If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed. -- Benjamin Franklin
This month marks the 15th anniversary of ZVTS and, well...damn.
This child of mine is almost old enough to start taking driving lessons.
Didn't think I'd make it this far, or that I'd still be fighting The Stupid a decade and a half later, but here we are.
Thanks for sticking around, folks.
With Supreme Court silly season over, we're taking a bit of a break here to recharge.
Anything good comes along I'll write it up, but we'll be on limited posts for the first week of July.
Meanwhile, go watch Nimona on Netflix. I haven't seen an animated film ooze this much style since Soul.
Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates, and keep warm this Sunday if you don't. Have a good holiday season for you and yours.
Me, I don't ask for much, but if you've enjoyed my posts over the year, try dropping a few bucks in the tip jar.
Several of you have over the years, and it's been appreciated.
Be safe.
OK folks, we're hibernating until 2023 with limited posting.
As usual, I'll have my prediction scorecard for 2022 graded, and I'll make my 2023 predictions on December 31.
Light posting for the rest of the week for the Thanksgiving holiday.
Enjoy the time with your loved ones.
If anything *really* goes wrong, we'll cover it.
Taking a break this week after a repugnant mess of a SCOTUS term, and the perverse notion that America is a land of freedom and liberty. I'll be having limited posting this week in order to try to recharge the batteries for the fight ahead.
Have a safe and happy 4th holiday, at least.
It's my birthday, so I'm taking the day off. I need it. (I think we all need a day off.)
If any really important news breaks, I'll get it in Last Call or so.
Thanks for being with me all these years, folks. America has changed dramatically in some ways over these nearly 14 years that I've been doing this, and documenting those changes has been a vital part of dealing with them.
It's something I can control, you know?
Have a good one. I'll be around tomorrow.
The dusty white cargo plane stood out among the gleaming corporate jets, as did its passengers: 48 barking dogs, newly arrived at the private air terminal at Hanscom Field, outside of Boston.
They had left Mississippi that morning with their health certificates taped to their kennels. All week, the staff at Oktibbeha County Humane Society (OCHS), in Starkville, Miss., had been getting them ready, giving them their shots, testing their temperaments, and color-coding each crate for its destination: red for Second Chance Animal Services in North Brookfield, Mass.; gray for the Animal Rescue League of Boston; and blue for the MSPCA, an independent animal-welfare organization.
On the tarmac, representatives from each jostled around the animals like vacationers at baggage claim. Danielle Bowes, a staff member at Second Chance, checked her list. She was looking for two tiny puppies named Tiger and Presley; black and brown 4-month-olds Bandit, Josie, and Wells; an adult lab mix, Trent; and a dozen more, ranging from 8 lb. to 40 lb., from 8 weeks to 4 years old. When she found Bravo, a 1-year-old collie and American blue heeler mix, she cooed into his cage, “Hi, Pretty, you’re going to go quick!” Back at Second Chance, the dogs will quarantine for 48 hours, per state law, before they go up for adoption. If past experience is any guide—and transports like this arrive nearly every week all over the country, by plane, truck, and van—they will be gone in a few days, becoming the newest of the estimated 90 million canines living with U.S. families.
There is not a dog shortage in America—not yet, at least. But there are stark geographic differences in supply and demand. Massachusetts needs more dogs, and Mississippi has too many. The same is true of Delaware and Oklahoma, Minnesota and Louisiana, New York and Tennessee, and Washington and New Mexico, among other states. To compensate, sophisticated dog–relocation networks have sprung up over the past decade, transporting dogs and cats from states with too many to states with too few. Mostly, it’s a tactical problem: “How do we connect those shelters that have too many animals and are at risk of euthanasia simply because they were born there, to those shelters where these animals are gonna fly off the shelves?” says Matt Bershadker, CEO of the ASPCA, the New York–based animal-welfare giant, which sponsored and organized the flight arriving at Hanscom. Over the past five years, the ASPCA has poured resources into its “relocation” program, which in March will celebrate its 200,000th animal moved. But it is far from alone.
These pipelines of adoptable animals—primarily, but not exclusively, moving from south to north—have become a cultural phenomenon in their own right, and a key part of a broader transformation of companion-animal welfare. The ASPCA’s program may be the biggest and most organized, but dogs (and, to a lesser extent, cats) move by all sorts of other means. There are ad hoc bands of volunteers, organizing on Facebook and Petfinder, who cover their back seats with towels and rendezvous at rest stops, passing animals along every couple hundred miles. In big cities and their suburbs, nonprofits have sprung up to partner with overcrowded Southern shelters, hire a driver and load up a van with a few dozen animals every month or more. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many of these groups became overwhelmed with demand in some states, leading to months-long waiting lists and stiff competition among adopters. That spurred a surprising fourth category: veritable smugglers, who saw an opportunity in loading up a horse trailer with the cutest strays and driving north (leaving the nonprofits with the sick and less desirable animals).
It is a good time to be an American dog. In the 1970s, as many as 20 million dogs and cats were euthanized each year. That number has declined precipitously. The ASPCA now estimates 390,000 dogs and 530,000 cats are euthanized each year, down from 2.6 million as recently as 2011. That’s still too many—especially when a way to further reduce the number is at hand. Euthanasia was once seen as an inevitability: there were just too many animals. But a combination of factors—cultural, medical, and political—has changed that. More people want mutts, rebranded “rescues.” Fewer animals are born each year, thanks to broader spay and neuter programs, often dictated by law, and improved surgical techniques. And more are being moved, which helps save those animals, but also opens up space and time to care for others left behind. For shelter staff, who suffer from a disproportionately high rate of mental-health problems, nothing matters more than keeping up with their animals’ needs. Rather than being beaten down by the incessant necessity of euthanizing the unwanted, they are buoyed by a steady flow of adoptions.
Money helps, of course. The geographic disparities that lead one place to have too many dogs and another too few are primarily fueled by a difference in resources. Shelters in heavily populated cities and suburbs benefit from well-funded population-control programs and large pools of potential adopters. Shelters in rural areas struggle with excess animals, and communities with broader economic burdens. Puppies flying private may seem excessive—the flight into Hanscom cost the ASPCA approximately $30,000—but the kennels on the tarmac among the corporate jets are an indicator of the broader success of the animal-welfare movement, and the enthusiasm of its donors. The easy problems are nearly solved; the hard ones require a new approach. “Animal relocation” is not only about meeting demand for puppies, but also building the capacity to help all animals.
The ASPCA-sponsored flight exemplifies an organized effort to connect disparate communities in pursuit of a common goal. It is a living, breathing—barking, panting—geographic arbitrage. But by treating these flying puppies as points of connection between communities, like the knots in a net, the issue of excess animals can be addressed. It’s a recognition that some problems, even ones that bridge red states and blue states, can be solved together.
Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate, and have a great Saturday to those of you who don't.
Me, I remain astonished that I'm still at this and have been for twelve and a half years, and that you're all still here with me.
Here's good wishes to all of you.
We're going into hibernation for the rest of the year starting today. I'll have some things as they warrant on a daily basis, because the fight against the Stupid doesn't rest, but I'll have our usual end-of-year review and predictions for 2022 as well, and we'll be back in the New Year.
Thanks to all of you who still actually want to read this mess after 13 years.
It's Thanksgiving, and that means light posting this week. Still, there should be a lot to talk about, and there's a lot to be grateful for still, like you folks who still read me after 13 years.
Have a peaceful week, folks. I'll be along later today.
Seems like a good time to take a break this week, but I should be making at least one post daily.
I do appreciate all of you. I've seen some of you folks around for over a dozen years now and it still surprises me that anyone would stick around for my goofy-ass opinions after all this time.
I remain humbled, as I do regularly. It's been a hell of a journey, and we continue it daily.
Here's Babish's Eggs Florentine recipe, because man, I love Cooking With Babish.
As I said earlier this year, 2020 has been rough on all of us, so if my missives into the void have been of any use to you, please consider dropping a few bucks in the tip jar. If you can't, no problem. I'm glad to have everyone as a reader after all this time and I appreciate your continued support above all.
You can use the Donate button below, or the link at paypal.me/zandarvts.
Going to have a reduced posting schedule for the rest of the week, but there's enough going on that I will try to post daily. But hey, after everything that's gone on this month, I think we all need a break from this particular orange turkey.
Also it's been a rough year, so if you enjoy ZVTS, drop a buck or three in the Paypal bucket if you can. If you can't, take care of yourself. We all need one another.
As the official fireworks show began over the National Mall, some people gathered at Black Lives Matter Plaza offered up a counter narrative in the form of Lift Every Voice and Sing, the Black national anthem. Others opted instead to chant “fuck your fireworks.”
The plaza played host to protesters throughout the day, a largely tension-free scene as demonstrators continued to demand racial justice. But as Independence Day shifted to night, a series of small confrontations played out, a microcosm of ongoing debate about the right tactics to confront white supremacy.
Around 10:40, a group of Trump supporters walked through, only for protesters to escort them out. Another person walked through, and a protester through his red hat over a fence.
Some protesters wanted to get more physical with the president’s supporters, while others just wanted to help facilitate their exit. Police eventually formed a line to prevent the Trump supporters from reentering the plaza on Vermont Ave.
Earlier in the night—just before the official Fourth of July military flyovers began—a small group of protesters gathered for a “Flag-Burning Challenge,” where they set small U.S. flags alight before eventually torching a larger flag that was laying on the ground. The event sparked a brief scuffle, as other protesters tried to stop the flag-burning from happening.
“This is what they want, don’t give it to them,” said one person, alluding to how the act could generate negative coverage of the movement. (Stories about the flag-burning quickly started circulating in right-wing media.)
But for Jamel Mims of the New York City Revolution Club, burning the U.S. flag was justifiable.
“[Trump has] fucking called us terrorists, and called those people, that lynch mob that he’s enabled, ‘fine people.’ And so those fireworks represent a fucking disgrace, and that flag represents the ugly history of that country and its ugly present,” he said. “And there’s only one way to properly display it: fucking on fire.”
An entire town in Louisiana got a Christmas blessing thanks to holy water and an airplane.
Cow Island and the neighboring farms got a dusting of 100 gallons of holy water just before Christmas, the Diocese of Lafayette announced Sunday.
Cow Island is a town about 32 miles southwest of Lafayette.
The community-wide blessing was thought up by L'Eryn Detraz, a native of Cow Island and a missionary currently stationed in Ohio, the diocese said.
Parishioners of St. Anne Church brought water from home to be blessed by Fr. Matthew Barzare before it was loaded onto a plane and distributed by a cropduster pilot.
"A happy and blessed Christmas to everyone from St. Anne Church and parishioners!" the diocese said in the statement.
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