Pet Monologues

Imagine returning to your home after a long vacation. You pick up your pets from the kennel, unload your luggage and head to bed to recover from the long drive. But your sleep is anything but restful. All night, you’re plagued by tiny pinpricks and incessant itching. It doesn’t take you long to figure out that you’re being attacked by a seemingly infinite mob of hungry fleas.

An Adult Flea
Photo courtesy CDC/Vector Ecology & Control Laboratory, Fort Collins, Colo.

What happened? Did your pets pick up an infestation at the kennel? Did the vampire-like insects hitch a ride on your luggage? Or did a swarm of them decide to move in while you were gone?

It’s a creepy idea, but the most likely answer is that the fleas were waiting for you. Fleas are parasites—or life forms that feed on hosts—often harming the host in some way. Fleas use their hosts’ blood as food. They generally prefer the blood of four-legged animals to human blood, so before you went on vacation, the fleas fed on your pets, not on you.

Although newly emerged fleas need to find food within a few days, adults can go for a couple of months without a meal. Flea pupae can also stay in their cocoons for up to a year, waiting to sense the body heat and vibrations that signal the presence of nearby hosts. So when you go on vacation, the fleas don’t starve to death — they simply wait for you and your pets to come back. Read the rest of this entry »

Rhames mastiffs not guilty.

Now it’s the mastiff people’s turn. Read the rest of this entry »

God love Stephon Marbury for being bright and compassionate enough to create a $14 basketball shoe so kids don’t get robbed and beaten up over their $200 Air Jordan’s. Well, he must have had a brain cramp saying dog fighting is a sport, “just like deer hunting.” Now where does the fickle finger of fate point to?

The media just jumped all over Vick and dog fighting. And yesterday before Marbury’s blurb, in the Chicago Tribune, sports writer Rick Morrissey is quick and right to point out what the media did and how misplaced our senses are.

“But the convulsive reaction to the Vick case has made it obvious we’ve lost our sense of proportion. Dogs are defenseless, and we humans are quick to protect the defenseless. It is one of our better qualities. But a woman in the hands of a 230-pound elite athlete is more or less defenseless, too, and I can’t remember any case of domestic abuse, sexual assault or murder involving an NFL player that sparked this kind of public outrage.”

Rick closes with “A little perspective, please—especially the next time a player attacks a woman. Another incident should be happening any day now.”

He’s saying let’s get our priorities straight and how the media impacts issues. When the media goes “hunting” for something, they usually bag it. Deer hunters, unavailable for comment. Marbury, eyes open, ears on.

For Rick’s full story
The Greater Outrage

The first article I read on this topic was dated March 2005 from Fairfax County Virginia, so this is not exactly a new idea. Two years later we have the following article revisiting this issue…

Dangerous dogs in Virginia get online registry.

RICHMOND, Virginia: Bear is a golden retriever-shepherd that attacked a bicyclist. Dee Dee, a pit bull mix, killed a cat. Cody, a Labrador mix, bit the neighbor.

Their mug shots, misdeeds and home addresses went online last week at Virginia’s Dangerous Dog Registry, a new Web site modeled after the state’s sex offender registry. It lets residents locate dogs in their county that have attacked a person or animal, and that a judge decided could cause injury again.

Created after dogs killed a toddler and an 82-year-old woman in separate incidents over the last two years, Virginia’s registry is part of a growing effort by states to deal with canines deemed dangerous. Thirty-one states now make owners legally liable if their dogs maim or kill, and in 2006 Ohio became the first state to ban some breeds outright.

In the last two years, nearly 100 municipalities have taken similar steps - banning pit bulls, Rottweilers, English bull terriers and American staffordshire terriers, or passing regulations that require owners to use muzzles or short leashes in public, according to the American Kennel Club. Read the rest of this entry »

How safe do you feel around dogs?

A baby girl has died after being attacked by two guard dogs in Leicester. Read the rest of this entry »

Top tips for avoiding a dog attack.

Newsround interviewed vet Tricia Mundy from the Village Animal Hospital in Surrey, who gave us some top tips for avoiding dangerous dogs. Read the rest of this entry »

Bear attack victim gets serious about life.

A man who was attacked by a grizzly bear in Alaska has married his longtime girlfriend after she helped save his life. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s start with this. If the pit bull terrier ever needed good press (think PR) now is the time to write something positive about this pooch. The reason? Life is about “balance” and there are few “positive” pit bull stories that we are aware of. PM is happy to publish the following article from the Chicago Tribune…

by Gerry Smith, Chicago Tribune

“Trainer aims to reprogram public’s view of pit bulls: Pit bull olympics.”

Head, a 6-month-old pit bull with tattered ears and a passive demeanor, learned to sit on Saturday, a small but notable achievement for a dog once bred to fight.

Photo by Julia Fishkin

On a sidewalk in Humboldt Park, Head was part of a small group of neighborhood pit bulls participating in a dog obedience class taught by Tony Gordon, whose mission is more than just turning around a few hostile canines.

Gordon, a disciple of Pavlov’s theories, said he also hopes to educate pit bull owners and transform public perception about a breed that has been maligned by the media in high-profile attacks on children. Read the rest of this entry »

Can cats talk? Many cat owners would like to think so and some even claim that their cats speak a number of recognisable words. A Brazilian cat takes claims one step further by apparently being able to sing a number of well known songs while the Fortean Times carried a report of a cat which speaks several words in Turkish and suggested, with tongue firmly in cheek, that the reason many owners cannot understand their cats is because the cats are speaking Turkish. But before cat-owners rush out for phrase books, are these cats really speaking or are their owners just talking turkey?
Photo: Kevin Steele

For humans, the terms ’speech’ and ‘talk’ are not restricted to vocalization, but encompass human body language (which most of us read without realising it), gestural languages (sign language) and tactile languages (of deaf-blind individuals) which are equally expressive among those fluent in their use. Further, human language comprises both verbal and non-verbal components (including the written extension of body language through gestural substitutes such as the , symbols within Internet communication). Read the rest of this entry »

Inside the cells of every pet cat lies a history book, a story detailing the journey from the wilds of Asia to the comforts of a windowsill perch.

Combining the fields of genetics and archeology, scientists have cracked open the book to find that cat domestication occurred near the beginning of human civilization, long before many previous archeological estimates. The circumstances of this early association between man and cat may explain the friendly but tenuous truce between felines and humans.

Published Friday in the journal Science, the research used DNA from modern house cats to trace the origin of domestic cats back to a specific time and region thatcoincided with the settlement of humans in the Middle East region known as the Fertile Crescent. Read the rest of this entry »