Stupid. On a Stick.

Suppose you had no pressing issue to complain about, no message, and no money.

Would you ask people to send you money so that you could find an issue to complain about, and also ask them to the write the message so you could put it on a bulletin board?

Believe it or not, that's the latest pitch from the "National Animal Interest Alliance," the organization that was last seen asking us all to help raise money because they were spending "$10,00 a month" to help defend Wendy Willard's extremely poor treatment of her "Murder Hollow" basset hounds.

Willard, of course, has now permanently lost 10 of her dogs, the judge has ordered her to clean up her kennels and allow for open inspection by the PSPCA, and criminal animal abuse charges are still swinging over her head.

It seems the NAIA got it all wrong, and so too did everyone else fanning the fires of hysteria on this case.

Any apologies forthcoming to the PSPCA? Nope.

And guess what? There's also no accounting for the money raised!

How much was it, and what was it spent on?

No one is saying.

Dog owners, of course, are ripe for flim-flam profiteers with contrived crisis. This is the bread-and-butter of the Humane Society of the U.S. and it's also the bread and butter of folks who always seem to spring up to to pluck off a few hundred dollars from dog clubs and other unsophisticated donors.

Dog people give to breed clubs through memberships and donations, and the clubs always seem to end up having a few hundred (or a few thousand) dollars lying around doing nothing.

What happens next is that a few reactionaries at the top of the club hierarchy write a check "to help the cause" (always vaguely defined and the facts never quite gotten together or reported out to the membership).

Later, everyone forgets to check on exactly what happened with that donation, same as they were previously "too busy" (and the need "too urgent") to actually do due diligence before the donation went out.

The folks at the top of the Club, who may or may not know what has has actually happened with their donation, are generally not too eager to report out that it was all a waste.

Bottom line: The question remains. How much money was raised for the Murder Hollow bassets by Bulldog Breeder Julian Prager's email notices across the Internet?

And where did the money go?

As for the the rest of us in the world of dogs, before anyone starts contributing to any billboards for an urgent crisis (not yet named) to support words not yet written, we might want to find out what happened to the last raft of checks given, and what it had to do with the welfare of dogs.

And for us in the hunting community, before we start saluting similar nonsense from purported hunters, we might want to check to see if any hunting is actually going on here.

The pitch of the Basset Hound folks, after all, is that you can be a vegan bunny hugger and "hunt" with these dogs because it's really not hunting.

Nice! Perfect. The canine equivalent of skeet shooting.

PETA would surely approve.
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