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All in Animal Companions
Last week 300 homeless pets from Puerto Rico were flown to a second chance at life in New York and Maine. The Sato Project and Wings of Rescue spirited 165 dogs and 135 cats from the island's overcrowded animal shelters, with a boost from an unlikely source – Tito's Handmade Vodka.
It is unclear why there is both an International Dog Day and a National Dog Day. Wouldn’t one cover the other? But never mind, the day of the dog has arrived today, August 26.
Japanese researchers have observed a phenomenon that we thought was impossible: a nonhuman animal crying tears of joy. A new study reported in Current Biology this week demonstrated that our canine friends will well up with tears under certain circumstances, and it probably happens more often than we think.
It’s been a year since Charlotte Maxwell-Jones refused to leave Afghanistan as the country fell into Taliban control. The woman from East Tennessee who founded the Kabul Small Animal Rescue would not abandon the many dogs, cats, sheep and parrots in the chaos of the US withdrawal.
Gillian Anderson, a longtime friend to animals and PETA, turns 54 today with a message for couture giants Michael Kors, Versace, and Jimmy Choo: Stop harvesting hides from alligators, snakes, and lizards.
This week (August 7 through 13th) marks the 13th annual “Give a Dog a Bone Week” event arranged by Feeding Pets of the Homeless. The nonprofit has been raising both awareness and pet food for the unhoused for the past 15 years.
The highly respected Polish Academy of Sciences has declared the domestic cat an “invasive alien species,” citing the cheeky pet’s propensity for murdering birds and small mammals.
In England last week a beagle-mix named Bonnie had an adventure that reads like the plot of a children’s book. It began when the five-year-old pooch went on the lam from her Bolney, West Sussex home, making her escape while her wards were preparing her food.
Baseball fans in Queens are cheering on a first-place team and a first-rate dog: Shea the labrador retriever. Shea is spending the first year and a half of his life hanging out with the New York Mets and their fans, after which he’ll be placed with a disabled veteran as a service dog.
A “beagle breeding facility” in Virginia has been shut down, following two years of failed inspections that revealed horrifying living conditions. Inspections of the Cumberland, Va. facility run by the company Envigo, uncovered dozens of violations of federal regulations and revealed heart-wrenching cases of underfed, sick, injured and – in some cases dead – beagles. Last week a federal judge declared that some 4000 dogs are now up for adoption, giving authorities 60 days to move the beagles to safe havens.
For the third time in five years, Fred the labrador has adopted an orphaned brood of ducklings. Fred is the 15-year-old resident dog at Mountfitchet Castle, a living history museum in Essex, England.
It’s been known for some time that dogs can identify the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus with a sniff, but now we know a dog’s olfactory ability is so precise it can detect even long covid cases. The new research is published in Frontiers in Medicine.
Winkie Winkerton left her condo above the sink on June 25 after 11 years of happy living in upstate New York. She was at least 16. The good people at Heart of the Catskills, a humane society in Delhi, drove two hours for a prearranged meet and greet at the Kingston Petco, where I waited with a carrier. “Not everyone wants a senior cat,” said her chauffeur. Since no one picked up the black cat sitting in the next cage, I got her too.
The chihuahua mix named Mr. Happy Face has issues. The little guy has tumors, neurological problems that make standing or walking a struggle, has to wear a diaper, and holds his head at an odd angle. In spite of these medical problems – or because of them – Mr. Happy Face is a winner: he just took the World’s Ugliest Dog honors in Petaluma, California.
They called him wrinkled and jowly, and now they call him the best. Trumpet the bloodhound has won Best In show at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, held for the second year in a row in Tarrytown, NY.
This is a picture of two friends: the beagle Daisy Mae and the diva Sheila Nadler in what she calls her “domicile” on West 72nd Street. I have been thinking of both a lot recently.
Cats love catnip. They eat it, roll in it, and clearly get a buzz from it. Most cats also love silver vine, a plant not closely related to catnip. Even big cats – like jaguars and tigers – will enjoy a good chew.
On March 13, a 3-year-old husky named Leon disappeared from the Iditarod, having slipped his collar at a checkpoint roughly halfway through Alaska’s annual sled race. Three months and 150 miles later, Leon has been found “understandably skinny but seemingly healthy,” Iditarod spokesperson Shannon Markley told the Associated Press.
A visit to the dentist can be pure terror for small kids, but a clinic in Quito, Ecuador has found a soothing presence that can calm the most anxious nerves: a dog named Aldo.
