Ladies and gentlemen, I think that we will be in the fight of our lives in the next decade or so. Never before have I seen a divide between the country, and the city. the minority, and the majority. between reason and insanity. Don’t woprry though, Anyone who opposes PETA and other organizations has enopugh political ammuniton to extinguish the animal rights movement, we just need to use what we have.

The animal rights activists take money from the public that the public believes is going to fund animal shelters. Since it does not, the shelters are chronically underfunded. Further, many if not most of the shelters *buy* their policy and kill manuals from HSUS. Those manuals are designed to kill as many animals as possible, for trivial reasons such as age, physical condition, chronic conditions which are easily managed and so on.

Then they dump all their ‘rescues’ into these already overcrowded shelters which already have high kill rates. This pushes the kill rates even higher.

Then they tell the easily led public not to buy from breeders, but to adopt. Since very few hobby breeders dogs end in shelters, because their stock is sold with contracts stipulating that their dogs *must* be returned to them if the buyer cannot keep them for any reason, most shelter dogs originate with the high volume commercial breeders most people would like to see an end to, with a sprinkling of accidental breedings. This results in shelter dogs presenting a multitude of problems of temperment and health, partly because many of them are ‘revolving door’ dogs, who are returned more than once to the shelters, insuring that they never have a stable home or sensible training. Juvenile s/n takes its toll too, but that’s another piece of the picture.

Shelters therefore have become a sort of pet-shop-cum-abbatoir for dogs, and that is mostly due to the widespread belief in AR dogma.

If you find this rather dubious, consider that no AR organization supports no-kill sheltering. In fact, they actively OPPOSE no-kill sheltering.

This is only a small part of the story; AR dogma has permeated the culture so deeply that *all* aspects of animal ownership have now been corrupted by it, but the reality is that the more animals that are dead the sooner, the better the AR activists like it, because the closer they come to meeting their goals.

Re: animal abuse and domestic violence – no doubt there is a correlation there, but the way to resolve it is NOT by ending animal ownership, nor restricting it. That has to be approached from the other end, so to speak, via early, functional socialization. I think that’s beyond the scope of this article.

Been working on my own letter to the editor about this and hadn’t intended to share it. It isn’t “done”. But, I’ll paste it here. The problem is much, much broader and deeper than your article would indicate. And it’s going to be extremely difficult to turn this ship from Hell around. I am not convinced it can be done. I guess that remains to be seen. And BTW — the “animal cruelty” problem, the “pet overpopulation” problem, and the “nasty mean animal agriculture industry” problem, along with nearly every OTHER supposed problem the ARistas are battling were made up out of whole cloth by THEM, for the very purpose of getting the level of control they now have and wish to continue to build, until there is no longer a single animal kept in “slavery” by we wicked cancerous humans. If you haven’t already decided to (continue to) ignore the voices of sanity in this, dear readers, read on …

(Copyright Candace E Ware, Oct. 2, 2011, all rights reserved) “Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is about food safety. It’s about control. And it originates with the animal rights movement, which has been working the legal system for 40+ years to get to this point.

Many, many voices have been trying to raise the alarm for decades about the entirely natural and predictable results we are seeing, right now, of our country’s utter FAILURE to take the threat of the Animal Rights movement seriously and stop it in its evil, insane tracks.

Those who’ve been working since the late 1960s and early 1970s to expose the AR movement for the soul-less, misanthropic, nihilistic enterprise that it is, have been roundly ridiculed by the vast majority of the American public (well, those that even bothered to notice and respond) as paranoid, negative, even deranged. They’ve been accused of lacking compassion (or, more often, of being out-and-out cruel), of wanting nothing but to profit from animals, of being conspiracy-theorists and alarmists, and on and on and on. All for trying to point out exactly what was happening, and show YOU that you are being manipulated, used, and lied to.

The AKC, the “all-superior” uber-breeder types who think their way is the only RIGHT way (a way that comes, largely intact, right out of the AR handbook), and various veterinary, pet rescue and agriculture groups all took part in that bashing until very recently. Thankfully, many of these groups and organizations have finally begun to see the light and turn around.

Unfortunately, the rate of turn-around and productive action towards correction may very well be “too little, too late”. The Animal Rights-drafted “anti-cruelty” curriculums that have been in the public schools for generations now have virtually guaranteed that the young and powerful for the next century will lean toward the AR side. Veterinary schools in particular are cranking out rosy-cheeked AR-activist vets at a good clip. After all, if the general public continues to treat their pets like little people with fur, the veterinary bottom line gets quite the significant boost, doesn’t it? Temporarily, at least. Despite the fact that in the long run they are shooting themselves in the financial foot.

All those ears and minds, closed for decades while the threat advanced to their doorstep, are now shocked! THIS nonsense in the Dairy State? The recent abomination of tyrannical AR-driven “puppymill” legislation in Texas (signed into law by none other than Gov. Rick Perry, conservative in name only — and possibly within grasping distance of the White House)? Cage-free-ONLY eggs on the shelves in California? Pork producers basically driven out of Florida? A rural family bullied by the USDA and hit with almost $4 MILLION in fines because their kids raised and sold rabbits and guinea pigs? A wealth of instances, and more every day, in which perfectly ethical breeders are slapped with the puppy-mill label, their dogs seized and killed, and their reputations trashed before they get even ONE SECOND in court to defend themselves? It would take me all week to provide links to every example.

So here we are. Turns out that — of all the things the anti-AR folks have been charged with — we are in fact “guilty” of the only thing we were NOT accused of being — RIGHT.

There’s now more than 30 years worth of BAD AR-designed law in place, nationwide. An animal rights extremist and former employee of HSUS is in charge of enforcement at the USDA. An animal abolitionist is on the law faculty at Rutgers, and groups like PETA and HSUS run cinferences for attorneys showing them how to profit from a specialy in the practice of AR law. The sorts of actions and judgments I outlined above are just the beginning of the harvest, and will be looked back upon as the intial proof that the war was over and we had LOST.

All along, animal rights proponents (HSUS, ALF, PETA, FFA, etc.)have known that they didn’t have to accomplish the (seemingly so ridiculous as to be impossible) goal of outlawing animal ownership, use or display, hunting and fishing, or consumption of animal products as food or goods, in order to get their way. All they had to do was make it too restrictive, too expensive, and too Kafka-esque for it to be worth the bother.

And that is what they have all but managed to do — it is now for the most part so difficult, draconian, and expensive to breed, raise, own, and make a living with animals that fewer and fewer people have the wherewithal to deal with the hassle anymore.

Now, on top of all the OTHER fine qualities it took to be involved with animals — it takes a ton of COURAGE and a bottomless WALLET. Because if you are successful at it, you can count on the fact that they will come after you, sooner or later. And they’ll come after you HARD. And it will ruin you completely.

Who has the courage to willingly bring that upon themselves?? I know I don’t.

If we want our animals, our choice of diet, and our freedom in these areas back then we will have to both re-educate the public, and repeal a HUGE body of law — basically EVERYTHING that has been passed related to animals since about 1980. And we’d damn well better hurry. Domestic animals have a limited reproductive life span, and we are losing — at an alarming rate — generations and generations of animal husbandry knowledge and necessary genetic material.

Most people don’t realize any of this, or care. YET. Maybe sometime in the next few years, when “free-range” turkey becomes law, and is so expensive that most have to settle for tofurkey at Thanksgiving. Maybe THEN. We can always hope.