No it’s exactly the issue. The reason he’s shitting on the threads is because he thinks that saving animals is killing people. Because he’s a halfwit.
REALLY?! I had no fucking clue! There are people down there?! Jesus. I thought it was entirely populated by puppies and kittens and reindeer. :rolleyes:
Yes, I did also donate to the Red Cross, and not because I think people are inherently better than animals, you smarmy ass. I just like what limited money I have to give help as many as possible. I’m not one of these people who appologises for helping animals or needs to have an excuse to explain why I help both human and non human animals. Life is life, and it’s all precious in my eyes. Animals suffer just as much as people and deserve help too. So take your 2 cents and, well, donate to a good cause of your choosing.
How fucking dare you question how I choose to donate my money.
Fair enough. My position is that if I were rational, I’d be giving $50. Quite honestly, without that extra $50 I have no idea how I’m going to eat over the next few weeks. But I’m going without because I wanted to give more to the people suffering down there – and then added the extra for the helpless pets & strays because the idea of ignoring them makes me sick to my stomach. (So I might as well go without the food and help the critters out!)
What can I say? Animals have simply brought far too much joy into my life to ignore their needs.
Let’s be realistic here: the vast, vast majority of the millions of dollars soon to be pouring in for this horrific tragedy will be going to humans, as of course it should. The little bit extra that some of us will be directing towards the nonhuman victims will constitute such a miniscule percentage of these funds as to make this whole conversation fucking ridiculous.
I’m going to be amonst the few people sharing ** unregistered bull ** point of view.
I find really disturbing that the well-being of animals would register in people’s minds in such a situation.
A lot of people stated that “of course” they (or they assume, other people) would rescue first a human rather than an animal. But, having already made some similar comments in the past, I know it’s not true since several posters stated clearly then that given the choice, they would save their pet rather than a stranger.
Once again, I can’t help finding this very disturbing.
And furthermore, in this particular situation, given that the help doesn’t seem to be able to reach the victims, I’ve a hard time believeing that somebody trying to rescue a pet (why not the gators swimming in toxic waters, while we’re at it?) wouldn’t hamper the rescue efforts, if only by his mere presence (anybody present there who isn’t engaged in rescue or himself a refugee probably is a waste of space/food/available gas/whatever and an annoyance).
If you were a pet owner in that city you would want people taking care of the pets too. YOu realize that these poor people can’t get on buses without leaving their pets behind don’t you? To ignore them is cruel to the victims as well as the pets.
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As a threadshitter in the first degree, UB is a multiple repeat offender, a jerk of the highest order, and IMO should be 2/3 of the way to being banned.
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The ethical issues of devoting resources and priorities to pets and whether they interfere with or might be better devoted to humans is a subject worthy of reasoned and temperate discussion. Our friend, however, has never made an attempt nor shown the slightest inclination to do so.
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I think ignoring him, other than reporting his posts which are nothing more than further thread shittings, may well be the wisest course.
If Pinkfreud just said that her husband is going down to help with psychological trauma nobody would have blinked. But that’s exactly what he’s doing. People - even in life-threatening disasters - still love and are attached to animals and are still terribly traumatized by their suffering, abandonment and death. It seriously adds to the human trauma and it’s not trivial. It will help a LOT of people immensely to know that someone is going to try to help their pets and that they do stand a chance.
Yes, and? Is it the worst problem these people have to face and the main issue the rescue teams should take care of?
Pittsburgh will soon be hosting refugees. I’m not sure what you’d be able to do for them once they get there, but you can ask.
As for donations. Mr. Rilch and I chose to donate clothing, through the Salvation Army, rather than money. It may be costly to transport it, but at least we know exactly what our donation will be used for. He contributed two cartons of “fat clothes”, which has the added benefit of an incentive not to get that big again. I contributed some clothing, all I could spare, plus socks and underwear that I bought, and [whisper]two boxes of feminine products[/whisper]. Also some stuffed animals; make of that what you will.
I would have. Unless it’s a severe psychiatric emergency, we don’t need any people down there playing therapist. That can come later, when people aren’t up to their chins in water.
I hadn’t heard that; thanks for telling me. I’ll be sure to look into what I can do for them once they’re here.
Yeah, I choose to donate physical objects and blood rather than money, because I don’t like the idea of 20% of my donation going to administrative costs. Plus, the Red Cross says they have enough money; it’s just a matter of logistically getting the supplies and rescuers there. Not that it isn’t good to donate money, it’s just not the only thing you can do.
How do the animal rescues work? Are they going into the heart of the devastation to find pets or are they going to nearby shelters (which are either overloaded or unstaffed due to human evacuations) and other surrounding areas that have been already evacuated but are now passable? My understanding from reading posts on horse bulletin boards is that it’s the latter, but I can’t find any authoritative cites about how animal rescue works.
The people on the horse boards who are contributing to animal recue efforts aren’t doing so because they care more about the animals than the people. Instead they’re doing so because that’s all they’re trained to do and equipped for. They can’t treat or feed a person that has medical problems or a baby suffering from dehydration by offering them hay and horse electrolytes. Likewise, they can’t house a person in a horse pasture with a nothing but a run in shed or in a dog cage.
Are you sure of it? I don’t know how it works, nor in the USA nor in the case of a disaster as opposed to regular donations. But as far as I can tell, over here, a large part of the clothes donated to the red cross are sold by the weight, not actually handed to people.
Besides being costly to transport (actually, it might be more costly than just buying clothes nearby), it can be very unefficient to transport them . You also have to sort them out (a lot of people give clothes that the charities won’t ever hand out to anybody, given their state, or clothes that would be of no use (say winter boots in this case. You can’t just bring the stuff there hoping that the package, when you’ll open it on the spot will actually contain something useful), which takes time and people who might have other more urgent things to do.
And finally, of course, money is fungible. You can use it for what is the most needed, which might not be clothes, but baby formula, or fuel, or tents, or a number of thing we wouldn’t even think about. And of course, money not only can be “transported” immediatly, but it also can be used essentially immediatly.
Generally speaking, even if you actually knew exactly what it would be used for, how would you know that this is what is actually needed? I say : let this up to the professionnals, and people who are there to assess.
Except, of course, if the charities specifically asked for clothes (or something else), which is quite rare.
And of course, administrative costs are a necessity. Doesn’t the previous poster think major charities need peole to keep them running, offices, money for advertizing, to pay their vehicles’ insurance, the phone bills and so on?
Well, shoot. 
It might be true in their case, but I doubt it’s the case of most people posting in this thread. They probably don’t have hay stockpiles, nor own a dog shelter or are veterinarians.
And even in this case, given how diastrous the overall situation appears to be, I wouldn’t approve it if it had the slighest risk of being an hindrance for rescue efforts (like using the road network in the area might be).
As I wrote above, I find disturbing that it even registers in people’s mind in these circumstances. In some other thread, some poster, for instance, mentionned that the “snowball separated from his young owner” thing was what made him realize what was going on there because he couldn’t relate to footages of people losing everything, lacking food and dying, but could relate to a boy having to leave his dog behind. Honestly, what the fuck??? 
. That’s way past my ability to comprehend.
True–and most people posting in this thread aren’t going down there to help the animals out, precisely because they lack the training to do so.
I don’t think it’s fair, when someone says that they spent $30 on helping animals out of the $100 they spent on disaster relief, to criticize them for not spending all $100 on humans. Why lump the animal-relief in with the human-relief, but not lump in the movies we paid for last week, the beer we drank, the music we bought, the tobacco, the desserts, the clothes, the dinners at restaurants?
Any of us could donate all our worldly possessions to human victims of Katrina; but we don’t do so. Instead, we operate on a continuum, deciding how much we will give; and then we spend the rest of our money in other ways.
If someone decides they will give $70 to Katrina’s human victims, that’s a great thing. If they decide they’ll give a further $30 to the animal victims, that’s also a great thing (although I agree that the human victims’ needs are greater).
I am very sympathetic toward Shodan’s, “Well, that’s nice” position.
Daniel
Just donated $50 to the Humane Society for their animal relief efforts. There’s also a MUCH larger check, and possibly a fundraising effort on my message board, that will be sent to a mod from New Orleans who has been left homeless by the hurricane.
I guess I’m a stupid, dumb, evil, wasteful person for not giving $XXXX + $50 to the human, and nothing to the animals.
You lieing sack shit. I’ve never told a lie about you. You never confronted me with nothing to refute them. Sure I shouldn’t have shit on the threads where people were expressing more compassion for animals than that of humans. Flame me all you want for that. But anyone with a functioning moral compass doesn’t waste resources on animals at a time when humans are in dire need of those resources. You and the majority of people on this thread simply lack a functioning moral compass.
Oh come on. If he was a specialist dealing with psychological trauma, would he be more useful in the refuge camps, or a John Boat
Strawman.
PF’s husband is doing what he can, within his ability. I know there are pet people, and people that can’t seem to make the connection. But to lambaste someone that is trying to help is heartless.
I agree with this statement. I’m not criticizing PF’s hubby. He’s doing more than I am or can afford. But it’s not where I’d place my priorities.
The question I have here is: When is acceptable to use resources for animals? During the past year there was the tsunami, and during this time frame the genocide going on in the Sudan has continued. Homeless persons abound. Zimbabwe is committing crimes against humanity against it’s own poor. And millions of Americans, even taxpayers, are paying for pet care, and animal shelters.
That money, food, and human effort and time are all resources that could have been applied to any of the human catastrophies I’ve just listed. By your reasoning and your own statements, you have wasted resources by imposing on someone else to shoot a dog and put it out of its misery, because you couldn’t deal with it, yourself. Time is a resource that could have been used to attempt to deal with human tragedies.
My point is that there comes a point where people have to accept they can’t do everything, and that lesser problems should be dealt with, too. To that end, I’m not going to fault PF’s husband for his choices.
I’m not going to attack you for your views about morality. But you were a major ass in PF’s original thread and deserve most of the crap you’re getting.
clairobscur, you raise some valid points. All I want to say is that, at this point, I think that with a disaster of the magnitude of NO many of the animals that have gone stray are going to contribute to the problem as much as any other single factor, and so getting them out is a net gain. I don’t know how the rescue on the ground is being done - if I had to guess, I’d hope that those with the highest level of training are going into the disaster area, and shuttling survivors to aid stations where they can be triaged, processed and moved on to more permanent facilities. With that protocol, I’d imagine that the rescuers are also bringing in animal survivors as they can, for a similar triage pattern.
I’m aware I’m working on assumption piled upon assumption, but if that’s the pattern, then it seems to me that PF’s husband’s efforts will have a benefit for all levels of the relief effort - keeping any of the stages I’ve mentioned from being overloaded is key to keeping the whole thing working properly.
And, yeah, I’m one of those guilty people who’d be more likely to save my pet than a random stranger. I’m not proud of that, nor do I think it’s the right action -but there are times that I resemble a misanthrope. :dubious: