Police charge Madawaska man after St. Bernards starve to death

If you have proof that this happened, you might contact a local animal rights association, and they will act on your behalf, but don't wait too long. There are persons who are well meaning but may suffer from issues like hoarding, etc, so I'm not making excuses, but it sounds like you ladies are upset, and may have every right to be, but when you say that someone starved his dogs to death, you are also opening yourselves up to a libel lawsuit. If you can't prove what he did, and he can prove that you are lying about him, he may have a case! I don't know the story, but people do get into financial straits, and feeding dogs can be expensive, depending on the circumstances. Do you have any real proof that he starved them, and what do you base that on? You would, in a court of law, have to have real proof showing he willingly neglected those animals. Ive seen women and men with psych issues who had more than 40 cats in their homes, and half of them were dead. She was guilty of neglect, but never faced a day in court, simply because she was suffering from a serious hoarding problem, and had been for more than 3 decades. Sometimes, people come and attack people when an animal dies, but what if they had come with love and attention, first, to help that man out, to help him buy dog food, or whatever it was he needed and what the dog's needed? Then it seems the community was at fault, and if they had been more compassionate, they could have come to the man's aid, thus to the aid of the dogs. The Buddha had an idea, its a philosophical idea, and it's called pramana. What it means in ordinary speech, is that we cannot know what something really is unless we are enlightened. "Strictly speaking, pramana (Tib. tshad ma) means "valid cognition." (Wikipedia) It means seeing to be able to see things as they really are. Now we may think we know him, or her, but then realize, after twenty years, that we didn't know s*$t about him, or her, and then the divorce lawyers start lining up. How can we really know anything when "things" always change? We can't, not unless we are awakened. Then we know. For example, when I lived in Frenchville, I would walk from the main road into the forest, to my shack. Sometimes, as the sun was going down, and the light would shine a muted orange on the hard and icy, dark purple slabs of snow, I would suddenly see a small bear, a cub, in the distant field. Or was it a mother bear, or worse, a full grown male, with cubs, lurking somewhere? My heart would throb and suddenly I would freeze; not breathing, not saying a thing, and I would stand really still, listening, waiting to see the bear move, but even though this event repeated itself, time and time again, I would eventually see that it wasn't a bear at all, and as I moved in closer, I would see my bear transformed into a dark blackish, purplish-blue tree. That's right, my "bear" was really a small fir tree. Perhaps it was the marijuana, mostly it was my fear of bears, my horrible-to-this-day-horror-of-bears. It took me close to 45 years to figure out why I've always been so scared of bears, but that's another story. So, my mind saw "bear" when in actuality, there was only a fir tree. Sometimes it's a snake in the road, that turns out the be a peace of bark. That is what the mind does to us, about our lovers, about our bosses, about our new boats, etc. We form ideas, we judge. We are slaves to the observances and the formulations—their unending, shapeless forms. Indeed, if like Keanu, we could take the red pill, we might "see" what the Buddha and many others saw, the truth. Because I'm not awake, I can't tell whether or not my neighbor loves his girlfriend, because I can't. Sometimes it seems as though he does, and then, when the yelling starts at 4:30 a.m., I tend to believe he is anything but a worthless MFPOS. That is really the same thing about the man whom you say "starved" his dogs to death. But we don't really know what happened, really, unless you were in that man's head, every hour of every day, and you actually knew what he was thinking, experiencing and doing, you can't know. Anything else is just a guess. Of course that doesn't mean we let him off the hook, but we approach the situation with love and compassion, and maybe we actually learn that maybe he too is starving, hasn't been eating, and that he couldnt afford the $500.00 a month veterinarian bills, or we learn that his wife just came out of the hospice, and died at home, two days before the first dog died. Pramana is a complicated way of looking and discussing reality. It is a theoretical and philosophical tool that allows us to come to every new situations and to approach it with love, not the love that happens after a night on the town, but the kind of love one has for a shivering foal, or the trout that we throw back, suddenly feeling in awe of the beauty before us. That is compassionate love. If and when we can muster that kind of love then we can approach someone, anyone, and ask them, "Hey, are you new to this neighborhood?" or, "Hi, my name is.... Can I help you?" If one Floridian had approached a teenager in that manner, maybe he would have had an easier exit, one in which he didn't feel as though he had to shoot his way out. Unless we really know someone, far from being enlightened, we must stand back and try not to judge someone. What we can do is gather the facts, and take it from there. When we come from a place of loving kindness, what the Tibetan Buddhist's call Bodhichitta, then we are at least able to get to know someone better, but we also get to know more of the big picture. Though some people are trained to read others, like police officers, teachers, and yes, even parents, most of us, unless we have psychic powers, or siddhis, as the Hindus call them, we cannot really know exactly what people are thinking. Far from being enlightened, the majority of us can still benefit by approaching all people with equality, on an even path, and in doing so, we actually get to know them better. That means we listen to them without judging them, and in doing so, we all tend to treat each other just a little bit better.