The Chief just called me. He was standing in a hanger bay in Columbia South Carolina waiting with over 200 other soldiers ready to head out to Kuwait. He said if they didn’t have to stop and refuel it would be a 17 hour flight. 17 hours, that’s all that stands between freedom and safety and the beginning of war. He still states he’ll be safe, although in my most recent conversations with him he’s been a little less insistent. Maybe he learned some things in his ground training, maybe it’s finally sunk in where he’s going, maybe a combination of both. He told me the other day he would be stationed for the next 10 months at Camp Sykes. We can’t find a lot of information about this base on the internet. In fact the most current information either one of us could find was from 2005 and stated:

“Camp Sykes is located in Tall Afar about 40 miles from the Syrian border. The camp is considered to be one of the most dangerous and inaccessible in all of Iraq. The secular nature of Tall Afar’s population has only increased the instability of the area.”

Please, this place has got to of changed in the past three years. It has to of. We’ve made some progress haven’t we? If anyone knows anything about this base, please tell me. There are many people who read this blog who don’t comment, that’s wonderful! I stalk many a blog myself, if one of my readers out there has any information you can share, please email me: kaylyn50 at hotmail dot com. I would really appreciate it.

This is the first time since the Chief told me he was being sent to Iraq that he was anything less than upbeat when we hung up. This was the first time I hung up the phone shaking and in tears.

Am I overreacting? Maybe, but when we can’t trust the media to give us accurate information and we know we can’t, how am I supposed to feel?

Warning this post will be hard to stomach.

Read at your own risk.

However, I won’t apologize for it.  I feel

very strongly about it.

This article is posted on the following website:

http://www.tarasdream.org/

An organization I will hopefully be volunteering for soon.

WHAT REALLY HAPPENS WHEN YOU TAKE YOUR PET TO A SHELTER?

I am posting this (and it is long) because I think our society needs a huge wake-up call. As a shelter manager, I am going to share a little insight with you all - a view from the inside, if you will. First off, this (original website) is a forum to for adoption and / or rehoming as clearly stated in the rules. All of you breeders / sellers on craigslist should not only be flagged (and I hope the good people on craigslist will continue to do so with blind fury), but you should be made to work in the “back” of an animal shelter for just one day.

Maybe if you saw the life drain from a few sad, lost, confused eyes, you would change your mind about breeding and selling to people you don’t even know - that puppy you just sold will most likely end up in my shelter when it’s not a cute little puppy anymore. How would you feel if you knew that there’s about a 90% chance that dog will never walk out of the shelter it is going to be dumped at - purebred or not!

About 50% of all of the dogs that are “owner surrenders” or “strays” that come into my shelter are purebred dogs. The most common excuses I hear are:

. We are moving and we can’t take our dog (or cat). Really? Where are you moving to that doesn’t allow pets?
. The dog got bigger than we thought it would. How big did you think a German Shepherd would get?
. We don’t have time for her. Really? I work a 10-12 hour day and still have time for my 6 dogs!
. She’s tearing up our yard. How about bringing her inside, making her a part of your family?

They always tell me, “We just don’t want to have to stress about finding a place for her. We know she’ll get adopted - she’s a good dog”. Odds are your pet won’t get adopted, and how stressful do you think being in a shelter is?

Your pet has 72 hours to find a new family from the moment you drop it off, sometimes a little longer if the shelter isn’t full and your dog manages to stay completely healthy. If it sniffles, it dies. Your pet will be confined to a small run / kennel in a room with about 25 other barking or crying animals. It will have to relieve itself where it eats and sleeps. It will be depressed and it will cry constantly for the family that abandoned it. If your pet is lucky, I will have enough volunteers that day to take him / her for a walk. If I don’t, your pet won’t get any attention besides having a bowl of food slid under the kennel door and the waste sprayed out of its pen with a high-powered hose.

If your dog is big, black or any of the “bully” breeds (pit bull, Rottweilers, mastiff, etc) it was pretty much dead when you walked it through the front door. Those dogs just don’t get adopted. If your dog doesn’t get adopted within its 72 hours and the shelter is full, it will be destroyed.

If the shelter isn’t full and your dog is good enough, and of a desirable enough breed, it may get a stay of execution, though not for long.

Most pets get very kennel protective after about a week and are destroyed for showing aggression. Even the sweetest dogs will turn in this environment. If your pet makes it over all of those hurdles, chances are it will get kennel cough or an upper respiratory infection and will be destroyed because shelters just don’t have the funds to pay for even a $100 treatment.

And if ever you pet does get adopted, have you ever wondered how its new life would be? What if the new owner only wants a “junkyard dog” for protection and your pet will now spend the rest of its life on a chain out in the cold, the heat, lonely, neglected and unloved? Is this the life you would want for your pet?

But chances are your pet wont get adopted, even by an uncaring person.

Here’s a little euthanasia 101 for those of you that have never witnessed a perfectly healthy, scared animal being “put-down”. First, your pet will be taken from its kennel on a leash. They always look like they think they are going for a walk - happy, wagging their tails. That is, until they get to “The Room”, when every one of them freaks out and puts on the brakes when we get to the door. It must smell like death, or they can feel the sad souls that are left in there. It’s strange, but it happens with every one of them.

Your dog or cat will be restrained, held down by 1 or 2 vet techs (depending on their size and how freaked out they are). A euthanasia tech or a vet will start the process. They find a vein in the front leg and inject a lethal dose of the “pink stuff”.

Hopefully your pet doesn’t panic from being restrained and jerk it’s leg. I’ve seen the needles tear out of a leg and been covered with the resulting blood, and been deafened by the yelps and screams. They all don’t just “go to sleep” - sometimes they spasm for a while, gasp for air and defecate on themselves.

When it all ends, your pet’s corpse will be stacked like firewood in a large freezer in the back, with all of the other animals that were killed, waiting to be picked up like garbage. What happens next? Cremated? Taken to the dump? Rendered into pet food? You’ll never know, and it probably won’t even cross your mind. It was just an animal, and you can always buy another one, right?

I hope that those of you that have read this are bawling your eyes out and can’t get the pictures out of your head. I do everyday on the way home from work. I hate my job, I hate that it exists and I hate that it will always be there unless people make some changes and realize that the lives you are affecting go much farther than the pets you dump at a shelter.

Between 9 and 11 MILLION animals die every year in shelters and only you can stop it. I do my best to save every life I can but rescues are always full, and there are more animals coming in everyday than there are homes.

My point to all of this is DON’T BREED OR BUY WHILE SHELTER PETS DIE! Hate me if you want to - the truth hurts and reality is what it is. I just hope I maybe changed one person’s mind about breeding their dog, taking their loving pet to a shelter, or buying a dog. I hope that someone will walk into my shelter and say “I saw this thing on-line and it made me want to adopt”. That would make it all worth it.

– Anonymous

Los Angeles Times: Federal rule to allow more hunting of gray wolves

From the Los Angeles Times

Federal rule to allow more

hunting of gray wolves

The loosening of restrictions is a ’safety valve’ for states, in anticipation of a legal fight over delisting the species as endangered.

By Tami Abdollah
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

January 25, 2008

State game agencies and private citizens would be allowed to kill federally protected gray wolves that threatened dogs or seriously decreased deer, elk or moose populations in parts of the northern Rocky Mountains, under a federal rule announced Thursday.

The regulation comes a month ahead of the expected federal decision to take the gray wolf off the endangered species list, which would allow wolves to be hunted. That decision is likely to face protracted litigation.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services officials said Thursday that the revised provision would allow for states to deal with areas where wolf activity is affecting wildlife populations while delisting is tied up in court.

“This rule, if it goes forward, could provide a safety valve for the states during the two to three years while the delisting goes through litigation,” said Ed Bangs, Fish and Wildlife’s wolf recovery coordinator. “Whether this rule ever gets used or not, who knows. But if you’re protecting your dog on a Forest Service hiking trail, you’ll be glad this rule exists.”

Environmentalists interpreted the rule as an attempt to skirt delays expected from delisting litigation.

“The shame of it is we spent so much time and effort trying to recover wolves, and were within spitting distance of recovery,” said Doug Honnold, managing attorney for the Northern Rockies office of Earthjustice, a nonprofit law firm. “But instead of securing those recovery gains and building on them, Fish and Wildlife Services is throwing them away. . . . They want the right to kill wolves willy-nilly.”

Honnold said he would file suit and seek an injunction against the rule on behalf of environmental organizations including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity.

Once ranging from central Mexico to the Arctic, gray wolves were killed off for decades, and their population had virtually disappeared from the American West by the 1930s. They were listed as endangered in 1974.

Since they were reintroduced to central Idaho and Yellowstone National Park in 1995 and 1996, their population has spread throughout the northern Rockies region, swelling to more than 1,500, and it’s growing by about 24% annually, according to wildlife officials.

The rule issued Thursday relies on a revision of endangered-species regulations that allows lethal force against “nonessential experimental populations” like the gray wolf under certain circumstances. The section was created as a compromise with ranchers who were worried about a growing wolf population preying on livestock. Thursday’s revision was the third change to the gray-wolf-reintroduction rule since it was written in 1994.

Currently, gray wolves cannot be killed unless they are preying on livestock or on a dog on private property, or are the main culprit behind dwindling populations of animals such as deer, elk and moose.

The rule change issued Thursday would ease the burden of proof to justify a wolf kill. State agencies would only need to show that wolf predation had been one factor among others for a decreasing population of ungulates, such as elk, deer or moose. A wolf threatening a dog also could be killed. None of the rule provisions apply to wolves within national parks or outside central Idaho and the greater Yellowstone area.

A state agency that wants to kill wolves preying on ungulate populations would have to file a lengthy wolf management plan with Fish and Wildlife. Officials in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana said they had no immediate plan to do so.

“The state of Idaho is more interested in delisting than in changes to [this] rule, which is kind of a stopgap, or an interim measure . . . should delisting be delayed,” said Steve Nadeau, an Idaho Fish and Game official who oversees the state’s wolf program. “We have no plan to use [the rule] unless wolves are not delisted anytime soon.”

The new rule is scheduled to take effect in about a month, around the time the delisting decision is to be announced.

Bangs, who helped lead the reintroduction of gray wolves when the tri-state area had about 10 wolves, said that most elk and other hoofed big-game animal populations were not greatly affected by wolves and that more wolves — about 150 annually — probably would be killed for preying on livestock.

“This is absolutely not a get-out-of-jail-free card for wolf killing,” Bangs said. “This is a highly structured scientific-based process to address real problems. . . . It won’t change the [overall] number of wolves, but it will change distribution and in a few areas the number of wolves.”

Last January, Republican Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter incensed environmentalists when he told a group of hunters on the Idaho statehouse steps that he wanted to be the first to sign up to kill wolves once they were delisted.

tami.abdollah@latimes.com

My entire life my family spent our summers and most weekends in the winters at the lake.  When I was 15 my brother and sister were old enough to stay home and work, leaving me at our lake house alone all summer with my folks.  My parents always told me one day I would miss times like that where I would have the freedom to spend that much time down there.  Of course I didn’t believe them-parents of 15 year olds are never right!  Well, not until the 15 year old becomes a 30 year old.

That summer, became bearable when I found out one of my closest friends from Jr. High now lived in the same town.  The same town where the two most exciting things to do were A)Go to the single screen movie theatre, or B) Go to the skating rink.  We chose the skating rink.  (as a side note, when this rink first opened, my brother and I used to take our OWN music there to be played because the city was so much more progressive than the lake.  Can you believe they didn’t have Queen??)

The first night at the rink this really cute red headed boy came and asked me to couple skate (ahhh, couple skate -pardon me while I swoon).  So we did, and we did it again, and then we were interpretable for the rest of the night.  As it turned out, this very cute redhead went to the same school and knew my friend.  The three of us hung out a couple of times, and then the three became two, he and I.  I really couldn’t have picked a better boy for my first boyfriend.  It was almost storybook.  We skated, we went to the movies, we even went to the county fair for Pete’s sake.  Almost sickening-I know.  Summer ended, we wrote to one another but he was 17 and with me only being 15, I didn’t have maturity needed to allow it continue.

The next time I heard from him he was in Cuba.  He had just finished basic training and he was in the Navy.  We wrote back and forth but weren’t consistent about it.  Some time ago when Classmates.com became all the rage I thought to look him up.  His bio said he was on the Stennis in San Diego.  I shot him an email with no expectations.  Much to my surprise I got one back almost immediately.  He was indeed still in the Navy and in fact about to be promoted to Chief. 

I pleased to say the redhead and I have stayed close friends ever since.  He’s now stationed in Virginia Beach.  Hopefully soon to be promoted to Senior Chief.    I received an email from him yesterday.  The email told me he had good news and bad news for me.  He would tell me the bad news first so that the good would cheer me up.  His bad news was that he was being deployed for a year to Iraq.  I was so stunned by the news I could hardly take in the good news.  That which was that he had just saved a ton of money by switching to Geico.  Yeah thanks!  This is his sense of humor.  I really thought at my age I was done having to worry about my friends being sent to Iraq.  I know sadly, I will soon have to worry about my friends kids being in Iraq, but never thought I would still have to worry about my friends.  I started with my million questions.  When are you leaving, why are you leaving, what the hell did you volunteer for, and what ship will you be on?

This is where my disbelief took an even deeper spiral turn south.  He told me he wasn’t going to be on a ship, for the year he was going to be deployed he would be considered part of the Army.  WTF?  You mean on the ground?  I really thought he was trying to pull one over on me.  No, he was completely serious.  Just before shipping out he would be issued Army fatigues that he would wear for the entire time he would be in Iraq.  I don’t even know how many times I asked him to repeat himself.  I just couldn’t, and still can’t wrap my brain around this idea.  I argued that he’s not ground trained how can the government do this?  He said it wasn’t a new idea; we already had over 10,000 Navy persons on the ground as part of the Army right now.

So, the trip I had planned for June to Virginia Beach/Norfolk has now been moved up to February.  I knew he was leaving in September, it was just supposed to be for a presumably benign 9 month ocean tour.  I wanted to see where he worked and the base and Virginia Beach before his tour.  Now the trip will have a very different feel.  

He’s told me I can come on the ship with him.  I know I will, although I’m not sure if I’ll be able to handle it.  I don’t anticipate having claustrophobic issues, I wonder with my feelings on this entire political issue if my incredibly sad emotions will take over once the look of the active military will be there slapping me in the face.  Only time will tell, I suppose…  Only time will tell.