I made a couple postcards this evening for Operation Denver. (Check my earlier post for more information on what Operation Denver is and how to participate.)
May 2010
Hey there, folks. I'm working on a few new drawings for this Memorial Day weekend, but I wanted to draw your attention to Operation Denver, an effort to urge Denver lawmakers to repeal the city's pit bull ban by sending one mile's worth of postcards (that's about 10,560 postcards) to the mayor.
If you weren't aware, it is illegal to bring an American pit bull terrier, American Staffordshire terrier, Staffordshire bull terrier, or any mixed or purebred dog that looks like one within the city limits of Denver. That includes just passing through. If they are discovered, dogs thought to be "pit bull type" dogs will be confiscated, and if a court finds them to be pit bulls, they may either be destroyed or, if the owner pays costs of impoundment, they may instead be permanently removed from the Denver city limits. The owner can also be charged a $1000 fine or imprisoned for up to a year.
In practice, the law costs the city a lot of money, and a lot of unaggressive pets are killed. Plus:
The ban was enacted under the assumption that ridding the area of this (so deemed) "dangerous" breed would decrease the number of injuries due to dog bites. Though the number of dog bite hospitalizations has decreased nationwide over the past 40 years, Denver has held the highest rate of dog bite hospitalizations of any county in the state since the ordinance was enacted, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment statistics.From 1995 to 2006, Denver had nearly six times the total amount of dog bite hospitalizations (and more than three times the amount per capita) as breed-neutral Boulder County. (Best Friends Animal Network)
A couple years ago the Netherlands repealed their national pit bull ban on the grounds that it made no difference in their dog bite statistics. Animal welfare organizations oppose breed-specific bans, arguing that the public safety could be better served by stricter enforcement of existing laws targeting aggressive dogs and irresponsible pet owners. These bans don't work, and they just penalize law-abiding pit bull owners (like me) who can't enter the city with their dog.
What you can do: Create a postcard (either digitally or on paper) urging Denver lawmakers to repeal the ban. E-mail the 4" x 6" digital image to operationdenver@gmail.com, or contact them for the postal address to send the postcard physically (in an envelope--they will mail them all on the same day sometime in September).
You do NOT have to live in Colorado to participate. If you care about dogs, please create and send a postcard, regardless of where you live.
It was with some difficulty that I made the decision last week to permanently delete my Facebook account.
It's not that I don't find the service useful. I really do. I've been using it to keep in casual contact with relatives and former high school classmates whom I otherwise would speak to rarely or not at all. It's social, but without the same kind of investment that comes from talking on the phone, or visiting in person, or writing a letter. In fact, that's one of the more common complaints about Facebook--"They're not your real friends! Facebook just creates the illusion of relationships!"--but I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. There's a spectrum of closeness in relationships, and you will always know some people with whom you would have difficulty sustaining a real conversation, but you like to see what they're up to nowadays.
It really was a tough choice to kick all that to the curb. I have been using Facebook since I was in college and the service was still called "TheFacebook." Admittedly, back then it was useful in an entirely different way than it is now--I used it to look up lab partners whose names I didn't recognize and people who arranged to buy textbooks from me on campus. The voyeuristic angle to it was already there, too; browsing through the profiles of friends and their friends was addictive and time-consuming but very, very satisfying. Most people left their profiles open to their network (i.e. their entire university), because just knowing it was a closed community limited to people who were like us gave the site an illusion of safety and trust that was lacking from competitors like MySpace.
That was really the primary appeal of Facebook. Let's face it: there are things we're completely comfortable sharing with some people but not others. Facebook's privacy changes (most or all motivated by marketing potential) don't acknowledge that, and they fundamentally undermine the entire reason I had joined the site to begin with. That's why I'm quitting. I don't really want my boss, my parents and my high school acquaintances communicating with me in the same space as my college and online friends. Sure, there are granular privacy settings now, but after repeated snafus resulting in previously-private data being set public without the user's knowledge, I don't trust Facebook to keep those things separate.
Plus there's the fact that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's creator, has been kind of a scumbag from the beginning. The more I find out about the guy, the less I trust his website with managing my semi-private communications.
There aren't a lot of alternatives right now, unfortunately, but Diaspora looks very, very cool. If or when they get that up and running, maybe I'll join it. Until then, you'll have to contact me the old-fashioned way: by leaving a comment on my blog.
On my cats' latest routine vet visit, I had the contents of Betamax's bladder checked for mischief, as he's been getting less reliable about his litter box usage lately. I needed to rule out a medical issue. To be honest, I suspected it was behavioral, that he was just getting picky or something, because sometimes cats do that.
Nope! Betamax is in fact afflicted with a condition called struvite crystals, which form in the bladder when urine is too alkaline. (Henceforth I will refer to this condition as "piss crystals.") Piss crystals are not usually life-threatening, but they irritate the bladder and can cause cats to have strange urination habits. They are a relatively common medical issue for all cats, but especially neutered males. If left untreated, they sometimes form stones that cause blockages in the urethra, and this can be fatal. Since I do not want my cat to die of piss crystals, I opted to treat the condition with a special prescription cat food from the vet.
Now, I am one of those weirdos who reads the labels on things out of habit, and that includes on pet food. Any vet will tell you that you should feed your pet a food with a real meat as the first ingredient, which is why I was kind of surprised to find that both prescription cat food options (Hills Prescription c/d and Royal Canin Urinary SO) had weird mysterious by-products as first ingredients. The Royal Canin can actually had a lot of the codewords I read as "rendering plant soup," which means a mix of sick or DOA livestock, diseased organ meat, garbage, expired food, and euthanized pets from some veterinarians and animal shelters. If your pet food says "meat by-products," "meat and bone meal" or "animal fat" but gives no indication of the kind of animal it comes from, that means they actually do not know, because it's all cooked together in a big horrible vat at the plant.
Both foods sounded pretty horrible from the labels, but I was leaning toward the Hills c/d just because it was specific about the origin of the meat. The cat got to make the final call, though. Luckily, he prefers the Hills, too. Here's the nasty-sounding ingredient list, for the morbidly curious:
Pork by-products, water, pork liver, chicken, rice, corn starch, oat fiber, chicken fat (preserved with mixed tocopherols and citric acid), fish meal, corn gluten meal, chicken liver flavor, calcium sulfate, guar gum, fish oil, brewers dried yeast, glucose, DL-Methionine, choline chloride, potassium chloride, taurine, cysteine, calcium carbonate, dried egg yolk, glycine, vitamin E supplement, iodized salt, potassium citrate, thiamine mononitrate, zinc oxide, ferrous sulfate, niacin, pyridoxine hydrochloride, beta-carotene, manganous oxide, calcium pantothenate, vitamin B12 supplement, riboflavin, biotin, vitamin D3 supplement, folic acid, calcium iodate.
I had been feeding both cats Castor & Pollux Natural Ultramix Adult Feline dry kibble (boy, that's a mouthful), but Betamax has to eat solely wet food now. That's okay. I've been doing some reading online and finding a general consensus that dry cat food is often a contributing factor to piss crystals, and that many cats recover fine while simply being fed ordinary canned cat food. I guess the reason is because cats have a low thirst drive and tend to form crystals when the urine is more condensed (i.e. they are dehydrated). Eating a wet food just gets more water into them, which helps flush the bladder before bad stuff starts building up. I think Betamax will stay on the prescription food for a while, and perhaps once he's been healthy for a few months, he will get a different canned food, like Wellness, which costs the same but contains much higher-quality ingredients, is available from retail stores, and can be fed to both cats.
To be honest, I should have switched to a wet food sooner. Getting off the high-carb dry food can help fat cats (like Maisy) lose weight without making them feel too hungry. Once the last of the dry food is gone, it's all canned for these two.
Mostly taken on the evening of April 23. The last two were taken the following morning.
For the record, this was a much better weekend than the photographs show.
