel Thomas of WAFB 9 News in Baton Rouge reported.

“According to the lawsuit,”  said Thomas,  Bender “took without permission ‘numerous items’ that belonged to the Companion Animal Alliance,”  which may include the documentation Bender shared with PETA,  and “began harassing the animal shelter as well as Companion Animal Alliance veterinarian Sarah Hicks and director of operations Amanda Pumilia through social media accounts.  Included in the lawsuit were screenshots of posts Bender created under a Facebook account named Companion Animal Alliance:  Shocking Truth Exposed.”

The Facebook account as of May 1,  2019 had 677 followers.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Blew whistle before

Bender,  a longtime Arkansas regional representative for the Humane Society of the U.S. before becoming Companion Animal Alliance executive director,  had already been a whistleblower in her previous role as founding director of Where Animals Run,  a pit bull rescue near Little Rock.

Beginning on October 12,  2005,  about six weeks after Hurricane Katrina,  Bender tried repeatedly to alert rescue organizations working in New Orleans that they were sending dozens of pit bulls to a purported sanctuary called EDNAH that had already been red-flagged for alleged neglect by the Humane Society of North Central Arkansas for about three years.

Pasado’s Safe Haven,  of Sultan,  Washington,  whose New Orleans rescue team had sent about 50 pit bulls to EDNAH,  threatened to sue Bender––until Baxter County Sheriff John Montgomery found 477 dogs packed into the two-acre EDNAH site,  as many as 100 of the dogs running loose.  One dog was found dead.

EDNAH cofounder Tammy Hanson,  then known as Tammy Doneski,  had been convicted in Chicago in 1994 of felonious impersonation of a medical doctor.

She and her husband William Hanson were eventually convicted of multiple EDNAH-related offenses,  jumped bail,  and were finally apprehended in Vermont in 2009.  Tammy Hanson then sued Montgomery;  that case was dismissed in 2014.

           (See Last Hurricane Katrina dog evacuation case ends in Arkansas.)

Companion Animal Alliance has troubled history

Founded in 2010 to house animals for East Baton Rouge City & Parish,  the Companion Animal Alliance handles about 9,000 animals per year,  including horses,  wildlife,  and exotic species as well as dogs and cats.

The Companion Animal Alliance web site boasts of a “program modeled by the Humane Society of the United States [that] targets specific low-income zip codes to offer pet education and medical care including spay/neutering”;  a program undertaken “in partnership with Our Lady of the Lake Cancer Center” that matches foster pets with cancer survivors’  a transport program “in collaboration with the American SCPA,”  which “helps transport lost and abandoned animals to northeastern partner shelters”;  and a neuter/return program for feral cats.

But the Companion Animal Alliance has also had a troubled history.

Peter Wolf.  (Facebook photo)

“From the start there were problems”

“When the Companion Animal Alliance took over sheltering responsibilities, it was with the intention of making Baton Rouge a no-kill community.  From the start,  however,  there were problems,”  noted Vox Felina blogger Peter Wolf in August 2012.

The first Companion Animal Alliance executive director,  Laura Hinze,  resigned after just two months,  Wolf recalled,  after the East Baton Rouge city council “publicly scolded Hinze and the Companion Animal Alliance over photos and complaints detailing inhumane conditions and overcrowding.”

Successor Debbie Pearson lasted only until September 2012.  Her successor,  Kimberly Sherlaw “was fired in December 2012 amid allegations by employees that she was a poor manager and was directing staff to violate veterinary protocols,”  reported Baton Rouge Advocate staff writer Rebekah Allen.

The next Companion Animal Alliance executive director,  Beth Brewster,  retired in 2018 after five years on the job.  The current Companion Animal Alliance executive director,  Jillian Sergio,  returned to the organization in April 2019 after several months as manager of the Routt County Humane Society shelter in Steamboat Springs,  Colorado.  Sergio previously held a variety of positions at the Companion Animal Alliance from 2015 to June 2018.

(See How Shelter Pets Are Brokered for Experimentation:
Understanding Pound Seizure by Allie Phillips.)

State legislation introduced

Responding to the current fracas,  Louisiana state representative Jerome “Zee” Zeringue (R-Houma) on March 29,  2019 “filed a bill that would prohibit rescue shelters from providing live animals to facilities that use them for research,”  and “would also prohibit shelters from euthanizing animals for the sole purpose of transferring their carcasses for research,”  reported Kim Chatelain of The Times-Picayune.

“While Zeringue’s bill does not prohibit dead animals from being turned over for research,”  Chatelain wrote, “it says no ‘animal shelter or other person shall euthanize an animal for the sole purpose of transferring the carcass to a research facility, biological supply facility or animal dealer.

“It also says that no shelter or person that accepts animals from the public or takes in strays shall provide living animals to facilities or dealers ‘for the purpose of research, experimentation or testing,”  and “requires any shelter that turns over dead animals for research to post a sign that advises people of the practice.”

Tuskegee Institute first graduating vet class, 1949.

Tuskegee vet school lab is a rescue?

Transfers of dogs and cats from the Russell County-Phenix City Animal Shelter to the Tuskegee University veterinary school came to light in September 2018,  after Russell County resident Tina Hively found that her family’s missing seven-year-old Lab/pit bull Sheba had been impounded a week earlier.

“By the time I found out she had been at the Russell County animal shelter,  her seven day stray hold was up,”  Hively told Mikhaela Singleton of WRBL News 3 in Columbus,  Georgia.

The shelter “had already sent Sheba to the Tuskegee University College of Veterinary Medicine to be used as surgery practice,”  Singleton explained.

Hively told Singleton,  Singleton said,  that “after several calls to the Tuskegee vet school, she connected with a professor who was able to locate Sheba in the holding kennels.”

But when Hively “asked the shelter for answers,”  Singleton reported,  “she was met with mixed answers.”

Specifically,  Hively said,  a shelter staff member “wanted to tell me she had been sent to a rescue.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

“To save as many dogs as we can”

Said Phenix City Police Chief Ray Smith in a written statement,  “As for the Tuskegee Veterinary School picking up animals from our shelter,  I can verify that this private school,  governed and licensed by the Alabama Veterinary Board,  does from time to time pick up animals from our shelter.  The animals they pick up are on the list to be euthanized.

“In an attempt to save as many as we can,  we often provide dogs to several organizations,  including the Russell County Humane Society and other shelter groups,”  Smith continued.  “The animals are not ‘seized’ by these organizations and the city does not charge for these organizations to pick up the animals. We only allow legitimate shelter groups or approved veterinarians licensed by the Alabama Veterinary Board to pick up animals from our shelter.

“The Tuskegee Veterinary School is a legitimate veterinary organization,”  Smith added “and must abide by the same ethical standards as any veterinary office.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

How many?

How many dogs per year are sent from the Russell County-Phenix City Animal Shelter to the Tuskegee University veterinary school?

Neither the Russell County-Phenix City Animal Shelter nor the Tuskegee University College of Veterinary Medicine appears to have disclosed this information.

If such transactions are not subject to the federal Animal Welfare Act,  they will not have to disclose it.

This 1966 LIFE magazine photo essay by Stan Wayman turned the tide of public opinion against pound seizure, leading to the passage of the Laboratory Animal Welfare Act.

Animal Welfare Act originated from similar cases

Ironically,  the Animal Welfare Act originated in response to similar cases.  Five times between July 1965 and February 1966,  Animal Welfare Institute investigator Fay Brisk and others traced specific missing dogs to laboratories.

Her investigations inspired Life magazine photographer Stan Wayman to produce an eight-page photo essay “Concentration Camps for Dogs,”  focusing on bunchers who collected dogs for sale to laboratories.

Merritt & Beth Clifton

The Wayman essay is generally credited with securing passage of the Laboratory Animal Welfare Act in August 1966,  amended into the much broader Animal Welfare Act of today in 1971.

Please donate to support our work: 

http://www.animals24-7.org/donate/ 

(Beth Clifton collage)

But if a pit bull kills you in Washington state,  you can now have your remains composted

            OLYMPIA, Washington––Between issuing campaign statements as one of 21 contenders for the 2020 Democratic nomination to run for U.S. president,  and signing a bill allowing Washingtonians to have their remains composted,  Washington governor Jay Inslee on May 1,  2019 authorized into law HB 1026,  overturning restrictions now in effect in 27 Washington cities on possession of pit bulls,  and sometimes other dangerous dog breeds too.

Jay Inslee is the one in the middle.
(Beth Clifton collage)

83-year-old woman lost ears to pit mixes even as Inslee signed the bill

Even as Inslee scribbled,  in Tacoma,  just 30 miles north of the Washington state capitol in Olympia,  “An 83-year-old woman experienced permanent disfigurement after being attacked by two pit bull mixes,”  KIRO 7 television news reported.

Added Fox News Q13,  “The woman, who asked not to be identified,  has severe injuries to her face,  neck and head.  Her daughter told Q13 she has more than 20 staples in her head––and both of her ears will have to be reconstructed.  The woman said her neighbor’s grandson owns two pit bulls. The dogs escaped from a backyard and attacked her while she was walking.”

Makes AKC “Canine Good Citizen” test the standard

In many ways a contradiction in terms,  HB 1026 opens with a lengthy preamble which “recognizes that local jurisdictions have a valid public safety interest in protecting  citizens from dog attacks,”  but declares that “a dog’s breed is not inherently indicative of whether or not a dog is dangerous.”

HB 1026 then makes the American Kennel Club Canine Good Citizen Test the standard for assessing dog behavior in Washington state,  apparently oblivious to the reality that the AKC itself exists in recognition of breed-specific differences in both dog behavior and dog appearance.

The ASPCA pioneered the use of behavior tests to promote pit bull adoptions. (See Did ASPCA discover certifying SAFER dog screening might be dangerous?)
(Photo:  From ASPCApro video)

But other tests are allowed

States HB 1026, “A city or county may not prohibit the possession of a dog based upon its breed,  impose requirements specific to possession of a dog based upon its breed,  or declare a dog dangerous or potentially dangerous based on its breed unless all of the following conditions are met:

“(a) The city or county has established and maintains a reasonable process for exempting any dog from breed-based regulations or a breed ban if the dog passes the American Kennel Club canine good citizen test or a reasonably equivalent canine behavioral test as determined by the city or county;

“(b) Dogs that pass the American Kennel Club canine good citizen test or a reasonably equivalent canine behavioral test are exempt from breed-based regulations for a period of at least two years;

Joshua Phillip Strother, 6, killed on July 7, 2015 by a pit bull rehomed by the Asheville Humane Society after passing the ASPCA’s SAFER test.

“(c) Dogs that pass the American Kennel Club canine good citizen test or a reasonably equivalent canine behavioral test are given the opportunity to retest to maintain their exemption from breed-based regulations; and

No dog flunks

“(d) Dogs that fail the American kennel club canine good citizen test or a reasonably equivalent canine behavioral test are given the opportunity to retest within a reasonable period of time,  as determined by the city or county.”

The devil is in the details.  What is “a reasonably equivalent canine behavioral test as determined by the city or county” leaves the door open to cities and counties accepting,  as a matter of convenience,  tests such as the so-called SAFER test promoted by the American SPCA.

Animal behaviorist Emily Weiss developed and introduced the SAFER test in 1999-2000,  amid complaints by pit bull advocates that too many pit bulls were failing older behavioral screening tests developed by Sue Sternberg of Rondout Kennels and others.

(See Did ASPCA discover certifying SAFER dog screening might be dangerous?)

(Beth Clifton collage)

39 people killed by 65 dogs who passed “equivalent” tests

Thirty-nine people are known to have been killed by 65 adopted dogs who had passed SAFER and/or other “equivalent” safety tests since 2010.

Among the 65 purportedly “safe” dogs who were rehomed,  but went on to kill someone,  were 43 pit bulls,  four dogs in the Presa Canario/bull mastiff category,  four Rottweilers,  three “English bull dogs,”  who may have been the “Olde English bulldog” pit bull variant rather than the brachiocephalic dog usually thought of as an “English bull dog”;  two German shepherds;  two wolf hybrids;  and one each of Akita,  Boerboel,  boxer,  Doberman,  golden retriever,  husky,  and unknown mix of breeds.

Kyna Marie Pamela Deshane

Sponsor had pit bull,  now has Rottweiler

“Poulsbo representative Sherry Appleton,”  at 76 among the oldest members of the Washington state legislature,  “fought three years to pass HB 1026,”  noted KIRO television news reporter Essex Porter.

“Appleton owned a pit bull for years.  She now has a Rottweiler,”  Porter mentioned.

This was four days after a Rottweiler owned by a family friend killed 1-year-old Kyna Marie Pamela Deshane,  of Ely,  Nevada,  and one day before a family pit bull killed 2-year-old Isaiah Geiling,  of Louisville,  Kentucky,  several weeks after previously injuring Geiling’s ear.

“People love these dogs,”  Appleton told Porter.  “There wouldn’t be so many mixes of pitties and other dogs,  22 million,  if they were a problem,”  Porter insisted.

Washington state legislator Sherry Appleton.

Bad math & low sterilization rate

In actuality there are currently about 4.4 million pit bulls and pit mixes in the U.S.,  according to the 2018 ANIMALS 24-7 survey of 11.5 million classified ads offering dogs for sale and 3.7 million classified ads offering dogs for adoption.

(See 2018 dog breed survey: at least 41% of U.S. pit bull population are seeking homes.)

And pits and pit mixes are as plentiful as they are––with about one in five in an animal shelter at any given time––primarily because the pit bull sterilization rate,  at barely 20%,  is markedly below the 70%-plus sterilization rate for all other dog breeds combined.

(Beth Clifton photo)

Inverse moral logic

Continued Porter,  “Asked why she didn’t favor leaving [dog breed regulation] up to localities as in the past,  [Appleton] responded,  ‘Because it discriminates against families.  If you go to move into a city,  the 27 of them that ban pit bulls or pit bull mixes or dogs that look like pit bulls,  then you are discriminating against the family because the family would like to move into your city.’”

Failing to recognize the right of others to be safe from pit bulls and other dangerous dogs before they attack,  Appleton displayed inverse moral logic comparable to the arguments she long has made in attempting to decriminalize possession of small amounts of addictive and otherwise dangerous drugs purportedly obtained for personal use.

This would allow dealers who succeed in disposing of large amounts just before being arrested to walk without charges.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Misrepresented 95 years of U.S. Supreme Court decisions

Earlier,  testifying before the Washington House Judiciary in 2015 in support of her first bill to ban breed-specific legislation,  Appleton misrepresented 95 years of relevant jurisprudence from the Supreme Court of the United States so completely as to invert the entire meaning of it.

Asserting that pit bulls are “gentle, loyal, and great with kids,” Appleton argued that “In 1920, the Supreme Court of the United States found that it was unconstitutional to have breed-specific ordinances and that cite was Nicchia v. People of the state of New York 254 US 228 (1920).”

In truth,  Nicchia v. New York agreed with the 1897 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Sentell v. New Orleans & Carrollton R. Co.,  which affirmed that government officials may shoot and kill loose dogs who pose a danger to the community.

Montgomery County dog warden Mark Kumpf with pit bull advocate Jane Berkey, who helped Kumpf to undo the Ohio law recognizing pit bulls as inherently “vicious” dogs.

U.S. Supreme Court upheld Ohio pit bull law,  but legislators undid it anyway

On February 19, 2008 the U.S. Supreme Court again upheld the constitutionality of breed-specific dog regulation,  without revisiting past jurisprudence,  by refusing to hear an appeal of Toledo vs. Tellings, a challenge to the former Toledo ordinance limiting possession of pit bull terriers to one per person, and requiring that pit bulls be muzzled when off their home property.

The Toledo ordinance was repealed in October 2010 after a long campaign led by Toledo Blade publisher and pit bull owner John Robinson Block.

Block campaigned on,  along with Montgomery County dog warden Mark Kumpf,  the Best Friends Animal Society,  and the New York-based pro-pit bull Animal Farm Foundation,  until in May 2012 the Ohio legislature prohibited any breed-specific dog safety legislation.

Mark Kumpf & pit bull.

“Pit bulls have a new best friend in Ohio”

“Pit bulls have a new best friend in Ohio: lawmakers. Elsewhere, some officials are on the other side of the fence,”  reported Rene Lynch of the Los Angeles Times.  “A new Ohio law protects pit bulls from being labeled as ‘vicious’ dogs simply because they’re pit bulls. From now on, dogs in Ohio can be labeled ‘vicious’ only if they do something to warrant it,”  meaning actually injure or kill someone.

“The law change comes,”  Lynch noted,  “just days after the fatal mauling of a 3-day-old child who was momentarily left alone with the family’s pit bull-mix in their Beaverdam,  Ohio,  home.”

The pit mix killed Makayla Darnell in her swing in the family living room while her parents were nearby in the kitchen,  said coroner’s investigator Steve Kahle.

(Beth Clifton collage)

New Ohio Supreme Court case

Almost a decade and at least 10 more human fatalities inflicted by pit bulls later,  the Ohio Supreme Court is expected to soon hear arguments as to whether a pit bull can even be designated “dangerous” under the 2012 legislation before the pit bull harms someone.

Currently,  dogs in Ohio in effect get one “free bite” before being deemed dangerous,  and may not be deemed dangerous even then.

But the Cincinnati City Solicitor’s Office is challenging that interpretation.

“In May 2016,  Prince Bane the pit bull was accused of biting a woman’s hand,”  explained Cincinnati Enquirer reporter Max Londberg.  “Prince Bane’s owner,  Joseph Jones,   was found guilty of failing to confine a dangerous dog,  based on evidence that Prince had bitten before,  according to documents filed with the Ohio Supreme Court.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Reversed conviction means no help for victim

“But the First District Court of Appeals rejected the conviction because Prince had never formally been designated as ‘dangerous’ in a court setting.”

The Cincinnati City Solicitor’s Office contends that the wording of the Ohio statute “does not require a previous designation of ‘dangerous’ to charge a dog owner with failing to confine a dangerous dog,”  wrote Londberg.

“At stake is whether the woman whose hand was bitten will receive restitution,”  Londberg finished.  “Jones’s initial conviction is a fourth-degree misdemeanor.  But if he wins his appeal,  it will be lowered to a minor misdemeanor,”  which “doesn’t allow for paying recompense to the victim, according to court documents.”

Klonda Richey

Fatal attacks

Allegedly unforeseen consequences of the repeal of all breed-specific legislation in Ohio included proliferation of breeds generally recognized as dangerous,  if not necessarily by law,  along often lackadaisical response to dangerous dog complaints by law enforcement if no one was actually injured.

Under Mark Kumpf,  Montgomery County dog warden from 2006 through 2018,  the Montgomery County Animal Resource Center in particular developed a reputation for slow and inadequate response to complaints about dangerous dogs.

Four people died from dog attacks in Montgomery County during the Kumpf years,  three of them involving dogs who had been the subjects of repeated prior complaints.

Jonathan Quarles Jr., 7 months, killed by family pit bull in Dayton, Ohio.

Klonda Richey,  Jonathan Quarles Jr. & Maurice Brown

Klonda Richey,  57,  was killed by in February 2014 her neighbors’ two dogs,  variously identified in court documents as “large-breed pit bulls,  mastiffs,  or cane corsos.”

A pending lawsuit against Kumpf and Montgomery County charges that Richey “made approximately 13 calls to the Montgomery County Regional Dispatch Center and at least 11 calls to the Animal Resource Center” seeking protection from the dogs who killed her in the months before her death,”  summarized Dayton Daily News staff writer Chris Stewart.

Jonathan Quarles Jr.,  just seven months old,  was killed in July 2014 by a pit bull who had previously attacked a mail carrier and another dog,  in separate incidents.   The pit bull owner,  Kimiko Hardy,  had recently completed a two-and-a-half-hour course on responsible dog ownership taught by Mark Kumpf.  Convicted of six related charges,  Hardy was in June 2016 sentenced to serve three years in prison.

Maurice Brown

Maurice Brown,  60,  was killed in April 2017 by a pit bull from an address where pit bulls had been the subject of repeated complaints since 2011,  including in one instance after a nine-year-old girl was mauled.

(See Kumpf out, but new bill won’t undo harm he did to Ohio dog law.)

More dogs means no cats accepted

Post-Kumpf,  “Because of an influx of dogs, the resource center has limited cat space,”  reported Ethan Fitzgerald of  WDTN television in Dayton,  Ohio,  on April 30, 2019.

Therefore,  Fitzgerald reported,  “The Montgomery County Animal Resource Center will no longer handle cats effective immediately.  Now the community lacks a quick place to drop cats off.”

Merritt & Beth Clifton

The Humane Society of Greater Dayton and the Society for the Improvement of Conditions for Stray Animals,  in Kettering,  accept some cats,  but only by appointment and charge surrender fees of $30-$75 per cat.

In addition,  the Society for the Improvement of Conditions for Stray Animals web site indicates that it rarely accepts cats of more than 12 weeks of age and cats who have lived outdoors.

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Christine Liquori & Ryan Hazel.
(Beth Clifton collage)

Thought they knew the risks…

            FORT PIERCE, Florida;  DIGHTON,  Massachusetts—Killed in unwitnessed dog attacks on May 9,  2019 and May 10,  2019,  respectively,  Christine Liquori,  52,  of Port St. Lucie,  Florida and Ryan Hazel,  14,  of Rehobeth,  Massachusetts,  had almost nothing in common––except that they were alone in kennel facilities with one or more dogs of known dangerous breeds.

Liquori was the tenth U.S. pit bull fatality of 2019.  Hazel was the tenth victim of a fatal attack inflicted by dogs of other breeds.

Liquori,  52,  a volunteer and longtime outspoken pit bull advocate,  bled to death from injuries suffered while she walked or exercised a pit bull alone in a fenced play area beside the older of the two Humane Society of St. Lucie County shelters in Fort Pierce,  Florida,  the oldest parts of which date to 1956.

Christine Liquori.  (Beth Clifton collage)

35th person killed by a shelter dog since 2007

Of the 61 shelter dogs known to have participated in killing 35 people since 2007,  including Liquori,  44 were pit bulls.  Only five shelter dogs had killed anyone in the previous 150 years.

The Liquori and Hazel deaths resembled at least three others in recent years:  Mary Jo Hunt,  53,  of North Carolina Bull Terrier Rescue,  killed by a pit bull in 2012;  Carol Harris,  59,  of the Akita Advocates Relocation Team Arizona,  killed by an Akita in December 2017;  and Happy Hound Hotel boarding kennel worker Laura Williams Ray,  53,  of Ouachita Parish,  Louisiana, killed by a pit bull in a January 2018.

Each was around one or more dogs who were not their personal pets.  All were working without backup and without any way to quickly summon help.

Ryan Hazel

Grandmother waited

Hazel,  14,  a high school freshman,  had reportedly often assisted 3 Dogs Running kennel owner and trainer Scott Dunmore,  49,  over the year before his death.

Dunmore was away in Boston,  however,  about an hour’s drive north,  when Hazel’s grandmother dropped him off at the kennel to help do the evening dog care chores at about six p.m.

“His grandmother told investigators she waited in the car,  as he expected to spend just 30-45 minutes completing his tasks,”  recounted Dalton Main of WFXT.  “After an hour,  police say the grandmother became worried about Hazel and contacted his parents,  who were away in New York. The boy’s parents contacted neighbors of Dunmore and asked them to check on their son.  The neighbor called police to report the attack on Hazel at 7:59 p.m.

(Dutch Shepherd left/ Belgian Malinois right)

Dutch shepherd & three Belgian Malinois

“Police say they found four dogs – one Dutch shepherd and three Belgian Malinois – roaming the property outside of their enclosure,”  Main added.

In addition to the Dutch shepherd,  an American Kennel Club-recognized variant of the Malinois and German shepherd dog types,  and the three Belgian Malinois found running free at the 3 Dogs Running site,  police found seven other dogs still in their kennels.

Often used for police and military work,  Malinois are only known to have killed one person in the U.S. before Hazel:  David Fear,  64,  of Grover Beach,  California,  who suffered fatal injuries on December 13,  2016 while rescuing neighbor Betty Long,  85,  from an unprovoked attack by a Malinois previously trained as a police dog by another neighbor,  then-Grover Beach police officer Alex Geiger.

Kenneth M. Phillips
(LinkedIn photo)

Malinois owner/trainer acquitted

Geiger was on April 12,  2019 acquitted of involuntary manslaughter and failure to maintain a large animal causing serious bodily injury and death.

Commented California dog bite attorney Kenneth Phillips immediately afterward,  “”The worst part about this ‘not guilty’ verdict is the ‘get out of jail free’ message. The defense was largely based on the absence of standard guidelines that would dictate how to protect the public from police dogs that are out of training.

“The defense used that argument to its advantage to get this particular defendant found not guilty, but the long term effect of the jury’s decision will create the missing guideline,”  Phillips predicted.  “Freedom from criminal responsibility means less of a need to be vigilant. The guideline will admit more casual confinement of these dogs. Public safety will suffer.”

Scott Dunmore. (Beth Clifton collage)

Kenneth Phillips called it

Less than a month later,  Phillips’ words appear prophetic.  Dunmore’s dogs are not known to have been police dogs,  but are Malinois apparently used in combat sports,  and Dunmore is a “name” trainer who might have been expected to be acutely aware of the risks to which Hazel was exposed when visiting the 3 Dogs Running kennels alone.

Dunmore,  originally from Britain,  earned a degree in engineering from the University of Surrey.  Turning to dog training in 1998,  Dunmore on the 3 Dogs Running web site boasted of “titled dogs in Schutzhund,  French Ring,  Mondio Ring,  Protection Sports Association,  and Dock Diving,”  and of being “the only decoy in the country certified in Schutzhund,  Mondio Ring,  French Ring and PSA.”

While Lisa Kashinsky and Marie Szaniszlo of the Boston Globe found victim Hazel remembered as being from a “super, super family,  a very nice kid,  [and] an excellent athlete,”  who played baseball,  football,  and ran track,  victim Liquori appears to have led a troubled life.

Christine Liquori with pit bull.  (Facebook)

Was Liquori infamous in Philadelphia?

Graduating from high school in Staten Island,  New York,  Liquori crossed paths repeatedly with several other women of the same name,  but of differing ages.

Some online sources place LIquori in Philadelphia before she arrived in Florida,  where she lived in several different cities.

A man named Samuel W. Landis,  then 46,  of Telford,  Pennsylvania,  was in 1995 convicted of beating to death Edna Hiestand,  71,  on March 7,  1994,   after extensively embezzling from her.

“In 1981,”  summarized Allentown Morning Call reporter Debbie Garlick,  “the former Quakertown councilman was convicted of embezzling funds from the borough fire department where he was chief.  He later forged his mother’s checks and stole from her.”

Christine Liquori

Forgery & fraud

Among the alleged beneficiaries of Landis’ crimes,  Garlick mentioned,  were a “Christine Liquori of Philadelphia,  who received expensive gifts from Landis and who traveled with him by limousine to New York City getaways,”  while Landis “occasionally paid her rent.”

Landis was sentenced to serve life in prison.  The Christine Liquori who was involved in that case dropped out of sight.

The Christine Liquori who was killed by a pit bull at the Humane Society of St. Lucie County appears to have been arrested at least three times on felony charges,  in June 2010,  October 2012,  and May 2013.  Her alleged offenses included forgery and fraud,  according to arrest reports published by the Hometown News of Fort Pierce and the St. Lucie News Tribune.

Paws Fur Recovery

Liquori had volunteered at the Humane Society of St. Lucie County for about three years,  through an organization called Paws Fur Recovery.

Not listed as an IRS-recognized 501(c)(3) charity by Guidestar.org,  the IRS service contractor that provides public access to nonprofit accountability documents,  Paws Fur Recovery describes itself as “a group of grateful recovering addicts and alcoholics helping shelter dogs find new homes.”

Lori Boettger,  founder of Paws Fur Recovery,  told Chuck Weber of CBS-12 that Liquori was due to reach six years of sobriety later in May 2019.

According to Facebook postings,  Liquori had worked as a chemical dependency technician at the Just Believe Recovery Center in Fort Pierce,  had started a new job at the Banyan Treatment Center in Stuart,  Florida,  on March 30,  2019,  and was in a relationship with a behavioral health technician at another addiction treatment center.

David Robertson

“Evaluating protocols”

David Robertson,  Humane Society of St. Lucie County director of administration since 2003,  and executive director since 2014,  told media that he did not know how long Liquori had been lying in the exercise yard before she was found.

“Robertson said the pit bull arrived at the shelter only a week earlier [actually eight days earlier], and had been up for adoption just two days.  He added his agency is evaluating its protocols,  in light of what happened,”  reported Chuck Weber of CBS-12.

Standard procedures for volunteers at most animal shelters is that they must sign in and check in with a staff supervisor upon arrival,  sign for temporary custody of any dog they are taking out of the building,  work with dangerous dogs only in the presence of staff,  and must sign out upon departure.

David Robertson & Frank Andrews

Troubled institutional history

But the Humane Society of St. Lucie County has for several years had as troubled an institutional history as Liquori had a personal history,  after a decade of relative stability under Frank Andrews,  director of operations from 2002 to 2014.

Beginning his career as a field representative for the American Humane Association,  when the AHA still certified animal shelters and held annual training conferences for shelter personnel,  Andrews later headed the Michigan Humane Society,  was in 1970 a founding member of the Society of Animal Welfare Administrators,  and from 1989 to 2001 headed the Los Angeles County Department of Animal Care & Control.

When Andrews died,  on January 23,  2018,  at age 85,  he was believed to be second only to Warren Cox,  whose career ran from 1952 to 2012,  in length of tenure as a humane administrator.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Five-year plan to go no-kill

Andrews’ last years at the Humane Society of St. Lucie County,  however,  were difficult.  Two former employees in 2011 sued the Humane Society of St. Lucie County for alleged wrongful dismissal.  No-kill advocates argued that under Andrews the Humane Society of St. Lucie County was euthanizing too many animals,  though during Andrews’ administration a successful spay/neuter program helped to cut both animal intakes and euthanasias by half.

The newer of the two Humane Society of St. Lucie County shelters,  several miles west of the shelter where Liquori was killed by the pit bull,  opened in December 2013,  two months behind schedule.

Post-Andrews,  the Humane Society of St. Lucie County board of directors in April 2018 committed to a five-year plan to go no-kill.

Christine Liquori  (Facebook)

“Could go upside down at any second”

In September 2018,  however,  the new shelter flunked an inspection due to “various violations [of standards] in conditions,  euthanasia procedures and staffing,”  reported Meghan McRoberts of WPTV.

“Concerns about finances for the shelter also emerged,”  McRoberts summarized,  “prompting Fort Pierce and St. Lucie County to refrain from making annual, lump payments to the shelter.  Instead, both make monthly payments and request monthly financial statements from the shelter,”  which as of February 2019 was in worsening debt.

Merritt & Beth Clifton

“It seems like it could go upside down at any second,” Fort Pierce city commissioner Jeremiah Johnson told McRoberts,  soon after newly hired shelter manager Mike Jones resigned for undisclosed reasons.

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