Category: Dogblogging

This Is Not Your Grandma’s Humane Society

I thought the border was closed to “non-essential” travel.

Two people, driving a rented box truck carrying 48 dogs, died in a crash in Eastern Idaho Friday. Sadly, 14 of those dogs also died in the crash.
 
Idaho State Police says the man and woman were from Arizona and were driving the truck for a nonprofit animal rescue. The dogs were being taken to Canada for adoption when the truck crashed on Interstate 15, west of Shelley.

48 dogs can be trafficked across multiple states in an un-ventilated box van into Canada to profit from the exploding “pandemic puppy” market, but if you need to cross into North Dakota as an individual to put your client’s show dog on a flight home to California — you’re out of luck.

This Is Not Your Grandma’s Humane Society

Humane Watch;

[Marc Ching is] a Los Angeles-based activist who got international headlines – and lots of donations – claiming to save dogs from the dog meat trade. Except, as a Daily Mail investigation revealed, the dogs actually perished in Asia: “Ching’s high-profile operation deteriorated into farce, and ended with hundreds of dogs suffering slow and excruciatingly painful deaths within days of being rescued.”

 

“Many of the dogs died after being locked in cages and denied basic treatment and injections that might have saved them,” the report continued. “Up to two-thirds of the dogs are now believed to be dead, with the British head of an animal charity involved in dealing with the pitiful aftermath saying: ‘Those poor dogs just went from one hell to another.’” Ching, meanwhile, went back to L.A.

Where the FTC has just nailed him for peddling fake cancer treatments.

This Is Not Your Grandma’s Humane Society

What could possibly go wrong?

A growing number of livestock veterinarians are raising concerns that dogs rescued from Chinese meat markets could bring African swine fever virus to the United States.
 
Rescue groups regularly save dogs from slaughter in China and transport them to this country to be adopted as pets. But because such dogs are considered food animals in China, they often are kept in close quarters with other livestock. [..]
 
“These dogs are rescued from meat markets,” said Lisa Becton, director of swine health information and research at the National Pork Board. “And, unfortunately, at these markets there are a lot of other species, like pigs, chickens and cows. There is a risk that the animal, the crate or the bedding could become contaminated.”

The “retail rescue” fraud is importing tens of thousands of dogs into North America each year for both resale and donation drives — along with a growing number of foreign disease variants and parasites.

Montgomery County 2019


Waiting for awards presentation in the rain at Montgomery County KC.

There is only one dog show in America that challenges the prestige of the Westminster Kennel Club show in New York, and that’s the terrier-only event known as “Montgomery County”, held every year on the first weekend of October near Philadelphia, PA.

I made my first trip to Montgomery in 1981 with my mother, won my first class, and have returned nearly every year since. For Terrier enthusiasts, it’s our Superbowl. We work all year developing puppies and older dogs with the goal of peaking on that weekend.

In recent years “Minuteman” Mini Schnauzers have enjoyed very good success on the weekend, with several different dogs winning major awards. However, with every top winning Mini Schnauzer in America in attendance, along with others flying in from around the world, just getting to the main ring to compete with the 31 other breeds for one of the four group placements is considered the most difficult task in our breed.

This year we not only won the breed at the American Miniature Schnauzer National Specialty, but placed fourth in the group with my new young dog, AmCanCh.Minuteman Colder Weather. Colder’s win could be considered a genuine upset — it was just his third weekend competing as a finished champion.

I don’t know what the next year holds for us yet, but for now I’m just content to bask in what is by far, the pinnacle in my many years of breeding and showing purebred dogs.

Now, I must get busy finding out what happened in the world while we were having fun.

Appalling

And entirely predictable: U.S. Spends Millions to Train Bomb-Sniffing Dogs Gifted to Arab Nations that Abuse Them (sorry, link fixed)

It is a heartbreaking story involving the taxpayer-funded Explosive Detection Canine Program (EDCP), which also provides specially trained dogs to foreign nations—mostly Arabic—under an antiterrorism assistance project operated by the State Department. The goal is to enhance the ability of their law enforcement agencies to deter and counter terrorism. The State Department doesn’t bother following up to assure that the recipient nations are keeping their end of the agreement to adequately care for the precious animals. The sordid details resulting from the government’s negligence are only public because the State Department Inspector General received an anonymous complain on its hotline. The watchdog launched an investigation and published the findings in a lengthy report that includes agonizing pictures of the victims in the custody of their foreign handlers.

This Is Not Your Grandma’s Humane Society

CTV;

When a British Columbia woman experiencing fever, headaches and weight loss for two months finally went to her doctor, a blood test revealed she’d contracted a contagious disease from a dog she’d rescued in Mexico.
 
Dr. Elani Galanis, an epidemiologist and public health physician at the BC Centre for Disease Control, said the case was surprising because the previously healthy middle-aged patient didn’t seem to be a candidate for the transmission of brucellosis, which medical literature suggests can afflict people with weakened immune systems, or the very young and elderly.
 
“Up until this adult woman became infected and tested positive we felt like the risk to humans, although possible, was very, very low,” said Galanis, who wrote about the anonymous woman in a recent issue of the BC Medical Journal.
 
The woman worked for an animal-rescue organization that transported dogs to Canada from Mexico and the United States, often driving there to pick up the animals, Galanis said.
 
On one occasion, she was bringing back a pregnant dog from Mexico and likely came into contact with the animal’s pregnancy fluids as it spontaneously aborted two stillborn puppies, Galanis said, adding the dog later tested positive for the bacterium brucella canis and the woman was diagnosed after seeking medical treatment last December.
 
“Given the story in other places, like the rest of North America, this hasn’t been seen much before,” Galanis said of transmission of the disease to humans. “We’re just starting to see it so I do believe it’s a true emergence of a new problem.”

Local pet owners should hope she didn’t parade it through a Petsmart dripping fluids. The only cure for canine brucellosis is death.

This Is Not Your Grandma’s Humane Society

Asian influenza, asian distemper and now Asian brucellosis;

In March, six Wisconsin animal shelters and rescue organizations, including the Washington County Humane Society, Humane Animal Welfare Society in Waukesha, Humane Society of Sheboygan County, Elmbrook Humane Society and Underdog Pet Rescue, received 26 dogs transported from South Korea by Humane Society International.
 
None of the dogs transported from South Korea to Wisconsin show signs of illness, but diagnostic testing revealed two dogs to be positive for B. canis. Wisconsin law requires that positive canine brucellosis tests be reported to the state. Public health authorities with the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection were immediately notified and have led the response.
 
Each dog, even those that tested negative for canine brucellosis, will be quarantined until they are no longer considered at risk. In addition, shelter dogs that were potentially exposed to the dogs from South Korea will also be quarantined. In total, approximately 100 dogs are expected to require quarantine.

These dogs aren’t legitimate rescues — they’re profit generators for the “flip-that-rescue” scam.

Some dogs were placed into adoptive homes prior to the positive test results. In those cases, state public health officials are contacting adopters to instruct them to place the dogs in quarantine in the home.

“Quarantine”? The only “treatment” for breeding dogs with canine brucellosis is euthanasia.

This Is Not Your Grandma’s Humane Society

As progressive veterinarians declare war on ethical Canadian dog breeders (wake up livestock producers — you’re next), the foreign “retail rescue” imports continue to flood in. And they’re bringing hitchhikers;

New Imported Distemper Strain in Dogs
 

Attempts were made to isolate the virus from the samples submitted for PCR, but with no success. Our next effort was to try to obtain sequence for virus directly from the nucleic acid used for the RT-PCR assay. This was successful for the F and H genes of CDV. Phylogenetic analyses of the sequences against various clades of CDV, indicated the imported dog was infected with the Asia-1 strain of CDV. We have no information on the existence of this clade of CDV in North America.
 
While we have been most concerned with the importation of canine influenza virus from Asia to North America by improper procedures by various “rescue” groups, the importation of CDV may be more significant in that CDV once it enters an ecosystem cannot be eradicated even with effective vaccines. Once again the North American dog population is being put at risk by those who have no regard for the importation of foreign animal diseases.

That’s right. They’ve imported a new form of distemper for which there’s no vaccine.

Update: …one dog out of a group of 26 dogs that were imported from Egypt by Unleashed Pet Rescue and Adoption in Mission, Kansas, tested positive for rabies.

Touched By Greatness

I was getting dogs ready at a show in Sacramento a couple of years ago when a nicely dressed couple approached and asked if they could meet the black dog I was grooming.

It was a really bad time, I explained, “I have to leave for the ring in a couple of minutes, please come back later.”

There were a pair of raised eyebrows, but they respectfully walked on.

My friend Julio, who was getting his dog ready at the table beside me, grinned.

“You just threw Barry Bonds out of your set-up.”

(I showed Apollo to his Canadian championship title earlier this year.)

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