100 Sled Dogs killed in Whistler so a travel company can save a few dollars

[jacey]

This via Annie Scarborough via facebook. The horrendous details of this sled dog slaughter only came to light when the company employee who did the deed with a gun and a knife (after vets in the area had refused to euthanise 100 healthy dogs for the sake of expediency) applied for mental health counseling for PTSD.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/restlessnativeblog/2014094348_chilling_tale_emerges_of_whistler_sled-dog_slaughter.html

Of course, you've got to wonder why he didn't refuse to do it.

Whistler is a town that lives and dies on its tourist trade. I sure hope this company is hounded out of business. (Pun not quite intentional, because a smile is the last thing this news brings to my face.) They still have 200 sled dogs.

Hopefully this will turn into a criminal prosecution. If it doesn't, it should.

Comments

[ferlonda.livejournal.com]

Sadly, this kind of behavior is common. Less than stellar Greyhounds are routinely put down at the end of racing season, puppy mills kill hundreds and hundreds of dogs through neglect or deliberate cruelty, etc. In my 9/11 lost bird list a woman just rescued a love bird who was part of a pair turned outside because the owner didn't want them anymore. There was little or no attempt to find them a new home.

There is the common perception that animals are just not worth humane treatment because who cares anyway and besides they're just animals and besides it's too expensive. There is also the issue of what do you do with a couple hundred bodies of chemically euthanized dogs. You can't put them in a landfill- they're toxic waste now. What do you do in the UK with a euthanized horse? Can't feed the meat to anything, can't safely bury it... where does it go? Here a lot of it gets into pet food. Yep, pet food.

People are just starting to realize (finally) that animals are not a convenience you can just dump or throw away when you're tired of them and that they need laws to protect them because humans tend to be total asshats when they think no one is looking who will care enough to do anything about it. Like the poor cat who starved to death at a shelter (YES, a SHELTER) because it got out of its cage and in trying to escape fell in a space between two walls where no one could reach it easily. It cried for two weeks. Everyone could hear it. Finally it died of thirst. No one did anything about it until the smell of the corpse was too much to take THEN they punched a hole in the wall and pulled it out.

The guy in Whistler who did the actual deeds probably didn't realize just how horrible it was going to be and of course there's that eternal peer pressure thing. Not excusing him in the least- a stiff dose of PTSD may actually do him some good.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I think it's the sheer scale of this that's so mind-boggling.

[ferlonda.livejournal.com]

It is a good sized cull- but not unusual at all. How about the 100s of 1000s of pigs buried alive recently in, I believe, China? Could be wrong about that... Then there's the pig farm in the midwest that was abandoned when the couple who owned it divorced and left thousands of pigs to starve to death. I could go on and on but I won't. I'm not sure that volume of deaths really matters, frankly. It's horrible but only in scale. Even one death like this is one too many for me.

I'm glad these dogs' deaths not only made the news but are getting the attention they deserve. A little after the fact but if it helps to raise awareness of over-breeding and the callous behavior of humans toward animals of all species, including ourselves, it will at least be good in that way.

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

That is utterly horrific... It all seems very unlikely, but... The evidence seems to fit together rather too nicely for it to be a fabrication.

Our foot-and-mouth culling in 2001 was bad enough... To do a similar thing with intelligent carnivores is even more barbaric.

Animals and business do not good bedfellows make.

[ferlonda.livejournal.com]

Oh, and don't forget the thousands of red winged blackbirds poisoned to death because a farmer complained about them eating from his UNCOVERED feed bins. They flew miles and miles after eating the poisoned food and then fell from the sky. How many predators ate them and then died from the same poison? How about the ground and the water contaminated by the poison?

Bleah. Humans make me sick. I'll stop posting about this now.