Readers
ONLINE EXCLUSIVE
Anti-puppy mill bill’s rejection disappointing
The Colorado House Agriculture committee’s rejection of a bill to limit Colorado breeders to 50 adult dogs and require annual veterinary certifications for each dog should disappoint everyone who cares about animals.
This bill could have helped prevent dogs from suffering in puppy mills – mass breeding facilities where animals live in cramped, crude, filthy conditions; suffer from malnutrition, exposure, lack of socialization, and a lack of veterinary care; and female dogs are destroyed when their worn-out bodies can no longer produce puppies.
It also would have helped prevent large-scale breeders from contributing to the companion animal overpopulation crisis. Puppies from breeders and puppy mills steal homes from animals in shelters, whose lives depend on being adopted.
People who have dogs’ best interests at heart – not just their own selfish desires to make money or win ribbons by breeding or showing them – would never bring more dogs into a world where there are already too many animals and not enough good homes.
To learn more, visit www.HelpingAnimals.com.
Lindsay Pollard-Post
staff writer
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
Norfolk, Va.
Obama is the thread linking market swoons
After President Obama was elected, the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered its worst day-after-election performance in history.
The day Obama was inaugurated, the DJIA slumped in its worst-ever inauguration day performance.
Following Obama’s first nationally televised press conference, the DJIA lost nearly 400 points more.
Perhaps one day the supersleuths at The New York Times and NBC (the National Barack Channel) will figure out the common thread linking these terrible stock market showings.
Mark Kalinowski
New York, N.Y.
In vitro fertilization morally problematic
Regarding the Octuplet mom, Nadya Suleman:
Genetic science has great potential for either serving or degrading humanity. Its proper use requires moral reflection and the establishment of moral limits.
Science has confirmed with objective certainty that full human life begins at conception with the formation of a genetically complete, self-directing human entity, the embryo.
Reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization are morally problematic because they are used to produce embryos in the laboratory where they can be observed and manipulated.
Here, a relationship of domination of researchers over their embryonic subjects exists that not only opens the door to new threats against life but is contrary to the dignity and equality that must be common to parents and children.
Human beings are not raw materials that can be exploited or commodities that can be bought and sold. If a man takes on the power to fabricate man, he also takes on the power to destroy him.
The human being has the right to be generated, not produced, to come to life not in virtue of an artificial process but of a human act in the full sense of the term: the union between a man and a woman.
Paul Kokoski.
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada