When I drove across the country a couple of weeks ago, something had changed since the last time I made the trek; what happened to all the pro-life billboards? When driving through the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin a couple of summers ago it seemed like we couldn't go a mile or two without seeing an 'Abortion is Murder' billboard with a picture of a hacked up fetus on it. And all that graphic, shock and shame-based marketing made me think of sandwiches.
Hold on, I can explain! Have you seen or heard a Subway commercial lately? The bulk of their advertising in the past few years has been focused on shaming and mocking overweight people.
OK, so it's not exactly saying, 'Have another burger, fatass!' but the implication is there: if you don't eat what we tell you to eat, you'll be fat, and if you're fat, you're miserable and unlovable. Just ask Jared. Maybe that's effective marketing, but it's also pretty slimy. Besides that, Quizno's is so much better than Subway, and Quizno's never gave me shit for going to Carl's Jr. They just told me their sandwiches tasted good. (And have you had that Batch 81 sauce? It rivals Arby's Sauce as the greatest condiment ever created.)
So Subway wants you to be ashamed of what you eat, and the Midwest wants you to hate yourself for the rest of your life if you've ever even considered an abortion, but it's not just Big Sandwich and the Religious Right who use shame to sell products and push agendas -- have a look at some animal rescue websites.
Check out Causes on Facebook, of which my organization has begun to make good use recently; the top animal rescue organizations on that site are showing you pictures of mangled fighting dogs, burned kittens, or just sad-ass puppies waiting miserably to be adopted. Don't you dare look away -- these animals need your help. And the fact that these top animal welfare organizations, including ASPCA, HSUS, and PETA, oppose the no-kill movement, meaning that in many cases they advocate the killing of the very same animals in their photos, all the while calling it 'rescue', you shouldn't be dissuaded from giving them your money, because after all, if you don't, more pit bulls will be mangled, and more kittens will be set on fire. Hell, you might as well be holding the match.
And then there's this delightful ad:
I can't tell you how many people have told me they turn the TV off when that one comes on. I'm surprised the networks will even air it. So I'd like to pose a few questions, to HSUS and the other organizations that use similar marketing strategies to raise money for their rescue (and animal killing) work -- Do you think the 'shock and shame' model changes hearts and minds? Do you think you make more money showing people disgusting images of torture, or showing them an alternative? And if you're showing people graphic images of animal suffering in order to raise money for your cause, aren't you exploiting those animals for gain, even benefiting from their pain? Is any of it really necessary?
I deal with the horror of animal abuse every day. I see the things in the HSUS ads firsthand. And I change the channel when those commercials come on. I don't deny that the ads are effective -- clearly they attract donors and volunteers, but I think it would be interesting to see psych evaluations done on the people who respond favorably to them. I can't responsibly hypothesize about what the results would indicate, but I will say that the reputation of animal rescuers for being 'crazy' isn't entirely undeserved, and furthermore, when I, who live in a kennel with a pack of feral dogs, often feel like one of the most sane people in our field, something's very wrong. I think it's entirely possible that shock and shame attract the mentally ill and repel the mentally stable. Honestly, if you think about it, how could that not be the case? If nothing else it's manipulative, and mentally stable people tend to walk away when they feel they're being manipulated.
I've stayed away from shock and shame in my own organization's website and promotional materials, preferring to show people images of healthy animals playing and having a good time. Sure, I tell their stories, but if I tell you a dog's face was torn half-off, do I really need to show you a photo of it? There's a big difference between not hiding the ugly truth from people and shoving it in their faces. Do I need to put a grotesque image in your head that haunts you for the rest of your life? Do I need to give your children nightmares? My Sanctuary may not be a multi-million dollar a year organization (yet), but for a nonprofit founded less than three years ago, I think we do pretty well. In the last five hours we've raised $150 with this photo:
It's not a ton of money, but we'll use every cent of it to save animals. Maybe we'd get more money if she was covered in wounds and lying in a pool of blood, but I'm not doing that. We'll build this organization without blood money, without shame money, without 'Please God make it stop!' money. And unlike the others, we won't be then using that money to kill healthy dogs and cats in some back room. Look -- I can be as negative and accusatory as anyone (this rant is the proof), but putting aside whatever foul mood I might be in or whatever's pissing me off today, even the very topic of this entry, 'at the end of the day' as they say, I'd rather create beauty than try to put a dent in ugliness. Sure, it's semantics, a glass half full/glass half empty kind of thing (or as my good friend Brent once said, the glass is half empty, and the other half is piss) but if I have the choice between showing you how ugly the world is or showing you another option, well, I think you know where I stand.
It's good to be home. Here's how the last couple of days went:
The night of my last entry I started to get pretty tired as we got into Montana, so I started calling Motel 6s. At the one in Billings, no one would answer the phone, so I figured 'screw them' and made a reservation in Butte. After trying to find a Pacific Pride (the members-only commercial fueling stations I try to use when I'm on the road) near Bozeman and discovering that all three of the ones in the area had converted to Commercial Fueling Network (the members-only commercial fueling stations I ought to be using when I'm on the road), which I discovered by driving all over the Bozeman area and going to all three stations, I filled up at Flying J, already fighting to stay awake, and made the rest of the drive to Butte. The Motel six in Butte is right at the junction of I-90 and I-15, and should be easy to find, but when you're exhausted and relying too heavily on GPS, things aren't as easy as they should be. Instead of having me exit I-90 and basically drive right into the motel parking lot, the GPS had me go down I-15, exit onto some middle-of-nowhere road, and drive into what looked like the hybrid of a trailer park and a train station, where I crossed no less than 30 sets of railroad tracks before ending up at the other end of the road that the motel was on. But even when I was going the right way, the GPS was trying to steer me back in the wrong direction, and when it started repeating, "When possible, make a U-turn," over and over without even a second's pause between repetitions, I threw it against the door of the truck.
I got all of the dogs inside the room and was ready to sleep by around 4:30 AM. Guido and Tony slept in crates, same as the night before. I slept about four hours before getting up and loading everyone out again, and this time it was an older, white, non-Russian man who kept asking me if he could clean my room yet. What the hell, Motel-6? Tell your housekeepers that check-out time is at noon and to leave me alone, especially when I've only been there four hours.
We got back on the road and had a pretty uneventful day. Either that or a lot of things happened that I can't remember because I was so tired. We got into Forks around 10 PM; all the dogs looked good, and my little ferals were all happy to see me, which was a little surprising, because in the past they've tended to revert slightly to their former, wilder selves when I've gone away. I took Maddie up to the small dog room and introduced him around; he was a little confused but he'll figure it out. Tony and Guido went into kennels, and Katie stayed in my room with me and the ferals. She is so good with other dogs, I may just keep her in here with me.
I have a couple of photos to share, taken with my phone again. The first is Maddie looking sad in the truck when I came back from lunch -- this was the sight that greeted me every time I returned to the truck after leaving him, even if it was only for a minute. (Don't worry, I always left the engine on during the day.) The second is Maddie when he smelled the ocean for the first time, as we crossed the Tacoma Narrows bridge.
I'm sitting at a truck stop with some dogs in the back of the truck, and I have to take a leak, so I'm going to try to write this quickly. Here's what's happened since I left the hotel with the old guy in his pajamas sitting in a chair in the hallway:
First, I got my pizza, thanks to a late start when I left Madison:
That's at Gino's East in Chicago, and sorry about this, vegetarians and vegans, but there's a sausage patty that covers the entire surface of the pizza. (I can get into a whole meat discussion some other time.) It took me 2 days to eat this thing.
I had hoped to be able to get to the Anchor Bar in Buffalo in time for dinner, to have a repeat of my last drive to the east coast where I ate Buffalo wings in the place where they were invented, but it wasn't to be this time. So instead I pulled an all-nighter to get to Massachusetts and pick up Maddie, my first rescue of this trip. That's right -- Madison, WI to Templeton, MA without stopping to sleep, and then to Warwick, NY, where I grabbed a shower, picked up another dog, and hung out for awhile before finally sleeping. It took over 36 hours. It was only 1,300 miles or so, but there was a ton of road construction, plus the stop for pizza, the time it takes to do a rescue, the time it takes to get lost in Warwick, NY, the most confusingly laid out town I've ever been to, where despite having been there twice before, I couldn't find my way around. Anyway, the dogs:
Maddie is a cockapoo (a huge one) with numerous, severe bites in his history, including at least one that sent someone to the ER. He's been good with me once we got over the initial meeting. He sleeps with his head on my lap while I drive.
Katie is the dog from Warwick; the reason I have Katie is a little complicated, or maybe it's not. I got an email from a woman named Eileen in NJ who volunteers at a shelter in Trenton that had a dog named Dillon who had knocked heads with a small boy at a Petco adoption event. The shelter decided Dillon was probably dangerous and hired an outside firm to do a behavior assessment. The people who did the assessment were imbeciles and chose to interpret normal dog behavior as unpredictability, and decided to deem Dillon non-adoptable. Eileen wanted me to take him, but being in the hands of idiots and assholes isn't enough to qualify a dog for placement with me. So I worked it out with Warwick Valley Humane Society to take in Dillon, assess him, and if he turned out to be truly dangerous I'd take him, either now or in the future should his behavior change over time. In return for them taking Dillon, I took Katie, a little pit-type dog with a pretty interesting behavior pathology. Katie obsesses over objects, and her obsession can escalate to the point of losing control and becoming dangerous to anyone trying to handle her at the time. It's a behavior I've seen in other dogs, but where I've seen it the most is with wild cats. Katie loves plastic water bottles, Frisbees, blankets, but she can also obsess over things like grass or a person's fingers. It starts with nibbling and progresses to biting and shaking, so she has to be diverted. So far it hasn't been too difficult, but as she becomes more comfortable and settles into the Sanctuary, we may see some changes. Anyway, here's a picture of Dillon, now at Warwick, where he's available for adoption -- he looks like a boxer/pit mix to me:
From Warwick I went to Noblesville, IN. I picked up Guido and Tony; Guido was kind of a high profile dog -- here's the story. That's the first search result I found -- there are a lot more stories about this if you want to hunt around. Guido is interesting; he definitely has barrier issues. When I first met him he was very 'mouthy' but I could keep him under control fairly easily; when I left the yard and came back a few minutes later he bit me. The bite didn't do any damage, but probably could have. He went for me again when I was lifting him into the back of the truck, but since then has been fine with me once he is out of his travel crate. Inside the crate, he's pretty defensive. We'll get through it. Here's Guido:
Tony bit a couple of Hamilton Humane's board members, and truthfully, I took him because board members of animal rescues are usually a total pain in the ass and a thorn in my side. I instantly liked Tony when I heard he'd bitten not one, but two of them. Here he is:
Tony was named Toby before I took him, but I have a dog named Toby who looks just like him, so that needed to be changed.
From Indiana, it was back on the road. I stayed at a Motel 6 in Sioux Falls, SD last night, and this morning the Russian maids were hassling me at 10 AM to get out of the room so they could clean it, even though check out time was noon. So I've had bad experiences with Russians on both road trips I've taken to the east coast, the previous experience being at a restaurant in Jackson, WY, staffed entirely by Russians who wouldn't take anyone's order. But I'm not willing to give up on you yet, Russia.
So now I'm at a Flying J, and this entry ended up not being so short, didn't it? And I still have to pee. So I'm going to wrap this up. Seacrest out.
Whether we're lavishing them with affection, maligning them for their violent behavior, parading them around as fashion accessories, or utilizing them as tools to aid us in our work or recreation, dogs are a pretty big deal. They mean different things to different people, but they mean something to just about everyone on the planet, and that's significant - you can't say that about cell phones, Volkswagens, hedgehogs, ball bearings, or lemon trees. You can't say that about most things in the world.
Click here to read the full article on the Olympic Animal Sanctuary website.
Last week my neighbor and I drove to Spokane to pick up two great Danes named Juno and Satina; the dogs had been declared dangerous after killing another dog on a neighbor's property, and they were facing an uncertain future with their usual pet-sitter leaving town and their guardian having an out of town job approaching. The dogs had been imported from Germany and were being bred, pretty regularly from the look of Satina, the older of the two. Satina was outgoing and happy to meet us, but Juno was shy at first, and did his fair share of growling and lunging. Once we got the dogs into the truck, they settled in nicely, and from Spokane, we headed south.
I dropped my neighbor off in Oakland, CA to visit with his family for a few days while I went on to Los Angeles, where I would visit friends and family and meet with some producers to talk about a possible TV show. Juno and Satina traveled well and seemed to be enjoying the ride. Satina was old (for a great Dane -- six years) and overweight, so she needed help getting in and out of the truck, but seemed otherwise content, so you can imagine my surprise when I returned to my truck after eating lunch at a Carl's Jr. in Chatsworth and found her dead in the back seat. The temperature was cool in the truck and as I replayed the last thirty hours in my mind, I couldn't think of anything that had happened that would have caused her to die. A bit in shock, I made a few phone calls, postponed my first meeting, and drove to the office of the veterinarian I had always gone to when I lived in southern California, so that he could perform a necropsy. Getting 160 pounds of deceased dog out of the truck wasn't the easiest thing in the world, but we managed, and I left Satina on the operating table, still a bit in shock, but more worried about poor Juno, who had just lost the only remaining thing from his prior life.
Juno surprised me a bit. I took him to my mom's place in San Juan Capistrano for about half an hour before we had to return to LA, and he seemed relaxed, even playful. We drove back north and arrived at the Hell's Kitchen set for our first meeting, and Juno was a hit. I had initially considered not taking the Danes to my meetings because I felt it might be too stressful, but with all that had happened to Juno, I wasn't going to leave his side. In the meetings, he did what big dogs usually do -- he slept.
I got a call from my vet about Satina; he had found cardiomyopathy to be the cause of death -- the walls of her heart were twice the thickness they should have been. He also found a diseased spleen and a large tumor on Satina's bladder that had spread to the spleen. The doctor asked if I wanted him to continue pulling tumors from the dog or to send tissue samples out for analysis, but there was no point -- the dog was essentially full of little time bombs. Had I known, I wouldn't have taken her to California, but I had no way of knowing. I was upset to have lost Satina so quickly; she never even saw the Sanctuary, but I had to focus on Juno, who was still very much alive and well.
We had two meetings that day and three more the following one, and Juno was a star -- a perfect example of why dangerous dog legislation is ineffective. Juno, who, if he was in Washington at the time, would have had to have been leashed and muzzled for the protection of the public, was a gentle, shy, quiet dog, and in the meantime, in Astoria, OR, a little girl was killed by her family's Rottweiler, who had no such restrictions placed on him. It was a tragedy that probably could have been easily averted, and as one family mourns their terrible loss, legislators and 'concerned citizens' are no doubt devising ways to prevent such an awful event from happening again, and the laws they are writing will no doubt punish dogs for the irresponsibility of those who possess them, and this tragedy will reach much farther than Astoria. It is already taking a toll; not until I looked up the story myself did I learn the breed of the dog involved -- everyone who had told me about the incident had said it was a pit bull. More bad press for pits.
But I'm getting off track. Juno, the "dangerous dog" was proving himself to be anything but. It was Friday and my meetings were all over; I gave some brief presentations to three elementary school classes at St. Margaret's where I had gone to school as a kid, and brought Juno out to meet my mom's fourth grade class, with a fence separating him and the children. He wasn't allowed on the campus, but being a little afraid of children, Juno was happy to keep his distance.
From the school we headed off for lunch with my friend Bob from high school and then back to LA where I had two rescues waiting. The first was Jill, a wolf-dog that had ended up at SPCA Los Angeles after no one could handle her in a home environment. Jill was shy, smart, scrutinizing. It was hard to gain her trust. I ended up spending about an hour at the SPCA with her until I was able to walk her on a leash, but even then getting her into the back of the truck was going to be a problem, so I opted to crate her and transfer her into the transport cage from there.
Next we went to a dog training facility where I met some previous clients and some new ones; I was there for Tesla, a doberman pinscher who had been accumulating a significant bite record and for whom the style of training the facility was using had not worked. The facility's owner and I had had an argument on the phone the day before that essentially amounted to her insisting that my methods would not work in an urban environment because the dogs needed to be under more control. In short, I can only do what I do because I live in rural Washington. I still don't understand the argument -- I have the same safety concerns that people in 'the big city' have, and I grew up in southern California, remember? I'm not some yokel who just rolled into town.
When we met in person, it was more of the same. I started out by badmouthing punishment-based dog training, to the delight of half the people there and the chagrin of the rest. Once inside the part of the facility where the dogs were housed, I saw a number of the items I had just finished disparaging: shock collars, spray bottles, choke chains -- Items used to cause pain and discomfort. I watched a yellow Lab jump and spin when he was shocked by his collar; his crime -- barking. The dogs weren't allowed to put their feet up on the fence when they greeted visitors. They weren't allowed to mount each other during play. They weren't allowed to communicate vocally. It was all about control and dominance. It was disgusting. Tesla was so stressed in that environment that she ran around nervously with a tennis ball in her mouth; she wanted to interact with people, but it was clear that she was on edge. I attempted to work with her a bit, but my gentle methods were entirely foreign to her -- she seemed to be waiting for the punishment to start, and the presence of her 'trainers' wasn't helping. The dog was a wreck.
I opted to just get Tesla the hell out of there. I took her out to the truck and had her jump up onto the tailgate, but she was afraid to go into the cargo area at first; I asked one of the young staff members to hold onto her for a moment while I grabbed some treats from the cab. He took hold of her so sharply, almost violently; it occurred to me that it wasn't only the dogs who were being trained inappropriately. Tesla went into the back of the truck on her own and I ended up not needing the treats. I stayed for awhile and talked with my new clients, got some firsthand accounts of a certain celebrity dog trainer's shortcomings, then got on the road. We got as far as Buttonwillow, CA before I was too tired to keep going.
Juno stayed in the hotel room with me, while Jill and Tesla slept in the back of the truck. Tesla had gotten into a bag of Juno's dog toys, which she had gathered around herself and made a sort of nest. She seemed stressed and didn't want to come out of the truck, but once I offered her a treat, it became clear that she wasn't stressed at all, just very comfortable. When I took her up to the hotel room for a little while, I realized what was really going on with Tesla -- she was feeling safe and secure, maybe for the first time in her life. Tesla was coming to me because of a history of biting; she was didn't like her head or feet touched, and she was a severe resource guarder. In the hotel room with me, she rolled around on the bed, and I touched the top of her head, pinched her toes, and tested her limits. She never bit me -- never even growled.
The next day we visited my friend Jason in King City, where I spent the night before heading to San Francisco to hang out with Melissa and Rick, then over to Loomis to see my cousin Tim and his wife Ali. I spent the night in Davis before going back to Oakland to pick up my neighbor, Chuck, and head north again. We made it back to Forks early the next morning, and I promptly got sick for about a week. The dogs settled in nicely; Jill got along great with the male wolf-dogs, and Juno and Tesla got along with everyone.
I wish I could say things slowed down, but with a little wild basenji mix from eastern Washington coming in, along with the last five of the Kennewick Eskimos, and Jack... sick or not, I stayed pretty busy. Maybe I'll get some rest next week.
In a few days I'll be heading to St. Charles, Missouri on what will probably be the last rescue trip for awhile. I thought this would be a good time to start using Twitter, so if you're interested in the play-by-play, I'm @stevemarkwell. I have no followers yet and it's embarrassing, but on the other side, I'm not following anyone. Is it bad that I don't really want to? Regardless, Twitter can be a valuable promotional tool and I felt I needed to use it, along with Facebook and blogging, to give people multiple ways to connect with my work. With the article about the Sanctuary coming out in the LA Times soon, I figured I'd better get on it quick, too. Funny about MySpace... anyone still using it?
So check me out on Twitter if you're a ... Twitterer? Tweeter? What a stupid site. But I'm still going to give it a fair chance.
