Do you know what to do if you see a dog shivering in the
cold? Even with their thick coats they are extremely vulnerable. If you see a
dog outside without shelter you should contact your local police department.
Just like humans, dogs are at risk for hypothermia, frost bite and even death
when left in extreme conditions.
Dogs should never be left outside when temperatures drop
below zero degrees Fahrenheit (-17.7 degrees C). Breeds with shorter hair like
Labradors, Beagles, and greyhounds as well as puppies and older dogs are the
most vulnerable.
Warning signs include shivering, lethargy and clumsiness,
leading to coma and even death. Experts say it’s always best to keep you dog
indoors and not to leave them unattended for extended periods of time. Walking
your dog in the cold can also be painful for your dog’s paws. Keep them moist
and apply petroleum jelly to their paws before walks in the winter.
Please share and help keep every dog warm and safe this
winter.
We’re only a few weeks into 2016 and we’ve already had a
few recalls concerning dog food. Sadly, another one has been announced this
week.
Carnivore Meat Company, which also recalled dog food last
year, is recalling some of its Vital Essentials Frozen Chicken Patties Entrée
for Dogs. The company is voluntarily recalling these products due to potential
salmonella poisoning.
Only one product lot is affected:
Vital Essentials Frozen Chicken Patties Entrée for Dogs
Net weight 6 pounds
UPC 33211 00807
Lot # 11475
Best by date 20161108
While Vital Essentials’ products are sold nationwide, this
particular recall only affects California, Florida, Georgia, Rhode Island,
Texas, and Washington.
Trips to the veterinarian leave Joy so scared, she gets
sick.
The black Lab-mix dog shakes and shivers, her heart rate
jumps, her blood pressure spikes, her temperature rises, her eyes dilate and
she cowers under anything she can get beneath.
After trying vet after vet for 14 years, the dog's owner
Debby Trinen of Sandpoint, Idaho, has finally found relief for Joy's stress
from a new approach to veterinary care called "fear-free."
The fear-free movement aims to eliminate things in the
vet's office that bother dogs and cats — like white lab coats, harsh lights and
slippery, cold exam tables — while adding things they like.
For example, a fear-free clinic "will have a big treat
budget," said Dr. Marty Becker, the initiative's main cheerleader and the
vet chosen to introduce it to the country. All the dogs and cats at his North
Idaho Animal Hospital, where Joy now gets care, have space on their files to
note favorite treats, from Easy Cheese to hot dogs.
About 50 practices across the country have gone fear-free,
Becker said. Later this year, the initiative will start certifying veterinary
professionals. The certification takes about 12 hours of online instruction.
The movement hopes to register as many as 5,000 people this year.
Hospital certification could start in 2018, followed by
animal shelters and homes, Becker said.
Heather Lewis of Animal Arts in Boulder, Colorado, which
has been designing animal hospitals since 1979, says there are many ways to
make veterinary offices more pleasant for pets. Among them:
Paint walls in
pastels and have staff wear pastel scrubs and lab coats. To an animal's eyes, a
white lab coat is like a bright glowing beacon and can be scary.
Remove old
fluorescent lights. Dogs and cats have better hearing than humans, and the buzz
from those old fixtures can bother them.
Consider
alternatives to lifting animals up on to high exam tables with cold, slippery
metal surfaces. Some clinics, like Becker's, use yoga mats for animal exams.
For background
music, choose classical. Becker and Lewis like collections called "Through
a Dog's Ear" and "Through a Cat's Ear."
A fear-free vet might also use sedatives or pheromones — chemicals
secreted by animals that serve as stimulants for many things, including mating
— rather than muzzles or restraints to keep animals calm during treatment,
Becker said.
"Twenty-five to 30 percent of pets need
sedation," Becker said.
Becker introduced veterinarians to the fear-free initiative
at the North American Veterinary Community convention last year. He's
presenting version 2.0 at the 2016 conference beginning Saturday in Florida.
Becker, chief veterinary correspondent for the American
Humane Association, has written 22 books and is doing the 23rd on the fear-free
initiative.
One fear-free center is the Bigger Road Veterinary Center
in Springboro, Ohio.
"We designed this clinic to look like you were going
for walks in the park," said Dr. John Talmadge. "Support beams look
like maple trees. I don't know if we're fooling any pets but the exam rooms
look like cottages and it looks like blue sky on the ceiling. It has a very
inviting feel."
He also expanded from 2,000 square feet to 10,000 square
feet so he'd have room for better senior care and pain management. And for
owners making end-of-life decisions for their pets, the clinic offers a private
area.
"There is nothing more important than making that last
treatment dignified and calming," Talmadge said.
Becker says the fear-free initiative is important because
stress and anxiety cause so many problems for pets, both physical and mental.
"Once pets know fear and anxiety and stress, you can't
undo it," he said, adding, "You can see it. You can smell it because
dogs are stained with their own saliva from licking themselves. You can hear it
and feel it."
Stress and fear can lead animals to hide the symptoms that
prompted the vet visit, and may even alter their test results, said Richard A.
LeCouteur, a veterinarian with a specialty in neurology and a professor
emeritus at the University of California at Davis' School of Veterinary
Medicine.
Talmadge says the fear-free approach is proving popular.
"We have more than doubled our business through that clinic since opening
(in April) and are well ahead of where we thought we would be," Talmadge
said.
The U.S. Postal Service will deliver smiles to cat lovers
later this year thanks to new First-Class Forever stamps that pay tribute to
our friends with fur, fins and feathers.
Among a group of 20 stamps of popular pets who looked into
the lens of Eric Isselée are two photos that celebrates the beauty of our pals
who purr.
Cats have acted as muses (or should that be mewses?) for
postal art since 1887, when Germany issued a stamp which featured a feline
sporting a fish in his mouth. Possibly the first cat to appear with a pet
parent on a stamp, in 1930 the silhouette of a small black kitten named Patsy
starred on a stamp from Italy which honored Charles Lindbergh’s historic flight
in the Spirit of St. Louis. U.S. cat lovers had to wait until 1972 for a feline
to show up on a stamp, according to the book Planet Cat: A Cat-Alog.
Along with the cat and kitten stamps, the upcoming booklet
of First-Class Forever postage also includes such popular companion animals as
puppies and dogs, parrots and parakeets, rabbits, horses, fish, mice, gerbils
guinea pigs and hamsters, geckos, hermit grabs, corn snakes, iguanas and
tortoises.
Pets will be issued as Forever stamps, which are always
equal in value to the current First-Class Mail one-ounce price.
A New Jersey woman who took in two abandoned baby squirrels
said she saw the animals taken away and was slapped with a fine after wildlife
authorities saw images of the critters that she had posted online.
Maria Vaccarella and her husband were surprised to find in
July an injured squirrel they had come upon in a neighbor’s yard had given
birth to two healthy babies and left the pair to fend for themselves.
“We left the babies out for 24 hours. No mom (came back) so
I decided to take them in,” she said.
Vaccarella treated the pair— whom she named Lola and
George— like her pets as she cared for them.
“I read up on them… I started feeding them puppy milk with
whipping cream for three months and started introducing other foods,” she said,
telling CBS New York that she fed them every two hours to build up their
strength.
Vaccarella posted photos of the siblings on social media to
the delight of her friends, who expressed how happy they were to see the
squirrels thriving.
“How sweet is that!” one person commented on a photo.
“You did a beautiful thing… saving those little babies!”
another person wrote.
But those pictures attracted the attention of state
wildlife officers, who visited Vaccarella on October 31.
“I was proud to tell them the story (of) how I saved them,”
Vaccarella said.
“I even asked if they would like to come in and see them…
If I had known it was illegal to have them I would have never let them (the
squirrels) in my home,” she said, noting that she reached out to a
rehabilitation specialist who had been unable to immediately take the pair.
Vaccarella told CBS New York she was happy to give the
squirrels to professionals and thought that was the end of it, but was
surprised to receive a summons in the mail for what she had done.
She pleaded not guilty to possessing captive game animals
and said she faces a fine up to $1,000 and up to six months’ jail time, she
wrote in an online petition to have the charges dropped and to find out where
the squirrels were taken.
“All I did was help these babies,” she wrote on the
petition.
Bob Considine, spokesman for the state Department of
Environmental Protection, which oversees the Division of Fish and Wildlife,
told Inside Edition that the civil penalty carries a fine of $100 to $500, but
no jail time as it is not a criminal penalty.
“We understand there are many people who take in wildlife
and have the best intentions, as clear was the case with Mrs. Vaccarella…
However, domesticating any wildlife for an extended period of time, which was
the case here, also puts these animals at great risk of being unable to survive
in the natural habitat, where they belong,” he told Inside Edition.
After the case was referred to the Division of Fish &
Wildlife by a New Jersey licensed wildlife rehabilitator who saw it on
Facebook, the department was obligated to follow through with an official
notice of violation of law. If they had not acted, they stood to be legally
challenged by the licensed wildlife rehabilitators, or anyone else, who reports
an infraction.
He said this is not a case the department is “focusing any
energy on.”
Wildlife officials are trying to figure out exactly how a
shark got into the swimming pool at a South Florida condo complex.
The South Florida Sun Sentinel reports that Florida Fish
and Wildlife Conservation Commission officers responded to the Mariner's Cay
condominium in Hypoluxo last week after a woman found a live five-foot blacktip
shark in the pool.
The woman told officers she saw two young men running from
the pool, which is located near the shoreline of the Intracoastal Waterway. The
officers removed the shark from the pool and returned it to the ocean.
Blacktip sharks are among the most common species in
coastal South Florida.
Happy birthday, Betty White! The Golden Girls alum turns 94
on Sunday, January 17, and she stopped by The Late Late Show With James Corden
earlier this week to kick off the celebrations.
“I’m sorry you had to say the number,” White said after
Corden, 37, announced her age to the audience on Tuesday, January 12. “I was
going to say it was my 58th!”
The Proposal star jokingly added, “I plan on celebrating
with Robert Redford. He doesn’t know that, and I think he’s out of the country,
but I’m going to celebrate with him.”
To commemorate her birthday, Corden quizzed White and NBA
player Amar’e Stoudemire on whether she was born before or after certain
historical items during a game called “Did It Exist?”
It turns out that White, who was born in 1922, is older
than sliced bread and Mickey Mouse (both were created in 1928).
It was the biggest dinosaur that ever lived, so when museum
experts tried to reconstruct a life-sized skeleton of the recently discovered Titanosaur
it presented something of a challenge.
The American Museum of Natural History in New York needed
to use some careful spatial planning when it built a replica of the enormous
creature for a new exhibition.
At 20 ft (6 m) tall and 122 ft (37 m) long, the recently
discovered dinosaur's skeleton is so big it does not fit in the museum’s
warehouse-sized exhibition room.
Instead curators were forced to build the massive dinosaur
so that its head pokes out of the door to the huge room.
Visitor's to the exhibition, which opens in New York today,
pass under the creature's massive head, which hangs just 9.5 ft (2.8 m) above
the floor.
A video from the museum shows a time-lapse of the
construction team putting the giant bone jigsaw together.
The Titanosaur, which has yet to be given an official
species name, was uncovered by paleontologists in a desert region of Argentine
Patagonia in 2014, after a farmer found what he suspected to be fossils.
Scientists believe the creatures lived 100 million years
ago, and fed exclusively on vegetation.
The 122-foot-long dinosaur stands 20 feet tall and likely
weighed 70 tons, about the same as 10 African elephants. Its thigh bones alone
are each nearly 8 feet long.
To build the giant structure, the museum team started with
the giant hind legs and pelvis.
From there, it was built up over a number of hours adding
sections of the spine, followed by the forelegs, ribs, neck, head and tail.
The dinosaur was identified from among 223 fossils from the
Patagonian site, by paleontologists from the Museo Paleontológico Egidio
Feruglio in Argentina and a team at the American Museum of Natural History.
The museum staff worked with Canadian company, Research
Casting International, to produce the skeleton.
The giant cast took the Canadian firm more than six months
to make, based on 84 fossil bones that were excavated from the site in 2014.
To build the display, the bones were recreated through
plaster casts and 3-D printing.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the skull was
partially designed using a single tooth.
The real fossils would have been far too heavy to mount, so
the life-size model is made of fiberglass.
With its neck elevated, the titanosaur would have been tall
enough to peer into the window of a five-story building, the museum said.
The Titanosaur will be shown to the public in a walking
pose, with its neck stretched out toward the museum's fourth-floor elevators.
In a Tweet from its official account, the museum states: “Ladies
& gentlemen, we are proud to present the Titanosaur, the Museum's largest
dinosaur.”
A new video from the American Museum of Natural History in New York shows the construction of a replica of the world's biggest dinosaur for a new exhibition. The video shows a time-lapse of the construction team putting the giant fiberglass bone jigsaw together.
At 20 ft (6 m) tall and 122 ft (37 m) long, the recently
discovered dinosaur's skeleton is so big it does not fit in the museum’s
warehouse-sized exhibition room.
The biggest dinosaur ever to be shown at the American
Museum of Natural History will be unveiled today, and its head will poke out
the door to greet visitors (pictured). The as yet unnamed Titanosaur is one of
the largest dinosaurs ever discovered, and lived 100 million years ago.
Reconstructing the Titanosaur
The 122-foot-long dinosaur stands 20 feet tall and likely
weighed 70 tons, according to the Wall Street Journal, about the same as 10
African elephants.
Its thigh bone is nearly 8 feet long.
To build the display, the bones were recreated through
plaster casts and 3-D printing.
Scientists from the Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio
and a team at the American Museum of Natural History collaborated with a
Canadian company, Research Casting International worked with what they had,
using existing bones to create what wasn't there.
Now, the Titanosaur will be shown to the public in a
walking pose, with its neck stretched out toward the museum's fourth-floor
elevators.
This is the only way the dinosaur would fit in the
building.
Some of the best-preserved bones will also be on display,
amongst them being the massive femur.
The Titanosaur is so large that it will not fit into one
room in the American Museum of Natural History ; its head will reach the
ceiling, poking out of the gallery and into the hall along with part of the
neck.
