February 25th, 2011 by Editor

When Nathan Winograd’s groundbreaking book Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America came out a few years ago, those of us who were true animal welfarists — not that faction of animal welfare that was leaning dangerously close to animal rightism — finally had a voice.  We rejoiced because we love animals and didn’t want to see them needlessly killed. (And it’s not euthanasia to needlessly kill perfectly adoptable animals in shelters.  Killing in shelters for reasons other than illness and a few other exceptions isn’t mercy killing; it’s just needless killing.)  And I finally understood why some shelters, Animal Controls, animal rights groups, and even some animal welfare groups didn’t want to save perfectly adoptable animals.

As Winograd pointed out in Redemption, the elimination of domestic animal ownership is in keeping with an ideology called “nativism.” Winograd defines nativism as the,

“…belief that the value of an individual animal comes from lineage and that worth as a species stems from being at a particular location first” (79).

In the minds of many environmentalists and animal rights activists, since you can’t set domestic animals free (after all, they are, according to them, unnatural human creations), you must necessarily kill them.  So, in their view, in order to return to the “natural order” of things, indigenous species should take precedent over human encroachment, which includes human domestication of animals, because wild (i.e. natural, indigenous), animals were there first.   Another way to put that is some animal rights and animal welfare organizations, as adherents of nativism, may not have an interest in saving pets’ lives, but may in fact be willfully seeking to exterminate them because pets are domesticated, not wild. Read the rest of this entry »

February 25th, 2011 by Editor

Editor’s note: Illinois State Representative for the 89th district Jim Sacia has posted a few times about the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) on his blog, but the blog post I’ve excerpted below is the most poignant. It is literally an answer to prayer (at least mine anyway) that elected officials start outing the agenda of the HSUS which has made a sport of slickster lobbying, defrauding the public, and unconstitutional legislation such that any elected official who entertains the HSUS’ legislation should be looked upon with a suspicion of treason. But kudos to Rep. Sacia for telling it like it is about the HSUS. I would simply point Rep. Sacia to the Activist Cash article about the HSUS’ alleged domestic terrorist ties and ask him, since he’s a retired FBI agent, why it is that the FBI does not investigate the HSUS’ domestic terrorist ties, or if they have investigated the HSUS’ domestic terrorist ties, why hasn’t anyone from the HSUS been prosecuted?  As Sacia himself notes in the blog post below, the HSUS is being investigated by the IRS for tax fraud.  Can’t we do better than that?  At what point does government stop entertaining the malfeasance of the HSUS and shut them down???

And while a few years ago I would have echoed Sacia’s sentiments to donate to your local shelter, I know the one I used to volunteer for was overtaken in what looked like a hostile takeover by radical animal rightists, so you have to be careful on the local level as well.  If your local shelter or Animal Control extols the supposed virtues of PETA, the HSUS, or the ASPCA, you might want to be careful.

From the blog of Illinois State Representative Jim Sacia:

…I’ve written of [the HSUS] before and the appeal they have for your money. Over the Christmas Holidays their ads were everywhere. Beaten down dogs, one eyed cats (and of course it was a big sad eye), and a lame, old, starved, and debilitated horse. And you, the concerned citizen, could fix all of this for a mere $19.00 per month sent to them to help care for these beaten, downtrodden animals.

Had you taken the time to do the research, you would have learned that the $19.00 per month translates to $228.00 per year and of that $228.00 total sum, $1.03 would have reached an actual hands-on animal shelter. By comparison, HSUS had 555 employees and paid them $37.8 million in 2008. This includes over $2.5 million contributed to employee pension plans. HSUS’ chief executive, Wayne Pacelle, made just over $251,000 in salary and benefits.

This agency just must receive closer scrutiny. Using Ohio as an example, “HSUS made zero donations to Ohio pet shelters in 2007 and 2008 and gave just $5,200 in 2006. This year, however, the organization is gearing up to spend millions of dollars in Ohio on the anti livestock farming ballot initiative.” (The Center for Consumer Freedom, not your local Humane Society, go to humane watch.org.)  Read the rest of this entry »

June 4th, 2010 by Editor

Elgin, Illinois, City Council members this week discussed what to do after an incident in which a 9-year-old boy was apparently pinched by one of two “pit bulls” a week ago today in Elgin’s Festival Park.  I say “pinched” because that’s what the Chicago Tribune called it.  Interesting that this incident went from an “attack,” to a “bite,” to a “pinching,” as if the media is now back-pedaling.  Will we soon find out that the dogs, barely out of their puppy phase, were just trying to play with the boy?  It’s also interesting too that while the owner of the dogs, Ms. Sonia Torres, is asking how the dogs got out of their cages while on her property, which sounds like she too thinks they were stolen, the Tribune is reporting today that the dogs “escaped from their cages.”  Yet, this is how the scene was described by the Courier News on June 1:

Torres had left her house to pick up her kids and upon her return found the gates to the dog’s cages open and a hole in her fence.

Sounds like they were stolen, and yet Ms. Torres was charged with having two dogs at large?  Why? Read the rest of this entry »

June 1st, 2010 by Editor

Why do I love the smell of a set-up in the morning?  Because it makes it easier to expose shady wrongdoings which stink to high heaven.  Anyone else getting the feeling that there’s something really rotten in Elgin, Illinois, based on Elgin’s most recent “pit bull” incident?  The Courier News made sure to include a photo in their report today about the two dogs involved in an incident in Festival Park on Friday just so we’d know they were “pit bulls,” though we still don’t definitively know what breed the dogs actually were.  The two dogs were free-roaming on Friday, when they were found a mile from their home.

Read the rest of this entry »

May 24th, 2010 by Editor

My, my, my what passes for journalism these days.  Yesterday, the United Press International (UPI) published an article about bully breeds, but it was difficult to determine if the article was advocating for these breeds, or if it was just more of the same conflicting information.  For instance, the article stated that PETA was a defender of “pit bulls”:

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is among defenders of the breed…”We’re for ‘em,” PETA said in a posting on its Web site. “By ‘for ‘em,’ I mean that we are for pit bull protection, for their happiness, and for treating them like dogs instead of like cheap burglar alarms, punching bags or gladiators in perverted death matches.”

Now by “defenders” does UPI mean advocates for “pit bull” death?  Because a simple Google search turned up the following from PETA’s website:

We…support pit bull bans, as long as they include a grandfather clause allowing all living dogs who are already in good homes and well cared for to live the remainder of their lives safely and peacefully.

And so what does this stance result in?  Lots and lots of innocent, dead dogs.  Breed bans always result in high kill rates in shelters and in animal controls due to owner surrenders and confiscations.  Not to mention, if PETA are the ones defining what is a “good home” for “pit bulls” there will likely be very few homes that will qualify.  Read the rest of this entry »

October 8th, 2007 by Editor

I think I speak for a good deal of reasonable people out here on planet earth who have been fighting bad animal legislation (and the animal rights groups/lobbyists who push for it) for some time who can finally breathe a vindicated sigh of relief and say to Nathan Winograd, “It’s about time somebody came out and said it.” If you’ve ever worked, volunteered, or otherwise been involved with a shelter, you will probably not be surprised at Winograd’s claim that pet overpopulation is mythology, a yarn if you will, spun by those with an agenda. But Winograd in his book Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America did the footwork, wrote the book, and proved it. Read the rest of this entry »

March 3rd, 2007 by Editor

Penn and Teller show us where contributions to PETA really go. Click here to see the video (Contains language and images you may find graphic).

“Our goal is total animal liberation.” — Ingrid Newkirk, President of PETA.