Kinetic Energy - pass it on

"Uhm, Honey? I think I packed the wrong bag."

In his day job he's a preacher.
Puppy Whisperer

I'm done at the clinic. They may have me go back and build a 3' pony wall, but all the scheduled work is finished. I hope they're satisfied with the results.

Barak Obama was asked today to comment on the success of the surge in Iraq, a surge that he opposed on the Senate floor. He responded that we'll never know if the plan he put forth - beginning to immediately withdraw troops - would have been successful.
That's not the point. The point is that the surge, which he said was doomed to failure, did indeed work, and he as much as admitted it by not challenging the reporter's contention that it had been a success.
He's right - we'll never know what would have been the outcome of his plan. But he was wrong about the President's plan, or more accurately, the military leaders' plan, which turned out to be a success.
Equally interesting, Obama says we need to shift resources from a more peaceful Iraq to Afghanistan where fighting is on the increase.
There's a term for that kind of shift. They call it a surge.


I Must Be a Country Boy

It's been a long time since I blogged something that stirred the pot, but I knew as soon as I heard a particular segment on NPR today I had to write about the topic. The half hour discussion looked at the money people spend on their pet's health. Interviewees included a vet and a woman who has just written a book on the topic. They agreed that it's not at all unusual for people to spend $10,000 or more to cure a pet of cancer or some other disease that would otherwise prove fatal to the animal. Often the treatment only prolongs for a brief period of time the inevitable, and the cat or dog dies from the disease a year later. They also agreed that people who live in the country almost never see their pets in this way and are amazed at what city people will spend to keep an animal alive.

We started raising animals when we moved to Prunedale, a rural area just north of Salinas, Ca. Our youth group had several FFA members and I got the itch. We had two dozen chickens, a half dozen rabbits, a dairy goat and a wild pig that I rec'd as a mere handful, bottle fed every four hours and that eventually grew to be a 150 lb. beast with attachment issues. (How was I to know the pig had a crush on me?) We've also always had dogs - never more than one at a time - who were either muts from the pound or purebreds that people dumped in the church parking lot.
Note: Cocker Spaniels have had the brains bred out of them and have one remaining talent. Sadly, that involves your leg.
As soon as we moved out to the country in Michigan I got back into animal husbandry, this time with rabbits and chickens. Goats take too much time and I don't need no lovin' from a pig!

I have butchered chickens and rabbits. Dozens of chickens and probably hundreds of rabbits. I had help slaughtering the pig and we sold the goat to a guy who knew how good goat meat tastes. (I learned on a trip to Africa years later.) They were all animals. They had no soul. They were not rational beings. To assign to them human characteristics is romantic, and wrong. We may develop deep feelings of attachment to a particular animal and feel genuine sadness when they die. But if we see them as equal members of the family it has to do only with our emotions, with a kind of anthropomorphism, and has no basis in reality.
Your dog doesn't think he's a person. He "thinks" (it's not a rational thought, it's an instinctive response) that you're a dog. He sees you as his pack leader and relates to you as such. You provide him with food and water. You give him a place to sleep. He comes to you with his head lowered in a posture of submission when his instinct tells him he might be in trouble with the pack leader. He may bring you things that his pack leader might want. Etc.
Cats? Who knows why cats do what they do. But it's not because they're rational, volitional beings. They are animals. They share that with dogs, and rabbits, and chickens, and love sick pigs.

At one point in the program a guy called in to say he'd never spent that kind of money on a pet because he couldn't afford to. But he wondered aloud if he would spend large sums of money if he had the disposable income to do so.
The vet pointed out that thousands of families in our country have no health insurance. Their kids get sick, need glasses or dental care and nothing happens because their parents can't afford it. The money spent to cure a cat's urinary track infection or a dog's lymphoma could sometimes buy a year or more worth of health insurance for that family.

As a Christian I see it as a matter of stewardship. We set a limit on what we would spend on vet bills. (You're going to think this sounds really cold!) Anything over $50 constituted bad stewardship. Granted, this was years ago when the kids were young and $50 amounted to more than it does now. But there was a limit nonetheless. And a couple of times that meant having a dog put down.
Someone might think, "How could anyone only spend $50 on a dog that probably cost five to ten times that much to buy?"
Back to stewardship. Why spend that kind of money to buy an animal in the first place? Millions of pets get euthanized every year because no one will adopt them, while people go to breeders and spend ridiculous sums to get designer dogs and cats. They're animals! I don't think we ever spent anything to buy a pet beyond whatever fees the shelter charged.

I suspect some people find themselves spending much more than they ever expected, and more than in retrospect they think is appropriate, because their pet's health needs sneaked up on them and the vet's presumption that no expense should be spared influenced them.

So, how much should be spent on vet bills?
If the dog or cat costs hundreds of dollars to get in the first place, that is irrelevant. Bad stewardship to start doesn't validate continuing bad stewardship.
Set a limit, a ceiling that is consistent with what you say you believe about human life. Not animal life, human life. Because the money you spend on your animal's health is money that you can't spend on the physical and spiritual health of someone for whom Christ died.
Is that loading the deck? You bet.