The Blog Pound

Friday, June 05, 2009 , early evening

All animal rescue workers get a little crazy

I almost feel silly calling myself an “animal rescue worker”, because I know I only deal with the public and pet relinquishment situations a few times a month. The poor people who do this for a living deal with relinquishment dozens of times a day, but then, some of them get paid. Not enough, I’m sure, but maybe it’s some cold comfort. I guess we must all feel the same emotions because I really identified with this fictitious letter that Flippy found while browsing a site for rat rescue. Even the rat rescuers are fed up! I liked the concept of this letter so much that I’ve been threatening to use a version of it as a autoresponder, and truth be told, I wrote something kind of like it a few hours ago. Someone wrote to me to try to rehome a cat, and it’s a situation where the cat doesn’t need rehoming, the owners just need to suck it up. But they don’t want to… no one ever wants to be inconvenienced (just the cat can be inconvenienced). Anyway, I hope some of you will enjoy the spirit in which this letter was written:

———————————————————
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Pet Owner:

Thank you for contacting us animal rescuers, and foster-homes about your inability to keep your pet. We receive an extremely high volume of inquiries and requests to accept surrendered animals (and none of us is getting paid, OK?). To help us expedite your problem as quickly as possible, please observe the following guidelines:

1. Do not say that you are “CONSIDERING finding a good home” for your pet, or that you, “feel you MIGHT be forced to,” or that you “really THINK it would be better if” you unloaded the poor beast. Ninety-five percent of you have already got your minds stone-cold made up that the animal WILL be out of your life by the weekend at the latest. Say so. If you don’t, I’m going to waste a lot of time giving you common-sense, easy solutions for very fixable problems, and you’re going to waste a lot of time coming up with fanciful reasons why the solution couldn’t possibly work for you. For instance, you say the cat claws the furniture, and I tell you about nail-clipping and scratching posts and aversion training, and then you go into a long harangue about how your husband won’t let you put a scratching post in the family room, and your daughter cries if you use a squirt bottle on the cat, and your congenital thumb abnormalities prevent you from using nail scissors and etc, etc. Just say you’re getting rid of the cat.

2. Do not waste time trying to convince me how nice and humane you are. Your coworker recommended that you contact me because I am nice to animals, not because I am nice to people, and I don’t like people who “get rid of” their animals. “Get rid of” is my least favorite phrase in any language. I hope someone “gets rid of” YOU someday. I am an animal advocate, not a people therapist. After all, for your daughter, you can get counselors, special teachers, doctors, social workers, etc. Your pet has only me, and people like me, to turn to in his or her need, and we are unpaid, overworked, stressed-out, and demoralized. So don’t tell me this big long story about how, “We love this dog so much, and we even bought him a special bed that cost $50, and it is just KILLING us to part with him, but honestly, our maid is just awash in dog hair every time she cleans, and his breath sometimes just reeks of liver, so you can see how hard we’ve tried, and how dear he is to us, but we really just can’t . .” You are not nice, and it is not killing you. It is, in all probability, literally killing your dog, but you’re going to be just fine once the beast is out of your sight. Don’t waste my time trying to make me like you or feel sorry for you in your plight.

3. Do not try to convince me that your pet is exceptional and deserves special treatment. I don’t care if you taught him to sit. I have a waiting list of battered and/or whacked-out animals who need help, and I have no room to foster-house your pet. Do not send me long messages detailing how Fido just l-o-v-e-s blankies and carries his favorite blankie everywhere, and oh, when he gets all excited and happy, he spins around in circles, isn’t that cute? He really is darling, so it wouldn’t be any trouble at all for us to find him a good home. Listen, we can go down to the shelter and count the darling, spinning, blankie-loving beasts on death row by the dozens, any day of the week. And, honey, Fido is a six-year-old Shepherd-Lab mix. I am not lying when I tell you that big, older, mixed-breed, garden-variety dogs are almost completely unadoptable, and I don’t care if they can whistle Dixie or send smoke signals with their blankies. What you don’t realize is that, though you’re trying to lie to me, you’re actually telling the truth: your pet is a special, wonderful, amazing creature. But this mean old world does not care. More importantly, YOU do not care, and I can’t fix that problem. All I can do is grieve for all the exceptional animals who live short, brutal, loveless lives and die without anyone ever recognizing that they were indeed very, very special.

4. Finally, just, for God’s sake, for the animal’s sake, tell the truth, and the whole truth. Do you think that if you just mumble that your dog is “high-strung,” I will say, “Okey-doke! No prob!” and take it into foster care? No, I will start asking questions and uncover the truth, which is that your dog has not peed outside in the last six months. Do not tell me that you “can’t” crate your dog. I will ask what happens when you try to crate him, and you will either be forced to tell me the symptoms of full-blown, severe separation anxiety, or else you will resort to lying some more, wasting more of our time. If you succeed in placing your pet in a shelter, do not tell yourself the biggest lie of all: “Those nice people will take him and find him a good home, and everything will be fine.” Those nice people will indeed give the animal every possible chance, but if they discover serious health or behavior problems, if they find that your misguided attempts to train or discipline him have driven him over the edge they will do what you are too immoral and cowardly to do: They will hold the animal in their arms, telling him truthfully that he is a good dog, telling him truthfully that they are sorry and they love him, while the vet ends his life. Why not just tell it like it is:

“We went to Wal-Mart and picked up a free pet in the parking lot a couple of years ago. Now we don’t want it anymore. We’re lazier than we thought. We’ve got no patience either. We’re starting to suspect the animal is really smarter than we are, which is giving us self-esteem issues. Clearly, we can’t possibly keep it. Plus, it might be getting sick; it’s acting kind of funny.

“We would like you to take it in eagerly, enthusiastically, and immediately. We hope you’ll realize what a deal you’re getting and not ask us for a donation to help defray your costs. After all, this is an (almost) purebred animal, and we’ll send the leftover food along with it. We get it at Wal-Mart too, and boy, it’s a really good deal, price-wise.

“We are very irritated that you haven’t shown pity on us in our great need and picked the animal up already. We thought you people were supposed to be humane! Come and get it today. No, we couldn’t possibly bring it to you; the final episode of ‘Survivor’ is on tonight.”

Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Pet Owner, for your cooperation. And kindly remember our sympathy is with the dog, not you.

Author Unknown
———————————————————

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 06/05 at 07:30 PM
The Litterbox • (2) Comments • Permalink

Thursday, June 04, 2009 , evening

A free and easy way to support Wee Paws: GoodSearch.com

Here’s a free and painless way to support Wee Paws every time you search the Internet! Go to GoodSearch.com and select Wee Paws Animal Sanctuary as your charity of choice, then install their toolbar or search box (or search via their website). Wee Paws gets a few cents for every Internet search you do, and in the course of a year, it can add up to quite a lot! Last year we had one person using the GoodSearch feature and we received $25 as a result of her efforts, so it’s a great way to help out while not really altering your Internet routine. The toolbar is absolutely safe and spyware-free, and is a simplified version of the Yahoo toolbar. If you don’t want to install the entire toolbar, you can just add Goodsearch as an option in the small “search box” available at the top of most browsers, and if you don’t want to make any changes to your browser, you can set GoodSearch.com as your homepage and do your searches from there. As long as you allow GoodSearch to set a cookie so it can remember you’ve chosen Wee Paws as the charity you’re supporting, you won’t have to do anything but search as you would normally.

You can of course decide to use GoodSearch to support any of the other thousands of charities they have listed—they seem to work with everyone from the largest charities to the smallest. The only thing I’ll say about Wee Paws is that I absolutely, positively guarantee that every penny you donate to us (via any means) goes to pay for the care of the animals. When I receive a donation I either use it to buy something the animals need, or I set it aside for later use… we’ve never used a penny of a donation on ourselves. Every time we foster a cat or bring in another stray off the streets, it’s because you’ve given us the money to do it. There are times the Wee Paws critters are eating better than the Wee Paws humans, but that’s because I want to ensure we develop a reputation for using our donations properly. We’ve put a moratorium on taking in any more permanent residents until we figure out our living arrangements, but once that’s settled, I plan to hunker down and try to expand Wee Paws by a few cats every year. I especially want to be able to start to work with senior citizens, to see about arranging to take in cats when people are hospitalized or pass away. Besides caring for bottle-babies, I think that will end up being our future—some hospice-type care for chronically ill and elderly felines, and a retirement home for cats who lose their owners to old age. I hate it when senior citizens avoid getting pets for fear they’ll outlive the animal, so maybe we can step in and help. Oh, I want to offer more long-term care for the pets of families in transition—for example, caring for the cat of someone in the military who is deployed overseas, or looking after cats while families are between homes (like we did with Buddy and Wilbur). There are so many ways to help, and the more support we get from the general public, the more we can get done.

If you feel so inclined, would you pass on word about GoodSearch to your friends if you have a blog? Again, it doesn’t matter what charity they decide to support, but the application deserves to be promoted and used by more people. Also, a big thank you to our friend Helena at Living and Dying in 3/4 Time, who told me about GoodSearch at least a year ago, but I neglected to post about it. Thank you, Helena, and thank you for the $25 you earned for us last year!

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 06/04 at 08:08 PM
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Sunday, May 31, 2009 , lunch time

My Animal Family

I’ve been a fan of the “My Animal Family” blog for years. It’s a fascinating look at cat welfare issues in Singapore, and it makes me feel good to know that there are cat lovers and advocates from one corner of the globe to the other. This entry caught my eye recently, “We Are More Human in a Crisis”. It’s about how the economic crisis has affected those of us who rely on donations to help us rescue cats, and how the shortfall of donations has made us more resourceful instead of making us give up the work we love. No matter where we happen to live, cat lovers are really all the same at heart.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 05/31 at 01:14 PM
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Friday, May 29, 2009 , mid-afternoon

Nutro Cat Food recall

I really apologize for being a week late on reposting this bulletin, which came in my email last Thursday. I hope it won’t affect any of you, but please pass it on if you think others may not have seen it yet.

Voluntary Recall of Limited Range of Nutro Dry Cat Food Products

Out of an abundance of caution, on May 21, 2009, Nutro Products announced a voluntary recall of select varieties of NUTRO(R) NATURAL CHOICE(R) COMPLETE CARE(R) Dry Cat Foods and NUTRO(R) MAX(R) Cat Dry Foods with “Best If Used By Dates” between May 12, 2010 and August 22, 2010. This recall is due to incorrect levels of zinc and potassium in our finished product resulting from a production error by a US-based premix supplier.

Two mineral premixes were affected. One premix contained excessive levels of zinc and under-supplemented potassium. The second premix under-supplemented potassium. Both zinc and potassium are essential nutrients for cats and are added as nutritional supplements to NUTRO(R) dry cat food. As soon as we became aware of the issue, we made the decision to hold shipments of affected dry cat product, and took immediate action to verify with our mineral premix supplier that no other products were affected. We then contacted the FDA to notify them of the voluntary recall. A full list of affected product and available alternatives for your clients is available at http://aci-direct.net/c.asp?770197&32d70b0ef7a40e2e&1

We have completed a comprehensive audit of premixes for all NUTRO(R) products, and have confirmed that this issue only affects certain dry cat food products. No other NUTRO(R) products are affected, including dry dog food, wet dog and cat foods and dog and cat treats.

Consumers who have purchased affected product should immediately discontinue feeding the product to their cats, and switch to another product with a balanced nutritional profile. While we have received no consumer complaints related to this issue, cat owners should monitor their cat for symptoms, including a reduction in appetite or refusal of food, weight loss, vomiting or diarrhea. We have suggested that cat owners contact their veterinarian if their cat is experiencing health issues or is pregnant.

Consumers who have purchased product affected by this voluntary recall should return it to their retailer for a full refund or exchange for another NUTRO(R) dry cat food product.

Affected product was distributed to retail customers in all 50 states, as well as to customers in Canada, Mexico, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, New Zealand, and Israel. We are working with all of our distributors and retail customers, in both the US and internationally, to ensure that the recalled products are not on store shelves.

Sincerely,

Dr. Tiffany Bierer
Health and Nutrition Manager
Nutro Products Inc.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 05/29 at 03:22 PM
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Under the Paw

Through a Facebook group, I’ve found a fabulous book by/about a man who loves cats, Tom Cox. The book is called Under the Paw, and you can read the entire prologue on the publisher’s site, Simon and Schuster: Under the Paw. Once you’ve read the excerpt and fallen in love with the book, you can order it from Amazon.com. It’s only available as an import, but I think it’s worth it… I’ve got an Amazon gift certificate which I’ll put to good use buying this.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 05/29 at 03:13 PM
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Monday, May 25, 2009 , lunch time

No More Homeless Pets Conference

Best Friends Animal Sanctuary has just announced that enrollment is open for the 2009 edition of the No More Homeless Pets Conference, held annually in Las Vegas. It’s a great chance to mingle with others who share your goals and values, and you’ll definitely come away from the conference refreshed and eager to put the things you’ve learned into action in your own community. Best Friends is actually offering a number of different conferences/workshops in 2009, including quite a few of their world-renowned, “How to Start an Animal Sanctuary” workshop. At one time they offered this workshop once a year, but it was so popular that added more and more of them, and they still quickly sell-out! This workshop gave me the knowledge I needed to start Wee Paws—it taught me how to register as a nonprofit, how to get the proper license for my community, and it helped me work out a relationship with a veterinarian. The relationship with the vet and her regular visits to our home (well, either she visits or one of the vet techs does) then got us the approval we needed to become part of Petfinder. From there it required a lot of nose-to-the-grindstone type work, but we were able to find donations of food and litter because we’d established a good reputation. I highly recommend this workshop to anyone who has a dream about having their own sanctuary… I know there are a lot of you. You won’t have any regrets.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 05/25 at 01:15 PM
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Sunday, May 24, 2009 , early evening

Cat food and cat litter: coupons for sale

I’m finally getting around to trying to clear out a backlog of free cat food and free cat litter coupons that we’ve acquired over the last couple of years. I don’t want it to seem like I don’t need these items, because I do, but in this case they aren’t my preferred products. The litter, for example, is the absorbent crystal silica gel litter, which our cats aren’t used to using, so I’d rather trade it for cash and buy the litter we normally use. The same with the canned cat food—it’s a great brand but really expensive compared to the cost of making homemade. A case of 24 cans of cat food lasts us about two and a half days, whereas the comparable amount of raw chicken (in terms of dollars) will buy enough meat to last us more than 7 days. So, let me tell you what I’ve got:

- coupons for free cases of 24 x 5.5 oz. cans of Merrick cat food. These cases sell for upwards of $35 online, and locally, we can buy them for about $33. I’ve heard of someone in a different part of the country who only pays $25/case (freight shipping differences, I guess), so these coupons are worth up to $35 each, depending on where you live. You can only redeem them in a retail pet food store and not online, so make sure someone in your area stocks this food before you decide to try it. It’s excellent, excellent food, and I think it’s probably almost as good as homemade if you can afford to feed it to your cats. The food looks great, it smells delicious… I wouldn’t hesitate to eat it myself. I’ll sell the food case coupons for $22/each, which I know isn’t a huge bargain for some of you, but might represent a $13 savings per case for someone else. Just email me and tell me how many you want (I’ve got a couple dozen of them), and I’ll send you a bill for them via PayPal. I’ll ship them for free, of course.

- coupons for free 8 lb. jugs of Precious Cat Senior or Precious Cat Long-Haired cat litter. Both of these litters are made of biodegradeable silica gel crystals, and they also contain an herb which helps attract cats to the litterbox (it’s true, it really does work). The silica crystals discourage the growth of harmful bacterias and molds, so they’re good for older cats or long-haired cats, both of which can be prone to urinary tract infections from contact with contaminated litter. You can use these litters for any cat, of course… they’re supposed to be low-tracking, which I always like. These were given to us by someone who’d in turn received them and couldn’t use them, and I’d rather use the cash to trade for the other Dr. Elsey’s products that I use, specifically, Precious Cat Ultra. I’ve got quite a few of these coupons, and the product retails for between $14 and $21—I’ll sell them for $10 each, with free shipping.

One other thing… I’ve got numerous copies of DVDs put out by Animal Planet to help new pet owners. The cat DVD is called “Be Your Cat’s Meow: A First Guide to Cat Care”, and the dog DVD is titled, “Bark Smarts: Caring for your New Best Friend.” I haven’t watched either of these DVDs, so I can’t vouch for what’s on them, but I hope it’s helpful tips for new pet owners! If you’re just curious about it, or a collector of stuff with the “Animal Planet” logo, I’ll sell these DVDs for $1 each, plus $2 shipping. The shipping charge (postage and new padded envelope) should cover multiple copies of DVDs, and I’m sure I could probably get at least 4 DVDs shipping for the one $2 price. Share with a friend! Donate them to a shelter! I’ve got tons of them and I’m going to have to start using them for coasters soon if you don’t take them.

For any of these items, email me at the link above and let me know what you want, and I’ll send you a bill via PayPal (please include your PayPal email address so I know where to send the bill). If this stuff doesn’t sell, it’s going on eBay and I’m raising the prices! Don’t forget, we’ve still got a massage chair to sell, too. Out of curiosity, are there any of you who’d be interested in purchasing a new iJoy chair from us in lieu of the more expensive type of chair I mentioned in a previous entry? We could sell you a new iJoy 130 or 550, shipped to your home, for about $600. If that sounds like a deal, let me know. If you want to haggle, feel free!

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 05/24 at 07:20 PM
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Trader Joe’s dog and cat food

We’ve been doing a lot of shopping at Trader Joe’s lately. We started doing it with the mindset of “quality over quantity”, but quickly found out they’ve got pretty good prices on many things. They’ve also got the variety that we crave so much, and since we started to shop there fairly regularly a couple of months ago, we’ve been almost entirely vegetarian, eating meat perhaps once a month when we have a craving for something specific (check Flippy’s blog for some of our favourite TJ’s stuff). I guess I was bound to end up in their pet food aisle one day, reading labels and checking prices, and I was pretty impressed by what I found. Their canned dog food contains meat, lots of identifiable meat (from chicken to lamb to beef) and none of those nasty “wheat middlings” or “corn gluten”. It’s not human grade food, and it still looks/smells like dog food, but the label is better than anything you’ll read from Alpo or Pedigree or Iams, and the food is less expensive. A 20 oz. can is 99 cents, whereas that’s often the regular price of a 13 oz. can of crappier food. If you used canned dog food for anything, even snacks or pilling, I think this food is a good buy.

I also checked out the dry dog food, and if you just consider the cost (approx. $1/lb.) it’s good food. Nothing fancy, and it won’t hold up if you’re comparing it to Solid Gold or Wellness or something more in the $3/lb. range. However, it again contains a small number of ingredients, and is primarily made of chicken and chicken meal. The senior food contains small amounts of glucosamine, chondroitin, and omega 3 & 6 fatty acids… not enough to truly count as a sole source of those things, but at least they’re making an effort. In contrast, I picked up a cheap bag of store brand dog food at Target and the ingredient list is horrifying: beet pulp, animal fat, corn, soy, wheat, bone meal, and just about anything and everything that isn’t edible by humans. If you’re on a budget and feeding a dry dog food, I think you can feed the TJ’s brand without guilt. Our two large dogs have always eaten dry food as their main diet (simply because of the expense of feeding raw/homemade to 200 lbs. of dog), but I always supplement the food with something like eggs, cheese, tofu, sweet potato, raw chicken wings, or whatever leftovers we don’t feel like eating (the dogs enjoy both spaghetti and chili). While I’d prefer to be feeding them Wellness Super 5 Mix or something similar, I feel okay about the TJ’s food.

Probably the best of TJ’s pet foods is their canned cat food. All meat, no by-products, no carbs, and only 59 cents per 5.5. oz. can. It might be the best hidden cat food bargain available, although again, it’s not anything like Merrick or Spot’s Stew or homemade (where the ingredients are human grade and identifiable). TJ’s also has canned tuna made just for cats, and the only ingredients are tuna and water. It’s terribly stinky stuff, and so dark that it must be made with unimaginable parts of the fish, but it is tuna! The label claims it’s a complete diet, although I can’t find any references to added taurine or other vitamins, so I think I’d just feed it as an occasional treat and not as a sole food.

Sadly, there seems to be a stinker in the TJ’s pet food family: the dry cat kibble. It doesn’t have a perfect list of ingredients (there are some corn products), but it starts with chicken and chicken meal, so that makes it better than any of the staple cat foods you find on grocery store shelves (stuff like Fancy Feast, Meow Mix, Cat Chow, etc.). I bought a bag to use for the “kibble hunts” we do a couple of times a week, and it was a disaster: almost every cat got diarrhea from eating about a tablespoon of this food, and Chelsea refused to eat it completely (smart cat). Our cats seem to have pretty strong stomachs because they eat both homemade and whatever we’ve had donated, so eating a new kibble isn’t an unusual thing, but we’ve never seen this kind of stomach upset before. The only cat it didn’t seem to bother was our foster cat, Kevin, but after a couple more small servings of it even he started to have the runs. I thought of using up the rest of the bag by feeding our porch cats with it but couldn’t bring myself to do it because of all the bad reactions we’d seen amongst our own cats, so the bag still sits in a cabinet, open and unused. I’m going to contact TJ’s about it in case there’s a problem with the case lot but I can’t find anyone else reporting problems about it… I think our cats just can’t eat it.

I’d really like to hear from anyone else who’s fed Trader Joe’s dry cat food (I bought the chicken flavour), to find out if you had the same experience. I don’t care if you find this entry two years from now, I still want to know!

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 05/24 at 08:23 AM
Rampant Consumerism • (1) Comments • Permalink

Friday, May 22, 2009 , mid-afternoon

Djupa Andetag

This isn’t particularly on-topic regarding anything… just something running through my head. When I was about 12 years old I did a fairly good job of teaching myself Swedish (languages being the one single thing I seem to be able to pick up at the drop of a hat). I had quite a few penpals in Sweden at the time, although they wanted to practice their English in letters, so I read Swedish gossip mags and listened to a lot of Swedish music. A few days ago I came across a Swedish music video on YouTube and as I listened to it, I was shocked/thrilled at how much of it I still understood. My brain may be turning into Swiss cheese, and my English words often evade me, but I guess I’ll just plan on relocating to Stockholm when I’ve totally lost the ability to make myself understood in North America. I thought I’d post the video I was watching, because I find it so calming, and because it contains an expression I’ve been comforting myself a lot with lately, “djupa andetag”. Oh, if you teach yourself Swedish and listen to the song 1035 times while standing on one foot and juggling a banded krait, you’ll discover the darkest secrets of Flippy and me, heh.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 05/22 at 03:33 PM
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Remembering Bonnie Underfoot

Join me over at the 2Tabby’s blog to give condolences to Victor Tabbycat and Tabbymom Jen on the one year anniversary of the loss of Bonnie Underfoot. Bonnie was one of those cats who tries to fight off your friendly advances, which just makes you love them all the more. While visiting, you can also ooh and aah at the beautiful Nina, who now keeps Victor company. I hope your day will be full of good memories and catnip, Victor and Jen! (sure, Jen… go ahead and roll in the catnip. What can it hurt?)

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 05/22 at 03:17 PM
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