I swear, this should be posted on the wall of, I dunno. Everywhere.The Onion's article, "I'm Thinking Of Getting A Dog To Neglect" pretty much sums up the thoughts of so many bad pet owners, only they don't think they're being bad pet owners. Tell that to the dogs.

J-E-A-L-O-U-S! Photo: LesleyS on Flickr

Coming home yesterday was, well, special. Tiny had decided to get into the trash and not only strew trash everywhere, but whatever he ate didn't sit well, so I came home to a mess of barf and trash. Nice.

Tiny's never been too terribly bad about getting into trash, or anything else, which is one of the reasons I allow him to free roam when I'm not home. Normally as long as you toss a pair of underwear on the floor for him to chew up, he's fine. (What is it with dogs and underwear???) But every now and again he gets a wild hair and decides to get into the trash and then he makes a godawful mess.

I've never understood the appeal dogs have with gross stuff. If I didn't have a baby gate to my laundry room, he'd go in there and make a snack out of the cat boxes. Now and then he loves trash, and he always loves underwear, it's his favorite.

I suppose it's one of the reasons I tend to prefer cats- they don't eat poo or underwear, and they don't get into the trash. Tell me, Animal Shak-ers, what gross things do your dogs love?

My own cats were about this patient when my kids were young, luckily for the kids. Now they’re all great friends.

Now that I've been witness to puppy births, I can totally say there's very little in this life that's cooler than watching puppies grow from sightless, deaf lumps to fun little puppies to dogs that do fun little tricks and everything. A dog Newscoma rescued was pregnant, so she gets to have that fun right now. Her dog had ELEVEN puppies though, yikes! Enjoy it, 'Coma, it's crazy but very fun.

In my puppy news, Kitty's learned to sit, stay (for a few seconds, though, since she's just a wee puppy and her attention span is short) and sit up to beg. Fun!

Photo: My dog Tiny, probably not a puppy mill dog.

An article today about another puppy mill being shut down in Tennessee has me wondering some things. The article says:

Officials with the Humane Society of the United States say, based on
advertisements leading consumers to Tennessee sellers, as many as 500
“puppy mills” operate in the state.

This year the Humane Society is pushing for a law requiring inspections for kennels which keep more than 20 breeding females.

Now, that leads me to wonder why something like this hasn't been enacted already. There are already inspections for many other kinds of breeding operations, why aren't there inspections for puppy mills? To me, that just seems completely no-brainer. 

The easy, non-legislation way to shut down puppy mills would be to get everyone to stop buying from them, as long as there is no market, they would be shut down. But efforts by many to get people to stop buying have not worked, so why not legislate? To me, it seems to be the only right thing to do.

I suppose one could make the argument that these places would just go down to 19 breeding bitches to keep from having to be inspected, but these places usually have hundreds of breeding bitches, so that would certainly cut down the amount of dogs being hurt. I think of the starfish story, and "It makes a difference to this one starfish" and even reducing the amount of dogs subjected to puppy mill conditions would be a great start.

Photo: BL1961 on Flickr

I cannot decide if this makes me incredibly sad, or if it's kinda of funny. Funny, in a sad way, I think. That dog's eyes make it pretty freaky.

Via: Newscoma