Support Your Local Puppy Mill

There are several good reasons to support puppy mills. Not the least is because "puppy mill" should be an innocent term. The idea of a business that mass-produces good dogs should be a blessed one, one that people sing the praises of. I haven't personally worked in one but I know a few things about industry. One of them is that most people who work in factories or "mills" are goodhearted people who work hard to produce a quality product. I was actually surprised to learn how good.

A real humane society would find owners who were in trouble and without threat of punishment, help them out of that trouble. "It's for the sake of the animals" becomes a pretty bleak statement when you know that puppy mill busts are hugely profitable for humane societies. They use the busts to extort money and puppies and then sell those puppies en masse to the public and beg for donations, right in the middle of articles condemning the people who bred them. For shame. Genuine criminal charges should not be able to be bought off this way, by giving money and dogs to a non-governmental agency. This is a conflict of interest and I don't know how prosecutors and police can stand being a part of it.

It is also an outrage when a so-called humane society re-inspects a kennel that has already been inspected by the state. It strips a compliant owner of their place of safety that should be provided for them by the state inspectors. Time and time again the "puppy mill" accusations have been thrown at people and their businesses have been raided right after a state inspection gave them a clean bill of health. There should be a law that if the state says it's clean, it's clean.

There is always something to pick on about someone's care of their animals. The fact is that there is almost always far more to praise than to pick on. Most puppy mill dogs and pups are found in good physical condition and that says a lot. Most likely it says that those dogs and pups were in a good place. It's real easy to say that someone's facility was covered in feces. Just exaggerate. It's also easy to exaggerate about the smell. Or we could decide that a place with a lot of animals is going to have an animal smell and those who have a clue know that's normal.

All people who own pets, who practice animal husbandry, or who hunt have a common interest and a common cause. We need the animals. Human needs and desires are legitimate. We have to remember that. Hunters need the animals for trophies, fur, and meat. Pet owners need the animals to satisfy the need to nurture and share affection. We all need the animals for food, and the farmer (animal husbandry) produces the animals. Treating an animal as an agricultural product is a good thing because farmers work as hard as anyone to treat their animals humanely regardless of species. The term "puppy mill" should be a badge of honor.

Give the HSUS Nothing

The HSUS has succeeded in costing California farmers billions of dollars for their "Proposition 2" that has the government spending money it can't afford to micromanage farmers and force them to spend money that they can't afford. They are basically repealing the science of mass production of animal products and replacing it with whatever. Who wants a cage-free egg after it's rolled around a concrete floor picking up chicken droppings? How about an infant mortality rate for pork producers that exceeds fifty percent? I guess we're going to have to like them apples, 'cause we ain't going to be able to afford pork chops. Raising the price of our food places the interests of animals ahead of the interests of humans.

They want to bring this crap to Ohio. They want to "negotiate." What is there to negotiate about? Giving up less to the HSUS? They are entitled to less than nothing. They should have to pay massive fines for the damage that they've already done. The only thing that they should be "given" is a massive investigation of its fraudulent charitable collecting, which diverts money from legitimate animal-based charities.

The HSUS went around killing animals in their euthanasia van during the Katrina crisis. They have a convicted terrorist on their payroll. He earned his qualifications both by acting as a publicity agent for the terrorist group Animal Liberation Front and by committing terrorist acts on U.S. soil. This is also a point because such actions make it so that legal businesses, legal businesspeople, legal workers in every animal related field are not safe even when they are in compliance with the law. John Goodwin's employment by the HSUS is a large stinking mess of proof that the HSUS uses people who disrespect our legal rights. I'm glad they hired him.

Is there actually something wrong with pet ownership that makes it so that owners of pets have to mind everyone else's business? It's not something wrong with pet ownership. It's a bad mental habit that people get into. They worry too much about the negatives and blow them out of proportion. Of course that attaches to pet ownership and everything else. It narrows a person's comfort zone to that which she or he can control. Maybe it's narcissistic and maybe narcissism is an inevitable result of casting one's self as the hero who can remove all negatives from life. So what's wrong with taking positives and amplifying on them? The love that a person can have for his dog makes it easy to forgive messes and broken screen doors. A love of humanity makes it easy to forgive someone whose worst crime is caring too much.

An Animal Rights-ish Feeling

I have to admit that I like most animals better than I like most humans. When there is a quandary between saving an animal and a human, I don't always have a clear answer. Maybe I'd save the animal because I can eat the animal. Those questions don't answer the big question as well as how I live my life in real life.

Why would I want people to keep pets and livestock if I think that animals are better than humans? Part of the reason is because I don't think that better in some ways means better in all ways. Also, even if an animal or human is better in all ways, we can still associate and live and play together. They're really good at putting on their best to be with their humans and that's why they will always make us feel as if they are better people.

Love and happiness are resources. These are resources that humans provide for animals.Love is something that humans seem to be uniquely able to be good at in the company of an animal, largely because of something that I tried to explain earlier. A companion animal relationship is based on shared love, happiness, and pleasure. Farmers who keep livestock and draft animals also find that kind of relationship.

An animal that might have been doomed to a lonely search for the rare morsel of food, and that would have starved to death if it didn't, can find a precious resource in humans. Wild deer, bears, and raccoons routinely beg for food, or steal it, or scavenge it from humans because humans are good at getting food and often have a lot of it.

Even if animals are better than humans, smell better, are more pleasant to the touch, are happier beings filled with more light, are somehow morally or ethically better, they have uses for us and they love us. Nature produces an animal that can do everything that requires technical expertise simply because nature accretes genetic and outside-world information and that's how to deal with it, to produce a brain that can process this information in practical ways. Of course the other animals that are part of nature want a part of this. They have curiosity, even a sort of intellectual curiosity. They helped make us. They definitely have a right to share.

Captive Breeding

I just had to answer this article about captive breeding.

Breeding of animals is not rocket science. The only way to fail at it is to never attempt it. Usually the problem is how to deal with an embarrassment of riches. I personally would rather have a few too many dogs, cats, or tigers than none at all. Captive breeding is in no way an "extreme tactic", it's a perfectly ordinary thing that billions of people have done.

The World Wildlife Fund uses one simple technique to persuade people that it is wrong to breed animals in captivity. I sometimes call it the "You'll shoot your eye out!" technique. They tell the reader or the listener to think only of all the things that can go wrong if someone tries to breed a rare animal. They might even admit that thousands have successfully bred those animals, but it's still "think of all the things that can go wrong." Why would anyone even listen to these people? All that they want you to do is stop doing what you think is right and obey them.

Think of all the things that can go right. Where there were no tigers there can be hundreds or thousands depending on the resources a group has. You might have mixed breeds but all of the animals whose genes went into the mix have many descendants and the more the merrier for genetic variety. The more genetic variety the better. Can you believe that so-called conservationists actually argue for "subspecies purity"? That's a lot like saying that a dog that is half Great Dane and half Saint Bernard is no good. When they say that Siberian/Bengal tiger mixes are no good for a species survival program, that's so wrong. They are the same species and genes from both populations are preserved. What they mean is that they want their programs to go their way, like an obsessive-compulsive thing.

They argue that there are "many difficulties" associated with captive breeding. So? We do it not because it is easy but because it is hard. They try to paralyze our thinking by talking about the dangers, and now the difficulties. Think of the reward: Most humans love animals. We get to keep them with us and take them into the future with us. A truly "natural" lifestyle includes as many plants and animals as we can have around us.

A species does not become uniform when humans take charge of its breeding. Look at the differences between the poodle, the dachshund, the border collie, the great dane, the pariah dog, the dingo, and all other dog breeds. Their genetic variety has obviously increased. This goes for horses, cattle, goats, sheep, pigs, and everything else. There are known and well-established methods for multiplying the number of "subspecies" of any animal, plant, or even bacteria. The only animals that have limited gene pools are the ones that people have been forcibly prevented from using in captive breeding programs, like the ocelot and the cheetah. Both of those species would number in the millions and they would be quite varied by now.

There are a lot of failures but that is the price of success. When they breed "naturally" in the wild every species loses a lot of its young. Fewer are lost in captive breeding. There is inbreeding in the wild, always. Lions are known for mating with their daughters. So are stallions. Those are just two species that live in family groups and the dominant males drive out their male progeny, or kill them, and mate with the females that stay. Outbreeding is actually alien to them.

The hopefully large number of tigers and lions in captivity in the United States reflect the success of an informal grassroots breeding program. Some say that there are as many as 25,000 tigers in the U.S. and I could only wish. No one ever seems to estimate the number of lions but it would seem that there would be more because even fewer of them kill their owners than tigers do and they like to live in family groups. Any true conservationist would congratulate the private owner on the success of breeding thousands of species individuals of endangered and threatened animals. A really good conservationist finds ways to help them and make it legal to breed the really endangered animals.

Were I to be in charge of a conservation program I would do this: Live-capture orphaned cubs from the wild and hand-raise them as pets. Take advantage of the large body of knowledge from successful private owners, and their enthusiasm, and their money and time and energy, and use them to raise the next generation of that endangered animal. Let's not kid ourselves. The wild is disappearing. People are living there. A war to move those people would destroy the habitat and kill a lot of humans. So let's put the animals on the dole and do it right. They'll be living better than they do in the wild. Humans will be a happier and calmer species. Everyone benefits.

Never Cry "Cruelty"

In his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism, in the last chapter which is titled On Natural Work-Democracy, Wilhelm Reich wrote a very good illustrative story of fair versus unfair criticism.

Here it is briefly: Imagine that an engineer has to repair a large engine that his factory needs by the next day. He's working well into the late evening. One person comes along and just smashes wires to be doing it because his wife nagged him earlier. The next one gives the engineer a pile of nonsense about how he's doing it wrong, tells him he's filthy (from working on the engine), and that he's immoral for abandoning his family that evening. Number two knows nothing about repairing engines. The third one had a hard time with his mother-in-law and spits in the engineer's face. Reich says that they are like highwaymen who disturb honest work. Does that sound familiar? This was written at the beginning of the establishment of the Third Reich in Germany, when a bunch of animal rights activists/ environmentalists took over a more or less democratic country and we know what they did with it.





The next person who comes along is another engineer who rolls up his sleeves and pitches in and helps. He knows the work and in the story he spots a mistake that he helps correct, and is POLITE, something that the activists are quite incapable of being.

Compare this to the kind of personal experiences that either teach a person when it is appropriate to be critical or prove that the would-be critic used his brains first. One example was when I was at a stable and a horse in a small round pipe enclosure without food and water begged me to give him some food. Using my brains and my own experience I realized that the horse was a valuable animal and if he was being "starved" it was for a reason. He might have gotten into the sacked feed and was being treated to prevent laminitis. He might have been due for a visit to the veterinarian and needed to be kept from food and water for a prescribed time. The most important thing to realize was that most likely the owner knew what he was doing and I didn't. The horse looked like he was in very good shape, too.

I've seen dirty houses and yards that had dogs that were reasonably clean, healthy, quite well-fed, and free of fleas and disease. This could be genuinely objectionable but it's a home and they're happy and cared for. On the balance it is still good and if I want better I should be willing to pitch in and help. I have done this before and if I were someone who would cry "cruelty" instead of cleaning Edward Taub's laboratory like I volunteered to do, I don't belong around the animals and I don't belong there because I'm either clueless or malicious. In other words, I should be like the engineer who goes in and helps to the best of his ability. Even if I didn't know much he might need another set of hands, maybe someone to bring in drinks and a snack and so on, but to me someone who helps does so by actually helping. A real helper has to be trustworthy, honest, and polite. He has to serve. He has to be truly tolerant. He has to be respectful.

HSUS Terrorism Connection

In my opinion this information is enough to justify legally dissolving the Humane Society of the United States, under terrorist and RICO acts. John P. Goodwin is a former member of the terrorist group called the Animal Liberation Front, and that is his only qualification for his job as a vice president at the HSUS. This is blatant support of terrorism and blatant support after the fact of organized crime.

At best the HSUS should never be permitted to be a complaining witness for a puppy mill raid or anything else. Their integrity is not in doubt, it simply does not exist.

Excerpt:

HSUS and Animal Liberation Front Connection (link)

One of HSUS’s supposed ‘subject experts’ on animal cruelty is John Paul “JP” Goodwin, better known for his ties to the Animal Liberation Front, ALF, which FBI considers to be a terrorist group.

In his February 12, 2002 Congressional Testimony James F. Jarboe, Domestic Terrorism Section Chief, Counterterrorism Division, FBI, said: “During the past several years, special interest extremism, as characterized by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), has emerged as a serious terrorist threat.”

What are we supposed to think?

When the HSUS hired John P. Goodwin that proved to the world that animal rights terrorism gets you a cushy job and even an artificial reputation backed by the wealthiest animal rights organization in the world. This is in direct contradiction to the HSUS's declarations that violence is not a means to an end. Even if the pretense of renunciation of violence were real, which Goodwin's posting disproves quite thoroughly, the violence that goes on creates a chilling effect on freedom of speech and participation in the democratic process.