EDITION OF MONDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2018 [PetPowellPress] For Monday we’ll just declare that we’re a sick of human behavior and focus on the good, angelic hearts who are trying to help animals. We’ve had enough anguish in the past few days, so I’m going to start today’s report with something genuinely beautiful. Made by a human!!!! How’s that for a 180 turn on the highway of humanity?
We will have, of course, Contemplations, but first help the animals. Take a positive step in your neighborhood, your city.
LOOK AT THIS GREAT QUILT:
COULD BE YOURS, ANIMALS WILL WIN
So, I got the photos of this quilt from Sydney Busch at the Friends of the Animals at Cedar Creek Lake and showed it to my Funspouse Martha who immediately said, “You have to busy raffle tickets. I want that for Christmas.”
Here’s the story on this whimsically entertaining quilt. Sydney says the “gorgeous quilt” was “made for us and donated by Quilters Guild in Gun Barrel City.”
The raffle drawing will be at 4 p.m.
Tuesday, December 18. As you know the Friends operate the world’s most successful spay/neuter clinic in Gun Barrel City and it is open on Tuesdays. So, that raffle may be coming at the end of the work day!
Tickets are $5 each and you can buy them at the clinic on Tuesdays -- it’s a pleasant drive from wherever you are to
Gun Barrel City. Also e-mail or text Sydney and she’ll help you purchase as many tickets as your bank account can stand! Call or text 214-808-4701 or email [email protected].
You can drop by the clinic on Tuesdays and see the quilt on display in all its 68 x 60 glory! What happens to the funds raised? Sydney says, “The proceeds from this will go into our new emergency medical fund to help indigent pet owners get veterinary medical care.”
[LARRY ASIDE: You can read more about the organization at www.friendsofthe animals.org or by going to the Facebook page HERE.
ADOPT-A-SHELTER DOG MONTH?
MANY WAITING IN MESQUITE,
INCLUDING A BAIT DOG
Oh, geez, look at that face! This is 45-pound Keller (3998583). I like to think he’s waiting to love and be loved and doesn’t want to upset anyone -- been around a number of dogs like this guy and they have a loyal happiness in them that is wonderful. He’s in the Mesquite Animal Shelter and that’s why we got his story from the volunteer biographer Judi Brown. Keller’s under a year old, a “smoky grey Pit,” Judi says. “Even with scars on his face he’s very photogenic! He’s very friendly and affectionate and if given the opportunity will climb up onto your lap. He’s also very alert. He is curious about everything and explores everything! He went nose to nose wagging his tail with other dogs in the bay. However his hair went up on his back when he met the cats. He also barked at them.”
Call the shelter at 972-216-6283 or email [email protected] to tag Keller. See more Mesquite adoptables HERE.
PACINO, FORMERLY A BAIT DOG
This is Pacino (39985506), once upon a time a bait dog. We got the tip on him from Karen Lee of Barkleyworld.com who forwarded a note from Mesquite Animal Services. The note reads:
"This is one of the most heart-wrenching cases and yet he met me with the happiest face and a butt full of wiggles. The moment I locked eyes with him, I almost began to cry. You should have seen the JOY on his face when we gave him a soft bed! It was truly heartwarming.
“All of his teeth appear to have been intentionally filed down and he has abscesses on his ears and face. The vet suspects he may have been used as a bait dog because of these conditions and because he is HIGHLY reactive to any animal that comes near him. He is very sweet with people, though. He will be a tough placement, but we would like to give him a chance.”
[LARRY ASIDE:
He’s on the clock for 11 a.m. Monday. I hope this is in time.]
The note reads that his initial medical report showed him “to be emaciated with open wounds on his face, legs and ears. The wounds appear to be mostly fly bites but his ears appear to have it the worst and have what I suspect are large hematomas on his ears."
To save his life, email [email protected]. The shelter’s number is 972-216-6283.
[LARRY ASIDE: Isn’t there enough intentional death in this world already?]
THE CONTINUING CAMPAIGN
TO SAVE WILMER ANIMALS
Here’s an available Earhound. There are a bunch of animals in the small Wilmer Animal Shelter and everyone of them in this facility -- just minutes south of Dallas on I-45 -- is at risk right now.
We’ve posted many of them and here’s one more, clearly an EARHOUND, Daisy, a Rhodesian Ridgeback mix who is described in her “SAVE ME BIO” as “SWEET, SWEET, SWEET. Very loving girl. She has double dew claws on the back! She is adorable - loves other dogs - and check out those ears. (They certainly are the cutest ears ever - seriously). Please, help save her. The person that rescued Daisy gave first vacs and she tested heartworm negative so she's healthy! She just needs someone to save her.” To help save her call or text 214-949-2726 or email [email protected].
A BRIEF FROM BURNS FLAT
From Michael Corleone in The Godfather: “It’s strictly business. It’s not personal.”
Animal rescue is personal. It’s not business. Your heart makes you an offer you can’t refuse. Save the animal.
Here’s the note from Burns Flat, Okla., rescue role model Terry Lynn Fisher that inspired that opening paragraph.
On Sunday she wrote, “This weekend, I told myself I was going to take some time away from the rescue part and spend it with my grandbabies. I have been so stressed over personal issues, and there have been so many in need. That didn't happen. The calls started Friday night and never stopped. I will be sending several emails out, so please bear with me. If you can help, I appreciate any I can get here. If not, I totally understand, for I myself know how many needs we have had lately.
“
To start, here are the two here at the pound that I need moved asap. Both are young and so very sweet. Both came from people that just didn't care.”
Ebony is the young Lab -- “she is crate-trained house-broken and loves everyone. When first met she is hesitant but once she realizes you will not hurt her, she is a love bug. Fine with other dogs and cats."
Ivory is the girl in the cage in the back of the pickup on her “rescue day.” Terry Lynn wrote, "Young little scruffy girl. I adores her. She is so full of love. Her family just never really cared and let her run wild -- she almost got hit so many times. A little thin but we are working on that.”
Terry Lynn would love to place these girls with rescue groups to give them a maximum opportunity to find a loving home. Email her at [email protected]. If you think you know a group, copy this and send it to them or give them our address www.readlarrypowell.com.
Terry Lynn has many other rescues she’s coping with and there’s no rule that says Oklahoma dogs can’t find good homes in Texas, though Texas dogs often have a hard enough time finding good homes in their own state.
She’s also helping with the Elk City Pound, that’s about as far away from her as the drive from downtown Dallas to downtown Fort Worth only there’s
less traffic and construction. But here’s the deal and contemplate these two dogs as you read what she’s written: “Elk City is about 23 miles from me... It is where my vet is and the town we go to for just about everything. The pound there has never really been a good place. There use to be a very evil man in charge. Thank goodness he is now gone and the young man that is ACO now cares and tries to save them...”
These are two of around a dozen dogs -- all sorts, big, small, meek, friendly -- that are about to get the needle if no one helps. Terry Lynn is helping as the go-between so contact her at [email protected] and offer to help or at least give her a “thank you” for trying so hard every day.
AT DAS ON THE FINAL SUNDAY
OF ADOPT A SHELTER DOG MONTH
I went deep into the list of the 275 adoptable dogs posted at dallasanimal services.org on Sunday. There are four of the faces. Unwanted. Likely to get the needle even if it is “Adopt A Shelter Dog Month.”
As long as I was looking at the dogs, I looked at the cats (63 on the website, more in the shelter) and the “other” category: two guinea pigs (Mocha and Frappe) and this magnificent Earhound, i.e., Earhoundus bunnyrabbitus.
That is Hazel, a 14-week-old black-and-white shorthaired rabbit. She’s been at the shelter since September 22.
Cali is that magnificent Calico (A1041948), a shelter resident since October 11 -- she’s about 9 months old.
And, then there are those wonderful, wonderful dogs. Hundreds of them. And only humans can save their lives.
[LARRY ASIDE: When I write “Dallas -- let’s stop the killing” -- it’s not just aimed at the Dallas City Council’s philosophy or the shelter following the orders to “humanely” end the lives, it’s aimed at the people who don’t care or decide to ignore what happens when they CHOOSE not to be responsible for the lives of the animals they once said they loved. This constant euthanizing -- not really an accurate word -- this constant killing can only be stopped by getting humans to act like a decent species. And that is a chore in a “don’t care society” in Dallas.]
CONTEMPLATIONS:
A LITTLE BIT OF LIGHT ...
Dear Readers: I’m still reeling from the Pittsburgh shooting. It is difficult to accept that there has been yet another mass shooting by an apparent madman in our America.
It isn’t that a “place of worship” was the the target -- it is that THE PEOPLE who worship were the targets. That guy didn’t care about shooting up a building, he was intent on killing THE people. That is so disturbing.
I grew up with a second-hand haunting by Hitler and his philosophy. My dad was in the Infantry in Europe -- just an American teenager trained to kill and sent to a beach in Normandy in an effort to end “the war.” He was among the GIs who were shot at and bombed and, yet, lived to liberate concentration camps. The visions of the dead and the barely living haunted my Dad for decades and, in his deathbed despair, were among the last things he remembered in the threatening fog of the evening of his own passing.
And now, there’s this demonic guy in Pittsburgh -- an American with a wrong-headed view of people.
If my dad had survived until now, he’d have a whole new round of night terrors -- only this time inspired by an American whose rights were saved because Dad and others -- my Baptist dad and his childhood Jewish friends -- went to war.
HOPEFUL AMERICAN BOY
-- Maybe I have lived a life of total naiveté -- In my childhood in the 50s and early ‘60s I was confident that humans, having seen World War II and Korea, would get wiser about their own behavior. Vietnam proved to me how stupid I was with that optimistic thought.
"Despair” is such a spot-on word for that feeling that permeates the aftermath of an event such as Saturday’s.
Remember that line from the Spanish writer/philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
The cataclysmic event of 1963 occurred in Dallas on November 22 -- one man assassinated the President of the United States and changed a world. An awful event.
But two months earlier, there had been that despicably wretched event in Birmingham, Ala.
On a Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, a handful of Ku Klux Klan plotters dynamited the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. The timed explosion on a morning when people should be safe in their place of worship, injured 22 but killed four girls -- three 14-year-olds and an 11-year-old. It took decades to put anybody in jail for this horrible crime.
A LINK TO PITTBURGH?
Why link Birmingham to Pittsburgh? Because good people care. People who want swift, certain justice. People who believe in the goodness of our nation and its system of justice.
My longtime friend and former colleague at The Dallas Morning News, Lori Korleski Richardson, is the wife of author and former journalist Jim Richardson, now a respected and beloved Episcopal Priest. They live and worship in California.
On Sunday morning, Lori posted this note: “Mourning in wake of the Tree of Life Synagogue murders, remembering what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said after four little girls were murdered in an Alabama church: ‘We must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderer’.”
God bless our America and keep every good and kind and respectful resident of this nation safe. Help the others see the light. As the Jewish proverb goes, “A little bit of light pushes away a lot of darkness.”
--- Offer an opinion, advice or a solution by clicking on “comment” below or emailing [email protected]. And God bless America with light to push away darkness. ---
