The Feminist Texican

This article just went up a while ago.  It’s supposed to be about the lack of funding at the Brownsville Animal Regulation and Care Center, and how their shelter is too tiny to deal with the number of animals they take in.  They only have one employee to take calls—about 100 a day—and send out the ACOs (animal control officers). They need more funding, more officers, more vehicles, a much bigger facility.

Texas is known for some truly horrifying animal euthanasia rates.  A few years ago, the Rio Grande Valley had the honor of being #1 in the nation, euthanizing about 30,000 animals a year due to severe overcrowding.  San Antonio was #3.  And according to the article, “Animal rescue groups estimate that there are now 42,000 cats and 36,000 dogs, strays and pets” in Brownsville alone.  To this day, we still have no low cost spay/neuter clinic.  Also, though it’s getting better, it’s still very embedded in the local culture that spaying and neutering is wrong/cruel.

Major stuff.  Major issues that need to be presented to the community.

But how does the article begin?

BROWNSVILLE — The commotion began under Michelle Cano’s truck. She had heard loud barking in the driveway while feeding her cats, and when she checked beneath her vehicle, she saw what looked like two pit bulls attacking her neighbor’s cat.

Cano ran inside and triggered the car alarm from her garage in an effort to scare the animals away. She even shot at one with her 10-year-old son’s pellet gun and called the police.

But it was useless, Cano said — the dogs mauled the milk-white feline then moved into her front yard, where they mangled the family’s two gray-striped kittens. She and her son could only watch from a bedroom window.

“It was the worst thing you could possibly ever see,” her son, Dalton St. Romain Cano, wrote in his journal later that evening. “It was like you were in a nightmare or a horror movie.”

Yup.  They started with a sensational pit bull attack—the name of the shelter and the focus of the article aren’t even mentioned until the 5th paragraph.  Not only that, but the article leads the reader to believe that they were strays out on the prowl for their next victim.  If the city just had more funding and more manpower, these evil, stray pit bulls would not be on the streets terrorizing innocent people and killing fluffy kitties!  Only later in the article is it revealed (in passing) that these dogs escaped from their neighbor’s yard.

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