Ingrid Newkirk killed a thousand dogs and cats with her own hands
Meet Ingrid Newkirk, found of PETA, self-described ‘press slut’ and crazier than a whole six-pack of post-experimental laboratory baboons. Her Wikipedia entry (from which I pinched all this) makes it clear she’s a complete nutter — and it was written by a sympathizer. (How do I know? The author describes an experience Ingrid had in India, watching villagers bind a dog’s “arms and feet.” Dogs don’t have arms, sweetcheeks. It’s legs all the way around. Only an animal rights activist can be that retarded about actual animals).
Ingrid was born in Ware, England (sorry, Uncle B) in 1949. Her dad was an engineer and the family moved to India when she was young. There she rescued strays and helped her mother (a volunteer for Mother Teresa) roll bandages and prepare medicine for the lepers. There, I suspect, she learned to loathe every living creature that moveth in the waters and every creature that creepeth upon the earth. Just a guess.
The family moved to the States in the ’60s and she didn’t do anything batshit insane, that I am aware of, until 1970. That year, she took a litter of kittens to the shelter in Poolesville, Maryland where they were promptly gassed. Also, it was a horrible place and the woman at the shelter was rude to her. That really, really upset her, so she decided to work there.
Does that make sense? No, of course it doesn’t.
She describes how horrible her co-workers were, kicking the animals around and “stepping on the animals, crushing them like grapes” and how she complained to management, but nothing was done. Did that happen? Maybe. But it has the thin, high music of a personal sadistic fantasy to me. Anyhow, her solution in her own words:
“In the end, I would go to work early, before anyone got there, and I would just kill the animals myself. Because I couldn’t stand to let them go through that. I must have killed a thousand of them, sometimes dozens every day.”
Oh-kay.
Right.
Whoo!
Oh, look! More crazy:
“On my way down into the District, I would stop in Potomac and pick up triple-ground prime meat … I would break a raw egg and take onions and capers and I would mix it all, and I would go about checking on the animals while eating this raw food right out of my hand.”
Before she went vegan, obviously. Handling animals and munching on a fistful of raw meat. Jesus fucking christ in a cornfield, that’s some serious crazy. Of course, eating excellent quality raw meat in front of an animal on a meager shelter diet would be a great way to tease the shit out of it. Just saying.
But wait! There’s more:
“Shelters cannot humanely house and support all these animals until their natural deaths—they would be forced to live for years, lonely and stressed, in cramped cages or kennels, and other animals would have to be turned away because there would not be room for them. Turning unwanted animals loose to roam the streets is not a humane option. If they don’t starve, freeze, get hit by a car, or die of disease, they may be tormented and possibly killed by cruel juveniles or picked up by dealers who obtain animals to sell to laboratories.”
Noticed what’s not listed as an option: adopting them out as pets. Because people like Ingrid believe animals that rub along pretty well with humans are traitors and must die. That’s why PETA shelters adopted out LESS THAN ONE PERCENT of the animals they took in in 2007. Ingrid must’ve called in sick the day those 17 animals found homes.
You know what? I’m not even going to talk about the good things PETA has done. Because they have done good things along with the stupid things, and on issues that are very important to me, and I’m madder than hell that a sadistic fuck like Ingrid Newkirk got her attention-whoring psychotic stink all over them.
Furylanche! Rottweilerlanche! Malkinlanche! (And anyone else whose kind link got buried under the giant footprint that is Michelle Malkin). Welcome! Stay! I’ll do my best to continue pissing you off in the worst way. Wait…that’s a good thing, right?
August 1, 2008 — 9:41 am
Comments: 48
PETA kills kittens…lots and lots of them…
Y’all knew that, right? Sorry to be a downer, after all the happy kitteh pictures this week, but I was banging around the Web Saturday, wondering what happened in that North Carolina animal cruelty case against PETA. I’ll forget if I don’t blog what I found.
Remember that case? Two PETA employees were nicked for dumping dead animals in a public dumpster behind a restaurant. Turns out, their ‘adoption’ van was a mobile death wagon. As Dana Cheek, formerly of the Norfolk SPCA, put it:
I often receive phone calls from frantic people who have surrendered their pets to PETA with the understanding that PETA will “find them a good home.” Many of them are led to believe that the animals will be taken to a nearby shelter. Little do they know that the pets are killed in the PETA van before they even pull away from the pet owner’s home … PETA refuses to surrender animals they obtain to area shelters for rehoming. If only the celebrity “deep-pocket” donors on the west coast knew that their donations were going to kill adoptable cats and dogs here in Norfolk.
PETA’s response is that the animals are ‘damaged’ and must be put down. Eighty percent of them? Bullshit! The city dogcatcher pulls a higher proportion of healthy cats out of a typical animal-hoarder’s den of filth. Some of the dead animals recovered in the North Carolina case were very adoptable kittens, not a mark on them.
Oh, the outcome of that case? Both acquitted in February on the serious charges of animal cruelty and obtaining property by false pretenses, but they got a littering rap. Like Arlo. At least the trial gave PETAkillsanimals.com some ammo: testimony under oath.
Like the admission that PETA got a $9,370 tax deduction in 2002 for a walk-in freezer. You know — to hold all the adorable fuzzy corpses. That’s what the pair in North Carolina did wrong, I guess: dumped the bodies rather than follow instructions and bring them back to HQ for blanching. (Incidentally, I love the way the freezer appears right after deductions for the Freeda the Fish and Lettuce Lady costumes. Hypocrisy much?).
Look, Providence Animal Control — where I hang out — is a pretty high-kill shelter, I suspect. The Kitteh Man there tries his best and, from what I can tell, makes pretty good choices (I’ve known him to stick his hand in his own pocket for vet services). I don’t ask questions about that part, but there’s too much of the farm girl in me to come down hard for no-kill-under-any-circumstances. But this is PETA we’re talking here. The meat is murder people.
Speaking of which, PETAkillsanimals.com is funded by the Center for Consumer Freedom — a pro-business, pro-restaurant, pro-pharmaceutical, pro-consumer group, which PETArds are apt to take as prima facie evidence that everything PKA says is crap. But facts is facts. And the FOIA is the FOIA. And who the hell else is going to be motivated to check out these sick fucks if not people who have been their targets? Just the occasional lonely journalist, crying in the wilderness.
Look…if you must, give your money to your local guys. The ones that are trying real hard and barely squeaking by. PETA doesn’t just kill kittens, it kills them for no damn reason at all.
Welcome ‘lanchers of various flavors. If this post makes you mad, check out the one above, about Ingrid Newkirk, founder of PETA. Make sure you’ve had your blood pressure meds first. Whoooeee!
July 31, 2008 — 6:48 pm
Comments: 29
You say ‘domestic’ I say ‘opportunist’
So the story goes that cats self-domesticated at about the same time as we began to practice agriculture. Agriculture makes granaries, granaries make mice, mice make cats. Plausible enough, but for a language quibble: I don’t think cats self-domesticated; I don’t think they changed one stripe from the Wild Kingdom version. Self-selected, more like. The ones that, on the whole, rather liked the company of man came out of the wilderness and settled in his granaries.
The fact is, some animals naturally rub along pretty well with people (and some don’t). They say you can’t tame a Felis silvestris grampia, no matter how hard you try. But catch a Felis silvestris lybica as a kitten and he’s anybody’s. They look exactly alike, but they’re different under the hood.
I’ve been thinking a lot about aminals lately. Sorry to drag you along on my middle-age what-do-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up journey to the center of my navel, but I’ve been trying to figure out if “animal artist” is interesting enough to last a lifetime. In the course of which, it occured to me that my favorite animals are the ones that rub along pretty well with humanity. Pets and livestock, of course, but I have a real soft spot for the vermin and the opportunists of nature, too.
Partly because they’re the only animals I get to see and interact with, I guess. But opportunistic animals also have a cheerful, bluff, “hey lady, you going to eat that french fry?” kind of attitude. They can take care of themselves just fine, thanks. None of this weak, whiny, candy-ass “woo, don’t even look at me, I’m endangered” stuff.
I don’t know. You think there’s much call for S. Weasel, famous painter of rats?
July 30, 2008 — 2:42 pm
Comments: 40
…and another thing…
Here’s how that kitteh study happened. A decade ago, a man in Scotland was taken to court for shooting a protected Scottish wildcat. Remember those? And he got up on the stand and said, “looks like a cat to me.” And they let him go because…well, yeah.
So scientists realized they needed to figure out the whole cat DNA dealio, especially if they wanted to protect some wildcats by law.
So dude went out and sampled almost a thousand cats, wild and domestic, from all over the world. There are five major flavors of wildcat, and the domestic cat can and does merrily interbreed with them all, because she’s a dirty, dirty girl. Which is why it’s so suprising that modern housecats can be traced not just to a single type of wildcat, but five specific individual cats.
Most domestic animals were domesticated simultaneously all over the place, from local wild stock, but not the cat. All the tens of millions of American housecats are the children of cats brought over on ships from the Olde Worlde — despite all our lovely lynx and margays and ocelots, the American domestic shorthair is all lybica. Isn’t that odd?
Okay, back to the Scottish wildcat for a second. One of the reasons they’re endangered is that they merrily interbreed with housecats. What researchers have found, though, is that over time the wildcat genes are stronger. That is, subsequent generations become, genetically, more and more like Felis sylvestris grampia and less like Mister Fluffybutt.
So I’m thinking that must by Lybica‘s trick. That despite inbreeding with some very dubious gentlemen, the line always moves back toward the original. Tabby breeds true.
A lot of cats have some stripeyness. Catch her in the right light and you can see faint bars under the black parts of Charlotte’s fur. But, other than that, Lybica characteristics aren’t usually sold separately. They all come together or not at all — the black lips, the brick red nose and paw pads, the long, blunt, wavy tail. It’s the whole Franklin Mint set, plus the beautiful mahogany display case.
All the slutty behavior and the silly shapes and colors cats have mutated into, it’s extraordinary how common cats like Schroedinger and Damien are — animals that have slap-bang regressed ten thousand years to the prototype.
I think that’s just so cool.
July 29, 2008 — 1:50 pm
Comments: 29
Danger: catblogging
Minion Scubafreak sent me pictures of Schroedinger the kitten on Friday, and I was struck by how much he looks like Damien at that age. “So what, Weasel?” you’re thinking. “Little gray stripey tabbies are as common as muck.”
Can I just take a second to tell you how very tired I am of reading your minds?
Anyhow, gray tabbies are different. Damien was my first and I observed him closely, after which I started paying attention to shelter tabbies and Cheezburger tabbies. It’s not just gray with black stripes and white highlights. Oh, no. There’s a whole constellation of unusual breed characteristics that go with: their paw pads and noses are a brick red. Their lips and the velvets of their paws are black. There’s a hint of brown undercoat around their muzzles and in other spots. Coarse fur, gray on the body (actually a side-by-side mixture of dark and light, like a badger). Long, wavy, blunt tails with black tips and a black dorsal stripe.
I could go on and on. In fact, I just did. Here, have some more.
There’s a tabby personality, too. They’re friendly, pushy, go-to-hell cats. Damien had a little hitch in his britches, a little trot in his trousers, a little wavey, jivey, slinky, shovy, hissy thing going. It was a cinch that boy would get into trouble; he probably invited an 18-wheeler to kiss his stripey ass. I have always believed he somehow bred true to some long ago wild pusso ancestor.
And I’m right, as usual. That lovely beast top left is a Near Eastern wildcat, Felis sylvestris lybica. Thanks to the miracle of mitochondrial DNA testing, they have recently discovered that animal and my boy had a common ancestor 130,000 years ago. Well, five common ancestors. In Eye-rack!
Dude. Read it in the Daily Mail. Must be true. (Okay, here it is in the NYTimes, Stuckup McSnooterson. And yes, it’s from last year).
They weren’t domesticated that long ago. They’re thinking maybe that happened maybe 10,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, but they used to think was 4,000 years and in Egypt, so this is pretty interesting. If you find this sort of thing interesting. Which I do and it’s my blog so you can cut it out or I’ll turn this thing around right now.
They found a cat buried, presumably with his owner, in a 9,500 year old grave in Cyprus. Which I thought was really sweet until I reflected that they undoubtedly killed the cat to accompany his owner into the afterlife. Unless the cat died first and they killed the man to keep the cat company in the afterlife, but I think that’s pretty unlikely.
Links to nice big color versions of the above: prototabby, Damien and Schroedinger.
Added: Did you see the thing Gabe linked at Ace’s, about how women bloggers aren’t popular because they post too much about their personal lives and their pets? Look, bud, there’s some shit about DNA in there, too. I didn’t really get that part, but it had some stuff with Latin words and everything, so ha ha on you. Jerkface.
July 28, 2008 — 10:07 am
Comments: 31
What next, O Lord? Ye Acme Safe on ye Head?
Pissing and Moaning Week continues on sweasel.com.
Okay, sure…I’ve been upgraded from ‘tasteless’ to ‘personal’ on Websense (thank you, Websense — I wonder who dropped a dime on me in the first place)…my desktop machine booted up normally, first try. But it takes more than THAT to tickle an weasel.
The conference room across from us has been ceded to a large, loud, high-priced IT consultant from Atlanta. She’s got a sinus infection and every few minutes — shitting you I am not — she horks up a giant loogie.
This is followed by a series of quiet gasps, moans and little moos of horror running down Cubicle Row. (Relax, minions — that’s not how Stoaty got wet. That comes later).
So to get away from it at lunch, I went to visit the pussoes again. They were crating up some dogs to take to the vet, so they didn’t let us in at the usual time. Half a dozen people waited outside under the porch when another of those short, HELLACIOUSLY powerful thunderboomers rolled through. Soaked the lot of us before anyone could let us in. The staff was all apologetic when they finally hustled the steaming herd of animal fanciers into the building.
That’s when I saw the CAT ROOM CLOSED TODAY sign. Respiratory infection. They’re pretty good at stopping that now, before it runs through the whole room, but it means careful isolation for a few days. (Say, I wonder if that’s what the IT consultant has got…)
Still, the quickest way for six strangers to become temporary friends is to get soaking wet together. While I waited for the worst of it to pass over, we chatted about pets and pointed out our HAVE YOU SEEN ME? flyers to each other and had a grand time there on the Group W bench.
And tomorrow, now that I have my connect back, I might actually blog. About things.
But don’t count on it.
July 24, 2008 — 5:23 pm
Comments: 36
Hey, sailors
The woman who sits next to me was working in another office today, so I visited the pussoes. None of the original bunch is left, except for the other little mama. She was pregnant longer than any cat the shelter guy had ever heard of. Me too. I thought maybe the kittens had died and she was resorbing them (this can happen, I think. Nature can be so…ew). But, no. Just as he was about to haul her to the vet, out popped four of the healthiest fat furballs you ever did see. No two alike, so she’s no better than she should be.
While I was chatting with the Kitteh Man, a nice young gay couple came in cat shopping. I thought to myself, “I wonder which cat they’ll choose…NOT!”
Yup. Fluffy McHomosexual here is no longer a stray. Well. He’s a good cat and I’m sure the nice gentlemen will make him a lovely home. Plus, they were eyeballing a certain kitten and a tuxedo tom and made inquiries about taking all three. So, hooray for soft-hearted cat-adopting persons of the same sex!
Sweasel.com is still blocked by Websense. I’ve sent another “I’m not that tasteless, pretty please” request. Frankly, the internet is in the summer doldrums anyhow (have you noticed?) and ain’t nothing to blog about. I’ll just…catblog or photoblog to show willing until I get this straightened out. And if I can’t work it out this week, I’ll see about setting up a mirror or something.
Good think I never monetized this sucker, or I’d be pissed.
July 22, 2008 — 4:34 pm
Comments: 39
Dude, my cat is SO HIGH
My cat is as high as a elephant’s eye. I read an article on animal pain management the other day that said opiates are still the best choice, so I’m guessing they filled her right up with smack. Her pupils were the size of dinnerplates; almost no green showing at all (I got a nice shot of this, but my SD card burped and mangled it). Yep. A Gig kitty of my very own, at last.
It’s always fun to see Charlotte act goofy. She was three months old, feral and starved nigh unto death when I trapped her with a squirrel trap baited with tuna. By the time she was strong enough to play, she was too old to learn how. I’d dangle a string in front of her, and she’d squint up at me solemnly, like, “yeah. It’s a string. Did you want something, lady?”
Now she got de rubberleg and a tongue that won’t stay in her mouth. Her pupils are back down to usual size this morning, but she’s still teh stoned. She gets a dose in her Friskies for three days, so I got liquid kitteh to play with for a while.
July 10, 2008 — 8:31 am
Comments: 47
It’s the Circle of Liiiiiiiiiife
Well! As of today, all (but one) of the original complement of pussoes at the shelter have either been adopted or…done that other thing. I think, with that, my grossly misplaced sense of personal responsibility is more or less satisfied. I think I’ll give Meowschwitz a rest for a while.
There’s a retired dude who tends to show up just as I’m leaving and I have the feeling I horned in on his gig. The front office calls him “the second shift” and the kittehs are, like, “no thanks, we’ve already eaten and had head skritchies.”
But fear not. It’s never long before I find more of somebody else’s bidness to stick my snout into.
June 26, 2008 — 12:34 pm
Comments: 76
Things that are not right
In a continuation of my apparent blog death wish, recent comments got me thinking about when I had my tomcat Roughly put down. He got kidney cancer, poor lad, when he was about twelve.
The vet left the timing entirely up to me. I would have appreciated some guidance, actually. Different vet. Didn’t like him either.
If you go through this, make sure they’re giving your animal the sleepy, tranquilizer stuff. Because there’s another stuff that’s more of a stimulant. It’s quick, but beloved pet has enough time to let out a last yelp. This is not nice at all.
I lived downtown and yardless, so when they asked if I wanted him cremated, I didn’t have much choice. And when they asked if I wanted the ashes back, I said I guess so. I thought he had a better chance of being handled individually that way. I’m not usually sentimental about remains, but it just didn’t seem right to send out the Best Cat Ever cheek by jowl with somebody’s schnauzer (though I suppose that’s what actually happened anyway).
I forgot about it until several weeks later, when they called me to pick him up. I thought the box was strangely heavy. Inside was a big white marble urn!
My mom? She came back to me in a plastic baggie sealed with a twist-tie.
June 25, 2008 — 2:45 pm
Comments: 56