BREAKING MEWS! Local cat has never been fed, EVER! Cruelty charges pending
Showing posts with label animal cruelty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label animal cruelty. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 12, 2019
Sunday, March 19, 2017
Gang life: Andy and the animals
It was only in the past week or so that I discovered the shame and disgrace that is Andy's Gang. This was a sort of grotesque Howdy Doody clone with a similar gallery of obnoxious kids, a creepy charmless host, and loud, bizarre characters running around pointlessly. That would be OK - sort of - except the drippy, creepy host is Andy Devine, the most irritating, smarmy actor ever to walk the face of the earth. He had this voice that was both whiny and abrasive, and a vacuous, my-brain-shrank-in-the-wash smile.
But the show would have been tolerable - maybe - without the animal segments. In this case the creatures were literally wired to tiny musical instruments and made to "play" them to a seemingly endless tune. In this video the song is unrecognizable, but it involves a chicken, a chihuahua, a hamster, a rabbit, and - the only one who retains his dignity through the whole thing - Midnight the Cat.
I like Midnight. Though he is probably as glazed as the rest of them from the effects of sedation, he at least keeps his eyes open. His paws are literally controlled by wires that are quite visible at times, jerking his legs up and down, and in one case as he "plays" the banjo, one front paw is rapidly yanked back and forth with wrenching force.
This is abuse, of course, and I don't offer it here as anything else. But it is SO bizarre that I had to share it. One of the many facts I didn't want to know about Andy's Gang is that there was, in fact, no studio audience, just an endlessly repeated stock-footage clip of kids stomping and screaming. (This kind of takes the piss out of the theme song: "I got a gang, you got a gang, everybody's gotta have a gang" - Gang? There's nobody here!). Andy Devine taped all the season's episodes in the space of a couple of weeks, then went off to do his real work, usually on Westerns where he played a whiny, fatuous, gravel-voiced sidekick.
When I found the clips, I was shocked and horrified at what they were doing to these creatures. This is like something out of the Twilight Zone, an animal nightmare. This sort of thing would, I hope, be outlawed today, though I'm not sure in the third world. I thank God now for shelters, the SPCA, the Humane Society, and for people willing to adopt kitties and puppies who have already been through the mill.
(Do you like my Midnight animation? I found two photos that are slightly different. And that is all it takes.)
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
The Story of Skippy
One summer day in the city, a day when nothing out of the ordinary was happening, a puppy was born.
The puppy's family named her Skippy, for no particular reason. She was a creamy-golden cocker spaniel, very sweet-natured and beautiful. The children doted on her, the adults tolerated her, and for a while, everything was good.
But things change. The biggest people in the household, the Mom and Dad, weren't getting along very well. Skippy could hear them screaming at each other, and she crouched down on her belly in dread. One night there was an awful crashing and booming upstairs, and Skippy didn't sleep.
The next day, they told the children they had decided it would be better if Mom and Dad lived in two separate houses. The children knew it was their fault. Skippy wondered if it was her fault. Soon it became apparent that it was.
Neither of them really wanted Skippy. They didn't like dogs, she smelled, her fur had mats, and the vet bills! They argued and argued about who would take Skippy. The children kept their mouths shut in fear that Skippy would be taken away from them.
She was.
First the Mom and Dad thought about giving her to a shelter where she might find a "forever home", but then a friend of theirs, a man with many dogs, asked to take her, and they told themselves it was a good thing.
The children said goodbye to her tearfully. Mom, busy throwing all of Dad's things out on the sidewalk, said they should stop being such babies and keep quiet, so they did.
The man had many dogs. But he had no use for the new dog that cowered in the corner, her tiny stump of a tail wagging in a blur to placate him. Sometimes she peed on the floor, and he slapped her muzzle so hard she could not help but let out a shriek of pain.
Then he'd tie her outside for a long time.
Something happened while she was outside, and it became apparent that Skippy was going to have puppies. The man looked at her like he wanted to murder her. Skippy went under the bed to protect her unborn puppies. They were all she had.
The man had the decency not to harm her during her pregnancy, but when the puppies were born, they didn't look right, as if their father had been a Doberman or Rottweiller. Too bitter mixed with too sweet.
Very early one morning, Skippy noticed her puppies were gone. She never found out where they went. She mourned, whimpering, until one day the man threw something hard at her head.
She stopped whimpering.
But there was something gnawing at her, thousands of centuries of needing human beings to love and pay attention to her. One day she rolled over on her back to expose her belly, and the man kicked her hard. The sound she made cannot be described.
Though it was not like her to abandon her people, one day Skippy took a chance and ran away. She became a dog of the streets. Her survival instincts were sharpened, and when a person approached her she crouched down and let out a low growl.
She became more and more matty, and thinner from eating scraps. It looked bad for Skippy, and some days she just wanted to run in front of a car.
Then something happened. A girl was walking along the street, and saw two enormous liquid-brown eyes peeking out from behind a bush.
She crouched down and said, "Come on, girl. Come on."
It took quite a while for Skippy to come out of the bushes. She didn't know what to expect. But she knew, in a certain doggish way, that children shouldn't be harmed. No matter what the girl did to her, she would find a way to tolerate it.
There was a rope digging deep into Skippy's neck, so she hooked her finger in it and dragged her home. The pads on her feet were hot and sore from planting her legs.
Her mother said, Cindy, I don't know. We can't take in another dog. I think we should take her to the shelter right now. It's the best thing for her. Cindy cried, but did as she was told, knowing that it was her fault.
Skippy knew that it was her fault.
Things were bad at the shelter, all bleach and bars. There were a hundred other dogs there, either barking aggressively or cowering in corners. People came and went, poking and prodding, looking for something that would soon be their property.
Skippy knew that some dogs ended up in wonderful homes, and wondered how to act. She knew she shouldn't hope too much, but hope was the only thing that kept her going.
Then one afternoon, an old woman came into the shelter. Her eyes met Skippy's.
It was love.
It was love, and despite the fact that the old woman didn't have enough money to feed a dog, she took Skippy home, naming her Lady after the dog in the cartoon movie.
This was a home such as Skippy had never known. She truly was treated like a princess. She even wondered if the old lady could get her puppies back.
But then one morning, everything fell still. The old woman didn't get up.
Then came the argument all over again: who will take the dog? No one seemed to want her very badly. She was a burden no one could afford.
Then someone spoke up. A man who had many dogs. The family brushed her carefully, making her look her best. He took her home, put a rope around her neck and tied her to a post in the yard.
Order The Glass Character from:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA
Barnes & Noble
Thistledown Press
Saturday, July 28, 2012
Fifty Shades of Grey Elephants: Janet goes berserk!
Janet has had ENOUGH! Don't stay in your seats, folks. . . RUN!!!
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Animal hybrids: monsters in the making
I know, I realize I shouldn't get into these things, these creepy things, these creepy things that make my flesh crawl, these creepy things that make my flesh crawl and also make me realize that humanity has no idea what it's doing.
What awfuls me out about this short video isn't the mammoth size of this freak animal, nor even the casual way they putter around him in total denial that he could kill them with one swipe of his gigantic paw. No doubt they think he's "sweet", no doubt they think he's "tame", no doubt they call him one of their "babies" (an ever-present symptom of the malignant disease of keeping exotic animals as pets).
I want to write more about this whole mess later, when I get a chance to see a documentary called The Elephant in the Living Room. I saw the last half of it on National Geographic Channel and spent the half-hour with my mouth open.
The cases in this documentary weren't the worst, but they were bad enough. Keeping exotic animals as pets often goes completely unregulated, sometimes with disastrous results. It wasn't just the utter degradation of seeing glorious jungle animals kept in wire cages (with one male lion slowly, agonizingly electrocuted by faulty wiring on a freezer): it was the emotional abyss at the core of the people who were keeping these "babies". "He's like my son," claimed the lion's owner before the disaster,"one of my kids." Why is it I have this feeling his real children never tapped his heart in the same profound way?
All that unfathomable sickness aside, I soon got on to the topic of animal hybrids and was pretty astonished at what I found. Astonished, and freaked out. There has been an awful lot of tampering going on behind our backs: I didn't realize the well-known liger is three times the size of a normal lion, weighing close to a thousand pounds and resembling some prehistoric beast on an unimagineable scale. All this has been engineered, folks - we made it happen - and we made it happen without the slightest knowledge or concern that the resultant creature would be so grotesquely proportioned.
From the liger and the smaller tigon, often afflicted by dwarfism (not that such an insignificant thing will stop them from being bred), I fell into the dusky world of the wolf dog, which some people own for the same reason they'd get their bodies tattoed over every square inch: look, I'm a social rebel, I own a dog that's half-wolf! Look, I take a huge risk every time I take him out of the wire cage!
Does anyone stop to think what is going on in the mind and biology of an animal that has been created from spare parts, cobbled together in God-knows-what sort of way just on a human whim? Might there be some sort of internal conflict at the most fundamental level? Might that animal not know who he/she is? Or are those kinds of concerns not on the table, so long as we satisfy our "let's try this and see what happens" impulse?
Oh, but it got worse, a lot worse! Zebroids, including a zorse, a zonkey, and a zony. A cama, fusing together two species that are, well, close enough, aren't they? Except the llama genes seem to cancel out the camel's hump. But who needs a hump anyway?
When I came to the grolar or pizzly, I began to feel sick outright. But bears are bears, aren't they? Does it even matter if they're brown or white? Then why do I feel so nauseated? Never mind that these grotesque and ridiculous names insult their animal dignity and wouldn't even suit a toy. Hey, the leopon is just a spotty lion, right? And the wolphin. . .
I stop at the wolphin. I stop at the wolphin because I know whales and dolphins are so intelligent, and I honestly wonder what sort of genetic clash might make these sea geniuses go completely mad.
What set all this off - I mean, after the National Geographic documentary, which I have ordered on a DVD - was stumbling upon something that nearly made my hair stand on end: the humanzee. I didn't like to think that it was possible, that we've come that far, that we might just want to try this out for a lark or out of scientific curiosity: but haven't we been told over and over again how genetically close we are to chimps?
This is a weird story that has been officially discounted, and now that I look at it a little more objectively I can see why. A couple claimed to have captured a baby chimp "in the wild" in 1960. Oliver had some pretty strange traits, the strangest being walking upright without the weird staggering gait of most chimps. He also had a strange-looking face, hairless and sort of flat, though hardly human. His ears creeped me out however, as they didn't look like chimp ears at all. They looked like human ears that had been grafted on.
Other chimps shunned Oliver, who seemed to prefer human company (and even mounted his owner's wife, causing them to eventually sell him). He smelled different, not like a normal chimp. These were all little question marks that added up to a very big one: did Oliver have human genes, and if so, how had this happened?
Back in 1960, the assumption was that some man had had sex with a female chimp "in the wild", the chimp had become pregnant, and little upright-walking, flat-faced Oliver was the result. He quickly became a sensation, dressed up in a tux and encouraged to smoke and drink for the crowd. This reflected the hilarity of the times upon witnessing animals "acting like humans". (Remember the Marquis Chimps on Ed Sullivan? I hope you don't.)
But a funny thing happened on the way to fame. People lost interest. The whole thing looked a little bogus. Oliver was sold again and again, each time falling a little deeper into the hole, and ending up in a small square wire cage in a laboratory.
Decades later, Oliver's original owner (perhaps wondering if there was more money to be made) tracked him down and eventually settled him into one of those chimp retirement homes. He didn't walk upright any more - too much trouble - and by this time he just looked like an old chimp, a very relieved old chimp, relieved he didn't have to wear a tux, smoke cigars and drink brandy for the crowd. He died only a couple of weeks ago, in fact, probably about 55 years old. Certainly he had served his time.
But it hangs in the air, doesn't it - weirdly, and sickeningly. Camas, pizzlys, zorses and wolphins. Why not humanzees? At the end of his life Oliver was genetically tested, and it was officially announced that he was "100% chimpanzee", so that was that. (If he hadn't been, what would they have said? The genie would be out of the bottle for sure.)
But I had a funny feeling about it all. I had a funny feeling about it all because that was over 50 years ago. I had a funny feeling about it all because that was over 50 years ago and, by God, now it is not only possible but bloody well likely we could do such a thing, "cross" a chimp with a human and come up with a whole new sort of species.
At the embryonic level, this has already been attempted and perhaps even accomplished. We want stem cells and new organs and all that sort of thing, necessary spare parts salvaged from throwaways, and we don't seem to care how much we ravage the natural balance in order to get them.
But an actual humanzee, a hybrid? Is it illegal? Would it be funded? Who cares. Money comes. It follows curiosity. I am beginning to get this sick feeling, this prickly feeling that we're going to see this, and sooner than we think. The trouble is, no one will know what to do with this wretched thing, this product of strands of DNA twisted horribly wrong: kill it now? Watch it suffer, or, perhaps worse, thrive?
What will it look like? Can you see it in your mind? Will it maybe resemble its human parent: "Doesn't little Johnny look just like his Dad"? Will it walk upright like Oliver, or scooch around on its knuckles and swing from the trees? Talk, perhaps? Have thoughts, opinions, needs? But who cares about needs at a time like this: who thinks of needs except OUR needs, our whims, our wretched inability to leave things alone and appreciate a fragile, unforgiveably damaged wild world that is committing suicide right in front of our eyes.
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
It took me years to write, will you take a look
Order The Glass Character from:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA
Barnes & Noble
Thistledown Press
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