A Reply to Brent Toellner

Blog posting and thread

Winograd ingratiated himself with a segment of owners who would latch on to just about any hope of decent treatment from anyone involved in the "humane" community. He still supports IPB (Indecent Proposition B) in spite of its total lack of human decency and contempt for human rights.

Best Friends skeeped about Winograd allegedly backing off support of IPB. This puts Winograd in an even better position with people who haven't thought it out. The enemy of my enemy is my friend? What if the enemy of my enemy is pretending to be such? It's easy to pretend. There is so much dirt to be had on the ASPCA, Best Friends, and the HSUS, that a tiny fraction of it makes a man look like a hero when he writes a book about it.

Early on, before Winograd closed comments on his blog, I commented that he shouldn't give the HSUS any way to redeem itself (as in "Redemption") because they have already committed too many crimes against humanity. Now his latest, http://www.nathanwinograd.com/?p=4473 , sets up a condition that will buy redemption for the HSUS or other miscreants that satisfy it. If they come together and "rescue" all the dogs that are displaced by IPB, then they will be among the blessed, to paraphrase. Otherwise they're evil little devils.

In other words, they'll be the good guys if they stage a feeding frenzy on an entire state of breeders whose activities were previously legal.

It is a very bad thing to ask people to "police themselves" in a setup like dog breeding. Any attempts to do so quite rightly cause people to defend themselves and the intend is to split the group and make them suspicious of each other. There is no good way to conduct such a program, at all, and the attempts cause a lot of damage.

According to Winograd the big three humane organizations are absolutely loaded to the gills with dirt. That's gravy for those of us who have learned, quite rightly to despise them. It also means to me that they not only do not have the right to judge any breeders, they do not have the ability. They are also known for lying.

One of the harshest things about this is that it will do what was done to exotic animal owners in Missouri. It will punish people who have spent millions to become legal. This is the HSUS's incrementalism. First it imposed unnecessary burdens on breeders. Now it's going to chop their income tremendously while they're still paying off the financing.

It is better to have no solution than a solution this destructive. The destruction is on purpose, from Winograd, from the ASPCA, Best Friends, and the HSUS. The handwriting has been on the wall because these miscreants have been lying to people. We haven't the slightest chance of knowing what is really going on.

Winograd follows the pattern of labeling commercial breeders as "puppy mills", therefore commercial breeders, in his mind, are automatically abusive, and if they are bigger breeders they are automatically more abusive. This is far less insightful than his usual material, so he is definitely doing this on purpose. Winograd ingratiated himself with the breeders to some extent, who seem not to have realized that he does not exempt them from the "puppy mill" label, and like I said, the complaints that Winograd has allied himself with the breeders has created a false impression.

I don't know what Winograd's definition of a "puppy mill" is or what definition he will stand behind, or what yours is, but you, Brent Toellner, were quoted by Winograd as saying this: "According to the US Department of Agriculture, there are 1,525 licensed commercial breeders in the state—nearly [three times] more than any other state. The rest… are unlicensed. In other words, Missouri could cut in half the number of ‘puppy mills’ just by closing down all of the unlicensed operations in the state."

You and Winograd have both said in writing that all of the licensed breeders in Missouri are "puppy mills." Please explain.