Author: Andrew Sullivan

A Genocide Is Being Committed In The Middle East

Some 40,000 Iraqi Yazidis, whose hometown of Sinjar was overwhelmed by ISIS militants on Saturday, are stranded on a mountain with little food or water after fleeing the city and being trapped there by the jihadists below, who consider them heretics:

UN groups say at least 40,000 members of the Yazidi sect, many of them women and children, have taken refuge in nine locations on Mount Sinjar, a craggy, mile-high ridge identified in local legend as the final resting place of Noah’s ark. At least 130,000 more people, many from the Yazidi stronghold of Sinjar, have fled to Dohuk, in the Kurdish north, or to Irbil, where regional authorities have been struggling since June to deal with one of the biggest and most rapid refugee movements in decades.

Sinjar itself has been all but emptied of its 300,000 residents since jihadists stormed the city late on Saturday, but an estimated 25,000 people remain. “We are being told to convert or to lose our heads,” said Khuldoon Atyas, who has stayed behind to guard his family’s crops. “There is no one coming to help.”

The Yazidis, Bobby Ghosh explains, are one of several Iraqi minority groups in danger of persecution and genocide by the murderous “caliphate”:

Many Shi’ites can flee—some already have—southward, and find refuge among family and those of their own sect; many of my Shi’ite friends in Baghdad are currently sheltering northerners sent to them by religious organizations. Kurds, likewise, have been streaming into the Kurdish-dominated areas to the north and west of ISIL-controlled territory. Yet another minority, the Assyrians, most whom are Christians, have also fled south, and now await succor from the West, especially from groups of well-established Iraqi Christians in the US, who themselves fled previous spasms of persecution. But other minorities, just as vulnerable to the wrath of ISIL, have neither international support nor nearby refuge. And ISIL seems to have identified them for special persecution.

ISIS has also captured the largest Christian town in Iraq. Razib Khan argues that these minorities’ days are numbered. To him, “the rise of the Islamic State, and the past 10 years of chaos and violence, suggest that this is the end of the persistence of ethno-religious sects such as the Yezidi across most of the Fertile Crescent”:

The Jacobites Christians, Assyrians, and Yezidi, lack powerful patrons and protectors. Though most Sunni and Shia would not countenance genocide, they are focused more on the exigencies of their own internecine conflicts. Many minorities already have large Diaspora populations Europe. Tens of thousands of Yezidi live in Germany, and tens of thousands of Assyrians live in Sweden. The most practical short term solution would be extend refugee status selectively to ethno-religious minorities to prevent them from being eliminated by genocide. …

Of course a final irony is that the migration of the ancient Middle Eastern minorities to the West will likely result in their diminishing over the generations. The corporatist straight-jacket of the Middle Eastern milieu was constricting, but it allowed for a communal identity to maintain itself. In the individualist West these small communities are unlikely to be able to self segregate in large enough ghettos where their cultural norms are dominant. This means that identity will become a choice, and over time intermarriage will likely result in a decrease in numbers. Though the Yezidi are rightly objects of sympathy, their cultural norms are quite retrograde in many ways. These folkways were adaptive in the circumstances of Kurdistan, a persecuted minority which had to maintain a high level of group cohesion. But in the West they are often impediments to full flourishing, and produce inter-generational conflicts.

Jacob Seigel notes that “Kurdish forces from Syria and Turkey have crossed the border, forming a rare alliance with the Peshmerga inside Iraq that has already begun clashing with ISIS to recapture the ground lost over the weekend”:

Tens of thousands of Iraqis now stranded in the mountains are awaiting the outcome of those battles. As for the United States, it is “working urgently and directly with officials in Baghdad and Erbil to coordinate Iraqi airdrops to people in need,” the Defense Department said. On Wednesday, it was 106 degrees in Mosul. There may be 25,000 children trapped in the mountains, according to the United Nations’ children’s relief agency. Forty of them have died already.

George Packer discusses what we might do to help the Yazidis:

Yesterday, a senior U.S. official told me that the Obama Administration is contemplating an airlift, coördinated with the United Nations, of humanitarian supplies by C-130 transport planes to the Yazidis hiding in the Sinjar mountains. There are at least twenty thousand and perhaps as many as a hundred thousand of them, including some peshmerga militiamen providing a thin cover of protection.  The U.N. has reported that dozens of children have died of thirst in the heat. ISIS controls the entrance to the mountains. Iraqi helicopters have dropped some supplies, including food and water, but the refugees are hard to find and hard to reach.

It was encouraging to learn that humanitarian supplies might be on the way, but we always seem to be at least a step behind as ISIS rolls over local forces and consolidates power. ISIS is not Al Qaeda. It operates like an army, taking territory, creating a state. The aim of the Sinjar operation seems to be control of the Mosul Dam, the largest dam in Iraq, which provides electricity to Mosul, Baghdad, and much of the country. According to one expert, if ISIS takes the dam, which is located on the Tigris River, it would have the means to put Mosul under thirty metres of water, and Baghdad under five.

But Morrissey wants more than that:

ISIS has purged Christians from their ancient communities in Mosul and the Nineveh province over the last several months. The war in Gaza has distracted the West for the last few weeks, but with that war now paused at the very least, perhaps it’s time to start shifting our gaze back to the much more dangerous situation in Iraq and Syria, where the death tolls already dwarf what has been seen in Gaza. We’ve spent a lot of time intervening in the Gaza war. What has the US done about ISIS, which poses much more of a threat to the US and the West, in a country where our presence might have made a difference?

 

Are We Abetting Central American Gangs? Ctd

Tomasky thinks we need to take a hard look at our own role in Central America’s descent into violence:

So in the three crisis countries, or at least in two of them (Guatemala and El Salvador), there’s a pattern. U.S.-sponsored civil wars tore the country apart in the 1980s. What happened next? As Ryan Grim and Roque Planas put it in a terrific Huffington Post piece tracing this history in greater depth, “With wars come refugees.” Terrified citizens of these nations started running to the United States by the tens of thousands.

When they got here, there was nothing for them. Depending on how old they were, they or their kids formed gangs in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the 1990s. We responded to that by “getting tough” on crime, throwing thousands of them in jail. Then when they got out of jail, we deported them back. We escalated the drug war—we had some success in Colombia, which merely pushed much of the cocaine trade into Central America. The ex-gang members we deported created extremely violent societies, societies where 10-year-old kids are recruited into new gangs and threatened with death if they don’t join, and it’s from those societies that today’s children are fleeing.

But Robert Brenneman stresses that the situation there is not as hopeless in as the prevailing narrative would have you believe:

While it is true that many of the children who reach the US border have grown up in difficult and even dangerous situations and ought to be granted a hearing to determine whether or not they should be granted asylum, I have Central American friends (including some from Honduras) who might bristle at the suggestion that every child migrating northward is escaping life in hell itself. The idea that all Central American minors ought to be pronounced refugees upon arrival at the border rests on the mistaken assumption that these nations are hopelessly mired in violence and chaos, and it encourages the US government to throw in the towel with regard to advocating for economic and political improvements in the region.

True, a great deal of violence and hopelessness persists in the marginal urban neighborhoods of San Salvador and Tegucigalpa, but these communities did not evolve by accident. They are the result of years of under-investment in social priorities such as public education and public security compounded by the entrance in the late 1990s of a furious scramble among the cartels to establish and maintain drug movement and distribution networks across the isthmus in order to meet unflagging US demand. At the same time as we work to ensure that all migrant minors are treated humanely and with due process, we ought to use this moment to take a hard look at US foreign policy both past and present in order to build a robust aid package aimed at strengthening institutions and promoting more progressive tax policy so that these nations can promote human development, not just economic growth. It is time we take the long view with regard to our neighbors to the south.

Previous Dish on our role in the Central American crisis here and here.

The Decline Of American Entrepreneurialism

Startups

Annie Lowrey leafs through a new Brookings study on :

Robert A. Litan of the Brookings Institution and Ian Hathaway of Ennsyte Economics provide some scary data points in two research papers they have released in the last few months.

  • The share of all companies comprised by start-ups under a year old fell by half between 1978 and 2011
  • The proportion of private-sector workers employed at older firms has increased from 60 percent to 72 percent since 1992
  • The proportion of workers employed at young firms has declined over the same period
  • Companies under a year old are failing more often, with the “failure rate” for start-ups climbing to 27 percent from 16 percent in the early 1990s
  • The “failure rate” has increased for all but the longest-established businesses

Even the vaunted high-tech sector is seeing the same trends: The share of tech companies that are 16 years old or older has risen from roughly 15 percent to 25 percent since 1992, while the proportion of the industry that works in such firms has increased, too.

Yglesias wonders if demographics are to blame:

One possibility is that the link to population aging is quite literal. A study by Vivek Wadhwa, Raj Aggarwal, Krisztina Holly, and Alex Salkever that looked specifically at “high-growth” industries found that the typical successful founder is 40. Not someone who’s at the tail-end of his career, but not someone who’s fresh out of school either. That’s in part because “professional networks were important to the success of their current business for 73 percent of the entrepreneur,” and it takes time to achieve that success. Mark Zuckerberg founded a great company when he was in college, but that kind of super-young founder is the exception not the rule — most people need some practical experience and contacts to succeed.

And back in the early 1990s, there were a lot of people in their late-thirties and early forties: Nowadays that cohort of people’s prime founding years are behind them. There is another large cohort of people coming up, but right now they’re too young to be peak entrepreneurs.

Casselman, who provides the above chart, thinks it’s clear the decline in the start-up rate “began long before the boomers began to age out of their prime entrepreneurial years”:

There is other evidence that America’s aging population can’t explain its aging businesses. Self-employment rates, for example, have declined for all age groups (other than teenagers) over the past 20 years. And as Hathaway and Litan showed in an earlier paper, the decline in entrepreneurship is remarkably constant across regions and industries, hitting youth-heavy tech hubs and graying industrial cities alike. Demographics may be contributing to the problem, but they aren’t the primary cause.

Is The Internet Tearing Us Apart?

Mark Dunkelman, author of The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community, suggests so:

The circumstances that once compelled Americans to develop familiar but less intimate relationships have faded. The time and attention we now spend online and with our closest friends is time not spent outside talking with neighbors, shooting the breeze at a bar, or grabbing a burger with a colleague from work. And while there’s nothing wrong with that per se, we ought not to be so naïve as to think that that those new relationships don’t come at a cost.

There are elements of the new social architecture to celebrate. A 2009 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that those who use sites like Facebook are generally in touch with a broader – and more diverse – set of acquaintances. But Stanford sociologist Norman Nie designed studies to explore how investments in certain types of relationships affected others. He concluded that every minute an individual spends on the Internet reduces the time he or she spends with friends by seven seconds, and with colleagues by eleven. In the absence of the sorts of relationships we once had with people who were familiar, but not intimate, we’ve become walled off from people who hold different points of view.

The Best Of The Dish Today

That’s a future prime minister up there. Won’t it be fun? Meanwhile, a reader writes:

This whole “least happy city” thing has (of course) got me riled up…

I think the key here is in the wording: satisfaction is not synonymous with happiness. It stands to reason that New Yorkers, as a species, are more dissatisfied than residents of Nashville (the adjusted “most satisfied” city). I have spent quite a bit of time in Nashville – great place, nice people – but they are satisfied with one small art museum with an ok collection, satisfied to see “Paula Deen Live” or a touring production of “The Book of Mormon” at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, satisfied with decent but ultimately uninspired and mediocre food, satisfied with a lovely – if underfunded – library, satisfied with pretty good colleges, satisfied with four blocks of walkable urbanism downtown, etc.

New Yorkers want (and expect) MORE. New Yorkers are unsurprised that they can see Vermeers at the Frick AND the Met. New Yorkers have seen great theater, which makes them want even better theater. It’s not uncommon for a New Yorker to eat great food one week, then compare it to a better meal they had last week . New Yorkers are currently arguing about how to make the Fifth Avenue main branch of the New York Public Library even better. New Yorkers greet Columbia and NYU with a shrug (not to mention the great CUNY system). And no place on earth (except perhaps Paris) is more focused on the quality and character of the urban environment than New Yorkers – and in every borough.

Perhaps Nashville delivers satisfaction. Nashville pleases. New York teaches New Yorkers the art of dissatisfaction. New Yorkers expect an awful lot from their city, and when it delivers, it surpasses all expectation. As you well know, it doesn’t give up those moments as often as we might like, but I for one, would rather a chance at the sublime than a guarantee of comfort…

Biased and balanced. Speaking of which, an update from another reader:

All I can say to your NYC reader who seems to think Nashvilleans (and presumably all other non-New Yorkers) are satisfied with their lives because they somehow don’t KNOW to expect better is … bless his or her heart.  It’s so nice to see a New Yorker live up to the reputation of being a condescending prick.

Today, we celebrated cheap beer, back hair and loud farts in movie theaters. We lamented the murderousness of ISIS, the cynicism of Hamas, the spreading scourge of sponsored content, and the rise and rise of the Israeli right. Readers pushed back on my criticism of Israel’s latest Gaza war; and I backed Douthat’s critique of what Obama might do on illegal immigration.

The most popular post of the day was The Last And First Temptation of Israel; followed by Back Hair Is Beautiful.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here.  You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 24 more readers became subscribers today – bringing us to 29,907. Help us get to 30,000 here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts and polos are for sale here. One subscriber writes:

I had the wonderful yet rainy weekend in Provincetown. We were able to also take in Miss Martina’s show. I thought I saw you outside the Wired Puppy coffee shop Saturday eve but reader-hat-shadesdid not want to interrupt your private time. It is through your stories of Ptown that made me want to visit. I have been a huge fan of your blog for the past 7 years. It has made a difference in my intellectual life. I know I can always read thoroughly about a topic. I became an obsessive reader during President Obama’s elections and the Arab Spring and most recently the Israel and Gaza conflict. I have also been reading How to Live, a great book club selection. I have been a subscriber for the last two years and will continue. I still sport your original t-shirt around Wilmington, DE.

Enjoy the rest of summer in your town and thanks for the tip to come. Such a great, friendly town.

See you in the morning.

A Cure For Ebola? Ctd

Brian Till objects to the disparity between the treatment American Ebola patients Nancy Writebol and Kent Brantly are receiving, including an experimental antibody therapy called ZMapp, and the little to no care afforded African patients:

The inequality in care couldn’t be starker. When a doctor and aid worker from the United States are stricken with a horrific disease, an erstwhile unknown cure is sent from freezers at the National Institutes of Health in suburban Washington, D.C., to a hospital on the other side of the world, and a Gulfstream jet outfitted for medevac is arranged to deliver them to one of the world’s premier medical centers. But when two Liberian nurses working at the same hospital are stricken with the same disease, they are treated with the standard of care that other affected Africans—those lucky enough to receive any medical attention at all—have been afforded for the past seven months: saline infusions and electrolytes to keep them hydrated. …

The Obama administration has not said whether it will allow ZMapp to go into production. Mapp Biopharmaceuticals published a statement to their website late Monday stating that the company is working “with appropriate government agencies to increase production as quickly as possible.” (An executive at BioProcessing, a Kentucky firm that produces at least one component of ZMapp, told an industry publication last August that his company can produce the proteins for ZMapp in two weeks.)

A TPM reader with a background in bioethics speculates about why the experimental drug was given to these two aid workers, and no, it’s probably not because they’re white:

It’s hard to overstate how unusual it is for a drug at this stage of development to be given to humans.

This CNN piece suggests that they’ve only tried it on eight macaques so far. That’s a small number; they’d normally do significantly more testing in primates (or some other good animal model) before moving on to humans. Then when they did move to humans, they’d begin by testing for safety, then do various complicated further tests on larger numbers of people, and only then, if it had proved to be safe and effective, would they be able to apply for FDA approval.

This means, first, that this probably wouldn’t have been considered a “treatment” yet, just a promising lead. But second: trying a drug at this stage on humans has serious ethical risks. You’d want to be really, really sure that the people in question had given informed consent, and that that informed consent included their being absolutely clear that this drug not only might not work, but that it might actually be harmful to them. You’d want to be sure that they understood what it means for a drug to be at this preliminary stage of testing, and that they fully appreciated the fact that they were taking a huge gamble. … I think that this (along with the fact that the drug seems to require careful handling of the sort that would best be provided in a serious hospital, and the fact that there seems to have been only a limited amount of the drug available) would argue strongly in favor of trying the drug first on doctors, and specifically doctors who understand how much of the normal testing process was being bypassed, and what that meant.

Julia Belluz deflates the ZMapp hype, pointing out that just because the two Americans who received the drug appear to be doing well so far, that doesn’t prove anything about its efficacy:

[T]his drug has never undergone testing in people, only monkeys. The data on the efficacy of ZMapp in monkeys has never even been published. Studies on similar drugs are not entirely confidence inducing, either. In this study, two of the four monkeys given monoclonal antibodies 48 hours after exposure to Ebola survived. In this second study, the animals had a 43 percent survival rate when given the drug cocktail after the onset of symptoms. So even though the treatment of monoclonal antibodies decreased the mortality rate — if given close to exposure of the illness —  scientists haven’t moved past these tiny animal studies to testing in actual people.

Mapp Biopharmaceuticals is also just one of some 25 labs in seven countries working on these antibody cocktails for Ebola, and none of them have entered a phase one trial in humans, according to the journal Science. For this reason Dr. Martin Hirsch, a Harvard virologist, told Vox, “It’s too premature to say that the patients being treated miraculously improved.”

Olga Khazan explains why scientists are looking for an ebola treatment rather than a vaccine:

Vaccines don’t work that well in fast-moving epidemics. There are a few things you can do with a vaccine once an outbreak starts. One is immunizing healthcare workers and the families of infected patients. Sometimes doctors try “ring vaccination,” or targeting residents of villages on the perimeter of the outbreak in an attempt to isolate and quash it.

But most vaccines take a few weeks to provide immunity, and even then, they don’t always control the disease’s spread. Donald Allegra, chair of infection control at Newton Medical Center in New Jersey, remembers trying to halt the advance of measles in a Cambodian refugee camp in the 1970s. “We vaccinated 10,000 kids, but didn’t have an effect on the outbreak,” he said. “Vaccines and acute outbreaks don’t work very well together.”

Book Club: How Extremists Need Each Other

A reader winds down our discussion by tying the lessons of Montaigne to the current crisis in Gaza:

It seems to me the most compelling angle to look at Montaigne right now is how living through the civil war of religion in France his whole adult life shaped his philosophy of bookclub-beagle-trmoderation. I had no idea how bloodcurdling the conflict between the Catholics and the Huguenots were. That was just shy of half a century of neighbors dragging neighbors out in the streets to be tortured, killed, and perhaps slowly roasted over an open flame for witchcraft! All over what we now think of as slightly different flavors of Christianity!

Montaigne has been accused of being too bloodless and passive, with his stubborn refusal to pass definitive judgement and his pursuit of equanimity as a cardinal virtue. But if you consider the bloody backdrop of the times he lived through, his very moderation is the bravest and most radical stance I can think of.

As the mob violence spiraled out of control on both sides, the pressure to fall in line and declare the moral supremacy of your cause must be almost irresistible. In fact, “us or them” thinking would have been rational, in a prisoner’s dilemma kind of way. Instead, he championed the power of individual human dignity. Even amid war, he coolly proclaimed, the lives of most people are unaffected most of the time. For an observer of his caliber, that is a statement not of insensitivity but of quiet defiance. Life goes on.

He lived according to his philosophy of modest courage. For instance, he chose not to fortify montaigne.jpgthe defenses for his estate even as anarchy engulfed the countryside. Instead, he hosted travelers so graciously that one group who planned to rob him changed their minds. Politically, he was a passionate moderate who believed the civil war was a political problem with a political, not theological, solution. He complained that as a Catholic with many Protestant friends, he was considered “a Guelph to the Ghibellines and a Ghibelline to the Guelphs”. He toiled as a go-between for the king and the protestant Henry de Navarre.

It seems to me that the true fight that is going on in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the moderates on both sides trying to hold the line against the absolutists on both sides. Even though the ultimate goals for the extremists on both sides are diametrically opposite, their medium-term goal is actually the same: to escalate conflict and prevent any compromise from tainting the purity of their victory. Unfortunately, it is shockingly easy to escalate conflict, especially with partisans on both sides searching for the worst in the others’ actions or rhetorics to justify their own hostile reprisals.

Montaigne would probably advise us to watch out for passion and zeal, so that we do not empower the absolutists. Easier said than done, even for those of us sitting safely with our American asses in our air-conditioned homes. But we all need to be more like Montaigne.

Putting A Price On Your Pet’s Life, Ctd

A reader adds to the growing thread:

When our late cockapoo was 10 years old, he was diagnosed with diabetes and very shortly after went blind. This meant two shots of insulin a day for the rest of his life, and our choice of a blind dog or a $3,200 cataract operation that would restore his sight. After several months of watching him getting increasingly more depressed about his blindness (and suffering our own depression from it), we sprung for the cataract surgery. Without doubt, it was the best $3,200 we ever spent. The look on his face the day after the surgery, when we took him out for the first time, was priceless. Like a puppy! The psychic relief that it gave my wife and me, and our two daughters, was priceless.

cockapoo

And despite the inconvenience of dealing with a diabetic dog (injecting him with insulin twice a day, other geriatric illnesses and conditions that flow from diabetes, urinary incontinence that got worse over time, inability to board him for vacations, and so forth), he lived five more years, all but the last six months or so of it with a very high quality of life. We put him to sleep at 15 1/2, when we knew he was giving up and would be gone within a few weeks, and it was still the toughest day of our collective lives.

I mention this because, when I tell this story to friends who are from rural areas, they laugh and tell me what a bunch of softies we are, that they would never spend $3,200 on an operation for a dog, that dogs will adapt to blindness. They see spending $3,200 on cataract surgery for a dog as nothing short of preposterous. But I can’t imagine living with him being blind, knowing we could do something about it.

A reader shares a resource for those facing life-or-death decisions for their pets:

Since I don’t have children, I sense that I would likely go overboard to care for my border collie. When I came across this quality-of-life scale for pets a few years ago, I bookmarked it so I could be more objective when the time comes. I hope other Dishheads may find it helpful.

Another raises an eyebrow:

I’m surprised your reader thinks that giving a dog chemotherapy will make it “very sick” and is “like torture.” Actually, at least with the kind given to my dog – which gave us another 15 months of very high quality life with her – it is very rare that an animal will get sick, or indeed suffer any side effects whatsoever. Mine had none. I’m sure a vet or two will weigh on the subject, but I just wanted to make this point.

Another nods, with many other readers sharing their stories and photos:

A reader pointed out that “chemo is awful” when discussing why he or she would not subject her family cat to it. I would suggest that she talk with her veterinarian about it before assuming that human chemotherapy treatment and pet chemotherapy treatments are perfectly analogous. In general, the side effects of pet chemotherapy are much, much less severe. My dog lost his leg to cancer about 20 years ago, and we put him on chemotherapy at the time. Of course we can never truly know what was going on in his head, but externally he was as happy, goofy, and active as ever during his treatment, and he loved going to the treatment center. And he ended up living three more years (his pre-chemo prognosis was three to six months).

Another updates us on his dog’s chemo experience, chronicled in “The Last Lesson We Learn From Our Pets”:

1044795_10201205134237952_1267167286_nLast summer I wrote to you about my dog Jack, who had recently completed chemo. At the time of treatment, we were told that our investment would likely get us a year, give or take, with the dog. A year came and went this past October, and Jack continues to be the happy, goofy, if old dog we had hoped he’d become. You may remember him from the photo that ran last summer [seen to the right].

Since then – and this is where we tie into the current thread – we’ve had to euthanize both cats in the house. The first cat became very ill, very quickly. The vet recommended tests, surgery, and ultimately a feeding tube. All of this was done with the understanding the cat would recover and live for several more years. Instead, we subjected the cat to incredible suffering for the better part of a week before we had to call it quits. My wife and I vowed that we would not repeat this.

When the other cat began his downhill slide, we discussed with the vet that our focus was on quality of life, not quantity of treatment. She was completely on board with this, and the cat had a glorious last week. One of the things we did was let him out in the yard to hunt, under supervision, and let his inner warrior get a one long, wonderful taste of life. When it was time to end things with this pet, we knew the suffering had been minimized, and therefore the experience was much, much easier. We have no regrets, and have planned a similar sendoff for the dog.

Another reader:

Several weeks ago, our beloved nine-year-old dog was diagnosed with a melanoma tumor in her mouth. As you know, this is one of the most aggressive cancers. We live on one of the Neighbor Islands in Hawaii, and our vet told us we would have to fly her to Honolulu for specialty treatment as there were no facilities for the required surgery where we live. Within two days we were on a plane to Honolulu with Gwendolyn to meet with the doggie oncologist at the specialty hospital.

2013-12-22_02-52-08_489

Following examination, including a cat scan, the doctors determined that it was in the early stages and gave us the option of surgical removal of part of the bone and teeth in her upper jaw. The surgery was performed and she was back home and feeling fine two days later. She is also receiving a very promising new melanoma vaccine that is used for both canines and humans. So far her prognosis is excellent. Other than a slight dent in the side of her face, you would never know she had had such a procedure. She has fully recovered.

So far the treatment, including travel, has cost in excess of $13,000. We are very fortunate that we can afford it and consider the cost about the equivalent to a really nice vacation. We will enjoy whatever time we have with Gwennie far more than that. We are realistic enough to know that if the cancer recurs we will most likely not pursue this course further, but we felt we had to give her the chance for more life. As a life-long animal lover, I know that there can be no greater pain for some of us than losing a well-loved pet. I also wish that we humans were treated with the same compassion when our time comes as we extend to our furry family members.

An equally loving pet owner chose the opposite approach:

PupsI have two 13-year-old dogs who are as dear to me as any family member (more so than a few). A recent trip to the vet with revealed congestive heart failure in one and possible Cushing’s disease in the other. The dog with congestive heart failure also has bad teeth that if treated would cost between $700 and $800. Both diagnosing and treating Cushing’s disease would require multiple trips to the vet. I am lucky to have a vet who understood completely why I declined treatment for both dogs.

I have been down this road before, once spending $700 on an ill and elderly rabbit who died on the operating table. I also spent $1,300 on a guinea pig’s teeth until realizing I would be shelling out $500 every six months. The guinea pig was euthanized.

I love my pets and cherish the way they have enhanced my life. But the sad truth is that they are approaching an age from which they will surely die of something. I doubt it will be either tooth decay or Cushing’s disease. I am not poor and could probably afford the treatments for my dogs with some economizing. But they are comfortable, they are treated for pain twice a day, and I will do all I can to make the last years of their lives comfortable. For me, declining treatment is an act of love and acceptance.

Another takes issue with the reader who wrote, “I understand that there is a sentimental component to the decision to forego a $5,000 operation for your pet, but from a moral standpoint I have no hesitation. Given that there is an oversupply of dogs and cats, putting one down simply means you can drive to the humane society and save another”:

Intellectually, I agree 100-percent with this. However, until it happens to you, you just cannot know to what lengths you will go for a pet. One of my dogs suffered a back injury. He was in great pain. I took him to a specialist who, after a $2,500 MRI, determined that he was a good candidate for successful back surgery. There were no guarantees, needless to say, but Homer was only six and a half years old at the time. I decided he was worth it and took money out of my retirement savings to get him the surgery.

Yes, he was on the end of a six-foot leash for two months. He didn’t like it. I slept with him on the living room floor for the first six weeks, then we built some kick-ass stairs for him to walk up to the mattress on my platform bed, where I tied a scarf around my wrist to his collar and he continued recuperating without being allowed to jump down, and believe me, his personality would dictate that he jump down. He has recovered beautifully, and even seems to have learned the benefit of using the stairs to get up and down from my too-high bed.

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Would I do it again? I don’t know. My other two dogs are just fine. I do get them dentals as needed, and they do go to the vet more than your average dogs. Homer has developed seizures, so we’re working through medications and dosages to keep them at a minimum.

I guess the answer on just how far you will go for your pets is so personal and individual that there might not be all that much point in discussing it. If someone told me to my face that I was stupid for spending the money that I spent on him (we call Homer the “Eight-Thousand-Dollar Dog,” though altogether I am sure I spent more like $10,000), I would call them something far worse than stupid.  Certainly financial circumstances can change enough as I get closer to retirement that the choice will be taken from me.  For now, I’m happy to spend the money to keep any one of my dogs happy and healthy and with me.

The Return Of Uganda’s Anti-Gay Act?

Politicians are working to bring reintroduce it after the country’s constitutional court struck it down on a technicality Friday:

On Tuesday, members of parliament supporting a new version of the measure held a press conference to announce that they would try to push a nearly identical version of the Anti Homosexuality Act through parliament within the next three days. The legislators claim to have nearly 100 of their colleagues signed up for the newest attempt to pass the law, according to government watchdog site Parliament Watch. The latest version of the law would look more or less like the old law, imposing stiff jail terms on homosexual individuals and organizations who work on LGBT rights in the country. However, there could be one addition this time: Parlimentarian Nabilah Naggayi Sempala said at the news conference that she’d like to see the law criminalize the act of heterosexual anal intercourse.

Maybe we were too quick to seize on “actual good news.” Still, Alexis Okeowo suggests things are better for Uganda’s gays now than they were five years ago:

The court’s decision reminded me of Devine, a flamboyant, self-assured general manager for a local company, whom I met two years ago. We had a drink one evening in downtown Kampala, at a neon-lit lounge staffed by a waiter who Devine gleefully told me liked to hit on him.  … “The word ‘gay’ wasn’t even mentioned five years back. Now people acknowledge that we are here. It has gotten better these days,” Devine said. He explained to some of his friends that he was gay, and, after their initial surprise, they accepted it. He and his friends could now go to Mulago, a public hospital, to get free H.I.V. testing and counselling. When he went to a clinic with a transgender friend, the doctor recorded the friend’s gender as male, even though he is biologically female. “That’s how far we’ve come,” Devine told me. At the same time, he said, “You wonder who’s watching you, and you have to pretend you’re not gay.”