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GoldCoastGirl
06-12-2006, 01:36 AM
I havn't had the chance to read past the first page of this thread yet I will say that I do not eat red meat anymore (havn't for many many years.. I've lost count)... and only recently have I started to eat chicken again (after not eating it for many years as well). Whilst I'm not picky about the chicken I eat (I mainly eat Red Rooster/KFC Twisters) I am about the eggs. Just that organic or free-range eggs taste better (for me anyway). Yes it costs more yet I enjoy my eggs ...and cage eggs just don't taste the same.

Also, I could never really give up diary in the form of yogurt and ESPECIALLY cheese. My milk intake is minimal.

As for those who want to give up meat, do it a little at a time and start introducing yourself more and more to other alternatives for meals. Show yourself how you can still eat great whilst not eating meat. Just wish the 'outback' pubs in Australia here would catch up... can't tell you how much of a bitch it is to have a decent meal in one of the pubs there if you do NOT eat meat or chicken (sigh).

Regardless of how the animals are treated and mis-treated (even the over-fishing of our oceans), people will continue to eat these foods until the day comes that they have to kill that cow or chicken then they all of a sudden can survive easily without meat. Soooo many people can alienate that cow in the paddock with what is supplied in the supermarkets. It is just too easy.

As for the cats and dogs surviving out in the wild, they do. The older they get the harder it will be for them to survive ..yes.. however you cannot argue that feral cats and dogs are not a problem. Well, they are a problem in my country along with canetoads (and rabbits and a lot of other 'introduced' species). I'm all for shooting of feral cats and dogs esp. feral cats. I'm a huge cat-lover just that I realise it takes alot of effort to "domesticate" a feral cat if it ever really ever becomes domesticated. As for the two cats in my life, one of them can (and has right in front of me) killed a mouse (thus eaten all of it except the tail) and the other has killed grasshopers etc in the past (she doesn't now as she's old and lazy). Do not ever think that a cat won't survive "in the wild". It will learn v.quickly or die trying at least.

Dottie Rebel
06-12-2006, 04:24 AM
DW: Why is the bandaid so much more respected than cure?

Do you know how many large-scale victories for animals--including animals used in sport--PETA is responsible for? The difference between PETA and your grehound organization is that your group saves animals 2 or 3 or 4 at a time (which is FANTASTIC--do not get me wrong). PETA, through campaigns to pressure businesses and influence individuals, saves animals by the hundreds of thousands. When PETA achieves a victory, such as recently getting designer Ralph Lauren to stop using fur, that translates into hundresds of thousands of lives. ANd let me tell you, there is nothing "easy" about that level of corpoate lobbying. I know!

Let me ask you one more question: just what do you think is the motivation for PETA's actions, if all their effort and time and money goes into activities that aren't really doing anyone any good? To make the world vegetarian? Well, when you beleive that will alleviate suffering, that seems like a noble goal? For fame and fortune? Ha! Yeah, Ingrid made the same salary that I did: less than 30K.

PaigeDWinter
06-12-2006, 04:57 AM
^^^^ Ummm... Greyhound murder isnt 2-3-4 at a time... its hundreds at a time. Go to yer PETA's website and reread about how many dogs 1 female and her young can breed? Now use that number towards the racing dogs.

Dottie Rebel
06-12-2006, 05:28 AM
It's not *my* PETA. I didn't intend to judge you based on a few beliefs that you hold and I would appreciate the same of you.

This has gotten way too personal and vicious. If I want to be put down I'll go to work. I'm out.

put a stop to collar pop!
06-12-2006, 07:38 AM
...Couldn't have said it better myself. As much as I love my three dogs, they are pets and I own them. There is no mutual relationship whatsoever, and if I didn't own them or make a choice to own them, they'd be dead. It's just that simple. Again, as much as I love them like my kids, the reality is that they are property. While I cherish them infinitely more than I do my coffee table or my bookshelf, they are still property both philosophically, literally, and legally. They are not equal to humans as the fanatics in PETA would like people to believe. In all reality, if my house were burning down, I would rescue my wife long before I would rescue my dogs. I'm sure most people short of Ingrid Newkirk and her ilk would do the same when it came down to brass tacks. So if you're claiming that Fluffy is on the same level as your wife, boyfriend, mother, father, sister, brother, friend, etc., you're living in La La Land.


Basically, I see it like this no one is advocating choosing pets over family members. You're just trying to play the "crazy card" again.

Down here in Florida, there have been a rash of gators killing people and pets. Quite a few of the dogs that have died, did so intervening in the inevitibale lunchability of their "owners." As in, they pretty much saved Joe Bob's ass. Now, I'm not going to sell my mom out for my dogs. Don't try to twist this like you did with those quotes you so poetically took way out of their intended context...

But if was between you, a complete stranger, and one of my dogs, who would most definately risk their lives for me, you can more than likely kiss your ass good-bye holmes. Sorry. It comes down to the quality of the realtionship for me. I know them, I don't know you.

PaigeDWinter
06-12-2006, 09:22 AM
It's not *my* PETA. I didn't intend to judge you based on a few beliefs that you hold and I would appreciate the same of you.

This has gotten way too personal and vicious. If I want to be put down I'll go to work. I'm out.

Yeah right. This would have been a VERY short thread if you were oh so ok with people believing what they want.. IE that PETA is full of it. What? I'm surprised you didnt have a quote from Newkirk about greyhounds.

DancerWealth
06-12-2006, 10:30 AM
DW: Why is the bandaid so much more respected than cure?

Do you know how many large-scale victories for animals--including animals used in sport--PETA is responsible for? The difference between PETA and your grehound organization is that your group saves animals 2 or 3 or 4 at a time (which is FANTASTIC--do not get me wrong).

Not exactly. Let me explain how it all works because it's much more amazing than you may realize.

There are a few national greyhound rescue organizations. Greyhound Pets of America, Grey2K and the Greyhound Protection League. One is more geared toward lobbying against greyhound racing and the others are more geared toward rescuing the dogs that do come off the tracks. Usuall reasons the greyhounds leave racing is due to the fact that they don't race well, are injured to a point where they won't race again, or because they race until they hit 5 years of age which is the mandatory retirement age. Once in a great while we will see puppies but that's rare. The only time that actually happens is when they are born with a blue colored coat. See, greyhound racers are very supersticious by nature and greyhounds come in about 20 different colors. The "blue" color which is to identify greyhounds that are actually grey, are the rarest of all the colors. The greyhound industry thinks that this color doesn't race well for some reason and they get rid of them fast. Years ago, they just used to shoot them after birth but now they give them up for adoption.

Anyway, regional greyhound organizations (such as ours) are usually affiliated with one or both of the national organizations. The national organizations work out the deals with the track kennels to get the dogs and that's when the regional organizations take over. We get the dogs to a hub city via truck or sometimes even airplane (more on this later). West of the Mississippi, our two hub cities are Kanab, Utah and Tuscon, Arizona. The dogs are taken to a hub city where some dedicated Veteranarian takes in the dogs (usually for free) and spay/neuter the dog, clean their teeth, catch them up on vaccinations, give them a bath, de-tick the dogs, and perform X-Rays for bone or joint issues. Then, the city-wide organizations take over from there. Before the dogs ever arrive at a hub city, they start to take applications for adoptions. It's rare when I've seen a local adoption group for greyhounds who doesn't actually screen the people who want them. This cuts down on returns and make sure the right dog goes into the right house. On the Hub level after the surgery is done, the dogs are personality tested. They are tested on how they behave with small animals, with strangers, with big animals, kids, etc. Once the personalities of the dogs are identified, they are issued as up for adoption to the local groups. Once they have a match to a good owner, the dog or dogs are taken via a volunteer pony-express type system to the local group who then gets them to their new owner. Some of the hub cities can actually have as many as hundreds of dogs go through the system every month.

Some people in the organization actually devote their lives to this now. One person, Claudia Presto, actually left her high six-figure job in Manhattan to open a ranch in Utah to start the greyhound rescuing from tracks in Colorado. One person, Dr. Heather Weir, is a young Veteranarian who opened a clinic just to provide her skills to help treat rescued greyhounds. That's all she does full-time. Then there's Maggie McGurry. She is a descendent of actual Brittish royalty who used to own her own charter airline. After selling it, she has taken the profits and now runs an organization called Wings For Greyhounds. She literally uses her own plane at her expense to transport rescued greyhounds to homes in areas that have no local adoption group. How cool is that!

So while it's true that the local adoption groups will only adopt out about 20 dogs a month, it's because they are all networked with the national organizations. We frequently place dogs in Las Vegas because an adoption group in Tuscon may have an excess of dogs with no homes to place them in. So people organize and form a pony-express system to get the dogs here fast. So why do we get an excess of dogs? Because sometimes the kennels will tell us that they have 5 dogs ready for pickup and when we show up, they have 20. 5 good ones, and 15 injured ones. So they know we won't turn away the injured ones (because the kennel will shoot them) and so they give us the injured dogs so they don't have to pay the vet bills to fix them. Sometimes, like last summer, a kennel closed down and we got a flood of hundreds of dogs at one time. The other beauty behind being so organized is that should a greyhound turn up in an animal shelter, we know exactly who it belongs to because we have a national database of who adopted what dog (based on the ear tattoo that the kennel gives the dogs at birth) so we use this system to protect them later on. This way, we can always figure out how to get the dog back to their owners fast. Also, if someone moves from Vegas to Detroit, and for some reason they can't keep their greyhound, we can hook them up with a Detroit greyhound adoption so that we can get the dog back and into a new home.

Needless to say, all this takes a tremendous amount of effort and money. Not just on the rescue end, but on the political end as well. Since greyhound adoption first started in the late 80s, word has gotten out about how horrific the industry is. Thanks to our national organizations, there are now only 1/3 as many racetracks today than existed 15 years ago. Also because of our national organizations much tighter restrictions are put on the kennels and trainers of the dogs. Inspections of the facilities are now common where they never used to be and the abuse horror stories have gone down tremendously. Again, this all takes an enormous amount of money to make happen. All of this has been done without a dollar of PETA money because they don't feel it's a cause worthy of getting involved in...you know, the slow and painful mass murder of hundreds of thousands of animals. See, PETA would much rather go after "Joe Farmer" who has cows used for beef because that's an easy battle. Like I said earlier though, we eventually learned that having PETA ally with us would hurt us much more than it would help so we stopped asking for their assistance (even though we never got it) because we know that once we affiliate ourselves with them, then it HURTS our cause way more than it would help. Initially they wanted PETA support because it was a cause just getting underway and desparately needed political power, financial support, and grass-roots help but PETA couldn't care less about the mass murder of animals that required some actual effort to help stop. Looking back, we've done a lot without them and are now actually working on distancing ourselves from PETA because we know of the damage they cause when they show up. To be honest, we would never be as organized today or have done so much good if PETA got involved early on. It took years for the kennels to finally trust us to where we would take the dogs, no questions asked, and get them into good homes. PETA's strong arm tactics would have caused MORE problems, not created less. Looking back, I'm glad PETA decided not to help us because the greyhound rescue cause would never have gotten so far along if they did.

One of our three kids...

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