Another air travel folly: puppy crushed to death

This story makes me so damn mad I can't even see straight. It just goes to show what life is like in a country where Big Business has almost no regulation at all - and actually gets taxpayer subsidies.

The beautiful puppy pictured here is gone now. She's dead. She didn't even live long enough to receive a name.

A New Hampshire couple was having a small puppy shipped to them from Arkansas. But when they were on their way to the Boston airport to pick up the 3-month-old dog, they got a call informing them that the puppy was killed while changing flights in Atlanta.

Someone at Delta Airlines had placed the puppy on the ground next to a baggage truck that was loading a plane. When the vehicle moved, the dog was crushed. The couple hasn't heard back from Delta since the incident, so it's obvious Delta is trying to shirk responsibility.

If Delta isn't responsible for this, who is? Clearly there were at least 2 workers involved in the incident (the one who put the cage on the ground and the one driving the vehicle), so this indicates they were just following the instructions the airline gave them. I blame the corporation more than I blame the employees, because the corporation gives the orders.

I've got a good mind to tell some execs what I think. You're not supposed to create a situation where pets are put in danger like this. Ever. But airlines have done it before: I remember once in the mid-'90s when it was revealed that greedy airlines had fatally suffocated puppies on flights. The industry didn't learn its lesson then, and it still hasn't.

The airline industry gets our money whether we fly or not: Congress and Bush bailed out the airline industry in 2001 for its own stupid mistakes that were costing it business. Our tax dollars are funding airlines' actions that endanger animals.

With America now nearly the model of a corporate command state, when will it stop? Right-wing activist judges have robbed the states of their rights to regulate air travel (like when they absurdly said states could not require stranded flights to provide passengers with water and restrooms) and the federal government chooses not to regulate it, so who will exercise some oversight over how airlines spend our tax dollars?

(Source: http://wbztv.com/local/dog.crushed.killed.2.694465.html)