Letters to the Editor

Pets are precious; don’t abandon them

As we move through spring quarter, everyone is starting to make plans for the end of the school year. Unfortunately, these plans do not always include a critical issue that really does require serious pre-planning ““ students and their pets.

Many students living near campus will adopt a cat, dog, or other pet during the year. Suddenly, the end of the year approaches, and they decide they cannot keep their pet. For both students and their pets, there is help.

If you own pets and do not think that you will be able to keep them when the school year is over, it is urgent that you make plans now to find a new home for your pets. Please make this a priority. Abandoning your pet on campus is not an alternative. There is actually a California criminal anticruelty law, the California Penal Code section 597s, that prohibits abandonment. In other words, you can be convicted of cruelty to animals for abandoning a pet.

Regardless of whether there is a law, it is, in fact, cruel to abandon a creature who has come to depend on a person to provide food and shelter. Pets form bonds with humans, and they experience betrayal, confusion, fear, and hunger when they are abandoned.

The best option by far is to keep your pet. The Pet Press

(thepetpress-la.com) provides information in the section on Animal Help under their “Links” page on how to find pet-friendly housing and also about animal rescue and adoption groups that can provide information about finding a new home for pets who can no longer live with their owners. The Pet Press also publishes a monthly newsletter with this kind of information that can be obtained at many pet supply stores and veterinarians’ offices.

Lisette Molina

Co-president, Bruins for Animals

Fourth-year, geography and international development studies

Myanmar needs the world’s attention

As a Burmese American and a member of the global society we all live in, it is imperative that all of us take any measures possible to make the world a better place by doing what we can.

The silence of the Daily Bruin, aside from recycled wire reports, on the recent cyclone in Myanmar that may have killed as many as 100,000 people and made more than 1 million people homeless, has dismayed me. To put it in perspective, the cyclone appears to have killed 100 times as many people as Hurricane Katrina did in 2005.

The epic scale of this tragedy in this country formerly known as Burma, coupled with the military junta’s reluctance and paranoia to allow foreign aid of any kind ““ despite the unimaginable outpouring of assistance by the United States, the United Nations and other countries ““ is unimaginable.

While the survivors languish from disease outbreaks because of poor sanitation, floating corpses, destroyed homes and lack of water and nourishment, the junta has decided to focus its energy and resources on less urgent matters, namely a constitutional referendum that will legitimize its place in the highest echelons of Myanmar government.

What makes me shudder most is that despite the stories that come out of Myanmar every hour and the nearly universal Internet access to among college students, many fellow UCLA students are unaware and oblivious to what is happening to the millions on the brink of starvation, malaria, cholera, diarrhea and ultimately, death.

What Myanmar needs most is aid in the form of money, and medical, food and water supplies. Only 10 percent of the cyclone survivors have received aid in any form, and the military junta, which cannot sustain its own people in the best of times, surely cannot tackle this catastrophe on its own.

For more than four decades, America and the rest of the world have watched in complete silence as the military decimated the nation through genocide, slavery, repression and violence. But now is not the time to tackle the political issues Myanmar faces. It is our responsibility to act and do all we can to help in the humanitarian crisis that the survivors ““ people like you and me ““ face.

Justin Lee

First-year, biology

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