THANK YOU

Jeannie & Kim of AnimalTalk Naturally, for hosting this event – the first-ever Online Dog Expo. Wherever you are, I hope tonight finds you in good spirits, and with your favorite dog beside you.

Our topic tonight is Animal Welfare vs. Animal Rights.

Let me begin with the forward to my latest novel, HIGH STAKES, which addresses this issue:

READ

To understand what the animal rights movement has become, we must first understand how it happened. Because, just like animal life itself, thoughts and ideas have a starting point, from which they grow and change and often become quite different from what they were first meant to be.

Taking care of animals is part of our nature as human beings. Some people say it’s our parental instinct at work, and others say it’s the nature of our hearts to bond with other living things. Most people agree, that how we treat animals is usually how a healthy-minded person will treat other people. Still others say, that’s not entirely true. They say, how we treat animals is something that can be taught or ‘enforced” with rules … and that’s a lot different from learning about life “hands-on.”

“Hands-on” learning is just like going out into the world and making your own way. It’s like discovering what works and what doesn’t from real, blood and guts experience. It’s about taking risks and feeling – really FEELING – what true and what isn’t. Let’s say it’s the difference between taught in school how to run a race … and really doing it yourself. On the one hand, you’ll sit in your chair, at your school desk, listening to an expert tell you the proper steps of how to jog or how to run a race. You’ll sit there quietly, perhaps yawn, and think you know how to run a race. But, on the other hand, when you try it yourself – when you find a place to run, put on your sneakers, and hunch down in the dirt. When you smell the grass and feel the sun shining on your skin and stretch your legs – when you start jogging and feel the air playing in your hair as you go faster – as your breath goes deeper and you feel your body using itself … this is far different than reading about it. Far different than having someone in authority (a teacher, a friend, a cult leader) telling you how something is “supposed to be.”

The same is true when you love animals. It’s not exactly something that comes with “rules” … it’s something we do naturally.

Not too long ago, people like you and me just took care of our animals as well as we could. Ownership wasn’t complicated. There was nothing to it: You found animals you liked, and you took care of them. If they got in trouble, you fixed things somehow. It was part of growing up and it was that simple. Taking care of animals and being responsible for them was something we just did. It heighted our sensitivities, developed our compassion and tapped into our finest emotions.

Everybody had pets back in those days and a few of us (not many) had dogs or cats that were purebred. Those who did, went to special gatherings called “shows” and competed for the grandest distinction an animal could have: “Champion.”

The making of a champion was a tradition starting ages before, as farmers and dog breeders gathered together once a year, usually around harvest time, showing off their crops and young stock. Pigs, rabbits, ducks, chickens, goats, sheep, cows, dogs, whatever they raised, they took to the county fair. It was a way for farmers to measure their success. It was a way of finding out if your secrets of breeding, feeding and raising animals really worked.

If you think about it, this really wasn’t so different from feeding, raising and training their own children. After all, there were certain standards of behavior expected from people, certain manners a child must learn, certain languages and manners of speaking to master. Self-improvement is how we developed from cave-men who couldn’t write … to such a thing as this Online Dog Expo right now. Self-improvement is how we get from first grade to graduation, and how we blossom into the greatest we can possibly be.

The same is true for animals. If you study pictures of animals of any breed over the years, you will see differences emerging. These differences are guided by breeders working toward an ideal.

Those in the Animal Rights movement sometimes object to certain breeds of animals that have been developed, or to certain traits those animals might posses. Radical animal Rights activists (and not all of them are radical) would say: Destroy those animals. While those of us thinking of animal Welfare, would just love them.

As time went on, many different kinds of animals came into the world because people who love animals are generally very creative people. Growing up, we played with animals and we had animals around us our whole lives. And so it was …

Care of our animals improved because we wanted the best for them. Vaccines were developed, better nutrition came into being, and better ways of taking care of our pets were discovered. We played with our pets, fed them, cleaned up after them, brushed them, trained them and took them to the vets.

A Collie named “Lassie,” a stallion named “Fury” and a mare named “Flicka” were heroes Saturday shows on TV … Roy Rogers wasn’t a fast-food chain, he was a cowboy on a palomino horse named Trigger. Rin-Tin-Tin, the German Shepherd was brave, and stories about Misty of Chincoteague Island were in every horse-loving child’s home, beautifully illustrated by C.W. Anderson and Wesley Dennis. It was a good time to grow up … it was a healthy time.

But, not everybody loved dogs or cats or horses as much as the rest of us did. Before we knew it, they started telling us where we could walk our dogs. They told us we had to clean up after our dogs when “Nature called.” In and of itself, that isn’t such a bad thing. But, suddenly, towns and cities, counties and states started thinking about pets as a community problem. And, “problems,” by their very nature, demand to be solved.

Before we knew it, landlords were saying you couldn’t have pets because they didn’t want animals destroying the property and lowering its value. No matter how good your dog or cat was, if your landlord didn’t like animals, you had to give tehm up – or move. What effect did this have on the emotional development of children?

After a while, places started making laws about how many dogs or cats we could have in our homes and it didn’t stop there. Soon, they were even deciding how many dogs we could have on our property at any given time – even if they belonged to visiting friends or relatives.

As many of us discovered, law-makers started deciding what kinds of dogs we could have (something called breed specific legislation) and even how big or small those dogs could be. Instead of teaching us how to train our dogs better, or even giving our dogs a chance, they took away our freedom to have whatever kind of pet we wanted.

With each law, they took away a piece of us as “grown-ups” able to make decisions for ourselves. Were laws like this the breeding ground of the “Animal Rights” movement?

Let’s take a closer look and find out.

In the 1960s, many of us were awakening to spiritual depths and understanding on a scale that was unparalled in the history of civilization. We were very different from those who had gone before us. We thought on a wide scale and we wanted to do great things. Many of us, maybe most of us, were animal lovers who valued the emotions which animals keep alive in our hearts. Foremost of those emotions being … LOVE.

It is from this foundation that serious thinking about animal welfare, or animal “protection” really began.

Yes, we had books like Beautiful Joe, about the dog misreated by his mean master, and we had the story of Black Beauty, about a horse who fell on hard times. But the stories didn’t stop there. Just like it is in the real world, the animals had good times and bad. Good people in charge of them and bad ones. They weren’t any more one-sided than our own lives usually turn out to be.

Back then, animal lovers got flyers in the mail showing pictures of animals being operated on without anesthetic, many of us had to cut open live frogs in biology class at school, or break open eggs and remove baby chicks before they were ready to hatch, or to cut live worms into pieces and report on the suffering. It was a rare animal lover who wasn’t hurt by such things … and few of us didn’t send donations to help organizations that were (or so we were told) against “Vivisection.”

The term “Puppy Mill” came into being at that time as well … These were places easy for any of us to be upset about. They were places where diseased, starving dogs were forced to live in cages and filth – being bred every time they came in season. OF COURSE we were going to send money to organizations fighting such places. (Besides: Many of us were respectable breeders with purebred dogs of champion bloodlines and if the public would put the puppy mills out of business, people would naturally come to us for their dogs …. Right?)

WRONG. The media and the public became confused about the term “Puppy Mill” morphing it to mean “Dog Kennel” and sweeping “respectable” breeders right along with the bad ones as they made ever-more restrictive dog laws.

By the 1980s, something new appeared on the scene. It was called “Rescue” (implied that a dog was in danger of being hurt or killed) and made everybody a hero. It began with responsible breeders looking out for the welfare of their own, particular breed of dog. If you raised Great Danes, for example, you would have an understanding with the local animal shelter to call you whenever a Great Dane arrived. You and your friends would help the dog find a new home.

Like the anti-vivisection groups, and the anti-puppy mill groups, these organizations did very good things, raising money for their causes from animal lovers everywhere … and, therein, lies the problem.

It didn’t take long for anybody to realize that animal lovers were going to contribute money, time and effort to whatever causes they believed would help the animals they loved. They saw Rescue groups – and the many animal lovers donating money to them, as easy targets and cash cows. A greedy, and sometimes very angry-at-life spirit began creeping into well-meaning organizations and things began to change.

JACKIE

As we gave them our money, they became stronger. With our blessing, they became national corporations collecting millions of dollars from those of us who believed we were doing the “right” thing. It made us feel good, knowing we were sending contributions to organizations that had clout. After all, they were looking out for pet owners like us … weren’t they?

Let’s take a quick look at these organizations:

Some are political,

like the animal rights corporation that stole the name of one of the most respected animal welfare services in the world: Most of us think of it as a Humane Society, but it’s not connected at all to the local animal shelter in your own home town. Here’s how that kind of confusion can happen: You can have a business in your home state and I could register – and use – the same name in my own state … and you could do nothng about it. Be careful if you think the “Humane Society of the United States” is about animal shelters … More likely, it’s a multi-million dollar corporation making laws that take away your animal-loving rights.

Some are Educational …

If you want a few surpirses, go online and look up the actual agenda of an animal rights corporation called PETA … and realize that your children are being taught this in schools.

Some are Frightening …

The last groups I’ll mention here tonihgt are those that fall into the Terrorist category. In my novel HIGH STAKES, there is a 200 page appendix that details their activities over the past 20 years. Certain individuals are on teh FBI’s Most Wanted lists for setting fires, exploding bombs, threatening lives, and many criminal acts.

In conclusion, there is a great difference between healthy, common-sense animal welfare and an angry law-making force called animal “Rights” … Which is more true to the beautiful, loving, forgiving nature of animals themselves?

Animals do have a “Right.” … They have the right to be cared for as well as the one who loves them can provide. If that becomes impossible, or if the owner falls on hard times, isn’t it more compassionate to help them find a way through the darkness? Isn’t that what love of life – in all its shapes, sizes and forms – is all about … and what animals, themselves, so patiently want us to see?

Thank you for this time. Make the world beautiful and strong and healthy. You can do it. You’re animal lovers, aren’t you?

QUESTIONS …..

They started

From time to time, we would find a stray dog on the street, put it in the back seat of the car and drive around the neighborhood looking for its owner.

We would feed the stray cats, enjoy the

One all –encompassing Right: To be taken care of as good as their owners can provide.