Kurt's Thoughts

The thing I noticed was missing from the Internet was a full copy of the Oprah Winfrey episode raising the awareness of the horror of puppy mills, the greed of pet stores that sell dogs, and the good that comes with dog adoption. 

http://www2.oprah.com/tows/pastshows/200804/
tows_past_20080404.jhtml

If you haven’t seen this episode, it’s really worth seeing:  The animal world has been abuzz about this show that Oprah did because of the good that it did to raise awareness of the suffering that people shield their eyes from seeing every time they buy a dog from a pet store or the Internet. 

The Lessons To Be Learned are: 

• 99% of all animals sold in pet stores or on the Internet are born in inhumane & abusive conditions. 
• No legitimate breeder would sell their dogs in pet stores or over the Internet.
• Don’t rationalize your purchase by thinking you’ve ‘saved’ a dog by buying one:  You do not save dogs by buying them from these people – you only perpetuate the problem and fund this terrible abuse.

Anyway, once I was able to record the episode on my own, I did some quick editing, and walla:  Piece of cake.  So here it is in all it’s glory in case you missed it.  Edited end-to-end, without commercial interruptions, into two trimmed videos – part 1 & part 2.  (The reason it’s not just one single video is because there’s a limit on how much you can upload to MSN Soapbox for playback, and the episode exceeds that limit so I had to split it into two parts)

Oprah Winfrey on Puppy Mills – Part 1

By the way, anyone that wants a copy of the entire edited video:  It’s 42 minutes & 37 seconds – approx. 170MB total in a multipart ZIP file.  (Get http://www.winzip.com to unpack it)

http://cid-97895bbb8ad10f37.skydrive.live.com/embedrowdetail.aspx/Public/OprahOnPuppyMills.ziphttp://cid-97895bbb8ad10f37.skydrive.live.com/embedrowdetail.aspx/Public/OprahOnPuppyMills.z01http://cid-97895bbb8ad10f37.skydrive.live.com/embedrowdetail.aspx/Public/OprahOnPuppyMills.z02http://cid-97895bbb8ad10f37.skydrive.live.com/embedrowdetail.aspx/Public/OprahOnPuppyMills.z03 

INSTRUCTIONS:
You need to download all 4 files into the same folder, then use WinZip to open it by double clicking on the OprahOnPuppyMills.zip file – this will extract the file OprahOnPuppyMills.wmv by stitching together the contents of all 4 50MB files and produce a single 170MB file.  (Let me repear:  Windows’ native ZIP functionality will NOT work – you must download and install WinZip from http://www.winzip.com.)

The resulting file requires Windows Media Player and is standard definition (i.e. TV broadcast) quality.  Mac users can download the software needed to play Windows Media HERE and Linux users can download MPlayer which will play Windows Media, HERE.

If you’re running another platform, or you can’t install the necessary Windows Media codecs, please leave me a comment and I’ll convert the file to another codec like MPEG4 or whatever it takes and repost it somewhere for you to download on a private site.