Who Rescued the Beagles and Why?

A beagle rescue story has slowly unfolded in my email box over the last week, but since there seems to be some confusion as to who rescued these beagles, and why, let me see if I can summarize the story in a few simple bullets:

• One hundred and twenty beagles and 40 monkeys were rescued from a bankrupt lab in New York state. Beagles and monkeys are stock animal-research subjects, and they are generally bred specifically for research purposes. Their welfare is supposed to be protected under license and inspection, but when Azopharma, the parent company of research lab AniClin, went bankrupt in April, the 120 dogs and 40 monkeys were put in legal and economic limbo.
  
  
• With bankruptcy of Azopharma, the dogs and monkeys were now owned by Bank of America, along with all other Azopharma assets. Bank of America hired Morris Anderson and Associates to deal with Azopharma in receivership. Morris Anderson tried to sell the animals to another research lab, but could find no buyers. The dogs and monkeys were safe in a locked lab facility with food and water, but they had only a skeleton crew of caretakers to take care of them, and they were moving nowhere and had no real stimulation for over a month.
  
  
• An Animal Rights group called Win Animal Rights (WAR) took the fate of the dogs and the monkeys to court, and on June 30 a judge issued an order putting the animals into the care of two animal rescues that had already been lined up by WAR -- one for the monkeys, and Pet's Alive in Middletown, New York for the beagles.
  
  
• The beagles appear to be healthy and not too poorly socialized, and a lot of adoption applications for them have come in very quickly. All good, and hat's off to Pet's Alive for their good work.
  
  
• Best Friend's Animal Society in Utah has helped raising money for the rescue effort. Their web site initially said they needed $250 per dog per day, but that appears to have been a mistake on the part of their web-tech; it was supposed to be $250 per dog per rehoming. Best Friend's Animal Society is raising the money and passing it on to Pet's Alive -- a sharing of effort, resources, and expertise. The money is being used to spay/neuter the dogs, worm, microchip, vet, house, feed, and handle the adoption paper work and transportation.
  
  
• Some folks are pointing out that Best Friends started out as an offshoot of a bizarre cult, which apparently is true. The founders were Scientologists who broke away from that group in the mid-1960s, and then drifted to California where they dressed in purple capes and called themselves "The Process Church of the Final Judgment." The founders of Best Friends (to their credit) tell the story themselves. They put it all down to confusion, youth, and the kind of spiritual-questing that was going on 30 years ago, but I assure you that not too many people were this confused for this long or in this way. That said, it should also be said that ALL religions start out as bizarre cults, and all have pretty much stayed that way. In a world in which the Pope wears a bizarre hat, winks at pedophilia, and stokes the fires of contempt for women and hate for gays, you will pardon me if I do not heap invective on folks who once wore purple-robes and who now help dogs, but otherwise do not seem to be doing anything quite as strange as eating the blood and body of Christ every Sunday (as so many traditional Christians do).

These are the facts as I understand them, and I do not think they ad up to scandal or concern, though I certainly understand the confusion as it relates to the internet fundraising pitch which appears to have simply been a fumble on the copy-editing end.

Of course, Best Friends and I are on slightly different wave lengths on a few things, but that's OK. These folks seem to be dedicated to "saving every life," but I long ago made my peace with some death, even if I find it regrettable.

Do I salute their "dependency model" of animal rescue? Nope, I do not. Rehousing a bunch of deeply aggressive dogs that cannot be released, while raising money through direct mail and the internet for the upkeep of those dogs, is nuts if you ask me.

But I am just one person, and there's more than one person, one opinion, or one solution in this world. If Best Friends can find people to donate, without lying to folks about what they are actually donating for, more power to them.

And, for the record, they seem to be doing that. I have no evidence they have misrepresented their work. In fact, most of what they seem to be doing is noble, even if some of it is impossibly idealistic.

As for the beagles, they are the real winners here. I suppose someone, somewhere will try to manufacture some contrived outrage that Bank of America lost the "value" of used dogs which no one actually seemed eager to buy.

But since Bank of America is stealing from Americans every day, and these same people do not seem very concerned about that, you will pardon me if I do not send flowers or a note of concern about the Bank's putative economic losses here. I am sure the bank will get over the situation. Without help from a lot of people, however, the beagles probably would not.


..