Purrs 4 Peace- Week 16 Announcement - "Shelters" should live up to their name.

Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research.
--George Bernard Shaw

Pound Seizure. Two innocuous words but together they mean something horrific: animal shelters or humane societies-places that are supposed to protect animals and find them good homes- selling household pets for use in testing and research. With this practice some die quickly. Many others are subjected to tortuous and agonizing long-term laboratory studies. I won’t even go into all the gut wrenching details of what these animals are subjected to or that some suffer vivisection while still alive. Just looking at the information online for purposes of this post took mum’s breath away and made her physically ill.

I abhor vivisection with my whole soul. All the scientific discoveries stained with innocent blood I count as of no consequence.
--Mahatma Gandhi

www.Care2.com has recently highlighted a heartrending story of a pet dog named Koda whose family was having a hard time and gave him up to a local shelter in hopes the shelter would find a good home for him. Instead, he was sold to a dealer and resold to the University of Michigan where he was deliberately inflicted with traumatic injuries as a subject in the University’s Advanced Trauma Life Support Class. Ultimately he was euthanized.

Koda’s story has led legislation proposed in Michigan to ban pound seizures in that state.

Although it has been proposed there is no Federal statute against this practice. I was only able to find 13 states that have outlawed pound seizure: Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and West Virginia. Some states actually mandate pound seizure, i.e., mandate that shelters must sell pets to dealers on demand. These include Minnesota, Oklahoma and Utah. Elsewhere it is up to local counties and municipalities to decide whether to mandate or to prohibit pound seizure. For more information see www.Americanhumane.org

This issue is even more crucial in this time when shelters are critical to the protection of animals. More and more are being made homeless due to the deployment of their humans in the military or due to the fact that their humans have lost homes to foreclosure or weather incidents.

Week 16 of Purrs 4 Peace details are as follows:

• Week sixteen’s appointed time is Sunday, September 27, 2009.
• Participants should purr for three minutes commencing at 12 p.m. EDT (U.S.) which is 5:00 p.m. (17:00 hrs.) BST in the U.K.
• The cat’s human staff should assist their cats with the project by stroking and nuzzling the cat at the appointed time.
• Please post your cat name and the country you purr in at www.confuciuscat.blogspot.com as a COMMENT if you are participating in this historic project. (posting a link to your own website-if you have one-is encouraged.) Or let me know by message on twitter or facebook.
• Posting purrs on facebook ( Acolytes of Confucius Cat or as friend to Alley Mason) and twitter (@ConfuciusCat) is encouraged, since it inspires purring in others, but not required. On twitter please use #purrs4peace in your tweets.

This week we will purr to stop this barbaric practice of pound seizures. Purr to pursuade. Purr to protect. Purr for peace.

As long as people will shed the blood of innocent creatures there can be no peace, no liberty, no harmony between people. Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.
--Isaac Bashevis Singer