This is a huge question within the animal protection community. It's so tempting to say, "No way!" but then we risk losing a whole lot of voters who support things like puppy mill legislation, factory farming regulations (to make life better for the animals being raised for food), and those whose main concern is wildlife. For example, we currently have hunters in our membership, people who want to see that puppy mills and wildlife management using lethal means are stopped. We also have people who do dog rescue and run animal shelters, but they pack a ham sandwich for lunch, and feel no guilt about it. Nobody in the LOHV -- in PA or any other state -- wants to lose those voters, even if we can't all agree on the menu.
That said, we certainly encourage vegetarian and vegan eating habits. That's right, I called them "eating habits." I refuse to call these things "lifestyles," because to me, a lifestyle is taking vacations every year or spending money on pedicures or having a maid. Someone who spends the winter where it's warm and has pristine pink toenails peeking through the sand and knows her house will be clean when she gets home has a lifestyle. Me? I'm just a vegan, someone who chooses not to eat any animal products. I was a vegetarian for more than 20 years, and recently did away with all milk and eggs, too. I had pretty much phased them out in recent years, but in the last few months, I've been being as much of a purist as I can be.
I say "as much as I can be" because sometimes you don't know for sure what's in something you get in a restaurant or that's served at someone's home, and you can only grill (so to speak) the waitress or your host so much. Unlike some of my colleagues, I won't send back a plate of pasta if someone sprinked about 50 grains of parmesan cheese on top. Even when I asked that it be omitted when I placed the order. Why? Because I just don't have it in me to make someone who's working for tips cart my plate back to the kitchen. The cow's not coming back to life, and I can make my point when I place my order, letting the staff know that more animal-free choices would be appreciated. I can write to the owner, and I can let the manager know before I leave. There are plenty of ways to nudge more restaurants toward a more inclusive menu without being a pain in the @ss.
Of course, I could also only eat in vegan restaurants, but given that this is Lancaster, the pickens are slim.
Now, make no mistake -- the League of Humane Voters is largely staffed by vegans, but we're purposedly inclusive because animal protection legislation is something every human should support -- whether you care about animals or not. Every single serial killer has a background of animal abuse. Kids who beat their dogs or hang kittens by their tails grow up to beat their wives and abuse their kids -- this is proven by study after study. Someone who can aim for an animal and run it down with their car as it scurries across the street will sooner or later take that sick anger out on another human. The more intervention that occurs when people are charged with and convicted of animal cruelty, the better. By intervention we mean not just incarceration and fines, but psychological help. People who purposely abuse animals are sick. That's that, and only good laws will assure us that animal abusers are dealt with properly and that they don't take the next step -- harming fellow humans.
So it benefits us all to have everyone at the table, regardless of what's served on the plate in front of him or her. The more members we have, the more of an impact we can have and the better animal protection laws will be. We welcome animal advocates of all stripes, from people who only care about their pets to committed activists who worry about all animals unfortunate enough to be caught up in providing food, clothing, labor, or entertainment for people. There are thousands of people who fall in between these two ends of the advocacy spectrum, and we enjoy having them all as voters who make their choices on election day based on a candidate's record on animal protection. It's that simple.
We hope you'll join us, and help give voice to the voiceless -- the animals who can't tell us they're scared and suffering, but who suffer just the same. We can ALL work together to make a difference, and I look forward to welcoming you to our next LOHV meeting (stay tuned to this blog for the date, when we've got one set up) and to adding you to our membership so you can be kept informed about legislation and elections that will have an impact on animals and the environment.
Welcome!
For more information about us, please visit http://www.lohvpa.org/.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
Memories (sing with me now...)
Just this morning I received a note from a former colleague who's big into nature education for kids, wherein she asked how I got involved with crows. See, I'd sent her an email with some leads to Lancaster-area schools that might be interested in her train-the-teacher stuff to help teachers become better at enlightening kids about nature, and mentioned that I'd done some presentations about crows for kids at one of the places I'd told her about. She wrote back to thank me for the leads, and in that email she posed her question.
That got me thinking (yeah, I know, AGAIN) about the crows and how they started the League of Humane Voters in Central PA. For those of you who don't know the story, it's a nice one -- about how grassroots efforts pay off, how an issue that gets a lot of people upset can bring those same people together to do some good (and not just complain), and how one bad thing can be turned into lots of good things if people respond to the presence of negative forces in a positive way.
Just a few years ago, after frustrating failures in trying to move the 30,000+ migratory crows who find their way to Lancaster each year (as they have for centuries -- we have news items from the 1800s to prove it), several municipalities decided to hire the government to come in and poison the crows. The goal was not to poison each and every one of them, but to kill enough of them to scare the rest away. It was expensive, cruel (the poison could take up to 3 agony-filled days to kill), and put non-target species at risk. The toxin in question was also a dangerous one to allow into the groundwater and soil, with stacks of scary data compiled on it, much of which was not in the government's analysis as provided to the municipalities. Local officials were told it was safe and humane, but they were misinformed.
That said, I got really upset when I read about the plan to kill the crows. I started calling every bird group and wildlife-protection organization I could find, which resulted in calls and letters from all over the country (and some from Japan and the UK) finding their way into our newspapers, and calls came in from ornithologists, wildlife biologists, and animal advocates around the world, offering expert advice on how to better move the crows, in a non-lethal way.
One call that I received proved to be the most helpful. Two people from New York, who had started the League of Humane Voters there (and had seeded several other chapters in other states) suggested that the number of upset people locally could be a good start to forming an LOHV chapter here. We held an open meeting for all those concerned about the crows and a surprisingly large group of people showed up. We packed into a room at Carr's restaurant (thanks to a wildlife rehabber who was also a waitress there), and Peter and Anne Muller came down from NY and gave their LOHV presentation. They explained how just a small group of people could organize and reach out to voters, and then alter the path of legislation and elections. Virtually everyone there signed up to start an LOHV in Lancaster, and the Central Pennsylvania Chapter was born.
Within the year, the members of the LOHV and I had made so many trips to municipal meetings to talk about not poisoning the crows that I became known as "the Crow Lady" and the papers started printing articles that told both sides of the story. Lancaster Mayor Rick Gray was the first of the leaders to say "No more!" to the poison (his predecessor had actually signed on to the poisoning plan), and the other townships followed suit. The Crow Coalition was formed, with members from the LOHV and representatives from each of the municipalities, and we set about moving the crows that winter, using only non-lethal tools -- loud noises and light -- and were very successful. We relied heavily on citizen volunteers, and we were grateful and encouraged by the number of people willing to go out in the cold evenings to fire "screamers and bangers" (the pyrotechnics used to nudge the crows out of undesirable roosting locations).
In the meantime, the Central PA LOHV has grown, thanks to other galvanizing issues -- puppy mills and factory farming, mainly -- and our chapter has gone from hundreds to thousands of members. We helped spawn a chapter in the Greater Philadelphia area, and then another in Lehigh County. So I say the crows started the LOHV in PA, and they did -- and the dogs and countless farm animals helped grow it. We were giving a voice to the voiceless, by empowering voters, and the idea took hold.
My favorite part of the whole thing is that a bumper sticker that I made myself (it said "Killing Wildlife is Cruel and Stupid - visit www.lancastercrows.org") was what put me together with the first few people who worked with me to put the meeting at Carr's together and to get more people involved. It turns out people saw the sticker and visited the site, emailed it to their friends, and also got in touch with me via the site. People who didn't realize others were against the poisoning now had a way to find each other and that made it possible to form a group of people who wanted to make things happen (or in this case, NOT happen).
So the smallest thing can make a big difference. A bumper sticker sent people to the web, and some phone calls, begging for help, turned up lots of advice and the idea for an LOHV chapter. The crows were no longer poisoned, and a way to inform and activate voters on many wildlife and animal-related issues was born. All I can say is, "CAW!"
That got me thinking (yeah, I know, AGAIN) about the crows and how they started the League of Humane Voters in Central PA. For those of you who don't know the story, it's a nice one -- about how grassroots efforts pay off, how an issue that gets a lot of people upset can bring those same people together to do some good (and not just complain), and how one bad thing can be turned into lots of good things if people respond to the presence of negative forces in a positive way.
Just a few years ago, after frustrating failures in trying to move the 30,000+ migratory crows who find their way to Lancaster each year (as they have for centuries -- we have news items from the 1800s to prove it), several municipalities decided to hire the government to come in and poison the crows. The goal was not to poison each and every one of them, but to kill enough of them to scare the rest away. It was expensive, cruel (the poison could take up to 3 agony-filled days to kill), and put non-target species at risk. The toxin in question was also a dangerous one to allow into the groundwater and soil, with stacks of scary data compiled on it, much of which was not in the government's analysis as provided to the municipalities. Local officials were told it was safe and humane, but they were misinformed.
That said, I got really upset when I read about the plan to kill the crows. I started calling every bird group and wildlife-protection organization I could find, which resulted in calls and letters from all over the country (and some from Japan and the UK) finding their way into our newspapers, and calls came in from ornithologists, wildlife biologists, and animal advocates around the world, offering expert advice on how to better move the crows, in a non-lethal way.
One call that I received proved to be the most helpful. Two people from New York, who had started the League of Humane Voters there (and had seeded several other chapters in other states) suggested that the number of upset people locally could be a good start to forming an LOHV chapter here. We held an open meeting for all those concerned about the crows and a surprisingly large group of people showed up. We packed into a room at Carr's restaurant (thanks to a wildlife rehabber who was also a waitress there), and Peter and Anne Muller came down from NY and gave their LOHV presentation. They explained how just a small group of people could organize and reach out to voters, and then alter the path of legislation and elections. Virtually everyone there signed up to start an LOHV in Lancaster, and the Central Pennsylvania Chapter was born.
Within the year, the members of the LOHV and I had made so many trips to municipal meetings to talk about not poisoning the crows that I became known as "the Crow Lady" and the papers started printing articles that told both sides of the story. Lancaster Mayor Rick Gray was the first of the leaders to say "No more!" to the poison (his predecessor had actually signed on to the poisoning plan), and the other townships followed suit. The Crow Coalition was formed, with members from the LOHV and representatives from each of the municipalities, and we set about moving the crows that winter, using only non-lethal tools -- loud noises and light -- and were very successful. We relied heavily on citizen volunteers, and we were grateful and encouraged by the number of people willing to go out in the cold evenings to fire "screamers and bangers" (the pyrotechnics used to nudge the crows out of undesirable roosting locations).
In the meantime, the Central PA LOHV has grown, thanks to other galvanizing issues -- puppy mills and factory farming, mainly -- and our chapter has gone from hundreds to thousands of members. We helped spawn a chapter in the Greater Philadelphia area, and then another in Lehigh County. So I say the crows started the LOHV in PA, and they did -- and the dogs and countless farm animals helped grow it. We were giving a voice to the voiceless, by empowering voters, and the idea took hold.
My favorite part of the whole thing is that a bumper sticker that I made myself (it said "Killing Wildlife is Cruel and Stupid - visit www.lancastercrows.org") was what put me together with the first few people who worked with me to put the meeting at Carr's together and to get more people involved. It turns out people saw the sticker and visited the site, emailed it to their friends, and also got in touch with me via the site. People who didn't realize others were against the poisoning now had a way to find each other and that made it possible to form a group of people who wanted to make things happen (or in this case, NOT happen).
So the smallest thing can make a big difference. A bumper sticker sent people to the web, and some phone calls, begging for help, turned up lots of advice and the idea for an LOHV chapter. The crows were no longer poisoned, and a way to inform and activate voters on many wildlife and animal-related issues was born. All I can say is, "CAW!"
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
The Things People Worry About
This past Monday night, Keith Olbermann, of MSNBC's Countdown program, included Lancaster PA in his "Worst Persons in the World" feature. It seems an LA Times article about the abundance of surveillance cameras in Lancaster City made us out to be George Orwell's nightmare, because we're spying on each other in an attempt to reduce crime, sacrificing personal privacy for what's probably an imaginary sense of safety.
This got me thinking. First, I'm not totally in favor of the cameras, for that very well-known Orwellian reason -- I don't like the idea of me or anyone else being "watched" by the government or law enforcement, or even a corporation (as we are in Lancaster, where the Safety Coalition, which puts up and monitors the cameras, is largely funded by corporations and corporate bigwigs who put up cash as individuals). On the other hand, I know of multiple crimes that have been solved on my own block thanks to the cameras -- one was a duo of moron girls who were wearing hoodies and masks and holding up people with a b-b gun. I have no guilt over denying those two mean-spirited nitwits their privacy, thank you. The cameras are also aimed at the streets, not into windows or back yards (as far as I know), so as someone whose street is video-taped constantly, I have yet to feel any loss of privacy. No, I can't nip out onto my front step in the nude to grab the newspaper, but I wasn't planning on that anyway.
So what does this have to do with the mission of the League of Humane Voters? After all, this blog is supposed to be about the legislative changes we work for, to improve the lives of animals. Well, here's the link, at least in my mind. The furor over the cameras got me thinking about what bothers people and why, and what, if anything, people are willing to do when something bothers them.
Recent news (heck, not just recently, this sort of news is perpetual) has shown us the depths to which humans can sink when it comes to cruelty, especially to animals. Days-old puppies tossed in the garbage. A puppy miller's "vet" chops off a puppy's tail without anesthesia. Dogs found with broken legs, lying in the gutter, cats set aflame, injured farm animals beaten by slaughterhouse workers, laboratory chimps tortured over and over to obtain useless medical data -- it's everywhere, every day, and when it comes to dogs and farm animals, it's happening every day within a stone's throw of the hated, privacy-stealing, uproar-causing cameras in Lancaster City. It's even happening IN the City, where dog fighting is an ongoing (I see chewed up pit bulls on the street all the time) but generally ignored problem.
But what do some people in Lancaster County and most of our legislators worry about? When it comes to the issues of puppy mills in particular and animal cruelty in general, they worry about people's livelihoods. Many legislators don't want to be seen to thwart anyone's ability to earn a buck, unless it's a union worker or someone on minimum wage. For those poor souls, it's tough luck, because corporate bottom lines reign supreme. When it comes to the "entrepreneurs" running puppy mills, however, it's mostly a hands-off approach. Don't risk any guy in a straw hat losing his business, even if he's earning money by breeding dogs to death, creating sick, inbred puppies, torturing dogs on a daily basis with do-it-yourself-at-home "medical procedures", serving bug-and-feces-covered food, providing freezing cold or steaming hot facilities (depending on the season), and ignoring noxious fumes from poor ventilation. But hey, you get a few hundred dogs in one place, and you're bound to have a mess, right?
Right. And that's why nobody should ever HAVE a few hundred dogs. Huge breeding operations cannot be run safely or humanely. It's just not possible. And it's wrong to treat dogs, who we call "man's best friend" on the one hand and then churn out in sick, twisted droves on the other, like a product. They're not products, they're creatures with a full nervous system, capable of feeling pain, anguish, panic, and an array of emotions that anyone who's ever known a dog can attest to. Does any legislator with his own dog think that the dog crouched in a cage (from which she's never, or rarely released) on some "farm" is feeling anything less than his own pet feels? Those sad eyes when you leave, those joyful leaps when you come home, the dog barking to protect the house or to alert his family to fire or an injured child -- these phenomena are not myths or sappy stories, they're true. And the dogs tortured every day in Central PA's puppy mills are being ignored -- by legislators who care more about the "farmer" earning a living than about the fact that he's a greedy sadist who needs to lose his or her kennel license (if they even have one) and look for another line of work. Worse, these legislators are ignoring their constituents, who overwhelmingly support stamping out puppy mills and cracking down on breeders who breed too many dogs to do it right. The voters aren't out to stop dog breeding (and that's not our intention, either -- we're realists), but they do want the torture to stop and the sadistic greed that causes it to be punished.
HB 39 languishes in committee (see my previous blog entry), the dog tethering bill continues to be an uphill battle, and the Puppy Mill law passed several months ago had so few teeth and was so badly neutered (pardon the expression) by the PA Senate that you could run 500 hundred big dogs through the holes it created for greedy sadists to exploit for their own continued gain.
And now some thoughts for the voters, especially those who care about the puppy mill issue but have never called their House rep or PA Senator: A legislator who can turn his or her back on these atrocities and continue to worry more about some "farmer" losing his income is the same person who'll deny funding for human concerns too -- services for the poor and their children, education, health care, initiatives to clean up the planet, green energy, open space protection, and more -- things that matter to everyone, and on which the voters' needs and desires are clear -- and also usually ignored.
So let's put up some cameras in Central PA's countryside. Focus them on the barn where barking dogs can be heard (but are never seen), where suburbanites from all over the country (and Joe Biden, our own Vice President) pull up to buy a puppy, where dogs are bred for pet stores, where torture is happening right now, at the hands of a greedy, sadistic "farmer" who sees dogs as a cash crop. I won't feel a moment's guilt denying privacy to those mean-spirited nitwits, either.
This got me thinking. First, I'm not totally in favor of the cameras, for that very well-known Orwellian reason -- I don't like the idea of me or anyone else being "watched" by the government or law enforcement, or even a corporation (as we are in Lancaster, where the Safety Coalition, which puts up and monitors the cameras, is largely funded by corporations and corporate bigwigs who put up cash as individuals). On the other hand, I know of multiple crimes that have been solved on my own block thanks to the cameras -- one was a duo of moron girls who were wearing hoodies and masks and holding up people with a b-b gun. I have no guilt over denying those two mean-spirited nitwits their privacy, thank you. The cameras are also aimed at the streets, not into windows or back yards (as far as I know), so as someone whose street is video-taped constantly, I have yet to feel any loss of privacy. No, I can't nip out onto my front step in the nude to grab the newspaper, but I wasn't planning on that anyway.
So what does this have to do with the mission of the League of Humane Voters? After all, this blog is supposed to be about the legislative changes we work for, to improve the lives of animals. Well, here's the link, at least in my mind. The furor over the cameras got me thinking about what bothers people and why, and what, if anything, people are willing to do when something bothers them.
Recent news (heck, not just recently, this sort of news is perpetual) has shown us the depths to which humans can sink when it comes to cruelty, especially to animals. Days-old puppies tossed in the garbage. A puppy miller's "vet" chops off a puppy's tail without anesthesia. Dogs found with broken legs, lying in the gutter, cats set aflame, injured farm animals beaten by slaughterhouse workers, laboratory chimps tortured over and over to obtain useless medical data -- it's everywhere, every day, and when it comes to dogs and farm animals, it's happening every day within a stone's throw of the hated, privacy-stealing, uproar-causing cameras in Lancaster City. It's even happening IN the City, where dog fighting is an ongoing (I see chewed up pit bulls on the street all the time) but generally ignored problem.
But what do some people in Lancaster County and most of our legislators worry about? When it comes to the issues of puppy mills in particular and animal cruelty in general, they worry about people's livelihoods. Many legislators don't want to be seen to thwart anyone's ability to earn a buck, unless it's a union worker or someone on minimum wage. For those poor souls, it's tough luck, because corporate bottom lines reign supreme. When it comes to the "entrepreneurs" running puppy mills, however, it's mostly a hands-off approach. Don't risk any guy in a straw hat losing his business, even if he's earning money by breeding dogs to death, creating sick, inbred puppies, torturing dogs on a daily basis with do-it-yourself-at-home "medical procedures", serving bug-and-feces-covered food, providing freezing cold or steaming hot facilities (depending on the season), and ignoring noxious fumes from poor ventilation. But hey, you get a few hundred dogs in one place, and you're bound to have a mess, right?
Right. And that's why nobody should ever HAVE a few hundred dogs. Huge breeding operations cannot be run safely or humanely. It's just not possible. And it's wrong to treat dogs, who we call "man's best friend" on the one hand and then churn out in sick, twisted droves on the other, like a product. They're not products, they're creatures with a full nervous system, capable of feeling pain, anguish, panic, and an array of emotions that anyone who's ever known a dog can attest to. Does any legislator with his own dog think that the dog crouched in a cage (from which she's never, or rarely released) on some "farm" is feeling anything less than his own pet feels? Those sad eyes when you leave, those joyful leaps when you come home, the dog barking to protect the house or to alert his family to fire or an injured child -- these phenomena are not myths or sappy stories, they're true. And the dogs tortured every day in Central PA's puppy mills are being ignored -- by legislators who care more about the "farmer" earning a living than about the fact that he's a greedy sadist who needs to lose his or her kennel license (if they even have one) and look for another line of work. Worse, these legislators are ignoring their constituents, who overwhelmingly support stamping out puppy mills and cracking down on breeders who breed too many dogs to do it right. The voters aren't out to stop dog breeding (and that's not our intention, either -- we're realists), but they do want the torture to stop and the sadistic greed that causes it to be punished.
HB 39 languishes in committee (see my previous blog entry), the dog tethering bill continues to be an uphill battle, and the Puppy Mill law passed several months ago had so few teeth and was so badly neutered (pardon the expression) by the PA Senate that you could run 500 hundred big dogs through the holes it created for greedy sadists to exploit for their own continued gain.
And now some thoughts for the voters, especially those who care about the puppy mill issue but have never called their House rep or PA Senator: A legislator who can turn his or her back on these atrocities and continue to worry more about some "farmer" losing his income is the same person who'll deny funding for human concerns too -- services for the poor and their children, education, health care, initiatives to clean up the planet, green energy, open space protection, and more -- things that matter to everyone, and on which the voters' needs and desires are clear -- and also usually ignored.
So let's put up some cameras in Central PA's countryside. Focus them on the barn where barking dogs can be heard (but are never seen), where suburbanites from all over the country (and Joe Biden, our own Vice President) pull up to buy a puppy, where dogs are bred for pet stores, where torture is happening right now, at the hands of a greedy, sadistic "farmer" who sees dogs as a cash crop. I won't feel a moment's guilt denying privacy to those mean-spirited nitwits, either.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Bottlenecks - WHY?
Animal cruelty legislation should be a no-brainer. Who would want to be known as the legislator who was in favor of performing painful medical procedures on dogs without anesthesia or antibiotics? Who'd want to be the person who looked the other way when the chance to stop real, tangible, proven suffering presented itself?
In the following article, "Anger Over Dog-Cruelty Bill Could Freeze Legislature", it seems that Dominic Pileggi, Republican and PA Senate majority leader is doing just that -- looking the other way on a chance to stop horrific medical procedures being performed by puppy millers looking to avoid scrutiny and save money. According to Thomas Caltagirone, Democrat, and head of the Judiciary Committee (and supporter of HB 39), the bill first waited way too long in the hands of the Senate's Agriculture Committee (chaired by Senator Mike Brubaker) and now it's being held up in the Judiciary. He considers it a stalling tactic.
Why would anyone want to stall or stop this bill? HB 39 requires that only a veterinarian can perform procedures such as caesarian sections (surgery to remove puppies from a pregnant dog), de-barking (which the LOHV favors outlawing entirely -- would you cut out a child's tongue if he or she was too noisy or kept making sounds that gave away the fact that you were running a sweatshop in your backyard? That's the reason so many millers de-bark their breeding dogs), and other procedures.
It's funny (not funny "ha ha") that when we're doing outreach events to the voters, they're often incredulous that things that should be illegal already are not. "You mean it's legal now to tie a dog outside 24/7 in PA?" Yep, it sure is, thanks to the same sort of delays on voting on the dog tethering bill, which has appeared in multple forms for the past few years. "You mean it's not illegal to sew up a dog with fishing line after cutting out her puppies, just to save money?" Nope, it's not illegal -- and it remains perfectly legal to do so, thanks to the sort of purposeful bottleneck currently being created in the PA Senate.
Contact your PA Senator today to ask that this bill be moved along and be voted on immediately. Here's a link to find your PA Senator's contact info -- all you'll need to do is insert your zip code in the box in the upper right of the resulting window, and you'll find out who your PA legislators are, and you can then click on the senators' name/s to obtain their phone numbers.
http://www.pasen.gov
Remember, calls work MUCH better than emails -- which are often deleted without being read, if the topic is one that the legislator and/or his staff would rather not deal with. Nice, huh? Taxpayers pay for the computers and software used to ignore the wishes of the voters.
In the following article, "Anger Over Dog-Cruelty Bill Could Freeze Legislature", it seems that Dominic Pileggi, Republican and PA Senate majority leader is doing just that -- looking the other way on a chance to stop horrific medical procedures being performed by puppy millers looking to avoid scrutiny and save money. According to Thomas Caltagirone, Democrat, and head of the Judiciary Committee (and supporter of HB 39), the bill first waited way too long in the hands of the Senate's Agriculture Committee (chaired by Senator Mike Brubaker) and now it's being held up in the Judiciary. He considers it a stalling tactic.
Why would anyone want to stall or stop this bill? HB 39 requires that only a veterinarian can perform procedures such as caesarian sections (surgery to remove puppies from a pregnant dog), de-barking (which the LOHV favors outlawing entirely -- would you cut out a child's tongue if he or she was too noisy or kept making sounds that gave away the fact that you were running a sweatshop in your backyard? That's the reason so many millers de-bark their breeding dogs), and other procedures.
It's funny (not funny "ha ha") that when we're doing outreach events to the voters, they're often incredulous that things that should be illegal already are not. "You mean it's legal now to tie a dog outside 24/7 in PA?" Yep, it sure is, thanks to the same sort of delays on voting on the dog tethering bill, which has appeared in multple forms for the past few years. "You mean it's not illegal to sew up a dog with fishing line after cutting out her puppies, just to save money?" Nope, it's not illegal -- and it remains perfectly legal to do so, thanks to the sort of purposeful bottleneck currently being created in the PA Senate.
Contact your PA Senator today to ask that this bill be moved along and be voted on immediately. Here's a link to find your PA Senator's contact info -- all you'll need to do is insert your zip code in the box in the upper right of the resulting window, and you'll find out who your PA legislators are, and you can then click on the senators' name/s to obtain their phone numbers.
http://www.pasen.gov
Remember, calls work MUCH better than emails -- which are often deleted without being read, if the topic is one that the legislator and/or his staff would rather not deal with. Nice, huh? Taxpayers pay for the computers and software used to ignore the wishes of the voters.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Welcome to the League of Humane Voters, Central PA Chapter, Blog!
This blog is intended to keep our members up-to-date -- about pending legislation, candidate endorsements, current court cases involving animals and the environment, and local politics as it pertains to factory farming, puppy mills, zoning, and other issues that affect animals and the planet.
More than one of our core members will be contributing here, so look for various perspectives and a variety of sources of news and information. And don't forget to visit our website:
www.lohvpa.org
Welcome, and please check back frequently for updates! I can't promise a daily entry, but we'll do our best to keep you informed and interested!!
-Laurie
More than one of our core members will be contributing here, so look for various perspectives and a variety of sources of news and information. And don't forget to visit our website:
www.lohvpa.org
Welcome, and please check back frequently for updates! I can't promise a daily entry, but we'll do our best to keep you informed and interested!!
-Laurie
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
