The Ethics of Owls

I was reading a story in the (London) Daily Mirror website this week about a little-known crisis in the UK: people who bought pet owls during the Harry Potter craze are now getting bored with the birds and dumping them off on people who run owl sanctuaries – or just abandoning their former pets in the wild. I was surprised to learn that there were no laws in the UK about owning an owl or keeping it as a pet; in the U.S. you’ll need specialized permits to have any raptor as a pet, and a lot of the states won’t allow such a thing. Even more surprising (at least to me) was the idea that you could just buy one; I immediately found myself wondering if there are owl breeders somewhere in Europe who raise broods of the birds for sale, if there are exotic pet stores that carry such animals, or if people just go out into the countryside and catch their own. But this isn’t the first case of movie-related pet fads coming and going that I’ve read about, and it struck me that there’s a larger ethical issue involved here…

Every time there’s a new movie featuring any particularly appealing animal, people will start trying to purchase one for themselves; marine biologists of my acquaintance tell me that this can even extend to seals, dolphins, penguins, and other creatures that common sense would dictate are not practical pets. In cases like the “101 Dalmatians” movies this can mean a huge surge in popularity of a featured breed of dogs, followed by a huge number of spotted puppies being abandoned when the novelty wore off and people realized that Dalmatians don’t really make good family pets. Things have gotten completely out of hand in cases like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, which had the same effect on turtles despite the fact that pet turtles don’t eat pizza, wield traditional weapons, beat people up, or offer witty repartee while doing so, and anybody with a room-temperature IQ already knew that. The question begged by all of this is why anybody is selling these animals under such conditions – and do they have an ethical obligation not to?

On the one hand, a pet store is a business like any other, and not selling your customers products that they wish to purchase is not only a violation of the first law of business, but also not a good strategy. If you can obtain animals for $50 and sell them for $500 you would probably want to, and if you can do so without endangering the lives or well-being of the animals it would be hard to say there was anything wrong with doing that. Dalmatians are considered high energy and high maintenance pets, but are also highly trainable and rarely aggressive, making them good rescue dogs and excellent companions for runners and other very active humans; it seems only reasonable to let anyone who actually wants one (and didn’t just see the movie and get ideas) purchase such a dog. The same could be said for pugs, St. Bernards, and various breeds of cat which have all appeared in popular movies. If somebody wants a specific pet and can take care of it without endangering the animal or breaking any local laws, should a merchant really be expected to refuse the sale?

By the same token, there are some types of animal that are difficult to care for without specialized training and facilities, or are at least really inconvenient. A large owl will need at least a 20-foot aviary, with room to flap its wings five times before settling onto a perch, as well as specialized food, sanitation and medical care, just to take the immediate example. Rabbits don’t like to be held an cuddled like cats do; they’re a prey species and tend to freak out around 200-pound apex predators like humans. Ducklings and chicks grow up to be ducks and chickens, and are no longer as cute as they looked on Easter morning. Even common pets like hamsters and gerbils sometimes take up more time and effort than people are willing to expend, and wind up being abandoned. And regrettably, there’s often no way for a pet store owner to tell the difference, even if they were willing to sabotage their own business and risk destroying their family’s well-being along with the pet animals’…

So I have to ask: should pet stores be required to determine if customers can reasonably care for the animals they are buying? Should we pass more legislation governing who can purchase what kinds of animals? How do we enforce such laws and regulations if we do? And who gets to decide whether a specific pet owner is sufficiently capable of caring for a specific animal? Can we require people to take state-approved training classes before purchasing a pet – and would that help? Or should we just accept that some people can take care of a European Eagle-Owl, a mountain lion and a badger without endangering either the animals or themselves, while other people will be savaged by anything larger than a Yorkshire terrier, and just let pet lovers and business owners make their own decisions?

It’s worth thinking about…

The Grad School Diaries: Something is Eating My Pumpkin

I’m not sure why we didn’t carve any pumpkins for Halloween this year; I think it was just a matter of having too much to do in the weeks leading up to the holiday and having no idea where we would actually be on October 31^st. If you’ve been following along in these chronicles – and I’m not sure why you’d be reading Part 74 if you haven’t been – then you already know about the wedding, the two receptions, and all of the associated chaos that consumed my household during that month. When the night of the 31^st finally arrived, all I had to put out on our front porch was a large pumpkin, absent any painting, drawing or carving. I put it out anyway, reasoning that anyone who came to our door looking for candy wasn’t likely to care what our pumpkin looked like…

When I was a kid, Halloween was probably my second or third favorite holiday, and on years when I was old enough to go out trick-or-treating by myself only Independence Day could touch it. I’d get together with two or three of my friends and set out as soon as it got reasonably dark. It was an article of faith with us that the larger houses up on the ridge near where my parents lived gave out better candy, but the streets down on the flat parts of our neighborhood could be covered much more quickly, since you didn’t have to climb up and down hills. Many years the deciding factor was the Halloween Carnival held at Crestwood Hills Park, a mile or so up the street from my house; nobody wanted to miss the Carnival, and no one really wanted to trudge up the hill to the park at the end of the night, so we’d often stay up on the hills and work our way generally upwards as the night went on…

Looking back now, from the perspective of the new century, it’s hard to believe that just one generation ago there was such a world. Even then parents would go out with very young children, but by the time we were nine or ten all of us were on our own. Parents still checked the candy for tampering, and everybody had a story of somebody’s cousin’s best friend’s sister who found a razor blade in an apple three years ago, but I never met anyone who had ever witnessed such an incident until long after I grew up. The biggest hazard any of us ever encountered were troublemakers – usually from outside of the Canyon – who carried shaving cream and eggs, and went looking for the unwary. And once I realized that my peculiar combination of paranoia and street smarts (with a smattering of real tactical thinking thrown in for good measure) meant that no clumsy, arrogant, oblivious troublemakers were going to see me if I didn’t want them to, my friends and I generally walked wherever we wanted…

In East Lansing, people don’t take their pumpkins in at the end of the night because they’re concerned about hooligans smashing them; they take them inside because they’re worried about wild animals eating them. But our pumpkin went unscathed through that night and the next one, and eventually I forgot about bringing it in or throwing it out. Until we were leaving for work one morning, and I noticed a long, regular white patch running top-to-bottom on the side facing away from the house. “I think something is eating our pumpkin,” I remarked to my wife. Sure enough, when I looked closer the white patch turned out to be long, even tooth marks, such as a large rodent might have left. I through the much-abused squash out, but it wasn’t until a few days later that we identified the likely culprit…

I’ve mentioned the enormous fox squirrels common to East Lansing in previous posts; some individuals in our neighborhood are more than two feet long, with tails almost as long as their bodies and a weight of as much as three pounds. The day after I finally threw out the gnawed pumpkin, however, a fox squirrel waddled onto our deck that must have been twice the normal size for such an animal. Nearly as wide as he was tall, with enormous jowls and huge, meaty limbs, it hardly looked like an arboreal animal at all; if not for the tail, you could easily have believed it was a young woodchuck. “That explains what happened to our pumpkin,” my wife remarked…

I had to laugh. It was the perfect East Lansing moment, watching the rotund squirrel scamper around on the deck; it still moved like a squirrel, whatever else it might have been. We’ve come a long way from our home in the Southbay, and my parents’ house in the canyons, and I’m still not sure where this mad quest is taking me. But apparently we haven’t run out of new things to see – or even out of comic relief…

Mock the Infidel!

Last fall I read a short notice online about a Baptist university in Georgia that was adding a new requirement to all of its faculty contracts for the following academic year: a "Personal Lifestyle Statement" that requires all faculty to “reject homosexuality, premarital sex, adultery, drug use and public drinking near campus.” I recall saying at the time that this would almost certainly decimate the school’s faculty, alienate all of the students who aren’t themselves fanatic-level Baptists, and bring scorn and mockery onto the entire institution; I also recall saying that neither the Georgia Baptist Convention (which controls the university) nor the hardcore Baptists themselves would be likely to care…

You can pick up the story off the AOL News page if you want to, but it would appear that over 50 faculty at Shorter University have already quit, and a survey taken last month shows that only about 12% of the total faculty are planning to sign the statement and remain at the school for the next school year. It’s not clear from the AOL News story, or from any of my other online resources, how exactly the University’s leadership expects to replace approximately 88% of their instructors; it’s also not clear how they expect to retain their accreditation (Shorter is accredited by The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, or SACS) without anything approaching an appropriate number of courses taught by ladder faculty. There is also no indication of their leadership backing off, however…

Now, we should acknowledge that as outrageous as this sounds, the University isn’t actually breaking any laws. Under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, any religious institution is entitled to discriminate in favor of a specific religion (presumably their own) in their hiring practices, even in job positions that have nothing to do with instruction in or practice of religion. It’s one of those provisions in Federal laws that need to be there, otherwise you might have Christian churches being required to hire Buddhist priests or face discrimination lawsuits, and even stupider things. Unfortunately, some institutions will use Title VII to skirt any aspect of the labor laws they don’t like, such as the case from last year of a teacher at a religious school being fired for not being a member of the faith that controlled the school – after she filed for Worker’s Compensation and disability. Or, as in this case, to eliminate anyone who isn’t sufficiently Baptist to suit the Convention’s requirements…

It’s not a story that has much relevance in a business setting except as a cautionary tale – and yet, I think it’s still worth bothering my readers (assuming I have readers) about. Shorter didn’t start out to become a bastion of religious intolerance and job discrimination, and despite its traditional close ties to the Baptists it has been a mostly respectable institution of higher learning, academically sound enough to earn SACS accreditation and acceptance from the U.S. Department of Education. Now, even if they remain academically beyond reproach, they are going to be regarded by tens of millions of people around the world as a bunch of God-bothering homophobic Southern Redneck hicks who care more about their specific religious dogma than they do about education or the truth. And on top of all that, it’s also hard to imagine how this could possibly advance the religious agenda of any of the parties involved, considering that anyone who would consider this “Personal Lifestyle Statement” a good idea is already a Christian zealot – and probably a Southern Baptist as well…

It’s something to think about the next time you hear someone complaining about how the Civil Rights/Equal Opportunity laws are too intrusive…

Pull the Other One

I was scanning through the news sites the other day and I ran across a story out of Arizona that I can’t help thinking epitomizes the false naivety that is responsible for so much of our current political gridlock. I usually try to avoid political discussions in this space, partly because there are already more political blogs online than there are people who want to read them, and partly because it’s not really my field. None of my degrees are in political science, history or law, and until “running this government like a business” becomes more of a possibility than a punch line there isn’t going to be much I can contribute to the conversation. That said, it’s events like this one that make me wonder if there’s really a dialog left, or if both sides are just trying to score points at the expense of everyone else…

As reported in the Phoenix Business Journal online, Arizona’s governor has just signed into law a new bill that will allow collections companies to use a defaulting customer’s last billing statement as proof of the amount that he or she owes when they attempt to collect the debt. Supporters of the bill claim that this will make it easier for companies to collect what they are actually owed, harder for deadbeats to skip out on their responsibilities, and allow companies to get more money from the sale of defaulted account debts to companies that specialize in recovering those funds. Naturally, the backers insist, this information would never be used to make it harder for people to recover from bankruptcy, add extra fees, charges and interest to accounts after the fact, or defraud people who don’t even owe anything into paying up to avoid legal expenses…

Opponents of the bill, naturally enough, insist that this is exactly what will happen under the new law. Even assuming that every member of every company extending credit, every collections agency trying to recover money, and every finance company buying up defaulted accounts are paragons of virtue and justice – and this would be a very unlikely assumption in a time when certain large banks keep trying to foreclose on properties that aren’t even mortgaged – it’s still hard to imagine how a law that allows a creditor to “prove” that you owe them any amount they like simply by printing a new version of your final statement is good for anybody. In fact, they will insist, at least some of the business interests pushing for this new law are probably gearing up to do exactly that…

Now, as usual, the truth is probably somewhere in between those extremes. I’ve spent some time in collections myself, and it’s certainly true that there are a lot of people who feel entitled to anything they can make off with, and will game any system just for the fun of it even if there’s no actual profit to be had. It’s also unavoidably true that any system built and run by humans is going to include human error, and that means that allowing this practice will inevitably cause harm to people who have done nothing wrong, even if none of the companies involved ever does anything wrong either. The problem here is that the companies already have all of the advantages of money, power and political connections over the consumer, that a single unjust “collections” attempt can destroy a family’s entire world – and that the people pushing this measure are pretending that no such thing as a fraudulent collections attempt could ever happen…

I don’t have an answer for the current financial crisis, or for the ongoing meltdown of consumer credit. And I can’t deny that collections failure is an issue, or that any company that gets dragged down by deadbeat customers and unrecovered collections will take all of its employees, suppliers and stockholders with it, making the whole national crisis that much worse. But whatever the answer might be, I’m reasonably sure that this isn’t it…

The Ethics of Strippers

I should probably start by pointing out that I have no issue, ethical or otherwise, with people who earn a living by taking their clothes off in public. In previous blog posts I have brought you the stories of women who proved that every so often a stripper really is just dancing to put herself through school, and I’ve run across stories of others who have used such jobs to survive when their companies went under or their industries crashed. There are some negative aspects of the job, as there are in any occupation, but most of those result directly from the actions of management or the customers, and very few of them actually compare to having to clean the Incontinence Supplies aisle of a drug store because the janitor called in sick yet again, just to take the obvious example. But what happens when the stripper in question is one of your employees – and you don’t run a strip club?

Consider, for example, the curious case of a reporter for the Houston Chronicle, who also happens to moonlight as a stripper. As reported on CNN this past week, Chronicle reporter Sarah Tressler had put herself through college as an exotic dancer, and still picks up the occasional “shift” at a club in Houston because she enjoys the work, and claims that it’s also good exercise. However, when the newspaper found out about her side job they informed Tressler that she was being fired for not telling them about stripping on the side, despite the fact that her work had been highly regarded to that point, and despite the fact that the paper has no regulation against reporters working side jobs. Ms. Tressler is suing for wrongful termination, claiming that this job action is discriminatory; presenting the Chronicle with a bit of a problem – and us with a question of ethics…

On the one hand, there are certain types of business where reputation and image are important, and the news media are definitely one of those. Any news story depends at least in part on the reporter’s ability to gather, analyze, and present information, and it can be difficult to take that presentation seriously if the person making it is someone you have seen performing in a strip club. In fact, until such time (if any) that the negative connotations of being a stripper are no longer associated with that occupation, it may be to the disadvantage of any business to have those connotations associated with any employee who needs to operate in a position of authority or expertise. Unfortunately, the common perceptions are sometimes wrong – and even when they’re not, the choice to fire someone on that basis may still be discriminatory…

On the other side of the issue, firing someone for working a second job when your company has no policy against moonlighting is unfair, and firing someone for working a specific type of job while ignoring all others may very well be discriminatory. Given that the vast majority of all exotic dancers are women – and that men performing the same function are not perceived as either promiscuous or incapable of more complex tasks – the reporter in our CNN story may indeed have a case; if there are male reporters on the Chronicle staff who work as strippers and have not been fired for doing so, the case may be open and shut. And even if it isn’t, we should probably remember that only a century or so ago most actors and actresses were also considered little more than well-paid prostitutes – and most beat reporters were considered little more than illiterate errand-boys, useful only for relaying information to the re-write men in the City Room who would then write the actual stories…

So let us ask the question bluntly: Does an employer have the right to terminate an employee for doing a second job that the employer feels reflects badly on the company? If they feel that such an association will negatively impact their business, do they have an ethical responsibility to their stockholders, employees, vendors and other stakeholders to terminate the individual with that association? Does an employee have an ethical obligation not to take actions – including second jobs – that will reflect badly on his or her employer? Does our answer change if that employee is a man or a woman, or if that employee is so badly compensated that he or she needs the extra income in order to survive? Or does every man and woman have the right to do as they like with their off time, and does the company have an ethical responsibility to respect their decisions and their privacy?

It’s worth thinking about…

The Grad School Diaries: On Hold

[This post was originally written at the end of 2010, and represents the last and darkest of three entries that reflect my situation and mental state at that time. Discretion is advised]

Readers familiar with American actor/comedian Rodney Dangerfield (1921 – 2004) will recall one of his famous one-line quips “I called the suicide hotline and they put me on hold!” I’m not currently on hold, and I have never met the book definition of suicidal (I completely fail the “intent” test, and always will), but I am waiting for my therapist to finish a personal phone call and resume our session. It’s the end of the year 2010, and I’ve been in therapy since last spring with a remarkable lack of progress thus far. It’s really not my therapist’s fault; he’s a nice enough guy and a well-respected member of his profession, but I don’t think anything has prepared him to deal with the morass of problems I’m dealing with right now. In fairness, I’m not sure anything could have…

Presented with case notes summarizing the details of the last six months, my regular doctor’s remark was “Holy crap, dude!” – except that he didn’t say “crap.” He then asked how I had managed to avoid being medicated, institutionalized or arrested throughout it all. Frankly, Doc, I wish I knew. This passage has been one of the worst times of my life, and one of the biggest miscalculations. You see, I knew it would be hard; it’s supposed to be. An expert of my acquaintance compares being in the doctoral level of graduate school to being an Olympic athlete, and it’s truer than he knows – there are only a couple of dozen business schools in the world that are better than this one, and less than half of them have a Strategy program. There might be a hundred people in the world who can play at this level; there could easily be half that many, or even less. It’s hard to imagine what a guy like me is even doing here; I couldn’t be any more out of place trying to make it onto the Dodgers’ roster this spring…

As previously noted, my analysis of the task suggested that if everything broke just right, I might just be able to pull this off. Also as previously noted, everything didn’t. In fact, I’m fairly sure that nothing did, and some factors I never counted on also went south on me. I’ve been betrayed, lied to, cheated, abandoned, disregarded, and ignored – and those are the parts I can explain. I’m not sure why I thought this life would be different, but it isn’t; it’s all of the worst trials of a difficult life, with the added benefit of having to face all of them alone, in a cold isolation that makes my worst days back home look good. There is no way out; there is no way back; I have no home to go back to, and no way of leaving this place. And with the horrible secret I now carry, I’m not even sure if I want the prize that my so-called teachers are apparently trying to screw me out of…

Looking back on this time, my psychiatrist and my neuro-cognitive specialist will both become convinced that I was suicidal today; the psychiatrist will actually become quite upset with himself for not seeing it at the time. I will try to explain it to him, but I’m not sure he believes me; I’m not sure you will, either. But even if no one is reading these words, even if no one hears them, they are still the truth. It’s not defiance that drives me; rage and depression have been my companions since childhood, but they will never guide my steps. All of the people who have tried to tell me who (or occasionally what) to be might as well save their breath; all of the people (and there are apparently quite a crowd of them in this town) who wish I’d just go away can give up on that, too. And all of the people who think they made me what I am, or made me do the things I do, are just wrong, plain and simple…

The truth is that I made me, by myself, and against all odds and all sanity, I actually like who I am, and who I have come to be. And the reason I will never have the intent that so worries my doctors is simply that I refuse to die that way. I have gone into harm’s way before, for people I cared about and things I believed in, and I will again, and it might be that one day I will give my life to accomplish something that matters that much to me. But until that day comes, if it ever does, I intend to go on fighting. And even though I know that there will come days when death itself will seem a kindness too great to ask for, still I mean to live forever…

How else could one ever see all that there is to see?

So, if my whole life has been leading up to this moment; if in fact all of the things that I’ve been through have given me the ability to live through this frigid hell and keep looking for the way out, does that mean that the Universe has no regard for mere human existence and we are alone, or does it mean that there is a benevolent God who has chosen to give me the tools I need to survive one more time, but can't be bothered to cut me a break in the first place? It’s an interesting question in philosophy and/or theology, and I’ll have to discuss it with my therapist. Once he gets off the blasted phone and we can get on with the session…

Not Again...

Since I started keeping this blog in 2007 I’ve brought you a number of stories about financial misconduct, management misconduct, and outright fraud in the nonprofit sector, and ranted about the responsibility of donors to investigate the organizations to which they give their money. It’s always been hard for me to fathom why people get taken in by scams of this type when there is information available online for free that would completely debunk the so-called charity that is trying to get money out of them. But then, people keep falling for the Nigerian Royalty scam, too, just as their parents or grandparents fell for the Spanish Prisoner con on which the Nigerian email scam is based – and despite dozens or hundreds of online resources that would debunk every version of that fraud. It doesn’t look as if things are going to be changing any time soon…

A case in point would be the alleged Veteran’s charity group calling itself the Disabled Veterans National Foundation, based in Washington D.C. You can pick up the story on the CNN website if you want to, or look them up on Charity Watch, but the facts of the case seem clear enough. The Foundation claims to provide services and resources for disabled veterans, but according to their published records they’ve received $55.9 million over the past five years and spent $61 million to the marketing firm that handles their marketing and direct solicitation funds. It’s not clear from the agency’s paperwork how giving tens of millions of dollars to for-profit marketing companies is supposed to help disabled veterans or anyone else; it’s also not clear where the extra $5 million came from, although I imagine the IRS will be looking into that. It’s also not clear what financial relationship exists between the people running the so-called charity and the people who own the marketing companies, but I’d bet you cash there is one…

Once the people running the Foundation realized that they’d been found out they started some of the most farcical damage control efforts I’ve ever seen, sending out what appear to be random lots of consumer products acquired in bulk (and presumably at a steep discount) to a couple of local veterans’ groups – both of which appear to be baffled by the “donations” and completely at a loss about what to do with them. In fairness, it’s hard to imagine what an agency working with disabled veterans is supposed to do with 2,600 bags of cough drops, 2,200 little bottles of hand sanitizer, needlepoint pillow designs, acrylic paints or 11,520 bags (80 gross) of coconut M&Ms, but it’s even harder to imagine how anybody could imagine that this would look enough like a legitimate donation to provide any cover…

Okay, it’s an old story – except for the random “donations,” which I feel are particularly manic – and readers of this blog (assuming I have readers) have heard it all before. I call it to your attention again specifically because it is an old story, and it isn’t going to go away – but this may be the first time in history when it is really possible to fight back. Fake charity scams are the counterpart of the Nigerian Royalty email, preying upon guilt instead of greed – a motivation just as basic, and just as human – and they aren’t going to stop any time soon. But debunking them no longer requires specialized education, professional training, or bitter experience. Just as it isn’t possible for some random know-it-all on the barstool next to you to snow you with a bunch of fake “knowledge” if you’ve got a web-enabled phone in your pocket, it isn’t possible for anyone to sell you on a fake charity when you can visit Charity Watch or Charity Navigator or any one of a dozen other resources before you give them a dime…