All the Creatures

Until just recently I was unaware of the writings of Joy Williams, a winner of the 1992 Strauss Living Award. She is a person who has used the pen (and keyboard) to make people aware of the raping of our planet.

Normally she is a novelist that has even written a travel guide about her home state, Florida, but in her book, Ill Nature: On Humanity and the Abuse of Nature, she takes sarcastic aim at everyone who is to blame for the dismal condition of our planet.

I have found nothing but praise for her writing. It is hard hitting and hits everyone, yes everyone, including you and I. If you are a consumer you are just as guilty of abusing nature and animals as the guy down the street starving his dog to death. Joy puts that into perspective in her book.

I even managed to find her book on sale for only .01 cent! Just click on the link to her book. On that page, at the bottom you can read a part of the book. You will get a good idea of her style of wit and writing.

Her works out shine the author. Other than finding out that she has written other books and lived in Florida, I cannot find out much more about her. If you happen to know if she has a website, blog or even a Twitter account, leave a comment as I would love to find out more about this woman.

All the Creatures

Yes you read the title of this post correctly. When I say “sleaze balls,” I meant it. It seems that animals tend to bring out the con-artists, the abusers and the scum of the earth at times. They prey on people that will do almost anything for the welfare of animals.

Craigslist seems to attract more than their fair share of the scum buckets. They post pictures of dogs, cats or horses and state they can no longer keep them and the animals will be disposed of if they can’t find a home in the next few days. Of course there is always an “adoption” fee. They state that they have to list it because it is to deter the real criminals that want to take the pet for experiments.

So how do you find out if they are legit or not. Usually you don’t until the 2nd or 3rd email from them. That is when they go into a song and dance about how they can’t afford the gas for the trip to drop off the animal to you or if you offer to pick the animal up the animal is located in a different place than where they are at. Their whole ploy is to get you to part with some money up front before you have even seen the animal. They seem to make up ways to part you from your money as each email or phone call becomes another email or phone call.

Then you get the child molesters that work with animals and often are around children. About 10 years ago there was a horse trainer in the Sierra Foothills that was giving riding lessons to young girls. The parents would be conned into leaving their children with him while they ran an errand. Of course the young girls finally blew the whistle on his antics and he went to jail.

So far I have not included the puppy mill wanna bees with their mutt crosses breeding them because they are tiny or just because they are registered with the AKC.  Nor have I listed the animal rescues that are breeding their animals. Both of them deserve their own blog posts.

I am all for finding out who you are dealing with and running background checks on them. If they have just moved to this country from another one then if there is such a thing as an international background check, then do it. You never can tell if someone is on the run from the law in another country, especially for molesting children.

All the Creatures

The video news story below makes you wonder how these people can proclaim themselves to be helping animals when the local authorities have to step in and take animals away from them - for the animals welfare.

All the Creatures