Seriously. Puppies.
TAMPA — In May of last year, the Tampa Bay Times asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture to provide the three most recent inspections of 15 puppy breeders who supply Tampa-area stores.
It took nine months, but the reply arrived last week: 54 pages of total blackout.
Every word of every inspection — from the date to the violations — were redacted from the documents provided. Providing “personnel and medical files,” the agency said, would “constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
These records used to be available on the USDA website for anyone to search and find. But in the first month after President Donald Trump took office, the information was scrubbed entirely from the website.
Why does that matter to Floridians? Because state lawmakers are now considering legislation that would null any local ordinance that prohibits the sale of dogs from a USDA-licensed breeder.
Rep. Halsey Beshears, R-Monticello, on Tuesday morning filed the amendment, which was tacked on to a 125-page bill offered by state agriculture secretary Adam Putnam. The amendment could be voted on as early as Wednesday.
Hillsborough County is one of those localities that bans the sale of dogs, though existing stores were allowed to continue operating. The goal of the ordinance, approved last year, was to block the pipeline of puppy mill dogs into Hillsborough. But as the Times learned last year, USDA-licensed breeder does not mean the facility is not a puppy mill nor does it mean it has a flawless track record.
A Tampa store, All About Puppies, received dogs from several large-scale out-of-state dog breeders with multiple USDA violations discovered at inspection.
One of those suppliers, Puppies Extraordinaire, a Kansas breeder that maintains about 1,000 dogs on site, was cited in 2015 and 2016 for keeping dogs in buildings and enclosures that were not up to code and could potentially cause injury.
At another Kansas breeder, Twin Oaks Kennel, inspectors in 2014 found staffers treating dogs with expired oxytocin. Whispering Oaks Kennel, also in Kansas, had a Shih Tzu in 2014 with an untreated eye infection swollen and crusted from a “slightly intruding point coming out of the pupil.” There, dogs were drinking water that was green out of containers with “green slime.”
All of that information is based on USDA inspections that were previously available to the public. Under the Trump administration, they are not. And if the Legislature decides to block local puppy mill ordinances, then dog buyers in those localities won’t be able to see the condition of the places that bred those pups.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Friday abruptly removed inspection reports and other information from its website about the treatment of animals at thousands of research laboratories, zoos, dog breeding operations and other facilities.
In a statement, the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service cited court rulings and privacy laws for the decision, which it said was the result of a “comprehensive review” that took place over the past year. It said the removed documents, which also included records of enforcement actions against violators of the Animal Welfare Act and the Horse Protection Act, would now be accessible only via Freedom of Information Act Requests. Those can take years to be approved.
“We remain equally committed to being transparent and responsive to our stakeholders’ informational needs, and maintaining the privacy rights of individuals with whom we come in contact,” the statement said.
This, of course, will make it harder to bust puppy mills.
The records that had been available were frequently used by animal welfare advocates to monitor government regulation of animal treatment at circuses, scientific labs and zoos. Journalists have used the documents to expose violations at universities.
Members of the public could also use the department’s online database to search for information about dog breeders, as could pet stores. Seven states currently require pet stores to source puppies from breeders with clean USDA inspection reports, according to the Humane Society of the United States — a requirement that could now be impossible to meet.
Animal welfare organizations quickly condemned the removal of the information, which they called unexpected and said would allow animal abuse to go unchecked.
“The USDA action cloaks even the worst puppy mills in secrecy and allows abusers of Tennessee walking horses, zoo animals and lab animals to hide even the worst track records in animal welfare,” said John Goodwin, senior director of the Humane Society’s Stop Puppy Mills Campaign.
The USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), which also oversees animals in circuses, zoos and those sold commercially as pets, says that making the data publicly available posed a threat to individuals’ privacy.
USDA spokesperson Tanya Espinosa would not specify what personal information the agency wanted to protect, but said that it would be impossible to redact it from all the tens of thousands of inspection reports, complaints and enforcement action documents that used to be public.
The decision is a result of the USDA’s “commitment to being transparent, remaining responsive to our stakeholders’ informational needs, and maintaining the privacy rights of individuals”, according to a statement on the agency’s website. The records will still be available in redacted form through freedom-of-information requests. ”If the same records are frequently requested via the Freedom of Information Act process, APHIS may post the appropriately redacted versions to its website,” the statement concludes.
But some critics met the privacy argument with scepticism. The USDA routinely redacted the names of individuals from the public reports anyway, saysJustin Goodman, director of the non-profit White Coat Waste Project in Washington DC, which opposes animal research. “Claiming ‘privacy’ is a smokescreen to unjustifiably evade critical transparency about government operations.”
This all kind of makes sense, when you realize that animals of all kinds will bear the harshest brunt of climate change.
Piles of dead turtle hatchlings are lining Queensland’s famous Mon Repos beach amid a heatwave which has pushed the sand’s temperature to a record 75 degrees Celsius.
While the majority of hatchlings break free from their nests at night when the sand is cooler, those escaping in the day face overheating.
“They can’t sweat, they can’t pant, so they’ve got no mechanism for cooling,” Department of Environment and Heritage Protection chief scientist Dr Col Limpus said.
“If they encounter very hot sand they just simply heat up.
“They slow down and that’s the end for them.
“You really only have probably an hour or so in those really hot sands and it’s terminal.”
The extreme heat is also conducted down to the turtle’s nest, pushing the temperature to about 34C, which is approaching the lethal level for incubation.
That is the hottest temperature recorded in a nest in more than a decade.
“We’ve got an increased mortality … that we haven’t been seeing in years,” Dr Limpus said.
The average hatchling survival rate is 85 per cent but due to the heat it is likely to be a lot lower this year.
The exact number of turtle deaths is not known at this stage, but hundreds have been seen dead on the beach.
The 1.6-kilometre Mon Repos beach is the most important breeding site for Loggerhead turtles in the South Pacific.
Because they are lower lifeforms missing some of the traits that make us human.
Andy, I do hope and DO think you’re being sarcastic/ironic with “lower lifeforms missing some of the traits that make us human”, hence the thumb up I gave it.
First, thanks to Peter for ruining my weekend . The first two clips were bad enough, but the “Angel” clip brought serious tears to my eyes.
The fact of the matter is that being “human” anymore really means being INhuman. Our total disregard for the ALL lifeforms as we rape and pillage the planet for profit is going to eventually lead to our extinction—-IMO, that’s poetic justice and not a bad thing for every other living thing on the planet.
The way dogs are treated is particularly heartbreaking. Dogs are dogs because WE made them what they are—-humans took an intelligent and social “pack” animal and directed its evolution towards becoming “man’s best friend”. It’s really no less tragic that we “carpet bomb” habitats/ecosystems—we bottom trawl the oceans, clear cut rain forests to make palm oil plantations, dump plastics into the oceans, dump mine wastes into waterways—-the list is endless . We heat things up so that corals and now baby turtles die (or flying foxes fall dead out of the sky, leaving behind many orphans which we then “rescue” because we’re SO “human”—-remember when that happened?)
I’ll say it again, the human species is NOT worthy of the exalted position it has achieved on the planet. Now the USDA has “abruptly” taken an action that will allow “humans” to continue to MAKE MONEY off the suffering and abuse of “lower lifeforms”? And we’re supposed to NOT think that the evil POS’s that have taken over the government are NOT behind it?
Guess where we’re headed, folks? “First they came for the “lower life forms”, and I did not speak out—-Because I was not a “lower life form”.
Looked at this again in passing, and too many “NOTS” in there. Didn’t intend a double negative.
While I agree that abuse of animals is unworthy of humans, they do that to themselves and each other all over the world. A the same time chimps kill and eat each other as well. Animals, of which humans are a part, do some things that parts of our brain if we are the average person would consider bad in our culture. Whether those things are bad is largely a part of your culture. Example, dogs. In china and other parts of the world you can eat your dog, tasted good and goes down well. In the USA you can go to jail. The point is much of what you say is simply your culture not realty of humans or other animals big or small actions to each other. After all a bacteria would love to eat you and you kill and eat them every second of your life and think nothing of it.
Humans are the only thing on this planet which can look at the stars and dream and put into place a different thing. The rest of the world just does the same old same old and has until that particular species goes extinct. If we manage to keep going, hopefully one day our children’s children will be going to the stars and meeting other creatures also going to the stars who looked up at those stars and dreamed the big dream.
I wonder where everyone else is today? Busy googling info on how to immigrate to Canada or NZ?—-(forget AUS—-Trump will soon be bombing them for reasons known only to his YUUUGE ego). Shopping maybe? Because once the trade (or shooting) war starts with China, the shelves will be bare?
I have been waiting for someone to make the OH-SO-VERY obvious connection here between climate change deniers, animal abusers, child abusers, wife-beaters, slave owners, racists, and Nazis (both neo and old time), but it hasn’t happened. Maybe it’s because Bates has hijacked this thread and driven most folks away? That’s too bad, because Bates is putting on quite a show today as he tries to show us how smart he is.
He began this comment with “While I agree that abuse of animals is unworthy of humans, they do that to themselves and each other all over the world”, and that made me hopeful that he, of all people, was going to make the connection I was looking for.
Unfortunately he veers off into chimps and eating dogs and gibberish about bacteria in what seems to be a feeble attempt to somehow conflate abuse with eating.
I’m not sure what he’s saying in his “go to the stars” closing, but one thing is clear—-I’ve listened to Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Bates is no Neil deGrasse Tyson.
The lower lifeforms I refer to are selfish psychopaths and sociopaths who treat life as a means of keeping meat fresh or purely as a way of making money without regard to their wellbeing.
Whom I consider to be real humans are more evolved than that and possess higher faculties such as empathy, compassion and integrity.
Thought so.
Because abusing animals is profitable, so long as you can hide what you’re doing from people it would upset. There are a lot of regulations designed to protect agricultural practices (from tight confinement to outright abuse) from public scrutiny…
With this dreadful decision covered by the mealy mouthed words:
those behind it, and those being protected only reinforce Derek Jensen’s message.
Shame! Shame! Shame on them!
Sorry ‘Derrick Jensen’. Having a senior moment.
And look at those turtles, your Cooking appears to be working Russell.
The decision per this story has been in the making for more than a year. How has that have anything to do with Trump and climate denial headlines?
As to the baby turtles you notice the words, not seen in a decade? So it was cooler for a decade and than got hotter again. How does that have anything to do with Trump and climate denial headlines?
You all know it does not. The headline is simply a lie to get clicks so the writer can make more money and vacation in some expensive carbon consuming fancy vacation spot.
The proper approach to the record issue is go to congress and complain in mass to each person in congress. Than crowd fund a lawsuit to return the records to open records which may or may not be the case under current law. Some lawyers in the department decided when Obama was in office that the records were not open source records. My county has a similar idea for animal control reports and requires a request to view the reports. That may or may not be the law with the Feds. That is what congress is for to change the law and the courts to interpret the law.
That whole process should apply to any studies paid for by the taxpayers on the climate. All those things are actually public records even if many of the scientists doing them think the record is confined to only the final report. If you want actual science you should be able to see the entire process of how one arrives at the final product to make sure the books were not cooked.
Trumpsters like myself do not fear the truth, we hate and despise lies and distortions along with the covering up of data and material changes in the data to arrive at a set conclusion. An example is the Giss data set versus the RSS, UAH and STAR data sets. The establishment is convinced the world is warming and man is at fault. You never see any mention that STARR shows cooling for decades, RSS and UAH showed no warming since 1998 until the El NIno nor that the El Nino never got as hot as the one in 97-98 or that the world was warmer, at least in the northern hemisphere in 1000 AD than today unless trees under a glazier in Alaska that old grew under ice. There are plenty of other examples of the science not being cut and dried for AGW that are ignored and glossed over in the climate discussion which after all is the future for our kids.
You are clearly incapable of connecting the dots.
That area where the turtles had to get out from the sand is hotter than for MORE than a decade, this is a further signal of the global temperature trend.
The temperature trend has been markedly up since the beginning latter part of the twentieth, the so called pause was in fact a slow down in the rate of acceleration of rising temperatures, totally misconstrued by the AGW denial machine which has now been emboldened by the advent of Trump and his manipulators, some of whom were a part of that denial machine. This is on the record and beyond dispute. One only has to watch the testimony of contrarians such as Michaels, Lindzen and Curry at that November 2010 (search on this ‘
House Science Committee: one last ‘rational’ climate science hearing?’) to appreciate how denial is going to spring back again under Trump & Co. There is the connection as clear as crystal to anybody with half a brain.
You clearly have no appreciation of how ecosystems work or the deleterious effects of losing species, especially keystone species.
Why is that so important, well here is a little education for you:
Why Healthy Oceans Need Sea Turtles (pdf)
and
Sea Turtles as Biological Transporters of Nutrients and Energy from Marine to Terrestrial Ecosystems (pdf)
It isn’t to hard to find more, so why do you behave like an ignoramus rather than look stuff up before defecating your bilge?
You have already been called on this nonsense and the latest obfuscation from John Christy is to intentionally mislead and misdirect.
But then your capricious and chaotic style of thinking is a mirror of that from the Trumpets and quite removed from reality. Reality such as the dynamics of the polar vortex, a cryosphere in melt down and much more.