Mixed Reactions in Phx Police Forum over Cat

Cat Stuck in Phoenix Police Officers Tree

As if we don’t have enough problems in the world today, we now have a local police officer who refuses to allow a neighbor to rescue his cat from a tree on the officer’s property.

People wonder why I have high blood pressure. This is one of the reasons. Idiot people who are striving to make life MORE difficult for their neighbors, especially police officers who make life more difficult. While I am hoping this is not the norm for all police, this officer in particular is causing a lot of problems that could be easily avoided and maybe even bring some much-needed “good press” to the Phoenix Police Department.

Instead, he has chosen to not only further his department’s crumbling “animal” reputation over a seemingly small matter, he has taken the law into his own hands and refused to let anyone on to his property to get this poor kitty out of the tree.

I don’t care that the cat “trespassed” onto his property. Sucks to be him, but it’s not illegal. I do hope the owners will keep the kitty inside if they do get their favorite feline home safely, but in the event  they do not (and at this point, even if they do), I would be levelling animal cruelty charges against this “official” neighbor.

Meanwhile, it’s my hope that the Phoenix Police take matters into their department and help this cat help out. Then again, if they can’t keep their dogs alive, what’s to motivate them to keep any other being alive?

Mixed reactions in Police Forum

For more info: Click to read more about the police officer’s initial statement and the subsequent fallout in the police officer forum.

New Recall on Chicken Jerkey

This was just released from the FDA on Dec. 19. Pay attention to what you have on hand for your pets.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) continues to caution consumers of a potential association between the development of illness in dogs and the consumption of chicken jerky products also described as chicken tenders, strips or treats. FDA continues to receive complaints of dogs experiencing illness that their owners or veterinarians associate with consumption of chicken jerky products. The chicken jerky products are imported to the U.S. from China. FDA issued a cautionary warning to consumers in September 2007.

Australian news organizations report the University of Sydney is also investigating an association between illness in dogs and the consumption of chicken jerky in Australia. At least one firm in Australia has recalled their chicken jerky product and the recall notification stated the chicken jerky product was manufactured in China.

FDA believes the continued trend of consumer complaints coupled with the information obtained from Australia warrants an additional reminder and animal health notification.

Chicken jerky products should not be substituted for a balanced diet and are intended to be used occasionally and in small quantities. Owners of small dogs must be especially careful to limit the amount of these products.

FDA, in addition to several veterinary diagnostic laboratories in the U.S, is working to determine why these products are associated with illness in dogs. To date, scientists have not been able to determine a definitive cause for the reported illnesses. FDA has conducted extensive chemical and microbial testing but has not identified any contaminant.

FDA is advising consumers who choose to feed their dogs chicken jerky products to watch their dogs closely for any or all of the following signs which may occur within hours to days of feeding the product: decreased appetite, although some may continue to consume the treats to the exclusion of other foods; decreased activity; vomiting; diarrhea, sometimes with blood; and increased water consumption and/or increased urination. If the dog shows any of these signs, stop feeding the chicken jerky product. Owners should consult their veterinarian if signs are severe or persist for more than 24 hours. Blood tests may indicate kidney failure (increased urea nitrogen and creatinine). Urine tests may indicate Fanconi syndrome (increased glucose). Although most dogs appear to recover, some reports to the FDA have involved dogs that have died.

The FDA continues to actively investigate the problem. Many of the illnesses reported may be the result of causes other than eating chicken jerky. Veterinarians and consumers alike should report cases of animal illness associated with pet foods to the FDA Consumer Complaint Coordinator http://www.fda.gov/opacom/backgrounders/complain.html in their state.

Top 10 Pet Videos of 2008

This year saw the addition of some great video clips. Some were just re-released as viral video comebacks, others were brand new.  We’ve focused on the funniest pet video clips on the internet during 2008.

Which one is your favorite?  Leave us a comment and let us know!

Here’s our list for 2008:

1. Ninja Cat
2. Engineer’s Guide to Cats
3. Simon’s Cat – TV Dinner
4. Christian the Lion
5. Polar Bears Play with Dogs
6. Battle at Kruger
7. Herding Cats
8. Cat Drives Roomba
9. Engineer’s Guide to Voting (Vote for Ginger)
10. Simon’s Sister Dog: Fed Up

For more info: Thanks to YouTube and the various videographers and cartoonists for these video clips. Visit PetsWeekly and Examiner.

You and Your Dog on Cover of K9

Have you created a cover for your canine superstar? Do it now by clicking here:

http://www.k9magazine.com/coverstars/

Make your or your friend’s dog a coverstar today for free. Be sure to save your image to your computer. Our feature today is a pic of Malachi and Aquilla – the world’s greatest dogs for 2008! Okay, I know they have been gone awhile, but this is a nice tribute to them.

K9 Cover Stars

Have fun!

Feline Navidad

Feline Navidad
By Stacy Mantle

Christmas Cats

The holiday season is upon us; surrounding us with good will, lots of chill, and neighbors in competition to see who can place the most strands of lights into one electrical outlet. We wear cheerful holiday colors of red and green, and place artificial reindeer antlers and Santa hats on the heads of our unhappy pets.

I love the holiday season. I love the brisk, cool winter days of the desert and the happiness that seems to exude from my fellow drivers as they allow me to cut in front of them during rush hour. And I especially love the thousands of holiday lights that adorn my neighbors’ homes. But even more than that, I love to watch my “anti-Christmas” cats struggle to bring them to the ground.

Yes, this is the time of year that we gently place delicate handmade baubles in our windows and fragile glass ornaments on our newly cut Christmas trees.

Some of us do it more than once…

In our house, for example, the tree is decorated on a daily basis. The holidays have become a bone of contention between my animals and I. While I enjoy the holidays for their highly marketed atmosphere of peace and tranquility, my pets view them as an opportunity for destruction.

To a cat, there is nothing better than climbing up to the top of a newly decorated tree for the sole purpose of destroying it. In their eyes, the symbolic tree has been relocated into their living room for no other reason than entertainment.

Really, what else could a cat want? They already have the comfort and security of a warm home, food and clean water, their own automated litter box, and now they have the convenience of a live tree in their living room. From a cat’s point of view, it’s heaven!

It’s no surprise then to find that cats also share my view that Christmas is the best time of year, but for a completely different reason. To them, Christmas is about having thousands of tiny strands of lights to hang on, dozens of delicate ornaments to knock to the ground, a giant tree to climb in the house, and an unlimited number of noisy beads to knock off the tree.

In my home, the holidays have led to the tradition of cat hockey and tree climbing competitions. On any given day, I must leave the comfort of my desk to referee an impromptu game or remove at least one cat hiding in the uppermost part of the tree as he gleefully removes the ornaments for the other cats’ hockey pleasure.

Generally, the youngest cat is assigned this task. While it is obviously the most entertaining part of the game, the one climbing the tree is always the one to catch the blame. He’s also the one to get sprayed with a water bottle.

While climbing trees is great fun, and wreaking havoc is even more fun, no cat likes to be sprayed with a water bottle. The elders know this; the youngest are still on a “learning curve”.

Here is a typical day in December for me:

4:00 am Wake up
4:03 am Let the dogs out of the house
4:05 am Let the dogs into the house
4:55 am Put some of the dogs into the yard and keep some of the dogs in the house
5:00 am Enter my office and spend the day writing at the computer while letting dogs in and out of the house
5:45 am Hear a loud crash as an ornament falls to the tile floor
5:46 am Listen to the flailing of claws and paws as cats scatter through the home (upon said tile)
5:48 am Curse (a lot) as I make my way through the minefield of little glass balls that have been knocked to the floor from the tree. Run to tree and locate the culprit responsible for most recent ornament drop. Warn them I will take them right back to the shelter if they don’t stay out of the tree, and remind them what shelters do to Christmas-hating, destructive cats.
6:00 am Cat, disgusted with me, storms off as I clean up the shattered ornament I was given as a gift from my best friend.
7:01 am Repeat previous scene. As necessary. Throughout the day…

Each evening is then spent picking up broken ornament balls and replacing them with the rapidly diminishing ornament stash that I keep for these purposes.

Since I can no longer have tinsel on my tree (animals love to eat the dangerous, silvery stuff), I added several beautiful strings of pearls to my Christmas tree. These are great fun for cats as they allow the opportunity for a good game of tug-of-war and, if they successfully move the game into the kitchen, are given the added bonus of making little tinkling sounds on the tile. These little pearl strings are also replaced each day, sometimes as late as 2 am, since that is the best cat playtime.

I console myself with the knowledge that at least my cats have good taste.

Exterior illumination presents a whole new challenge. Christmas lights are wonderful for our neighborhood feral cats to sleep against as they provide heat, but apparently they are even more fun to chew on.

This presents an obvious cat health consideration.

To offset any potential for electrocution, all of our extension cords are covered with electrical tape to prevent chewing. (Generally animals become bored once they have chewed through the tape, thus never reaching the actual cord). The lights are securely fastened with millions of staples to the very edge of the roof. This way, when the cat reaches over the roof to pull the lights down, it faces the possibility of falling to the ground below (something that even cats don’t like to think about) and the threat of getting hurt outweighs the fun it might have playing with the lights.

I spend the holidays walking around my house with a spray bottle in one hand and a dust buster in the other. Gifts are never placed under the tree until the morning of Christmas, (or they are opened each day by over-anxious pets who are worse than children). Tree cats are sprayed from water bottles that are kept in nearly every corner of our home. Hockey cats are subjected to the loud scream of a dust buster, and lights are securely wrapped in tape before they ever reach the roof.

Yes, the holiday season is here. So, keep your lights duct taped and your spray bottle handy, and may you and yours have a wonderful holiday season!

About the Author

Stacy Mantle is a freelance writer who currently resides in the southwestern deserts of Arizona with a number of cats, a coyote/wolf hybrid, and a very understanding husband. Her writing has appeared in publications such as The Arabian Horse Times, Today’s AZ Woman, and Pets Illustrated. Many of her stories and articles have been translated into several languages, and now reach an international audience. Quickly becoming known as “…the Erma Bombeck of animals”, her writing has skyrocketed to new heights as she records the stories of those she loves, inspiring the reader to learn why we have all come to love the animals we share our lives with. She is the author of “Conquering the Food Chain: Living Amongst Animals (Without Becoming One)”, which is available in Barnes & Noble bookstores nationwide, as well as online at www.bn.com or www.amazon.com, and is the founder of PetsWeekly.

Dog Takes Bullets for Family & Lives!

This is an amazing story!

Endangered Species Act

Yesterday, the Bush Administration/U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service blocked critical protection of the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act.

Dogs Can Think No Fair Too!

Study: Dogs can think ‘no fair’ too

25 comments Dec. 8, 2008 12:18 PM
Associated Press

WASHINGTON – No fair!

What parent hasn’t heard that from a child who thinks another youngster got more of something. Well, it turns out dogs can react the same way.

Ask them to do a trick and they’ll give it a try. For a reward, sausage say, they’ll happily keep at it.

But if one dog gets no reward, and then sees another get sausage for doing the same trick, just try to get the first one to do it again.

Indeed, he may even turn away and refuse to look at you.

Dogs, like people and monkeys, seem to have a sense of fairness.

“Animals react to inequity,” said Friederike Range of the University of Vienna, Austria, who lead a team of researchers testing animals at the school’s Clever Dog Lab. “To avoid stress, we should try to avoid treating them differently.”

Similar responses have been seen in monkeys.

Range said she wasn’t surprised at the dogs reaction, since wolves are known to cooperate with one another and appear to be sensitive to each other. Modern dogs are descended from wolves.

Next, she said, will be experiments to test how dogs and wolves work together. “Among other questions, we will investigate how differences in emotions influence cooperative abilities,” she said via e-mail.

In the reward experiments reported in Tuesday’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Range and colleagues experimented with dogs that understood the command “paw,” to place their paw in the hand of a researcher. It’s the same game as teaching a dog to “shake hands.”

Those that refused at the start – and one border collie that insisted on trying to herd other dogs – were removed. That left 29 dogs to be tested in varying pairs.

The dogs sat side-by-side with an experimenter in front of them. In front of the experimenter was a divided food bowl with pieces of sausage on one side and brown bread on the other.

The dogs were asked to shake hands and each could see what reward the other received.

When one dog got a reward and the other didn’t, the unrewarded animal stopped playing.

When both got a reward all was well.

One thing that did surprise the researchers was that – unlike primates – the dogs didn’t seem to care whether the reward was sausage or bread.

Possibly, they suggested, the presence of a reward was so important it obscured any preference. Other possibilities, they said, are that daily training with their owners overrides a preference, or that the social condition of working next to a partner increased their motivation regardless of which reward they got.

And the dogs never rejected the food, something that primates had done when they thought the reward was unfair.

The dogs, the researchers said, “were not willing to pay a cost by rejecting unfair offers.”

Clive Wynne, an associate professor in the psychology department of the University of Florida, isn’t so sure the experiment measures the animals reaction to fairness.

“What it means is individuals are responding negatively to being treated less well,” he said in a telephone interview.

But the researchers didn’t do a control test that had been done in monkey studies, Wynne said, in which a preferred reward was visible but not given to anyone.

In that case the monkeys went on strike because they could see the better reward but got something lesser.

In dogs, he noted, the quality of reward didn’t seem to matter, so the test only worked when they got no reward at all, he said.

However, Wynne added, there is “no doubt in my mind that dogs are very, very sensitive to what people are doing and are very smart.”

Source: http://www.azcentral.com/offbeat/articles/2008/12/08/20081208no-fair1208-ON.html

Lost

Well, we’re almost into another season of LOST! I know, Season 3 was disappointing, Season 4 was only moderately redeeming, but I have high hopes for Season 5. Here’s a sneak preview.

And we’ll be back with more puppy news tomorrow!

The “Darwin” Awards

Yes, it’s that magical time of year again when the Darwin Awards are bestowed, honoring the least evolved among us.

Here is the glorious winner:

1. When his 38-caliber revolver failed to fire at his intended victim during a hold-up in Long Beach , California , would-be robber James Elliot did something that can only inspire wonder. He peered down the barrel and tried the trigger again. This time it worked…

And now, the honorable mentions:

2. The chef at a hotel in Switzerland lost a finger in a meat-cutting machine and, after a little shopping around, submitted a claim to his insurance company. The company expecting negligence sent out one of its men to have a look for himself. He tried the machine and he also lost a finger. The chef’s claim was approved.

3. A man who shoveled snow for an hour to clear a space for his car during a blizzard in Chicago returned with his vehicle to find a woman had taken the space. Understanda bly, he shot her.

4. After stopping for drinks at an illegal bar, a Zimbabwean bus driver found that the 20 mental patients he was supposed to be transporting from Harare to Bulawayo had escaped. Not wanting to admit his incompetence, the driver went to a nearby bus stop and offered everyone waiting there a free ride. He then delivered the passengers to the mental hospital, telling the staff that the patients were very excitable and prone to bizarre fantasies. The deception wasn’t discovered for 3 days.

5. An American teenager was in the hospital recovering from serious head wounds received from an oncoming train. When asked how he received the injuries, the lad told police that he was simply trying to see how close he could get his head to a moving train before he was hit.

6. A man walked into a Louisiana Circle-K, put a $20 bill on the counter, and asked for change. When the clerk opened the cash drawer, the man pulled a gun and asked for all the cash in the register, which the clerk promptly provided. The man took the cash from the clerk and fled, leaving the $20 bill on the counter. The total amount of cash he got from the drawer… $15. [If someone points a gun at you and gives you money, is a crime committed?]

7. Seems an Arkansas guy wanted some beer pretty badly. He decided that he’d just throw a cinder block through a liquor store window, grab some booze, and run. So he lifted the cinder block and heaved it over his head at the window. The cinder block bounced back and hit the would-be thief on the head, knocking him unconscious. The liquor store window was made of Plexiglas. The whole event was caught on videotape.

8. As a female shopper exited a New York convenience store, a man grabbed her purse and ran. The clerk called 911 immediately, and the woman was able to give them a detailed description of the snatcher. Within minutes, the police apprehended the snatcher. They put him in the car and drove back to the store. The thief was then taken out of the car and told to stand there for a positive ID. To which he replied, “Yes, officer, that’s her. That’s the lady I stole the purse from.”

9. The Ann Arbor News crime column reported that a man walked into a Burger King in Ypsilanti , Michigan , at 5 A.M., flashed a gun, and demanded cash. The clerk turned him down because he said he couldn’t open the cash register without a food order. When the man ordered onion rings, the clerk said they weren’t available for breakfast. The man, frustrated, walked away. [*A 5-STAR STUPIDITY AWARD WINNER]

10. When a man attempted to siphon gasoline from a motor home parked on a Seattle street, he got much more than he bargained for. Police arrived at the scene to find a very sick man curled up next to a motor home near spilled sewage. A police spokesman said that the man admitted to trying to steal gasoline and plugged his siphon hose into the motor home’s sewage tank by mistake. The owner of the vehicle declined to press charges saying that it was the best laugh he’d ever had.

In the interest of bettering mankind, please share these with friends and family… unless of course one of these individuals by chance is a distant relative or long-lost friend. In that case, be glad they are distant and hope they remain lost.

*** Remember… They walk among us!!!