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Wednesday, August 2, 2017
Photographer is Using His Studio to Take Free Portraits of Rescued Pit Bulls: Aims to Dispel Breed's Myths
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Mark Your Calendar! DC Walk for the Animals: Saturday, September 30th – Capitol Riverfront – Yards Park
HRA Teaming with On Tap Magazine’s Wiener 500 Dachshund Dash For Post-Walk Festivities
Washington, DC – One of the great fall traditions continues, as the annual DC Walk for the Animals takes place on Saturday, September 30 at the Capitol Riverfront. The fundraising event includes a one mile walk around the Capitol Riverfront neighborhood to raise money for the Humane Rescue Alliance (HRA), which serves animals and the people who love them. In 2016 alone, HRA touched the lives of 60,000 and tens of thousands of people. Onsite check-in for the event begins at 11 a.m., with the DC Walk for the Animals taking place at noon. Events will continue throughout the afternoon, concluding at 5 p.m.
The registration fee to participate in the Walk is $35. Walkers are encouraged to reach out to friends and family to form fundraising teams to support HRA and compete for recognition as the top fundraising individual or team. For additional information about the DC Walk for the Animals visit www.dcwalkfortheanimals.org.
Also, for the first time, HRA has partnered with On Tap Magazine’s Wiener 500 Dachshund Dash, which will take place following the DC Walk for the Animals. Walk participants are invited to stay and watch this very entertaining event along with a full slate of activities planned for participants after the Walk, including food and beverage vendors, exhibitors, live music, and a pet costume contest.
The location for the DC Walk for the Animals is the Capitol Riverfront - Yards Park. Check-in for the Walk will take place near the corner of 4th St SE and Water St SE.
Ready to register? Click HERE!
About the Humane Rescue Alliance:
The Humane Rescue Alliance (formerly the Washington Humane Society-Washington Animal Rescue League) has protected and served the animals of the community for more than 145 years and serves more than 60,000 animals annually. The broad range of programs offered include: rescue and adoption, humane law enforcement, low-cost veterinary services, animal care and control, behavior and training, spay-neuter services, humane education, and many others. The organization is dedicated to ensuring the safety and welfare of all animals, bringing people and animals together, and working with all communities to support these relationships. HRA is based in Washington, DC, the only major urban area in the country that has all of its animal protection programs and services unified in one organization, making the Humane Rescue Alliance a model for the nation.
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Friday, July 14, 2017
Chain-Reaction Crash With Minor Injuries, Except for the Slime Eels
Picture the scene from the 1984 “Ghostbusters” movie in which Dr. Peter Venkman, played by Bill Murray, complains about being “slimed.” Then multiply that a thousandfold, and you’ll get some idea of what happened on a coastal highway in Depoe Bay, Ore., about 100 miles west of Portland.
A truck hauling 7,500 pounds of hagfish, also known as slime eels, was traveling on Highway 101 around noon, transporting the fish to be exported to South Korea, where some diners consider them a delicacy.
Traffic was halted for road construction, but the truck driver was unable to stop. The truck’s load shifted, causing one of the containers carrying the hagfish to “fly across the highway,” the Oregon State Police said.
To read more on this story, click here: Chain-Reaction Crash With Minor Injuries, Except for the Slime Eels
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A Move to Renew the Defunding of Horse Slaughter Facility Inspectors Was Defeated in a 27-25 Vote
Lucille Roybal-Allard, a Democrat from California, pushed for the inclusion of the renewed ban, but the move was defeated in a 27-25 vote.
Horse slaughter plant inspectors will continue to be unfunded through September 30 of this year; it remains to be seen whether US slaughter facilities will move to reopen after that date.
While slaughter is currently outlawed by default in the US through the lack of inspector funding, horses still fall into the so-called “slaughter pipeline” and are shipped to Mexico or Canada (as well as shipped overseas less commonly) with meat typically sold to European markets. Many supporters of US horse slaughter argue that re-legalizing slaughter in this country would reduce the suffering of animals being shipped over the border; opponents to slaughter argue that there is no such things as “humane horse slaughter” regardless of where the animal is taken.
Horse slaughter has been a contentious issue in the horse world and the political world for years, with strong arguments to be made on both sides for the health of the industry. Regardless of whether you are for or against horse slaughter, this development will certainly have far-reaching effects in the horse industry in the coming year.
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Three Dogs in Florida Were Rushed to an Emergency Veterinarian After Ingesting Fentanyl
Three dogs in Florida were rushed to an emergency veterinarian hospital last year when they were with their handlers during a drug raid and ingested fentanyl – an extremely potent drug used as a painkiller often mixed with heroin and twice as potent.
In response to the dangerous epidemic, law enforcement officers now carry naloxone with them just in case; as they send the police dogs into homes and cars searching for narcotics. The drug naloxone has been used for years to reverse overdoses in humans.
In January, the Massachusetts State Police started carrying naloxone for their dogs, and according to CbsNews, police in Hartford, Connecticut also includes handlers to carry the drug for their dogs – just in case.
As human officers have reported becoming very ill from a small amount of fentanyl after being in close contact with suspects – just patting them down and getting the white powder on their hands, reactions can be even more severe for K-9 personnel.
With dogs, their primary sense is smell, and they literally breathe and inhale the opioids, so to protect their four-legged partners, police officers now carry the naloxone kits which blocks the effects of opioids and reverses overdoses with few side effects.
Previously naloxone had most often been used by doctors, medics and emergency medical personnel – now police, firefighters and families with members suffering from addiction carry the kits; naloxone can be administered through injection or via a nasal spray.
The Drug Enforcement Administration, deputy administrator Jack Riley has warned police officers of the dangers of fentanyl to both humans and dogs:
“Fentanyl can kill our canine companions and partners just as easy as it can humans, so please take precautions for their safety too,” Riley warned.
In Broward County, Florida, a police K-9 officer named Primus became lethargic after a drug search. He and two other dogs were rushed to an emergency veterinarian where the dogs were all treated with naloxone – all three recovered quickly.
It is believed they may have inhaled a trace amount of fentanyl (the same drug that killed Prince) and that the drug even may have been absorbed into their bodies through their paws. Experts believe for a dog just two or three granules like sand would be enough to overdose a dog.
Officers are being much more prudent now before sending dogs into a home or building known where drugs are overtly observed. Sadly the drug epidemic has become so critical in the United States, even our dogs’ lives are at risk.
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The Three Biggest Fire Safety Mistakes Pet Parents Make
The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) reports that more than 500,000 pets are affected by home fires each year.
With Pet Fire Safety Day approaching on July 15, Petplan is raising awareness about prevention and planning for emergencies, and revealed the most common fire-safety mistakes people make:
To read more on this story, click here: The Three Biggest Fire Safety Mistakes Pet Parents Make
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How to Keep Your Cat From Scratching Furniture – and Why You Should Avoid Declawing at All Costs
Of course, clawing is a completely natural behavior for cats. According to PAWS, cats will scratch at furniture, carpet, and other objects for numerous reasons, such as to remove the dead outer layer of their claws, to mark their territory by leaving a visual mark and scent (cats have scent glands on their paws), as well as to stretch their bodies and paws. Unfortunately, for some inexperienced guardians, a cat’s need to claw might drive them to return or abandon their new feline.
70 percent of shelter cats end up being killed including strays, feral and surrendered cats, so it’s important we keep cats happy and safe in their home by any means possible, and keep them out of shelters. So, if your cat is scratching at furniture and other items in the house, here are some tips for how to deter them.
To read more on this story, click here: How to Keep Your Cat From Scratching Furniture – and Why You Should Avoid Declawing at All Costs
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Have You Ever Heard of The Tardigrade, A Microscopic Invertebrate That Can Survive Until the End of Earth?
To a group of theoretical physicists, tardigrades were the perfect specimens to test life's tenacity. “Life is pretty fragile if all your estimates are based on humans or dinosaurs,” said David Sloan, a theoretical cosmologist at Oxford University in Britain.
The tardigrade lineage is ancient. “Tardigrade microfossils are reported from the Early Cambrian to the Early Cretaceous, 520 million to 100 million years ago,” said Ralph O. Schill, an expert on tardigrades at the University of Stuttgart in Germany who was not involved with this research. “They have seen the dinosaurs come and go.”
Sloan, with his Oxford colleague Rafael Alves Batista and Harvard University astrophysicist Abraham Loeb, decided to try to rid the planet of tardigrades. In theory, anyway, in a report published Friday in the journal Scientific Reports. Through the powers of mathematical modeling they tossed three of the most devastating cosmic events at Earth: killer asteroids, supernovae and gamma-ray bursts.
“These are the biggest ways you can transfer energy to the planet,” Sloan said. The tardigrades kept on theoretically trucking, outlasting 10 billion years' worth of cataclysms. Until the point that the sun failed or engulfed the planet.
In picking their apocalyptic poison, the scientists first tried to sterilize the planet with radiation. In the lab, some tardigrade species can survive radiation doses of 5,000 to 6,000 grays. (“You would be very, very lucky to walk away” from a dose of 5 grays, Sloan said.) But long before the scientists blasted Earth with enough radiation to kill all the tardigrades, they calculated that the radiation's energy would boil the oceans away. The sticking point for tardigrades, then, was the evaporation of the planet's water.
For an asteroid to deposit that much energy into the ocean, it would need a mass of at least 1.7 quintillion kilograms. Of all the asteroids in the solar system, only 19 fit the bill. (By way of comparison, the asteroid that finished the dinosaurs was six miles across; an asteroid called Vesta that is one of the potential ocean killers has a diameter of 326 miles.) The chances of such a massive collision are so small, the scientists said, that the sun would die first.
Likewise, the closest stars that could explode into supernovae are too far away to boil the oceans. Gamma-ray bursts were a bit more complicated — “we don't really understand where they come from,” Sloan said — but not impossible to calculate. And though the bursts would strip off parts of the atmosphere, killing animals like humans, tiny and durable creatures under the ocean, huddled around hydrothermal vents, would be “sufficiently well-shielded,” Sloan said.
But lumping all tardigrade species into one unkillable chimera was a fatal flaw in this argument, according to tardigrade expert William R. Miller. “I can't say anything about the physics,” he said, “but they can't say anything about the animals.”
Not all tardigrades dwell in water; some species live in moss and lichens on trees. (Their variety of habitats is reflected in nicknames like “water bear” and “moss piglet.”)
Miller, a biologist at Baker University in Kansas, said that the authors of the new work treat tardigrades as a single animal, ignoring that they are in fact a phylum of 1,250 different species. He compared this approach to arguing that “a sixgill shark at the bottom of the ocean is the same as a snow leopard in Siberia.”
Sloan emphasized that he was approaching the tardigrade apocalypse as a physicist, not a biologist. He said such doomsday calculations commonly take a human perspective, but such an approach misses the true resilience of life. The cosmic implications of this study, he said, “means that if life did get started on another planet in our galaxy, it probably should still be there.”
Land-dwelling tardigrades endure extremes thanks to an ability called cryptobiosis, in which the animals lose all but 3 percent of the water in their bodies. It is in this state that tardigrades can survive the hottest heats, the coolest colds, crushing pressures or the complete lack of it. They desiccate, and then they persist. Joseph Seckbach, a biologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said that a tardigrade “can be in dormancy for 30, 40 years, and wake up and say, ‘Hello!’ ”
But there is no indication that water-dwelling tardigrades are capable of the same process, Miller said. “The illusion that marine animals survive with a cryptobiotic plan is just dead wrong.” Nor are they indestructible. “We work with active animals and they're quite easily murdered,” he said. “We kill thousands of them every day.”
Shill noted that tardigrades had evolved to survive in particular microhabitats. “I believe that the resistance to radiation is a product of chance,” he said. “If an astrophysical event sterilized all life on Earth, it does look also bad for the future of these amazing animals.”
That's not to say cosmic tardigrades are out of the question. In 2014, Miller and physicist Ran Sivron calculated that tardigrades could survive the 4.37-light year trip to Alpha Centauri (and then longer, if they presumably landed on a friendly exoplanet). Even then, though, “the ability to go into this cryptobiosis survival mechanism probably isn't going to work,” Miller said, “if they still don't have food, water, habitat or atmosphere.”
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