Animal Insting

First I will say that most people are nice to dogs, so those aren't the people I'm going to talk about.  But some people do really stupid or really horrible things to dogs, and I hate it when that happens.  The two stories I am going to tell you today have been in the news lately, so if you read any news about dogs, you probably already heard these stories, and if you don't want to hear them again, I will forgive you for not reading my blog today.  But only today!

Okay, well, the first story is about this woman in Minneapolis who tried to mail a puppy to Georgia in a box.  This box didn't have air holes or food or water or anything.  There was just a 4-month-old puppy in the box, and he was a poodle-schnauzer mix named Guess.

The woman who did this really dumb thing was named Stacey Champion.  She took the box to her local post office and paid $22 to have it sent Priority Mail.  She said not to worry if noises came out of the box because there was a robot toy in there.  The puppy was a birthday present for an 11-year-old relative in Georgia.

Well, pretty soon, the box started moving, and then it fell off the counter without anyone knocking it off.  So a postal worker listened to the box and heard a panting sound.  Then the postal workers opened the box and found the puppy inside.  They said there was no way the puppy could have got to Georgia alive because he had to fly in an airplane in the cargo compartment where it is really, really cold, and there is hardly any oxygen.

So the police went and found Ms. Champion, and they charged her with misdemeanor animal cruelty.  They took Guess to the animal control shelter, and he will be adopted out if Ms. Champion doesn't want him back.  So far, she hasn't tried to get him back, but she did ask for a refund of the $22 postage she paid, but the post office people said no.

My second story is about sled dogs, and it is much sadder than the first story.  What happened was that there was a company called Outdoor Adventures, and they supposedly killed 100 sled dogs because they didn't need them anymore.  Outdoor Adventures is located in British Columbia, which is a province way over on the left side of Canada.  The company is close to the town of Whistler, which is where the 2010 Winter Olympics took place.



Because of the Olympics, there were lots of tourists there, and they wanted to ride on dog sleds to find out what it was like to do that.  But after the Olympics were over, the tourists didn't come so much anymore, and not very many people wanted to ride dog sleds.  Which meant that Outdoor Adventures was stuck with way more dogs than they needed or could afford to take care of.

The company said they tried to find homes for the dogs, but they couldn't find very many.  So last April they made a man who worked for them shoot 100 of their 300 dogs.  Except some of the dogs didn't die when they got shot, so they had to get shot again.  Or they had to have their throats cut.  And after they were dead, they were all buried together in one big hole.

Then the man who had to kill all the dogs sued the company because he said it was the most awful, horrible thing he had ever had to do, and it gave him Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), just like soldiers sometimes get.  And the judge agreed that the man should get compensation for his PTSD.  I don't know if it made him feel any better to get the money or not, but what I do know is that it didn't bring the dogs back.

And after the court decision, the press and everybody else heard about what had happened to all those dogs at Outdoor Adventures.  The British Columbia SPCA and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police started looking into the killing of the dogs to see if they can file cruelty charges against the sled dog company.  And one thing they are going to probably do is dig up the dead dogs to find out more about how they died.

Anyway, that's all I'm going to say about this horrible subject.  I'm just glad I'm not a sled dog or a greyhound or a pit bull or any other kind of dog that is just killed off when it is not needed anymore.  Dogs deserve better than that!