Friday June 20th

Paul Berry, our exec director, standing at the back in the photo, has already been in Chicago a couple of days, working with Cynthia Bathurst, who heads up the Safe Humane program in Chicago. Yesterday, they took some dogs over to the community center at the 18th District Police Station meet a group of kids aged about six thru 14.

This is Cynthia explaining the whole program to the kids (apparently in great detail!). Here's the short version:

Safe Humane is a coalition of ministers (about 400), teachers, police, animal rescue groups etc to help build safe neighborhoods in at-risk communities. As Cynthia says:

"A safe neighborhood is a humane neighborhood. And vice versa. You can't have one without the other."

Cynthia started the program herself, and now she's on the staff of Best Friends, and with the support of Best Friends and our resources to help manage the animal protection side of the whole program. The point is, where you have cruelty to animals, you always have violence toward people, too.

In fact, in a recent survey of Chicago prisons, it turned out that 70 percent of all felony inmates admitted to a history of cruelty to animals. That's huge, but it's the same everywhere. (In some towns and counties around the country where the connection is understood, animal control officers are required by law to report animal abuse to child welfare authorities, because it's just guaranteed that where someone is abusing the pets, they're abusing the kids and probably the spouses, too.)

Susan Robinson, another of the Safe Humane team, asked the kids: "How many of you have witnessed a dog fight?"

Every single hand in the room went up.

Then Susan asked the group what they thought the dogs were feeling when they were fighting each other. Several hollered out single word answers like "angry," "scared" and "fearful."

One little boy said, "I think they must be very confused."

Like most of the kids in the room.

Dog fighting is endemic in some of these neighborhoods. Kids get dogs – almost always pit bulls – when they're quite young, pre-teen. Older kids will often approach them on a street corner and say something like, "Bet you $5 my dog can beat your dog." And so they all get drawn into the world of fighting. We're told that the dog fighting industry (and that's what it is) is now bigger than the drug industry.

There's a whole lot of backyard breeding, and the dogs who aren't wanted end up at city shelters, which are crowded out with bully breeds.

That's why this is all becoming a major focus of Best Friends.

The kids also got introduced by Officer Randi O'Carroll to Boomer and Isabelle and Lumpy and Bravo and other dogs, and practiced safety around dogs and learned not to be automatically afraid of them.

Last week, we sent out a postcard to members of Best Friends in Chicago inviting those who'd be interested in knowing more and perhaps joining in as volunteers, to come to a meeting tomorrow.

Next: Safe haven & intervention