September 16, 2010

Toys and Activities to Stimulate a Canine Brain

Dog guardians all know that the most exciting time of the day for Spot is playtime. We all play games such as fetch, but what about some games that are fun for you and your furry friend and have the extra benefit of stimulating your companion's brain? I discussed this topic in my book Let's Have a Dog Party! and thought I would share the following excerpt with you:

Noncompetitive games that you and your dog can play together include basic problem-solving skills and can earn your dog ribbons and trophies.

The Buster Fun Bone Treat is an extremely hard game in which a dog has to try to extract differently colored bones from a container in order to win an award. This game requires an investment of your time, but the delight of seeing your dog learn more and more is worth every second.

The I-Cube Puzzle is a plush cube containing squeaking balls that dogs can retrieve from inside it. The Hide-a-Bee Puzzle and Hide-a-Squirrel Puzzle stimulate dogs' minds and play on their curiosity. Available [online at Tail Waggers].

If you learn how to get your dog to use your (or anyone's) scent as a clue to which object to select from a group of objects, you can even amaze your friends by having your dog pick out the card you selected and then put back in the pack. Roy Hunter's amazing book Fun Nose Work will show you how. This book ... is full of interesting interactive games that engage a dog's nose and his brain and allow you to play with your dog as you both learn. In this book, Mr. Hunter, who spent twenty-five years working in the dog's section of the Metropolitan Police force of London, England, describes how dogs can be trained to find anything and everything including, in the case of a dog in New Zealand, six-inch nails under six inches of water! He takes guardian and dog through their paces, starting with easy-as-pie lessons to mind-boggling feats of tracking. Everything is done by understanding a dog's natural ability and rewarding progress.

How about you? Have you made up any games-or come across any-that seem to stimulate Fido's mind and senses?

September 15, 2010

Help! Dog Trapped in a Box!

First, there was the jaw-dropping story of a British woman who was caught on camera tossing an affectionate cat into an outdoor trash bin. Then, it was an Eastern European girl who slung crying puppies into a fast-moving stream. Now, right here in America, some people have imprisoned a dog inside a box barely bigger than his own body. The box has solid sides, and the dog can only see out if he jumps up and peers over them. He has been locked in the box for months. To add to the mental torment, the dog has worn his teeth down to nubs from biting at his prison, so his owners occasionally take him out of the box to painfully drill holes vertically into his teeth in order to irrigate them. And right there by the side of the box, the dog's keepers also manually extract sperm from him and use it to breed other dogs to sell. There's more, but the abuse that I've already described should be enough to make any decent person sick.

Take a look at Google Maps, and you can look down into the container and see the dog lying there.

Why, you may ask, aren't these people in jail? How is it that the local humane society has not swooped in and seized the dog?

Oh, I'm sorry. Did I write ''dog''? I meant to write ''orca.'' And the people perpetrating this horror are SeaWorld executives. So why exactly does swapping one intelligent animal for another or swapping an average Joe for rich business executives lessen the horror of this orca's ordeal or the injustice of the situation? Answer: It doesn't.

Tilikum is the orca. He killed a human being--for the third time--earlier this year. Perhaps there's a reason why killer whales are called ''killer'' whales. Tilikum didn't give his keeper, Dawn Brancheau, a little playful toss or misjudge and hold her under water just a second too long for her to survive. He shook her like a rag doll, slammed her into the side of the pool, stopped her from surfacing, and tore her body apart. My bet is that he knew exactly what he was doing. Having seen how he is kept and knowing where he came from, it's not hard to comprehend the depth of his anger and frustration.

milan.boers / CC by 2.0

Tilikum is 32 years old. When he was just 2 years old, he was caught by marine "cowboys" who kidnap dolphins and orcas to sell to amusement parks. He was taken from his family--his pod--in the open waters off Iceland, and he's lived in a cement pool ever since, unable to use his echolocation, to swim away, to travel the oceans, or to hear or see his relatives. He is ''trained'' to eat what he's given and do what he's told. He is also trained to roll over, which allows trainers to masturbate him with a gloved hand and collect his semen in a container. His semen is frozen for later use or used immediately to inseminate female orcas at one of SeaWorld's parks so as to provide additional animals to use in shows.

Life in a tiny concrete tank is no life at all for these animals, as evidenced by the death this week of Tilikum's 12-year-old son at SeaWorld San Diego. Twelve! This orca would likely have lived to be 50 or 60 in the open sea, his rightful home.

After the third human being lost her life to Tilikum, SeaWorld reduced his meager ''world'' even further. Tilly is now relegated mostly, if not solely, to the ''F pool,'' a solid-sided concrete pool that measures just 36 feet long and 25 feet wide. Tilikum is 22 1/2 feet long with a wide girth. He weighs more than 12,000 pounds. So he has to scrunch just to turn around. And once turned, there he is again, nose against the other wall. He has been condemned to hang in place in the water indefinitely.

PETA is calling on the local humane society and the state's attorney to free Tilly. After all, cruelty to animals, whether to a dog or to an orca, is illegal in all states.

September 13, 2010

Hoarders Hurt Animals

Animal hoarding was a dirty secret until hoarders began to appear on our TV screens and showed us how they are compelled to collect so many dogs, cats, or parrots that the animals end up living in cages that are only inches bigger than the animals' own bodies--for their entire lives.

Imagine what it must be like for these animals--stuck in a see-through box, sitting in their own filth, unable to take a step, never comfortable, constantly being yelled at to be quiet, or ignored because their captors are so accustomed to hearing them crying, whining, and working away at the cage bars?

Now, though, the cat's out of the bag, and perhaps more cats will soon be out of hoarders' hands.

But, like a virus, the hoarding impulse has morphed into something even more insidious. Hoarders are trying to take over our animal shelters.

One hundred years ago, New Yorkers stopped stray dogs from being drowned in the Hudson. Forty years ago, humane societies stopped municipalities from killing unwanted dogs and cats by using hot, unfiltered truck exhaust fumes, causing the animals to choke to death.

Today, while some primitive pounds remain, great strides in humane sheltering standards have been made. There are places where behaviorists work to reduce abandoned animals' separation anxiety, groomers cut away matted hair to make animals comfortable and adoptable, and walkers are employed to ensure that no cage paralysis sets in. There are municipal animal shelters that cope with tens of thousands of animals a year yet still provide a comfortable, caring environment.

But ''institutional hoarders'' now threaten to turn back the clock on these hard-won reforms by bullying authorities into adopting magical-sounding ''no-kill'' policies that do animals no favors. Inside such hoarding facilities (many of which eventually end up in the news after raids by law enforcement agencies), dogs and cats--sick or healthy, old or young--are reduced to withdrawn and pathetic wrecks because of the crowding and neglect that they endure.

In well-run animal shelters, managers know that you can't store animals as if they were oranges. Tough decisions must be made about who remains on the adoption floor and who goes to sleep forever. As long as people fail to spay and neuter their animal companions, continue to acquire and dispose of animals casually, and buy from breeders and pet shops instead of adopting, there will be far more dogs and cats than there are good homes for them all. Millions more.

Many hoarding facilities leave the dirty work to others, refusing to accept sick, aged, or ''unadoptable'' animals. In order to avoid euthanasia, they reduce operational hours to prevent drop-offs and adopt animals into bad homes. Severe crowding means that diseases flourish, causing misery and, ironically, often leading to mass euthanasia of all the animals, even those who entered the facility in good health.

In New Jersey recently, a no-kill group that had been in charge of a particular animal shelter left the shelter to another group's management. Their successors had this to say about what they found when they took over:

''The conditions at the shelter are ... what's the right word? Abysmal, horrendous, shocking, horrifying, take your pick. It's difficult to put into words what it's like to see 99 dogs crammed into a facility built to comfortably house only 50. What it's like to witness 274 cats in a building meant for only 80. Perhaps the best description is a word we in this field know only [too] well: HOARDER.

''The facility is disgusting. ... Cats come in healthy, get sick, and die. Kittens drop dead in their cages every day. ... Dogs ... spend 23 1/2 hours in cages where they can't stand up or turn around, can't stretch their limbs, where they can't get away from their own filth. Their noses are rubbed raw and bloody and many have split pads from getting their feet caught in the wire pop-up cages meant for cats. And this place called itself a no-kill shelter.''

Giving an animal a quiet, painless, and peaceful death is a sad indictment of our throwaway society, but a life in a cramped, filthy cage is not a ''rescue.''

Last month in Virginia, PETA ran an ad pleading for homes for 28 cats. Three people responded. In the same area, PETA has spayed or neutered more than 63,000 dogs and cats. Birth prevention never completely staunches the flow of unwanted animals, but "fixing" one dog or cat saves countless more animals from homelessness and misery.

Municipalities need to stand firm. Time and money must go into mandatory spaying and neutering as well as guardianship education--not into warehousing animals. The no-kill movement is harmful to humane sheltering.

Posted by Ingrid E. Newkirk