October is Fundraise for Farley Month

It's every pet owner's worst nightmare. A beloved pet needs veterinary care, but the owner can't afford treatment. For many seniors and people with disabilities, this scenario is a sad reality.

That's where the Farley Foundation steps in.

The Farley Foundation helps sick and injured pets that belong to low-income seniors and people with disabilities.

The Foundation offers financial assistance to veterinary clinics in Ontario to help cover the cost of providing necessary veterinary care for pets belonging to seniors receiving the Federal Guaranteed Income Supplement or people with disabilities who receive the Ontario Disability Support Payment, and who cannot otherwise afford treatment for their pets.

The Farley Foundation pays tribute to one of Canada's most famous pets. Farley is the Old English sheepdog who appeared in the For Better or For Worse® comic strip. For Better or For Worse® is the charming and poignant chronicle of a Canadian family. Cartoonist Lynn Johnston first introduced the fictional Patterson clan to audiences 21 years ago.

Farley was the first dog I ever owned. As a puppy he was a boundless ball of black and white energy. As an adult, he was a personality, unique unto himself and truly, part of the family.

Owning a dog introduced us to the world of veterinarians, groomers and obedience school - all of which helped us to learn how to care for and understand what owning a pet entails (pun intended). Farley was a wonderful, unforgettable companion, who died but lived on for years in FBorFW.

In 1995, Johnston decided to develop a storyline about the death of Farley, the Patterson's 14-year-old sheepdog. The powerful and moving story received international media coverage. Johnston received more than 2,500 letters from fans. Many were devastated that the beloved dog was written out of the comic strip. Others shared their heartbreaking stories of losing a family pet. After seven years, Farley's loss is still a sentimental subject!

Long after Farley left us, I had the opportunity to work with my husband's sister, a veterinarian in Manitoba. It was Beth who made me so aware of her role in the community. As an "animal doctor", she tended to family pets as well as large farm animals. Every patient was handled with professionalism and sincere consideration for both the animals and their owners. After all, when a member of the family is sick, it affects everyone!

Seeing a worried family greet their healthy pet after a night in the "hospital" was a rewarding sight. Calming someone who had lost a pet was as heartwrenching as any final passage.

Beth did her work for the love of it. When people couldn't pay, they brought us chickens or fresh pies. Never did a patient go untreated - even in the middle of the night, sick animals were treated and cared for. Calves were born, piglets too and abandoned kittens were nursed by hand until they were big enough for adoption.

It was a hard job, and I was part of it for a season, carrying supplies, cutting sutures, holding flashlight and holding hands.

To be asked to help veterinarians to care for pets who, for lack of finances, might be left to suffer is an honour. By lending Farley's name and image to the Farley Foundation, I feel part of this venerable group, and once again, my very first dog, is remembered in a very special way.

More about the Farley Foundation and how to help out here

For Better or For Worse® official website here

More about For Better or For Worse® here

The Kindness of a Stranger

A puppy that seemed destined for the pound and possible death was reunited with his owner late Tuesday.

On August 26, Josh Gomez, a 22-year old music teacher, brought his puppy, Pilot, to the PetFIRST Veterinary Clinic in Duluth, Georgia. Pilot was suffering from parvo, a deadly virus that can kill young animals very quickly. Treatment, which involves providing fluids to prevent dehydration, and managing related symptoms, can be costly.

Three days later, Gomez went to pick up his dog. He paid the vet $1,152, the amount he said the clinic had quoted him. However, Dr. Garry Innocent, the veterinarian, Innocent, however, said he never quoted that figure to Gomez and that the real amount Gomez owed was $1,640. That amount eventually increased to over $2,200, because of boarding costs.

Gomez felt that his dog had been held "hostage", as the clinic refused to release Pilot until all additional costs were paid.

Georgia law allows veterinarians to "dispose of" a pet 10 days after demanding, in writing, that its owner pay the animal's medical bill in full.

In a letter dated Sept. 8, Innocent informed Gomez that if he didn't pay the bill, he would "report this matter to all authorities including Gwinnett County Animal Control for pet abandonment and disposal" and suggested that the puppy might be euthanized. He called Mr. Gomez a "jerk", commenting that "all the twit has to do is pay his bill". PetFIRST does not offer options like payment plan negotiations or Care Credit, a third-party loan for veterinary expenses.

In response to angry e-mails and phone calls that "were disrupting his business", the vet relented and advised that instead of handing the dog over to Animal Control, he would offer Pilot for adoption to one of his "star" clients.

Tuesday, September 18 was the deadline Innocent set for Gomez to make good on his debt.

That afternoon, Carol Diamantis of Brookhaven paid $972 in cash to free Pilot.

Diamantis, Gomez and his attorney, Ed McCrimmon, paid a surprise visit to PetFIRST Animal Hospital late Tuesday. The cash Diamantis ponied up Tuesday afternoon settles the bill once and for all, according to the vet.
Diamantis said she stepped forward after reading news accounts of the pet's possible demise. "If I was in the position, I would hope somebody would help me out," said Diamantis, who brought her two sons with her.

The surprise visit prompted further theatrics, and the vet demanded that Pilot's bill be paid in cash before the dog would be handed over. McCrimmon, Gomez's lawyer, even called the Duluth police — to make sure the exchange took place, he said. Finally, a vet tech handed Pilot to his owner.

The dog jumped into Gomez's arms, his tail wagging. Gomez beamed. So did everybody else.

"I feel better than ever," said Josh Gomez, as he petted and hugged his puppy, Pilot, in the parking lot outside PetFIRST Animal Hospital in Duluth, Georgia. "I'm just glad it's done."

Credits: Ben Smith at Atlanta Journal - Constitution; Jason Getz, photography

L'enfer c'est les Autres

When French playwright Jean-Paul Sartre's contemporary existential masterpiece for stage, Huis Clos (No Exit) was first produced, theatre audiences and critics alike were disturbed by its unsympathetic characters and unrelentingly bleak thesis—succinctly stated by Garcin, the journalist-coward trapped in a room with two other craven individuals, all fated to act as each other's torturers for eternity—"Hell is other people."

The three damned souls - Garcin the army deserter and philanderer, Inez the lesbian who turned a wife against her husband, and Estelle the gold-digger and cheat - are ushered into a Second Empire style drawing room. They realize that they are in hell, and they fully expect to meet with the wrath of Satan and his minions.

Instead, they are politely shepherded into the single room together, one by one, after which the door is locked behind them. Quickly, they realize the hideous truth of their collective situation - each individual is to act as the torturer of the other two.
Resisting this fate, they decide they must fully understand and forgive each others' sins in order to find salvation. As each character's personal web of deceit unravels, they are all forced to face their own true nature.

---

ESTELLE: Ah yes, in your mind. But everything that goes on in one's head is so vague, isn't it? It makes one want to sleep. I've six big mirrors in my bedroom. There they are. I can see them. But they don't see me. They're reflecting the carpet, the settee, the window-- but how empty it is, a glass in which I'm absent! When I talked to people I always made sure there was one near by in which I could see myself. I watched myself talking. And somehow it kept me alert, seeing myself as the others saw me...Oh dear! My lipstick! I'm sure I've put it on all crooked. No, I can't do without a looking-glass for ever and ever. I simply can't.

INEZ:Suppose I try to be your glass? Come and pay me a visit, dear. Here's a place for you on my sofa.

---

The barriers come down, the denials fade, all attempts to self-justify are shot down, and the ugly truth of each sinner is revealed.

---

GARCIN: Will night never come?

INEZ: Never.

GARCIN: You will always see me?

INEZ: Always.

GARCIN: This bronze. Yes, now's the moment; I'm looking at this thing on the mantelpiece, and I understand that I'm in hell. I tell you, everything's been thought out beforehand. They knew I'd stand at the fireplace stroking this thing of bronze, with all those eyes intent on me. Devouring me. What? Only two of you? I thought there were more; many more. So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burning marl." Old wives' tales!There's no need for red-hot pokers. HELL IS--OTHER PEOPLE!

ESTELLE: My darling! Please-

GARCIN: No, let me be. She is between us. I cannot love you when she's watching.

ESTELLE: Right! In that case, I'll stop her watching. (She picks up the PAPER knife and stabs Inez several times.)

INEZ: But, you crazy creature, what do you think you're doing? You know quite well I'm dead.

ESTELLE: Dead?

INEZ: Dead! Dead! Dead! Knives, poison, ropes--useless. It has happened already, do you understand? Once and for all. SO here we are, forever.

ESTELLE: Forever. My God, how funny! Forever.

GARCIN: For ever, and ever, and ever.

(A long silence.)

GARCIN: Well, well, let's get on with it...

---

First produced in Paris, 1944, Jean Paul Sartre's famous one-act play Huis Clos is his clearest dramatic metaphor for his philosophy: We all hold the power of choice, and with that power comes the responsibility of consequence. It is in the judgement of our peers that the truth lies about who we really are.

Updating animal legislation from 1892

In recent months, a number of high-profile animal abuse cases across the country has made many Canadians aware of how woefully inadequate and outdated Canada’s laws against animal cruelty are.

These well-publicized incidents have prompted thousands of Canadians to sign petitions and write letters to Members of Parliament demanding reform of our animal cruelty laws, which have changed very little since 1892.

There are currently two private members’ bills before Parliament to reform the Criminal Code sections on animal cruelty.

Bill C-373, introduced by Mark Holland, M.P. for Ajax-Pickering, is a comprehensive bill that not only increases penalties, but also closes off the many loopholes that allow animal abusers to walk away scot-free. Currently only one quarter of 1 % of animal cruelty complaints actually result in conviction.

Bill C-373 has the support of such major animal welfare organizations as the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies (CFHS), the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association (CVMA).

However, hunting and animal industry groups are supporting rival Bill S-213, which substantially keeps in place laws from 1892. This bill, introduced by Senator John Bryden, is opposed by the major animal welfare organizations.

What can you do?

To learn about the differences between Bill C-373 and Bill S-213, read Mark Holland's article which was published in the September 2007 issue of Canadian Pets & Animals Magazine.

Inform yourself about animal cruelty issues and why Canadian law needs to change.

Share your views with your MP, and tell him or her that you want to see an effective bill passed.

Write to newspapers and discuss the issue with friends and on online forums.

Write to Justice Minister Rob Nicholson and tell him that you are not satisfied with Bill S-213.

Write to the Senators and urge them not to pass S-213 in its present form when it is reintroduced under a new number in the new session of Parliament.

Visit Mark Holland's website for their contact information.

Mother Teresa's Dark Night of the Soul

On Dec. 11, 1979, Mother Teresa, the "Saint of the Gutters," went to Oslo. Dressed in her signature blue-bordered sari and shod in sandals despite below-zero temperatures, the former Agnes Bojaxhiu received that ultimate worldly accolade, the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance lecture, Teresa, whose Missionaries of Charity had grown from a one-woman folly in Calcutta in 1948 into a global beacon of self-abnegating care, delivered the kind of message the world had come to expect from her. "It is not enough for us to say, 'I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,'" she said, since in dying on the Cross, God had "[made] himself the hungry one — the naked one — the homeless one." Jesus' hunger, she said, is what "you and I must find" and alleviate. Finally, she suggested that the upcoming Christmas holiday should remind the world "that radiating joy is real" because Christ is everywhere — "Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we receive."

Yet less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. "Jesus has a very special love for you," she assured Van der Peet. "[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand."

The two statements, 11 weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction — that one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared.

And in fact, that appears to be the case. A new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist."

That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and — except for a five-week break in 1959 — never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. "The smile," she writes, is "a mask" or "a cloak that covers everything." Says the Rev. James Martin, an editor at the Jesuit magazine America and the author of My Life with the Saints, a book that dealt with far briefer reports in 2003 of Teresa's doubts: "I've never read a saint's life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented."

The church anticipates spiritually fallow periods. Indeed, the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross in the 16th century coined the term the "dark night" of the soul to describe a characteristic stage in the growth of some spiritual masters. Teresa's may be the most extensive such case on record. (The "dark night" of the 18th century mystic St. Paul of the Cross lasted 45 years; he ultimately recovered.) Teresa found ways, starting in the early 1960s, to live with it and abandoned neither her belief nor her work. Her faith-filled perseverance might have been her most spiritually heroic act.

Come Be My Light is that rare thing, a posthumous autobiography that could cause a wholesale reconsideration of a major public figure — one way or another. It raises questions about God and faith, the engine behind great achievement, and the persistence of love, divine and human. That it does so not in any organized, intentional form but as a hodgepodge of desperate notes not intended for daylight should leave readers only more convinced that it is authentic — and that they are, somewhat shockingly, touching the true inner life of a modern saint.

More at Time

Scarborough Unfair

A Scarborough homeowner who spent 10 years cultivating a native plant garden of more than 150 species says Toronto bylaw officers went well beyond their authority by chopping it down without warning last week. Deborah Dale returned home from work last Tuesday evening to find the plants removed from in front of her home.

"I called the police because my garden had been vandalized. It's not the first time I've had plants stolen, but to have the entire garden been taken away ... After 10 years it's not funny in the least," said Ms. Dale, a former president of the North American Native Plant Society.

City officials confirmed yesterday they were responsible for removing the garden, which was on both Ms. Dale's property and on the city-owned boulevard, saying they had received complaints that the garden had become unruly and offensive. The cost, about $200, will be added to her property taxes.

The Toronto Municipal Code requires all lawns to be kept trimmed to 20 centimetres or less. Natural gardens, those of free grown plants native to the area, are exempt. But Bill Blakes, the area’s manager of municipal licensing and standards, said the city rarely issues such exemptions. In Scarborough, he issues about 12 a year.

Ms. Dale said the city had no right to deem her property an eyesore simply because they didn’t recognize the plants she was growing.

"The city not only destroyed flowering plants and plants that were setting seed for use by the North American Native Plant Society in their fundraising efforts, but they also removed shrubs, a red oak tree, and even the sign indicating that it was a natural, pesticide-free garden," she wrote in an e-mail. She listed Cardinal Flowers that attracted hummingbirds and Butterfly Milkweed — finally in full bloom after years of growth — as some of the casualties.

A 2003 complaint about her garden was dismissed, Ms. Dale said. On June 26, the city received a new complaint. She received an infraction notice the next week, she said.

"I know the neighbours complain. I've complained about them, they’ve been hacking at my hedge. The city can't do anything about that. Apparently they can do something like enter private property and destroy my garden," Ms. Dale said.

Mr. Blakes said the city responds to complaints about unruly gardens and lawns with an "advisory letter", and then a second warning before sending in the mowers. Ms. Dale said she's filing a grievance against the city to recoup the cost of her garden, approximately $10,000.

"That’s 10 years of work. I don't have the time or the money to put back into recreating that garden from scratch. It took years, and it took a lot of courage. When you have a blank slate like that, just digging the first hole and knowing you're going to be doing something a little different that not everyone is going to understand, it's very difficult.”

Meanwhile, Ms. Dale is still upset at the loss of her personal nature project. "The city hasn't responded to my complaints about this. They haven't even acknowledged they’ve done it. I explained to the bylaw officer again that it's a native plant garden and it's exempt from any bylaws. There are no weeds at all in the garden. I invited them to come out and look at it. And that’s the last I’d ever heard."

Pet lovers call for tougher cruelty laws

When Toronto Humane Society investigator Tre Smith learned this week that his licence had been temporarily suspended, pending review of an ugly confrontation with the owner of a dog whose life Mr. Smith had just saved, the incident underlined a murky no-man's-land familiar to non-police law-enforcement officials.

And with Canada's archaic animal-cruelty laws poised to leapfrog from the 19th century to the 21st, the altercation provides a snapshot of difficulties looming for the men and women who enforce those laws.

Nowhere more so than in Ontario, whose animal-welfare regulations are by every estimate the weakest in the country. The industrial and financial heart of the country is also behind most states in the US.

That could change. Provincial politicians of all stripes, including the governing Liberals, appear certain to raise animal rights in the election campaign this fall. A further sign of the times: A workshop at the Law Society of Upper Canada, a first, will examine the law and animal rights.

But the big change is likely to be in Ottawa, where two competing pieces of legislation are currently before the House of Commons. Both would amend the federal Criminal Code to make cruelty to domestic animals an indictable offence rather than a summary one.

And while tougher animal-cruelty laws are decades overdue in the view of Hugh Coghill, chief inspector for the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, he wonders how the province's more than 170 investigators can be expected to deal with offenders facing years in a penitentiary, rather than a small fine or - rarely - a brief spell behind bars.

"Indictable offences are arrestable offences," Mr. Coghill said.

"That means an SPCA officer would theoretically have to arrest the individual, take him or her to the police station to be fingerprinted, photographed and entered into CPIC [Canadian Police Information Centre, the national database that records criminal charges and convictions].

"Well, we don't provide handcuffs or handguns or nightsticks to our officers, and we don't provide them with the training to arrest people. Nor does any SPCA or humane society across Canada."

Laws in effect since 1892 decree that a Canadian can inflict on a pet the worst kind of suffering imaginable and incur no more than six months in jail, a $2,000 fine and a maximum two-year ban on owning animals.

Two bills are now before the Commons. One is Bill C-373, tabled by Liberal MP Mark Holland, which has passed its first reading and, along with severely toughening sanctions for abusing animals, aims to redefine them as sentient beings rather than objects.

The other initiative - Bill S-213, from Liberal Senator John Bryden - doesn't go that far, and in the view of its critics would still leave gaping loopholes in the law. But because it has the Harper government's backing and has now passed both the Senate and second reading in the Commons, Bill S-213 may be the one that takes effect.

Even with the way things are, he said, laying criminal charges for animal cruelty - 385 were laid province-wide last year - is expensive and cumbersome.

"The OSPCA act only gives us the power to write orders, it's ineffective and it's outdated," said Tre Smith.

"We'd like to see the federal laws toughened but also the provincial ones so we can hit [miscreants] in the pocketbook right away."

Even when orders are issued, one in four are contested via the Animal Care Review Board, a quasi-judicial government-appointed referee.

The society's files bulge with numbers. Each year, more than 1,000 investigations are launched citywide, and each year most perpetrators receive no more than a warning. In the first quarter of this year, the society was able to lay just four criminal charges.

Our laws protect anyone who wants to abuse an animal.

Source: Timothy Appleby, The Globe and Mail, August 11, 2007

What Can You Do?

Tell the Ontario government and Premier McGuinty that tougher animal cruelty laws are long overdue.

Sign the petition.