Monday, July 27, 2009

The more things change...

From the Terrierman blog...


A friend writes that he strongly suspects he is not a "modern" man.

There is something about the modern world that disturbs his rational conscience. He is not exactly sure what it is.



"It's rather a conundrum and a very real impediment to my peace of mind."


I think I know how he feels. I feel it too.

Or should I say I still feel it. The feeling is a little less pronounced that it once was, but it is still there.

It slithers out late at night, tips its hat in my general direction, and disappears around the corner into a shadow of doubt.Where the hell are we going with all this? How does it all end? I can feel it; I can smell it. Something wicked this way walks.

I talk to a friend about this generalized feeling of malaise. This is the same fellow who once told me: "Your mind is like a bad neighborhood; don't go in there alone." He knows me.



"I feel a sense of impending doom."

"Right," he says, taking a sip of coffee at Starbucks. "Do you know what that is?"

"No."

"That's impending doom."


And then he smiles.

He says we all have it.

And why wouldn't we? We were all raised in the full light of the Atomic Bomb, with duck-and-cover as Lesson One in our grade school plans.

We have been told that the water we drink is toxic, that the male fish in the river are gravid with eggs, and that 40% of all animals are going extinct tomorrow.

We are informed, almost on a daily basis, that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, and that that hand basket is being delivered to us by terrorists.

Our jobs are sliding out from underneath us, even as we get older and health care costs skyrocket.

The place where we hunted last year is now a Wal-Mart, and our 15-year daughter is on the Pill.

Our new car is made of plastic, and we can't find the dipstick.

The American flag flying from our porch is made in China, and the girl serving us eggs at Denny's was made in Mexico.

My friend has his own version of this windup, but you get the general idea.

Everything is happening too fast, and there is a general sense, among all of us, that we are losing control.

But it's not quite as bad as we think, he says. We need to perform an autopsy on our fears.

And so I do that.

I remind myself that the nuclear treaties have actually worked. The U.S. and the Soviet Union have one-fourth the number of atomic bombs they had two decades ago, and neither side is rattling is sword in a believable way. In fact, no one on earth has an Air Force or a Navy worth worrying about except the United States.

The water in our rivers and lakes is cleaner now than when we were kids. So too is the air we breathe.

Fish have always been able to change sex at will -- we just didn't know it.

The best weapon the terrorists have come up with is a couple of guys with box cutters. We are not fighting Lex Luthor.

Yes, our jobs are sliding out from underneath us, but that has been happening for 200 years -- horse shoes to iron rails, iron rails to cars, cars to flying saucers. Every era brings declining industries and rising ones too. The direction forward may not be up for all of the people all of the time, but it's generally up for most of the people most of the time. In America, even the homeless watch color TV and get hot meals and a free bed at the shelter.

Yes, we all have a sense of impending doom from time to time. That is natural. It is probably how we are supposed to feel. Like fox, humans are naturally wary. We distrust new things that show up on old ground.

And, truth be told, there is a lot of new stuff: New roads, new laws, new TV shows, new foods, new people, new electronics, new medicines, new ways of producing old things. By the time I figure out how all the features on my new cell phone work, it is out of date, and time for a new one.

We can never catch up.

And yet, most things are better now, aren't they? Who wants to return to 1975 health care? Who wants to return to their 1975 job, their 1975 house, their 1975 wage, their 1975 phone, or their 1975 car? Even after the real estate crash, my house is worth twice what I paid for it.

And yet it is easy to lose any sense of good. After all, who wants to talk about good on television? No one!

The media knows there are no ratings to be had by saying we are going to stumble forward and be alright in the end. Disaster and doom sell. Apocalypse sells. "If it bleeds, it leads"

CNN knows its ratings surge with every war. Triple murders, assassinations and child disappearances are good for Fox television's bottom line. Never mind that these things never actually happen to any of us. We listen to cable TV talking about some dead blond girl, and we never internalize that it's a child we do no know, in a city we have never visited, and the murder occurred two years ago. This is not news. This is olds. This is a contrived crisis: a cocked up story designed to suck us in so that we will watch more TV commercials. This is television appealing to our basest fears and our most prurient interests. It has nothing to do with the reality any of us is actually living.

Ditto for so many stories we hear about the natural world. We are told everything is about to go extinct, but the IUCN Red List shows that over the last 400 years very few animals and plants actually have, and most of these have been endemic birds on very small tropical islands.

Meanwhile, we ignore the natural world we really live in.

In America today, we are knee-deep in ducks, deer, mountain lions, alligators, buffalo, manatee, fox, raccoon, hawks, bear, falcons, eagles, wolves, coyotes, jack rabbits and elk.

Across the world, more and more wild land is being put into protected parks, even as population growth is slowing, child mortality is falling, access to clean water is improving, and starvation is in decline.

We bemoan the loss of small farms, but we are not celebrating the fact that large farms are more efficient, farmers now get vacations, food is cheaper, and the real problem in America is not starvation but obesity.

We are awash in vitamins, milk, and soap. It is a pretty great thing if you ask me.

But we ignore that. Instead we like to scare ourselves a little by dwelling almost exclusively on the negative, no matter how small or unlikely.

It's like the mind games we play when we are in deep woods and it is beginning to get dark. We have never actuallyseen a rabid coyote. We have never come across a cougar following us on a hiking trail, or an alligator sliding off the bank while we are swimming.

But we like to imagine it could happen, and so we bounce that danger around in our mind and write and talk about it a bit more than we should. Never mind that a bee sting is more likely to kill us than a wolf.

We do the same with food. We read unpronounceable ingredients on the side of packaged foods. Dihydrogen Monoxide?What the hell is that? It must cause cancer.

We fret about the possibility of a single death from nuclear energy, while ignoring the scores of very real deaths that occur from coal mining every year.

We elevate the scary and exotic because it is more interesting than the boring and conventional. And, as a consequence, we have this vague sense of impending doom hovering over everything.

And yet the future keeps coming, doesn't it?

And always, it seems a little bigger, and a little more complex than we are really comfortable with.

The future is fast and unknown.

The past, on the other hand, was slower. And we know how that story turns out.

A lot of good stuff lies in the past.

But isn't that the good news?

We can keep all of the good stuff we want. After all, don't we still run this country by choice?

We can still fish with a cane pole; we do not have to buy graphite.

We can still get an aluminum canoe; no reason to buy plastic.

We can still grow vegetables in our back yard, walk to school, bicycle to work, and run the dogs in the park.

We can still hunt, go to the high school basketball game, and watch old episodes of I Love Lucy.

And if we don't do that, then we are making a choice.

And, in truth, that choice is often logical.

A plastic canoe is better than an aluminum one.

A four-piece pack rod is better than a hard-to-carry cane pole.

Jon Stewart is generally funnier than Lucille Ball.

And so we come to the troubling truth: For the most part, the world is getting better.

Is not the Internet a marvel? How about color television, the I-pod and central air?

I have fruits and vegetables at the store I could never have dreamed of as a child -- kiwis, mangoes, Asian apples. If I want Tang and marshmallows and Graham Crackers, they are still there, but now they are in competition with so many other things that they only rarely make it into the basket.

Is that a bad thing?

No. And yet, just saying the names of these childhood foods creates a certain level of nostalgia.

I am reminded that the world was once slower and simpler.

Whatever happened to the smell of a hay loft? Whatever happened to the smell of old varnish in a boat house? They have been replaced by giant round bails wrapped in plastic and gleaming fiberglass decks. And why? Because no one want to lift 2,000 square bails into an expensive and hard-to-maintain barn, and everyone knows a wooden boat is 200 seams just waiting to sink.

And so the world changes rapidly, and with the change we feel a growing sense of unease.

Our comfort foods are gone. The secret woods of our youth have been razed to expand a parking lot. It has been years since we walked down a creek looking for tadpoles. Instead we check email, do taxes, and run to the next appointment.

And yet, most of us fight back in a fashion, don't we?

Some of us hunt with dogs or hawks in a manner unchanged since the Middle Ages. Others have large vegetable gardens, or spin their own wool for knitting, or have backyard chickens.

Some people carve wood, ride horses, or hunt with black powder.

I have friends who collect toy soldiers and sail old E-scows. I have friends who tinker on vintage cars and trucks, who herd sheep, and who have kitchens full of Ball jars for home canning.

Nothing loved is ever lost.

And yet, much of what people are doing now is not exactly traditional.

Most of the people with backyard chickens did not grow up with backyard chickens.

Most of the people flying hawks and digging on terriers did not grow up with these sports.

Thirty-five years ago, almost no one shot black powder.

So what is going on?

I am not sure. But one possibility is that even as we rush towards the future, some part of us is setting up a belaying point to the past.

It is a kind of psychic anchor -- our way of hedging our bets.

Yes, we are jumping off the cliff into the Great Unknown, but we will hold on to a few bits as a touchstone to the past -- a reminder not only of simpler times, but also of the notion that we might be able to still do it the old way, without the new technology, the nouvelle cuisine, the video games, and the Starbucks Coffee.

Maybe. We are not sure.

We remember what happened the last time the electricity went out in the house. We remember the time they were working on the pipes down the street and the water was turned off for a whole day. We remember what coastal Louisiana looked like after Hurricane Katrina, and the wild look in the eyes of the folks in California who have seen fire licking at the shingles of their house.

And so we do not cut the cord to the cable TV, and we do not pour sugar into the gas tank. Instead, we put 20 pounds of rice and 20 pounds of beans into two old plastic paint drums, and we make sure we pack in one of those new radio-flashlight-generator-cellphone-charger gizmos and a few bottles of water purifier to boot.

And then we go out for coffee.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Animals Right Attorney Next Regulatroy Czar...


Radical Animal Rights Attorney Cleared

To Become Obama’s Regulatory Czar

Dog Owners, Hunters, Farmers Urged To Ask

Their Senators To Stop Sunstein Nomination

by JOHN YATES

American Sporting Dog Alliance

http://www.americansportingdogalliance.org

asda@csonline.net

This report is archived at http://eaglerock814.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=general&thread=52

WASHINGTON (July 21, 2009) – Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) has lifted his “hold” blocking the nomination of Harvard Law School scholar and animal rights legal strategist Cass Sunstein for the post of regulatory czar in the Administration of his close personal friend, President Barack Obama.

Sen. Chambliss had blocked the nomination based on concerns of farm groups because of Sunstein’s strong animal rights beliefs, including support of stringent regulation of people who raise animals and a ban on hunting. Last week, however, Chambliss met with Sunstein and announced on the Senate floor that he had lifted the hold on the nomination. The Senator added that the way is now clear for the U.S. Senate to confirm Sunstein before its August recess.

The American Sporting Dog Alliance is urging all dog owners, hunters, firearms rights advocates, farmers and civil libertarians to take immediate action by urging the U.S. Senate to reject the Sunstein nomination to head the powerful Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in the White House. Taking action now is of the utmost urgency.

Sunstein has the strong support of the Humane Society of the United States, which is the political arm of the radical animal rights movement, according to a July 15 statement by HSUS Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Michael Markarian in The Huffington Post. Referring to the regulations to implement the federal Animal Welfare Act, and new rules about animal fighting and importing dogs, Markarian wrote: “These kinds of legal changes are precisely why Americans need a regulatory czar like Cass Sunstein in charge of OIRA -- to make sure the federal agencies properly implement regulations to enforce these new laws.”

The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) “reviews and alters regulations created by federal agencies,” according to Congress Daily.

Sunstein, who has published 15 books, would have broad powers to review, recommend changes and possibly engineer changes in all federal regulations, including those about dog ownership, farming, hunting on federal lands, and enforcement of gun control laws.

In his published writings and speeches, Sunstein has advocated:

  • Giving animal rights groups the power to file lawsuits on the behalf of animals against their owners.

  • Very strict regulations about animal ownership, farming and hunting.

  • The elimination of hunting.

  • The elimination of the individual right to keep and bear arms.

  • Moving toward a vegan vegetarian society.

  • Rewriting the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

  • And restrictions on free speech.

Each of those assertions will be documented later in this report by direct quotations from Sunstein’s published books and speeches.

The American Sporting Dog Alliance believes Sunstein would have a severely negative impact on dog owners, farmers, hunters, gun owners and civil libertarians – Indeed, to all Americans!

This is underscored by Sunstein’s status as a close personal friend and advisor to President Obama since they met in 1992, when Sunstein taught law at the University of Chicago. This will give Sunstein unprecedented influence and access to the President.

It is further underscored by numerous mainstream reports that Sunstein is slated to be President Obama’s next nominee to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court. This adds to the urgency of convincing the Senate that Sunstein’s beliefs are un-American and in direct contradiction to the basic principles outlined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Although Sunstein’s nomination had been blocked by Sen. Chambliss until last week, Government Executive reported that he actually has been working at the job in the White House on a daily basis.

Sunstein’s potential use of power – and potential abuse of power – has been increased because President Obama redefined the role of OIRA shortly after taking office. The Wall Street Journal reported July 6: “In a significant, but little noticed, memo written 10 days after taking office, Mr. Obama ordered up a rewrite of how OIRA goes about its work, the first such revision since 1993. ‘Far more is now known about regulation -- not only when it is justified, but also what works and what does not,’ the president wrote. A regulatory review would make use of new tools and would ‘clarify the role of the behavioral sciences in formulating regulatory policy.’ "

The Wall Street Journal called the OIRA “obscure but powerful.

The American Sporting Dog Alliance believes that Sunstein will use this position to influence President Obama’s directives to all federal agencies on how to write, interpret and enforce all federal regulations. This includes regulations about agriculture, raising animals, hunting on public lands, and gun law enforcement and procedures. This is a dangerous power to be held by someone of Sunstein’s clearly radical and unconstitutional beliefs.

Thus, we are urging every American to immediately contact both of his or her U.S, senators, and as many other senators as possible, to urge them to vote against the Sunstein nomination.

This link will provide a search engine to locate each state’s senators, and an alphabetical list of the senators to link to contact information: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm. Each state has two U.S. Senators who represent all of the citizens of that state.

We recommend at least two forms of contact: Send an email as a first step, plus also send a letter or fax, and/or make a phone call. Please do this immediately, as a Senate confirmation vote could come at any moment.


In addition, please send this report to all of your friends and contacts and ask them to help, and post it on any message boards that you use. Also, please write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper and any other papers you read.


Here are some direct quotes from Sunstein to illustrate our concern:

1. "We ought to ban hunting"

- Cass Sunstein, in a 2007 speech at Harvard University

2. “We should focus attention not only on the enforcement gap, but on the areas where current law offers little or no protection. In short, the law should impose further regulation on hunting, scientific experiments, entertainment, and (above all) farming to ensure against unnecessary animal suffering. It is easy to imagine a set of initiatives that would do a great deal here, and indeed European nations have moved in just this direction. There are many possibilities.”

--Cass R. Sunstein, “The Rights of Animals: A Very Short Primer,” John M. Olin

Law & Economics Working Paper No. 157, The Law School, The University of

Chicago

3. “…(R)epresentatives of animals should be able to bring private suits to ensure that

anticruelty and related laws are actually enforced. If, for example, a farm is treating

horses cruelly and in violation of legal requirements, a suit could be brought, on behalf of those animals, to bring about compliance with the law.”

--Cass R. Sunstein, “The Rights of Animals: A Very Short Primer,” John M. Olin

Law & Economics Working Paper No. 157, The Law School, The University of Chicago

4. “But if, as a practical matter, animals used for food are almost inevitably going to endure terrible suffering, then there is a good argument that people should not eat meat to the extent that a refusal to eat meat will reduce that suffering. Of course a legal ban on meat-eating would be extremely radical, and like prohibition, it would undoubtedly create black markets and have a set of bad, and huge, side-effects. But the principle seems clear: People should be much less inclined to eat meat if their refusal to do so would prevent significant suffering.”

--Cass R. Sunstein, “The Rights of Animals: A Very Short Primer,” John M. Olin

Law & Economics Working Paper No. 157, The Law School, The University of

Chicago

5. “Less modestly, anticruelty laws should be extended to areas that are now exempt from

them, including scientific experiments and farming. There is no good reason to permit the

level of suffering that is now being experienced by millions, even billions of living

creatures.”

--Cass R. Sunstein, “The Rights of Animals: A Very Short Primer,” John M. Olin

Law & Economics Working Paper No. 157, The Law School, The University of

Chicago

6. “Everything depends on whether and to what extent the animal in question is capable of suffering. If rats are able to suffer, then their interests are relevant to the question of how, and perhaps even whether, they can be expelled from houses.”

--Cass R. Sunstein, Martha C. Nussbaum. Animal Rights: Current Debates and

New Directions. (Oxford University Press, USA, 2004). P. 12

7. “A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not

necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government.”

--Cass Sunstein, arguing for a Fairness Doctrine for the Internet in his book,

Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton University Press, 2007), p.137

8. “In what sense is the money in our pockets and bank accounts fully ‘ours’? Did we earn it by our own autonomous efforts? Could we have inherited it without the assistance of probate courts? Do we save it without the support of bank regulators? Could we spend it if there were no public officials to coordinate the efforts and pool the resources of the

community in which we live?... Without taxes there would be no liberty. Without taxes

there would be no property. Without taxes, few of us would have any assets worth

defending. [It is] a dim fiction that some people enjoy and exercise their rights without

placing any burden whatsoever on the public … There is no liberty without dependency. That is why we should celebrate tax day …”

-- Cass R. Sunstein, “Why We Should Celebrate Paying Taxes,” The Chicago

Tribune, April 14, 1999

9. “Much of the time, the United States seems to have embraced a confused and pernicious form of individualism. This approach endorses rights of private property and freedom of contract, and respects political liberty, but claims to distrust ‘government intervention’ and insists that people must fend for themselves. This form of so-called individualism is incoherent, a tangle of confusions.”

-- Cass R. Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and

Why We Need it More Than Ever, Basic Books, New York, 2004, p. 3

10. “[A]lmost all gun control legislation is constitutionally fine. And if the Court is right,

then fundamentalism does not justify the view that the Second Amendment protects an

individual right to bear arms.”

- Cass Sunstein, writing in his book, “Radicals in Robes”

11. “…[T]he Second Amendment seems to specify its own purpose, which is to protect the"well regulated Militia." If that is the purpose of the Second Amendment (as Burger

believed), then we might speculate that it safeguards not individual rights but federalism.”

-- Cass R. Sunstein, “The Most Mysterious Right,” National Review, November

12, 2007

12. In his 2004 book The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever, Sunstein claims that “citizens’ rights exist only to the extent that they are granted by the government.”

Those views are why the American Sporting Dog Alliance adamantly opposes the Sunstein nomination. His track record is frighteningly consistent.


Thank you for helping.


The American Sporting Dog Alliance represents owners, breeders and professionals who work with breeds of dogs that are used for hunting. We also welcome people who work with other breeds, as legislative issues affect all of us. We are a grassroots movement working to protect the rights of dog owners, and to assure that the traditional relationships between dogs and humans maintains its rightful place in American society and life. The American Sporting Dog Alliance also needs your help so that we can continue to work to protect the rights of dog owners. Your membership, participation and support are truly essential to the success of our mission. We are funded solely by your donations in order to maintain strict independence.


Please visit us on the web at http://www.americansportingdogalliance.org . Our email is asda@csonline.net .

PLEASE CROSS-POST AND FORWARD THIS REPORT TO YOUR FRIENDS

The American Sporting Dog Alliance
http://www.americansportingdogalliance.org

Sunday, July 19, 2009

What A Legacy...

Glen Salmon, USFWS


(taken from the Cover Dog Field Trial Message Board)

He closed down Indiana's field trials, now the USFWS has hired him.

One of the Indiana gang of three biologists that worked with USFWS Region 3 to
stop the running of traditional field trials here in the Hoosier state has now
been appointed to a position with the USFWS in Washington.

Glen Salmon along with IDNR biologists Glenn Lange, and Mark Reiter told the
membership of the Indiana Field Trial Association that they would rather not
have anyone on their properties. When the IN Field Trail Association asked about
each individual point on the Field Trial audit regarding properties where field
trials were run in the Hoosier state their response was " field trialers will
not win these battles, we write the audits and you'll not win."

They were right. These biologists conspired with Region 3 USFWS and NO
traditional field trials have been held on Indiana Fish and Wildlife properties
since. Other states are now in the process of losing their public grounds.

Trialers should be aware now that Mr. Salmon is with the USFWS in Washington.


...............


April 16, 2009

Glen Salmon, director of the DNR Division of Fish and Wildlife for the past
seven years, has announced he is retiring after 32 years with the state agency
to accept a position with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Washington, D.C.

"This is really exciting," said Salmon, who will become deputy director for the
federal Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration Program. "This is a chance to do
some stuff on the national level, to continue a great relationship between the
states and the Service on this program, and hopefully just make that even
stronger."

The Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration Program provides oversight and
administrative support for 10 federal grant programs that cover wildlife, sport
fish, boating, coastal wetlands conservation, landowner conservation incentives,
and tribal activities.

"It's going to be different," said Salmon, who will remain with DNR through
June. "They have a great culture in the Service, but we have an incredible
culture here (in DNR)."

Salmon managed a staff of 230 DNR employees that includes biologists, property
managers, staff specialists, and natural resource educators. The division
oversees 21 fish and wildlife areas, eight fish hatcheries, numerous other
conservation areas, and hundreds of public access boat ramps.

The division also is responsible for the management of wild animal populations
on both public land and private property.

"Glen is a positive, upbeat, consummate public servant who never sought to gloss
over difficult circumstances," DNR Director Robert E. Carter Jr. said.

Salmon joined the DNR in 1977. His first position was at Cikana State Fish
Hatchery near Martinsville. He later worked at Mixsawbah State Fish Hatchery
near Walkerton before returning to Cikana to become assistant hatchery manager
in 1980. He moved to the DNR central office in Indianapolis in 1980 as a staff
specialist and was promoted to assistant division director in 1998 before
becoming division director in 2002.

Salmon cited the acquisition of Goose Pond Fish and Wildlife Area and a land-use
agreement for Fairbanks Landing Fish and Wildlife Area as two of the highlights
of his tenure.


Source: Department of Nature Resources

Sunday, July 12, 2009

New Oral Flea & Tick Research...

From ScienceDaily (July 6, 2009) Scientists in New Jersey are describing discovery and successful tests of the first once-a-month pill for controlling both fleas and ticks in domestic dogs and cats.

Peter Meinke and colleagues at Merck Research Laboratories note the need for better ways of controlling fleas and ticks, driven in part by increases in pet ownership. Estimates suggest that there were 71 million pet dogs and 81 million pet cats in the United States alone in 2007 — up from 61 million and 70 million in 2001.

Although many powders, sprays and other topical agents are on the market, many pet owners prefer the convenience of pills. Products given orally can reach more parts of an animal's body, do not wash off in rain or bath water, and don't transfer from pets to people. At least one existing pill fights fleas in pets, but does not appear effective for ticks.

In tests on fleas and ticks in dogs and cats, a single dose of the new pill was 100 percent effective in protecting against both fleas and ticks for a month. There were no signs of toxic effects on the animals. Scientists obtained the flea and tick fighter from a substance first found in a fungus that "has the potential to usher in a new era in the treatment of ecoparasitic [ticks and fleas, for instance] infestations in companion animals."


Journal reference:

  1. Meinke et al. Discovery of the Development Candidate N-tert-Butyl Nodulisporamide: A Safe and Efficacious Once Monthly Oral Agent for the Control of Fleas and Ticks on Companion Animals. Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, 2009; 52 (11): 3505 DOI: 10.1021/jm801334v

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

ONLY ONE WEEK LEFT...

TO CAST YOUR VOTES FOR
THE BIRD DOG HALL OF FAME !!

MAKE YOUR VOTE RED

VOTE BEARCAT

VOTE ABRA


Friday, July 3, 2009

What Comes Around...



Rochester awaits verdict after Lab bites neighbor

Councilman led drive to ban pit bulls

    (From the Sioux City Journal)
By Lynn Zerschling | Posted: Wednesday, July 01, 2009
SIOUX CITY
-- The city councilman who led the drive to ban pit bulls in Sioux City is
waiting to find out whether his Labrador retriever will be euthanized for biting a neighbor.
Councilman Aaron Rochester said Tuesday he has appealed Sioux City Animal Control's determination that his family's yellow lab is vicious after Saturday's incident, which resulted in an emergency room visit and five stitches for the injured neighbor. Sioux City Police Capt. Pete Groetken said he held a hearing on Rochester's appeal Tuesday morning and will reach a decision by the end of the week. He can either uphold Animal Control's designation or overturn it. The 3-year-old dog, Jake, is being held at the Animal Control shelter until the case is resolved. At 4:45 p.m. Saturday, a man and woman who live in the neighborhood walked by the Rochesters' home in the 1300 block of 46th St. The lab was sitting on the front porch. As the couple walked by on the sidewalk, the dog ran off the porch and jumped the man, Groetken said.. The neighbor suffered a scratch to his right leg as he tried to push the dog away, some marks on his chest and bites to his thumb that required five stitches at a hospital emergency room. Groetken declined to identify the man because the case remains under investigation. Rochester said his neighbor did not wish to be identified, and other neighbors contacted by the Journal said they did not know who he was. Rochester said he and his wife, Amy, held a birthday party for their youngest child, Kate, on Saturday. Amy had gone inside their house while Kate and a friend played outside. Rochester said he had left the party to drive his eldest son to work. "(Amy) heard something and yelled at Jake to come in the house, and he ran in the front door," Rochester said. "The people know our dog, and the wife said Jake would bring her a tennis ball and she would throw it. He is a great watchdog. My speculation is, he was watching our children and may have thought they were in danger." An Animal Control officer impounded Jake on Saturday after the dog bite was reported. Rochester said someone at the hospital called police to report the bite, which he said is standard practice. Last year, Rochester led the council's controversial effort to ban future ownership of pit bulls in Sioux City. Rochester supported his position with Animal Control reports showing that type of dog is the most apt to bite people. Pit bull owner Amanda Gardner, who helped lead opposition to the ordinance, said Tuesday night: "I don't wish any dog to be put down. But how many little kids have cried because their pit bulls have been banned from the city or euthanized? In Aaron's words, a bite's a bite." Dog owner Terry Mann, who also opposed the pit bull ban, said, "Labs are one of the best breeds there are; the most friendly. ... I don't think the dog should be put down at all." Rochester emphasized that he has not gotten special treatment because of his position as an elected official. "It happened Saturday afternoon, and Animal Control had my dog by Saturday night," he said. "I did not get special treatment." Vicious-dog proceedings Police Capt. Pete Groetken has two choices when he hears cases of animals declared vicious by Sioux City Animal Control: He can uphold or overturn the ruling. If he upholds the decision, the pet owner may appeal his ruling to a special master appointed by the city manager and eventually could appeal the master's decision to court. If in the end the dog is found to be vicious, the animal must be euthanized. "I have yet to have an owner say go ahead and euthanize my dog," Groetken said. "There is language in the city code that says if the owner refuses to do it, the city can do it." Last year, the City Council redefined vicious animals. To be declared vicious, an animal must bite or harm a person or another animal. The injury would have to cause "bleeding or noticeable and documented injury to the person" or significant injury to another animal or fowl that requires medical attention. A trained guard dog or K-9 is not subject to that provision. Pet owners used to have the option of placing their pets in homes outside the city limits, with the approval of Animal Control. Last year, the council ruled that owners no longer can do that. The council noted other cities and counties are banning vicious dogs from being placed in their jurisdictions.

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