Book by hannah mageean

Paws & Needles

Hannah Mageean

Paws & Needles

Hannah Mageean

Dedication

I

dedicate this book to my dogs, Frodo and Gracie, as well as my cat, Pan. It’s hard for me to imagine a life without them. They, truly, mean the world to me. I hope that I can make the right decision when their times come. They have been there for me at times of need and in ways that even people I was close with couldn’t be.

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Acknowledgments

I

would like to thank my Freestyle teachers for supporting me through the long process of creating this book and the whole of Freestyle Academy for allowing all of my hard work come to life and mean something. I’d also like to acknowledge all seven of the people that took the time out of their day for me to interview them.

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Gracie

DOG v

Contents

9 10 12 14 16 18 23

Preface Introduction Jewish Animals, Nazi Humans The History of Man’s Best Friend Master-Slave Owner-Property Animals Have Feelings Too Works Cited

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Top: cows Bottom Left: Frodo with tennis ball Bottom Right: Shadow

Preface

I

have learned a lot from this project, not just about euthanizing animals but about myself. For a lot of my life, I had avoided eating meat and killing bugs when there was a better option. Euthanizing an animal is a fairly new concept in my life which, before this project, I probably would have said it was cruel. But the experience of making this book has allowed me to learn more about the reasons why euthanizing an animal might be a moral option. I’m still figuring out my beliefs and how exactly I feel about other aspects in the animal world and when exactly it is right to euthanize an animal but, overall, this project has changed my perspective on this topic.

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Introduction

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Gracie

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hen I was little, I was terrified of dogs and I avoided cats. It wasn’t until my family had to move, temporarily, while my house was being remodeled, that I met my neighbor’s dog and fell in love. He was a medium size schnauzer with long black hair and his back side wobbled when he ran, probably from an old injury. He was older but he still had fun playing with me in the yard. Soon after I moved back to my home, he passed away. I remember wishing I had been there and that maybe if I had been, that he would have lived. In fourth grade, I tried everything I knew how to do to show my parents that I was responsible enough to take care of a dog. I would walk my stuffed dog around the house by dragging him with a string tied around its neck. My sister and I drafted arguments as to why a dog could add to our family and finally, we found the perfect dog for our family, a pug-chihuahua mix who we named Frodo. And as the years progressed, the family grew with the additions of Pan, the cat, and Gracie, another small dog. Frodo is old and fat now and doesn’t do much more than eat and sleep and occasionally run after a squirrel. But we all love him just as much as when he was a puppy.

Throughout my life, I’ve worked around horses and when I was fourteen, I got a job as an intern for teaching children how to ride. When I was sixteen, I got the real job and I couldn’t have been happier. I had known a lot of the horses there for years. One weekend when I wasn’t working, a horse that we’d been giving supplements and medications was put down because he had gotten to the point where he couldn’t walk. That was the point where his owner decided she should stop trying to make him live because she was afraid to let go. The next summer, when I returned, his buddy had passed. He was devastated that he’d lost his only friend and had gone into an incurable depression. I didn’t know those two horses well but there was one horse I had known since I was little. She was the oldest horse I knew and that came with her sassy, old lady personality.

But as sassy as she was, I knew she was in pain. I frequently came in, in the morning, and found her in her stall, laying down, unable to get up. I had to help her and encourage her to stand. She had sad eyes and walked slowly. My boss had told her owner, who only came out to see her when she was dropping off medications, that she thought it might be time but she refused. When my coworker came into work one morning, he found her laying in her stall. Except that day, she wouldn’t be getting up.

Today, about 1.5 million shelter animals are euthanized every year. That’s 670,000 dogs and 860,000 cats euthanized in animal shelters across the United States. A total of about 6.5 million animals enter U.S. animal shelters. Only 50% of the cats and 48% of dogs are adopted. Is euthanizing animals morally right?

Animals are euthanized for various reasons and those reasons largely depend on location. Typically, in wealthier communities, there are substantially fewer stray animals compared to less clean areas where it’s easier for strays to survive and where it is more likely for people to abandon animals. There is also less of a chance for a rabies breakout in cleaner communities with fewer strays. Therefore, in cleaner, wealthier communities where people are taking care of their pets, making sure their vaccines are up to date and they 11

are spayed and neutered, there won’t be many animals going into shelters. On the other hand, in places where there are lots of strays, there’s going to be an overflow in animal shelters which leads to many healthy animals being euthanized. And where there are lots of unvaccinated animals, there is disease and that only leads to more euthanizations. Is euthanizing really in everyone’s best interest? How do animal rights supporters feel about this and how do we know when it is right to euthanize an animal?

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Jewish Animals, Nazi Humans

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ow, after experimenting with vegetarianism and veganism throughout my life, I’m here to discuss the morality of euthanasia. From my experience, those who are vegan or vegetarian for reasons other than health, eat a plant based diet because they simply don’t want to contribute to the cruelty that takes place in the farming and slaughter conditions. But euthanizing an animal is still killing an animal.

The modern and humane way of euthanizing an animal is by injection which is supposed to be completely painless appart from a mere pinprick. However, in some places, gassing is still used and is generally considered inhumane while in some states, completely illegal. In an article published by Indiana University Press in 2006, the treatment of animals is compared to the Holocaust. Although the article gives a thirty-nine point essay on individual aspects of the similarities between how the Jews were treated in concentration camps and how animals are exploited everywhere today, the most related is the gas chambers. In concentration camps, the Nazis found it was too costly to make enough bullets to commit genocide, killing up to six thousand people a day which is why they used gas chambers to exterminate a lot of people and fast. Gas chambers used to be a common way of euthanizing animals because it’s cheap and fast because you can stuff a lot of animals into a gas chamber. Now, it has been concluded in many states that it is inhumane to gas animals. And, at least in the minds of many animal rights supporters, vegans or vegetarians, if you wouldn’t do something to a human, don’t do it to an animal. That is the basic reasoning behind vegetarianism and veganism.

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The History of Man’s Best Friend

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Frodo

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e all know that man first domesticated animals for his benefit. Cattle was domesticated for leather, milk and meat. And sheep were domesticated for wool and meat. But long before all of that, the dog was domesticated.

It is believed that man first tamed the dog in Europe 15,000 years ago and in Asia 12,500 years ago. The exact time and place that dogs were first domesticated is still very debated by scientists. There have been skulls found in caves in Eastern Europe that some scientists thought were dog skulls from 31,000 years ago but Dr. Abby Drake, an evolutionary biologist and a member of Cornell University’s biology department, proved that it was a wolf’s skull with a digitizer that she had used to determine the differences between a wolf’s skull and a dog’s skull. She has put together a whole database to show the evolutionary differences between wolves and dogs to explain the variations in just the skulls.

That means that dogs were domesticated before or close to the time that plants were domesticated and humans began cultivating and farming. Of course, despite acknowledging man’s best friend so many years ago, we will probably never know how the death or suffering of a dog affected man. Did he mourn its death? When it was hurt, did he leave it to die, or did he try to end its suffering? Dr. Abby Drake says that in her experience, dog remains were most commonly found buried near or with humans. She notes that she found one with a necklace of deer teeth around its neck. This is cultural evidence that could be a sign of respect and honor.

We can also see with the Aztecs, that they often buried dogs with humans. It is speculated that they could act as offerings or as guards or even as an escort to the underworld. From that, we can assume that many of these dogs did not die naturally. They probably weren’t brutally killed but it resembles the master-slave or ownerproperty that we see today. However, the extent that we see of that today varies.

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Master-Slave Owner-Property

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Dog in Shelter

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hen an old lady comes into the vet’s with her 16 year old, dying cat that got hit by a car, the vet is likely to say that she should have the animal put down as to put it out of misery. When a dog is returned to the animal shelter because it attacked a child, it will be put down because it is unsafe to be around humans. In many places, animals in shelters with be euthanized if they don’t get adopted within an allotted amount of time.

Despite most pet owners not thinking of their pets as their property, that’s what they are. An owner can chose to do what they will with their pet because a pet is property. Jill Bertrand, a retired veterinarian, describes a situation that she was faced with early in her career. “This farmer brought in one of those 5 gallon paint buckets with nine newborn puppies in it and said, ‘My stupid dog got pregnant and had these puppies. Euthanize them all.’” And, naturally, her moral instincts told her to say no until he said, “Okay fine, I’m going to take this home and fill it with water and drown them.” That was the choice she was left with: give the puppies a painless death or let the farmer drown them. Either way, the innocent puppies would die. “And he had every legal right to do that to his dogs,” she told me. Normally, at least around here, people try to make the right decision for their pet. But as we can see from this example, there are some people that don’t care about the life of an animal.

At the Palo Alto Animal Shelter, Sachi Hwangbo, the Volunteer Coordinator, describes the shelter as “unique” because most of the animals that they get are lost or abandoned and there is no overpopulation of strays. That means that there is no reason to euthanize animals after any certain amount of time. “We have the space for any animal to stay for any length of time. There’s no time limit.” The veterinarian at the shelter, Bonnie Yoffe, confirmed that most of the surgeries that she does consist of spays and neuters and caring for the medical needs for the animals at the shelter. The only times that they would humanely euthanize animals is if they, “either behaviorally or physically are not able to go up for adoption and successfully go into a home.”

Here, we can see that the best decision for the animal is being made. An animal that is too ill or too aggressive is simply not going to have a good life. If it is sick in any way, it could be in pain or just be suffering, in which case, quality of life is not good and if adopted out, it’s not fair to the family if an animal dies just a month after adopting it. If an animal is aggressive and no one can seem to help it, it’s not going to have a life worth living if it’s in a cage for the rest of its life. So that is how the life of an animal is determined: quality over quantity.

In the book To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus shoots a rabid dog in the streets where everyone was scared of it and he is then known as a hero. This shows that at the time that the book takes place, in the 1930’s, an animals life was lesser than that of a human. That is still true today and it is not inherently wrong.

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Animals Have Feelings Too

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Hand Holding Paw

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hen I ask my dogs, “Do you want to go to the park?” or, “Do you want to go on a walk?” they immediately jump up and run to where their leashes are kept and anxiously wait for me to put them on. Although it was especially hard for Gracie to catch onto having to go wherever I went, walking with a leash on is very important. They can understand so many words I say but they don’t know that cars are a danger and could kill them. This is minor compared to the concept of euthanizing an animal but follows the same reasoning: we must make decisions for the animals because we care about them.

With such kind hearts, domestic animals are driven by love but sometimes that can be clouded by fear. Geri Weitzman, who has been a vegetarian for about 20 years and vegan for 3 of those years because she doesn’t believe in killing animals for food, said something that I don’t think many people recognize. She said, “I think when animals are aggressive it’s not because they’re mean, it’s just what they’re programmed to do when they’re scared.” So when people say that they have to make the best decision for an animal, they’re assuming that an animal can’t tell them their quality of life. But we can see, animals can react to the things they know like a dog reacts to the word “walk” and a cat reacts to the sound of the treat bag. A dog barks when they want to go outside and a cat meows when it wants food. Animals do, in fact, try to communicate with humans.

Richard Brown has had many different pets, many of which were wild like the squirrel and bluejay that would come in the house and he would feed them peanuts. His dog, Boo, was found as a stray in the mountains and he took him in. Boo was already about 13 years old when they found him but after years of living with Richard, he had had numerous surgeries, couldn’t use his back legs, couldn’t hear well, and couldn’t see well. Richard describes the day that he was sitting in the backyard, on the grass with Boo, “A shaft of sunlight came down and lit us up and the dog looked up at me and I felt like the dog said, ‘It’s okay now, I’m ready to let go.’” When he took Boo to the vet and they gave him the shot, Richard refused to leave until he felt Boo’s heart stop and his last breath leave his chest. There is no need to let an animal suffer a painful death when it is ready to let go.

Although it can be sad for a loved animal to pass, I believe an animal can tell its human when it’s ready to go and that is when the human must also do what is best for the animal: listen and let go.

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“A shaft of sunlight came down and lit us up and the dog looked up at me and I felt like the dog said, ‘It’s okay now, I’m ready to let go.’”

Richard Brown

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Works Cited

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Bertrand, Jill. Personal interview. 29 March 2018.

Brown, Richard. Personal interview. 2 April 2018.

Graf, Christine. “When did dogs become man’s best friend?” Faces: People, Places, and Cultures, Oct. 2016, p. 8+. Student Resources In Context, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A470160330/SUIC?u=los42754&sid=SUIC&xid=56f792ca. Accessed 3 May 2018.

Hwangbo, Sachi. Personal interview. 21 February 2018.

Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. New York :Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.

Saey, Tina Hesman. “DNA tells of dual origins for dogs: domestication might have happened in Asia and Europe.” Science News, 9 July 2016, p. 15. Student Resources In Context, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A458915902/SUIC?u=los42754&sid=S UIC&xid=e0d62b7f. Accessed 7 Apr. 2018.

“Shelter Intake and Surrender.” ASPCA, 2018, www.aspca.org/animal-homelessness/shelter-intake-and-surrender.

Sztybel, David. “Can the treatment of animals be compared to the holocaust?” Ethics & the Environment, vol. 11, no. 1, 2006, p.

97+. Opposing Viewpoints In Context, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A144352920/OVIC?u=los42754&sid=OVIC&x id=78831217. Accessed 3 May 2018.

Weitzman, Geri. Personal interview. 30 March 2018.

Yoffe, Bonnie. Personal interview. 15 March 2018.

“12 Aztec dogs found buried in common grave in Mexico City.” UPI NewsTrack, 14 Feb. 2014. Student Resources In Context, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A358653711/SUIC?u=los42754&sid=SUIC&xid=3826eced. Accessed 8 Apr. 2018.

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My name is Hannah Mageean and I am currently a junior at Freestyle Academy. I love animals and consider myself an animal rights activist. I have always been drawn to art and plan to pursue design.

I plan to go to college in California and live out the rest of my life somewhere warm.

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Paws & Needles

Hannah Mageean