Anyone involved in or with an interest in animal welfare or advocacy, is aware of the atrocities that take pace in China on a daily basis; companion animals, dog and cats, brutally killed and tortured for their skin and for their meat. This doesn’t even touch on what’s done to other animals and wildlife, but there is no limit to the cruelties visited on animal life in China. In the past months, China, especially Beijing and the surrounding areas, have stepped thing up a notch. These efforts are to ‘clean up’ for visitors and to hell with whether they are beyond cruel and inhumane.

I’ve been reading stories of strays rounded up, stuffed in cages, so many to the point that they can barely breathe, let alone move, taken away and killed in ways you don’t even want to hear about. The pictures remind you of torture during the middle ages or holocaust with animal victims.

Dog meat is routinely sold at markets where dogs are jammed in cages alive and miserable until a shopper picks out their ‘dinner’ and the pitiful creature is cruelly yanked out and killed. I’ve seem pictures and videos. You cannot even imagine, you don’t want to. In many restaurants, dishes containing dog meat are standard fare.

Now, to try to cover up this practice, which most of the world considers disgusting, even many Chinese, as pets are more and more embraced as family members, China officials are banning the offering of dog meat dishes on the menu of a number of restaurants that will be catering to tourists.

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When I am old…
I will wear soft gray sweatshirts…
and a bandanna over my silver hair…..
and I will spend my social security checks on wine and my dogs.

I will sit in my house on my well-worn chair and listen
to my dogs’ breathing.
I will sneak out in the middle of a warm summer night
and take my dogs for a run, if my old bones will allow…

When people come to call,
I will smile and nod as I show them my dogs…
and talk of them and about them…
….the ones so beloved of the past
and the ones so beloved of today….

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You all remember ex-Trooper Charles Jones, the NC trooper that was videotaped hanging and kicking his K-9 partner? Well, after being fired in September 2007, he sued to get his job back and a judge recommended that he be reinstated but the final word is not in yet.

Well, it looks like Jones is back on a police force and actually has been since four months after he was fired from NC State Highway Patrol in September of 2007. He’s now with the Apex, NC police department as a patrol officer.

I find it funny that in the media storm surrounding the case, which included him suing to get all his back pay from the job he was fired from, it was never mentioned that he had already been hired by another police department.

So now he’s making almost 40K a year, about two-thirds of what he was making as a trooper at 60K. He been working for Apex PD for months now, he wants his trooper job back and the pay since September. If the Office of State Personnel follows the judge’s recommendation, what exactly will it mean? Will he be getting paid twice over? Will he just quit Apex PD, the department that gave him a chance even thought he had been fired by NC state?

I’d also like to know why he wasn’t brought up on animal abuse charges. Just because his was just one of many troopers who treated their K-9 partners in this manner to one degree or another, doesn’t make it right. He was caught, on tape no less. In my mind, anyone with common sense should know better than to treat any living creature in the manner that Jones treated Ricoh.

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