Category: Retail Rescue

This Is Not Your Grandma’s Humane Society

Puppy Importing Leading To Disease Outbreaks In Colorado

By the time the seizures began, Elliot says, it was too late.

“They were happening back to back to back to back.”

She says he was diagnosed with distemper despite paperwork from the rescue showing he’d been vaccinated.

“I had to explain to my 4 year old, who had the dog for three weeks, that we had to put him to sleep and that he was not coming back home.”

Billy is one of five dogs from New Hope Rescue that would be euthanized. Owner Joann Roof, who had no comment, was charged with misdemeanor animal cruelty. Investigators say she knowingly imported and sold sick dogs from a New Mexico Shelter. The state suspended the facility’s license. […]

Fisher says, last year, rescues and shelters imported 37,000 dogs, most of them puppies that are in high demand. CBS4 went undercover and found people lining up for them at adoption events. Fisher says some even buy the dogs right off transport vans. We got video of dogs being unloaded in parking lots.

“If an animal is being taken right off the truck, that rescue has no idea what’s going on with that animal,” said Fisher.

It’s not rescue — it’s international trafficking.

This Is Not Your Grandma’s Humane Society

Surely the foreign rescue dog racket was suspended due to the pandemic, yes?

No.

A rabid dog imported into the United States this month has sparked a public health investigation across several states.

Health officials say a dog brought to the U.S. from Azerbaijan that ended up with a family in Chester County, Pennsylvania began acting strangely. It later tested positive for rabies and was euthanized. At least 12 people were exposed to the animal.

The dog was one of 34 animals — 33 dogs and one cat — imported by an animal rescue organization from Azerbaijan to O’Hare International Airport in Chicago on June 10.

That’s not a typo — Azerbaijan.

This Is Not Your Grandma’s Humane Society

Essential travel…

Nearly 50 dogs from China were in Great Falls on Wednesday as they waited to go to a rescue facility in Canada. The dogs are currently being housed at Happy Tails Lodge.
 
They were flown from China to Los Angeles, California, and then driven to the Canadian border to cross into Canada.
 
But when they got to the border no vet was available to check them out, so the organization transporting the dogs asked Happy Tails to take the dogs in temporarily. […]
 
The dogs are not available for adoption here; they are contractually obligated to be delivered to the agency in Canada. Duncan did not know the name of the Canadian facility.

Most of the dogs appear to be strays or stolen pets.

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

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.

This Is Not Your Grandma’s Humane Society

Pilots N Paws…

… is a non-profit charity that exists simply to coordinate flights for rescues making their trafficking statistics much harder to trace. Just like HSUS which doesn’t run a single pet shelter in America, Pilots N Paws is also merely a cover. They don’t actually ship a single dog but they rake in the glory and donations. Like Wings of Rescue, they have a trademarked brand and corporate logo to protect and promote.
 

Backlash hit in 2016 when the real rescue volunteers who do the work that they take credit for went public with the truth. Now the Pilots N Paws website features the disclaimer below, still hiding the fact that they have $700,991 in assets, money donated to them by a public that doesn’t know they don’t rescue a single animal.

Diversity Is Our Strength!

They’re coming for the “climate”:  This parasitic worm can be deadly – and it’s coming to Europe

Not so long ago, human diseases caused by parasitic worms were thought to be confined to resource poor communities throughout Africa, Asia and South America. But in this age of global travel and changing climate, parasitic worms are slowly but surely moving into parts of Europe and North America. The long-term consequences of increased parasitic worm distributions are difficult to predict, but the harm that infection causes highlights the need for developing control strategies that can mitigate this 21st-century threat to global health.

Related.

h/t A Canadian

This Is Not Your Grandma’s Humane Society

More:

“We have breeders that breed for the auction,” says Will Yoder, a commercial breeder of Cavalier King Charles spaniels in Bloomfield, Iowa. “It’s a huge, huge underground market. It’s happening at an alarming rate.

The crazy Cavalier people were among the first to launch this insanity about 20 years ago, buying up Cavs for exorbitant prices to the glee of commercial breeders. Now it’s grown into a fundraising scam.

This Is Not Your Grandma’s Humane Society

More canine influenza;

According to Weese, the outbreak likely stems from a shipment of rescue dogs from Asia.
“We’re suspicious that this group of dogs, these infections, trace back to the importation of a dog from China,” Weese said.
The outbreak follows two earlier but smaller clusters of cases in southwestern Ontario’s Windsor-Essex County, which were also linked to imported rescue dogs from Asia. Weese cautioned that dogs in the vicinity of Grimsby, Ont. may also be at risk.
Also known as dog flu, canine influenza is a highly infectious virus that, much like its human variant, causes fever, coughing, lethargy, loss of appetite and runny noses and eyes. While relatively common in Asia, the virus is extremely rare in Canada. It cannot, however, be transmitted to humans.
“I’ve never seen anything like influenza like this,” Orillia-based veterinarian Dr. Joanne Olinyk told CTV Barrie. “These dogs do get sick, they cough. It’s scary.”

And some die.

Navigation