Puppy Mills

Here is a link to an interesting article revealing some of the clandestine nature that surrounds puppy mills and commercial breeders:

Lawmakers push to expand Iowa dog breeder oversight

Flying Dachshund

Waldi is hard to take pictures of when he is running. Blink and you'll miss him!

Veterinary Care vrs Medical Care

My brother sent me this great article looking at the costs of veterinary care verses human medical care. Click here to see the full article plus an array of great comments.

A dog is a rat is a doctor is a vet

I want to return briefly to a point made in a hard-hitting post from Canadian blogger Blazingcatfur about the awful treatment his mother received:

With barely contained anger I informed the nurse that keeping an ill, 84 year old woman in a hospital corridor for 18 hours was not the type of care that anyone should be expected to tolerate. In fact my cat receives better treatment from his vet.

This is not the first time I've seen the point raised about veterinary care being better than health care for humans. And you don't have to compare veterinary care to health care under socialized medicine to see the difference, although it becomes particularly glaring if you do.

Under our "system" of veterinary health care, there's generally little or no wait, they're invariably friendly (because you could always grab your dog or cat and take it to another vet), and as to the prices?

Let me give a personal example. My old dog Puff once swallowed half a tennis ball he had flattened, and it opened up like a parachute inside his small intestine. This formed an insurmountable blockage, and necrosis set in. Without immediate emergency surgery, Puff (by that time in horrible agony) would have been dead in a day or so. He was cut open, the foreign object removed along with a three foot section of intestine (the two severed ends being anastomized together) and after a couple of days at the vet I took him home, where he fully recovered without complication.

The bill for all of this? Nine hundred and fifty dollars.

$950.00

Now, this was some time ago, and today it would be more. Probably close to a couple of grand.

But imagine how much it would cost if a boy were to swallow something he shouldn't have and it lodged in his small intestine and had to be removed. I shudder to think of the possible bill for emergency surgery and two days in the hospital, but I think you'd be lucky if it cost less than $20,000.

Why?

The instruments, the drugs, the surgical techniques, sterile hygiene, intravenous lines, and post-operative support, all of these things are basically the same. True, the boy would not be placed in a four by six cage during his stay in the hospital, but a bed in a room is not all that complicated.

What accounts for the huge difference in price? A lot of people say it's the liability insurance, but is that all there is to it? It's not as if there's much difference in the degree of education between an MD and a DVM. (And it's actually harder to get into vet school than it is to get into med school, so if there's an issue involving brains, the vets might win.)

It strikes me that there is a giant, overarching difference between veterinary care and regular medical care, and that is that the former is barely regulated by the government, while the latter is so regulated that even now -- without socialized health care -- many doctors feel as if they spent most of their time being bureaucrats. Is that it? I'm sure my vet kept records for Puff, but I'd be willing to bet they consisted of little more than a couple of paragraphs summarizing the diagnosis, the procedure, and his recovery. And I'd also be willing to bet that for the same procedure on a boy, if all of the records were all printed out they'd be a stack of documents inches thick.

I realize that people will say I am silly and comparing apples and oranges, but it wasn't that long ago that the complex education and licensing as we know it simply did not exist. When they weren't cutting people open, "barber surgeons" cut hair and shaved faces.

But you don't have to go back to the 18th century. A close friend who died a few years ago had a copy of a bill she received for the birth of her son in the late 1940s. Including delivery, hospitalization, and maternity care, it came to just over two hundred dollars. Even if we correct for inflation, there is simply no comparison between the prices then and the prices now for medical care.

While I realize technology has added many tools to the medical arsenal since the 1940s, the same tools have been added to the veterinary arsenal, so that can't be all there is to it. I have not seen any vet bills from the 1940s, but I am sure that a cursory examination would reveal that the rate of increase has risen in a normal manner that we would expect, while the rate of increase for human medical care has skyrocketed. (Of course, in those days, far fewer people had health insurance. Might the "blank check" from the big pocket have something to do with it?)

Should we allow vets to treat humans? Why not? If a woman can consent to an abortion, why can't I consent to having a veterinarian cut a tennis ball out of my intestines?

Why can't we be consenting adults?

Order of Finish

As some of you may know, I have been doing a lot of work lately with the greyhounds at the local dog track. I thought I would post this pretty neat order of finish in a race last week. They finished in order: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8.

The photo is taken as an extended exposure, the camera placed on the finish line. The contraption in front is the lure that the dogs chase. Due to the exposure, especially fast moving parts like legs can often look odd. On top, you see the "mirror" image so that we can see both sides. Sometimes we can only tell order-of-finish from the mirror. This is the same type of photo we use for photo finishes. A photo like this is taken of every race and, the ones that are close, we can zoom in on and see who crossed the wire first.

Definitely a rare order of finish!

Shadowfax

As many of you know, I am a hopeless fan of all things Lord of the Rings. I stumbled across this video with Blanco, the Andalusian stallion that plays Shadowfax, and his trainer. The video itself is nauseating, but it is great to see such a talented horse. Apparently his trainer does clinics and workshops on equine training at her barn in San Diego. I bet that would be interesting! Anyone ant to go? ;)

Red Panda

Just a cute red panda picture

Wind Getting off Easy

My brother brought this article to my attention. Definitely some food for thought, especially for avid bird-watchers such as myself.

Does Wind Get Off Easy?

When birds die due to oil or chemical exposure at an oil company's storage or waste-water facility, the company may be prosecuted for violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Exxon-Mobil, for example, recently pled guilty to killing 85 birds protected under the MTBA. The oil giant will pay $600,000 in fines, and several million more to implement a compliance plan to prevent bird deaths in the future.

Exxon-Mobil's not alone. Electric utilities are also prosecuted when protected birds are killed by poorly insulated transmission lines. And yet not all power produces are prosecuted for the accidental killing of protected birds.

As the Entergy Tribune's Robert Bryce detailed in the Wall Street Journal, wind power kills more protected birds than Exxon-Mobil's refineries, and yet gets a free pass.

A July 2008 study of the wind farm at Altamont Pass, Calif., estimated that its turbines kill an average of 80 golden eagles per year. The study, funded by the Alameda County Community Development Agency, also estimated that about 10,000 birds—nearly all protected by the migratory bird act—are being whacked every year at Altamont.

Altamont's turbines, located about 30 miles east of Oakland, Calif., kill more than 100 times as many birds as Exxon's tanks, and they do so every year. But the Altamont Pass wind farm does not face the same threat of prosecution, even though the bird kills at Altamont have been repeatedly documented by biologists since the mid-1990s.

The number of birds killed by wind turbines is highly variable. And biologists believe Altamont, which uses older turbine technology, may be the worst example. But that said, the carnage there likely represents only a fraction of the number of birds killed by windmills. Michael Fry of the American Bird Conservancy estimates that U.S. wind turbines kill between 75,000 and 275,000 birds per year. Yet the Justice Department is not bringing cases against wind companies.

The problem of bird kills from wind power are well documented. A 2001 report on avian mortality by the National Wind Coordinating Council estimated wind power was responsible for 33,000 bird kills per year, the vast majority of which are protected under federal law. The American Wind Energy Association estimates bird mortality rates are, on average, "one to six per year or less" per megawatt of wind power capacity in the United States. Given the U.S. had 25,000 megawatts of installed wind capacity in the U.S., wind power could be responsible for as many as 150,000 bird kills per year. How many will die if wind production increases ten-fold or more to meet proposed renewable energy mandates? (And will we consider that actual wind output can be far less than installed capacity.)

Wind power is hardly the only thing that kills birds. Bird kills are a problem with many tall structures, and other energy sources are hardly without their problems. All things considered, wind may be preferable to available alternatives (even if it cannot provide base load capacity) and could be an important part of America's energy supply in the future. Yet it seems clear that when it comes to killing protected birds, traditional energy companies face federal prosecution, while wind energy gets a pass.

One reason for the special treatment is that it is easier to reduce bird kills at traditional energy facilities than a wind farm. In Exxon-Mobil's case, netting can keep birds away from potential contamination sources. There's no comparably easy fix for wind farms -- at least not yet. So federal prosecutors may target enforcement efforts where they can maximize the environmental results. It's also possible that there's no political benefit to going after "green" energy.

Here is the link to the article. Lots of links are available in the article to the various information sources mentioned.