Pet Monologues

Chapter 9: The stories that nourish a newspaper.
By John Armstrong

[This is the ninth of 14 excerpts, running Tuesdays and Thursdays, from John Armstrong's memoir of the working life: Wages.]

When a cement truck lost its brakes on a hill and ploughed through someone’s backyard, you needed the parents and relatives of the dead and wounded, the name of the driver, the owner of the company, the neighbours (to fill out the background and describe the terror they faced daily with Big Trucks roaring though their neighbourhood) and someone from government licensing to comment on why he and his department hadn’t checked this truck’s brakes.

It was also important to get the Opposition critic for that department who would describe how the government had failed so tragically in this case, despite his repeated warnings that such a disaster was coming, and how his party would do things differently if they were in office….

The same was true of any local tragedy whether it was the man who hacked up his wife and mailed her postage due to her parents or an immigrant woman who spoke and read no English and bled to death in the emergency room because she couldn’t fill out the admittance papers. Read the rest of this entry »

This must be “fix the blog” week. PM is having site maintenance issues. Here is a 13 item laundry list to boost your blog from Samantha and Tigger over at Life from a cat’s perspective. But first, to preface this next post a little terminology should be clarified. For example, what is a “meme”? Urban Dictionary offers this definition along with some others:

Meme (a noun):
1 : an idea, belief or belief system, or pattern of behavior that spreads throughout a culture either vertically by cultural inheritance (as by parents to children) or horizontally by cultural acquisition (as by peers, information media, and entertainment media)

2 : a pervasive thought or thought pattern that replicates itself via cultural means; a parasitic code, a virus of the mind especially contagious to children and the impressionable

3 : the fundamental unit of information, analogous to the gene in emerging evolutionary theory of culture
- meme pool (n.) : all memes of a culture or individual
- memetic (adj.) : relating to memes
- memetics (n.) : the study of memes

4 : in ‘blogspeak,” an idea that is spread from blog to blog Read the rest of this entry »

Almost a week after Bravo! a raw pet food diet producer, announces a product recall, Melinda Miller, one of the principals of Bravo and a co-founder of the North American Raw Petfood Association (NARPA) writes a memo and sends the following email:

*******
A Message From Bravo:

*ALL* raw meat carries pathogens. Whether you buy from the grocery store, from wholesale meat suppliers, or from prepared raw diet manufacturers.

It is impossible to avoid. The USDA allows poultry producers to have up to 23% Salmonella contamination on poultry. A good portion of chickens are actually *born* with Salmonella. So the poultry products that manufacturers must use are contaminated long before it ever gets to us. Since these are *RAW* diets and we don’t cook them, the bacteria is left intact. This is true for *every* raw diet manufacturer and for every person who feeds raw regardless of their source. Raw meat has bacteria - that’s why people are told to wash
their hands after handling raw meat. ANYONE who has fed raw has fed pathogens such as Salmonella and Listeria.

Do Salmonella and Listeria pose a threat to our dogs and cats? Not really. If you go to our website you’ll find a recall FAQ that gives citations about how Salmonella is a normal part of the intestinal flora and how dogs apparently neutralize the bacteria. There’s even a quote from the FDA Consumer magazine that acknowledges that healthy dogs and cats rarely become ill from Salmonella.

So why is the FDA involved and why did we do the recall? You can find more information on that on our website also. But briefly you should know some of this:

The FDA agents told us that we are just the first of the raw diet companies to be visited, and that they hope to be able to shut down the raw diet industry and stop raw feeding. So this is an industry problem, not a Bravo problem.

The FDA has a very black eye due to the melamine recalls. So, they want an easy win so they can prove they are safeguarding America’s pets. Raw diets are an easy target for them.

The FDA is holding raw diets to a *cooked* diet standard and has no desire to be reasonable and acknowledge that you can’t hold *RAW* meat to the same regulation that governs *cooked* meat.

The FDA and USDA are currently in a bitter battle. The FDA is trying to take control of USDA operations. We believe one of the reasons Bravo was chosen was that we are a USDA facility. By bashing Bravo
they are able to bash the USDA.

This recall is the result of politics and unreasonable bureaucrats. Bravo raw products carry the same risk - and BENEFITS - as any raw product - whether home-prepared or manufactured.

We have been a company dedicated to high quality. That’s why we use antibiotic-free poultry, and grass-fed, hormone-free red meats. It’s why we manufacture in our own USDA plant under USDA human processing
standards. Other than the reality that all raw meat has some pathogen presence, nothing has changed. You can still count on us to make a high quality and beneficial products.

To those who have been sending notes of support, thank you very much. We’re caught in the midst of a political struggle and it helps to know there are people who understand and appreciate the passion
and care we put into Bravo products.
FMI: www.bravorawdiet.com

Melinda

Melinda Miller
Bravo Raw Diet

For the highly structured bloggers, or those that long to be, here is a blog, Watermark—a poet’s notebook, that has been posting Cat items on Friday’s. It suggests a great way to create that “something fun to look forward” mindset. To introduce you to Watermark here is one of the earlier posts that went all the way back to August 2004! The title is “Badly Drawn Cats” and the premise is this: “it’s all very simple—drunken doodling leads to challenge to friends leads to asking random people in pub to draw pictures leads to knocking up web site leads to obsession!”

Here are several to admire:

Source: Watermark—a poet’s notebook.

I found during the past 18 months there were six deaths from dogs being dragged to death. Few were accidents and I have been hesitant to post these stories. Just too darn sad and maddening. And when I do see pets, animals, children, sitting in the back of a pickup truck, it makes me very uncomfortable. I don’t think anything should be back there that cannot survive a rollover, a sudden stop. And yet, the dead dogs were leashed to the vehicles and your dog, Jackson, was not.

And then this story! Count your blessings!!!

The story…

Well, one of my worst fears took place yesterday afternoon. Jackson fell out of the truck. Read the rest of this entry »

Town awards girl with pet rooster then cries fowl telling her to get rid of it.

The David Mamet movie “Things Change” is based on a series of accidents, coincidences and misunderstandings. Read the rest of this entry »

A tornado is cause for a cat to be missing for three months. Smoky is found!

GREEN BAY, WI—A tornado destroyed Wanda Ploeger’s mobile home in rural Riverview, Wisconsin, scattering her belongings. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently joined a Denver, Colorado-based online organization known as Blacktie-Colorado. Blacktie is an exceptional and essential venue for non-profits to expand fundraising opportunities, as well as promote and manage their premiere special events.

In my marketing/sales role for Blacktie. I decided to enlist my three-year-old black and white Boxer, Roxy Hart, to go with me to call on potential clients for membership in the organization. I bought her a beautiful formal satin black tie to wear for our marketing campaign and headed downtown to a building housing mostly environmental non-profits. I had heard everyone brings their dog to the office.

Roxy behaved beautifully, having no prep for her ambassador role. While she wouldn’t go into the elevator, she did manage to navigate through narrow doors and five flights of steps up to various offices. Keep in mind, Roxy hates hallways and narrow spaces.

Anyway, we introduced ourselves and left materials on Blacktie for follow up. The only way I’d improve on our presentation is to work a little more with Roxy to sit attentively during our presentation (good luck, I know) and to color coordinate her leash and collar with the formal wear. We’ll see how many memberships we sign up.

Blacktie is rapidly expanding to major cities across the nation. If not yet in yours, contact blacktie-colorado.com and help them make that happen.

Source: Christine Meyer

Meowlinqual. Yes, a cat translator.

Takara Co ltd, in Japan, announced Meowlingual—a cat meow translator. Read the rest of this entry »

Ever wonder why some dogs need haircuts? Why some leave a trail of lost hair behind them? Why people are allergic to certain breeds of dogs and most cats? A common belief is that some animals have hair, non-shedding, while others have fur, the shedders and allergy bombs.

All mammals have some sort of hair covering some, much, or virtually all of their bodies. The hair on some animals is known as fur, but it’s all the same no matter the name. Hair is made of the protein keratin and dead epidermal, or skin, cells and it grows from follicles in the inner layer of the skin. Human follicles each give rise to a single hair, but animals that depend on fur coats for temperature regulation often has several or many hairs per follicle. The diameter of individual hairs decreases as the number of hairs per follicle increases. Each follicle has an oil gland to keep skin and hair smooth. Dog breeds developed to work in water generally have high oil content in their coats so that water runs off hair and does not penetrate to the skin. Read the rest of this entry »