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Are San Francisco canines gobbling up the drug-laced poop of meth customers and getting addicted themselves?
It’s an actual query flashing throughout social media proper now, additional dividing the Metropolis by the Bay, the place crime, medicine and politicians have all made a large number — however not the hellscape some conservatives salivate for — of California’s most picturesque place.
It was a Twitter put up, after all, that brought about the feces to hit the viral fan. I received’t identify names as a result of 1) I don’t punch down and a couple of) I don’t promote crap (normally). However the account of a widely known San Francisco basher posted this warning a couple of days in the past:
Don’t learn this if you’re simply grossed out.
Final evening at a celebration I met a lady who left San Francisco after her canine walker informed her the canines have been getting hooked on meth-laced feces.
Apparently they have been operating across the parks searching for it after which getting excessive.
Hundreds of feedback, retweets and even a Reddit thread ensued.
In a single camp are the San Francisco haters, the $1,000-shoe sorts who merely can’t dwell there any longer as a result of the entire city is a steaming sizzling mess. Not even Fluffy is protected!
On the opposite aspect is the “Settle down, Karen” crowd.
Who’s proper and what does all of it imply?
I do know you’re nonetheless studying this largely to seek out out if the canines actually are meth-poop junkies, however you’re not going to get a fast reply. Sit. Learn.
This poop consumption scandal issues as a result of San Francisco has develop into the love-to-hate icon of the right-wing media. For years, propaganda purveyors equivalent to Tucker Carlson have zoomed in on San Francisco — and poop issues specifically — as proof that Democrats are conspiring to spoil America as we all know it.
Way back to 2020, Carlson launched a sequence dubbed “American Dystopia” that detailed this sinister plan by Democrats that in some way the remainder of us missed. It was not, and isn’t, delicate. However it’s efficient. All people hates public poop.
“Civilization itself is coming aside in San Francisco,” Carlson warned again then. “Proper there in broad daylight, on town’s sidewalks, that are plagued by junkies and feces and soiled needles. … That is what they want to do to your neighborhood.”
With President Biden’s election and Gov. Gavin Newsom clawing his approach to nationwide consideration, the poop stakes have risen. It’s not sufficient anymore that we might see it, and even step in it. Now it might kill our furry pals.
OK, right here you go: It’s not going. Seems that the drug-poop scare is one thing of an city delusion, the identical because the killer with the hook hand or the chupacabra. Media shops have chronicled this drug scare from the Humboldt Coast to New York’s Prospect Park, and even Germany.
However that doesn’t imply it couldn’t occur, proper?
Being a reporter, I did that reporting factor and requested specialists who really find out about canines and poop and the way a lot of a menace addict excrement is. UC Davis veterinary toxicologist Robert Poppenga sounded sorry he picked up my name, however answered anyway. Poppenga identified that the byproducts of methamphetamines are predominately excreted via urine. He’s personally by no means seen a case of meth-poop intoxication, and theorized that “a canine must eat an terrible lot of feces to come back near a poisonous dose.”
The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which runs one of many largest pet poisoning hotlines within the U.S., concurred that it’s extremely unlikely that an lively dose of meth might develop into concentrated in feces. However because it famous in an announcement, studies of drug-impaired pooches are on the upswing, and a few medicine do wind up in poop — principally marijuana. The hotline had 6,259 calls about potential canine exposures to hashish final 12 months.
Seems plenty of canines get a weed excessive from consuming poop — the substance is present in an lively type in excrement — and naturally from simply consuming straight marijuana left round by careless house owners who then inform vets the pets ingested it on a stroll. Manner much less embarrassing, manner higher story.
Rowena Fontanilla works at Park Animal Hospital in San Francisco, proper on the panhandle of Golden Gate Park close to Haight-Ashbury. She mentioned the hospital usually treats impaired canines that are available “simply falling over and stumbling.”
It even occurred lately to Panko, the Chihuahua mixture of head nurse Tiani Palmer, who seen her pet appearing bizarre after a stroll close to the California Academy of Sciences.
Panko received wobbly, and Palmer mentioned that along with her 10 years of expertise as a registered nurse for animals, she acknowledged rapidly that the canine had seemingly eaten one thing altering. She let her pooch sleep it off, and Panko is ok.
Fontanilla mentioned inducing vomiting and testing the puke is the one approach to know what poison a canine has ingested, a process her facility has carried out. However even that little bit of crime-scene investigation doesn’t reveal whether or not the drug got here packaged in poop, or was really simply meth or heroin or weed that somebody dropped. So much occurs within the park.
Some canines aren’t as fortunate as Panko. Any sort of overdose might be deadly, and because the proprietor of a chow chow pet that — I’m sorry to say — likes to eat poop, I take the priority significantly. Like my Winnie, about 16% of canines are “severe” poop eaters, repulsively caught within the act of consuming feces greater than 5 instances, and deemed to have the fancier, scientific time period of coprophagia. So the true dependancy right here is perhaps to the poop itself. Dangerous, dangerous canine.
However Palmer had this key perception: Canines consuming medicine is a “widespread downside, however not more than it has been all these years.”
Sure, of us. Canines consuming medicine is nothing new, in San Francisco or anyplace else.
San Francisco canine walker Janet Slissman informed me by way of e mail that she has heard about canines dying from medicine for a very long time, however argued “most parks have their very own particular poison.”
At Crissy Area on the base of the Golden Gate Bridge, as good a park as yow will discover in San Francisco, she warns that the ocean lions contaminated with leptospirosis, a bacterial illness, can sicken canines. Ft. Funston, she cautions, has horse manure that may comprise giardia. Different parks have coyotes, which may simply straight up kill canines.
Canine walker Eric Burford, who calls himself “the Fairy Dogfather,” laments the “staggering” variety of rooster bones his prices choose up weekly.
So as an alternative of being freaked out about meth-poop, Burford suggests we deal with the true issues. We’ve got 1000’s of individuals with no place to defecate however on the streets and in our parks. We all know that homelessness, dependancy, housing and poverty are crises that damage us all, whether or not we’re straight affected or poop-avoiding bystanders.
We don’t want the fixed fear-mongering of poverty-porn social media influencers and right-wing media peddling simplistic — and false — narratives in regards to the finish of civilization. San Francisco, like every city heart, has at all times had issues, together with medicine.
By Friday, once I reached the unique Twitter poster by way of a direct message, she conceded that “hashish not meth appears to be the consensus,” with out mentioning that marijuana is a authorized drug that has in all probability been sending San Francisco canines on lengthy, unusual journeys since earlier than Jerry Garcia and the Summer season of Love.
Actuality has by no means stopped propaganda, however right here’s a thought.
You don’t need your canines consuming drug-laced poop? Then give these with addictions someplace else to be apart from our outside areas. Senate Invoice 57, which might enable for protected consumption websites to open in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Oakland, is on Newsom’s desk — he has till Monday to signal it or veto it. Secure consumption websites don’t simply preserve folks from overdosing, in addition they present loos. So advocate for Newsom to signal it.
Or deal with housing and San Francisco’s still-inflated rents and lack of reasonably priced locations. Maintain politicians like Mayor London Breed to account — regardless of her requires crackdowns and extra policing, little has modified. Ask the police why they aren’t arresting criminals for rampant petty crimes, just like the current story of a thief caught red-handed slicing off a catalytic converter, solely to be directed to the closest bus cease by officers. That’s an precise downside.
Canines hooked on meth-laced feces?
That’s simply bull-poo.
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