Jill Rants and Raves

a puppy dies at the albany bulb

I can't think of a clever title for this blog. My heart is hurting. My shoulders are aching, my eyes sore from crying and plenty of anger to go around.

15 weeks ago 10 pups were born to a dog that looks like many others and in spite of the love she elicits from her doting owners, she is to me just a big unremarkable mastiff mix and her pups an unwelcome addition to the landscape. Harriet, the owner of the dog is a homeless resident, one of many, camped out in the undergrowth of the Albany Bulb where - come good economy or bad - the homeless, the outcasts from 'civil' society, the drunks, bums and the dispossessed take refuge from a world that wants to control our every move. The visual and emotional terrain of the Albany Bulb is unlike anything else I have ever experienced - outsider art, tangled ruins of industrial debris, and a view of San Francisco Bay which leaves one breathless, exuberant off leash dogs, imaginative scrap recyclers who remove metals from this landfill and sell them to the highest bidder for re-use, and a neighborhood of good people, badass people, tears, love, alcohol, excitement, disease and discarded needles, human crap. And the animals that share these experiences

The pups grew up at Jimbo's old camp, a cabin he had built deep in the mess of tangled iron and twisted concrete remnants, a place he had called the Albany Free Library, where you could drop by and bring a book or take a book and most everyone left a note in the Visitors Book. But Harriet and Sandy forcefully had required Jimbo to leave his home of many years so that the pups could be safer, safer than in their camp under trees more open to the elements, and the passing rats and skunks. Jim had slunk away, angered. And so the pups frolicked and grew strong, played in gleeful exuberant joy among the pampas grass and broom, around the mounds of human debris and around the campfire which on these recent cold nights kept at least some of the icy shards away.

And the pups grew without being vaccinated properly against distemper and parvo. Allowed to run all over the trails that criss cross the landfill they were not protected against a disease which when it takes hold can destroy the system mercilessly and painfully by attacking the intestine and causing the dog to shed the lining in a violent uncontrolled bout of diarreah and blood which smells like the death which is fast approaching. They had received one vaccine, maybe even two - but three and preferably four shots are needed for full coverage, and in a public park where under-vaccinated dogs are commonplace these pups were innocent victims of a sort of wild arrogance where actions have no consequence and where people stupidly allow their animals to breed because it is 'natural' but have no concept of the thousands of unwanted animals dying daily in shelters down the road in Oakland, up the road in Pinole and across the hill in Antioch.

I begged Harriet to let me take care of the vaccine needs of the pups and to get them wormed and to let me get them fixed at some point so that we could prevent further litters. She had refused. Strange since she had let me vaccinate the 9 pups she had found in a box next to the outhouse at the landfill one night last summer. I backed away, and now two of the pups are dead, horribly dead, with blood pouring from their asses and septic shock setting in and stunning them into death, one of them - Sweetpea - died during the night and the other -TinkerBell - died in my arms at the vet - because when it comes right down to it, I will always get the call in a crisis.

That call came this morning from Animal, another landfill resident, as I arrived at the Bulb with my dogs and within an hour, one dead pup and the dying pup were in my friend Karen's pick up truck on the way to the emergency vet in case she could be saved. The vet took one look and shook her head and went to get the euthanasia drug to help the poor pup to move past agony to a calmer place. She died while the vet was out of the room and my heart is broken for her.

But let's be clear. My anger isn't reserved for Harriet and the crazy world of denial she lives in. There is only one way to stop these kind of deaths and that is to make pet vaccines entirely available for free, and take them to where the animals live, wherever that is. Don't force people who are freakin' compromised to make a note of when the next low cost clinic is at the local pet store. Take the vaccines, the worm meds, the flea meds out to where they are. Don't argue it, don't be moralistic about it, don't complain that they are costing the city money. Costing the frickin city of Berkeley money? The dog has no damn choice. And the price Tinkerbell and Sweetpea paid? What about that?

Karen and I carried the two dead bodies to Berkeley Shelter in black plastic contractor bags, and cleaned out the back of her truck. We picked up vaccines and antibiotics for the surviving two pups who still live with Harriet and Sandy and for some other dogs who might be compromised and headed back to the landfill to give the shots. Tomorrow I will put up signs warning everyone that if they have a puppy which is under-vaccinated they should get the fuck off the Bulb....

I watched the pup die today and I don't have the strength for this....

je ne parlais francais mais je comprend the pact avec the devil

I'm not talking Haiti. Not that I don't care. Of course I frickin' care. And I'll send a donation to Doctors Without Borders 'cos I love what they do... oh shit I've just realised, isn't that the same group of doctors called something like 'Doctors Sans Frontieres' or something french like that? And isn't it the french that caused all the problems in Haiti...I mean like Pat said...Napoleon the Third or whatever...some short guy...oh my god...and the pact with the devil was in order to throw the French out and get rid of all the coq au vin and that's what happened... and the Haitians were forever damned after that. It's all the freakin' Frenchies fault. And now their doctors are gonna go and pretend to treat these poverty stricken devil impacted poor people....oh shit.

You can see why I don't really want to talk or blog about the situation on the island of Hispaniola. I mean it is way too complex for me and far too French.

So, without any further ado - go right ahead, try and pick a fight with me in the dog park about spay/neuter laws. Just try it, because I tell you I am just pissed the fuck off. I don't believe in mandatory statewide spay neuter laws because they are completey unenforceable. They are a feelgood measure so that highly paid lobbyists can pretend they are spending donors money reducing killings in shelters caused by pet overpopulation. They aren't. What does work is offering true low cost or free available, accessible spay and neuter each and every day. But let me tell you what works also - when an animal is impounded into an animal shelter, it is an opportunity to intervene - if need be - to ensure that the owner/guardian gets a chance to correct what might have caused the animal to get into the shelter in the first place. I believe whoever you might be - whether you live in a campsite on the Albany Bulb, or whether you live in a monster house in the Oakland Hills - you should be able to get your animal back if it is impounded.

But if your dog is covered in wounds, if it's ears have just been shorn off by a garden implement, if your cat is covered in fleas and has anemia, if Hamlet has been impounded 6 times while crapping on people's front lawns and chasing squirrels, if your prized siamese is dripping blood in heat a mile from your home, if your dog has cojones the size of bowling balls and was cruising the neighbourhood looking for pussy - the canine kind - I think the city, which paid the money to safely catch and shelter your animal and which routinely kills healthy young animals because no-one wants to adopt the 'overflow' of unwanted animals - I think the city has an obligation and a freakin' right to require you to pay for medical treatment for whatever ails your pet, and to insist that unless you have a good reason why Buster was out cruising the freeway overpass - that the animal gets fixed before going home.

And if you say the goddam contractor left the gate open, or my dumbass kid dropped the leash, or Buster is actually a show dog Weimeraner and this will NOT happen again, or Princess is 14 and the vet says she is too old to undergo surgery - you know what - you get the animal back unfixed. 

Reality is that most people - when told the animal has to be fixed, and that the shelter can arrange that, take the animal to the vet, and in many cases offer a low cost spay/neuter option - most people say 'oh, ok, and can you vaccinate it and microchip it as well?' And reality is that most show Weimeraners don't end up in animal shelters. Mostly it's a population of under socialised, neglected mutts. But it is an amazing thing how many people think their 70 pound pit/lab/hound/shepherd/rottie mix is so unbearably cute that they are going to 'breed' them and they already have homes lined up....

If one more person yells at me that I am trying to mess with their dogs 'reproductive rights' I may well have to throw mud at them. Dogs don't have rights as long as the very same people insist that the animals are property, and even then - would dogs make better decisions about having babies if they knew how many puppies are getting euthanised in shelters. We make the decision about how to end these animals lives when they are in pain, yet we don't want to mess with the 'natural' act of giving birth twice a year when there are no freakin' homes for these animals - dog and cat reproductive systems are still built for a time when giving birth in the wild meant a number of offspring dying at birth or taken by predators in the first few days or weeks. There is nothing 'natural' about breeding some stupid mastiff mix and selling the pups. Especially not when they are no longer cute at 9 months old and get dumped in shelters. Add in the number of testicular cancers, mammary tumours, ovarian cancers and fights and injuries associated with animals in heat....and well...you get the picture.

I believe in good dog and cat breeding.There. It is said. But there is a big picture here. I don't have all the figures but I do have one - the Martinez Shelter kills around 400 dogs and cats a month. I have been at the Antioch shelter and seen dead cats on the euthanasia table, young healthy dogs lined up in cages waiting for the Fatal Plus, I have seen photos of piles of bodies at rural shelters waiting to be heaped into the oven for burning. They bleed from the nose often and shit comes out of their asses as they die. 

I am sick about it. I am furious that we breed these animals for our vanity, for our pocket books, for our stupidity, for their death. I'm gonna fight and argue for as many ways to fix animals before they leave the shelter under any circumstances. And these freakin' stupid libertarian 'don't mutilate my animal' arguments are making me ill. Go spend a day holding the animals down as they get killed in a shelter euthanasia room. Modern shelter design calls them 'comfort rooms'. Get the fuck over it.

the opening balance of 2010 is 'sad'

I did not like last year much. Sorrow sat all too closely on my shoulder for most of the summer as I had to bring to an end the lives of two of my dogs and sandwiched in among those hurts was the death of my friend and one time lover Berta Freistadt. And it was a cruel death, a final inequitable assault on her body, which was so ravaged by disease that her ability to laugh on that final day just shook the complacency, my assumption of good health, right out of me. My visit to London to see her one last time was filled with a sort of sad ooze which clung to every experience no matter how enjoyable.

A month earlier I had said goodbye to Oscar, a dog who had become over the previous 4 years a muse of sorts, a daily reminder of the nobility of short red dogs, and a creature whose very existence had re-inspired me to take my camera with me on even the shortest trips. And by the end of the morning of the last day of August I had buried my broken beloved border collie Frankie, and I felt a swoop of sadness and it has not left me.

Calvin, my aging grey and white corgi/Aussie mix started showing signs of dementia last week, clip clopping through the house back and forth, can't get comfortable on one of the many dog beds strewn around, and then I found him, snout pressed up into a corner, standing staring at a wall. He cries in discomfort when I lift him, he snaps at the other dogs if they land too close to his painful back legs with their surgery scars running north to south.

Tears, always an incredibly easy release of emotion for me, have been dripping down my cheeks at the most inopportune times - I cried in the middle of a meeting with the architects, Commissioners and city staff as we discussed the new animal shelter and I started crying recently during a meeting with board members and I realise - not for the first time - that I exist, have always existed with a sort of reservoir of sadness as a backdrop to the landscape, no matter the state of my conscious brain. I envy those who can keep their emotions in check. It's hard, let me tell you, to be seen as a somewhat combative butch, and have these wet cheeks as if I were right back in the headmistresses study being asked if I were masturbating in class.

This profound sadness sits next to me at my table, rides in the car with me, accompanies me in the hills with my dogs at my side, goes to bed at night and keeps the bed a little warm, reminds me every day of how soon it can all be taken away. It is a companion of sorts, preparing me for the next sorrow, the next death, and the next abandonment.

But I wouldn't want to do it a different way. Maybe it's that I couldn't do it a different way. It's not the dogs or their loss that makes this murky sadness, it's not the loss of Berta that causes the tears to be such familiar friends to me. It comes from a profound sense that I still have not proven myself in the world, it won't matter what I accomplish, what books I produce, what iconic photographs of mine make people smile in comforting recognition, how many animals I save, how much I follow my father's exhortation to do 'justice' in the world, how many times the vulnerable can depend on me. It just doesn't seem to matter. There just is no comfort when the skin you inhabit is a jagged edge to the soul within.

I used to pick a fight to relieve the tension. 3 years in therapy have done wonders to unclench my emotional fists, but has left me with fewer options for self defense. I actually like crying, I think it's kinda beautiful. Just wish the on-off switch hadn't been busted.

 

zhu zhu hamsters dodge a bullet

Me and my hamster Fred, 1966. Note the CND button - that's Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament for those of you who think that is just a freakin' peace sign.

Wow, was I happy to be listening to the radio yesterday as the 23 year old head honcho of Zhu Zhu pets explained that their furry, lovable, funny, and talkative little 'pets' were vindicated after a rough week in the media. In spite of being made in China they didn't contain massive amounts of toxic contaminants after all, and were safe to give your under-informed (that's me being polite) children who would probably tire of a real hamster as soon as they got nipped or found those little brown ropes of poops in their bed. After all, as ZhuZhuPets website states: "Zhu Zhu Pets™ hamsters don’t poop, die, or stink"  Yeah, can't have the family pet dying. Or smelling. She did warn however that if you wanna snag one of these 'hot' toys you'd better be prepared to be at your favorite China outlet way ahead of the doors opening because these little faux pets are flying off the shelves. Yippee!!!!

I wasn't sure that I was getting depressed. Now I am. And it isn't just about Zhu Zhu Pets, though that didn't help. The animal shelters are filling up now, as winter sets in, the economy still forcing people to choose between feeding the dog and clothing their children, and small dogs flying out of the shelter doors as adoptions rise but the staff at one shelter saying to me 'most of them will come back after Christmas'.

It isn't even that though. It's Obama and the Peace Prize (bloody hell) it's Obama's lack of commitment to one policy or the other in Afghanistan, it's the virulent hate for Jews expressed on the Letters Page of my local paper, it's the rape and murder of a pregnant woman in a comfortable Los Angeles neighbourhood, it's that with the USPS losing billions of dollars a year, they are closing local post offices (why is the Postal Service losing billions when UPS and Fed Ex seem to be able to make decent money?) and do I want health care insurance reform at this point? No, really, do I? 

It's that I hate this time of year. I love Halloween and I enjoy the weeks till Thanksgiving. And then comes the euphemistic Black Friday. The day after Thanksgiving, America looks like the facile, consumer driven, big fat idiot that it tries hard not to look like. And there's no escape. I feel trapped. And the days get shorter and the sky goes grey and I cry a lot, and fear a lot. I still don't seem to have the on/off switch in my brain that I need to stop the wheels from grinding up there the way they do. And now that I am the kinder, gentler Jill this lack of defense makes me feel I need a barricade, not just a few sandbags against the world.

When my family moved to Berlin in the winter of 1961, as the Berlin Wall was beginning it's forced separation of families and cultures and homes and plunged a steel and concrete brace through the heart of a city, my family protected me from the reality - we bought a magnificent tree, so tall the tip folded as it hit the ceiling, we hung large fragile bulbs in exuberant color from the limbs and attached real candles in little metal holders to the branches and the scent of pine was intoxicating, presents tumbled across the floor, the skins of tangerines and the cracked shells of walnuts littered the table, the coal fired central heating roared, as drifts of snow and ice clung to the house. No expense was spared. I was distraught, miserable and lost. But everything looked and felt and tasted so powerfully protective.

I could almost forget that we had left our spaniel Judy, left the puppies and the cats, left the land of wonderment, with the bats at Batu Caves, and the tigers of Fraser Hill and the perpendicular railroad of Penang, and the large sea turtles breeding in the sand on the coast, and the fantasy of a family at peace with itself. We also left behind in Kuala Lumpur the 2 foot high metal Xmas tree that sat on a glass topped table for a while in the sweaty muggy days of a Malayan December.

I really don't like this time of year. I wonder how bio-degradable ZhuZhu pets are because unlike the real thing, they will not return to where they came and feed the soil with their bones and feed the maggots to nurture the earth....

And I really do need to check in with my therapist.

why are these dogs in the same place as me at the same time

It was just a walk in the park. I was loading my gang up in the car when someone called out to me. There's a dog, just cowering in the bushes over there. Two women had left him, with a huge bowl of food, and got in a car and driven away. I walked over with a leash and asked a guy I know as a volunteer at the animal shelter to help. I went and sat next to this quivering beast, frozen to the spot. He snarled as I reached out. Susie, Alan and I surrounded him, and I prodded him gently with a leash to distract him while Alan reached over his neck and tightened a loopy leash around his neck. It was over in a minute and Crunch, as I've inexplicably named him - temporarily - was walking on leash next to Alan towards my car. CoCo, Shuggie and Roo leapt out to greet him, and his eyes lit up, tail swivelled excitedly and soon enough he was jumping in the front seat of my car.

The young 15 pound black Scottie mix that had bared his teeth at me 5 minutes earlier now buried his face under my arm as we drove to the animal shelter to have him scanned for a microchip.

I have to say, its hard for me to understand the idea of leaving your dog in a park with just a bowl of food and walking away. But then, it's hard for me to understand a lot of what people do.

I know that this little dog deserves a good, loving new home - unless there is a damn good reason why an unaltered, unidentified, un-microchipped litle guy is running around loose. So, for now, I'm just showing you Crunch, and if you know anything about why he was cowering in the bushes at the Albany Bulb, or if you know anyone who would love this spectacular guy to bits - lemme know....

giving thanks in a conflicted sort of way

 
It's been a while since I've done any internal demolition here on my blog - been too busy obsessing about animal stuff, but this morning, after the strangest dream involving Honey Lee Cottrell and Susie Bright, a sailboat sunk beneath the waterline and a cat on this underwater boat somehow staying dry, licking it's un-declawed paws in that sexy way cats do when they are completely unperturbed by anything going on around them, oh yeah and my camera case with the Hasselblad inside it getting stolen from the deck of the boat, I suddenly started obsessing in that way I do - about love, life and the futility of relationships.

Of all the American excuses for a good family fight, Thanksgiving is my favorite but as we head towards it and I haven't decided which of the generous offers to spend time with someone else's family I'll accept, these self absorbed feelings rise to the surface (wonder if the submerged sailboat is somehow emblematic of my sunken feelings - doubtful). Did I ever write about my miserable 3 weeks on a sailboat in Tahiti? During the rainy season? Geez, that is a freakin' beautiful place. But I have to admit, after watching tourist ships the size of space stations cruise past the islands disgorging debris and daily tons of human shit, after seeing mounds of plastic bottles on the sandy beaches of Bora Bora, watching a Picasso fish get speared for my dinner, and having a moray eel grab at my passing leg, oh and dropping a knife blade down on my naked foot as I was making dinner and bleeding all over the galley, and never being able to get far enough away when our hosts - a couple then but not now - had one of their nasty fights. 

Oh, and here we are neatly back to the futility and agony of relationships. I don't like the anguish associated with change, I'm not comfortable with trying to read between the lines, I like the idea of collecting, as my friend Sue O Sullivan once said, 'a constellation of support' people who love me passionately but never expect me to dress up for dinner no matter what their mother might think, who crawl into bed with me to snuggle up, but are fine with me getting up in the middle of the night and sleeping in another room, women who don't say 'come back to bed' once I've got up and coffee is made. I want to know that loyalty is loyalty is loyalty and that I won't be lied to, cheated on or abandoned. I can't bear it when friends disappear when they dive into the steamy terrain of a new love affair, I like to know that I can break a date and it be ok, and that my english reserve won't be misread as uncaring or unfeeling. I don't do well in relationships - yet I love being in them. I need to know that a woman will be ok with the fact that my neighbour Sally comes in through my back door carrying cake but needing the coffee to go with it, and that friends will just let themselves into my house unannounced. 

I don't like the way couples batten down the hatches - hmm, there's that boating terminology again. I don't like how insular, how territorial, how claustrophobic the whole thing feels. But at Thanksgiving, the lack of a girlfriend sort of comes into sharper focus - my friends have gone off to Vegas or are meeting the new boyfriends parents, or invite me to a family get together but warn me of the dynamics. Last year I had the best Thanksgiving. Susie, Bonnie and I went to opening day of 'MILK' at the Castro Theatre and after to a small cafe on Market street for diner Turkey, mash and gravy. It couldn't have been better.

I could be anywhere - with Suzy and Claire in Adelaide, with old pals in London, with my family in Berlin, in Spain with Cheryl, with extended family in Israel, in LA with new and old friends - but I am here, with the dogs and cats - fretting over whether being on my own is going to be ok. It'll be fine. Maybe I'll even take a roadtrip with Target, Calvin and Roo (what to do about 3 pound CoCo?) and hike in the snow.

The only place I don't want to be is on a boat.

shaniya davis - you too will be forgotten

The 3 foot tall, forty pound, 5 year old apparently given or sold by her mother into sex slavery has been found dead by the side of a road in Fayetteville, North Carolina. There is very little to say about anyone involved in this situation except that they will not be the last to do this to a child and the You Tube videos of Shaniya will be replaced soon enough by the next missing child, the next pre-teen sex slave, the next Jaycee Dugard. I was driving this morning and listening to the news, you know - the kind of news where the college football score is announced before a story of a five year old abandoned to a living hell. And I pulled over and threw up. Really.

We can ask all sorts of questions about what kind of species we are, what kind of country, what kind of society we are; what kind of substance abuse, economic blight, family uncaring or social service neglect brought this girl to being no more than roadkill in a landscape of moral and ethical bankruptcy. We can throw blame around for days or we can trot our local law enforcement agencies out to say 'never again' and our politicians will make hay of the ass-kicking they are doing at the local level.

Recently my local state Assemblywoman wrote a self serving email to her constituents telling all of the amazing things she had done to bring the disparate forces of hate together after the brutal gang rape of a schoolgirl. The thing is Nancy - how many rapes have there been in Richmond since you sent that email? Why isn't there a politician who will stand up and say 'we are powerless to stop this degradation, because morally, we just don't have it in us to stop'.

We are a nasty nasty species whose moral progress is so far outstripped by our technological wizardry, by our brilliant inventive minds, that the divide between what we accomplish in innovation and experimentation and what we do in the dark slime of our souls is so vast, so incomprehensible. It's almost as if we are talking of another species. I was the same age as the small children abducted, tortured, sexually assaulted and slaughtered by Ian Brady with the help of Myra Hindley who then buried the bodies on the Moors in England in the 60's. They even tape recorded the screams of their victims. This terrible terrible evidence was played in court and I doubt any juror on that trial has ever forgotten. These days, security cameras catch the kidnapper (and possible murderer) of Shaniya on film, and we are left with a tantalizing and hopeless sense of 'what if'. But Shaniya is just todays YouTube video.

We can fly a drone 2 miles high over the darkest reaches of the Pakistani border regions, a small object controlled and 'piloted' from warehouses in Maryland which can blow up an Al Queda operative as he lies on a sunbed on a roof - but we can't find a 5 year old child in our own midst.

We can send yet another multi billion dollar space shuttle to complete mind-boggling adjustments to a space station, but little girls still turn up thrown into mud ditches packed in a suitcase, and a girl abducted 18 years previously, raped and isolated from the outside world can go unseen, raising two children in a backyard.

I have absolutely no answers. Because there is no answer and no solution to the darkness inside of us. How one continues to live, and feel joy, to laugh at a stupid film, to feel the utter beauty of life and the world around us - that is the mystery of our species.

declaw or death

Last thought on the declaw ban - at least from me, for now. Something has really been bothering me about the presentation from the CVMA vet - you know the guy whose oath includes doing no harm - when arguing that vets should continue to be able to offer declaw surgery. He said he thinks vets should be able to offer declaw surgery instead of doing what the family requests - which is euthanising the cat on the advice of an oncologist. This 'choice': declaw or death has been one of the opposition arguments that has just fucking infuriated me. And it's an argument that many cat advocates have bought - just because it is offered up by vets and many humane societies including SPCA's around California.

Here is the real alternative to declaw - surrender the animal to a Humane Society, SPCA, rescue group or even a municipal shelter (if you can determine that their kill rate is one which would likely mean the cat would be re-homed). Take the money you were just about to pay a vet to kill or maim your animal and donate it to the non-profit as a 'thank you' for helping.

The idea that the alternative to declawing is killing the cat is an insidious and vicious argument. The real alternative to declawing is a low population of domestic cats. If every for profit vet were to offer 3 free spays and 3 free neuters every month to the low income population in your area, lobby the CVMA to re-instate their feral fix subsidy program, and advertise adoptable cats sitting at your local shelter on your notice boards - then watch the numbers of unwanted cats start falling.

the scaremongers

 

Photo: ©Jill Posener, 'Lucy 2007'

Berkeley did the right thing last night when the City Council voted unanimously to enact a ban on declawing cats - unless it is for therapeutic medical reasons to save the cat - in the City of Berkeley. We didn't come away with as strong a statement on 'punishment' as we would have liked. To allay the hysteria whipped up by a strange assortment of bedfellows, the procedure could be charged as an 'infraction' instead of a misdemeanor. It was a tiny victory for the small band of angry pinched face opponents who looked as if they wished it were 1968 again and they were undergrads facing down the forces of oppression on the UC Berkeley campus.

The lone representative from the CVMA (California Veterinary Medical Association which leads the lobbying efforts against declaw bans) looked as if he really is tired of getting dressed in the same rumpled suit every day to give the same tired speech about why vets should continue to be allowed to cut the toes off cats. He also looked a little uncomfortable when one of his allies exhorted Council to beware that we could be restricting the rights of women to safe abortion if we passed a cat declaw ban. With a syrupy voice this fellow Humane Commissioner had most of the audience staring in disbelief as she spoke of 'women over a certain age' remembering what it was like to be denied control of our own bodies.

Another opponent spat out the words 'cat rights' when mixing her metaphors - there is a big difference between animal rights and animal welfare. As a feminist who really did put herself on the battle lines in the 70's for 'A Womans Right To Choose' this cheap, sleazy attempt to taint animal welfare advocates as 'anti-choice' is one of the reasons I will work as hard as it takes to shut them down and shut them up.

Yesterday, in emails circulating around our small northern California city (just over 100,000), people like me were described as 'animal rights fascist extremists' and there was talk of tearing families apart as vets and cat owners were thrown in jail and would never be able to get a job again, that 3 strikes laws could mean a cat declawing could land someone in Pelican Bay.

Here's the thing - cats & dogs - they have no rights. Under California they are called 'property'. If you find an animal and keep it, instead of taking it to a shelter, you have to keep it, just like a lost umbrella, for thirty days before calling it your own. How's that for rights? I'm fine being an owner. I like the responsibility.

It is because they have no rights that we - the human in this equation - must act in their best interest.

It is because they have no rights that we must take the dreadful painful decision of when to end their lives.

It is because they have no rights that we have to protect them against abuse, whether cloaked under cover of veterinary practice or practiced without veterinary care.

I am neither anti abortion nor an animal rights fascist - though being called both in one day is at least a new experience.

Cat declaw bans

West Hollywood, San Francisco, Beverly Hills and now Los Angeles have all voted to support bans on cat declawing except in circumstances where it is medically necessary for the cat's health. Berkeley votes on this issue next Tuesday. This flurry of bans is a direct response to new state law which comes into effect on Jan 1st 2010 which would bar cities from doing just this. This law, SB 762, which was sold to legislators as protecting 'healing arts' practitioners from whimsical city legislators banning certain 'medical' procedures was in fact sponsored by one lobbying business association, the CVMA - the California Veterinary Medical Association. Not by doctors or dentists - although advocacy groups for those practitioners did sign on to the bill - but by the lobbying group concerned with protecting the profit centre of the private veterinary industry.

You'd think this would be a fairly straightforward matter. You can't find a single person who thinks declawing is a good thing to do, vets talk in terms of personal distaste, staff at vet hospitals have taken me aside to ask why, as a Humane Commissioner, I can do nothing about preventing this practice, even the representative of the CVMA who spoke to our Commission spent the better part of his talk saying how awful a procedure it can be, and yet - the battle lines are drawn between allies in animal welfare, between vets who belong to the same business association, and between cat lovers.

Scare tactics have characterized the opposition - that this ban means that cities will soon be banning abortions, that HIV compromised individuals will be killing their cats in droves, that children with cancer will have their beloved pet ripped from their arms, that shelters will be 'flooded' with owner abandoned cats because they can't declaw them. Shame on the fear mongers. Really. Shame on them. Yesterday I heard that someone was calling Council members describing a terrible scenario of people being arrested and hauled off to jail if we pass this ban. 

Is it really analgous to the anti abortion movement? Are the photographs of botched surgeries with gruesome deformed cat paws dripping blood and swollen arms from failed laser surgery the same as the oversize posters of crying fetuses in a metal sink in an abortionists lair? I don't think so. I think that an industry that fails to police itself adequately needs public oversight and that when the vet industry can do no better than to scream that banning this barbaric surgery will mean shelters overloaded with abandoned cats and therefore it will be my fault when thousands die, the conclusion I reach is that they have run out of any meaningful defense.

The answer to most animal related problems lies in education and information yet we are still stuck, in even the most progressive cities, in a state of punitive control after the fact. Animal shelters budgets are huge yet a tiny percentage is assigned to publications, outreach advocates, or low cost and available vaccines, spay/neuter and affordable well-pet care for low income residents. The need to adopt out as many animals as possible to keep euthanasia numbers low means that hardly any counseling is done with a prospective adopter. Education about cat declawing is no exception. Because of it's general purpose name, most people think it means removing the claws. Sounds ok.

It isn't. It involves removing the last bones of the toes of a cat. It is in fact de-toeing. And yes, many people say they are happier with their cat once the cat no longer has intact toes. I live with cats - and I don't play rough with them, I never encouraged them to chase my fingers under the bedcovers, I sprayed them with a water bottle when they scratched at the sofa (even though every single thing failed with the fat beached whale Tutte and she has damaged stuff in my house, declawing was never ever an option) and I don't have cat scratches up and down my arms. Don't like claws? Don't get a cat.

And if you do get a cat - or two - educate them, train them, provide scratching posts, tell your kids not to play games with them where the cat lays on its back and scratches the kids wrists to pieces - with their back legs it should be noted.

One day soon, we won't reconfigure domestic animals to suit our furniture, to conform to a breed standard, or to fit our image of what a designer doggie should look like. And we'll look back and wonder what took us so long to outlaw this obscenity.