Category: Sterilisation

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The Prevention Imperative

When any organisation states that its purpose or mission is to prevent cruelty to animals, one would expect that such an organisation would be engaged in activities that focus on prevention.

Let’s consider the meaning of the word, ‘prevent’

Prevent, v.t. 1. to keep from occurring 2. To stop from doing something

To prevent is to stop something effectually by forestalling action and rendering it impossible.

Prevention is something that happens before the fact, not after the event of cruelty has already occurred. It’s something we do, in every case, to stop something happening. We drive safely to prevent accidents; we eat healthily and use vaccines to prevent disease; we behave considerately to prevent conflict.

When one considers an organisation, it’s a little more complex, since an organisation is engaged in many activities, but surely the intent of the organisation must be to fulfil its mandate guided by it’s stated or at least implied purpose embodied in its name? Surely the main focus of its activities should be on those most likely to prevent cruelty?

Continue reading “The Prevention Imperative”

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From Schism to Synergy

It was 1995. I had joined a company as Group Financial Manager after consulting to them for several months, and it was beginning to dawn on me what a huge challenge I had taken on. The company was in trouble, and the MD had asked me to fix one division in particular – a manufacturing division that was fraught with problems, from worker unrest to product quality, from capacity constraints to inventory issues.

My girlfriend and I had decided to spend a long weekend at the Kruger Park on a hiking safari, and since Angela was driving, on the way there I started a book that I had wanted to read but had not had the time. It was titled ‘The Goal’ by Eli Goldratt, and I had been referred to it by a colleague more than a year before. It made compelling reading, and by the time we got back after the long weekend, I had finished the book. On the Tuesday I hit the ground running and started implementing the methods spoken about in the book, and just 6 weeks later the result was a turnaround, from R250k per month to R750k per month and we were already cash flow positive a month later…

Anyone who has been engaged in Management Consultancy will tell you that such an achievement is unusual to say the least. What was it that turned a ‘Dog’ – the term used in industry for a failing business that should be closed or sold – into a ‘Star’, and so quickly? Continue reading “From Schism to Synergy”

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Mandatory Sterilisation: It’s not Magic

The Companion Animal Population Control Imperative

Many years ago, I read an outstanding book about the nature of cures in medicine, entitled ‘Beyond the Magic Bullet’, in which Bernard Dixon showed that the notion of a single remedy for a single malady was incompatible with the complexity of medical practice. He also showed that single-discipline approaches to any given problem in medicine were inevitably short-sighted, since every disease, particularly chronic disease, was multi-faceted.

Some years later, I was to research and adopt the Goldratt problem-solving methodology, which I developed into a set of strategic tools, the basis of which had three core components: critical thinking, complexity, and value definition. Continue reading “Mandatory Sterilisation: It’s not Magic”

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Companion Animal Welfare’s Trolley Problem

Those engaged in companion animal welfare in South Africa face an ethical dilemma, which can be expressed as a Trolley Problem. If you don’t know what that is, read here:

http://www.trolleydilemma.com/

The short version is that the driver of a trolley on a railway track sees that there are five men working on the rail. He tries to stop but the brakes do not work, and he then has to make a choice, since he sees that he can switch to another track, where there is only one man working. Does he switch or remain on his current track?

Everyone who commits their time, energy or money to our companion animals has a choice as to how they will apply those resources to the animal welfare crisis. When we examine those choices, we see that they are not easy and that in each case we give up something; there is an outcome we trade off against the outcome we have invested in.

Triage situation

Triage, n:
1. the process of sorting victims, as of a battle or disaster, to determine priority of medical treatment, with highest priority usu. given to those having the greatest likelihood of survival.
2. the determination of priorities for action in an emergency.

For those who are unaware, we have a crisis in companion animal welfare in South Africa. An optimistic estimate Continue reading “Companion Animal Welfare’s Trolley Problem”

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Jeff Young on the overpopulation crisis

(Jeff Young understands the ‘macro’ picture better than most, and he makes some points I have been making for a reasonably long time, the key one being that we cannot solve the crisis by rescuing and rehoming…)

Humane Societies, Animal Rescue Groups and Veterinarians May Cause More Pain and Suffering Than They Alleviate

My name is Jeff Young, and I have been a veterinarian for over twenty years. I have been on numerous humane society boards, have been an animal control officer, and I speak and consult on companion animal overpopulation issues all over the world. I have done over 165,000 surgeries in the last twenty years, and have established full service training hospitals in Bratislava (Slovakia), and Merida (Mexico).

I have trained over 300 veterinarians in more efficient, safe surgical techniques.

From the time I graduated veterinary school, I have had one simple goal: to reduce the population of unwanted dogs and cats around the world. As a veterinarian, I can reduce companion animal over-population by simply providing and promoting low cost spay/neuter. Over the last two decades, we have seen some difference in overpopulation with the rise of educational groups like Spay USA, mobile spay/neuter clinics like the Montana Spay Neuter Task Force, and the construction of mega sterilization clinics like the Las Vegas spay/neuter clinic.

Each year, we will kill over a billion dogs and countless more cats all over the world, simply because Continue reading “Jeff Young on the overpopulation crisis”

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Will the ‘Ethical Breeder’ please stand up?

Why is there a certain group of people who are let off the hook, because they are “registered” show breeders, who breed for only one purpose “breeding the perfect animal for the show bench” (which is a total nonsense, because judging is subjective and the breed standard is a bunch of crap based only on somebody’s desired view of what the outside of the animal should look like – and which ignores 99.75% of the genome – and which breed standard can be changed whenever it suits the show scene).

The other group of people are those who do not register or show their animals, but who do exactly the same thing – they mix and match, crossbreeding or not, but they are known as “backyard breeders” and people say they must be stopped. Why must they be stopped?

Very often the difference between a “registered breeder” and a “backyard breeder” is merely that the registered breeder is driven by competition and ambition to breed to excess (sometimes 30-40 females and several studs) in pursuit of the “perfect specimen”, while the other breeder has one or 2 females and breeds a couple of litters a year.

What makes registered show breeders special? A look at the state of pedigreed animals reveals that they certainly cannot be “improving the breed”, because many of the breeds are physically and genetically in a mess and have deteriorated over the 130 years that the breeding game has been played. Why is it OK for them to breed and nobody else? What are their qualifications, and are any required before joining the “registered breeder club”? Why the double standard? Continue reading “Will the ‘Ethical Breeder’ please stand up?”

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BREAKING the CYCLE: The Animal Welfare Imperative

‘An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’ – Benjamin Franklin

As a strategist and problem solver in the Corporate world, I was always somewhat dumbfounded by the degree to which problem-solving was directed rather simplistically at symptoms rather than root causes, effectively only solving part of the problem, or solving it only for a short time, or causing other problems that negated the solution anyway.

Animal Welfare SA suffers the same malaise. Many organisations and individuals focus on rescue, rehabilitation and rehoming, and of course there is a necessity that somebody do this, since there are so many homeless animals. This is an attempt at finding, for each animal, a ‘cure’ – a home in which they can live happy lives.  If we recruited more people to welfare, could we home more animals? That very much depends Continue reading “BREAKING the CYCLE: The Animal Welfare Imperative”