One of Mayer’s greatest hopes for the sterilization drug is to reduce animal euthanasia in Arizona, where shelters are overflowing and thousands of dogs and cats are put down every year.

Maricopa County ranks second only to Los Angeles County in pet overpopulation, according to Bretta Nelson, a spokeswoman for the Arizona Humane Society.

This past year, 94,889 animals entered Valley shelters. The Arizona Humane Society performed nearly 20,600 surgical sterilizations on cats, dogs and rabbits, costing nearly $2 million.

There is still a long way to go before the Food and Drug Administration approves the medication for broad use, but if it comes to pass, the nature of spay/neuter discussions could be fundamentally altered forever.

Worrying rise in parvo has economic roots: Veterinary clinics are reporting an increase in parvovirus, even though it’s easily controlled with an effective vaccine. The instinctive reaction is that the spread of parvo shouldn’t happen, until you think about one reason it is: more and more pet owners are choosing not to take their pets to the veterinarian because of the prolonged economic hard times. Shots are therefore not being administered, and so the deadly incidence is increasing. You can read more at the South Bend Tribune.

Africa’s Dog Whisperer’s dog attacks little girl: If I’m telling you about someone being attacked by a dog, there’s a deeper story. James Lech touts himself as Africa’s #1 dog expert. He calls himself Africa’s “Dog’s Whisperer.” While he was having lunch in a Johannesburg mall, he was accompanied by his Rottweiler. Lech claimed the dog was a service dog. That makes the video accompanying this story from the Times Live so much more disturbing. The Rottie attacked an injured a four year-old girl who was walking by the table. Although Lech claimed the dog was accidentally stepped on, the video indicates otherwise. There’s the background. Now, please read this outstanding response from my friend Nancy Freedman-Smith.

Challenging the veterinary status quo: It’s hard to go against the grain in a respected profession with experts in an established specialty.  That’s why it’s well worth reading this post by Pet Connection’s BFF Dr. Patty Khuly, from her “Fully Vetted” blog. More importantly, be sure not to miss the comment thread that follows.

Lethal heat: Over the past two weeks, triple digit temperatures have blanketed the United States. It’s been brutal for people…and we don’t have fur coats. Imagine what it’s been like for pets. From the Stamford Patch:

Animal Control Officer Chris Martel says that the smart thing to do is to leave the dog at home, even if you don’t have air conditioning. Leave plenty of water, and put on a fan if you have one.

“It can get over 100 degrees in a car in minutes in the summer,” Martel says.

If she sees a dog in a car in a dangerous situation, Martel says, she will not hesitate to issue a summons for cruelty.

If she can’t find the owner of the car, and the dog is suffering, she is allowed by law to break the windows of the car and get the dog out. She can also have a warrant issued for the arrest of the owner of the car, and she says she will not hesitate to do so if the situation calls for it.

If you see a dog – or any animal – locked in a car in a situation that you think is dangerous, you can ramp up your courage and seek out the owner of the vehicle and explain why he or she should get the dog home.

Blog post of the week comes from our friend Heather Houlahan at Raised By Wolves: “Not your stick.”

Video of the week: The kitten is named Visa. The Pitt Bull is named Spike. They fight like, well, cats and dogs. But in a good way. Thanks to Phyllis DeGioia for the tip.

Picture of the week comes to us from my pal Maria Goodavage at Dogster. A Dogster reader named Laura Hickman sent in this picture of an English Bulldog named Elliott. He was the lucky recipient of a cool new bed when neighbors emptied their cooler in an Ohio driveway on a roasting hot day.

Special programming note: Next week, the news wrap will be preempted by special Pet Connection coverage of NoKill 2011. We’ll be live-blogging next weekend from The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., bringing you conference sessions by luminaries in the No Kill movement. The presenters will include Nathan Winograd, Ryan Clinton, and our very own Christie Keith. Stay tuned all next weekend!

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.

Image credit: Dr. Loretta Mayer, azcentral.com. Elliott, dogster.

Michael Boyd, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and director of As You Like It, released the following statement today:

The Royal Shakespeare Company has decided not to use rabbits for its performances of As You Like It in New York.

The production opened in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2009 in the rural heart of the U.K. The dead rabbits used for the performances in Britain—part of a scene illustrating the contrast between court and countryside, where life was harsher and people hunted and prepared their own food—were sourced locally from gamekeepers as part of a farming control program.

The RSC and the RSPCA (the U.K. equivalent of the ASPCA) were satisfied that the rabbits used for the performances in Britain were sourced responsibly and killed humanely.

The moral of the story is: making your voice heard can make all the difference. (Thanks to Mary Cvetan for the heads up).

Rabbit bust in Oakland: Staying on the bunny theme, but with not as happy an ending, a scene out of a bad episode of “Cops” played itself out last week in Oakland, Calif. last week, when nearly two dozen rabbits were seized from a home in Lake Merritt. According to SFGate, the seized animals were malnourished and deformed.

The bunny bust comes just as Oakland enters into the debate over urban agriculture regulations, deciding how to monitor livestock – its treatment and slaughter – in one of the country’s hotbeds of urban homesteading.

“This blurs the lines for animal cruelty. When is it OK to raise something for food, and when is it cruelty?” said Megan Webb, director of Oakland animal services. “This is an issue we’re all going to have to sort out.”

In the case of the 21 rabbits, a neighbor alerted the East Bay SPCA to the rabbits’ condition last week, and on Tuesday, staff from Oakland animal services and the SPCA raided the home.

The additional details are grim, so read at your own peril. Thanks to Susan Fox for the link.

Generics meet veterinarians: It was just a matter of time. Generic medications are finding their way into the veterinary market.

Border Collie beach cleanup: Four different readers wanted to see this story covered, and it’s easy to understand why. Anyone who’s spent time at coastal beaches is familiar with the screech and the mess of seagulls. I’m a sailor, so I have a particular antipathy toward the obnoxious winged rats. The new solution? Border Collies! Back to SFGate:

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) released a report today that suggests that using border collies to harass gulls has helped improve water quality at Illinois area beaches.

Trained to distinguish gulls from other varieties of birds, the collies patrol beaches from dawn to dusk to chase away gulls, whose droppings have been shown to contribute to E. Coli contamination.

Check out the accompanying video. I loves me some Border Collies.

Austin’s a doggy kinda town: Austin, Tex. is already a great city to visit and to live in. It already stands as a shining light of No Kill success. According to the Austin American-Statesman, it just got better if you’re a dog.

Differences between dog and cat people: Business Insider cites a survey from hunch.com that tries to detail the societal differences between dog and cat people. Check it out and see if you fit any of the survey results. I don’t, but perhaps you will.

Note: I’ll be away next week, but Christie Keith will be filling in as your news anchor. See you in two weeks.

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.

Image credits: Shakespeare, loc.gov. Ranger, bcxfour.

We hope everyone has a happy, safe and fun weekend…and be sure to hug your pets a couple extra times, just because.

The blog will return Tuesday morning, July 5, with David’s news wrap.

The blog will resume on Tuesday with David’s weekly news wrap column.

Photo credit: Ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery, arlingtoncemetery.mil.

Anyway … yesterday and maybe earlier, pop-ups appeared on the site. I think this was a surprise gift from the folks at Black Dog; I say “think” because even though I don’t remember discussing them, I may well have approved them.

In any case, they’re not on the blog anymore. I would give a prize to the first person who complained, but I think it would be a 10-way tie.

Carry on …

I hate to be the blog police, but Gina’s out of town and she left me in charge, so, well… here we go.

New here? Look up at the top of the main page of the blog. See that thing about our “comment guidelines“? Please read it, especially the part about how all first time commentors are held in moderation to prevent spam — a system that blocks THOUSANDS of spam comments a month that would otherwise make your reading experience here pretty craptastic.

We release comments at what I have to consider super-human speed, but even bloggers must enter our regeneration pods from time to time, so please don’t accuse us of censoring your oh-so-dangerous-and-brave commentary because your comment didn’t appear two seconds after you made it.

Also, note the part where we don’t allow comments with “usernames” as opposed to, you know, names. That means no, we don’t release comments if you’re using the name “Hater of Famous Dog Celebrity” or “Truth About Important Social Pet Issue” or even “BestDogMomEver.” And we’re definitely not going to allow “House of Pet Supplies at Great Discount Prices” or “Yet Another Pet Blog You Really Must Read.”

If you’re an individual and are dead set on hiding your identity, it’s not like we’re going to come to your house and ask to see your ID. Go ahead and use any name, Bill or Sue or ZsaZsa. We’re cool with that.

And yes, we have some long-time commentors who use non-names, but they started doing that before we made this rule, so it’s kind of like the dog who you let stay on the bed when you’re trying to make it because you started doing it when he was just a cute little puppy and now that’s he’s a 135-pound Great Dane you’re stuck with it.

Also, please don’t include your website, commercial or otherwise, in your actual comment. You can include it in the “website” field when you fill out the comment.

Questions? Feel free to ask.

Dr. Becker, Gina and all of us here at Pet Connection are full of grief for Liz and Dr. Kay, and are taking a day of silence here at the blog to mourn their losses.

Although we won’t be blogging, we know that both of them will be reading, so please continue to leave notes for them here if you wish.

Until Wednesday.

Liz Palika
Kindred Spirits Dog Training
3343 East Vista Way
Vista, CA 92084

I’ve known Liz for a long time, but I met Paul for the first time last summer, when we all went to Del Mar. I could tell in a moment why he and Liz were together. I loved talking to him, and when we parted, I told him I looked forward to seeing him again soon.

UPDATE: If you would like to make a donation in Paul Palika’s memory, their service dog training center is a registered 501(c)3 organization. Paul was very involved in the group.

Make checks out to Kindred Spirits Canine Education Center and send them to

Terry Albert
14021 Earie Lane
Poway, CA 92064

You’ll receive a receipt for your tax deductible donation.

Here is a picture of Paul with Archer, his service dog.
.

.

Semper Fi, Paul.

Zenyatta’s last gallop in California. She’s now retired in Kentucky, with everyone waiting to find out if she’s in foal.
.

.
As for me, what Christie said is the doG’s own truth. I’m working nonstop on the preparations for a 30-city book tour that starts in a little more than a month.

Good times.

And yes, we’ve also upped our reporting from conferences and trade shows, added more places where our work shows up (such as AARP.com) and generally, just hustled our butts off to try to make it in a tough economy that’s even tougher for writers.

One thing I wanted to try was e-books. We have a team that many veterinary schools and certainly specialty practices would envy, not to mention we have some of the top writers in the pet-care world. So I had this idea of e-books, short, tightly focused and very inexpensive works on a single topic people need to know about, such as how to know if your pet needs to go to the ER (Dr. Tony, of course, in his own unique style), how to introduce a new baby to an established pet (Arden Moore and Mikkel Becker), hospice care and pain management (Dr. Robin Downing), various dog-training topics (Liz Palika) and so on.

We’re getting ready to make the first of these book available soon, with the help of an outstanding editor, Greg Melvin (that’s him at right, going over Dr. Tony’s e-book, which he’s editing on paper, being Greg).  Greg is MY editor, the person I have worked with the longest in what is becoming a pretty long career (just because, hey, I’m getting old!). Until fairly recently, Greg was at Universal Press, where he edited Ann Coulter, Aaron McGruder, Dear Abby, Roger Ebert, James J. Kilpatrick and many more writers and cartoonists, and yes, that’s the entire range of left-to-right politics, and all his writers loved him.  (Here’s an article on him, talking about what it was like to edit such a wide range of opinion.) He is an old-school editor, the kind of person whose mastery (and I don’t use that term lightly) of the language is complete, but more than that, you never see his fingerprints on your work: When he edits, it’s as if you wrote it, but better. And yes, he prefers to edit on paper, even e-books.

He is the best editor with whom I have ever worked, and I have worked with a lot of very good editors. He has also, over the years, become my very good friend.

Greg is now working for the federal judiciary, but since he has nights and weekends available in theory, I asked him to take on editing the e-books, and he agreed.

I’m writing from his home in Overland Park, Kansas, now, staying here over the weekend to talk about the e-books (and Madeira, jazz, film noir, Monty Python and Chaucer) before I head in to Kansas City for a couple days of meetings about the spring book tour.

This morning Greg took off for a four-mile walk (he walks 36 miles a week, four miles a day during the week and four miles twice a day on the weekends, no matter the weather … even during blizzards) leaving me with his utterly charming cat, Harry.

Turns out Harry is an editor, too, “helping” me with my writing this morning.

That Harry is here to harass me is a bit of a miracle. He was born on Greg’s uncle’s farm in Mississippi, and Greg saved him on a family visit. He tried to catch all the kittens and the mother, but only Harry would allow himself to be picked up.  The little kitten had every kind of parasite known to cats, and barely made the transition from farm kitten to suburban housecat, he was so sick. Now he has it so good that Greg immediately got a stern warning from me about Harry’s weight … which he’ll need to be reducing slowly before I am back in Kansas City this spring.

Hmmm … maybe the editor and the editor’s cat can write a feline weight-loss guide together. Then I can edit him.