You can combine a puppy mill with a dog brothel.
Even people who really like dogs don't buy one very often. They'll just go outside the city. It's not even a black market.
"Puppy mill" is a fairly emotive term for "someone who breeds dogs and sells them". I'd be entirely in favour of imposing welfare rules on dog breeders, but banning them is going too far. We obtained Garm from a breeder because we wanted a dog of her specific type.
You can ask for ENFP, but they don't really know.
It's not banning them entirely. People would still be able to buy dogs directly from the breeder. It's just banning pet stores from providing a pipeline from the worst of the worst.
The local pet store was in the paper for managing to kill a dog while grooming it. I forget exactly how.
Henry hoover, I reckon. Garm is certainly pretty concerned about ours.
Anyway, no one I know would buy a dog from a pet store, but l guess I know funny people.
The dog was choked. He was named "Kobe".
Anyway, dogs are like a whole different thing than when I was a kid. At one point, we had ten puppies in our basement because our Spaniel got lucky.
The question is whether it's a market that's appealing to organized crime. I don't think puppies have the same profit margins and overlapping markets or infrastructure for organized crime that sex work, drugs, or even avocados do. People don't want to buy a puppy from their pot dealer, and you're not sending in puppies along existing smuggling routes.
Is there a thing that you think ought to be illegal, but the existence of organized crime and market infrastructure convinces you that it's better for the thing to be legal?
If I wasn't me, I might answer "alcohol. "
The biggest question when there are a lot of interested buyers of something, I think, whether the law allows their basic desire to be met in some way, even if constrained, without going illegal. I think rescue/adoption can in fact meet most of the demand for dogs, so this seems reasonable. (California anti-mill legislation allows specialty breeders to stay around; possibly classist, and there are probably definition issues, but does seem important from the POV of letting there be a market outlet for the people who have the money and desire for specific breeds.)
One example of the tipping point as I see it: most cities in my area have banned both flavored cigarettes and menthol cigarettes. My city had lagged on the menthol ban (having been an early adopter of a flavor ban before a best practice emerged) and just added it, which I supported, because it makes cigarettes somewhat less attractive for people to take up. But some of the menthol ban proponents are saying next should be banning tobacco sales entirely, which, by preventing a market outlet, seems exactly the kind of measure that would make a black market explode. (Make cigarettes plain, blandly or scarily packaged, expensive, yes, all that; but don't ban them.)
Of course taxation also has a tipping point somewhere, where if the tax goes too high, that also spurs a black market. That's more trial-and-error domain.
Menthol is probably going to rise as a topic this year, by the way, because the state legislature recently passed its own ban, but the tobacco industry bought enough signatures to halt implementation, so look for it on the November ballot.
I'm at least open to that position for hard drugs, not sure I'm fully convinced either way.
What puppy mill legislation won't stop is buying and selling of dogs raised for dog fighting, where the appeal to organized crime is obvious.
The dog fighting people are uninterested in my idea for a welterweight division.
Oh god, there was a racial pattern that made me super uncomfortable. The proposed ban was being seen as a referendum on a new local pet store. The people who spoke in favor of the pet store were mostly Hispanic, and were making emotional appeals for bringing pets home to the family. The people who spoke against puppy mills were mostly white ladies. I agree with the white ladies, but having a superficial layer of white-ladies-vs-Hispanic-families made me feel super uncomfortable and weird.
With especially harmful drugs I would satisfy the demand not with a big retail industry like we did with cannabis, but with government dispensaries. Counselors, fluorescent lights, plain packaging, etc.
There's an issue here where rescues are mostly not puppies, and kids want puppies.
Are you saying it's hard to find homes for older dogs, or that there are actually insufficiently many puppies?
I think rescue/adoption can in fact meet most of the demand for dogs, so this seems reasonable. (California anti-mill legislation allows specialty breeders to stay around; possibly classist, and there are probably definition issues, but does seem important from the POV of letting there be a market outlet for the people who have the money and desire for specific breeds.)
Here, too - there's no ban on breeding dogs, but consumers would have to purchase directly from the breeder.
I think that's true. The other thing is that rescues sometimes involve proving your worth to the kind of person who has so much leisure that they can volunteer to screen dog getters. I'm guessing that's a different process for someone like me than it is for many people.
I don't think puppies have the same profit margins and overlapping markets or infrastructure for organized crime that sex work, drugs, or even avocados do.
Organised crime is involved in the avocado trade? Breaking Guac?
People don't want to buy a puppy from their pot dealer
Well, not with that attitude.
and you're not sending in puppies along existing smuggling routes.
"What's in the back? Oh, uh, just my luggage, beach towels, some souvenirs from my trip..."
(muffled yipping)
"God DAMMIT!"
Yeah there's a big problem with the Mexican drug cartels taking over the avocado business. Here's an article in the Guardian.
23: I assumed there's insufficient rescue puppies, but I'm not at all an expert. Also aren't shelters not as cute and fun to visit as a pet store?
Good heavens.
"Mexican organised crime has long mutated away from 'just' drugs trafficking. Today, the model is this: you control a given territory, and within in it you exploit whichever commodity is locally available. That includes avocados, but also limes, papayas, strawberries, illegal logging and mining, to name but a few."
State-making as organised crime...
That's a whole school of theory in political science.
Retail legal/marketable: Cannabis, psychedelics, maybe a few others
Dreary dispensaries: Opiates, amphetamines, cigarettes
Some very large percentage of the rescue dogs here are pit bulls or pit bull mixes. That's even after they put down the ones that are too aggressive.
Today, the model is this: you control a given territory, and within in it you exploit whichever commodity is locally available.
These are criminals, though. If they had Harrod's charge accounts they'd be "valued strategic partners in the region".
The obvious solution is to legalize cock fighting to give the dog fight people an outlet that isn't cruel to mammals.
Everyone I know with a rescue pitbull says they are lovely gentle dogs but I can't help thinking that I probably, for obvious reasons, don't have conversations any more with people who have unknowingly brought home a homicidally violent pitbull.
I'll never have one because I don't want to look like a Bud Light drinker.
This thread makes me want to go buy a Spaniel.
There is no sex work on the top of my head.
Don't give up. It's still early.
i just want to know how to obtain a whippig (italian greyhound + whippet mix) for when we eventually buy a flat, it is not easy to suss out though.
That's probably something you can see a pot dealer about.
Crom (mistakenly Garm above) is a whippet/terrier cross. Even one quarter whippet is quite a lot for a flat. Whippet/greyhound sounds like a bundle of fun but I hope it's a big flat with a park nearby.
Actually I need to think of a new alias for Crom because the next dog will be a wolf hound which I plan actually to call Crom, so having Crom as the online pseud for the other one will be confusing.
The validity as an argument of "but it will create a black market" depends entirely on what you're trying to regulate or ban.
Drugs? A lot of them can be made from or mistaken for medicine. Marijuana and probably some others can be grown in any backyard or large flowerpot. There are dozens if not hundreds of illicit drugs. Regulating all that sounds really hard and taking part in a black market sounds really easy.
Child labor? There already are tons of workplace regulations. Some of them only apply to large employers but some apply to everyone. One that applies to everyone is tax stuff, tying Social Security numbers to peoples' birth dates. That makes it relatively easy to check if an employee is old enough or not. Also, there's school; kids are supposed to be in it for most of the day. There are gaps in each of these systems (the school year and actual family businesses, to name two), but still, there are tons of precedents for bans or regulations on child labor and plenty of ways to do it.
It seems possible to define "puppy mills" in such a way that they're closer to the second thing than the first.
21: On counselors, and fluorescent lights. The rules around getting methadone when it's being used to treat addiction are pretty stigmatizing and dehumanizing. (If prescribed for pain, I think it's different). You have to get in line every day, sometimes even in a blizzard, to get medication that will allow people to function normally.
I'm not keen on people taking up heroin but there are probably worse things if you can buy it safely. What can you set up that won't make it like fruit flavored vaping intended to get a bunch of kids addicted without making the experience of buying drugs for people who use them degrading and dehumanizing and keep out the criminal element?
Werther's Original flavored heroin.
30. I think it's pretty mainstream as a theory of state formation in e.g. the later neolithic. Legality wasn't an issue of course, but the distinction between early state emergence and a protection racket is too fine for most people to bother with.
I got my cat from a pound. All of the many visible dogs there were pitbulls.
43: Om née Crom. Or, if the whippet/terrier Crom is a girl, Onliner Cromsbelle.
42: *italian* greyhound, essentially a cat in dog format. & yes agree regular glorious runs are essential, but otherwise the small scale sighthounds i've known were otherwise looking to nap elegantly.
behind the corner, in a box, those dogs weren't visible
I misinterpreted a perfectly clear comment to make a stupid joke and I'll do it again.
Now I want an invisible dog.
But not one that craps invisible pot, because that would kinda defeat the entire project.
Once crap leaves an invisible dog, it's visible. The actual moment of pooping is very unsettling to watch.
52: ah, I see. Tiny wee shivering dog, right?
58: Inside an invisible dog it's too light to see,
59: yes, hence attraction of whippet mixture, slightly more robust, still elegant.
Someone walking a greyhound on a cold winter day explained to me that they needed to keep moving so the dog didn't freeze because it has no insulation. But maybe it was just a way to avoid me.
Crom (mistakenly Garm above) is a whippet/terrier cross.
Oh my god. Our childhood dogs were whippet-terrier mixes. My memory is that there'd been an accident at the breeders, so to speak, and they were trying to get rid of the puppies.
These were the worst dogs! AIHMHB. They were so dumb and they looked like the giant rat Splinter, from TMNT. It took years to get them to be house broken. Then they were house broken for a few years. Then they went senile when they were 7 or 8 years old and started having accidents. Then they lived for like 8 more years, having accidents in the house. MISERABLE BEASTS.
I have so many stories about those dumb dogs. One would lick the other's head all over, compulsively, all the time. The other dog's head would be chronically wet, or dried into brittle spikes. That dog would get ear infections. So at one point we muzzled the first dog. Now, the dogs would drag their noses up your bare legs as you walked, but now the muzzled dog was trying to nose the back of your bare legs, so he'd scrape up your legs, because the raw edge of the wire of the muzzle was on the outside of course.
Then the muzzled dog had the one idea of his life. He discovered that he could push his head against the wall or the floor, and get his snout just far enough to the side that he could get his tongue out. And so he could continue to lick his brother compulsively. That was the end of the muzzle.
Eventually the lick-ee died a year or so before the licker. The licker continued to lick bigger and bigger patches in the carpet, or dog bed, or wherever he was.
My mom would say "At least they were nice dogs," which is true. At least they were not mean-spirited dogs.
This is not my childhood dog, but it's an uncanny likeness.
Our last dog would view the basement as a free piss zone if no humans were there. He would also drink out of the toilet. You'd be sitting down watching the TV and hear the gulping.
My mom bought a carpet shampoo machine.
Anyway, there are various philosophies about when to put a dog down and my dad lost that argument.
Oh yes. Our dogs were super into the catshit and we had a perpetual arms race, trying to keep them out of it.
How do you do that pause thing? Is this it?
||
I am in an emergency room waiting room. I might be having a heart attack, but probably not. I have a congenital heart problem that sometimes causes pain, but I've been having more pain than usual the last 2 days. I'm probably fine. I just need to make 100% sure my heart isn't dying.
To make this situation worse I deliberately tried to provoke a no-mask person into a fight. Or not a fight. I wanted to goad her into doing something that would get her kicked out. There are police and security all over the place. I may not have behaved very well. All my usual self-control techniques worked until she told a nurse off for asking her to put her mask up. I guess I took that as permission to give in to the hate.
Anyway. The charge nurse told me off. They don't want to escalate with these people. Apparently they're treating her in a different part of the ER. Specifically to keep us apart. So I'm that guy now.
Anyway I'm torn between feeling like, well, someone had to be the bigger asshole (she did keep her mask on afterward) and feeling a little bit of shame about giving in to this desire to just fucking fight with these people. As if I was 8 years old.
||>
Maybe just not when you think you might be having a heart attack? Take care of yourself and hopefully it's something else less dangerous.
70: this is very obviously good advice. But I think the potential heart attack was a necessary condition of losing my temper. I've probably spent the equivalent of 4 or 5 days in emergency rooms in total (for many other health problems) and never gone nuts.
69:. Good luck, and don't sweat it. Just don't try to start any more fights in the ER
I should make a flow chart for when to start a fight.
72: that may not be possible!
BTW I realize that I didn't explain, it wasn't a physical fight. I was just goading her on. Which is shameful. I was sitting while she was pacing around the ER.
75: on rereading my first comment yes I see it was. More details: she had been listening to conspiracy videos on her phone without headphones. And when she told the nurse off she said she didn't have to wear a mask because she "has liberties." So obviously I took the bait here. Ah well. Once in a two-year pandemic while maybe having a heart attack in the presence of someone who was essentially beggging for a fight is an ok record for losing my temper.
I would have but been able to listen to the videos.
I came to terms with the no-headphones thing in hospital waiting rooms by thinking "this might be the worst day of their life, cut them some slack." I do spend a lot of time in hospitals.
I could hear the videos over my noise-cancelling headphones.
I figure as long as you're not hurting anyone, however you get through the ER wait when you're maybe having a heart attack is fine.
80: thank you! The charge nurse here does not share this opinion. Not that I blame her.
Cut yourself some slack, also cut the nurse some slack, they're really going through it.
It's best to just vandalize the hospital administrator's car.
Oh no - keep us posted on your maybe-heart attack. And now the nurse gets to hate two people and have twice the scapegoats, so you probably helped.
Moby's on the right track.
Hope your heart heals.
speaking from the experience of my beloved better half having had a heart attack last year - don't have one, but if you do have one, the er is the place to do it. still rarely i hope it isn't a heart attack & that you feel much better soon!
Not a heart attack. Going to go calm down now. Thanks everyone!
I just keyed two BMWs and a Tesla. Moby was right, that really is the way to go.
64 is similar to Crom but I am happy to say that Crom shows none of the other characteristics of heebies childhood dogs.
This is, in fact, the main reason I want a wolfhound - Crom is basically a miniature wolfhound, so we can put them at different distances from the camera and take false-perspective trick shots.
re: 92
I read a load of Rosemary Sutcliffe when I was a kid, so in my head, wolfhounds (or similar giant shaggy hounds) are what all dogs looked like, in Britain, if you go back far enough.
92: excellent, wise idea! wishing you much dog happiness & v much looking forward to one day having my own stepped-of-the-walls-of-pompeii hound of elegance about the place 💓
Glad to hear it's not a heart attack, RC. Hope you're feeling better,
My dad had an Italian greyhound ("Lola"), and yes, she was basically a cat except that she loved to eat diced apples.
74.1: rarely comments, prefers to let his fists do the talking.
Hurray for non-heart attack!
Clearly commenting on Unfogged prevents heart attacks. Glad to hear you're okay, RC.
The family to which we are closest has an affinity for pit bulls and similar mutts. God bless them for taking some of the pressure off the shelters, but I wouldn't take any of those dogs. None of them were aggressive or badly behaved, but I don't find them handsome, if they're smart you can't tell, and they're just blocks of bone & muscle who don't look where they're going. Like boars through the underbrush.
TBH I'm not really a dog person, I just like the one kind of dog that's the only kind I've ever had--shepherd/husky mixes in the 40 lb range. Beautiful, graceful, smart, (mostly) silent. I'm happy to meet other dogs and I'll pet them or whatever, but I've hardly (never?) met another type of dog that I'd want to live with.
My first and only dog is a pitbull and whereas I used to find them unattractive they are now imprinted on my brain as the avatars of loveable goofiness.
When he was a puppy I stepped over a small hedge trying to teach him how to jump it and he paused for a moment and then thrust his big smiley face directly through, so proud of himself, so boars checks out.
He still loves smashing his face through the underbrush.
This thread captures so much of what's frustrating about being politically engaged (both the despair and being endlessly on hold ) https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1489717016420306947.html