Flip This Dog for Profit: Mandatory Edition

HT to Fugly Horse of the Day.

Here's how dogs pulled from the Los Angeles pounds are carefully "placed" by a charitable animal rescue "organization:"



Well, at least the price is high enough that it's unlikely anyone is buying them for animal experiments or fight bait.

Check out rescues as carefully as you would vet a private breeder. A pretty website is not the same thing as a solid reputation.

Now -- will the ersatz rescuers in California stop sending dogs to this woman for resale? Or is it "out of sight, out of mind?"

I'm taking some heat from other animal welfare advocates about my skepticism regarding the proposed "Oreo's Law" in New York State.

Please note that word. Skepticism. Not opposition. Though that could change.

The way to convince a skeptic is, possibly not to scream about how everyone who is agin' us eats puppies for breakfast.

Advocates for the proposed law claim that the requirement that "rescues" have a 501(c)3 designation and their principles have no criminal convictions or active complaints for animal abuse are sufficient safeguards for the dogs that would be subject to mandatory no-questions-asked release.

Do they have any idea how rare convictions for animal abuse are? How many serial abusers dodge conviction over and over through no virtue of their own?

In fact, most animal welfare advocates do know how rare and difficult it is to get a conviction, especially when an abuser or hoarder has set him or her self up as a "rescue." They are the first to open up a litany of tales of the ones that got away, and are still out there running scams and inflicting cruelty.

Some claim, presenting no evidence, that the ASPCA maliciously killed the proposed law's namesake out of spite -- and not, as the A claims, because the dog was too dangerous to keep alive.

Concerns about the competence and stability of Pets Alive, the upstate rescue that went media-nuclear when ASPCA declined to give them this dog, are countered with "Well, it's not really about Oreo and Pets Alive."

Um, yeah ... it is.

The bill as it is currently proposed would have required the ASPCA to turn over what they say was a very scary dog to an organization that thinks this is a great story about their ability to rehab a "difficult" animal.

I'm not a huge fan of the ASPCA -- mostly because of their deceptive and manipulative fundraising practices. But they do seem to do a pretty good job at behavior intervention and assessment for the dogs in their NYC shelter. And they are a friend to the pit bull.

The only way the ASPCA could prevent the dog from being taken over by people who were surprised that chasing a feral around a pen trying to pet her didn't work out as a rehab program would be to have her adjudicated as a dangerous dog. Pronounced vicious by a court.

Of course, the NY court system has nothing better to do than review testimony about whether or not every dog in a shelter is or is not vicious.

This would certainly not take years in each and every case, forcing the publicly-funded shelters to keep dangerous dogs alive in conditions that cannot possibly provide an acceptable quality of life. Oh no, these cases will jump to the front of the dockets and be resolved in days! And the scrabbling sound in my attic these days is leprechauns!

The standard for a court of law to declare a dog vicious and order its death against the will of its owner should be very high.

The standard for the owner of an animal -- including a shelter -- to make a decision about potential danger from, and quality of life for, that animal has always been significantly different.

Does any animal owner really want to change either of those principles? How will that improve animal welfare?

Here's a thought. If I could not, by force of law, make a decision to euthanize a rescue animal that I had determined to be dangerous and/or incapable of enjoying an acceptable quality of life -- an animal that I, or my organization, owns -- then I wouldn't do rescue. Period. Let someone else have all the responsibility and none of the authority.

I don't think I'm the only one. Work your way forward for the unintended consequence of the week.

People who dismiss objections to sloppy thinking behind novel legislation with the assurance that "the courts will provide recourse" have no idea how long the courts take to do anything.

Nor the expense and disruption involved when a nonprofit or government agency must contend with nuisance actions, including maliciously-brought actions. Money and time that should be devoted to caring for animals gets diverted into lawyering.

I perceive that I am playing Cassandra when it comes to most animal welfare advocates. I'm used to that in every area of life by now. What's worse is the revisionism a year or ten later, when I should be able to pull out the toldyaso.

I join the irrepressible Fugs in the title of this post.