Pets suffer from Midwest flooding too. at Pet Monologues

Asides

Who would be the next President of the animal kingdom…

Kobe Bryant’s popularity extends even to the animal kingdom. From a database of more than 465,000 pet insured animals including dogs, cats, birds, and exotic domesticated animals, 359 are named “Kobe,” making it the 189th most popular name of 65,536 pet names across the nation. Five pets in the database are named “LeBron,” two are name “Yao Ming,” and there’s a “Boston Garnett” along with a “Dirk Nowitzki.”

The most unusual sports name in the pet world, however, might belong to a Yorkshire Terrier that answers to “Kobe Shaq Jackson.” via los angeles times

Dress up games.

For Halloween one needs a creative tool to dress up Fluffy and Buddy. Here it is! Dressup games. My cute pet dressup.

Pets vote.

“Even our dogs and cats have learned that elections matter.” vice president Al Gore Click on a dog to buy a vote for Bark Obama or McCanine. Check in daily to see who is pulling on the lead…

visit petsvote

Pets. Dead people. Asked to vote.
CHICAGO — More than 1,000 phony registrations were submitted, Lake County official says. Dogs, goldfish and dead people were sent voter registration forms by mistake as part of an aggressive registration drive in the northern suburbs, Lake County Clerk Willard Helander said Friday. "This is nothing like we've ever seen before," Helander said in a news conference in Waukegan, where election workers identified more than 1,000 phony registrations submitted over the past few weeks. Helander blamed the problem on a group called the Voters Participation Center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that is a project of Women's Voices/Women's Vote based in Washington, D.C. Sarah Johnson, a Women's Voices spokeswoman, said the group uses a commercial data list generated by a national vendor to send out registration forms and that mistakes happen. "Sometimes . . . people think it's funny to get a magazine addressed to their cat or their dog, and when they do that, their cat or dog ends up on the list," Johnson said. "But we're just trying to make it as easy as possible for people to register and vote." Election officials in Oregon, Kentucky and other states have complained that the Women's Voices project has caused confusion. A record 401,935 Lake County residents are registered for the Nov. 4 election. via chicago tribune [1] [1] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-lake-voter-fraud-both-18-oct18,0,7157423.story

Great Lakes wolf killing stopped.
Court Reverses Bush Decision to Strip Protection From Wolves in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Breaking News! Agreeing with a Center for Biological Diversity legal action, a federal judge today overturned a 2007 Bush administration decision to remove Great Lakes area wolves from the endangered species list. The ruling puts an immediate halt on the killing of hundreds of wolves in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. While the Great Lakes wolf population has increased to 4,000 individuals under the protective cover of the Endangered Species Act, the species is still missing from most of its historic range, including the Northeast, the southern Rocky Mountains, the Great Basin, and the West Coast. Rather than developing a national wolf recovery strategy, the Bush administration craftily abandoned wolf recovery in most of the country by delisting wolves in the Great Lakes and the northern Rocky Mountains and declaring that the lack of wolves in other areas relieves the administration of any responsibility to continue recovery actions. In today's ruling, the judge agreed with the Center's amicus argument that stripping protection from local populations while refusing to consider the recovery of wolves throughout the lower 48 appears to violate the central purpose of the Endangered Species Act. The precedent setting ruling will protect hundreds of species from this backdoor strategy of abandoning species recovery. This is the second major victory in two weeks for the Center's wolf recovery fund. On September 16, the government announced it would give up defending against our northern Rockies wolf lawsuit. Thanks for supporting the wolf defense fund and sending thousands of emails and petitions objecting to the slaughter of wolves in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. This victory couldn't have happened without your help. Thanks also to our litigation allies at the Humane Society, Help Our Wolves Live, the Animal Protection Institute, and Friends of Animals and Their Environment.

Endangered species act under assault.
Send Comments to Secretary Kempthorne. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced devastating changes to the Endangered Species Act, signaling the end of protection for thousands of imperiled species. The new regulations would: - Exempt thousands of federal activities from review under the Endangered Species Act; - Eliminate checks and balances of independent oversight; - Limit which effects can be considered harmful; - Prevent consideration of a project’s contribution to global warming; - Set an inadequate 60-day deadline for wildlife experts to evaluate a project in the instances when they are invited to participate – or else the project gets an automatic green light; - Enable large-scale projects to go unreviewed by dividing them into hundreds of small projects. We must stop Kempthorne from fatally crippling our nation’s most successful wildlife law. Take action today. [1] [1] http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/2167/t/5243/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=25351

Porpoises belly up to low-fat diet.
TOKYO — Dolphins at a Japanese marine park are going on a low-fat diet after developing potbellies and failing to look sharp in their aquatic performances. Kinosaki Marine World in western Japan said Tuesday that all its 19 dolphins have been on a low-fat diet since late August, when they started failing to hit jumping targets and keep upright while treading water. "We were puzzled by their poor performance. Then we noticed they looked rounder," said park spokesman Haruo Imazu. Keepers weighed them and found all had gotten plumper, some up to 22 pounds heavier just during the summer. All had the same menu—about 31 pounds of mackerel mixed with some white fish — but keepers found the mackerels had gotten fattier, adding too many calories. Keepers immediately put them on a weight-loss program, feeding them more white fish and less fatty mackerel while instituting an exercise regime, Imazu said. Less fat and moderate exercise seem to be working. via chicago tribune [1] [1] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-dolphins_01oct01,0,4672913.story

Man punches shark. Saves dog.

SLAMORADA, Fla. — A dog is recovering after a Florida Keys carpenter dove in to save his pet from a shark.

Greg LeNoir said he took his 14-pound rat terrier Jake for a daily swim at a marina Friday.

The 5-foot shark suddenly surfaced and grabbed nearly the entire dog in its mouth.

LeNoir said he yelled, then balled up his fists and dove headfirst into the water. He hit the shark in the back and the creature finally let go of the dog.

Man and dog made it safely back to shore. The dog suffered bite wounds but was not critically injured.

PM editor’s note: OMG!

Elephant killed by bus.
MEXICO — A five-ton elephant was killed by a bus after it escaped from a circus in Mexico, and wandered onto a busy highway. Bus driver Tomas Lopez, 49, also died and at least four passengers were taken to hospital after the accident, which happened just before dawn on Tuesday in Ecatepec, north of Mexico City. The elephant had escaped from its cage at the Circo Union circus, according to Mexico State police spokesman Juan Sanchez, who said officers were still investigating the circumstances. It is understood that the 40-year-old animal, named Hilda, broke free as her keeper arrived to feed her. She apparently knocked down a metal door that led to the street and wandering through two neighbourhoods before trying to cross the road. Marcelino Ramos, 22, keeper at the Circo Union circus, told El Universal daily newspaper: "I untied her so she could eat. She never did this before, but suddenly she ran at full speed and broke through the gate." Police said the bus driver stood no chance of avoiding the elephant as it charged onto the road near the famous Teotihuacan pyramids. Last month, a 500lb lion escaped from a private zoo in southern Mexico. The animal killed two dogs and a pig and attacked a woman and child on a donkey before it was sedated and caught. via telegraph.co.uk [1] [1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/mexico/3069003/Escaped-circus-elephant-killed-by-bus-in-Mexico.html

Pets suffer from Midwest flooding too.

No-kill shelters form vast networks to save dogs and cats for adoption.

Lesley Irwin scrolls through 200 pitiable e-mails a day to pick out the lucky dogs and cats she can keep in her Huntley pet shelter, then anguishes over the many she has to turn away.

“Every day I’m trying to balance out the good with the bad,” Irwin said Monday.

Her Animal House Shelter is one of roughly 50 no-kill shelters in Illinois that are taking in scores of pets from Midwest flood zones. In most cases, their owners lost homes in the high water and can no longer afford to care for their animals, dropping them off at already overcrowded shelters that euthanize.

The demand for new homes for these four-footed refugees has mobilized a network of dozens of volunteers, who are transport- ing them in relays to no-kill shelters, most of them in the Chicago area.

“So many are getting euthanized that don’t make it out,” said Sally Matay, president of Illinois Animal Rescue, who said she is receiving up to 1,000 e-mails a day from people seeking shelters for the pets.

For weeks now, there has been growing pressure to rescue animals from facilities that are either flooded or overcrowded because of water-logged communities nearby.

Matay, who started a rescue pipeline last year, is a middleman, connecting animals scheduled to be euthanized with no-kill shelters. Every Tuesday, volunteers pick up animals from pounds in southern Illinois, Iowa and Indiana—areas all hard hit by the recent floods—and transport them in cargo vans to Tinley Park and Joliet, where another van in the relay takes over.

“A lot of people had dogs tied up in their backyards, so when the yards flooded, they lost their homes,” said Julie Falkenberry, vice president of the Perry County Humane Society. “Their owners either untie them when the yard floods or hand them over to the pound for lack of a better place to put them.”

Sally Westerhoff, executive director of the Quincy Humane Society, sent an e-mail to Chicago-area animal shelters last week asking for help. Her shelter is filled to capacity as it cares for 20 animals that belong to flood victims and another 22 from the nearby shelter in Missouri’s Pike County that was overwhelmed.

“There have been people who have come in [to give up their pets] and I’ve said, ‘We’re in the middle of a disaster here. There all these people who have lost their homes and can’t take care of their pets, so you’re going to have to hold on to yours a little bit longer,’ ” she said.

Westerhoff said two of the dogs—a black Lab mix and an American Eskimo—were left chained in a backyard as a family drove away when their home was evacuated.

Many of the dogs, Irwin said, arrive infested with ticks, mange and heartworm.

Buster, a large yellow dog that looks like a cross between a Labrador and golden retriever, arrived Sunday at Irwin’s shelter with red sores on the tips of his ears. Fly bites are common, she said.

“We are getting the ones no longer wanted by their owners, or there are no other options for their owners,” said Cindy Ritter, general manager for the Huntley shelter. “It’s really difficult because you want to rescue every one of them.”

The shelter can house 150 to 200 dogs and about 50 to 75 cats. It currently has 70 dogs from flooded areas with about 60 more scheduled to arrive this week.

Publicity about the animals’ plight brought a record 45 adoptions over the weekend, she said.

Officials at no-kill shelters hope that by rescuing dogs before they get sick, they can save the animals from being euthanized.

On Wednesday, volunteers from PAWS Chicago will head to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to pick up 9 to 12 dogs abandoned during the recent flooding, said Paula Fasseas, founder and chairwoman of the no-kill organization.

The animals had to wait out a mandatory window of time in case their owners came back to claim them. But no one did, Fasseas said.

“The saddest part is that these people have left their homes and they’re devastated,” she said. “They’d like to see [the pets] get a good home.”

via Chicago Tribune

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 10:04 am and is filed under Death, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.