4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2018
editor@dailyastorian.com
KARI BORGEN
Publisher
JIM VAN NOSTRAND
Editor
Founded in 1873
JEREMY FELDMAN
Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM
Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN
Production Manager
Water
under
the bridge
who felt the plaque was commercial in nature and
“completely out of place” in the column park. He
favored forbidding all plaques there except those
connected with the column and local history.
Councilman Bill Wilson said he understood the
first TV antenna was on the J.J. Astor hotel, but that
he saw nothing wrong with the marker in the col-
umn park.
Compiled by Bob Duke
From the pages of Astoria’s daily newspapers
Clatsop County’s largest agricultural income crop, the pro-
duction of mink pelts, is facing a marked decline.
Marvin Hille, manager of Oregon Fur Producers, said five
mink ranchers in the county have gone out of business during
the past year. This means a loss of 3,000 breeding females to
an industry, which boasted 24,000 female mink in January,
1967.
The mink industry began in Clatsop County in the early
1930s and showed a steady increase until last year. A steady
decline in price per pelt has been noted in some colors since
1956.
Foreign imports of pelts have cut deeply into profits of the
domestic mink rancher, Hille said.
10 years ago
this week — 2008
The landslide that hit First and Commercial streets in Asto-
ria in January 2007 began moving again about a month ago —
slowly, almost imperceptibly — according to Astoria Public
Works Director Ken Cook.
Unfortunately, financial aid for permanent infrastructure
fixes from the Federal Emergency Management Agency has
been moving at a similar speed.
But city leaders are optimistic the pace is picking up.
Unsuccessful the first time they appealed FEMA’s decision
to deny funding, they are hopeful a second appeal filed last
month will do the trick.
Secretary of State Clay Myers, followed by a
swarm of Portland press representatives, came here
Thursday morning to see the $1 million Pacific Riv-
iera development at the mouth of the Necanicum
River which suddenly has found itself the center of a
storm of unwanted publicity upstate.
Myers, a member of the State Land Board by
virtue of his office, said he was concerned about the
problem of possible damage to clam beds and about
possible infringement on the Land Board’s rights in
managing submerged and submersible lands.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is not going
to ask NorthernStar Natural Gas Co. to resubmit its
permit application for the Bradwood Landing lique-
fied natural gas project.
And that’s fine with the National Marine Fisher-
ies Service, according to a letter sent Friday.
The action has LNG opponents worried that
NMFS might have been under political pressure to
change its position.
A beloved urban trail has been renamed to honor a beloved
Astoria citizen. A new sign will proclaim The Richard Fenc-
sak Cathedral Trail.
Fencsak is very ill and has done a lot of work in the com-
munity and on the city’s trails, said Astoria City Manager
Paul Benoit before the Astoria City Council’s unanimous vote
Monday in favor of the name change.
“He loves those trails so much. I’ve never met anyone in
my life who glories in nature so much,” said Fencsak’s wife,
Arlene Layton, in an earlier interview.
Fencsak, who owns Bikes and Beyond in downtown Asto-
ria, has been a longtime contributor to The Daily Astorian.
He wrote a column on outdoor sports and later became Coast
Weekend’s restaurant critic, earning the affectionate moniker,
“Mouth of the Columbia.”
50 years ago — 1968
A bronze plaque commemorating establishment of
the nation’s first community television cable system
CARL EARL
Systems Manager
75 years ago — 1943
The USO building, built in 1942, still sits at the foot of
17th in Astoria.
in February, 1949, will be erected in Astoria Column
park as result of permission given by the city coun-
cil Monday night.
The plaque was given the city six years ago by
National Cable Television association, through Gov.
Mark Hatfield.
The council voted 4-1 to approve the project,
overriding objections of Councilman Roy Duoos,
Contrary to reports about the city Saturday, Astoria meat
markets are open today. For the most part, however, the butch-
ers are busy with other things besides selling meat. Said one
representative market man, “Yes, we’re open; and we have a
few smelt and a bit of meat — what you see there on the show
case. We have to answer the phone and be here to tell people
we haven’t what they want, you know, and it’s always possible
that some rancher might bring us in something.”
“What’s the answer? Well, I wouldn’t know,” continued
another. “It looks like a shortage of help on the ranches, to me.
How else can you explain the diminishing returns in the Port-
land stock yards. They’re not getting in more than half the cat-
tle, sheep and hogs they did a year ago up there with an addi-
tional 100,000 people to feed. Yes sir, it looks bad.”
Astoria’s Fighting Fishermen last night pulled
a typical Astoria basketball trick in coming from
behind in the second half to blast Tillamook on the
Cheesemakers’ floor, 38 to 28. The win was Asto-
ria’s 10th consecutive victory, with no losses, and
gives the Fishermen two legs on the district No. 10
championship.
It’s time to end the scam of flying pets
O
ne day, we may all owe a debt of
gratitude to Dexter the peacock.
At Newark Airport recently, a
woman tried to board a United Airlines
flight with Dexter. She described him as her
emotional-support animal.
But given that peacocks are
large birds and there is not
much evidence of their ther-
apeutic benefits, United said
no, Dexter could not board.
A predictable social-me-
DAVID
dia storm ensued, both
LEONHARDT
pro- and anti-peacock.
By late last week, United
Airlines decided it had enough of making
ad hoc decisions about traveling animals
and announced a tighter new policy. Dexter,
unwittingly, may have struck a blow for
sanity.
If you spend any time on planes, you’ve
probably noticed the surge of animals. There
have been pigs, monkeys, turkeys, snakes
and oh-so-many dogs, often sprawled across
crowded cabins. Delta alone flies about
250,000 animals a year — not even counting
those tucked inside carry-on bags or checked
in cargo holds — more than double how
many it flew in 2015.
The number of problems is rising, too.
A large part-Labrador mauled a man on a
flight to San Diego last summer. A recent
Delta news release included some words that
don’t normally appear in a corporate news
release: “urination/defecation” and “barking,
growling, lunging and biting.” According
to a labor union for flight attendants, more
passengers are suffering allergy attacks,
and more are arguing, or worse, over
animals.
I’m not going to claim that flying pets
are one of the country’s biggest problems
right now. That’s a high bar, after all. But I
do find this situation to be a fascinating case
study of how mass cheating can become
acceptable — and how decent people can
make decisions that are more selfish than
they realize. It is one of the downsides of
a modern culture that too often fetishizes
individual preference and expression over
communal well-being.
This story begins with progress, in the
form of a 1986 law forbidding discrimina-
tion against handicapped air travelers. The
law made sure that physically disabled peo-
ple could travel with service animals. It also
rightly applied to nonphysical disabilities.
Some autistic children, for example, function
AP Photo/Tali Arbel
Oscar the cat pokes his head out from his pet carrier travel bag on his way to John F.
Kennedy International Airport in New York. Oscar is a cat of the world with remote-con-
trolled toys and his own Instagram account, but he doesn’t like flying.
AP Photo/William Mathis
AP Photo/Julio Cortez
A sign marks a pet relief area in New York’s
JFK Terminal 4.
A service dog strolls through the isle
inside a United Airlines plane at Newark
Liberty International Airport.
better with a trained dog.
The trouble started when pet owners
realized that they could game the system,
because airlines did not require much proof
of medical need. By claiming one, people
could bring an animal on board without put-
ting it in a carry-on bag and without paying a
fee that typically runs $125.
It’s true that some people honestly
believe they have an emotional condition
that an animal solves. But they are often
confusing their preferences with actual
medical needs. As a recent front-page story
in The Washington Post dryly put it, the
effectiveness of emotional-support animals
“is poorly substantiated through studies but
widely embraced by the public.”
Once animals became more common on
planes, the trend fed on itself. Pet owners
figured that if other people were cheating
the system, they might as well too. A cottage
industry sprung up in service of low-level
fraud. For $30 on Amazon, you can buy a
bright-red dog vest that reads, EMOTIONAL
SUPPORT. With a quick web search, you
can find a therapist to diagnose you long-dis-
tance. Fill out a form, and suddenly you’re
certified as having an illness that requires
animal attention.
All the while, people told themselves
they weren’t doing anything wrong. (How
often have you heard a version of, “My pet is
friendly and harmless”?) But people weren’t
thinking about the collective cost of their
actions — about the many children afraid
of sitting next to a dog, about travelers with
serious allergies, about flight attendants
charged with keeping cabins safe and, most
of all, about truly disabled travelers.
“As a person who is blind, my access
rights are being infringed upon when
somebody passes off a fake service dog,”
Tom Panek, an advocate for the blind, told
CBS News last week. At airports, disabled
travelers with service animals are sometimes
getting harassed by fed-up airline employees
and passengers. Inside crowded planes,
untrained animals have attacked service
animals.
The last few weeks may have brought a
turning point. First Delta and then United —
following L’Affaire Dexter — announced
stricter rules, requiring certification of
animal training. Ultimately, I hope the
Department of Transportation creates a fairly
strict uniform rule for all airlines. (It should
also ensure safe conditions for animals in
cargo holds, which would make people com-
fortable with checking their pet.)
The whole bizarre situation is a reminder
of why trust matters so much to a well-func-
tioning society. The best solution, of course,
would be based not on some Transportation
Department regulation but on simple trust.
People who really needed service animals
could then bring on them planes without
having to carry documents.
Maybe a trust-based system will return
at some point. But it won’t return automati-
cally. When trust breaks down and small bits
of dishonesty become normal, people need
to make a conscious effort to restore basic
decency.
David Leonhardt is a syndicated colum-
nist for the New York Times News Service.