Puppy Mills and Pit Bulls––is legislation the right approach?

In my state of Oregon there are two pieces of dog-related legislation currently being considered. HB 2470 is supposed to address puppy mills, HB 2852 is ostensibly aimed at increasing public safety from “dangerous dogs”.

These goals are hard to disagree with, but the details of both bills are such as to cause concern in people who know and love dogs.

HB 2470, the “Puppy Mill” Bill

The first, for example, contains a so-called “lemon law” provision giving puppy buyers legal recourse against sellers if:

Section 5 (1) (b) Within two years after the customer acquires the dog, a veterinarian states in writing that the dog has, or that the dog died as a result of, a congenital or hereditary defect adversely affecting the health of the dog or requiring hospitalization or nonelective surgical procedures.

The buyer is entitled to reimbursement for vet expenses up to 100% (or in some cases 150%) of the purchase price of the dog) in combination with returning the dog for a full refund, exchanging the dog for another, or keeping the dog.

This sounds fair and workable at first glance, but the greatest problems of illness and unsoundness come from dogs bred by backyard breeders (“Hey, my female Lab is in heat, your male looks good, let’s introduce them and sell some puppies!”) and from actual puppy mills that mass-produce dogs for profit. Neither of these is likely to pay up willingly (puppy mills sell to pet stores through nation-wide brokers, so there is some doubt about even identifying the breeder of a specific puppy). Then the dog owner has to go to court for the $350?

Reputable breeders work hard to eliminate the known genetic flaws from their breed and from the puppies they produce; often, they also have buyers sign a contract in which the buyer promises to contact the breeder at any time if unable to keep it. The breeder wants to be consulted on suitable re-homing, and to be the home of last resort if no suitable home can be found. Good breeders love their dogs; they want to keep them out of shelters and bad homes. Breed enthusiasts operate rescue programs for their breed, for the same reasons.

If a dedicated breeder has done due diligence in genetic choice of a breeding pair, had all the tests done, monitored the dogs for heritable defects, and still at age one year a puppy develops a genetic fault, shall we hold that person as liable as some for-profit breeder who has done none of those things?

My observation has been that the only way to make money from breeding dogs is to go the backyard breeder/puppy mill route: low overhead, no varying of breeding stock but using the animals at hand, dogs kept in low-rent conditions (the way dogs are housed and kept at puppy mills would make a stone weep), minimal vet care, and sell everything you breed without testing, socialization, screening buyers, or making guarantees.

HB 2852: Your dog may be labelled a “dangerous dog”

The second bill, HB 2852, is in large part what’s known as “Breed-Specific Legislation”. The Feb, 24, 2009 version actually forbade future ownership of pit bulls and lookalikes, with big fines and euthanasia as penalties, and required special permits and insurance for current owners. The revision, after great outcry, requires owners to carry $1 million in mandatory liability insurance coverage (“failure to prove compliance with order punishable by maximum fine of $720 per day”).

And other provisions would have drastic consequences for all dog breeds by broadening definitions of “dangerous dogs” which are subject to court-ordered restrictions, insurance requirements, and even euthanasia. As far as I can tell the bill still contains a provision under which “menacing” a person, off your property, for “no good reason”, can result in classification as “dangerous” and result in court-ordered insurance and enclosure requirements or even euthanasia. What constitutes “menacing”? A growl, a lunge?

This bill is opposed by the Oregon Veterinary Medical Association; they oppose all breed-specific legislation, I am told.

In brief, the objections to Breed-Specific Legislation (BSL) are:

• vagueness of identifying the breeds subject to the law
• increasing the “outlaw” cachet of some breeds which are already being abused by dogfighters, criminals, and garden-variety macho dog owners who acquire them as ego accessories
• using scarce public resources against a single breed rather than supporting the public education which is the most important element for increasing public safety with regard to dogs, as well as for reducing abuse of dogs

Vagueness of identifying the breeds subject to the law

Vagueness helps accomplish the real aim of BSL, which is to eradicate certain breeds. This bill defines “pit bull” as

(b) ‘Pit bull’ means a dog that:

(A) Is registered or otherwise listed as an American pit bull
terrier, Staffordshire bull terrier or American Staffordshire
terrier with a dog breed club or league, dog fanciers
association, breed registry or similar organization; or

(B) Has appearance and physical characteristics that
substantially conform to the breed standards of the United Kennel
Club for an American pit bull terrier or of the American Kennel
Club for a Staffordshire bull terrier or American Staffordshire
terrier, as those standards existed on January 1, 2009.
[Section 1 (b), HB 2852]

This means that shelters will euthanize any dogs that could possibly be seen as “bullish” whether they look pure-bred or are mixes. They’ll be unadoptable and potentially a legal liability. Present owners of dogs that are pit bulls, or resemble them, will be in a quandary: get expensive insurance, risk huge liability if any incident occurs (your dog accidentally knocks over a child, or bites a person teasing him), or get rid of their dogs. Some estimate that at least a dozen different recognized dog breeds could fall into the loose definition, which will be applied in individual cases by someone with no special knowledge (a judge, a policeman, your neighbor).

In the city and county of Denver, where pit bulls have been illegal since 1989, Denver’s Division of Animal Control impounded 689 pit-bull-looking dogs in 2003. “All we can do is say what they look like,” said the Director of the Division. Since enforcement got serious in 2005, 1,667 dogs have been euthanized because they appeared pit bull-like.

Increasing “outlaw” cachet and macho accessorizing

What else needs to be said about this?

Re-directing public resources and attention

It’s easy to pass feel-good legislation, much harder to do what is necessary to truly address a problem. As far as dog safety goes, the problem is not the breed but the owner. And also those breeders who produce dogs without regard for temperament or overall health (including truly evil people who breed dogs, and abuse dogs, in order to make vicious creatures).

Both of the bills described above would be expensive to enforce. When Joan’s boxer mix is impounded, she sues the county: Prove he’s a pit bull! And the “puppy mill bill”, HB 2470, sets out specific rules for how dogs are kept by individuals that breed or sell a certain number of puppies per year; that’s great, but it is meaningless without enforcement. In this economic climate, the idea of adding county staff to investigate or inspect dog breeders is laughable.

Singling out specific breeds

Pit bulls do have very strong jaws, and were bred for fighting, but also for lack of aggression to humans, since in a fighting bout, humans in the ring separate the two dogs by hand. In addition, recent decades of breeding for stable companion dogs has created pit bulls that are gentle companions. The methods of those who train dogs today for fighting are savage, including starvation combined with feeding them small live animals, beating, and electrical shocks. Would this be necessary, if the average “bullish” dog were by nature an eager fighter and savage killer?
About half of the 51 brutalized dogs seized from Michael Vick’s Bad Newz Kennels have been evaluated and placed in permanent or foster homes; some have achieved Canine Good Citizen certification and a few are working as therapy dogs. The other half were judged too dog-aggressive for adoption, and sent to a special facility where most are now judged quite safe for staff and visitors to mingle with. Some of the 51 had been used as fighters, others––less eager to fight––as “bait dogs” for the others to “practice” on. Yet of them all only one was judged irredeemable and euthanized. [For details, see long Sports Illustrated article, one-page version here, and also a Washington Post article .]
Outlawing specific breeds such as pit bulls [American pit bull terriers, Staffordshire bull terriers or American Staffordshires] or Presa Canarios would have little effect on numbers of dog bites—dog bite statistics are not very exact. The intent of breed bans is generally to reduce the number of serious and fatal dog attacks; the powerful jaws and tenacity of pit bulls, PresaCanarios, Rottweilers, and a few other breeds seem very threatening. Yet the American Animal Hospital Association has this to say on the issue:

A study performed by the American Veterinary Medical Association, the CDC, and the Humane Society of the United States, analyzed dog bite statistics from the last 20 years and found that the statistics don’t show that any breeds are inherently more dangerous than others. The study showed that the most popular large breed dogs at any one time were consistently on the list of breeds that bit fatally. There were a high number of fatal bites from Doberman pinschers in the 1970s, for example, because Dobermans were very popular at that time and there were more Dobermans around, and because Dobermans’size makes their bites more dangerous. The number of fatal bites from pit bulls rose in the 1980s for the same reason, and the number of bites from rottweilers in the 1990s. The study also noted that there are no reliable statistics for nonfatal dog bites, so there is no way to know how often smaller breeds are biting.

Whatever the breed, the role of the owner in choosing, training, supervising, and caring for the dog is in my opinion the main reason that such attacks happen. Unscrupulous or ignorant breeders, who do not screen for temperament and health problems, and do not exercise care in placing puppies, are the second greatest cause.

I would love to see some of this bill’s provisions enacted and enforced everywhere: a limit of (in the current version) 25 intact sexually mature dogs per premise––personally I think that is too many but it is a start––and rules about care, housing, exercise, and health. As long as the rules are enforced fairly, and defined with regard to the varying circumstances of breeders, it improves the care of the dogs. An example of taking into account the varying circumstances of breeders: the bill requires that anyone with 10 or more sexually intact dogs over 4 months of age must provide each dog with an enclosure meeting certain requirements. One can imagine, especially with smaller dogs, someone who might have 10 dogs that do not even have individual enclosures, but are in the house and outside in a single large run or big fenced property; the bill seems to require that the breeder be able to point to some individual kennel for each of the ten dogs.

In the next post I’ll make some suggestions for a better approach to these issues, something that we dog owners can do ourselves.

For now, if you live in Oregon, please contact your legislators about these bills. At the National Animal Interest Alliance site you can send an email to your legislator about the Puppy Mill Bill, HB 2470; they also offer more information and suggested points to mention. To oppose the Pit Bull/Dangerous Dog legislation, cite HB 2852; there’s a state form here to identify your district’s legislators and get their email addresses. This page also gives contact information for your US Senators and Congressional Representative.

For readers who live elsewhere, the NAIA site has legislative alerts for national legislation as well as in each state. Sign up for alerts; see legislation in your state (don’t click on the map, go down farther and click on the link for your state). The AKC also has a legislative-watch page. Scanning these pages shows just how active the efforts are across the country, to enact restrictive and breed-specific legislation about dogs.

Letters to local newspapers setting out the actual provisions and consequences of proposed legislation are another way to oppose these bills. If legislators feel that their constituents are fooled by the beneficial titles (“Anti-Puppy Mill” or “Control Dangerous Dogs”) they don’t dare vote against them or support amendments.

More free books for kids: Portland, Oregon

Last month I blogged about giving away books to kids at our local food pantry. It’s been an effective way to encourage reading in kids of all ages, and provide parents and grandparents with books they can read with the children. All kids should have books of their very own. I wrote the post hoping to encourage others to get involved in getting books and children together.

As a former Portlander, I am pleased to report that there’s a group in that city dedicated to gathering books and giving them to disadvantaged kids. It’s called The Children’s Book Bank and they are currently concentrating on children under 6, when early habits are formed. They’re doing some creative stuff: one way they gather books is by inviting those who want to help, to have a book drive through their own organization, which could range from Boy Scouts to church to a business or hiking group. They also muster volunteers to help clean and mend books and bundle them up. If you live near Portland, visit their site and think about how you could help.

This offers one model for those who’d like to form an organization for the purpose, as well as for one-time group efforts to gather books and then donate them to some existing organization. I guarantee your community has organizations that would welcome clean usable children’s books. These would include Head Start programs, shelters (ones for women and children, or for homeless families, or for kids on the street), social agency waiting rooms, daycare facilities run by non-profits, Ronald MacDonald Houses, maybe the local Boys and Girls Club. If it’s a place that serves disadvantaged kids or families, they can probably find a good use for your kids’ outgrown books or books your group can gather in a book drive.

And, if you want to do something on your own, like I’ve been doing–showing up each week at the food pantry for 3 hours with a carful of books and two folding tables, I can attest to it being easy, well-received, and very rewarding. I’ve also gotten to read some great kids’ books as I sit by my tables!

Here is a figure from The Children’s Book Bank site:

“Two thirds of low-income families own no books for their children.”

Let’s all do something to change this, now!

Apple’s short video tutorials

Mac users know that OS X, and its included applications such as Mail and Preview, can do more than we realize. One place that provides an easy review and demo of new functions is the tutorial site, Apple Business Theater. Beneath the video viewing window are dozens of titles. Here are some examples:

The video tutorials I sampled were only a couple of minutes long: tightly targeted to doing just the one action described. I was particularly interested in the new capabilities of Preview (Apple’s viewer for pdfs, images, and other things) to work with pdf files. In the past I have spent hours searching for and trying out various third-party apps to merge or edit a pdf, since we didn’t own Adobe’s expensive Acrobat editing program, only their free reader.

OS X enables “Print to pdf” from any app, and some apps such as Nisus Writer offer “Save as pdf” too. Either way, it is easy to create a pdf now without Acrobat. Now, using Preview, we can merge 2 pdfs, delete and re-arrange pages, add pages, and annotate pdfs.

Many other handy tips are demonstrated here; take a look!

Or should it be classified as “fantasy”?

I was searching the Quality Paperback Book site for “science fiction’, and the last of 8 matches was

THE NEW SCIENCE OF GETTING RICH

by Wallace D. Wattles, edited by Ruth Miller

Book- Softcover / October, 2007 / QPB Price: $10.99

I thought this was an amusing computer error, but after I read the club’s description of the book, I see that it is just honesty in advertising…

Are you obeying the Law of Attraction?

If you’re not, you should. You see, there’s more to getting rich than your talent or your environment. There’s a natural law, the Law of Attraction, which stipulates that specific actions always produce the same results—and money, property and success are among them. Learn the simple equation behind acquiring the riches you’ve dreamed of, and your dreams will become reality.

That’s the message of The New Science of Getting Rich. Originally written by Wallace D. Wattles over a century ago, this hugely influential text inspired Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret and has been fully updated for the 21st century by Ruth Miller. Don’t be a Law-breaker—follow this clear-cut guide and strike it rich!

With all the excellent science fiction being written today, why has QPB got only 7 titles? And among those 7 are a Steven King, a DVD of X-Files, and a collection of century-old horror and fantasy by Rudyard Kipling.

But QPB has become rather flaky in recent years, flogging fluff and worse. There are 5 hits on a search for “astrology”, and only 4 for “astronomy”; 35 matches for “healing” (a word that I would like banned for a decade or so) including books on the healing powers of olive oil, and vinegar, and water. And Angel Healing, in which you can “Learn to direct angelic color rays through your hands and thoughts to transmit energy and the healing power of angels.”

Another “healing” title offered by QPB is The Miracles of Archangel Michael, wherein author Doreen Virtue, Ph.D. will show you “how to contact Archangel Michael, the powerful protector, and work with him for physical and emotional healing”. The publisher of this last one is Hay House, whose site shows that they specialize in this variety of self-delusion, with other titles (on its site) including
28 Days to a More Magnetic Life
Fractal Time: The Secret of 2012 and a New World Age
and Psychic Healing: Using the Tools of a Medium to Cure Whatever Ails You.

O tempora, O mores! (And what else is new, eh?)

B Vitamins may reduce risk of macular degeneration

I get “headline summaries” of health-related research from docguide.com, and one of last week’s headlines was “Vitamin B Combination Plus Folic Acid May Reduce Risk of Age-Related Vision Loss”. Age-related macular degeneration, or AMD, is pretty common on older people: one large study found that people in middle-age have about a 2 percent risk of getting AMD, but this risk increased to nearly 30 percent in those over age 75. There are increased-risk factors such as gender (female), race (white), smoking, obesity, and family history of the disease.

My husband’s mother has AMD, so I’ve seen its effects and I immediately went to read the article as summarized at docguide:

Taking a combination of vitamins B6 and B12 and folic acid appears to decrease the risk of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in women, according to a study published in the February 23 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.

William G. Christen, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, and colleagues conducted a randomised, double-blind trial involving 5,442 women aged 40 years and older who already had heart disease or at least 3 risk factors. Of these, 5,205 did not have AMD at the beginning of the study.

In April 1998, the women were randomly assigned to take a placebo or a combination of folic acid 2.5 mg per day, vitamin B6 50 mg per day, and vitamin B12 1 mg per day. Participants continued the therapy through July 2005 and were tracked for the development of AMD through November 2005.…

Women taking the supplements had a 34% lower risk of any AMD and a 41% lower risk of visually significant AMD. “The beneficial effect of treatment began to emerge at approximately 2 years of follow-up and persisted throughout the trial,” the authors wrote.

Because the findings apply to the early stages of disease development, these supplements appear to represent the first identified way––other than not smoking––to reduce the risk of AMD in individuals at an average risk. “From a public health perspective, this is particularly important because persons with early AMD are at increased risk of developing advanced AMD, the leading cause of severe, irreversible vision loss in older Americans,” wrote the authors.

Beyond lowering homocysteine levels, potential mechanisms for the effectiveness of B vitamins and folic acid in preventing AMD include antioxidant effects and improved function of blood vessels in the eye, the authors noted. [or see the full text as published in Archives of Internal Medicine]

A reliable study?

As you can see, this study has a lot of factors that give its findings credence: a large sample size (albeit all female), random assignment of the subjects to receive vitamins or placebo, and double-blinded protocol (neither the participants nor the medical professionals working with them knew whether they were taking placebo or vitamins). And the study lasted for 7 years, allowing time both for the development of AMD, and for the vitamins’ preventive action, if any, to have an effect. Longer is generally better in epidemiological studies; given the expense of long-term studies, though, 7 years is longer than many. The authors caution that “… our findings could be due to chance and need to be confirmed in other populations” but that doesn’t indicate misgivings on their part, it’s a standard caveat of good scientists. One swallow does not make a summer, as Aristotle observed. Being able to replicate results is a fundamental part of the scientific method.

One non-random element was that the women “already had heart disease or at least 3 risk factors” for it, so they may be expected to have a higher than average incidence of circulatory problems. If that means they had a greater-than-average risk of getting AMD, which is in part a circulatory disease, then the efficacy of the vitamins may appear more dramatic than if administered to a truly random population where only some individuals have heart disease or risk factors for heart disease.

Practical implications

What about the amounts of B6, B12, and folic acid that were given? I went at once to see how much we get from the two vitamins we take each day, a multi-B and a regular multi-vitamin/mineral combination. Here’s what I found out:

The supplements we take at our house supply much less than the amounts used in the study.

That brings up two new questions:

Would it be safe to take such high levels? and
How much do we need to take to get the effect (assuming that the effect seen in the study is real)?

The second question is easier to answer: we don’t know. The study used high amounts, no doubt to be more certain of seeing any possible connexion. Lower levels might work, but that must await another study.

The first question has no definitive answer either. If you want my guess, it is that yes, it’s probably safe, but I’ve never even played a scientist on TV, so who am I to say? Below, I present the results of some quick research on safe levels of these vitamins, which indicate that probably the high levels are safe.

But first let’s consider some common-sense indicators. We can give some weight to where the authors work: Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School; Departments of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health; and the National Eye Institute, Bethesda. The study participants were female health care professionals, not poor women in a remote country. While the potential conflict of interest statements at the end of the article reveal some funding from pharmaceutical companies, such companies generally don’t make much from vitamin preparations because they can’t really be patented to prevent others from selling similar products. Cynically, I conclude that respected ivy-league docs, with fellow health-care professionals as their guinea pigs, and no big money to tempt them, are probably not going to take risks by knowingly pushing the limits on safe levels of the study drugs.

Now for some numbers. The “Safe” levels in the chart above are from the Council for Responsible Nutrition, self-proclaimed to be “the leading trade association representing dietary supplement manufacturers and ingredient suppliers”. Those levels are conservative.

Two other kinds of data are known as NOAEL: No-observed-adverse-effects-level, and
LOAEL: Lowest-observed-adverse-effect level. Vitamin B6 has been tested up to levels of 200 mg/day without seeing any adverse effects, and for B12 up to 5 mg/day has been given before adverse effects were observed. These levels are well above the amounts used in the study. For folic acid, while “safe” levels have been named, there appears to be no research which has established NOAEL or LOAEL. [data from US Government sources compiled by Judy A. Driskell, Professor of Nutritional Science and Dietetics at the University of Nebraska]

Another reassuring fact is that all three of these vitamins are water-soluble, so they do not accumulate in the fatty tissues; excess is excreted in the urine.

Why are supplements necessary for these vitamins?

No one is likely to get the amounts used in the study, solely from unsupplemented foods. (See US Government charts of food nutrients, B6, B12, Folic Acid (folate).)

For example, to get 50 mg of B6, you’ll need to eat about 70 bananas or medium baked potatoes––and these are the two foods highest in that vitamin. Cold cereals are highly fortified, but it takes about 30 cups of fully fortified cereal to give you 50 mg, according to the government chart. For 2.5 mg of folic acid, get to work on putting away more than 2 pounds of cooked beef liver each day, or about 5 cups of fully fortified breakfast cereal.

If you are like me, you are wondering how people were ever healthy when all they had to eat was plain old food without any vitamin supplements, and no fortified cereal, bread, and milk. One answer, of course, is that our forebears often did suffer from vitamin deficiencies. It wasn’t just sailors on long voyages getting scurvy. And some conditions, like AMD, turn up more frequently now because more people live to the age where they occur. It is intriguing to wonder, though, what other factors may be at work when mega-levels of nutrients (far beyond those found in food) seem to protect against ailments. Perhaps the overall nutrient and micro-nutrient levels of our food are lowered by depleted soil in which crops (including animal feedstuffs) are grown, loss of nutrients during shipping and storage, and other elements of the modern commercial food business. Maybe we don’t get some as yet unknown nutrients which potentiate our use of other nutrients.

For my part, I’m going looking for supplements with higher doses of these three B vitamins. I may not end up with quite the levels used in the study, but I’ll see how close I can get within the limits of budget and willingness to swallow a bunch of pills.