‘Gay Dog’ Refused Entry To Australian Restaurant

“I just want to be like everybody else and be able to go out for dinner, to be left alone and just enjoy a meal,” he told Australian press.

An Australian restaurant has been forced to apologize and pay compensation after refusing to let a blind man enter because they thought hisdog was gay.

In May 2009, Ian Jolly, 57, was attempting to dine at the Thai Spice restaurant in Adelaide, when he was refused entry after staff misheard his female companion, and thought his “guide dog” was a “gay dog.”

“The staff genuinely believed that Nudge was an ordinary pet dog which had been desexed to become a gay dog,” the owners said in a statement to South Australia’s Equal Opportunity Tribunal.

Jolly is now set to receive a written apology and $1,400 compensation.

However, Jolly said that the situation had made him embarrassed about going to restaurants.

“I just want to be like everybody else and be able to go out for dinner, to be left alone and just enjoy a meal,” he told Australian press.

The last chapter of One Nation Under Dog focuses on one of the most telling examples of our modern-day petmania: The rise of pet-loss bereavement groups. The very real devastation a lot of pet people feel when their animals die–which they still do, despite all the modern veterinary innovations our pet spending has subsidized–is a pretty good reflection of the upgraded status of pets that’s one of the focuses of my book. The teraputic approach to mourning, and the efforts to fit it into religion, also represent more ways that the stamdards of petcare reflect the priorities of contemporary humans.

Of course, bereavement also reflects the limits of puppymania: A lot of the people in the group I followed felt like their peers thought they should just get another animal and be done with it–something they wouldn’t hear if the dearly departed were a two-legged family member. Likewise, one of the counselors I interviewed told me that some of the most distraught of her clients were very religious people. It’s easy to see why. Religious folks are more likely to turn to their church in an hour of need, and in this case, church is no help: Because traditional theology excludes animals from Heaven, they wouldn’t get to hear what they wanted–ie, that they’d see Fido again in the hereafter. Needless to say, I interviewed a people who were scouring religious texts for evidence to the contrary.

But my pal Nancy recently sent me a link that takes a whole different approach to the issue of Dog and Man in Heaven.

There’s no revisionist theology afoot , alas, at the evangelical After the Rapture Pets website. But thee is plenty of puppy love. The idea: Evangelicals believe that at some late-stage point, all good (human) Christians will suddenly disappear, ascending Heavenward in the rapture. The rest of us sinners, meanwhile, will have to slug it out down down here on Earth, where we’ll presumably realize the error of our ways and/or get what we deserve. But what about pets, who don’t deserve to starve just because their owner was rapture’d and therefore unable to stock the pantry with Science Diet?

“We thought about the stories of pet rescues in New Orleans after Katrina,” writes founder Sharon Moss. “Imagine how many more pets would have been saved if there had been a database of pets and volunteers activated immediately. This is something we could do for Christian owned pets.”

The basic plan is to recruit a squadron of non-Christian volunteers who will step in after Moss and her colleagues get saved and rise up to that great non-pet-friendly place in the sky,.

The website lists various trials and tribulations along the way. The group initially charged $10 a month–yet another example of the pet insurance trend I’ve variously written about–but was accused of running a scam. Then they made it free, but “a lot of anti-Christian jerks started submitting fake memberships and cluttering up our database.” So now there’s a one-time $10 fee, designed to keep out the jokers but retain folks “serious about the safety and care of your pets, as well as your peace of mind.”

This is what will happen for all pets registered with us immediately after the Rapture:

1. Our non-Christian administrators will activate our rescue plan.
2. Volunteers will be alerted immediately by email and telephone that they have been activated.
3. Pets will be assigned to our Volunteer Pet Caretakers based upon location and other factors.
4. Our administrators and Volunteer Pet Caretakers will do whatever it takes to find and rescue your pets. If your pet has a location chip, they’ll use that, or they’ll go to every location you’ve registered with us, and, if your pets are not at one of those locations, they’ll search for your cars as well as stay in contact with the local pet shelters. If they are unable to reach a Volunteer Caretaker in your area for whatever reason, our administrators will communicate with local animal organizations, like the Humane Society, to advocate for your pet’s rescue and care.
5. Our administrators will stay in touch with our Volunteer Pet Caretakers regarding each and every pet to be sure everything is being done to rescue and care for them.

One of the FAQ’s on the site is: “Is this real?” They insist it is. Either way, this is a big, diverse country with all kinds of religious perspectives. And, naturally, every one of our diverse ways of approaching the world gets projected onto our pets, too.

Incidentally, you can by After the Rapture Pets “Volunteer Pet Caregiver” shirts here, at Cafe Press. Though wearing such a shirt–and thus admitting that you’ll be down here with the sinners and the Shar Peis come rapture day–is presumably a marker of your faithlessness. But at least you’ll face judgement day in the company of animals.

Self-cleaning litter boxes. Aquariums that can be hung like picture frames. NASCAR-branded pet beds. Snoop Dogg-themed pet hoodies. Bird cages shaped like castles. Talking food bowls. Dog kimonos.

Leashes that blink. Leashes that beep. Leashes that glow in the dark.

Organic dog treats. Kosher dog treats. Australia-themed dog treats. Dog treats sponsored by Dick Van Patten. Dog treats made from desiccated bull penis. Dog treats made from desiccated bull penis and then kneaded into yard-long braids.

GPS devices. Electronic doggy-door keys. Radio-controlled doorbells that ring when puppy wants a walk. Electric treadmills—a bargain at $499—for when you don’t want to take him on one.

Gear that’s proudly made in the U.S.A. Gear that’s sold under a sign that reads “Szenzhen Huacheng Sci & Tech Development Co.”

Dog mineral water.

Cat mineral water.

Hamster/Guinea Pig mineral water.

Still more pet mineral water—but from Iceland! And in brushed-metal bottles, lest your animal absorb contaminants from the plastic!

Products to combat shedding. Products to combat “tear stains.” Products to combat the smell of pet excrement. Products—“scientifically tested”—to combat the smell of pet excrement before it is even excreted.

Pet swaddles. Pet strollers. Pet diapers.

And I think I mentioned the ferret hammocks, right?

For reporters, the highlight of the show is that the pet industry drops its annual sales projections during the show’s second day. Take these numbers with a grain of salt–the trade association is run by good people, but I’m enough of a reporter to know that self-reported stats are not gospel. All the same, given the above scene, it’s amazing that these are the goods Americans will brave a recession to buy. Pet spending didn’t take a hit in the 2001 recession, and it’s trucked through the global collapse, too–on the logic, I think, that once dogs and cats became promoted into family membership, their care and feeding was no longer a discretionary expense but, to many people, an obligation. The kimonos, not so much: They get attention, but the bulk of pet spending remains food and medicine. Still, both of those markets are worlds away from the age of Chuck Wagon and All Creatures Great and Small.

Alas, this year I can’t be at the show this year, so I’ll miss the plucky inventors betting their savings on a miraculous new dog leash, the dedicated true believers who want to convince the world that raw pet food is the humane option, and the corporate behemoths operating vast hospitality suites in the name of rolling out their latest pet-care miracle. But luckily for me, the pet industry–eager to woo younger folks who’ve been statistically less keen on pet-ownership–has beefed up its content with Expo-related Twitter feeds and a YouTube channel. There are also video highlights on the show’s own homepage. Which is quite an irony: Last year, I was taking some footage of a company’s chew-toy using my Flip video camera when a guy from the firm came up to me and wrenched it away. Industrial espionage, he suspected! Apparently a well-founded fear: I wound up with an entire chapter in my book profiling various sides of the chew-toy wars.

]]> http://michaelschaffer.net/2010/03/missing-my-expo/feed/ http://michaelschaffer.net/2010/03/the-mutt-census/ http://michaelschaffer.net/2010/03/the-mutt-census/#comments Fri, 26 Mar 2010 14:39:39 +0000 Michael Schaffer http://michaelschaffer.net/?p=459 I filled out my decennial U.S. Census form a couple weeks ago. Uncle Sam got data on all the people in my house, and my relationships to them. But not, alas, about the animals. Which is understandable: They may represent a significant chunk of our economy–$47.5 billion this year, according to the American Pet Products Assiociation, up $2 billion over last year–but they still don’t vote, or require social security, or factor into gerrymandering decisions, or require public schools. So they’re maybe not such a big deal to federal statisticians.

For pet-industry statisticians, it’s another story. Different dogs get different diseases, have different life expectancies, and otherwise figure prominently in the business decisions of those who make veterinary medicines, operate animal hospitals, or manufacture breed-specific dog foods. So just who’s out there? The statistics are pretty weak. AKC breed registrations apply only to pure-breds, and only to owners who bother to fill out paperwork for the organization–a population that’s declining. As for dogs of uncertain parentage, there’s even less. But this year, themed around the decennial census, Mars is conducting it’s first Mutt Census, asking people what the dominant breed their pet is. It’s hardly scientific questioning: Participation is online, for whoever wants. And a number of the questions read a lot more like a search for marketing data (how many times a day do you feed your dog?) than canine demography. But still.

Anyway, as a guy whose book argues that pets over the years have come to be treated increasingly like humans, and that this is a function of some pretty big changes in our human society that we unintentionally but inescapably project onto the critters formerly known as Rover and Spot, I can say that there’s at least one way where canine population-counting politics mirrors the human kind: People in my native DC, that weird non-state that hosts a Congress whose members it can’t elect,  feel left out. Check out the complaint from weloveDC.

Lee was not a dog person, and the tone of the obits generally cast her as a party-pooper when it came to the human-animal bond:

In the world of which she dreamed, no dog would be allowed to besmirch the city’s streets for even a moment: instead, it would attend to its affairs at home, on newspaper, before padding outside. She envisioned, as she told The Times in 1972, a battalion of city “poodle maids,” who would prowl New York issuing summonses to the masters of dog offenders.

Ms. Lee’s stand put her at the forefront of the pitched battle over dog excrement that raged in the city for much of the ’70s. When she appeared in public, outraged dog owners hurled invective; occasionally they hurled the subject matter of the debate itself. Ms. Lee had no qualms about responding in kind.

All the same, I wish some of the coverage had pointed out an odd twist on Lee’s legacy: According to a bunch of the vets I spoke to while researching my book, a major unintended consequence of pooper-scooper laws was a significant improvement in canine health. Poop, as any parent who changes diapers knows, holds a lot of clues about the health of a baby who can’t discuss intestinal issues on her own. Ditto a dog. And, thanks to Lee and those like her, a lot of dog owners in the 1970s suddenly found themselves handling a lot more poop than they previously had done. Which meant that a lot more people were getting early warnings that their dog might have some issues, and were going to the vet to ask about it.

So thanks, Ms. Lee. Sorry about the bags of…um…invective.

If nothing else, Michael Vick’s return to the NFL has been good for the banter in the Schaffer household. Though I live in Philadelphia, I’m a DC native and remain a Redskins fan. My wife, though, never much cared about sports until she moved to Philly; she’s now a sports-talk radio addict and, naturally, and Eagles fan. This has, over the years, led to a certain degree of football-related tension around the house.

Of course,in an over-educated, under-testosterone’d household like ours, sports trash-talk tends to be heavy on references to aspects of a team that may not strictly have much to do with sports–like a team’s owner’s politics, or their uniform design, or, say, whether or not their fans are all a bunch of Republican lobbyists from Virginia/a bunch of violent goons from South Philly. For most of this time, I’ve been on the losing end of the PC arguments, what with my home team’s tyrannical and bumbling owner, its Bush-endorsing former head coach, and that whole pesky racist team name thing. So you can imagine my relief that I can now tease my wife about how she, a woman who tears up during Beethoven, now supports dog-murder every time she cheers on an Eagles touchdown.

In fact, its been kind of fascinating to have been living in Philadelphia as the Vick signing sank in. The debate, if that’s what you call it, has been completely idiotic, albeit in ways that tell us a lot about how we Americans think about everything from pets to football loyalty to, most of all, justice.

On pets, I’d long thought that the extent of our national Vick-hatred was a sign of how much we love dogs: Kobe Bryant, settled out-of-court with a woman who decided against testifying in his sexual-assault trial, is back in the endorsement fray. Vick seemed to me to have done something the public views as even lower. But one refrain since he signed on with the Eagles reminds me that there’s also a dissenting point of view. For all the protesters in front of their practice facility, for all the people vowing to cancel season tickets, all of the brainless man-on-the-street reports on the local TV news featured at least one person saying something along the lines of: Gimme a break–people in this country treat dogs better than humans! (As if one person’s decision to send a pet to a plush doggie day spa counterbalances another person’s decision to bludgeon a dog to death for the sin of costing you money by losing a fight.) Which is all to say that our national petmania is a complicated thing, and not without its own backlash.

On football loyalty, I’m afraid the fact is that Michael Vick’s future reputation will depend, more than anything, on how he performs on the field. He got a standing ovation in his first preseason home game–something that may or may not reflect the city’s broader view, since the sort of folks who go to preseason games tend to be die-hards. But the motivation for the cheers, which as far as I can tell is that everyone’s out to get Vick and so we have to rally around him now that he’s one of ours, is an impulse that extends beyond die-hards. Vick is joining a team that’s been hobbled by injury and will likely not be very good this year. He’s suspended through week six. If his return is perceived as somehow spurring an Eagles rivival, that will assure his place in the good graces of far more fans than I’d care to admit: Look for all sorts of stories about how Vick’s winning pass demonstrates that he’s pulled his life back together, serves as an inspiring example of overcoming, etc etc. We are, when it comes to sports still a very naive country. No number of scandals, shootings, or sex crimes will ever remind us that athletic brilliance and personal tawdriness are not actually contradictions, and that we should maybe seek our role-models elsewhere.

Or else we’re just fatalistic in our team loyalty. My wife won’t be cheering Vick, but she still loves her Eagles. “This is what it means to be a fan,” she says, as if the Vick signing is like a muffed punt or a blown call or a last-minute super-bowl choke. “You get kicked in the teeth every time.”

And in terms of revealing our views on justice, the Vick-signing fallout has been especially interesting. By day two, the entire thing had devolved into a phony constitutional debate, with dim-bulb sports-talk callers saying that Vick had “paid his debt to society” and had the “right” to play. Well, in the sense that he’s served his legally mandated prison term, of course he has! And, insofar as any free adult in the country has the right to hold any non-regulated job that will hire them, of course he does! The same goes for the related arguments Vick’s defenders raise, about compassion and second chances and how the whole criminal system depends on holding out the opportunity for convicts to thrive once they’ve done their time. But that’s not really the point.

The point of a football game may be to score more points than the other guy, but the point of a football franchise is to make money for its ownership. Usually, those two things go hand in hand. They’re not identical, though–teams will sometimes go out and sign free agents who are likely to boost fan turnout or merchandise sales or whatever, and they’ll get rid of players for the same reason. This is true of any entertainment business. It’ll be hard to find leading-man roles at the Cineplex for an actor with a reputation as, say, a Holocaust denier–even though that actor hasn’t committed any crime by espousing his views, and even though he has a “right” to espouse them. In fact, it goes for any firm with a public face. You could be the best car designer in the world, but if you’d done 18 months for drowning, elextrocuting and hanging caged dogs, you wouldn’t get to become CEO of Ford, because the company would rightly fear that the opprobrium would shave a couple percentage points off the bottom line.

The Eagles may not be so worried about this, either because they think winning will quiet the rage, or because they’ve managed to finesse the debate in such a way as to make it seem as if opposing the Vick signing means opposing someone’s basic constitutional rights. Oddly, the whole thing made me think of the chapter in my book about the “dog wars” over off-leash pets in San Francisco city parks: As tempers rose, the debate ceased focusing on what was the best use of the park system for a diverse range of citizens, and instead went straight to the Bill of Rights: Opponents were either fighting your “right” to be a dog-owner, or fighting your “right” to picnic without being bothered by someone’s poodle. As such, like so many things in pet-world, it told us a lot about contemporary America: Our arguments always go back to freedom and rights.

The best bit I’ve read about Vick is from Phil Sheridan, sports columnist for my former employer, the Philadelphia Inquirer. Sheridan opposes the Vick signing in large part because the guy’s a bad fit for the team, which runs a different offense and has a perfectly good back-up. But reacting to the roll-out press conference, where Vick declared his remorse and was vouched for by the tragedy-scarred, Bible-quoting former Colts coach Tony Dungy and by current Eagles coach Andy Reid, whose kids have been mixed up with the justice system themselves, here’s what he also said:

Clearly, Dungy and Reid believe what they said. There is no doubting their desire to offer Vick an opportunity to rewrite his legacy and atone for his actions. There’s a football component here, to be sure, but there is something more.

Here’s the problem. By defending the Vick signing in those terms, Dungy and Reid also imply that anyone who disagrees with the move is somehow not Christian (or forgiving) and not American enough. And that’s just not fair.

It is possible to wish Vick a redemptive and productive future without wanting to spend your Sunday afternoons rooting for him on the football field. It is possible to think he paid his debt to society for his egregious behavior and also think it is a mistake for the Eagles to add him to their team.

Right on.

But of course, I’m not an Eagles fan. So I’ll stick to shouting “dog killer!” at my pro-Eagles friends when our two teams finally face off.

Tomorrow, a second trial on the custody of the nearly six-year-old brown pooch is set to begin. The Williamstown woman plans to testify again that her ex-fiancé broke an oral agreement to let her have the dog after she moved out of their house.

In March, a three-judge appeals panel ordered a new trial, saying Superior Court Judge John Tomasello should not have treated Dexter as just another piece of furniture during the first trial, in Gloucester County, in 2007. The new trial will be heard in Salem County, where Tomasello is now assigned.

Gina Calogero, Houseman’s attorney, said the appeals panel had issued a “landmark decision” on pet custody, which she called an “emerging field and cutting-edge law.” Calogero, who specializes in animal rights cases, says many judges are now being asked to decide who gets the pet when there is a breakup.

“Ten years ago, I never heard of any such case,” said Calogero.

A few thoughts:

1. This is a phenomenon I wrote about in my book. As pets have become a more emotionally important part of people’s lives, their attachment to them has taken on new forms, forms that reflect not just the eternal nature of animals, but the specific nature of our ever-changing human society. Divorce battles are a big part of that society, so it’s no surprise they’d involve pets.

2. The institutions of our society–courts and schools and governments that write restaurant codes and the like–adapt slowly but surely to changes in the way we live. And, sure enough, they adapt to the social upgrade we’ve given pets. It’s not fast enough for those of us with pets, of course, but eventually things change, whether it’s allowing restaurants to be pet-friendly if they choose, or devoting chunks of public land to dog runs, or drafting emergency evacuation plans that include pets. Same goes for figuring out how to adjudicate pet lawsuits or custody battles–and do so in a way that treats pets not as property but as the emotionally crucial beings they are in many people’s lives.

3. If I were a judge, I would be frantic to not establish a precedent that judges should decide these things. Not because it’s not worthy, but because it is a hell of a lot of work. Child-custody is tough enough–and at least the kid can talk.

4. The woman in this story has been on the Today show and otherwise been treated as an exotic. Someday fairly soon, it won’t seem so exotic.

Via Petconnection, I also came across a very sweet obituary for the dog at PeoplePets.com.

“Other than a few other small cameos, Gidget’s working life didn’t continue much beyond her Taco Bell legacy. But she left quite an impression. ‘One time, I kid you not, she actually pushed her stand-in out of the way because he was still there when she arrived on set,’ [trainer Sue] Chipperton recalled with a laugh. ‘Gidget always knew where the camera was.’”

One thing I’m not so sure about, though, is Gina’s speculation about the grim side-effects of a nationally famous Chihuahua:

It’s a shame that her rise to cultural icon pushed the Chihuahua into every idiot girl’s purse and made it a staple of every quick-buck breeder’s shady operation or every puppy-milling scum’s “inventory.”  A lot of those dogs have been turning up in shelters steadily ever since. Breed rescuers and ethical breeders will be picking up the pieces for years to come.

It only stands to reason that media exposure would boost a breed’s popularity. But while I was researching my book, I spent some time chatting with Hal Herzog, a scholar who has actually crunched the numbers about why some breeds rise and others fall in popular appeal. Though tracking breed population is an inexact science–Herzog uses AKA registration figures, which don’t encompass all dogs and are themselves declining even as the pet population grows–his research suggests that media exposure has little to do with it. Winning the Westminster Kennel Club title, for instance, hasn’t had any dramatic impact on a breed’s population.  Ditto pop culture exposure, where, Herzog writes, famous cases like the run on Dalmatians sparked by 101 Dalmatians was the exception rather than the rule. Of Gidget, he writes:

The majority of the many hundreds of movies, television shows, and commercials featuring dogs have had little or no impact on the popularity of obscure breeds. Take the well-known Taco Bell television ad campaign that ran between 1997 and 2000 featuring a Spanish-speaking Chihuahua named Gidget (“Yo quiero Taco Bell”). The extemsive exposure of the breed during 3 years of media saturation did not produce an increase in the popularity of Chihuahuas. Indeed, registrations for the breed declined 43% between 1998 and 2003.

Now, it’s possible that Gidget affected Paris Hilton, who in turn caused puppy millers to turn their ghoulish attention to Chihuahuas. In fact, that seems the most logical explanation to me. In fact, I suspect Paris’ much-photographed travels with her pup helped shape ideas about the glamorousness of pets–ideas that have had rotten effects in terms of spurring frivolous pet-as-accessory acquisitions as well as well as good ones like helping open more restaurants to pets. But I don’t know that based on any data. The rise and fall of breeds turns out to be one of these very odd phenomena where causality is very hard to tease out.