Open a store – what could go wrong?

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We are still digging out from under the nightmare of our first store location – a horror story involving, in no particular order, a PTSD victim hoarder as a neighbour on one side of us, a crazy cat lady hoarder upstairs from us, and a burned out acid freak for a landlord. The entire shitstorm culminated with our ceiling collapsing into the middle of the store (did I mention this was due to the upstairs celing being soaked in an over abundance of cat urine? Super fun!). It has been an experience I strongly suggest avoiding at all costs, not to mention a timely lesson in “why we have insurance 101”.

Having to move 1,000 square feet of merchandise (what we could salvage of it, that is) will try the patience of the strongest person. Needless to say, I am spending about 18 hours of every day trying to get the new location running smoothly. This would have been easier if we could have renovated *before* we moved in, instead of afterwards – for example, it’s generally easier to remove an entire wall when you don’t have shelving attached to it.

Hopefully, things will calm down by mid September. I’m excited about adding new product lines – Orijen, Acana, Blue Buffalo (by customer request) and Solid Gold. Possibly Earthborn and Halo, too – anyone have feedback on them?

Animal Control Greenville, SC – Lose Your Dog, Get a Lecture

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When Joe, Elise Jerozal’s Parson Terrier, went missing, her mom Katie  Jerozal knew all of the steps to follow to bring home a lost pet. She put up flyers, canvassed the neighbourhood, posted messages on Facebook, and even posted a video to Youtube featuring Elise asking for help in bringing Joe home.

It’s no surprise Katie knew what to do – after all, she’s got an awful lot of experience with dogs. Katie’s mother showed dogs, and Katie herself competed in Junior Handling, taking her Pug to Westminster one year to as one of the top Junior handlers in the country. Part of the reason Katie bought Joe for Elise was so that Elise could show him in Juniors, and possibly train him for the obedience ring. Getting Elise into showing would make show dogs a third generation family tradition – Katie didn’t stop her involvement  with show dogs when she outgrew Juniors. She’s now a small scale, ethical breeder of French Bulldogs, owning a handful of top winning Frenchies, including a Best in Show and Best in Specialty show winning boy she still proudly talks about on her Lucida French Bulldogs website.

It’s Katie’s website that caused problems when she got in touch with Greenville Animal Control to report Joe as a missing pet.

Katie sent Greenville Animal Control a precise, well detailed email regarding Joe, via their website –

Joe is a 1 year old Russell Terrier. he was bought for my daughters 7th birthday to do obedience with. He was last seen in our yard where, we think, he was taken.
He was mostly white with brown markings
He went missing last night around 8 pm from (address redacted) ln Taylors SC
Katie got back an email asking her to clarify that Joe was missing from Greenville, to which she responded in the affirmative. The next response she got was this –

I noticed that you breed Frenchies. Have you ever thought of discontinuing that? There are cancers associated with breeding (mammary tumors, testicular cancer, etc.) that result from not spaying and neutering. Also, Frenchies, like any other breed, end up in shelters.

I would imagine that if you love your Frenchies, you would not want them or their offspring to be in harms way.

Susan

 

No suggestions on how to find Joe. No confirmation that someone would check the shelter to make sure Joe hadn’t been turned in. Instead, all Katie got was a lecture on how her insistence on having intact dogs (intact dogs she was BREEDING!) was the reason that dogs die of cancer and end up in animal shelters.

Did this idiotic and heartless response come from some well meaning but poorly trained shelter volunteer?

Nope. It came from –

Susan Bufano
Community Relations Coordinator
328 Furman Hall Rd.
Greenville, SC 29609
(864) 467-3986
(864) 467-3294 Fax

Community Relations Coordinator! Holy crap! Talk about a lack of essential job skills. I’m going out on a limb here, but I’d think that a large part of the job description of a Community Relations Coordinator for Animal Control involves actual public relations skills, the kind that support community members, instead of alienating them.

Of course, this is all on top of the fact that Susan is spouting the same tired and inaccurate myths about how keeping dogs intact is some sort of automatic cancerous death sentence (by this reasoning, I’m a little bit surprised that Susan didn’t also suggest Katie should look into getting Elise a hysterectomy before it’s too late, since ‘intact’ women could also grow up to get reproductive cancers). Her insinuation seems to be that Katie is some sort of irresponsible jerk who lets her dogs run around Greenville willy-nilly, clogging up the Animal Control shelters and generally forcing well meaning people like Susan to kill them against her will.

Sigh.

Look, I get the impression that Greenville AC is one of the better run municipal shelters. They have a vigorous volunteer program, they offer Animal Care Summer Camps for kids, and they offer low cost veterinary services, microchipping and spay neuter clinics. I understand that Susan’s intentions might have been good, but she’s letting her own personal agenda (her personal Facebook page talks a lot about animal rights and her veganism) get in the way of servicing her community – the very job her title conveys she is meant to be filling.

Greenville AC’s webpage features this on the very first page –

Screen shot 2013-08-02 at 10.17.13 AM

 

If you want to be the ‘first place’ people go when their pet is lost and missing, please start doing a better job of being supportive, instead of misguidedly judgmental. Greenville AC made an already traumatic time for Katie’s family even worse, by failing to support her in any way that could help to bring Joe home.

UPDATE

Joe is home! As Katie tells us via Facebook:

‘we were out handing out flyer to everyone in our neighborhood. I was cutting through a yard and I heard him bark. Elise ran into the yard and he was on an enclosed deck. How she didn’t see our flyers is odd. They weren’t home so we took him and left a thank you note’

Good news, and good job, Katie!

 

Patrick the Miracle Dog Before and After

Are high profile abused dogs a ‘brand’?

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Most people have heard about the case of Patrick, the Pit Bull mix who was repeatedly abused by his owner, Kisha Curtis. In 2011, Curtis left Patrick tied to the railing of her apartment for a week, before shoving the emaciated dog into a plastic bag and throwing him down a trash chute. Patrick was rescued just moments before he would have been compacted with the building’s garbage.

This past Tuesday Curtis pled guilty to charges of animal abuse, clearing the way for her criminal trial to finally proceed. As part of her guilty plea, Curtis has also agreed to forfeiture of Patrick, something she had fought against until now. Essentially, she was not only pleading not guilty to the charges, but was also demanding the right to have Patrick returned to her.

Unbelievable, right? After all, why would someone who so obviously didn’t care about Patrick’s welfare fight so hard to get him back? For the answer to that, we need to follow the money, which we can do in this case by simply reading the sentence that Associated Humane Societies of New Jersey (AHS) used to describe Patrick when fighting a court battle for their own custody of him –

(Patrick is a) “very valuable brand for commercial exploitation and fundraising”

As Nathan Winograd so succinctly summed up Patrick’s custody battle –

It is expected that the court will also determine whether Patrick is given to the only “loving home” which he has ever truly known: the home of the veterinarians who saved his life and want to keep him or whether he will be given to the Associated Humane Societies of New Jersey (AHS), which has sued those veterinarians (and the City of Newark) to gain custody of Patrick so that they could continue to exploit his name for money.

AHS is claiming “ownership” of Patrick because it was to their clinic that Patrick was immediately rushed for emergency treatment after being pulled from the trash chute of Curtis’ New Jersey apartment building. Once stabilized, the dog (as yet un named) was transferred to Garden State Veterinary Services (GSVS) in Northern New Jersey. Since it was St. Patrick’s day weekend, staff at GSVS named him “Patrick”, hoping that the “luck of the Irish” would help the severely starved and dehydrated dog survive his injuries.

Patrick’s recovery has been nothing short of a miracle, and the Veterinarians and staff of GSVS have been responsible for that, spending hours nursing him back to health. As the only loving home Patrick has ever known, a GSVS Veterinary Nurse who particularly bonded with Patrick has long hoped that Patrick will be allowed to live out his life with her, as a family pet, once the court cases are over.

AHS, however, has other plans. They want “trademark registration number 23699″ (that’s how they refer to Patrick in their court documents) to be returned to them, so that he can live out his life at the AHS Forked River Shelter that shares property with the AHS Popcorn Park Zoo.

Their reasons? Denying AHS ownership will, in the words from their court documents,  “deprive AHS of its property interest in Patrick”, resulting in “significant losses” of “economic advantage”.

In other words, ‘we won’t be able to keep using him to raise money’.

AHS believes that what’s in Patrick’s best interest is to spend his life essentially on display at their zoo shelter, where he can continue to operate as a fund raising cash cow, and to that end they are suing both the City of Newark and the GSVS veterinarian that saved Patrick’s life. In fact, by even writing about Patrick, myself and any other bloggers could be violating what AHS claims is their ‘intellectual property ownership’ of any stories, articles or images of or relating to Patrick (affectionately nicknamed “Trademarky Mark”, I’m willing to bet).

Screen shot 2013-07-31 at 12.15.51 PM

Figure above taken from Court Filing of Associated Humane Societies Inc. Vs City of Newark and Garden State Veterinary Services

Read Nathan Winograd’s excellent full story on the fight for control of Patrick here, and the Patrick Miracle Facebook page has a step by step break down of Patrick’s history and current status.

You tell me – where should Patrick be allowed to stay? Is he a “fund raising brand”, or an abused dog who deserves a chance at a new life?

 

Toronto Dog Park Poisoned & Barrie Dog Poisoned in Own Yard

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A Barrie, Ontario Veterinarian is issuing a warning to other residents of the city to be on the lookout for poisoned hotdogs, after his own dog was poisoned this weekend.

The poisoned hotdog was left in Dr. Martin’s own yard, leaving no doubt that this was an intentional case of attempted poisoning.

“I let my dog out, and he was out in the backyard and I saw him eating something in the corner of the yard. I took a look at it, grabbed it out of his mouth and it was a hotdog that was sliced down the middle. there were three tablets.”

Martin says those tablets were extra strength Tylenol and his little dog Marcel swallowed one.

Martin rushed his dog to the animal clinic and then to the animal hospital to induce vomiting. He says the dose would have killed his dog because of his size.

Luckily Martin was able to get the drug out of his dog’s system in time.

“If I had just let him out and went back in the house he would have eaten the whole hotdog and he would have died that day or the next day,” Martin says.

Read more: http://barrie.ctvnews.ca/vet-issues-warning-after-pet-poisoned-in-barrie-s-north-end-1.1387612#ixzz2aSCdJUfh

Meanwhile in Toronto, rat poison has been found in the off leash dog park located inside High Park. The deadly poison, still in its packaging, was found in the popular dog park by two women walking their own dogs. They contacted police, who are actively investigated whether this was a deliberate poisoning attempt.

If so, it would not be the first time.

Last year, three Leslieville area dogs died after ingesting poison, and at least fifteen more dogs became seriously ill.

A High Park dog owner summed it dog owners’ fears, saying –

“This is becoming a common occurrence that happens every summer and dogs have died,” Phillips said. “It is concerning because some dogs eat everything and because this is such a big space you don’t notice what your dog gets into. It is hard to know who the suspect could be.”

Read more: http://www.torontosun.com/2013/06/27/dog-owners-concerned-after-rat-poison-found-in-high-park

This is a good time to remind people to be aware of their surroundings, and to be extra careful about letting dogs off leash. It’s also a good time to start training the “leave it” command, to reinforce that dogs should not eat random items they find on the ground.

A good overview is here – http://drsophiayin.com/blog/entry/dogs-who-eat-things-off-the-ground-training-leave-it

 

Carla Cheney

Walmart Fires Employee for Confronting Customer Who Left Dog in Hot Car

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If you’ve ever read this blog before, you know how much hatred I have (and I’m sure all of you feel the same way) for morons who live their dogs inside hot cars while they “run in to do some shopping just for a minute”.

Carla Cheney, a former pharmacy technician at Walmart in Kemptville, Ontario, feels the same way, so when she saw a man leaving his Newfoundland dog inside of his pickup truck in the parking lot of the Walmart where she worked, Cheney felt compelled to do something about it, and confronted him on his asshattery.

“I said he should not be leaving his dog in the car. The man said it was none of my business.”

Cheney says that this sort of thing is nothing new – in fact, she says that Kemptville Walmart customers leave pets inside their vehicles almost every day, no matter how hot the weather. Less than a week before the incident that got her fired, Cheney, a dog owner herself, witnessed another customer leaving her dog inside of her car, on a scorching hot day.

“I was pretty upset and I said to my manager, ‘What do I do?’ He said it was none of our business and went into the store.”

Cheney disagreed, and phoned the police herself. They responded to the call, and reprimanded the woman for leaving her dog inside the car (I hope ‘reprimand’ is secret cop code for ‘slapped the moron upside the head with a baton’).

When Cheney confronted the owner of the Newfoundland Dog, she had not yet started her shift, and was still wearing her street clothing. Despite acting as a ‘civilian’, and on her own time, Cheney was called into her Manager’s office on the day of the encounter, and told she was being terminated for being ‘rude to a customer’.  She was then escorted out of the store by security, which she said was ‘humiliating’.

Walmart Kemptville seems to have a history of terminating employees who speak up on behalf of animals. Sean Dhaliwal, another former employee of the same store, was fired after he confronted a customer who left a dog inside a hot car. Dhaliwal had already given his two week’s notice, but was told not to come back to the store to finish out his shifts.

Walmart Canada issued a statement saying,

“there are guidelines in place for associates to follow when it comes to identifying dangers, including pets in danger.”

Apparently, those guidelines are something along the lines of “shut up and go clean the bathrooms, wage slave”.

Cheney has now retained a lawyer, and plans to contest her firing.

Read more here on Cheney’s firing.