Nice. I regularly donate to the ASPCA, but when I get an apartment (rent) or a home of my own, I plan to take in as many dogs as I can. Love them.

When Mr. Witch and I were looking for puppies, we went through a local "Humane Society" group which operates a couple different shelters and also has a program for placing adoptable puppies, kittens, dogs and cats in "temporary" or "foster" homes until a "forever home" can be located. Are these kinds of local groups with "Humane Society" in their name affiliated with the HSUS in any tangible sense or is the "Humane Society" part of the name just a way of identifying what they do? (Kind of like how you can have First National Bank, CitiBank, SeaFirst Bank, etc. They all have "Bank" in their name because it describes what they are, but they're aren't actually affiliated with each other.)

We try to work through our local groups also. Mr. Witch and I adopted our first 2 dogs within the first year of our marriage, and as each of them passed away, we brought 2 new "furkids" into our home. (And yeah, even though I know it's corny as hell, we actually do tend to think of them more as kids than pets....) Our county only allows us two at a time or I'd probably convince hubby to let us have more

Humane society is a generic term, yes. Local humane societies and shelters are usually very good.

Breed rescue is also a good place to look for companion animals. I find breed rescue, in general, to be extremely committed to finding the right place for an animal and screen homes pretty rigorously. Between local shelters and breed rescues, you're likely to find a pup/dog that is perfect for your family, and both are true rescue organizations.

Neither of my dogs are rescues. The older one might have ended up in rescue if we hadn't taken him, as he has some significant shyness issues, and you have to know what you're doing with shy dogs. The younger one is from a show line, actually a very well-known line in this breed. I saw her dam a few years ago and fell in love and am thrilled to have this baby. We don't intend to show her. We're not "dog show" people really I'd love to work our boy, either in artificial working like lure coursing, or in real work, but his shyness is a big factor. So at the moment he hunts patches of sunlight and dreams of squirrels and he's very happy.

Rescues are great. Breeders are not devils

Both on and off topic, so I'll leave the blue box off for now. I never know.

Our Tao Shen is from a breeder, our MuShi is from a Shih Tzu rescue organization, and our kitteh, Niven, was rescued from a Baltimore-area hotel (management of which was going to have him destroyed).

My wife donates a portion of her CD sales to the Humane Society of the United States, as well. Too.

Ok, good. Thank you! I just wanted to make sure that in supporting our local Humane Society I wasn't inadvertently supporting PETA.



True. Dealing with dogs that have those kind of emotional issues can be a real challenge and if you don't know what you're doing - or don't, at the very least, consult with someone who does - it can lead to some serious problems. Our youngest had some issues of her own when we got her - especially in how she acted towards me. We ended up working with both a trainer and a canine neurologist and between behaviour modification work and some medication, she is now just the most wonderful dog I could possibly ask for, and she spends a lot of time in my room with me. It was a rough couple of years, but it has been SO worth it!



I'm glad your so happy with her! We talked about looking at a purebred dog at one point, but really couldn't afford it. Besides, I'm the main dog person, and I've always had shelter mutts, so I'm comfortable with them (and the possibility of surprises they have *g*)



And that's the most important thing, right?

Since HSUS is trying to make it more difficult and expensive to own pets (and eventually to eliminate that human right), your wife is foolish in doing so.

Tell me how so, for I have never heard that ...

HSUS and PETA are propaganda machines. They do not contribute money to animal welfare. Google "HSUS" and "scam" and take a look. Wayne Pacelle, the CEO of HSUS is a PETA graduate. HSUS is the more "respectable" face of PETA. They have the same goals -- set all the animals free. (And while you keep "animal companions" only serve them vegan food.)

Your wife sells CD's?

Our pug/schipperke mix came from a rescue; we rescued one of our cats after it's owner died and he was so shy the family was going to put him down. Took 5 years, but I finally got him purring last summer.

All our other pets are either found or they found us.

My all-time favorite cat was a Siamese I got when her owner went to Europe leaving pregnant momkat alone in her apartment. My co-worker was her neighbor, who fed momkat until the day the owner was due to return. Thinking she had, the neighbor went on a trip of his own for a week and realized when he returned that the cat was still on her own. He asked me for help.

The first time we opened the door to feed her after her solitary week, she launched her self at us, hissing wildly. We retreated, leaving the bag of food inside. We heard snarling and tearing sounds, then nothing for a while. When we dared open the door again she didn't attack and over the next few days she stopped freaking at our presence. We continued to feed her for weeks, and still no owner. Finally the kittehs were old enough to adopt out, so we did. I took one of them

We never heard from her again. She never came home.

But I got a fantastic talking cat out of the deal, who taught herself how to use the toilet.

Our fair city has an ordinance outlawing pet ownership and making us guardians instead. We are noted for having more dogs than children in our population. We have two shelters and were one of the first places to have a no-kill policy. The local SPCA has an adoption center that was richly endowed. The cats have designer condominiums and the dogs have their plush living rooms with TV's. The city run shelter is more like what we usually see and have to take in whatever stray or surrendered animal of any kind. I volunteer for the SPCA feral cat program and spend two evenings a week down at the port feeding feral cats (and unintentionally, skunks and racoons which just love cat food).

Here is more ammunition for mocking our fair city for its nuttiness....a proposal to ban pet sales.

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/201 ... et_ban.php

Ahh, I do that about every other night (when I forget to bring in the leftover dry food in the outside cats' bowl after dinner).

The possum who lives under my side deck, and the two raccoons who drop by every few days to see if there's anything to eat, plus the cat who lives across the street and another up the alley, all regular clientele of Ducktape's Diner.

It broke our hearts to do it, but all the bird feeders came down after the evening the very big black bear was on our deck just a few yards from where we were standing, with only a large glass window separating us -- but I told that story here already.

Thanks for that; I'll look into it ...

Yes, she is a Jazz singer ...



I protect her from the crazies who lurk here ...

In regards to the question on if the Great Apes should get some special protections, my take on it is yes. What strikes me is how much we keep trying to make ourselves different than they are.

Okay, having always been a science geek way back when, especially when it came to early man and paleoanthropology, I remember when the breakdown for humans was:

Superfamily: Hominoidea, Family: Hominidae, Genus: Homo.

Chimps, Gorillas, Orangs, and Gibbons were all Family: Pongidae. Clear difference, them and us. Later on, this got modified, gibbons were spun into Family: Hyloatidae. Still, them and us.

Until molecular biology started having a look in at when speciation started to happen. What happened then is that the Ponginae became a subfamily under Family: Hominidae. Humans at this point became:

Superfamily: Hominoidea, Family: Hominidae, Subfamily: Homininae, Genus: Homo.

By the mid 70's, (bear in mind the childrens books on science I was reading then were from the 60's, as well as the National Geographics, so I missed this), they realized that Orangs were the outgroup, and were actually the sole members of the Ponginae. Chimps and Gorillas both were grouped under Subfamily: Homininae.

This didn't sit well with some, because while many biologists don't like to distingish other species to that level, they make an exception where Humans and Apes are the case.

So they tried to spin off Chimps and Gorillas into their own Tribe, the Gorillini, with Humans in the Hominini tribe.

Superfamily: Hominoidea, Family: Hominidae, Subfamily: Homininae, Tribe: Hominini, Genus: Homo.

By the early 1990's, it was found that, chimps were closer to humans than Gorillas. This placed Chimps under the Hominini tribe.

With a 93% DNA match, they should have counted Chimps as a sister species, rather than a seperate genus. No, instead Humans got the subtribe Hominina, and Chimps got subtribe Paninina.

Which is why you now have a classification for H. s. Sapiens that reads like a tounge-twister.....

Domain:Eukaryota, Kingdom:Animalia, Phylum:Chordata, Class:Mammalia, Order: Primates, Superfamily:Hominoidea, Family:Hominidae, Subfamily:Homininae, Tribe:Hominini, Subtribe:Hominina, Genus:Homo, Species: Homo sapiens, Subspecies: Homo sapiens sapiens

As far has I know, they don't break down dogs, cats, horses, or just about any other spieces with a backbone like this.........

With a decent backing track you could make that into a top selling tune.

Allied to this unusual scheme for classification are the behavioral traits that have been serially identified as "uniquely human."
Tool user -- until we saw tools being used throughout the animal kingdom
Tool maker -- until we saw primates creating digging tools
The culture-bearer (the teaching animal) -- until we saw animal parents teaching their kids
Language user -- until we taught American Sign Language to Great Apes

Now we rely on the distinction between a signal and a symbol, with the latter having abstract meaning, and we claim that only humans create and use symbols. I have a feeling that this will eventually come to be a joke told among orcas and dolphins. Why it is so important to find a bright line between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom eludes me.

Souls.

Tollie - that question surprises me. I thought I had properly prepared you: self-consciousness.

That's been done. Pearl Jam, Do the Evolution. Daniel Quinn says that this song comes close to expressing his ideas in Ishmael, upon which the album Yield was consciously based.

It seems to me it is a major facet of a subject we're going to be hearing a great deal about for at least the next year or two: exceptionalism.

We sure ought to be talking about that.

Primates are welcome to join Fogbow; we don't discriminate on the basis of zoological classifications.