A Solstice Prayer for Chase the Lost Dog

Chase, a beagle mix, was found wandering in a rural area of Athens, Ohio and picked up by the Animal Warden and brought to the shelter there. He ran out of time and was on death row. He was picked to join a group of dogs slated to come to Ontario to one of the humane societies here, but then the week of transport, they ran out of room and once again Chase was at risk …. back on death row because he had nowhere to go.

His rescuer was bringing a couple of dogs up to her rescue, and her contact in Ohio asked if she would please also take Chase and one other hound also being left behind, and that’s how Chase came to be in Ontario. He traveled with the volunteer group Open Arms Transports which provides volunteer drivers to bring dogs north to Canada and safety. Each driver drives approx. one hour north and then hands the dogs off to the next driver who goes one hour north, and so on.

Chase finally got adopted but on his first night in his new home, he escaped the yard and bolted. That was Saturday Dec. 12th. He’s been missing ever since.

As of yesterday, he is on the run and last spotted heading west on Lakeshore near 30th Street. The Oakville Humane Society and the Toronto Wildlife Center have both loaned the rescue group humane live traps to catch Chase.

We need the public to keep a look out for Chase and let us know where/when he is spotted so that we can track his whereabouts and set up the traps.

It is imperative though that people do not call him or get too close to him because he is terrified and will run. He needs to be oblivious to the fact that you’ve seen him.

It would be a terrible tragedy for Chase to have been saved from death row in Ohio, only to die alone … hungry, cold, and frightened … on Toronto streets.

Chase is fully vaccinated and microchipped. He is wearing a red collar with Ohio rabies tag and also a yellow microchip tag. He is also wearing a black/red harness.

If you can help us, please contact the numbers above. (Note that Toronto Animal Services is closed for part of the holiday week).

Up to date information at Chase’s Facebook group:  Help Find Chase

Global TV coverage (Video availability can be sporadic).

Lost dog notification at One Bark at a Time

Image:  Stray Dog, Roger Winter

A Muzzle Fit for a Princess

Dwyn Tomlinson is one of the jewellery artists over at BeadFX that posts her usually over-the-top inspirations on their website.

This week, she’s put together a lovely rhinestone-decorated dog muzzle!

The muzzle is for Miss Chrysanthemum, a kissy pitty that is unfortunately discriminated against in our wonderful province because of her looks. Now she has a fancy muzzle that she can wear with Attitude!

Dwyn did the decoration with a device called The Bejeweller, which is used to hot-glue rhinestones. The Bejeweller has a variety of cup shaped tips that you put down over the rhinestone on the front, and it heats up the stone and melts the hot-fix glue on the back. You then position the rhinestone in place, and it sticks there. You take the Bejeweller away and go get the next one.

A lot of Swarovski stones were put to good use in the creation of this pretty accessory.

Dwyn’s blog: Dragonjools

Matter Lent: The Photographs of Sally Mann

From Erika Ritter’s The Dog by the Cradle, the Serpent Beneath:

Early in the twenty-first century, American photographer Sally Mann disinterred the year-old remains of her beloved pet greyhound, Eva, salvaged what fragments she could, and took them back to her studio to reassemble and photograph. Eventually, those photographic studies of Eva’s hide and bones became part of a larger exhibition Mann called “What Remains”.

That 2004 exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery was subtitled “Matter Lent”. As art critic and scholar Alice Kuzniar points out, “Lent” conveys a sense of gravity, similar to the forty-day period of mourning called Lent that precedes the resurrection of Christ.

What Remains is a five-part series that explores the ineffable divide between body and soul, life and death, earth and spirit. The project visually depicts the eternal cycle of life, death, and regeneration. What Remains draws upon the artist’s personal experiences as inspiration for a haunting series about the one subject that affects us all: the loss of life and what remains.

The subtitle also serves to evoke the fleeting way in which pet animals – espeically in view of their comparatively short lifespans – are “lent” to us, only to be taken away too soon by mishap, disease, or decrepitude. The bleakness of that little pile of bones and hair that Eva has dwindled down to in her posthumous photos strikes Kuzniar as “suggesting an unutterable, choking grief that can only put on display but not verbally express what essentially is a void.”

The text Sally Mann wrote to accompany the imaes of Eva’s remains documents her wanting to find out what had “finally become of that head I had stroked, oh ten thousand times, those paws she so delicately crossed as she lay by my desk, rock-hard nails emerging from the finest white hairs.”

Never one to shy away from challenging subject matter, Mann asks us in What Remains to contemplate the beauty and efficiency with which nature assimilates the body once life is over. Here she seamlessly connects the landscape of the earth to the topography of the body and examines how both are tightly interwoven. Yet she creates tension between the two. As the exhibition progresses, portrait faces of her children emerge from the darkness of the alchemical photographic process, surrounded by murky images of the landscape, as if struggling to become free of the earth that inevitably reclaims the body.

For humans in general, the extent to which we summarize animals in terms of their physical essence may cause us to treat their remains either as enormously significant or as completely inconsequential. On one end of the spectrum, there are pet cemeteries and Sally Mann’s photographed remains of her beloved Eva’s bones. On the other end, there’s the commodified carcass hung in the utcher’s window or the meaningless tuft of fur on the roadshide that once was a chipmunk.

Discussion of the exhibition at Artnet.

Image: Sally Mann, Untitled #17, 2003.

Pilgrimage to St. Guinefort’s Wood

Earlier, we wrote about Guinefort, the dog saint, the inspiration for the Welsh story of the hound, Gelert. Both dogs, having killed a serpent threatening the infant son of the lord of the castle, had been killed in anger just before said lord discovered his son safe beneath the cradle and the serpent dead.

Some of us make pilgrimages. For me, it is to Beautiful Joe Park, resting place of Marshall Saunders’ canine hero. Beautiful Joe was a real dog and he really lived in Meaford, Ontario. In addition to his cairn, the park boasts shrines to service dogs, including Sirius, the 9-11 rescue dog, and there is an annual garden party.

I’m heartened that author Erika Ritter is another pilgrim. She writes about her visit to the little town of Chatillon-sur-Charonne in France, in search of the woods and burial place of Guinefort, dog saint and children’s protector.

Here is an excerpt from her wonderful new book, The Dog by the Cradle, the Serpent Beneath, about the paradoxes of human-animal relationships.

“Not far to the northwest is … Chatillon-sur-Chalaronne. That’s the same Chalaronne River which, a few kilometres beyond the vollage, runs alongside the grove of trees where tens of generations of mothers gathered, to immerse their children in the water as part of a superstitious healing ritual.”

“Before coming here, I inured myself to the very real possibility that modern Chatillon-sur-Chalaronne might be a hideous strip of cheesy malls. Or perhaps a zone industrielle paved over the holy greyhound’s one-time burial place. At the very least, I was braced for souvenir shops hawking t-shirts declaring ‘J’ai Survecu le Bois de Guignefort.’”

“But St. Guinefort was nowhere to be seen in Chatillon-sur-Chalaronne, and nobody in town seemed to have any idea he was the heart and soul of the local tourist industry… In an overcrowded pizzeria, a kindly couple offered to share their table, and ultimately their fellowship with us. What were foreign tourists doing here in the off-season?”

“‘Nous cherchons le Bois de Guignefort,’” we answered.”

“‘Le bois de … quoi?’”

“Well, like, duh. C’est evident, n’est-ce pas? The holy greyhound?”

“For by no means the first time in my long, inglorious history of failing to locate dog-related markers, monuments and memorials, I experienced a sinking sensation. I ducked into a nearby stationer, thinking that, at this point, even to blunder upon a small souvenir greyhound would be better than nothing.”

“Inside Le Papier Rouge, a shelf of tourism books caught my eye. I went over to investigate – and came face to face with a glossy brown-and-off-white pamphlet entitled Saint Guignefort Legende, Archaeologie, Histoire.”

“Good dog, Guinefort, I thought as I carried the monograph to the cash.”

“A Nancy Drew moment is what I prefer to call my surprising stumble upon a salient clue. The worst kind of Nancy Drew moment. I went into that shop looking for some sort of kitschy little dog figurine.”

From Ritter’s book. Read it.

St. Guinefort, the Dog Saint

From De Supersticione, by inquisitor Stephen de Bourbon:

The sixth thing to say is about insulting superstitions, some of which are insulting to God, others to man. The superstitions which attribute divine honors to demons or any other creature insult God. Idolatry is one example, or when wretched women sorcerers seek salvation through the adoration of saddles (sambuca) to which they make offerings, through the condemnation of churches and relics of the saints, through carrying their children to ant-hills or other places in search of healing.

This is what they did recently in the diocese of Lyons. When preaching there against sorcery and hearing confessions, I heard many women confess that they had carried their children to St. Guinefort. I thought he was some saint. I made inquiries and at last heard that he was a certain greyhound killed in the following way. In the diocese of Lyons, close to the vill of the nuns called Villeneuve, on the land belonging to the lord of Villars-en-Dombe, there was a certain castle whose lord had a baby son from his wife. But when the lord and lady and the nurse too had left the house, leaving the child alone in his cradle, a very large snake entered the house and made for the child’s cradle. The greyhound, who had remained there, saw this, dashed swiftly under the cradle in pursuit, knocking it over, and attacked the snake with its fangs and answering bite with bite. In the end the dog killed it and threw it far away from the child’s cradle which he left all bloodied as was his mouth and head, with the snake’s blood, and stood there by the cradle all beaten about by the snake. When the nurse came back and saw this, she thought the child had been killed and eaten by the dog and so gave out an almighty scream. The child’s mother heard this, rushed in, saw and thought the same and she too screamed. Then the knight similarly once he got there believed the same, and drawing his sword killed the dog. Only then did they approach the child and find him unharmed, sleeping sweetly in fact. On further investigation, they discovered the snake torn up by the dog’s bites and dead. Now that they had learned the truth of the matter, they were embarrassed (dolentes) that they had so unjustly killed a dog so useful to them and threw his body into a well in front of the castle gate, and placing over it a very large heap of stones they planted trees nearby as a memorial of the deed.

But the castle was in due course destroyed by divine will, and the land reduced to a desert abandoned by its inhabitants. The local peasants hearing of the dog’s noble deed and innocent death, began to visit the place and honor the dog as a martyr in quest of help for their sicknesses and other needs. They were seduced and often cheated by the Devil so that he might in this way lead men into error. Women especially, with sick or poorly children, carried them to the place, and went off a league to another nearby castle where an old woman could teach them a ritual for making offerings and invocations to the demons and lead them to the right spot. When they got there, they offered salt and certain other things, hung the child’s little clothes (diapers?) on the bramble bushes around, fixing them on the thorns. They then put the naked baby through the opening between the trunks of two trees, the mother standing on one side and throwing her child nine times to the old woman on the other side, while invoking the demons to adjure the fauns in the wood of “Rimite” to take the sick and failing child which they said belonged to them (the fauns) and return to them their own child big, plump, live and healthy. Once this was done, the killer mothers took the baby and placed it naked at the foot of the tree on the straws of a cradle, lit at both ends two candles a thumbsbreadth thick with fire they had brought with them and fastened them on the trunk above. Then, while the candles were consumed, they went far enough away that they could neither hear nor see the child. In this way the burning candles burned up and killed a number of babies, as we have heard from others in the same place.

One woman told me that after she had invoked the fauns and left, she saw a wolf leaving the wood and going to the child and the wolf (or the devil in wolf’s form, so she said) would have devoured it had she not been moved by her maternal feelings and prevented it. On the other hand, if when they returned they found the child alive, they picked it up and carried it to a swiftly flowing river nearby, called the Chalaronne [tributary of the Saône], and immersed it nine times, to the point where if it escaped dying on the spot or soon after, it must have had very tough innards.

We went to the place and assembled the people and preached against the practice. We then had the dead dog dug up and the grove of trees cut down and burned along with the dog’s bones. Then we had an edict enacted by the lords of the land threatening the spoliation and fining of any people who gathered there for such a purpose in future.

Source: Paul Hansall, Internet Medieval Source Book.

More on dog saints at Dissident Editions.

Puppy Mill Hell

When an animal rescuer attended a dog auction in Missouri, she found the dogs selling for almost nothing.  The Missouri Department of Agriculture had ordered the sale because conditions in the puppy mill had deteriorated from whatever their miserable standards were.

Before the dogs could even be offered for sale, they had to be shaved and dipped in a poisonous chemical to kill all the vermin on their bodies.

The rescuer bid on dogs selling for five dollars, one dollar, even a quarter.  She did not know where she could take all the dogs that she brought back with her that day, but she also knew that the dogs that did not sell might be killed.

Two SUV’s full of dogs. Six schnauzers, a maltese and a pregnant poodle. We line the cages up in our studio. This moment is their first taste of freedom. All were left at the end of an auction, facing death. HUA paid .25 for each, saving them from being put to sleep, saying they deserve a chance to live.

There is no better place than a dog auction to observe the total lack of compassion and respect for life that is the hallmark of the pet industry.  Terrified dogs are pulled from their cages and muddy pens and paraded on the auction table while the auctioneer bawls out their breeding ability.  “No bottom jaw, but that’s not whar she breeds.”

On a freezing cold day, dogs are set out in open wire crates to spend the day until they are hauled off in the back of open trucks to freeze on their way to another hellhole.  In the humid heat of early fall in the southern states, dogs are taken from their sweat boxes and crammed into small travel kennels at the close of the auction.  The treatment of dogs at dog auctions has always been incredibly horrible even when they brought good prices.  Now they are worth almost no money, which is the only value known to the breeders.  The dogs can suffer to death during the sale or while being transported, and it is of no consequence.

Julie Lavin, director of Hearts United for Animals (HUA) and the founder of Almost Home Canine Rescue, drove through the entire night to meet the transport on the interstate and bring dogs to her rescue or transfer to other rescues.  The following day Janeal Dominico, founder of Little White Dog Rescue, drove to Iowa to take dogs for her rescue and bring the rest to HUA.  She met HUA volunteers in Omaha with the dogs who had nowhere else to go.

The HUA volunteers drove directly to a television station where the dogs were welcomed and taken into the newsroom.  There the doors of their travel kennels were opened.  When the Schnauzers realized it was a safe place, they bounded happily around the studio enjoying their newfound freedom.

Their old lives so fresh, auction tags are still wrapped around their necks. Some dogs are too scared to completely step out of their cages. The pregnant poodle doesn’t hesitate. She has infected ears, rotted teeth, and a lot of love to give.

The lady poodle stepped gracefully out of her kennel, walked around to every person in the room with a loving greeting as if to say thank you, and laid her head in the news reporter’s lap.  This pathetic looking dog, only three years old, was a skeleton shaved to the skin with cuts and abrasions everywhere, and she was soon to give birth to puppies.  She has been named Angel.

The story of the 25-cent schnauzers and the pregnant poodle made the ten o’clock news that evening. KMTV, Channel 3 in Omaha, has worked for months to bring the plight of the puppy mill dogs to the attention of the public.  Every dog loving person owes a big debt of gratitude to these kind people.

When you buy a puppy from a pet store, just who do you think is getting rich? Corporate puppy mills, back yard breeders and hell-holes like this one.

Support your local animal shelter.

More at Prisoners of Greed.

Eating Animals

A good read for anyone interested in the travesty that is factory farming is Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book: Eating Animals.  Here’s an excerpt:

We have let the factory farm replace farming for the same reasons our cultures have relegated minorities to being second-class members of society and kept women under the power of men. We treat animals as we do because we want to and can. (Does anyone really wish to deny this anymore?)

At the end of the day, factory farming isn’t about feeding people; it’s about money. Whether or not it’s right to kill animals for food, we know that in today’s dominant systems, it’s impossible to kill them without at least inflicting occasional torture. That is why some farmers apologize to their animals as they are sent off to slaughter. They’ve made a compromise rather than cut a fair deal.

If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to centre our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war.

The everyday horrors of factory farming are evoked so vividly, and the case against the people who run the system presented so convincingly, that anyone who, after reading Foer’s book, continues to consume the industry’s products must be without a heart, or impervious to reason, or both.

~ J.M. Coetzee

It shouldn’t be the consumer’s responsibility to figure out what’s cruel and what’s kind, what’s environmentally destructive and what’s sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don’t need the option of buying children’s toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabelled side effects. And we don’t need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.

Historians tell a story about Abraham Lincoln. that while returning to Washington from Springfield, he forced his entire party to stop to help some small birds he saw in distress. When chided by the others, he responded, quite plainly, “I could not have slept tonight if I had left those poor creatures on the ground and not restored them to their mother.” He observed, quite simply, that once those suffering birds came into his view, a moral burden had been assumed. He could not be himself if he walked away.

Whether I sit at the global table, with my family or with my conscience, the factory farm … feels inhuman. To accept the factory farm…to feed the food it produces to my family, to support it with my money — would make me less myself, less my grandmother’s grandson, less my son’s father.

This is what my grandmother meant when she said, “If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.

Image: Christopher Rogers.

Exotic Fights

About three weeks ago, the Toronto office of the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) launched an education campaign to raise awareness of the cruelty to animals inherent in blood sports such as bullfighting, bear baiting and cockfighting. One of their eye-popping print ads showed up today in Metro news, the favourite free paper of transit riders.

The smart campaign materials are designed to mimic the old-style circus event posters. At first glance these posters and advertisements seemingly publicize bullfighting, bear baiting and cockfighting events; however on closer inspection they contain clever messaging that indicates these activities are cruel and barbaric.

Created largely pro-bono by award-winning Toronto advertising agency TBWA, the campaign is designed to pique the interest of those individuals who might be attracted to attend these kinds of events with an aim to show them what truthfully happens at these events – hundreds of thousands of animals suffer unnecessarily and die solely for human entertainment.

Exotic Fights dot com.

More about the campaign.

More about the blood sports .

There’s a Dog in my Church

Montreal is one step closer to being North America’s Paris: it’s gaining on the City of Lights — a famously pooch-friendly place — by offering a monthly communion church service for dogs.

Paws and Pray was recently inaugurated at Christ Church Beaurepaire, an Anglican church in Beaconsfield on Montreal’s west island, to coincide with the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals. The communion service features bread and wine, as well as doggie treats and bowls of water for the four-legged parishioners.

The church’s minister, Michael Johnson, said he has always enjoyed doing a pet blessing once a year.

Johanne Tassé, president of Companion Animal Adoption Centres of Quebec, who suggested the idea to Johnson, said she believes the idea can have a profound impact.

“Animals deserve our care and respect,” said Tassé. “If we can bring dogs to church, how can we turn around and abuse them?”

She believes that the “deplorable” state of animal welfare in Quebec requires people take a closer look at how animals impact our lives.

“There are search-and-rescue dogs, search-and-recovery dogs, dogs to help the disabled, dogs that go into hospitals,” said Tassé. “Dogs help us so much and we need to recognize them as being part of our lives.”

She believes that by welcoming dogs into a house of worship, people will be less likely to neglect their dogs and the service can help effect a change of attitude.

“We’ve lost a little bit of our humanity,” said Tassé. “The time is right to elevate (animals’) significance in our lives.”

Full story at The Province and The Chronicle Herald.

Le French Connection/Highway of Hope.

Baxter the World’s Best Therapy Dog

Baxter, the world’s best, most devoted, and oldest working therapy dog, 19 years and 6 months, eased peacefully from his life on Friday afternoon, October 16th. His angel wings were well deserved.

You’re in the arms of an angel. May you find some comfort there.

Baxter, a chow mix rescued at the age of two, began volunteering seven years ago at San Diego Hospice. In a place created for making goodbyes gentler, Baxter comforted everyone who crossed his path. He licked tears from grieving faces, gave hugs to those at a loss for words, and warmed the hearts and souls of those who were making their transition. He would take his body and curl himself next to a patient for hours, making this intense eye contact that penetrated the human spirit in everyone, proving his undeniable loyalty, love, and sensitivity. Everyone loved Baxter!

Baxter has his own blog, Facebook page and book, Moments With Baxter.

In the last few years the arthritic Baxter needed to be pushed into the hospital rooms on a little wagon and gently placed into the arms of the dying. It was his vulnerability in his old age that helped him bond even more to the patients he helped let go of life. Watch this beautiful tribute to this amazing dog.