Connections (31 page)

With a tenderness that made his chest full, he pulled onto the FDR Drive.

PET-ICULAR

Six to eight million cats and dogs are brought to shelters every year.

Three to four million of them are euthanized.

That’s an improvement over the 20 million from thirty or forty years ago.

It’s better, but not good enough.

PET-ICULAR

The US military chops off the legs of live goats and pigs to understand war wounds. They stuff tubes down cats’ throats, and they crush mice into cylinders. More than ten thousand living, breathing, suffering creatures are shot, mutilated, and killed by them—our government—every year.

PET-ICULAR

Who cries for the animals used in research? Between 70 and 100 million animals in the United States are maimed, blinded, scalded, force-fed chemicals, genetically manipulated, hurt, and killed each year—all in the name of science—by private institutions, household product and cosmetics companies, government agencies, educational institutions, and scientific centers. Maybe you don’t care so much about the 20 million rats and mice, but what about the sixty thousand dogs, the twenty-six thousand cats, and the thirty thousand primates? Who cries for them, too weak and hurting too much to cry for themselves?

PET-ICULAR

In a landmark ruling, a ring of eight perpetrators were recently sentenced to short prison terms for injuring or killing 500 to 640 dogs in their dog-fighting operation. How many other rings are operating out there?

PET-ICULAR

The tobacco industry is still using animals to experiment, forcing them to breathe cigarette smoke six hours straight every day for up to three years. Or apply tar to their skin to cause tumors to grow. They already know smoking is bad for you. What are they trying to prove?

PET-ICULAR

The US exports almost 12 million pelts a year to service the 500-million-dollar global fur industry. Foxes, mink, lynx, born and nursed in suffocating crowds, only to be killed and skinned, some of them while alive.

PET-ICULAR

The Dallas Safari Club auctioned a permit to shoot a black rhino in the name of conservation. It went to a bidder for $350,000. The government of Namibia, which issued the permit, allowed this to “cull” the species. Even though in the past fifty years, the number of black rhinos has dwindled from seventy thousand to five thousand. A man with $350,000 could do so much to save wildlife.

PET-ICULAR

More than sixty-four thousand dogs—our best friends—were used in research as recently as 2012. More than 98 percent of schools have stopped using animals, but what about the other 2 percent, including the University of Mississippi Medical School, Wayne Medical School, two other universities, and twenty scientific facilities? The National Institutes of Health had given the University of Wisconsin $3 million to conduct sickening experiments on cats. Luckily, the laboratory was closed down in January 2015.

PET-ICULAR

An estimated 100 million sharks are killed for their fins every year. Or for sport. Their fins are chopped off. Then the sharks are thrown back into the ocean, alive, where they struggle to breathe, suffocating or bleeding to death. I hate sharks, but I hate people who do this to living creatures more.

PET-ICULAR

During the 2009 recession, 500,000 to 1,000,000 dogs and cats were given up to shelters.

PET-ICULAR

The ten-billion-dollar illegal wildlife trade is fourth—after drugs, arms, and human trafficking—in profit. Rhino horns sell for $35,000 a pound, more than the price of gold.

PET-ICULAR

Of the ten thousand puppy mills in the country, only two thousand are licensed, giving them the authority to cage, torture, and abuse dogs so they can breed two million puppies. Dogs who never know the touch of a human hand, whose paws never know the feel of grass. Missouri gets the star for the most.

PET-ICULAR

It took the international outrage over the murder of Cecil the lion to expose trophy hunters for the barbaric human beings they are. Worse than indifferent to the lives of animals, they revel in the pleasure of killing them. And pay big bucks, in this case $55,000, to do it. What is the sport in having someone lure an animal close enough to shoot it?

PET-ICULAR

Baby monkeys are torn away from their mothers at birth and subjected to terrifying experiments. Why? To measure their emotional pain. The National Institutes of Health is actually breeding monkeys so they have more babies to subject to psychological torture. Then they kill and dissect most of them before they’re eight years old. How can they endure eight years of cruelty and horror?