pet connection

Show of hands: how many of you plan ahead?

OK, for those of you who raised your hands and meant it (Gina, please put your hands down. C’mon, I’m serious), I have the first recommendation for a book you’ve gotta buy when it comes out in 2011.

According to Reuters, Three Rivers Press will be publishing “Awkward Family Pet Photos” sometime next year.  It’s the followup to the outrageously funny “Awkward Family Photos”  (which I have right here on the table next to me, if you must know), based on this epic blog.   From the Reuters story:

Both sites were created by Mike Bender and Doug Chernack to celebrate the uncomfortable casual snapshots that every family owns.

The book version of “Awkward Family Photos”, released in May, has reached the New York Times paperback advice bestseller list, while the web site gets over 20 million impressions a month.

I don’t know which are better, the pictures or the captions.  To get a preview of what AFPP will look like, give this site a gander.   Fair warning:  the two sites combined could easily chew up an hour (or three) of your day … not that I know that from experience or anything.  No, just guessing.  Yes, that’s it. Guessing.

Senseless hot car tragedy: It doesn’t matter how many times or how widely it’s publicized, stories like this one from the Washington Post about a woman in Frederick, Maryland still happen like clockwork every single summer, and they still break my heart each time. And this one is even worse for its astonishing ending.

A woman has been charged with animal cruelty after her yellow Labrador retriever died in an overheated car while she shopped at a Costco in Frederick, authorities said.

Cathryn Washington, 67, left 14-year-old Delta in the vehicle as she ran in to buy some pet products on an afternoon when the temperature hit 104 degrees, Sgt. David Luckenbaugh of Frederick Animal Control said.

She intended to just be 15 minutes or so [returning] after about an hour and 15 minutes to find Delta clinging to life.

A 14-year-old dog. And 15 minutes would have been more than enough to kill any dog. But wait, it gets worse: She went back in and returned the pet products. Pick your jaws off the floor now and go read. Yes, there’s even more to this story.

Gulf rescue: Shelters all over the Gulf of Mexico coast have been filling up since the oil disaster started three months ago. Last month, 10 homeless dogs, refugees from the Gulf, made it from Louisiana shelters to Annapolis, MD.  Again, from the Washington Post:

Bryan Myers and Meredith Luttrell of Arnold adopted a 7-month-old Labrador retriever mix, whom they’ve named Cooper. When they first brought him home, they said he seemed sad and shy.

“It definitely took him awhile to warm up,” Luttrell said. “You could tell he had been through a lot.”

But after a week, they say they’ve seen a complete turnaround in Cooper.

“He’s a very sweet and affectionate dog,” Myers said. “I don’t think we could have picked a better dog.”

Of the 10 dogs sent to Annapolis, only one is left, a female Labrador retriever mix named Bree. Every little bit helps.

Advanced veterinary care increasing: More and more today, veterinarians are treating their patients with increasingly sophisticated — and sometimes pricey — therapies and techniques.

MSNBC highlights about the trend, and quotes Pet Connection’s BFF Dr. Patty Khuly in the story:

Around the nation, veterinarians are practicing ever more advanced medicine on the nation’s 77 million dogs, 90 million cats and a myriad other animals — treatments that vie with the best of human medicine.

The driving force is “the changing role of the pet in our society,” said Dr. Patty Khuly, a veterinarian at Miami’s Sunset Animal Clinic. The bottom line for many people, she said, is that investing in a pet’s life “improves the quality of a human life immeasurably more than, say, buying a luxury car.”

[...]

Though many Americans don’t get the kind of care their pets do, there are often no limits to what they’ll do to save the animals — spending $12 billion last year paying veterinary bills, according to The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. That’s about double what owners spent a decade earlier.

Hey watch it, I’m packin’ a Flexi: Glock makes firearms. Flexi makes retractable leashes. Which product has a longer safety warning? According to our pal Janeen over at SmartDogs, the answer may surprise you.

The Flexi lead’s product safety warning is over 1,400 words long. Glock‘s is less than 250.

[...]

I understand that the number of words (or scary pictures) published in a product safety warning isn’t necessarily a fair indication of how dangerous an item is, but since is it’s no secret that I hate the ubiquitous retractable leash I decided to do a little research on accident statistics to see if I could turn up anything interesting.

The results of my search were absolutely jaw-dropping.
According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) 16,564 injuries associated with leashes required hospital treatment in 2007.

According to my trusty calculator, that’s more than 45 injuries associated with leashes every single day. Janeen doesn’t like retractable leashes, and her post talks about why. It’s definitely worth a read. In all fairness, though, a Glock 9mm pistol will not be even a little bit helpful when I’m walking Cami and Harry around our local wooded trails, and in any case, I don’t have a license. I’m just sayin’.

Goats on a golf course. NOT the same as snakes on a plane: Let’s fly up to Bismarck, ND, shall we? There are these goats, see. And they were supposed to be slaughtered, only this man named Eric Stromstad bought them for $50 apiece. He’s a superintendent of a golf course, and instead of using them for shish kebab, he put them to work. They’re now part of the maintenance staff of the Hawktree Golf Club. One of them even has a name: Lucifer. Lucifer the Goat. The Lord of the Underworld and his pals do a great job, too, eating 3 percent of their body weight in weeds every day. And Eric loves the idea. From the Fargo paper,

The animals’ 1,000-square-foot pen is moved every few days to a new patch of noxious weeds. The goats have an insatiable appetite for the weeds, especially leafy spurge, Stromstad said.

“Outside a handful of crushed corn, they’d rather eat weeds than anything,” he said. The goats also are drawing visitors to the course, Stromstad said. “Some members are bringing their grandkids here to see the goats and not to play golf,” he said.

Thanks to our Phyllis DeGioia for the crunchy story.  Next time I’m in Bismarck I plan to meet Lucifer.

Hey, you can’t keep those chickens there:   For the second straight post, I have a chicken story for you, this one courtesy of the lovely P Greene (that would be my wife).

I don’t want to say the police in Austell, GA, aren’t very good at their jobs, because I’m sure they are.  Police work is nothing to laugh about.  However, Austell’s finest cited a man named Robert Sosebee for having illegal livestock on his property.  The livestock were, you guessed it, chickens. In point of fact, Mr. Sosebee did have chickens on his property, but he wasn’t breaking the law, even though he didn’t have a permit.  Why?  Because the chickens were ceramic.

I always like to hear from readers, especially if you have tips, and links for interesting stories.  Give me a shout in the comments, or better yet, send me an e-mail.

Photo credits:  Eight lives to go, AwkwardFamilyPetPhotos.com.  Scofflaw chickens, wsbtv.com

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