Long rant...if you're in a hurry, scroll down to see the dogs.
Twitter just gets more annoying. Is it ever due for a replacement. I don't hang out there any more but I did use the Twitter button to post Zazzle merch, today. Twitter didn't even get the pictures right. I posted the same pictures on Gettr; they did, but nobody but some TV talking heads' automated feeds was on Gettr so I don't expect the pictures were seen there. I know they weren't seen on Twitter because, in the place where the Zazzle picture should have popped up in the Twitter stream, what I saw was a dog picture.
It wasn't a good dog photo, aesthetically. It was one of those snapshots where a small camera, probably a camera-phone, was used to snap a large dog whose head was much closer to the small camera than the rest of it was, so what showed on the screen looked like some sort of alien life form whose open mouth could easily hold all of its hind section. Nevertheless, there was something indefinably attractive about the dog.
Not that she was an especially pretty dog. She appeared to be a mix of brown-and-tan-marl Australian Shepherd and bull terrier. Still, the marl coat caught the eye, and the dog had lovable puppy-dog eyes. Even with her mouth hanging open, she looked as if she might have been about to drown somebody in drool, but not bite.
Well, you know how it goes. People who have no idea what they're going to do with puppies allow their dogs to have puppies anyway. Then they dump the puppies at shelters that are still pretty fully stocked with last year's puppies. Then horrible things happen to last year's puppies. They might be gassed, or used in medical experiments. If shelter staff really had compassion, they might be released to permanent homes with poor people, free of charge, but that seems to be rare.
To be fair, a dog that is part Oz and part bull terrier is going to need a considerable amount of food, a firm hand, and fairly long brisk walks. If her needs aren't met and she runs away, it's not just a matter of "Oh the poor little stray, how can she survive." She's most likely to forage in garbage cans but she might attack someone for food the person was carrying...
Still, shelters are their own worst enemy when it comes to finding homes for all the shelter animals. "Fill out an application online," many shelters say, "to meet the animal." Hello? People are going to tell all the burglars and identity thieves in cyberspace where they live, in real life, just to meet an animal? They'd do better to ask people to "Schedule an appointment," or just walk into the shelter and see who's there, and make sure people are seriously interested in an animal before they ask any questions. And, if they're really serious about placing animals, it'd be better to collect information through conversation with a prospective adopter, not writing anything down until money changes hands and the shelter staff can reasonably ask adopters to sign an agreement that, if things don't work out, they can bring the animal back. At no time during this conversation should a prospective adopter who may be sensitive about such things feel that shelter staff are trying to control the conversation. It's the animal who's "applying for a job." Adopters should feel the shelter staff's gratitude. It would be an improvement if shelters offered screening and counselling for nannyism.
I'd like to see a law that, if there is any chance of a healthy animal being killed, the shelter must advertise it free of charge to anyone who chooses to adopt it. There is no way to guarantee that things will go well with anything we do in this world. Some shelter staff may need counselling about how to "let go and let God." The only thing the shelter can reasonably do, if some family member who was not consulted about the adoption hates the dog, is to have generous return policies.
Anyway, I read that this lovable-looking dog was scheduled to be killed "tomorrow," as of the fourth of June. Hello? It was the eighth already. I automatically tweeted, "If she's still alive, can you talk the shelter into giving her another week? My adorable adoptable dogs post goes live at 8:30 tomorrow morning."
I gave the Twit two hours and checked again. No response. Twitter was "filtering" my tweets. Not even because I'm being censored, but just because I'm a private individual who's not paying to have my tweets "promoted." For those who've not visited Twitter lately, the new system tries to make sure we all see about 25% frankly paid ads of no interest to us whatsoever, about 50% tweets from businesses, and 25% or less tweets from private people. The people you visit Twitter to check in on may be tweeting every day but months will go by between sightings of them on your home page, because from Twitter's point of view tweets that aren't selling anything are "low quality." So the woman's lucky that a few people finally saw her urgent message, about the dog being killed "tomorrow," on the Thursday after she'd tweeted on a Monday.
Very likely the dog's already dead. Blame the censorship.
"Can't you, can't I, can't we just band together and pay for Twitter to work for us again?" I suppose you could, if you're foolish enough. I don't theik that's an option. Twitter's motivation for shutting up its actual users, the basis of its claim to be a "social" medium, is to offer the corporate sponsors something more like the TV experience they prefer, where they get to dictate the content of the boring little shows they allow to run for a few minutes before they scream their sales pitches at us, and we get to sit there and wonder why we feel so discontented. That's not the Twitter experience you or I or anyone wants; that's not worth paying for. If you want to pay for a commercial spot on television, I say pay for a commercial spot on blinking television. But I don't even watch television if I can avoid it.
Twitter served businesses well for a long time when it was honest and unfiltered. Everyone interacted in real time. An occasional commercial tweet popped up here and there on people's home pages, which was not ideal but bearable. Otherwise everyone interacted on the same level. That was the talking point people used to get me to join Twitter, originally. "You can follow and tweet to movie stars, the President, anybody! Sometimes they'll even tweet back! You can get into a conversation with just about anybody in the world. It's craaaazy!" And it was. And it worked. Businesses for whom it worked were businesses that paid someone to tweet back to the random people who tweeted at them. These businesses followed their customers, so customers like me were motivated to follow them. Everybody was winning except Twitter--because when companies as big as General Mills and Toyota and Microsoft were getting the kind of genuine endorsements that influence audiences that are fully conscious, where is the incentive to keep producing and blaring out the kind of commercials that target audiences that have passed out drunk in front of the teevee?
But now Twitter's problem is that you can't have Twitter without the alert, mostly affluent, mostly educated, mostly just-barely-right-of-center, mostly young or youthful adults, audience interacting with one another. On social media, if there's a hierarchy of any kind, it needs to be the reverse of the one on television. On social media, individuals rule. Movie stars and the President rule more territory than most people, but on social media a bored kid in the back of a fifth grade classroom rules and a huge corporation drools. In order to maintain access to the kid's attention, and pocket money, the corporation has to study his content and interact with him on the level he sets, posting "Wow!" when he posts a picture of the doghouse he built and so on. The corporation has to work to earn the right to show that kid an occasional message like
"Sugar Puffs for one and all!
Make you bounce right off the wall!
Rot your teeth, and out they fall!
Your false teeth will look better!"
Original Twitter had real social value. I thought its primary value was in fast, open-access emergency communications: While the heavy snow that had been forecast turned into heavy rain, people were tweeting things like "This road's flooded" and "Lights are on again on this street" and "Tracy, why don't you spend the night with us?"
But Twitter soon showed more potential benefit to humankind than that. Glyphosate Awareness got a few popular food companies sensitized so that Zatarain's rice, Planters peanuts, M&Ms, Jif, and a few other brands became safe to eat. President Trump used Twitter to assess audience reactions and know exactly how much boorishness was making him seem like "one of the guys" to fans, while milking the elitist bigots' reactions to the fact that Trump's not a gentleman--showing that, if his critics were gentlemen, they weren't the nicest kind. People used Twitter to find lost pets, or find homes for shelter pets.
No more.
The woman who tweeted to a mutual e-friend about the dog's plight probably mean that the dog would be killed on Tuesday. The friend might, like me, have thought the post's appearing later than Tuesday meant the killing had been delayed. Likely the dog was killed on Tuesday.
Which means that, although my reply, if it came after the dog was dead, might have aggravated the woman's pain, she's likely not to see it before next Monay.
It doesn't take very much of that to destroy trust in Twitter, and the game will then be over.
I only hope some smaller site is prepared to take over before Twitter completely self-destructs.
</rant>
Now today's actual dogs:
1, Zipcode 10101: Fergie from New York City
Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/fergie-61476285/ny/new-york/rescue-dogs-rock-nyc-ny1274/
Placed in a shelter as a puppy, poor Fergie has spent about a third of her life expectancy in shelters. She's had some training. She is described as good with other dogs and children but, especially as a puppy, apt to be overexcited if there are too many of them or they get too hyper. Her ancestry is thought to include German Shepherds and Labrador Retrievers. She will need a big secure yard, a lot of food,a nd a lot of exercise. Fergie is originally from Alabama.
2. Zipcode 20202: Minnie from D.C.
Like my Minnie cat, she started out mini-sized but didn't stay that way. She was last weighed at 44 healthy pounds. It's not known whether she was the smallest of a large litter but, when rescued, Minnie was undernourished and scared of things. In foster care she's said to be becoing less fearful and more playful. She's had some basic training, too.
3. Zipcode 30303: Bailey from Atlanta
Just seven months old, he seems to be getting basic crate and litterbox training. He seems to be a fast learner. His foster family say he likes other dogs, and they want him to be adopted by someone who's had some experience training puppies.
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