Saturday, December 18, 2010
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Friday, November 12, 2010
Monday, November 8, 2010
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
My Review of Half Zip Sweatshirt with Hood
Originally submitted at Maurices
This long sleeved hoodie comes with a half-zip front making it an easy pullover choice. It shows off a cool ombre coloration that creates an all-over funky effect. The hood, neckline, sleeves, kangaroo pocket and bottom hem are all banded with a ribbed fabric trim. A casual hoodie with contemporary...
Soft and cozy
By QTQ from Indianapolis on 8/24/2010
Waist: Feels true to size
Length: Feels true to length
Pros: High Quality, Nice Color, Breathable, Versatile, Comfortable, Stylish, Flattering, Washes Well
Best Uses: Casual Wear, Wear to School
Describe Yourself: Casual Dresser
There isnt anything about this that I don't love! Its cozy soft without being clingy - I like to be able to push my sleeves up and its no problem with this fabric. The colors pop, and weather worn with a tee or cami, you'll look great in the pumpkin patch, at the game, everywhere! I'm a little thick thru the middle, and this provides great camouflage!
(legalese)
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
The life of a battery hen
United Poultry Concerns
"Battery" Hens
The Life of One Battery Hen
By Karen Davis, PhD
Photo by: Mercy for Animals, Weaver Brothers Egg Farm in Versailles, Ohio
Prologue
Sound of a Battery Hen
You can tell me: if you come by the
North door, I am in the twelfth cage
On the left-hand side of the third row
From the floor; and in that cage
I am usually the middle one of eight or six or three.
But even without directions, you’d
Discover me. We have the same pale
Comb, clipped yellow beak and white or auburn
Feathers, but as the door opens and you
Hear above the electric fan a kind of
One-word wail, I am the one
Who sounds loudest in my head.
The Incubator
Deep inside an industrial incubator filled with thousands of chick embryos, a baby hen is growing inside an egg. During the first 24 hours after her egg was laid, the chick’s tiny heart started beating, and blood vessels formed that joined her to the yolk which feeds her as she floats and grows in the fluid of her encapsulated world. The baby hen has had feelings since her 21st hour of life inside the incubator, and since her 24th hour of being there, she has had eyes. By the fourth day, all of her body organs are developed, and by the sixth day, she has the face of a little bird. Her beak has grown, and with it the egg tooth she will use to break out of her shell – the shell that was formed by her mother hen’s body, in a breeding facility somewhere – to protect her from harm.
The baby hen has comforting exchanges with the other embryos in the incubator, but a forlornness is felt inside each bird that passes from shell to shell. The two-way communication between themselves and a mother hen – the continuous interaction which they are genetically endowed to expect, and which they need – has not occurred. The mother hen’s heartbeat is missing, and she does not respond to the embryos’ calls of distress or comfort them with her soft clucks. The reverberation of something continuously running outside the eggs does not spark meaningful associations, as, for example, the crow of a rooster or the sensation of the hen shifting her eggs with her breast and her beak would comfortingly do.
Still, by the 20th day, the baby hen occupies all of her egg, except for the air cell, which she now begins to penetrate with her beak, inhaling air through her lungs for the first time. The air isn’t fresh, and the baby hen rests for several hours. Then, with renewed energy, she cuts a circular line counterclockwise around the shell by striking it with her egg tooth near the large end of the egg. With this tooth, which disappears after hatching, she saws her way out of the shell. Twelve hours later, wet and exhausted, she emerges to face the life ahead.
"As each chick emerges from its shell in the dark cave of feathers underneath its mother . . ." But this is not the baby hen’s birth experience. Start over: "As the mother hen picks the last pieces of shell gently from her chick’s soft down . . . " But this is not part of the baby hen’s story, either. Try again: "As soon as all the eggs are hatched, the hungry mother hen and her brood go forth to eat, drink, scratch and explore, the baby hen running eagerly within sight and sound of her mother, surrounded by her brothers and sisters." In reality, none of this happens, except in memories that arise in the baby hen’s dreams as she grows and stares through the bars, in the cages that await her arrival.
The "Servicing" Area
The baby hen and her fluffy yellow companions are being wheeled down the hall in the incubator cart. When it stops, three workers remove each tray of newly hatched chicks. They toss, sort and dump the discarded shells, the half-hatched chicks, the deformed chicks and the male chicks into the trash. They smoke cigarettes between the arrival of each cart, and the tobacco fumes along with other odors and gases produce a sickish, burning sensation in the baby hen’s eyes, chest and stomach. One of her companions hops onto the edge of the tray and falls to the floor. High-pitched screeches occur as the carts, which now include hers, wheel into the next room, crushing and half crushing the fallen ones, plastering them in blood on the floor.
One by one, each chick in the tray is grabbed by a hand and pushed up against a machine blade. Now it’s the baby hen’s turn, and as her face is pushed against the blade, an agonizing crunch and pain shoots through her beak and her body causing her to flap her wings, cry out, and lose her bowels. Smoke and stench mingle, as the traumatized chicks, each with a stumped red hole in front of her face, are sprayed with something chemical, and the baby hen blanks out. She jerks awake upon feeling herself being grabbed and jammed in a cage in a dark place.
The Pullet House
Throbbing pain in her head and her beak, jostling of others around her, wires hurting her feet, air that makes her sick. The hen can never get comfortable. She cannot obey her impulse to walk and run. She is in a cage in the "pullet" house, where she and the other young hens, thousands of them, will eat mash from the trough, excrete into the manure piles, and grow until, five months later, they are moved to the layer house and into the smaller egg-laying cages. The hen and rooster who created her in the breeding facility were slaughtered while she was still in the incubator. Her brothers were suffocated at the hatchery, and she has sisters somewhere, perhaps in the same building that she’s living in.
She suffers excruciating pain when she accidentally bumps her wounded beak several times against the metal trough when she tries to eat the mash. Her body aches, her heart beats in fear, her face is disfigured, things crawl on her skin. There is no earth to bathe in. Healing, her beak develops small bulbs, called neuromas, and in time the pain almost stops, just a dull ache there, but the young hen can never preen herself properly, or eat right, although she tries, and when she and some other hens appear in a magazine picture, people who never knew her think that she and her sad companions are ugly by nature.
The Layer House
One night a hand flings her out of the pullet cage, into another cage, and wheels her to another cage. Feelings pass between herself and the other hens pressing against her, as their combs grow white and lumpy, and hang over their eyes like dough, but no words exist for these feelings, just as there is nothing in the natural evolution of hens to prepare them for this situation. When a cagemate dies and rots, the hen stands on top of her to get off the wires. Her cage is somewhere among stacks and rows of cages. She is in a universe of cages. Eggs form in her body, are expelled with difficulty, and roll away. Rats whisk through the troughs leaving pellets in the mash. They whisk in and out of the cage bars, even brush through her feathers, which are mostly broken spines now. Flies suck stray yolks in the isle in front of her cage, and one day the troughs are empty.
The End
Somehow the hen has managed to get her head and one spiny wing stuck between the bars of her cage, and she can’t free herself. Ignorant people say that a chicken doesn’t know she is going to die, but the hen knows that she is going to die. When a hand – the most brutal, cruel thing she knows – opens the cage door and pulls her backward from inside, yanking her almost in two, she shrieks as she is dropped into the bucket where other hens, oozing eggs, pieces of shells and blood await her. They absorb her into themselves, as something heavy and soft plops on top of her that moves just a little, or so she feels, in being carried away.
Photo By: Mercy for Animals
Postscript: Killing of Unwanted Chicks and Hens By the Egg Industry
By Karen Davis, PhD
"Spent" Hens
The U.S. egg industry routinely deprives hens of all food or severely restricts their rations for one to three weeks, in order to shock them into producing another cycle of eggs after a year of relentless egg laying. This practice is called forced molting. Hens deemed no longer productive ("spent") by the egg industry are disposed of in several different ways. Because they have almost no muscle tissue compared to birds bred for meat, they have little or no economic value. As a result, these still very young birds are disposed of as cheaply as possible. Many are suffocated to death in 40-foot-long dumpsters, then trucked to rendering facilities and turned into animal feed ingredients. Others are gassed and buried dead or alive in landfills or ground up, dead or alive, in grinders. Still others are trucked to "spent fowl" slaughter plants and used in school lunch programs and other government food programs. Hens travel to slaughter in cages without food or water for hundreds of miles, frequently across state lines or into Canada, often with missing feet, legs, and wings that were left behind during catching. Hens who are still laying eggs are pasted in egg slime and pieces of shells.
Male Chicks
Along with defective and slow-hatching female chicks, the U.S. egg industry trashes 250 million male chicks as soon as they hatch because roosters don’t lay eggs. Instead of being sheltered by a mother hen’s wings, the newborns are ground up alive or thrown into trashcans where they slowly suffocate on top of one another, peeping pitifully as a human foot stomps them down to make room for more chicks. Some hatcheries gas the chicks with carbon dioxide (CO2). Ruth Harrison, the author of Animal Machines (1964), said she stopped supporting CO2 gassing of chicks after subjecting herself to inhalation of various gas concentrations. She said, "In my opinion, it is no better than the old practice of filling up a dustbin with them and letting them suffocate" (New Scientist, 5/19/90).
No federal laws protect chickens in the United States. They are excluded from the Animal Welfare Act and from the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act.
Karen Davis, PhD is the founder and president of United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl. She is the author of Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry; a Home for Henny; More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality; and Instead of Chicken, Instead of Turkey: a Poultryless "Poultry" Potpourri (a cookbook). Karen’s next book, The Holocaust and the Henmaid’s Tale: A Case for Comparing Atrocities (Lantern Books, 2005), includes the above essay "The Life of One Battery Hen," which first appeared in the Summer 2004 issue of the AV Magazine, a publication of the American Antivivisection Society (www.aavs.org).
United Poultry Concerns is a nonprofit organization that addresses the treatment of domestic fowl in food production, science, education, entertainment, and human companionship situations and promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of chickens and other domesticated fowl. www.upc-online.org.
Home | What's New? | News Releases | Action Alerts | PoultryPress | Resources | Merchandise | Links | E-mail
"Battery" Hens
The Life of One Battery Hen
By Karen Davis, PhD
Photo by: Mercy for Animals, Weaver Brothers Egg Farm in Versailles, Ohio
Prologue
Sound of a Battery Hen
You can tell me: if you come by the
North door, I am in the twelfth cage
On the left-hand side of the third row
From the floor; and in that cage
I am usually the middle one of eight or six or three.
But even without directions, you’d
Discover me. We have the same pale
Comb, clipped yellow beak and white or auburn
Feathers, but as the door opens and you
Hear above the electric fan a kind of
One-word wail, I am the one
Who sounds loudest in my head.
The Incubator
Deep inside an industrial incubator filled with thousands of chick embryos, a baby hen is growing inside an egg. During the first 24 hours after her egg was laid, the chick’s tiny heart started beating, and blood vessels formed that joined her to the yolk which feeds her as she floats and grows in the fluid of her encapsulated world. The baby hen has had feelings since her 21st hour of life inside the incubator, and since her 24th hour of being there, she has had eyes. By the fourth day, all of her body organs are developed, and by the sixth day, she has the face of a little bird. Her beak has grown, and with it the egg tooth she will use to break out of her shell – the shell that was formed by her mother hen’s body, in a breeding facility somewhere – to protect her from harm.
The baby hen has comforting exchanges with the other embryos in the incubator, but a forlornness is felt inside each bird that passes from shell to shell. The two-way communication between themselves and a mother hen – the continuous interaction which they are genetically endowed to expect, and which they need – has not occurred. The mother hen’s heartbeat is missing, and she does not respond to the embryos’ calls of distress or comfort them with her soft clucks. The reverberation of something continuously running outside the eggs does not spark meaningful associations, as, for example, the crow of a rooster or the sensation of the hen shifting her eggs with her breast and her beak would comfortingly do.
Still, by the 20th day, the baby hen occupies all of her egg, except for the air cell, which she now begins to penetrate with her beak, inhaling air through her lungs for the first time. The air isn’t fresh, and the baby hen rests for several hours. Then, with renewed energy, she cuts a circular line counterclockwise around the shell by striking it with her egg tooth near the large end of the egg. With this tooth, which disappears after hatching, she saws her way out of the shell. Twelve hours later, wet and exhausted, she emerges to face the life ahead.
"As each chick emerges from its shell in the dark cave of feathers underneath its mother . . ." But this is not the baby hen’s birth experience. Start over: "As the mother hen picks the last pieces of shell gently from her chick’s soft down . . . " But this is not part of the baby hen’s story, either. Try again: "As soon as all the eggs are hatched, the hungry mother hen and her brood go forth to eat, drink, scratch and explore, the baby hen running eagerly within sight and sound of her mother, surrounded by her brothers and sisters." In reality, none of this happens, except in memories that arise in the baby hen’s dreams as she grows and stares through the bars, in the cages that await her arrival.
The "Servicing" Area
The baby hen and her fluffy yellow companions are being wheeled down the hall in the incubator cart. When it stops, three workers remove each tray of newly hatched chicks. They toss, sort and dump the discarded shells, the half-hatched chicks, the deformed chicks and the male chicks into the trash. They smoke cigarettes between the arrival of each cart, and the tobacco fumes along with other odors and gases produce a sickish, burning sensation in the baby hen’s eyes, chest and stomach. One of her companions hops onto the edge of the tray and falls to the floor. High-pitched screeches occur as the carts, which now include hers, wheel into the next room, crushing and half crushing the fallen ones, plastering them in blood on the floor.
One by one, each chick in the tray is grabbed by a hand and pushed up against a machine blade. Now it’s the baby hen’s turn, and as her face is pushed against the blade, an agonizing crunch and pain shoots through her beak and her body causing her to flap her wings, cry out, and lose her bowels. Smoke and stench mingle, as the traumatized chicks, each with a stumped red hole in front of her face, are sprayed with something chemical, and the baby hen blanks out. She jerks awake upon feeling herself being grabbed and jammed in a cage in a dark place.
The Pullet House
Throbbing pain in her head and her beak, jostling of others around her, wires hurting her feet, air that makes her sick. The hen can never get comfortable. She cannot obey her impulse to walk and run. She is in a cage in the "pullet" house, where she and the other young hens, thousands of them, will eat mash from the trough, excrete into the manure piles, and grow until, five months later, they are moved to the layer house and into the smaller egg-laying cages. The hen and rooster who created her in the breeding facility were slaughtered while she was still in the incubator. Her brothers were suffocated at the hatchery, and she has sisters somewhere, perhaps in the same building that she’s living in.
She suffers excruciating pain when she accidentally bumps her wounded beak several times against the metal trough when she tries to eat the mash. Her body aches, her heart beats in fear, her face is disfigured, things crawl on her skin. There is no earth to bathe in. Healing, her beak develops small bulbs, called neuromas, and in time the pain almost stops, just a dull ache there, but the young hen can never preen herself properly, or eat right, although she tries, and when she and some other hens appear in a magazine picture, people who never knew her think that she and her sad companions are ugly by nature.
The Layer House
One night a hand flings her out of the pullet cage, into another cage, and wheels her to another cage. Feelings pass between herself and the other hens pressing against her, as their combs grow white and lumpy, and hang over their eyes like dough, but no words exist for these feelings, just as there is nothing in the natural evolution of hens to prepare them for this situation. When a cagemate dies and rots, the hen stands on top of her to get off the wires. Her cage is somewhere among stacks and rows of cages. She is in a universe of cages. Eggs form in her body, are expelled with difficulty, and roll away. Rats whisk through the troughs leaving pellets in the mash. They whisk in and out of the cage bars, even brush through her feathers, which are mostly broken spines now. Flies suck stray yolks in the isle in front of her cage, and one day the troughs are empty.
The End
Somehow the hen has managed to get her head and one spiny wing stuck between the bars of her cage, and she can’t free herself. Ignorant people say that a chicken doesn’t know she is going to die, but the hen knows that she is going to die. When a hand – the most brutal, cruel thing she knows – opens the cage door and pulls her backward from inside, yanking her almost in two, she shrieks as she is dropped into the bucket where other hens, oozing eggs, pieces of shells and blood await her. They absorb her into themselves, as something heavy and soft plops on top of her that moves just a little, or so she feels, in being carried away.
Photo By: Mercy for Animals
Postscript: Killing of Unwanted Chicks and Hens By the Egg Industry
By Karen Davis, PhD
"Spent" Hens
The U.S. egg industry routinely deprives hens of all food or severely restricts their rations for one to three weeks, in order to shock them into producing another cycle of eggs after a year of relentless egg laying. This practice is called forced molting. Hens deemed no longer productive ("spent") by the egg industry are disposed of in several different ways. Because they have almost no muscle tissue compared to birds bred for meat, they have little or no economic value. As a result, these still very young birds are disposed of as cheaply as possible. Many are suffocated to death in 40-foot-long dumpsters, then trucked to rendering facilities and turned into animal feed ingredients. Others are gassed and buried dead or alive in landfills or ground up, dead or alive, in grinders. Still others are trucked to "spent fowl" slaughter plants and used in school lunch programs and other government food programs. Hens travel to slaughter in cages without food or water for hundreds of miles, frequently across state lines or into Canada, often with missing feet, legs, and wings that were left behind during catching. Hens who are still laying eggs are pasted in egg slime and pieces of shells.
Male Chicks
Along with defective and slow-hatching female chicks, the U.S. egg industry trashes 250 million male chicks as soon as they hatch because roosters don’t lay eggs. Instead of being sheltered by a mother hen’s wings, the newborns are ground up alive or thrown into trashcans where they slowly suffocate on top of one another, peeping pitifully as a human foot stomps them down to make room for more chicks. Some hatcheries gas the chicks with carbon dioxide (CO2). Ruth Harrison, the author of Animal Machines (1964), said she stopped supporting CO2 gassing of chicks after subjecting herself to inhalation of various gas concentrations. She said, "In my opinion, it is no better than the old practice of filling up a dustbin with them and letting them suffocate" (New Scientist, 5/19/90).
No federal laws protect chickens in the United States. They are excluded from the Animal Welfare Act and from the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act.
Karen Davis, PhD is the founder and president of United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl. She is the author of Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry; a Home for Henny; More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality; and Instead of Chicken, Instead of Turkey: a Poultryless "Poultry" Potpourri (a cookbook). Karen’s next book, The Holocaust and the Henmaid’s Tale: A Case for Comparing Atrocities (Lantern Books, 2005), includes the above essay "The Life of One Battery Hen," which first appeared in the Summer 2004 issue of the AV Magazine, a publication of the American Antivivisection Society (www.aavs.org).
United Poultry Concerns is a nonprofit organization that addresses the treatment of domestic fowl in food production, science, education, entertainment, and human companionship situations and promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of chickens and other domesticated fowl. www.upc-online.org.
Home | What's New? | News Releases | Action Alerts | PoultryPress | Resources | Merchandise | Links | E-mail
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Friday, March 12, 2010
Monday, March 8, 2010
Todays verse is Just Right!
I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength. - Philippians 4:12-13 (NIV)
The apostle Paul applies the strength of God both to good and bad circumstances. He is basically saying that the gospel gives him the power to process victory and defeat similarly: as under the hand of God. In other words, how we handle our victories is also the way we handle our defeats. When our identity is in Christ and not in our achievement, success and setback are held in the same hand.
What do you think? Discuss at:
http://facebook.com/DailyBibleVerse
Today's commentary by:
Dave Whitehead, Senior Pastor, GraceNYC.org
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Q & A with Dr. Gary Smith, lead author of the American Academy of Pediatricians new policy statement on choking hazards - Wellness - TIME.com - StumbleUpon
Q & A with Dr. Gary Smith, lead author of the American Academy of Pediatricians new policy statement on choking hazards - Wellness - TIME.com - StumbleUpon
FTA:
"DR. SMITH: Hot dogs are the leading cause of food-related choking death in this country. A child dies every five days in this country due to choking on food, and among those cases, hot dogs are the most common type of food. The reasons for this are actually not hard to understand. If you were to take the best engineers in the world, and you said to them, 'Design for me the perfect plug for a child's airway,' you couldn't do better than a hot dog. Unfortunately, it's exactly the right shape of the airway, it's the right diameter—it forms a plug, completely sealing off the upper airway, right above the vocal chords. Because of its shape and size, and because it's compressible, it wedges itself in. It's almost impossible to dislodge. Then it's only a matter of minutes before there is irreparable brain damage and even death. As a pediatric emergency medicine physician, I can tell you, even if we are standing right there with all of our skill and experience, with all of the correct equipment and lighting, it is really hard to get those objects out of a child's airway once they're wedged in like that. It's almost impossible."
FTA:
"DR. SMITH: Hot dogs are the leading cause of food-related choking death in this country. A child dies every five days in this country due to choking on food, and among those cases, hot dogs are the most common type of food. The reasons for this are actually not hard to understand. If you were to take the best engineers in the world, and you said to them, 'Design for me the perfect plug for a child's airway,' you couldn't do better than a hot dog. Unfortunately, it's exactly the right shape of the airway, it's the right diameter—it forms a plug, completely sealing off the upper airway, right above the vocal chords. Because of its shape and size, and because it's compressible, it wedges itself in. It's almost impossible to dislodge. Then it's only a matter of minutes before there is irreparable brain damage and even death. As a pediatric emergency medicine physician, I can tell you, even if we are standing right there with all of our skill and experience, with all of the correct equipment and lighting, it is really hard to get those objects out of a child's airway once they're wedged in like that. It's almost impossible."
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Dogs Deserve Better
To my friends and contacts, please take a moment and read this! For the cold/hot, chained, forgotten dogs!
On the Dogs Deserve Better fan site, member Linda Keeter writes about this:
"One of the comments ... expressed a wish that Oprah, a professed dog-lover, would do a show on Tamira and her efforts. She accepts show suggestions and email at this link. Perhaps if enough supporters of DDB contact her and others highly visible in the media, they will hear the call. It's time for the spotlight!"
Member Pat Roxana Saez writes:
“ok, done: PLS...others DO THE SAME!!!”
“Dear Ms. Winfrey and staff:
I would like to share with you a gut wrenching story about a dog advocate in Pennsylvania that has recently been fined by a judge for helping starving/freezing and dying dogs that are left 24/7 in 7 degree weather.
There are 13,000 facebook members are disgusted about what is happening. Please read this, and help!
http://hypercampaign.hyperoffice.com/s/1/sxe2/JYFrcEE/cm
the website for them is: http://www.dogsdeservebetter.com”
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Facebook ASPCA post
Copied here for your reading enjoyment...
When I lived in California, I did a little animal fostering but wasnt able to do more because of heavy work schedules and a young family. Now that I live in Indiana and have no job (I'm on disability) the animals seem to find me!
Two kittens found their way to my home when I lived in town, and I ended up keeping them - first Pidge, who was stuck up a tree by the flower shop. I took her out of the tree and she went back up! The most pitiful whining, pleading help-me kitten! She is a gray tuxedo. The owner of the flower shop told me to take her as all she did was meow and get stuck in that tree! So I took her home, and surprisingly, she hardly ever says a word now, is most cuddly and a great mouser! Plus she's learned about trees!
About a month after Pidge came along, there came Hector. His mommy was feral and lived in a ditch outside a friends house on a busy county road. Mom got squished, sadly, but they caught this little boy and brought him to me - only about 5 weeks old, he was scared and not quite all the way weaned. He's a quiet unassuming gentleman, white and tabby striped.
Then at the end of 2008 I moved to the country. One frigid morning I opened the front door to find a poor, skinny, scared black and tan hound curled up on my boots. Elvis was a character, as all hounds usually are, and with the help of our local animal rescue, Adopt-A-Dog and H.E.L.P., we contacted a black & tan rescue group and he found a wonderful home on 140 acres with a wonderful woman who loves him a lot! Now he was a handful!
Nana came by, scared and cold one winter night, she was under my car. A lovely blue merle aussie, she also found a new loving forever home.
Next came the kittens, a parade of them! A lady posted on a freecycle group that she had some drop off kittens that turned out to be much younger than she guessed - they were about 4 weeks old, if that! A day later, I got a call from Adopt A Dog that someone had dropped a box of kittens off at the shelter - in the cold, in a box, not a soul around! Now I had 4 bottle babies! As it turned out, while they were still nursing and not ready to rehome, I had to go to Texas, so...they made the trip with me! We drove, and my daughter and I would feed them when we stopped, and they got lots of attention!
Speaking of my daughter, she is 18 and thoroughly enjoys helping with stray animals, especially the babies. I could not do it without her and all my love and admiration goes out to her!
A poor starving dirty little asian mix came one night, covered in grease and wheezing with pneumonia. She was a beautiful and loving kitten, about 4 months old, but she was so sick! *So* sick, poor thing. We tried, the vet and I, for weeks, but end the end, we had to help her cross the rainbow bridge. Her condition was so debilitated and her infection so embedded that nothing was working. I was so sad, and so was my father, who was madly in love with her - and he doesn't even like cats! At 92 years old, he helped me dig her resting place, and we hiked around the property a bit until we found a suitable rock and a stick that struck his fancy. Princess Missy was a loving little thing and I had such hopes we could save her. I still miss her.
I didn't have to wait long before I got a litter from Adopt A Dog! Their mother was run over by a tractor, and at 9 days old, these 6 little babies needed someone who could give them the round the clock care they needed. Adopt A Dog in our community has few volunteers and precious little donations, but they do what they can! They helped with the vet bills and formula and I took over the daily care. Unfortunately one kitten didn't make it, but the other 5 are the prettiest most well adjusted kittens you've ever met! Two found forever homes with me and three found homes where they are highly loved and I get regular updates on how they are doing!
In between all this, I helped place two older cats, 6 years old, that for one reason or another were given up by their owners. Im starting to get a reputation for helping the helpless..and they come, they find me, and welcome they are!
It all started with NorCal Boxer Rescue (ncbr.org) and my old girl Dixie, who is going be 10 this year. I fell in love with helping animals and dont think I could ever not help out, even if I have to go hungry to do it! Its my dream to someday visit Best Friends Sanctuary in Utah, the Houston SPCA, and am currently researching how to help change in laws in the state where I live, as the animal protection laws are just pitiful. Awful.
Thats my story, I hope it warms your heart! I hope it inspires you to keep helping, keep trying!
When I lived in California, I did a little animal fostering but wasnt able to do more because of heavy work schedules and a young family. Now that I live in Indiana and have no job (I'm on disability) the animals seem to find me!
Two kittens found their way to my home when I lived in town, and I ended up keeping them - first Pidge, who was stuck up a tree by the flower shop. I took her out of the tree and she went back up! The most pitiful whining, pleading help-me kitten! She is a gray tuxedo. The owner of the flower shop told me to take her as all she did was meow and get stuck in that tree! So I took her home, and surprisingly, she hardly ever says a word now, is most cuddly and a great mouser! Plus she's learned about trees!
About a month after Pidge came along, there came Hector. His mommy was feral and lived in a ditch outside a friends house on a busy county road. Mom got squished, sadly, but they caught this little boy and brought him to me - only about 5 weeks old, he was scared and not quite all the way weaned. He's a quiet unassuming gentleman, white and tabby striped.
Then at the end of 2008 I moved to the country. One frigid morning I opened the front door to find a poor, skinny, scared black and tan hound curled up on my boots. Elvis was a character, as all hounds usually are, and with the help of our local animal rescue, Adopt-A-Dog and H.E.L.P., we contacted a black & tan rescue group and he found a wonderful home on 140 acres with a wonderful woman who loves him a lot! Now he was a handful!
Nana came by, scared and cold one winter night, she was under my car. A lovely blue merle aussie, she also found a new loving forever home.
Next came the kittens, a parade of them! A lady posted on a freecycle group that she had some drop off kittens that turned out to be much younger than she guessed - they were about 4 weeks old, if that! A day later, I got a call from Adopt A Dog that someone had dropped a box of kittens off at the shelter - in the cold, in a box, not a soul around! Now I had 4 bottle babies! As it turned out, while they were still nursing and not ready to rehome, I had to go to Texas, so...they made the trip with me! We drove, and my daughter and I would feed them when we stopped, and they got lots of attention!
Speaking of my daughter, she is 18 and thoroughly enjoys helping with stray animals, especially the babies. I could not do it without her and all my love and admiration goes out to her!
A poor starving dirty little asian mix came one night, covered in grease and wheezing with pneumonia. She was a beautiful and loving kitten, about 4 months old, but she was so sick! *So* sick, poor thing. We tried, the vet and I, for weeks, but end the end, we had to help her cross the rainbow bridge. Her condition was so debilitated and her infection so embedded that nothing was working. I was so sad, and so was my father, who was madly in love with her - and he doesn't even like cats! At 92 years old, he helped me dig her resting place, and we hiked around the property a bit until we found a suitable rock and a stick that struck his fancy. Princess Missy was a loving little thing and I had such hopes we could save her. I still miss her.
I didn't have to wait long before I got a litter from Adopt A Dog! Their mother was run over by a tractor, and at 9 days old, these 6 little babies needed someone who could give them the round the clock care they needed. Adopt A Dog in our community has few volunteers and precious little donations, but they do what they can! They helped with the vet bills and formula and I took over the daily care. Unfortunately one kitten didn't make it, but the other 5 are the prettiest most well adjusted kittens you've ever met! Two found forever homes with me and three found homes where they are highly loved and I get regular updates on how they are doing!
In between all this, I helped place two older cats, 6 years old, that for one reason or another were given up by their owners. Im starting to get a reputation for helping the helpless..and they come, they find me, and welcome they are!
It all started with NorCal Boxer Rescue (ncbr.org) and my old girl Dixie, who is going be 10 this year. I fell in love with helping animals and dont think I could ever not help out, even if I have to go hungry to do it! Its my dream to someday visit Best Friends Sanctuary in Utah, the Houston SPCA, and am currently researching how to help change in laws in the state where I live, as the animal protection laws are just pitiful. Awful.
Thats my story, I hope it warms your heart! I hope it inspires you to keep helping, keep trying!
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Has it really been so long
Wow, have really neglected the ol bloggeroni, not like people are jammin up the intarwebz trying to read it.... lol
so ohTen is gonna be the year, right? Right? AmIRite?
Seems so... heres A horoscope, out of the dozens available (altho horoscopes are fun, I really believe in the Maker of the Stars! He holds my future...)
2010 Taurus Snapshot
The Year of the Bull
Taurus, with the Moon in your sign on the Spring Equinox, you might have a luckier year than you've had in a long time. With Jupiter conjunct Uranus in healing Pisces, you can resolve any difficulties left over from 2009, and create good luck for yourself. 2010 will bring a marked improvement in your mental energy. As an earthy Taurus, you'll be more willing and able to make a difference than other signs. You might attract a charming person unlike anyone you've known before, who will be a lover and companion but also challenge you on a number of levels. Your professional life is going to have its ups and downs. You could finally decide that it's time for a change. Pessimism is the main obstacle confronting you in 2010.
so ohTen is gonna be the year, right? Right? AmIRite?
Seems so... heres A horoscope, out of the dozens available (altho horoscopes are fun, I really believe in the Maker of the Stars! He holds my future...)
2010 Taurus Snapshot
The Year of the Bull
Taurus, with the Moon in your sign on the Spring Equinox, you might have a luckier year than you've had in a long time. With Jupiter conjunct Uranus in healing Pisces, you can resolve any difficulties left over from 2009, and create good luck for yourself. 2010 will bring a marked improvement in your mental energy. As an earthy Taurus, you'll be more willing and able to make a difference than other signs. You might attract a charming person unlike anyone you've known before, who will be a lover and companion but also challenge you on a number of levels. Your professional life is going to have its ups and downs. You could finally decide that it's time for a change. Pessimism is the main obstacle confronting you in 2010.
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