Editorial: Obsessed about pit bulls? Among the many issues raised by Beth Clifton’s ANIMALS 24-7 essay “Why pit bulls will break your heart,” published yesterday, is whether ANIMALS 24-7 is obsessed about pit bull issues that most of the humane community prefers to ignore. Indeed, of the first 350 articles posted by ANIMALS 24-7 in five months online, about 10% have focused on pit bull proliferation, attacks by pit bulls on humans and other animals, and––especially––pit bull attacks occurring because humane societies and animal control agencies pretend that the risks associated with dogs bred for centuries to kill other dogs, tethered bulls, and escaped slaves do not exist. ANIMALS 24-7 covers these issues because other media serving the humane community do not. Failure to honestly face and address the realities of pit bulls, ANIMALS 24-7 believes, is a cancer eating away the heart and soul of animal advocacy. ANIMALS 24-7 does not believe that animal rights, animal welfare, or even just being kind to animals is advanced by protecting backyard breeders of fighting dogs from the passage of effective breed-specific legislation to prevent the births of a million pit bulls per year who will repeatedly flunk out of homes and be killed at the average age of 18 months. ANIMALS 24-7 further does not believe that allowing the mauling deaths of 43,000 other animals per year––about 5,000 of them mauled by pit bulls rehomed from animal shelters––is in any way morally preferable to accepting the ethical responsibility of euthanizing a dangerous dog. Your warm response to ANIMALS 24-7––launched entirely on my own personal credit––affirms our hunch that most grassroots animal advocates agree with us. Most grassroots animal advocates are acutely aware––and horrified––that the leading national humane organizations have veered so far off message, not only in pit bull advocacy but in activities such as sponsoring meatfests in the name of promoting farm animal welfare, exposed in our most read article of the past 30 days. We need your help to keep getting the word out. ANIMALS 24-7 is obviously not getting even one red cent of support from any of the meat-pushing and pit bull-pushing national organizations. We depend entirely on you, our conscientious individual donors, to keep us on the job of investigating and exposing, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, publishing the news and raising hell. Please click animals24-7.org/donate/ and put in your 2¢, two dollars, $20, $200, or whatever else you can to help our effort to restore perspective, ethics, and compassion to the cause. Thank you, Merritt Clifton, founder P.S.––I bet everything I have that you feel as strongly as I do that the lives and well-being of all animals matter and are not to be sacrificed to either economic expediency or “political correctness.” Your generous donations tell me I’m right, and that together we will win this struggle for the heart and soul of the animals’ cause.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 07:41:28 +0000
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