A historic beagle rescue, a big cat bill & tales of whales

“Government inspectors found that beagles at the facility were being killed instead of receiving veterinary treatment for easily treated conditions; nursing mother beagles were denied food; the food that they did receive contained maggots, mold and feces; and over an eight-week period, 25 beagle puppies died from cold exposure. Some dogs suffered from injuries when they were attacked by other dogs in overcrowded conditions.” -- HSUS

I have always heard good things about beagles’ temperament, which has made them popular, easy-to-work-with lab animals.  How supremely unlucky for beagles. 

During the last week, a rescue began for some 4,000 beagles in a facility where they were bred to become lab animals.  The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) is leading the rescue, which also involves other animal-advocacy organizations, to move the beagles into shelter-partner sites around the country for eventual adoption. 

This move, with its great humane motivation, is thrilling to know of.  I hope people all over are following the HSUS news, watching for specifics on where the beagles are going, donating to HSUS to help the effort and thinking very seriously about adopting!       

https://www.humanesociety.org/4000beagles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZo_j-U_J-0

For both big cats & people

A federal bill that would curb or end the exploitation and suffering of captive big cats and protect the US public – the Big Cat Public Safety Act (H.R. 263) – is coming up for a vote this week.  Please contact your US representative to urge a positive vote on this important legislation.  

Basically, the bill aims to (1) prohibit the possession by private individuals of lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs, jaguars, cougars or any hybrid of these species, and (2) restrict direct contact between the public and big cats of any age.   

The Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS), one organization urging passage of this bill, points out that since 1990, there have been nearly 380 dangerous incidences involving captive big cats in 46 states and the District of Columbia, with 25 people killed and many more injured.

What else does it take?

It also takes this: “Cub petting operations continuously breed big cats so they can sell photo and handling sessions with young cubs to the public.”  After being “torn from their mothers shortly after birth,” the cubs are exploited and often mistreated.

Once they grow too big to handle or bring in profits, cubs may be “funneled into the exotic pet trade, sold to other disreputable exhibitors, or ending up in the illegal trade in wildlife parts.”

This is all very ugly. 

To repeat: Please ask your US rep to vote "yes" on the Big Cat Public Safety Act (H.R. 263).  Thank you! 

Huge, invaluable & jeopardized

Whales, cetaceans, leviathans . . . just a few ways to allude to “fully aquatic, open-ocean” marine mammals, including the blue whale, “the largest animal known to have ever existed,” according to Wikipedia.  And not only the largest, but also intelligent beyond belief, incredibly feeling and, alas, long victimized by humans – to the extent that some are already functionally extinct, while others are “endangered.”

A comprehensive description of whales and whale history that will amaze and (properly) depress those who listen to it can be found in “Whale Nation,” a two-CD set.  The first CD is devoted to Heathcote Williams’s extended poem about these majestic creatures, while the second CD, about whale history, is read by Williams, Harry Burton and Caroline Webster (beautiful, stirring voices all). 

For those who care about our world’s threatened environment and its animals, I recommend buying or at least listening to this impassioned CD.

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Heroes for animals & could-have-beens

She is, indisputably, a hero for animals – and just the person you’d want to have in the neighborhood if your beloved pet were in mortal danger. 

“She” is Julia Caldwell, a detective in Ewing Twp., Mercer County, and she did for a trapped dog what some of us could only dream of doing: saving a trapped animal from dying in a burning building. 

She was just passing by when she came upon the fire scene and quickly made her way to the window pointed out by a neighbor.  Inside that room, a dog was caged, but the residents weren’t home.

Caldwell got a colleague to boost her up so she could climb inside, open the cage, wrap the dog in a towel and hand the animal ou-t the window to those waiting.  The dog weighed 70 pounds, while Caldwell was 105 fit pounds of hero.  

With two dogs of her own at home, Caldwell said later she just couldn’t imagine losing her own house and everything in it.  “I knew I could get in that window,” she said later, “and I just thought, let me get in and get out.”

Done!

Update: The last I read in the Times of Trenton, Caldwell was still recovering at home.  Her 90-second rescue had caused damage to her respiratory tract, necessitating an induced coma and intubation.  Still suffering from reactive airway disease, or RAD, and a collarbone injury, she’s been cleared to return to desk duty.  Her pulmonologist must still OK her return to full duty.

Two crucial questions remain: (1) how is the rescued dog doing?  (2) will the dog’s family (please!) swear off leaving him or her in a cage?    

Now here’s the other side of the “hero for animals” coin:

A Personality Test  by Maureen Thorson In the orchard, I catch out of the corner of my eye a black rag snapped tight in the wind. Turns out to be a field mouse racing across fallen leaves tumbling in and out of pocks like a Marine recruit, all go!go!go! purely exposed to the eyes of hawks, foxes, whatever wants to eat her, which is everything. As I watch, she disappears into divots, reappears, slides, carroms, and slaloms, a little dark clown. I can't help it— I laugh at her pratfalls. I laugh at her fear. I laugh at her fear. I laugh as she runs for her life.  ("A Personality Test" by Maureen Thorson, from SHARE THE WEALTH, © 2022 Maureen Thorson.  Used by permission of Veliz Books.)

Birds: nectar & water  

A massive trumpet vine envelops the arbor on our deck, and the red-orange flowers (resembling trumpets, of all things!) are vividly beautiful.  Besides me, they have also attracted hummingbirds this summer, and I’ve been fascinated to watch them zipping all around the flowers.

One recent day near sunset, a “hummer” was right outside the deck door, treading air at high speed. That caused me to wonder if and how these birds decompress after that blurry movement goes on for so long. 

So I asked the naturalist-author of a terrific bird book, National Wildlife Federation’s World of Birds: A Beginner’s Guide (c. 2014), and Kim Kurki responded: “Hummingbirds will perch high in trees to rest. They do have very tiny nests, but won’t hang out in them after the young have left” (a practice that’s true of many birds).

High up in a nearby evergreen right now, at least one lounging hummingbird may be keeping an eye on our imposing trumpet vine.  

I’ve noticed that some people have decided bird baths, despite their name, are for flower display.  Providing water for parched birds on sizzling summer days?   Nah, anybody can do that!

Now I'm wondering whether those people got bird baths for exclusive use as shallow round flower vases.

'Animals doing well' are cheering sights

Yes, “It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world” – and a bad and sad one too (seeming sometime to worsen every day).  Current events routinely amount to one horrific piece of news after another, with no hint of sanity, compassion or care for the future.

How to cope, feel optimistic and move forward?

One cheer-up for me was this recent sighting: in a little clearing at the edge of a park stood two sweet spotted fawns, tails flicking while they nosed around.  Utterly charmed, I drove slowly by, praying they wouldn’t venture into the street.

I took the same route home, hoping to see them again.  I did.  One had stayed in place, while the other was now barely visible behind high brush nearby, with a taller figure whose brown coat glowed through the foliage: mom.  Had she been watching her kids from the same spot when I first went by?

The second and always pick-me-up: Billy Summers, a loving tuxedo cat whose bright eyes tell me he’s alert and ready to play (or eat?) . . . and happy for our togetherness: a thrill every time.  

Obviously, non-human animals doing well are dependable uppers for me, even if it doesn’t happen widely or often enough. 

In New Jersey, though, one statewide organization has for nearly 40 years worked (yes, even during the dog days of summer!) for our state’s animals, from bears, deer, geese and farm animals to cats, dogs and others -- some pets and some lost, homeless or abused, but all needing attention and care.

The Animal Protection League of New Jersey (APLNJ) is making its commitment and influence felt in numerous summer activities that include such efforts as . . .

• Participating on a Forest Task Force and proposing to stop all current deer-killing practices that necessitated the group’s creation
• Re-fighting the poaching bill that keeps coming up by meeting with legislature leadership; seeking co-sponsorship of the bill to ban bear feeding at that series of meetings
• Preparing to meet with Gov. Murphy’s staff about the Division of Fish & Wildlife’s unsatisfactory non-lethal bear program 
• Maintaining the Canada geese program; tabling (distributing printed info and answering questions) at numerous locales; making presentations to interested groups on deer; taking part in collaborative coalitions on behalf of deer, bears & gestation crates. 

'People power' for animals

Another example of people working for the good of animals is Britain’s new animal-welfare law, the Animal Sentience Act.  By requiring all government officials to consider animal welfare when laws and policies are enacted, it provides legal protection for animals. 

Before leaving the European Union (EU) in 2020, Britain had supported a declaration of animal sentience (“ability to perceive or feel things”) that became a legal article in the 2009 Lisbon Treaty. That legislation provided “legal recognition that all vertebrate animals, decapod crustaceans (such as lobsters) and cephalopods (such as octopuses) have the capacity for feelings and emotions, both positive and negative.”  

That (comparatively enlightened) statement of belief came centuries after the common earlier practice of equating animals with inanimate owned objects – both seen as property, unable to feel pain or suffer. Instead, it acknowledged that non-human animals, like humans, also have feelings that deserve care and respect.

Once out of the EU, however, Britain was no longer bound by the Lisbon Treaty article and lacked any such guideline.  Then “people power” changed all that.  Activists’ massive drive for sentience-recognition legislation led in April to passage of the new Animal Sentience Act, now regarded as only the foundation for what may follow.

If the newly created Animal Sentience Committee and public opinion continue to influence government actions, UK campaigns to ban cruel animal products and promote “fur-free Britain” may become realities.    https://tinyurl.com/2s3tafhh

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