Good Homes Need Not Apply

Please read this all the way through. Nathan Winograd shows us how arbitrary and unfair some shelter adoption guidelines can be to the potential adopters and the animals.

Good Homes Need Not Apply

September 10, 2009 by Nathan J. Winograd

"I’ve devoted the last 17 years of my life trying to reform animal shelters in the United States (far longer doing rescue work). I’ve worked at two shelters in the country that have the highest rates of lifesaving in the nation: one as its Director of Operations and the other as the Executive Director. I’ve also worked and consulted with dozens of shelters nationwide. Currently, I run the national No Kill Advocacy Center, which is dedicated to ending the systematic killing of animals in shelters.

"I often face traditional sheltering dogma that is a roadblock to lifesaving innovation. Too many shelters operate under regressive assumptions without analyzing them to see if they are true. Too often, the dogmas are false, and so I offer a No Kill alternative, one oriented toward preserving life. If shelters reevaluated, rather than hid behind conventional wisdom, they would more effectively perform a shelter’s most fundamental job: saving lives.

"One of the most enduring of these traditional dogmas is that animal shelters must kill because the public can’t be trusted with animals..." read more

Is Canned Food Dangerous for Your Cat?

In the long run, it might be dangerous to feed canned food to your cat. Canned food has consistently been proven to be linked with hypothyroidism in cats. This is an older cat's disease, but who wants to cause a problem for their beloved cat as they grow older?

The Winn Feline Foundation published a third study on this, which showed the same results in the UK as have been found in New Zealand and in the U.S.

From the U.S.-related PubMed link above: "CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE: These findings suggest that the increasing prevalence of feline hyperthyroidism is not solely the result of aging of the cat population and that canned foods may play a role."

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Aksum Notes: Wow, now I'm going to have to rethink what and how to feed my cats the wet food I know they need. I'm sticking with Taste of the Wild dry food, though. It's been great for them and they still like it a lot.

So far I have verified that Instinctive Choice Premium Canned Cat Food by Trilogy International is free of bisphenol A-diglycidyl ether, which is the product that is in the inner lining of the cans that are linked to hyperthyroidism in cats in three recent studies.

-Susan Graham
Aksum Abyssinians