Skip to main content

Adopt Me!

Pet adoption is a good thing. I love dogs. I have written a lot about my beagle over the years. I happily adopted her from a Fort Worth shelter. I grew up with dogs. I took care of my previous housemate's dog for five years. I helped take care of an Akita that belonged to a New Orleans police officer for a couple of weeks after Hurricane Katrina. I love my girlfriend's dogs. And I gladly took care of my neighbors' dogs while they were out of town a month ago.

But if there's one thing I cannot stand, it's seeing friends of mine on Facebook clogging up a news feed with pictures and links featuring dogs that might be put to sleep if they aren't adopted in time.

I don't mean to be heartless, but I'm not so sure what "good" there is with posting picture after picture with a description like, "Scrappy needs a home by Friday or he will be put down." I understand the idea of trying to put the word out if anyone is looking for a new dog, but not everybody wants a dog or can take care of a dog. And not every dog can get the care it needs in one household if the house is overrun by dogs.

I'm not about to run a kennel in my house. My daily focus is on Victory, and I happily help out with my girlfriend's two dogs. They all receive plenty of love and care, but I can't even fathom trying to save every at-risk dog in the metroplex. No, I don't like seeing dogs get put down, but I don't want to feel some guilt that I'm not Crazy Dog Man. That pulling on the heartstrings can be overbearing. I can only hope that dogs and cats find loving homes and live fulfilling lives.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Catherine Wheel

Originally posted: Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 Despite managing to release five proper albums, Catherine Wheel was one of those bands that always seemed to slip past the mainstream rock crowd. Yes, they got some nice airplay in their day, but people seem to have forgotten about them. You may hear “Black Metallic” or “Waydown” on a “classic alternative” show on Sirius or XM or maybe even on terrestrial radio, but that’s about it. For me, they were one of most consistent rock bands of the ’90s, meandering through shoegazer, hard rock, space rock and pop rock, all while eluding mainstream pigeonholing. Led by the smooth, warm pipes of vocalist/guitarist Rob Dickinson (cousin of Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson), Catherine Wheel featured Brian Futter on lead guitar, Dave Hawes on bass and Neil Sims on drums. They weren’t a pretty-boy guitar band, but they weren’t a scuzzy bunch of ragamuffins either. Though the band hailed from England, Catherine Wheel found itself more welcome on American air
4 comments
Read more

Hello, Control

I'm still a big fan of iTunes . I haven't tried Napster , Urge or eMusic as I've been perfectly happy with Apple's program ever since I downloaded it two years ago. However, an annoying new feature has come up with its latest version, 7.0. Whenever you pull up your music library, a sidebar taking up 3/4ths of the screen appears plugging the iTunes Music Store. Why is this an annoyance? Well, first and foremost, since you can't close the sidebar, you can't escape it. I believe a music library is a private collection, a spot away from the music store. So what's the need for constant advertisements and plugs? To provide a better visual, let me describe what I see whenever I pull up a song in my iTunes library. When I listen to "This is a Fire Door Never Leave Open" by the Weakerthans, I see a graphic for Left and Leaving , the album that it comes from (and available in the iTunes Music Store), along with a list of the Weakerthans' other albums,
3 comments
Read more

Politics Shmolitics

Yesterday, the more pleas I saw for people to go out and vote, the more uncomfortable I felt. Plenty of the blogs I hit up everyday said something along the lines of "Vote and if you don't, don't complain." Folks, this is why I find discussing politics so alienating. There are plenty of reasons why I don't discuss politics on here or in my everyday conversations. The biggest reason is because I don't have a lot of interest in politics in the first place. By what I've seen, heard and read for the last eight years, political debates are usually pissing contests. Judging by the views I've processed, it would be easy to think that we're all slowly going downhill either on the left, right or down the middle. Yet I don't think we're going totally downhill or totally uphill. Debating the direction we're going seems futile, especially when adults start screaming at each other like they're in grade school. To my ears, political debates are s
11 comments
Read more