I just found out about a great site, Pet Defense.  Thanks to S. Kennedy for the link.

http://petdefense.wordpress.com/

Be sure to read the entries on AB 1634, California's horrendous enlistment into the AR extinction plan.  It's been the talk of the 'sphere this week, since the original piece of garbage was rewritten - but not for the better.  We'll have to keep tabs on this one - California is easy meat for militant animal rightists and other fad-carrying propagandists - it's all about stroking the egos of the manipulees.  My links go to the Pet Connection and the marvellous Lassie Get Help.

Brent over at KC Dog Blog has an interesting post regarding Kansas City's failed mandatory sterilization law.  Despite the numbers, the City is trumpeting the success of the program and appears to have also brainwashed local media - who have access to the same figures that KC has.

This reminds me of a passage in a book I'm reading.  The thesis of the book is that emotion plays a major role in decision-making, overriding logic and facts, which is why arguing dispassionately and rationally aren't working for us:

"What [Lyndon] Johnson and [Dr Martin Luther] King both intuitively understood is what colleagues and I demonstrated with brain imaging forty years later:  that arguing about the rationality of rationalizations is attacking the wrong target.  Rationalizations are the post hoc smoke that billows from emotional fires.  In our study, only after partisans had come to emotionally biased judgements did we see any activation in circuits usually associated with reasoning, suggesting that they had begun to develop rationalizations for their emotional biases.  You can systematically debate the fine points of these realizations, but you're wasting your time.

You don't put out a fire by waving at the smoke.  You put out the fires.  And if someone keeps starting those fires, you put out the arsonist."

--Drew Westen, The Political Brain, p. 351

Words to live by.

More later, have to get on with my big project.