The Idea of Professional Sports Hurts My Brain

Monday afternoon there was a great show on NPR's Fresh Air called The Road to Recovery For Michael Vick's Dogs.

Featured in the show is Hector and Hector's adopted human, who also this week got cancelled on by Oprah (stupid Oprah).  It's okay guys.  NPR is way classier.

It's a good show, so you should give it a listen, if not tonight then the next time you're sitting around folding laundry or something.  There's never anything good on TV, anyway.

Michael Vick seems to be everywhere on any news program these days.  The general consensus seems to be "Everyone deserves a second chance," and I say, sure.  Give him a second chance to suck a fat one and choke to death.  That would be pretty spiffy.  I stopped watching professional football (professional sports, really) after Michael Vick.  This nation needs to get it's shit together, seriously.  We completely revere people who do nothing more than bash each other and play with balls on a field, and the thinkers of the country go completely unnoticed.  And then we sit around and wonder why we're getting more stupid with every passing second.  Priorities.. 

So since all anyone can talk about is Michael Vick, when this morning's show on NPR was about brain damage sustained by playing football (see, some stereotypes are right), as soon as the word "football" was uttered, I thought Michael Vick.  And of course, inevitably, of his dogs.

So here I am driving to work, half listening to a show on chronic traumatic encephalopathy and thinking of all the rescued Vick dogs and some of the things I learned from listening to Monday's Fresh Air when a thought struck me.  Apparently, only one or two of the dogs out of Vick's kennels needed to be put down.  Some of them need to live in sanctuary, but the majority of them, like Hector, are incredibly loving and forgiving dogs.  How does that happen?  What makes one dog come out of hell fairly unscathed while another has been turned into a demon?  Is it all just personality traits, or is it possible that the dogs who were so volatile that they needed to be euthanized had chronic traumatic encephalopathy?  We know Vick tortured those dogs.  Repeated blows to the head will do it.  If it happens in people, why not dogs?  

But Where Do They Come From?

Jen posed the question of questions in a comment on The Shocking Truth last night.  The answer is multi-faceted, and too long to cover in a comment reply, so I'll turn it into a post.

They come from where you think they come from, mostly.  Probably.  Being in this job for the fifth year, I can't make assumptions about anything anymore, because I've found out after years of prejudice myself that it just isn't always how you think.

Years ago, when I first started working at the store, we had a supplier in PA (not Lancaster) who was a USDA certified commercial breeder.  When I say commercial, that means he bred more dogs than most people see in their lifetime.  I won't say his name, I will refer to him by N.  I specify commercial and not puppy mill for a reason:  He was not the images you see of PA Amish puppy mill breeders.  He wasn't even Amish.  His facility was large, clean, and the dogs had kennel runs, not oversize hamster cages.  He was only a three hour drive away from our store, so we personally drove to his facility to pick out our own dogs on his property, and drove them in our own vehicles back to the store.  We (I) personally saw the conditions of the dogs and their living space.  I personally, out of a morbid curiosity, checked into him in an on-line search when I first started working at the store.  What I found was that in 10 years he had one infraction during an inspection:  A bowl in his kennel was dirty.  One.  Infraction.  For One.  Dirty bowl.

As far as commercial breeders go, this guy was in a class by himself.  I swear in the five years I have worked there the worst communicable disease a puppy of his came in with was ringworm.  His dogs were always vaccinated before we got them, with kennel cough, parvo, and a five-way combo vaccine at the proper intervals.  Were his dogs always sound?  No, of course not.  Most of the time any obvious problems were already on their records from his vet.  And a couple of times we had beagles and beagle mixes that developed cherry eye while in our kennel, we took them back to him and he had his vet perform the corrective surgery for us - free of charge  except for the cost of the gas to get them there - and then we brought them back.

Did I agree with his style of breeding dogs?  I most certainly did not.  But if someone was going to breed dogs for profit, I'd rather see it done his way than the way it's usually done.  And the way breeding dogs for profit is usually done is not always by puppy mills.

Some of the puppies we get from local breeders who only breed one or two litters a year.. They come in, typically, in conditions that range from middling to really bad.  We got Bassets from a lady 20 minutes away once, and when Dr. W. was looking them over, we found ticks in their ears, covered with fleas, ear mites, ear infections, suspicious spots of hair loss, they were dirty and you could see every one of their bones.  She said to me, "These dogs didn't come from where you usually get dogs, did they?"  I said, "No.  N. would not have let a dog out of his kennel like this."  She said, "I can tell.  They really weren't very well taken care of."

They're usually wormy, have no shot history, and take a lot of work to get in a condition to be sold.  

I can think of three small local breeders of one breed off of the top of my head who took as good care of their dogs and put as much money and effort into their puppies as N. did.  Just three.  One bred Chow-Chows, one bred Jack Russells, and another guy bred field trial champion bloodline Beagles (and when I say bloodline I mean sire and dam were champions, not some obscure name 9 places back in a pedigree).  I never met the lady who bred the Jack Russells, but she would never give us their registration papers because she said she wanted to give people less incentive to breed them.  The Chow-Chow breeder is a regular customer in our store.  The guy with the Beagles only comes in when he wants to sell his pet quality puppies, but when his puppies are in our store he comes in every day to see them.  He lives at the opposite end of the state, so that's quite a hike.

The owner of the store is a giant softee.  He really is.  Otherwise, he wouldn't take the poorly dogs at all.  He does it with entire litters of accident puppies people want to get rid of fast, too.  Those are usually the ones in the worst condition of all, and I always half want to strangle and beat him for taking in dogs with no shot history.  (UM PARVO RISK, HELLO?!)  But he does it because he knows that at least he can do this for them, and he feels badly for them being in the situations that they're in.  It's hard to be mad at compassion. He really doesn't make any money from the accident puppies.  They're typically a true 57 mix, or mix of Insert Purebred Here and Next Door Neighbor's Dog.. Maybe.  And we have to put so much into them to get them into any condition to be sold that by the time he's sold them, he's only making money on the supplies we sell the dog with.

For awhile we were getting puppies from a lady who owned a pet store in a neighboring state, and her dogs did come from Amish puppy mills, and they were always sick with something and took a lot of work.  We eventually stopped dealing with her because she was just a pain in the ass every way and more.  And when they're from the Amish, there's really no denying it.  When the breeder card says a name like *Abbediah Zook and someone asks you, "These aren't Amish dogs are they," you can't exactly lie about it.

Unfortunately, between the new PA puppy mill legislation and the economy, most of our good breeders are no longer breeding.  The Chow-Chow guy had both of his females fixed and cited the economy as the main reason he's not breeding anymore.  I haven't seen any of the JRT lady's puppies in months, and I can only assume she's in the same boat.  N. elected to shut his kennel down at the first of the year rather than deal with the state of PA and the SPCA harassing him continually.  And the SPCA truly was harassing him.  They wanted his dogs, bad.  That whole situation really pissed me off, because of all the people to go after, N. was probably the least worthy of their attentions, but they came after him like a pack of sharks on a bleeding tuna. The only thing I can think of is that they wanted to obtain his dogs any way they could because they saw dollars signs all over them.  There really was no other reason for it.  They cited him for one of his dogs having periodontal disease, no lie.  They were that desperate.  I figure because he kept his dogs in such good condition, they wouldn't have to put any money into them to adopt them out, and everyone loves puppies.  A load of cute, healthy puppies with vaccination histories doesn't usually fall into the SPCA's lap.  It would be pure profit for the SPCA.  I can see why they'd be itching to get them.

For the record, let me just say.. I'm not usually down on the SPCA, but what they did to N. was really uncalled for.  How many pet dogs have periodontal disease in the US?  Really?  Seriously?

The PA legislation was just effed in so many ways.  It didn't just take down puppy mills.  A co-worker of mine got her Dogue De Bourdeaux from a breeder in PA who had to stop breeding because of a gut-punch combo of the economy with the new legislation right smack in the middle of it.  She even had to turn down her invitation to Westminster this year because of it.  Yes, that's right.  A breeder of Westminster quality show dogs was shut down by the PA puppy mill legislation.  They really threw the baby out with the bathwater on that one, congrats PA.  And really, did it end anything?  In PA, sort of.  For the most part, they're just going to move to Missouri, Ohio, Kansas.  It will just jump from state to state.

And now, we have to buy our dogs from other places.  We tried a broker called Lambriar for awhile.  They weren't up to the standards we were used to.  Now we're trying another place, and it's not working out.  The puppies aren't coming in from breeders with Amish-sounding names, but I don't know how much that actually means.  I do know that although they all have shot histories when they get here, they are all coming in with kennel cough right now.  (Hence the reason for the kennel overhaul cleaning P. and I had to do on Sunday.)  I had my first dog in my kennel die a couple of months ago because sometimes before this 1 pound Chihuahua puppy got to us, some idiot decided it would be a great idea to perform surgery to repair a small umbilical hernia.  I am not a happy kennel manager right now.

The chances of us finding another breeder like N. are zil.  He was one of a kind.  I'm sure there's another one somewhere, but within driving distance?  No.

Right now, we're up in the air about where to go now.  There's been talk of teaming up with a local rescue that we already do a lot of work with to adopt their dogs out of our kennel.  Or possibly just becoming our own brokers using the classified ads of our local paper.  There's a broker here who does that, about 10 minutes from our store in fact, and she sells them to places like Lambriar out of her house, but her dogs are always atrocious.  Which again, just underlies the fact that you don't always know for sure that dogs from brokers who find their ways to puppy stores are from puppy mills.  This lady goes around buying puppies from people out of the paper to sell to places like Lambriar, and I don't know if the people who sell the dogs to her realize that's what happens to them.

Anyway, some food for thought about where they come from.  This is already pretty long, so the issue of instant gratification of a long-term commitment will have to wait until another night when my son isn't sick and my dog isn't as obsessed with the cat litter box.  (Ew.)

I hope you guys read fast.  I'm long-winded.

*I just made Abbediah Zook up off the top of my head as an example.  So if there really is an Abbediah Zook out there somewhere who makes his living as a carpenter or something, I humbly apologize to all the powers of Karma, I make no reference to any real person with that name.  Not that any Abbediah Zook is likely to know that I'm talking about him on-line, but I like to cover my bases.

Lazy Sunday Night Post

This is a rambling lazy Sunday post.  P and I kicked the kennel's ASS today, and unfortunately it gave us a fight. Cleaning all the gunk out of all the air vents in every kennel, pulling out every shelf and table to clean behind it.  There was a lot of dust.  There were many sneezes.  I drank a huge cup of coffee, a Monster Nitrous, and a cappucino and had time to eat nothing all day.  Now I'm crashing, sitting here with a bowl of lo mein and a cup of iced chai, unwinding.

I'm going to try and keep up with animal (mostly DOG) current events in the news, tell you all more about the dogs I work with and the dogs I have lived with, and hopefully sprinkle some breed profiles and training tips and secrets about, just to keep things on the useful side.  I still have to tell you about my Sainted Labrador, Arleigh Burke's Bay Rum.  Sorry to you readers who know me and hear me gush about Bay all the time - but he deserves it.  I'll give you more of a bio on me, at some point.  In order to know about me you need to know about the other animals in our house (two cats, Simon and Mojo; and a pionus parrot, Peanut).  So I've got some ideas to throw at you, simmering around in this head of mine.  Stay tuned.

In other news, I've been invited to join a collective blog - Inu Baka.  Inu Baka means "dog crazy" in Japanese.  So yeah, it's another dog blog, mostly Shibas.  What can I say?  Dogs are life - the rest is just details.  Anyway, the collective blog is a really neat idea, and I'm really excited to be a part of it.  A big thank you to Jen for including me in an awesome group.  So if you're a dog person, pop over and visit the rest of us inu baka dog idiots.  If you're into manga, there's a manga by the same name that's a pretty good read.  If you use the link here to buy it, then I has a happy, so if you're really interested, do me a favor and click.  And that's all for tonight, my little droogies.  Have a happy Sunday night.

Jesse James & Cinnabun: How Tough is Too Tough?

The recent dog news is all about Jesse James and his bully breed bitch Cinnabun.  

A video shows Jesse working with a bully breed bitch by letting her hang from a device known as a spring pole.

View that video.


To those of you unfamiliar with dog training, a spring pole is basically a rope with something for the dog to bite tied to it, attached to a weighted platform so the dog cannot pull it over.  The point of this exercise is somewhat lost on me.  People involved with bully breeds will like to tell you that this "conditions" their dogs, but I'm at a loss as to what they're being conditioned for.  In some states, a spring pole is considered dog fighting paraphernalia, and you can get in serious trouble for owning one.  It does test their "gameness," another word for how tenaciously they will go after quarry. 

Can they get hurt doing this?  Yes, I'm sure they can, especially when people are stupid about it and hang spring poles from insane heights or place them in unsafe spaces.  Neither of these is true in the video of Jesse James and Cinnabun.  


That being said, the dogs do like it.  They aren't being forced to do this.  There is nothing in the world that can make a dog hang there and not let go if it does not want to.  The enjoyment of spring poles isn't confined to the bully breeds, either.  My sainted Labrador would use trees as spring poles, and if left to his own devices around trees that were small enough, he would eventually yank them out of the ground or rip all limbs within jumping distance off the tree.  I will say, he never so much as loosened a tooth in this play.  Dogs chomp on bones without damage to their teeth, remember.


Is there a legitimate use for spring poles?  Some police dogs, as puppies, are tested for suitability to the job by a spring pole or a person standing in as a spring pole for the puppies.  Basically they get the puppies really wound up with a rope, let them bite, and then try to pick them up off the ground.  Any puppy that won't hang on with all four feet off the ground isn't going to make a police dog.  Please note, this is not a part of their training, and it is not something they are required to do all the time.  It's just a way to test the suitability of their temperament for police work as young as 8 or 9 weeks.

Here's the main source of controversy:  Is it inhumane?  


When used properly, I don't think so.  I never saw anything inhumane in my Labrador deciding for himself to hang with all four feet off of a tree branch, and I don't see anything inhumane in the use of spring poles, though I do question why people decide to do it.  If a bully breed is being legitimately used for boar hunting, that's one thing.  But how many people really do that with their dogs?  The only person I've ever seen use a bully breed for boar hunting was old videos of Steve Irwin and his dog Sui on Animal Planet.  If a person is using it for the sole purpose of the dog's enjoyment, from safe heights in a clear open space, I see nothing wrong.  As before stated, the dogs do love to do it, and from a behavioral standpoint, I think it is better for the dog to play tug-of-war with an inanimate object than it is to possibly let the dog learn that it is physically superior to people.  When people do it for no other reason than to demonstrate what a tough, dangerous dog they have, then I have concerns.  Those are the people who usually let their dog dangle from dangerous heights, or have them jumping and swinging wildly around from unstable, home-made spring poles in areas littered with dangerous debris that the dog could hurt itself on when letting go.  When it is being used as a training tool for dog fighting, then it is inhumane.

None of these is true of the video showing Jesse James letting Cinnabun use a spring pole.  The dog's tail is wagging, she is clearly enjoying herself.  The spring pole is well made, and the area is free and clear.  The dog is not hanging from a height in which she will hurt herself when she drops, it's just high enough that she can get her feet off the ground.


The notion that Cinnabun "ran away" recently because Jesse "makes" her use a spring pole is complete idiocy.  The more likely scenario is that Cinnabun wandered away because she's an unspayed female, and that's what dogs do when they aren't fixed.


This dog lover's take?  This is just another way to vilify Jesse James because he cheated on Sandra Bullock and whatever else of his private life people haven't recently agreed with.  It might also be that this display of strength and tenacity in a bully breed scares people.  This is a breed that has been utterly crucified by the press, much maligned and made into a terror that it isn't.  I can easily see how people could watch that video and envision a person in place of the spring pole, only see all the damage that this dog is capable of when watching a strong man shake her while she is dangling in the air and she still will not let go.


I see her heart.  I see a dog whose tenacity extends beyond her jaw musculature to her loyalty.  I see a dog who loves as hard as she hangs on to a rope.  No, indeed, she ain't lettin' go.  Not of anything she holds dear.