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Okay, so how does one stop (unintentional) animal cruelty?
Shanadeus
Registered User
Registered User
Beware, the following video might disturb you:
Right, so these people are just morons who think that their pet will be fine, that feeding them poison and human food is nothing to worry about at all (I can't remember how many times I've heard someone feed their dog some fucking cake).
These kind of bad pet owners ignore advice from others are ignored, and I have a feeling they'd probably dismiss what a vet says with some hand-waving.
Now, they're not in the same league of people who intentionally hurt their pets but to cruelly treat your animal because of ignorance is still very sad and something that should be combated.
But what can you do without people's freedoms being unduly infringed upon?
Most people would probably say that people shouldn't at all have to change their behaviour because animals don't deserve any legal rights and are really nothing more than thinking property.
Even if you did give the animals more rights, you'd still run into the problem of enforcing them. Animals can't like humans contact authorities on their own behalf, they have to rely on adult humans just as toddlers have to.
If you offer people professional help (and with what money? I'm not sure if tax payers in any country would be open to the idea of paying for vets to inform bad pet owners of how to take care of their pets) then the pet owners such as the ones in the video above will probably dismiss it as I said above.
You can't restrict sales of pets (introducing pet licenses, regulated pet sellers, etc) to just people who pass some pet knowledge test as that'll just drive the whole thing underground and introducing more laws that might punish pet owners more than they do today might of course result in these pet owners ignoring their pet's plights - killing them off and/or buying them in their own backyard.
No doubt the last thing I brought up is already happening.
So, what can be done?
Are we just going to have to live with unintentional pet cruelty?
EDIT: Linked to the Vaseline video instead of the Energy drink one, my apologies.
Spoiler:
Right, so these people are just morons who think that their pet will be fine, that feeding them poison and human food is nothing to worry about at all (I can't remember how many times I've heard someone feed their dog some fucking cake).
These kind of bad pet owners ignore advice from others are ignored, and I have a feeling they'd probably dismiss what a vet says with some hand-waving.
Now, they're not in the same league of people who intentionally hurt their pets but to cruelly treat your animal because of ignorance is still very sad and something that should be combated.
But what can you do without people's freedoms being unduly infringed upon?
Most people would probably say that people shouldn't at all have to change their behaviour because animals don't deserve any legal rights and are really nothing more than thinking property.
Even if you did give the animals more rights, you'd still run into the problem of enforcing them. Animals can't like humans contact authorities on their own behalf, they have to rely on adult humans just as toddlers have to.
If you offer people professional help (and with what money? I'm not sure if tax payers in any country would be open to the idea of paying for vets to inform bad pet owners of how to take care of their pets) then the pet owners such as the ones in the video above will probably dismiss it as I said above.
You can't restrict sales of pets (introducing pet licenses, regulated pet sellers, etc) to just people who pass some pet knowledge test as that'll just drive the whole thing underground and introducing more laws that might punish pet owners more than they do today might of course result in these pet owners ignoring their pet's plights - killing them off and/or buying them in their own backyard.
No doubt the last thing I brought up is already happening.
So, what can be done?
Are we just going to have to live with unintentional pet cruelty?
EDIT: Linked to the Vaseline video instead of the Energy drink one, my apologies.
Shanadeus on
Posts
Yep.
As a bonus, you might actually educate yourself too.
For instance, I didn't know what the potential toxicity of petroleum jelly was. So I looked it up! Guess what: it's non-toxic. It's not a known carcinogen, teratogen, or scary-anything-ogen.
The worst risks: diarrhea and upset stomach.
There's apparently some concern over petroleum-based impurities, but the jelly itself is nontoxic.
So a good response, I guess: "Hey, you know that petroleum jelly can cause your bird to have diarrhea and an upset stomach?"
A poor response: "How dare you feed petroleum jelly to your poor bird!"
In general, I find that telling people, "If you do {X}, then {Y} will occur" works a little better than "You shouldn't do {X}. It's bad."
Speaking of which, I've observed that no matter what a YouTube video depicts an animal doing, somebody will come along to accuse you of being a terrible pet owner. If going by YouTube comments alone (yes, I know, YouTube comments are the demons) then genuinely bad pet owners are outnumbered by hyperventilating pearl-clutchers about 100 to 1.
(Similarly, I think letting a dog eat cake is kind of tacky, but depending on the dog and type of cake, it might be objectively bad or it might not be. Chocolate cake? Yeah, that's super-toxic for dogs. White or yellow cake? Eh, if they eat it all the time you'll end up with a fat diabetic dog, but one time on a YouTube video? Not worth having a heart attack over.)
The cat we had growing up had problems with hairballs and constipation.
Guess how it was treated?
Dollop of petroleum jelly on his paw every night
Our terrier pulled out of the garbage and ate almost a quarter pound of chocolate cake. Dog was completely unphased.
I'm glad to know that. (Genuinely glad; I don't mean that to sound dismissive.)
Chocolate overdose is a pretty common problem requiring vet visits, though. I wouldn't deliberately feed a dog chocolate.
Come to think of it, the hairball gel I have at home is called Petromalt.
Looks like it's 44% petroleum jelly.
I explained to him why it was a terrible thing to do to a living thing but I'm not sure he'll listen.
Anyway, it was just an example of an owner that mistreat their pet because of ignorance and a non-desire to change their treatment of their pet even when given polite advice:
I have to wonder exactly how much tolerance dogs have for chocolate, I'd guess it probably varies based on the breed. My dogs are fairly largish, and one or both of them managed to eat an entire box of baking chocolate that we had accidentally left on a counter, with no visible effect.
How does liver damage manifest, anyway?
I know this because we'd had our dog a week when the devious little bastard got himself an entire entenmen's chocolate cake and we flipped the fuck out. After trying every trick the internet could provide to get him to throw up, from hot foods to hydrogen peroxide, the little dude's cast iron stomach would not give up the deadly, deadly cake. It was at that point that I looked over the label and noticed that entenmen's chocolate cakes contain no actual chocolate. But that burst of terror fed quite a bit of research on dog-safe foods.
GT: batshido Hit me up on ME3.
That really made me raise my eyebrows.
(glad your dog was fine)
My beagle is a tiny, tiny thing, she ate a few chocolate chips we spilled while cooking. She basically shut down for an hour, scaring us all to death, until it got out of her system.
Since then we have been very very careful with anything chocolate.
Chocolate toxicity in dogs
Looks like if you don't see a reaction with in 72 hours you're in the clear (actual time frame likely lower, but I'm not a vet nor have I recently seen someone play one on tv, so you get an overestimation with a comfortable pad). A lot of the symptoms are going to be pretty clear indications something is up (ie: vomiting). Some of them may be less clear (hyper excitability).
This link might actually be better, but the largely agree.
As with any drug / toxin, body weight will have a significant effect on how much it takes cause problems, as will individual tolerance. We had a chow mix who got a whole bag of semisweet chocolate chips one day while we were both at work. By the time anyone got home, she had thrown up & had diarrhea all over the house. After a trip to the emergency vet, she was fine.
Also, remember that while people's first response is usually "but he likes it" dogs are like small children... what they want and what is good for them are not always the same thing. My dog had to actually MOVE a bag of powdered sugar (which I normally couldn't keep her out of) to get at the chocolate chips underneath, which I had thought were safely out of her reach when I'd left the house that morning. And afterwards we had to work even harder to keep the stuff out of her reach, because apparently her mind didn't associate "I ate this stuff" with "I got really horribly sick", but rather with "it tasted soooo good". (The vet actually warned us that would probably happen, and it did.)
Pretty much this. My beloved golden retriever of the daycare I spent my entire childhood was regularly fed brownies (and macaroni and cheese and sandwich crusts, etc) and she lived to 18 years old. Friends of friends a while back had their huge dog eat a full 1 pound chocolate bar in one sitting and he was perfectly fine. As soon as you get small dogs and high concentrations of cocoa, though, then you're in trouble.
My mom just says "oh but they love (people food) so much" / "it doesn't hurt anything."
SWTOR: Allanna (Shadowlands) / TSW: Sara-Luna
*eyes right*
My cats like to jump in my tub and drink water dripping out of the faucet. Sometimes I leave the tub filled up after having a bath.
There was a cockatiel we found that used to get on our shoulders. It flew off my shoulder one day and landed on the ground where my dog tore it to pieces. I dug a grave for it and the morning after the grave was reopened and the bird had been devoured.
Cocoa is toxic to dogs, very toxic actually. The reason a bit of cake isn't going to hurt them is because the amount of cocoa in chocolate cake is low.
A dog can die from eating a bar of bakers chocolate. It won't die from eating a hersey bar.
Needless to say, the amount of cocoa found in "chocolate" of all sorts varies by an incredibly large degree.
The things that an average kitchen-owner needs to be extremely careful about keeping out of reach are bakers chocolate, semi-sweet morsels (for cookies), and powdered cocoa.
If your dog raids the candy dish he's not gonna die in all likelihood.
Theobromine is a near analogue to caffeine, which is why it causes problems. Dogs metabolize it slowly, so a dog getting a hold of baker's chocolate is similar to a human slamming 20 double espressos as fast as they can.