The Heinous Hoarding Situation in Troy, Ohio

 Ok, I just got off the phone with Kim, who is in charge of everything having to do with the rescue of the birds in Troy, OH.

I have a lot of information to give you but I want to start at the beginning. First of all there are many people who are complaining about the Miami bird club not doing anything and giving them a hard time. Stop it. They only formed the club in January and have gone over and above what any club has ever done, except for a few who have experience with rescues, but none of this proportion and horror.  They are in a steep learning curve and are learning quickly. Kim said that she will know all the animal laws by the time this is over and will set out to change them for the better. Kim asks for your prayers... and a little money.  I added that last part.

Kim also said that THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN. She stated that Troy is a BIG animal loving community and as this horrific story spreads and the media becomes involved by printing it as well as doing videos, laws will be changed because the people of Troy won't put up with no protection for animals.  One guy last week had his horses taken away because they were dying and the next day, the judge gave them back, yesterday they died.  Things will change, but they need to get through this first in order to get the birds out. That is the Prime Directive. Getting the birds out. They will get out, because this is not going to go away. So please cut them a lot of slack. They are on top of it every minute, doing what is possible under the current circumstances.  Really.  

Kim asks that no one do anything stupid in case you were considering doing something other than picket the house which is next door to 2063 W. Ohio 55. If you want to picket stand only in the gravel. Do not set foot on this guy's property or you may be arrested and make things worse for everyone. This is a criminal investigation and we must tread lightly.

Kim and the other members of the club are working on this constantly, but every time they make a turn there's another road block, another "You can't do that."  The municipal  prosecutor is Lenee Brosh. THIS IS WHERE WE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE. If her office is swamped with calls she will be forced to prosecute Ratcliff, the abuser.  Right now, she isn't doing anything.  Her office number is  Telephone: 937-440-3928   This is critical, she has to prosecute the perp and release the birds.  Call and tell her this is a criminal offense and Ratcliff must be arrested. I have always said it takes a grassroots effort to make changes. We are that effort.

About the birds: The humane officer who hasn't let Kim remove the remaining birds, is the one person who is going in every day to feed and water them. She is a volunteer, not even a county employee and she is taking care of them. She is apparently not the enemy. The birds that were the most ill have been removed, are in treatment and will go to sanctuaries when they recover. The birds that remain in the house are doing ok. The group hopes... hope being the operative word here, to have them out this week. The Avian Welfare Coalition, with an attorney, is on the way there as I type this. 

However, the best thing any of us can do is to donate.  There are going to be big medical bills and there is just no money. Kim asks that your gracious donation go directly to her email addy via Pay Pal.  kseitz63@frontier.com  Please use just this one address.  Any amount is gladly welcome.  If you want to do a little fund raiser with your club or on your own  please feel free to do so. Desperate times require desperate measures.

So... the birds are being fed and watered. The sick are out of harms way. The club is doing everything humanly possible. The prosecutor must be called and told to arrest Ratcliff. That is equally important as the donations.  Please make the call tomorrow and donate or do a fund raiser if you feel moved to do so.  

Zoo Babies, Koko's Birthday and Sea Shepherd Emergency

I have just discovered the most wonderful web site.  The contributors are zoos and aquariums and what they do is post photos of all the baby animals that have recently been born at their respective zoos. It is so precious you simply cannot imagine. You have to go page 2 to look at the baby glossy black cockatoo chick. What a face… I want to give that baby a big smooch. You gotta love that face. There will be other photos added as more animals, some very rare, as babies are born and images are posted to the site.  Click here to go to go take a peek. You’ll have a big grin on your face in one second.

There is a list of zoos along the left side that will take you to each zoo.  It’s a great site. 

Speaking of zoos, I  have several zoos who use StarBird products for their animals.  I found out that the marmosets love to hide in the center of the Ring Around the Rainbow.  The anteater at the Denver Zoo loves to push the FootBall around and the serval cat carries the Fine Vine Swing everywhere he goes, even when he goes in to sleep.  Who knew?  I’ll be getting photos from the Denver and the San Diego Zoos of some of the animals playing with StarBird toys. I’ll post them on the StarBird web site and Facebook page.

Last blog we talked about Koko the gorilla. Well our beautiful girl just had a birthday on July 4^th, and she is now 40. I hear she had quite a celebration. Koko received an ultra realistic baby gorilla doll and has been spending a lot of time with it, carrying it in much the same way as most gorilla moms carry their newborns. Koko has asked to have a real baby gorilla, she will make a great mom.

This baby doll looks real doesn’t it?  Click here and you can see photos of Koko’s presents, her cake, her playhouse, and her meal of sushi and other Japanese birthday treats.  Koko was originally named "Hanabi-ko" which means Fireworks Child in Japanese. Koko also has lots of videos you can see here. Please visit the Gorilla Foundation and read the latest news about inter-species communication and the foundation’s goal to move to the Maui Ape Preserve.

On another note, Japan plans to return to the Ross Sea to brutally murder our precious Great Whales... again. The Steve Irwin, flagship of the Sea Shepherd fleet is being detained in the Shetland Islands.  A civil lawsuit was brought against Sea Shepherd by Maltese fishing company Fish and Fish Ltd. Sea Shepherd Society said: “we believe they were illegally caught after the season had closed, without an inspector onboard, or any paperwork documenting the legality of their catch”. Sea Shepherd cut loose 800 endangered blue fin tuna. They need all the help they can get to save the ship in order to stop the senseless and horrific slaughter of pilot whales in the Faeroe Islands, as well as return to the Antarctic to stop the tortuous murder of whales by Japan. This is very serious and Sea Shepherd needs all the help they can get to free the Steve Irwin.  Over a thousand lives are at stake here. Please pass that on.  They only have till August 20th or so to finish raising $1.4 million dollars.  Thank you. This is a matter of great urgency.  UPDATE August 4th:  The court reduced the bond and the Steve Irwin has been released and is on it's way to the Faeroes. But they still need money to refill the coffers.  Please help if you can.

Koko the Gorilla and the Gorilla Foundation

Many years ago I learned of Dr. Francine “Penny” Patterson and the female baby gorilla, Koko, with whom she was working in order to teach Koko sign language, and with that skill set, give her the ability to communicate with humans. My deepest beliefs have always been that all animals know more than humans give them credit for knowing.  I have always known that certain animals and birds are exceedingly intelligent, think, feel, suffer, and deserve far more respect and honor than that afforded them to date. Dr. Patterson was at the forefront of discovering the incredible abilities, hearts and minds of non-human animals. My heart was full with the possibility of inter-species communication with primates, dolphins and parrots. It was a start, long overdue, but the gorilla door had opened a crack.

Through the years I followed what I could find to learn more about this profoundly fascinating study of teaching a gorilla American Sign Language.  During those years there were two National Geographic covers featuring Koko. I know you remember the one of her holding a camera in front of her face and making a photo of herself in the mirror (1978). She got cover credit as photographer.  Being a photographer I was jealous.  :)   Her second National Geographic cover (1985) featured her and All-Ball, a gray tail-less kitten that she loved and mourned when it was hit by a car on a mountain road. (Koko’s empathetic relationship with All-Ball changed the existing fearful paradigm about gorillas forever).   If you have one or both of those covers, the Foundation would be pleased to liberate it/them from your home.  But I digress.

The study continues to this day and has proven to be even more astonishing than anyone would have imagined. Except me and others like me... I'm not astonished, I'm thrilled! Recently I had the supremely good fortune to speak with Gary Stanley, Director of Educational Technology at The Gorilla Foundation / Koko.org (Koko’s home). It was like following the thin trail of Alex for so many years and one day meeting his scientist mom, Irene Pepperberg and eventually becoming good friends and traveling companions.

Here I was speaking to someone intimately involved with the care and welfare of Koko.  Washoe, a chimpanzee was the other most important primate to learn sign language, but sadly she ended up in the care of William Lemmon, who was harshly abusive to animals under his care, disciplining them with cattle prods and shooting them with pellet guns (after which he would dig the pellets out with a knife).  The most important work being done in inter-species communication... and I was now talking to someone involved with (and working for) Koko.   Very cool.

In our talk, Gary spoke about the wish list for the gorillas http://www.koko.org/wishlist and the remarkable program called KokoZEST, that he has developed for use by primate caregivers to enrich the lives entrusted to their care.  The following is brief excerpt from the article about ZEST (Zoo Enrichment Signing Technology): http://www.koko.org/news/news_080828_Wel_KokoZEST.html  I encourage you to read the entire article.

“Gorillas and other great apes in captive environments deserve our most sensitive care — both because they exhibit a high level of emotional and intellectual awareness, and because they face an increasing threat of extinction in the wild.

Zoological institutions recognize this, and hold themselves to elevated standards of care and management for great apes. They have developed sophisticated behavioral enrichment techniques to mitigate stress and provide physically and mentally stimulating environments, and employ training techniques such as operant conditioning to ameliorate potentially difficult medical matters and to introduce preventative health and wellness routines.



Ground-breaking developments in great ape behavioral enrichment and training are thus of the utmost interest to great ape management teams, because they can lead to enhanced health, greater contentment and increased reproduction of endangered gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans.”

Another excerpt:

“During the past 35 years, working with gorillas Koko, Michael and Ndume, we have found that the two-way communication afforded by teaching even "basic" signs to gorillas significantly improves the ability to care for them. And others who have taught sign language to chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans, have had similar experiences (see, eg, Fouts, Savage-Rumbaugh and Miles).

The most notable benefit of ZEST in a zoological setting is the aid to medical evaluation and care. By developing a pathway to convey simple yet important bits of information regarding health and welfare issues (diet, illness, pain, etc.), zoo keepers and medical personnel can work more effectively toward the highest level of care for great apes in captivity.”

“The Gorilla Foundation is constructing a unique and critically important gorilla preserve in Maui. The Maui Ape Preserve will provide a natural environment for Koko and other gorillas, and is a vital step toward saving the species from imminent extinction.”      

Construction is in progress — http://koko.org/preserve/ 

This gives us but a peek at what is happening at the Gorilla Foundation; not only the continued mutual growth and education between caregivers, Koko and Ndume, but the promise of a preserve, the hope for conservation of gorillas in the wild (so humans will stop eating them), but also the opportunity for primate caregivers to learn and use the ZEST too so that all primates may thrive in captivity.  Imagine how they suffer, unable to communicate the most basic need.

There is so much more to share about Koko — including her quest to have and teach a family of her own — and I will...

Maybe there is a glimmer of hope for humans to stop abusing and 'be still my beating heart', start honoring animals...

We will see...

The 2011 Animal Behavior Management Alliance Conference

Last weekend I attended the ABMA conference in Denver, Co, hosted by the Denver Zoo who is a customer of StarBird. StarBird is my company that makes enrichment products for parrots and now zoo animals as well. The Denver Zoo is one of our clients. 

ABMA stands for Animal Behavior Management Alliance. You can see some of the animals using enrichment if you go to the site. http://www.theabma.org It's very heartwarming to see the gorilla studying him/herself a mirror, the polar bear playing with a pumpkin, the Banded mongoose playing with a meal worm filled Kong, or the bearded dragon on a Mr. Potato Head and more.

There is a mandate that zoo and aquarium animals must have enrichment. It's a start. It's a tiny bright light in the world of captive animals. It's compassion opening the closed door of realization that captive animals have needs... and one of them is for enrichment.

It was a very eye opening experience even though I was only there for two days. I was a vendor, actually the only one on the second day as the other vendor, A Thousand Hands, was only there for Monday, the first day.

There were over 175 attendees and listen to this... something there filled my heart with hope... over 75% of the attendees were women. Imagine that! Women, who are compassionate nurturers if there is such a term. Women, young women, who care deeply about the welfare and enrichment of captive animals. Women, in charge of a heretofore arena ruled with an iron hand by men. Women who have intentionally studied animals, and have given over their lives to work with animals regardless of conditions, hours or effort required. I met so many really friendly women and men who were in the trenches, love what they do, and want to make things better.

Some of the lecture titles: Training Birds for Medical Care,

Mix Method of Positive Reinforcement and Natural Horsemanship used on Wild Equines

San Diego Zoo's Planned Development of Online Animal Care Education

Blazing Clickers 

Integrating a Geriatric Cheetah into a Positive Reinforcement Training Program

Maximizing Animal Training Through Evaluation, Training Evaluation Instruction

The Unsinkable Bismarck: The Challenges and Benefits of Obtaining a Physically Challenged California Sea Lion

Enrichment of a Grant's Zebra Through Training and Socialization

“Why” Before “What” Shifting Towards Goal-Based Enrichment

Evaluating Enrichment Devices with Denver Zoo Orangutans With the Goal of Identifying Appropriate Options for Orangutans in Borneo... and that's just a few.

My personal favorite... Beyond Animal Training – Elevating Human Behavior.

Wednesday everyone went to a behind the scenes adventure at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, and Friday the Denver Zoo was the destination; I was sorry to miss the trips, but I was there as a vendor and could not stay the entire week.  

There are other conferences coming up. I would very much like to go to them, but that remains to be seen. However, it fills my heart to see that caregivers form all over are gathering in order to share information and ideas on providing better care for captive animals...  

It's a very wonderful thing...