Euthanasia

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- It was triumph and tragedy as horse racing gained a superstar and lost a competitor this weekend at the Kentucky Derby. The tragedy was the death of filly Eight Belles on a major stage. It was a freak accident, and longtime horse racing observers, including veterinarian Larry Bramlage, said they had never seen anything quite like it, a horse suffering two broken ankles at once.

Los Angeles County animal control officials closed an Antelope Valley horse sanctuary Monday, euthanizing a dozen animals and relocating almost 90 more. Authorities also arrested Janis Damiani, the caretaker of Equus Sanctuary in Pearblossom, on suspicion of animal cruelty, according to the L.A. County Department of Animal Care and Control.

Everyone agrees that coyotes -- at least two of them -- have recently been preying on the scores of feral cats that have lived for decades on the sprawling campus of Cal State Long Beach. The dispute is over which animals should have to go. University officials say the cats are attracting the coyotes, and it is the cats that need to be removed. That has outraged many cat lovers who fear the felines will be killed. They say the coyotes present the danger, so they should be evicted.

On any given day in the six city-run animal shelters, there are roughly 1,000 dogs, cats and rabbits, most available for adoption. On average, 56 are adopted daily and 50 are euthanized -- or killed, as private animal welfare groups bluntly put it. A "no-kill" policy is the holy grail for municipal shelters nationwide.

The city shelters didn't empty out all of their 1,000 or so animals during last weekend's big adoption promotion, but business was brisk enough to extend a moratorium on the euthanasia of healthy animals through today. The Los Angeles Department of Animal Services said that from Friday through Sunday, the city adopted out 323 animals -- cats, dogs, rabbits and a few other creatures, including a snake.

More than 2,000 French doctors and nurses have signed a petition declaring that they had helped patients suffering from incurable diseases to die and calling for legalized euthanasia. The declaration, published in the weekly Nouvel Observateur, comes days before the trial of a doctor and a nurse charged with administering a fatal dose of potassium to a woman suffering from terminal pancreatic cancer in August 2003.

Fourteen months ago, Tom McDonald heard the news no one wants to hear. At 76, he was an active retiree who lived in a comfortable ranch house overlooking Lake Oroville, north of Sacramento, a good-looking man with a luxuriant head of silver hair and an outdoorsman's ruddy, fleshy face. He and his second wife, Dolores, traveled the West Coast in their 28-foot RV, took weekend jaunts to Tahoe, lounged with friends and family on their "party barge." Tom went trout fishing. He invented gadgets.

A court in Perigueux, France, convicted a doctor in the poisoning death of a terminally ill cancer patient and gave him a one-year suspended sentence. Laurence Tramois was found guilty in the Aug. 25, 2003, death of Paulette Druais in the nearby town of Saint-Astier. Chantal Chanel, a nurse who delivered the fatal dose of potassium prescribed by the doctor, was acquitted. Last week, 2,000 doctors and other medical personnel signed a petition urging the decriminalization of euthanasia.

You can't strip all the emotion from the argument over assisted suicide. But cooling the coarse rhetoric could lead to a more rational and substantive debate. The kind of coarse rhetoric I'm referring to was Cardinal Roger M. Mahony's charge last week that Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles) is part of the "culture of death." That's church lingo and, with any luck, it won't infiltrate the public policy dialogue.

In the iconography of cuteness, few things hold greater heart-melting sway than kittens. Hallmark, the world's largest greeting card company, owns 1,230 images of kittens and has put at least some of them on 894 products in the past decade. Corbis, a leading stock photography source, offers more than 1,400 images of kittens online for licensing. And ratemykitten.com proclaims it has posted 117,179 photos of people's kittens.