Posts Tagged ‘irresponsible ownership – other animals’
Come one, come all: Fundraiser for Me and My Sucky Life!
Yet more internet panhandling – this time on Facebook!
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OT, but everyone in America should see this one.
Thursday – I am leaving this up a second day as the story’s so hot in the news right now and I know people still want to discuss it. A happy thread on Friday, I promise!
WARNING: Extremely graphic, unpleasant video. Not appropriate for kids, hell, not really appropriate for anybody but we need to do something about it and that is why I am posting it.
I am not opposed to drinking milk. This is not an “animal rights” issue. This is about:
1) having the DECENCY to treat meat/dairy animals in a CIVILIZED way while they are alive
2) NOT doling out pain because it is FUN for you
3) NOT letting the public believe milk comes from happy cows or some such Madison Avenue shit
This is at Conklin Dairy Farms in Plain City, Ohio. If you have a problem with this, please call Sheriff Nelson at 937-645-4102 and request that these individuals be prosecuted criminally. While you’re at it, call your Congressman and ask why these asshats got $36,000 in federal farm subsidies. Your tax dollars at work!
As always, a polite and succinct call is the most effective. Yelling or bad language is not appropriate. I know how you feel. I feel the same. You are welcome to post here that these individuals should have their testicles ripped off with a carving knife, and I will agree, but when calling the police or elected officials, holding your temper is a MUCH more effective technique. This is very simple: These people need to go to prison. They have broken the law and deserve the maximum penalty under the law. It is your right to call and ask about the status of this investigation, but you must be polite. Remember, the police see people every day who do this stuff and worse to children. They have a lot on their plates. Still, we want this prosecuted – there is no excuse for any other outcome!
As always, I must give huge kudos to the person who was incredibly brave and went in there wired up. I don’t know if you all realize how dangerous that was. These kind of people will happily bang YOU on the head and go, oops, accident. I doubt we will ever find out his/her name but if you read this, I have nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for you.
All right, let’s discuss this free speech thing…
Animal welfare groups are having kittens (I know, I know, bad pun) over the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that even videos that depict wanton animal cruelty deserve free-speech protections under the First Amendment. The Supreme Court ruling had to do with a guy who sold pit bull fighting videos. While I am certainly HUGELY opposed to dog-fighting, I agree with the Court’s decision, and I’d like to explain why, and then we can discuss it:
Limiting free speech is an extremely slippery slope. Let’s say we make it a crime to film acts of animal cruelty and sell the footage. Sounds good on the surface, right? But here’s what you’ve just made illegal:
- The kind of undercover video of animal cruelty we saw with Amanda Sorvino’s Bravo Packing expose or the HBO documentary “Dealing Dogs.”
- Covertly filming a trainer beating the crap out of a horse at a show so that you can send that to me for this blog.
- A tourist filming animal abuse on his vacation in a foreign country, who brings the footage back to America to try to take it to the media and gets caught with it in the airport.
Now, I’ve tried to think of ways to draw this distinction. How about saying it’s illegal if you’re doing it for profit. Um, fail again. I have advertisers, the news sells commercials, we all could be accused of profiting off of graphic video if we cover the story. Alright, now we’re stuck with intent. Intent, always a hot button issue because it’s subject to interpretation, is the reason you can take pics of your child at bathtime and not be prosecuted for pornography. But when I try to write down a definition of what kind of intent is okay and what isn’t, even I get stumped. There’s a reason Justice Stewart once said, with regard to pornography, that he knew it when he saw it! Ooooh boy. I’m not particularly comfortable with a law based upon someone’s personal opinion like that. I mean, I’m gonna hazard a guess you could pull out a fair number of members of Congress who think homosexual pornography should be illegal just because they are personally squicked out by it. Heck, don’t half our states still have stuff on the books prohibiting sexual practices most adults, gay or straight, engage in? You can see how tough it is to draft these laws. I like the idea that the Supreme Court rules on the side of free speech more often than not.
The original author of the law that was struck down is trying again with a more narrowly drafted bill, and I think he may get this one to stick, though I haven’t read the text of it yet:
Local congressman introduces new bill to stop the sale of animal cruelty videos
But honestly, I’d rather see our focus on prosecuting the acts, not filming or selling them. Hello, when those videos are produced and sold, we have a trail of bread crumbs that leads law enforcement RIGHT TO those freaks. How many child pornographers do you think we’d catch without a money trail and evidence? Not to mention their equally freakish customers. Do you think we catch it when some miscreant is abusing their child in their home? The only way we catch that is if the child is brave enough to talk. And then the child’s truthfulness may be questioned. Films and photographs are hard evidence of crimes. They are disgusting and we all hate them, but they are PROOF that can be used to LOCK THE FREAKS UP.
We do not necessarily need extra penalties for filming cruelty. We need stiffer penalties for performing cruelty and much better enforcement. So, Mr. Stevens the dog-fighting video guy, go make some more. Make sure to show some human faces. Film some license plates, pan around and accidentally catch some of the property where it’s taking place. Have a nice cold six-pack while you’re filming, get a little sloppy. Go for it!
That’s what I think. What do you think?
Oh, and for those of you who think it’s ok to give kittens away for free to anyone who “seems nice,” welcome to reality. If you’re too lazy to get your barn cats in to be spayed, you might want to watch one of those “crush videos” for a little motivation!
Reposting this becau se she still needs a home and is only at the trainer’s for another week so I’m hoping someone may be interested in meeting her! 
For those of you who might have an empty stall waiting for a super snuggly Thoroughbred mare, I am pleased to announce that Exclusive Report, who you may recall got rescued from last fall’s Enumclaw auction, has completed 60 days of professional training and now needs a home to continue her riding career. “Hope†as we call her, is at that point where she is very well behaved with experienced riders but not ready for inexperienced ones. We think her ideal home would be a flat hunter/dressage home (although there is no reason she could not be started over low fences, too) with a quiet, soft handed rider with no temper. If you love snuggly “pocket ponies,†this is your girl – snuggly without being annoying or pushy. Send me an e-mail with HOPE in the subject line if you’d like to know more about her. She is in the Seattle area.
Cleanliness is next to…impossible for some folks?
Yes, it’s another news story about horses being seized, but I think it’s going to be an interesting one. Why? Because from all reports, they weren’t seized for being thin.
Article that gives more background – she got divorced, the money dried up, blah blah blah, the usual pile of excuses. The author seems sympathetic but other than that, it’s actually a very good story with common sense advice about the work it takes to care for horses properly. She sounds like a very good horse mom herself.
73 horses and 53 cats and dogs were seized because the place was a damn pig sty, with a foot of manure in every stall and horses standing in their own excrement. Again, why does anyone need to have this many animals to begin with? To me, having 70 horses is a ticking time bomb — it’s a staggering money-sucker that you have to keep feeding cash into. Unless you are SUPER rich and invest very safely, it always makes a lot more sense to have 20 horses or so max. 20 is nowhere near as big of a mess to clean up if things go bad for you – and things can go bad fast, especially in this economy. I really want to know who thinks they genuinely need more than 20 horses? It’s an interesting question. What do you need more than that for? Let’s say you have 3 showing, 2 or 3 stallions and 15 mares, and you ride your mares for pleasure. Isn’t that enough? Why not?
Anyway, here is her web site, which of course is the typical unrealistic, fantasy-based silly nonsense I tend to see with people who do not view their breeding program realistically. I swear, you can predict things going bad based upon nothing else than the presence of any talk on one’s web site about dreams, beliefs, life, love, unicorns, winged horses and how the owner wanted a horse farm since she was a little girl. When I see a web site that sticks to the facts about the horses, their pedigrees and their show wins and other accomplishments, guess what, it is almost ALWAYS a well-run, clean and successful facility. Hmmm. Someone should do a study on that! Anyway, Beth Lynne Hoskins seems to have viewed her farm as the “Garden of Eden.” If it is, I guess God should have sent Adam and Eve down complete with waders to walk through that place! YUCK!
Of course, I say hooray to this seizure, but I am wondering how it will hold up in court and whether New York has the laws to support a seizure for unsanitary conditions? This reminds me of the much-blathered-about case a few years ago with the barrel horse farm. Nothing was dead there, either, and they claimed they were being unfairly persecuted but again – the place was just a damn sty. Nobody ever bothered to remove manure. It was piled up the sides of the run in sheds leaving a little ditch for the horses to stand in at the middle. Now, most of us know that it’s not good for a horse to stand in poo all day. We know that it is bad for their feet, causing thrush and scratches if it’s deep enough We know that it contributes heavily to worm infestation and we know (or should know) that worms alone can kill a horse. So, cleaning up manure is a fairly serious matter — and still, I meet people who cannot seem to master it, and frequently these people have high quality horses, which is just baffling to me. I have been at barns with lovely horses standing in stalls that clearly haven’t been done in a week. Or, the stalls are done but no one ever removes poo from the paddocks and run in shelters so the horses are fetlock deep in grossness out there. And these people don’t seem to realize this is a problem. They will post pictures of their mare who gave birth in the run-in shed and baby is lying on piles of poo. Gross! And most definitely unhealthy.
I have heard the rationalization that no one picks up after the horses in the wild. Well yeah, but horses in the wild don’t stand in one place, saying hey predators, this is where we hang out, come and get us! They move constantly so you don’t have the accumulation that you have when you put a fence around them and lock them into a small space. If you are going to do that, you need to pick up a manure fork. Yes, I know it is hard work! No, it is not any fun to do in the winter – I grew up in the Midwest and I have spent plenty of time kicking at those mountains of frozen poo with my boot tip trying to break them up so that I could pick them up. (One of many reasons I don’t live there anymore, ha ha). I am very familiar with the unpleasant sound of the alarm at 5:00 in the morning because I had to stalls before I showered and got ready for work — and I know many of you are, as well.
Bottom line, horses are hard work. I know, I know, news flash, right? But they are. They are a whole bunch of hard work. Having them live outside does not, in many cases, create appreciably less work! You still have to clean up after them. There is still feeding and watering and scrubbing out water tubs and troughs. One horse is quite a bit of work. Five to ten horses is enough work that you need to have a good solid hour to hour and a half on both ends of your work day to provide care. Get past ten and it either needs to be your full time job to do it right, or you need to be able to afford barn help, or you need a miraculous ability to motivate your teenagers (and if you can do the latter, please write a book, everybody will buy it!).
Horses need grooming and they need to have their feet picked. They have to be handled for the farrier. Sometimes they need the vet. You will need to deworm them and give them shots or pay the vet to do those things. Even if they don’t leave the property, you at least need to give tetanus so they don’t die a horrible death from stepping on a nail. I actually saw a horse dying with tetanus in my youth and you won’t forget it if you see it. The shot is literally about $1.50. Get it done.
I just think this case is a classic example of someone who had WAY too many horses, probably didn’t have enough help, and was too lazy to do the job herself. While there are former models who do clean stalls (Kelly LeBrock springs to mind and I’d bet money Bo Derek isn’t afraid of picking up a wheelbarrow), I can also see a former model thinking she is a princess who can’t possibly break a nail working in the barn. We’ll see what people have to say about her. The Morgan world is pretty small so I’m sure one or more of my readers will have some insider information to offer, but I’ll say right now that I’m in favor of horses being confiscated for no reason other than filthy conditions, as long as the ACO’s are properly trained. Obviously there is nothing wrong with a horse having mud on his coat. There is something wrong with horses standing in deep mud – get some geotextile fabric or old pieces of carpet or used conveyor belting and gravel and fix your high traffic areas. There is something wrong with stalls that don’t get cleaned at least a few times a week. There is something wrong with water buckets and troughs that are growing green slime or smell funky.
I’d love if we had sanitation standards for horse farms that were nationwide. Heck, then maybe someone could do something about that freak Darlene Wilson in Roy, who has been featured on this blog before. I just heard she got a church group out there to “volunteer” and they had to pick-axe a foot of manure out of her stalls. GROSS! Darlene, news flash, you shouldn’t have had horses when I blogged about you before, and you still should not have horses. You have been incapable of taking care of them for years and one of these days someone is going to light a sufficient fire under Pierce County’s butt to prosecute you. I’d give them up now, if I were you.
And back to Beth:Â Beth, when you suffer financial misfortune and cannot afford barn help anymore and have 73 horses, there is a way to fix the problem for $16:
You aren’t crippled from any of the accounts of this story so put your horses up for sale and pick up a damn manure fork and get to work! My guess is that if you take those two simple actions, the judge is a lot more likely to go easy on you – and you know, so would I.
P.S. Morgan people: Beth is not making you all look bad or Morgans look bad. Beth is making Beth look bad. Please don’t have a cow like the Arabian people do every time I pick on an Arab person. Every single breed has bad seeds and it does not reflect upon your breed as a whole. I do know that most of you take great care of your horses!Â
If you’re looking for a young horse to work with, here is a cutie at Shiloh Horse Rescue in Nevada to check out!
OT: Dog related
Just a quickie but this needs to be seen by as many people as possible. This is an expose video about a “rescue” called Cold Noses, Warm Beds that is apparently getting California rescuers to pull shelter dogs and ship them up there …
Where CNWB “adopts” them out for outrageous prices, without checking references, or even having an application completed!
It’s all on video. Sheesh, lady, YOU ARE NOT A RESCUE. Listen to her lie! Boy, is she a good liar.
I know many of you are involved in the dog world as well, so please pass this around! And, oh, kudos as always to the smart person who got this video done. Actually, this is a great example of how to be Mary Sunshine when you are trying to get info. This is how you get info.
I am always asked to do a FHOTD for dogs and dog rescue. #1 I don’t have time and #2, dogs really are not my area of expertise. I think it would be great if someone did do a blog like this, though. Clearly the dog world has just as many faux rescues as the horse world (probably many more) and both other rescuers and consumers need to be warned.
