February 25/2015

(E.B.W.) Critter Corner 

                       

Feature:

Dudley’s Story 

     “A cattle rancher in Tennessee spent many years buying young cows… & then selling them for a profit to be slaughtered. A few months ago, this man bought a group of baby cows. Among them was a small boy cow later named Dudley who got bailing twine wrapped around his foot which constricted the blood flow & caused his foot to fall off. The calf could barely walk & for some reason the rancher took pity on him…Dudley was spared & the farmer tried to make him well.

      The rancher gave Dudley antibiotics to heal the raging infection, but later did not have the funds to give Dudley further care. Over the last 10 months, Dudley has had a very hard time…

In Tennessee, there was a vegan woman who found out about Dudley & begged the man to let her get Dudley to someone who could help him. When she called us, we immediately started calling veterinary hospitals & companies who manufactured prosthetics. With one of the leading bovine surgeons in Tennessee waiting to examine Dudley, &, a prosthetics company on alert to create his missing foot, Jay & I boarded a plane bound for Nashville to save Dudley! 

     … we drove Dudley 3 hours to the University Tennessee Knoxville Large Animal Hospital…After an exam, x-rays of his foot, blood tests, & fecal exams, the surgeon told us that…Dudley would be an excellent candidate for a prosthetic limb. Dudley was then prepared for surgery where they would amputate the damaged bone & muscle from his injury & fit him with a temporary prosthetic. While Dudley recovers, a mold would be made of his leg to be sent to a prosthetics company that will create a permanent prosthetic to be delivered in a month.

     Once Dudley is completely healed, we want to bring him to the safety of The Gentle Barn where he will finally find a safe home & a loving family for the rest of his life. When he is ready, Dudley will give hope & inspiration to thousands of war vets & other people dealing with physical differences.

     …Dudley's surgery, post-operative care, & prosthetic will cost thousands of dollars, but we believe he is worth it! Dudley has suffered enough, please help us save him, make him well, & enable him to pay it forward to people who need him.”

  

Ellie Laks 

www.gentlebarn.org

Cute Critter Pic 

Weekly Chuckle

Canadian Links: 

Humane Society: https://www.humanesociety.com/

International Fund for Animal Welfare: www.ifaw.org/canada/ 

Canadian SPCA: https://www.canadahelps.org/en/.../the-canadian-spcala-spca-canadienne/

U.S. Links:

Humane Hollywood: http://www.humanehollywood.org

 

 

 

February 18/2015

(E.B.W.) Critter Corner 

 

Feature:

You’ll Go Far, My Pet

           “Not to brag, but we may have a little genius on our hands. Our 6-month-old is up before dawn playing brain games…

           I am talking, of course, about our dog.

           …within hours of adopting our fuzzy, adorable Pi, I sensed that being a pet parent today…means cultivating intelligence, manners, & communication skills the way the parent of say, a small human might…

           A doggie tick-tack-toe puzzle from Petco encourages ‘problem solving’ & increases ‘eye-paw-mouth coordination…

           A new dog is nothing if not a mystery shrouded in fur. What exactly was lurking behind Pi’s smoky eyes?...

           For answers, I turned to Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist…Last year, he started Dognition, a Web-based testing service that offers a series of rigorous at-home video experiments to evaluate your dog’s cognitive skills. The results are fed into a database with tens of thousands of dogs to determine one of 9 personality types: Socialite, maverick, renaissance dog, & so on.
      

           ‘People want to get inside the heads of their dogs, & after 40,000 years of living alongside them, science is finally helping us do it,’ Hare said…

           In the last decade…we have learned more about how dogs think than in the last century…his own research shows that dogs read our gestures, like pointing, more flexibility than any other animal.

           Other investigators from Hungary, using functional MRI, recently announced the canine brain was sensitive to cues of emotion in human voices. When you pet a dog, another study concluded, both human & canine oxytocin levels increase…

           Julie Hecht finds her bliss in canine urine. She is a researcher with the Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College…& writes the amusing Dog Spies blog on Scientific American’s website.

           …A decade of influential research conducted in conjunction with the Family Dog Project at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary, where Hecht put together her master’s thesis, suggests that ‘dogs show very similar responses to what you see with infants up until toddlers around the age of 2,’ she said…

           It’s true that dogs everywhere are doing things that would have been unimaginable in the Alpo era. Last year, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Working Dog Center trained a team of shepherds & retrievers to sniff out lab samples containing ovarian cancer. Scent hounds are also being used to forecast epileptic seizures & potentially life-threatening infections.

           A black Labrador from the St. Sugar Cancer-Sniffing Dog Training Center in Chiba, Japan, was accurate 98% of the time in picking up early-stage signs of colon cancer. As Hare…said, ‘I will take a dog smelling my breath over a colonoscopy any day of the week, even if it’s just an experiment.’

           As for our own puppy experiment, results are adding up.

           The DNA test reported that Pi is a Great Pyrenees-Border collie mix, which means her forebears may have mingled with French aristocracy…”

 

David Hochman

THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Montreal Gazette    

May 17/2014

Cute Critter Pic 

Weekly Chuckle

Canadian Links: 

Humane Society: https://www.humanesociety.com/

International Fund for Animal Welfare: www.ifaw.org/canada/ 

Canadian SPCA: https://www.canadahelps.org/en/.../the-canadian-spcala-spca-canadienne/

U.S. Links:

Humane Hollywood: http://www.humanehollywood.org

 

 

 

February 11/2015

(E.B.W.) Critter Corner 

Feature:

2,000 zebras make surprise African crossing

     “JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA- At a time when mankind’s encroachment on habitats is increasingly leading species to extinction, scientists have discovered a mass migration of animals in Africa that reaches farther than any other documented on the continent.

           The journey made by about 2,000 zebras who traveled between Namibia & Botswana…was discovered by wildlife experts only after some of the zebras were collared with tracking devices.  

           The new-found migration is a rare bright spot at a time when mass movements of wildlife are disappearing because of fencing, land occupation, & other human pressures…

           The previously unheralded trek occurs within the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area which…encompasses national parks in Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, & Angola.

           ‘It goes to show us that nature still has some surprises,’ said Robin Naidoo, senior conservation scientists at the Washington Wildlife Fund…

           The zebra odyssey encompasses a round trip journey of 500 km, starting in floodplains near the Namibia-Botswana border at the beginning of the wet season. It follows a route across the Chobe River & ends at the seasonally full water holes & nutritional grass of Nxai Pan National Park in Botswana…

           ‘This is the longest known land migration in Africa, in terms of distance between end points,’ Naidoo said…

           Much remains to be learned about the Namibia-Botswana migration. The World Wildlife Fund said long-term research is needed to confirm if the migration is annual & fixed & ‘whether this is genetically coded or passed behaviorally from mothers to offspring.’”

Christopher Torchia

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Montreal Gazette

May 31/2014

Cute Critter Pic 

Weekly Chuckle

Canadian Links: 

Humane Society: https://www.humanesociety.com/

International Fund for Animal Welfare: www.ifaw.org/canada/ 

Canadian SPCA: https://www.canadahelps.org/en/.../the-canadian-spcala-spca-canadienne/

U.S. Links:

Humane Hollywood: http://www.humanehollywood.org

 

 

 

 

 

 

February 4/2015

(E.B.W.) Critter Corner 

 

Feature:

Walking With Wolves

            Maya sniffs my hand, takes a step forward & offers her back for me to pat. This would be utterly mundane if Maya were a dog. But she’s 100% grey wolf.

           And wolf handler & trainer Shelly Black tells me how lucky I am to receive any affection from this regal creature.

           ‘Maya has her quirks & is shy & aloof,’ Black explains. ‘If she gives anyone the time of day, it’s usually only 2 seconds.’

           I’m flattered.

           Maya leans into my leg & I run my left hand through the long & luxurious fur from her shoulder blades to mid-back for a good 10 seconds…

           I’m taking part, with 5 other tourists, in Northern Lights Wolf Centre’s special Walking With wolves program just outside of Golden B.C. It’s the only place in the world where people can go on a hike with wolves…The wolves run free & we follow on a stretch of pristine, sunny, & snowy Crown land in the Blaeberry Valley bracketed by the Rocky & Purcell mountains…

            It is surreal to trek in the wild with these majestic animals…

           Maya is the black-grey-&-white regal veteran at 14 years of age…

           We’re also joined by 21-month-old Scrappy Dave, the equivalent of a rambunctious, lanky teenager. And he’s also a real looker with his white-&-buff coloring & piercing yellow eyes…

           And when we reached the sunny clearing at the halfway point of our hike, Scrappy Dave frolicked & posed for pictures with each of us…

           Originally, the Blacks bought a couple of wolf pups from zoos to raise for photography & film work…

           They decided to test their British Columbia license to keep wolves & asked if they could offer a Walking With Wolves program for tourists. The government said yes…

           The key to allowing such human-wolf interaction is imprinting. Northern Lights acquires only wolf pups born in captivity that will imprint on Shelly & Casey.

           ‘We become the alpha male & female for all our wolves,’ Shelly explains.

           ‘We are the leaders of the pack & provide them with food…So they will interact with humans. But they are still the same as their wild cousins. They are shy. They won’t wag their tail for you. They will approach you, but they are not like your pet dog’.”

Steve MacNaull

POSTMEDIA NEWS

The Montreal Gazette

March 22/2014

 

Cute Critter Pic 

Weekly Chuckle

 

Canadian Links: 

Humane Society: https://www.humanesociety.com/

International Fund for Animal Welfare: www.ifaw.org/canada/ 

Canadian SPCA: https://www.canadahelps.org/en/.../the-canadian-spcala-spca-canadienne/

U.S. Links:

Humane Hollywood: http://www.humanehollywood.org