The life-saving skills of a black Labrador have earned him a top medal in the British Army. Nine-year-old Treo’s job is to sniff out roadside bombs in Afghanistan for soldiers, and he has proved rather good at it.

In August, 2008, while working as a forward detection dog in Sangin, Treo found a “daisy chain” improvised explosive device (IED) – made of two or more explosives wired together – that had been carefully modified

and concealed by the Taliban at the side of a path. A month later, his actions saved another platoon from guaranteed casualties, again by finding a daisy chain IED.

Now he is being rewarded with the Dickin Medal – the animal equivalent of a Victoria Cross – the highest accolade for a military animal.

Treo retired and is now enjoying life with handler Sergeant Dave Heyhoe back at 104 Military Working Dogs Support Unit, in North Luffenham, Rutland.  Sgt Heyhoe said, “Treo’s work involves searching for arms and explosives out on the ground to the forefront of the troops. It’s very important. We are part and parcel of the search element. We’re not the ultimate answer but we are an aid to search. Another aid would be the metal detector – but Treo is a four-legged variety.”

Sgt Heyhoe says their relationship is now far more than a working partnership.

“Basically, me and the dog have got to understand each other and without that we can’t be effective on the ground. He must know when I want him to go somewhere to search. Everyone will say that he is just a military working dog – yes, he is, but he is also a very good friend of mine. We look after each other.”

Treo is the 63rd animal to receive the Dickin Medal – introduced in 1943 to honor the work of animals in war – and the 27th dog to receive the honor. Since its introduction it has also been presented to 32 World War II messenger pigeons, three horses and one cat.

[Courtesy of FoxNews.com]

It’s time to dig up those old fur coats you regret buying on impulse 10 years ago and got no use out of. Besides, fur is no longer in fashion, it’s shunned by some of the hottest designers out there! Luckily, the Humane Society of the United States has come forth with a solution to rid of you faux-paux while helping animals in need (and gives you a chance to buy some faux-fur instead!)

The Coats for Cubs program helps orphaned, injured or sick wildlife by gathering fur coats and using them for nests, bedding or cuddly replacements for mom and dad. In 2009 alone, 2,687 fur items were donated.

“We use the discarded furs as bedding to give the animals comfort and reduce stress,” said Michael Markarian, the agency’s chief operating officer in Washington, D.C. “The fur garments act as a surrogate mother. It is a warm and furry substitute.”

The coats go to wildlife rehabilitation centers that take in baby raccoons, chipmunks, squirrels, coyotes, skunks and other animals, and has helped thousands of animals since it began in 2005 with the Fund for Animals.

Markarian said many of the coats are donated by people who find fur to be inhumane — whether the animals are trapped in steel-jawed traps or raised on factory farms. For those who have fur and no longer want to wear it, “This is a great way for them to give back to the animals,” he said.

Amber Ginter, 13, from Kingston, Ohio, spent last summer collecting fur coats as part of a community project affiliated with the Humane Society. She put a box in her church, wrote a letter describing the project in the church bulletin and collected 30 coats in two months, she said.

“It was kind of sad to see all the furs because you know they had to kill the animals to get them,” said Amber, who wants to be a veterinarian or zoologist when she grows up.

The Florida Wildlife Center in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. has used coats for wildlife babies in the past, but employees and volunteers had to scrounge for donations, twist arms, or scour garage sales and thrift stores. After becoming a Humane Society affiliate last June, the center got three boxes full of furs and are well stocked for baby season.

“It’s a remarkable, generous way to make good of a tragic beginning. I know young people are involved in this effort. Bravo for understanding this better than adults and for seeing a positive way to help other animals,” said Sherry Schlueter, managing director at the Florida Wildlife Center in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

The center houses what they believe is the largest wildlife trauma center in the United States, Schlueter said. Of the 12,000 animals cared for in 2009, just over 1,900 were orphaned babies, including about 1,000 gray squirrels, Virginia opossums and raccoons — those most likely to benefit from the furs.

The center is expecting at least 1,000 additional baby animals in 2010 because a nearby wildlife rehab center closed last year.

The coats are always needed, but they are especially welcome in one of the worst winters in memory, said Erica Yery, president of the Wild Bunch Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in Alexandria, Va. Most of the baby animals she has now are raccoons who are making good use of the coats.

“They go in and snuggle up. Of course, they might tear it to shreds after a while,” she said. But she knows they like the fur — if they didn’t “they would just throw it out. They wouldn’t keep in it their nesting box.”

The coats are great, but caps and hats are even better, she said, because she doesn’t have to cut them and they are already rounded like nests.

The current Coats for Cubs coat drive technically ends on Earth Day, April 22, but the Humane Society will accept coats any time of the year, Markarian said. Donations can be shipped to the group or turned in to any Buffalo Exchange, which has stores or franchises in 14 states.

For more information and to make your own donation, please visit the Humane Society’s website.

[Courtesy of yahoo! news]

About 10 years ago, Cliff Richardson was living under a bridge, scratching out the troubled life of a drug addict. He was living amongst a community of homeless people residing there, but Richardson’s closest companion may have been Bullet, a small mixed breed dog so smart that she seemed to cross streets only when the light turned green.

One of the places Bullet would wander to was an alley off Seventh Place — a small side street just blocks from the bridge in the Arts District in Los Angeles — where activist Lori Weise had a makeshift kennel and free kibble for homeless individuals to feed their canines.

Skipping forward to the present, past Richardson’s repeated run-ins with the law and multiple “state vacations” as he calls them, and he still makes a habit of visiting Weise and her dogs on Seventh Place. But now when Richardson stops by, instead of just grabbing some dog food, he helps walk, socialize and train her pack of more than a dozen rescues.

Last year, Weise, who runs the nonprofit Downtown Dog Rescue, secured a $20,000 grant from the Annenberg Foundation to support her program Jobs With Dogs. The project seeks to employ homeless, low-income and under-employed individuals to walk and socialize the dogs, some of which are up for

adoption.

The initiative is not new: Weise, who houses the shelter at the Modernica furniture warehouse where she’s the manager, has been active in the field since 1989. Downtown Dog Rescue started as an small no-kill shelter that took in homeless dogs off Skid Row, socialized them, spayed and neutered them when possible, and found them homes. Along the way, Weise has always sought to build relationships with and sometimes employ people from Skid Row and beyond. That’s why she provided the free food to the men and women of Skid Row who kept dogs, a practice that she says is far less common today than it was in the 1990s.

“When I was talking to Annenberg and asking for this grant, I basically said, I’m going to do this work whether you give me the grant or not,” Weise said. “It’s just that it’ll really help me to expand what I’m already doing.”

Richardson, who has always had an affinity for dogs, was assigned one of Weise’s most timid rescues, a caramel-colored pitbull named Kylie. He and friend Tony Sperl, an animal activist who helped Richardson reconnect with Weise, would show up and walk a pack of Weise’s dogs a few times a week. On Sundays, they would participate in Downtown Dog Rescue’s weekly dog training classes at the Coliseum, Richardson always pairing with Kylie.

“Kylie is a dog that’s basically un-adoptable,” Weise said. “She’s not going to bite you, she loves other dogs, but you take her to an adoption [event] and she’s just going to cower and shake.

“But Cliff was able to really connect with this dog. Not even the lady that rescued her could do that.”

The one-year Annenberg grant allows Weise to pay Jobs With Dogs participants about $10 per hour. The program extends beyond dog walking and training. Weise has also hooked up with the gang intervention organization Homeboy Industries, employing that group’s members to distribute anti-dog fighting fliers to stores around town. The fliers include a tipline to report dog fighting.

Then there are cases like Henry Acosta, another Jobs With Dogs participant who has battled drugs and anger management issues since he was a teenager. The South Los Angeles resident has worked on and off at Modernica doing maintenance tasks for about 10 years. He quit a few times, and Weise fired him a few times.

“Lori always gave me a second chance,” Acosta said.

Acosta helps with another Downtown Dog Rescue project, Operation Safety Net, which works mostly with older women in South Los Angeles who need yard work and maintenance in order to keep their dogs. Acosta is an apprentice in the program, learning skills such as fence building, all the while helping to ensure that another dog with a home doesn’t end up on the streets or at the pound.

Though Acosta does not yet walk the dogs, he sees them and hears them every day when he’s working at Modernica.

“One thing I’ve realized is that all these dogs have different personalities,” he said. “There’s the timid ones, the rowdy ones, the playful ones — they’re just like human beings.”

Please visit downtowndogrescue.com for more information.

[Courtesy of LA Downtown News]

Missy, an eight-year old cat, owes her life – and her mobility – to her family and vet technician. And now, she’ll be known as the first feline in the world to get a complete knee replacement.

Vets believed she was close to death after she was run over by a car, but she made a recovery after undergoing pioneering new surgery to rebuild her limbs and fit a specially-made metal joint.

The eight-year-old family pet had been lying injured in a bush for two long days with one hind leg broken in eight places and the other with a completely dislocated knee before she was found by her owners.

“I heard a tiny little cry coming from the bush and I knew she was calling me,” said owner Louise Morris from Petworth, West Sussex.

Dr. Noel Fitzpatrick, the vet who performed the operation at his clinic in Guildford, said, “It was a case of  putting Missy to sleep forever or developing an artificial knee, which had never been done before. Amputation was not an option since the other hind leg was broken in eight places.”

The skin and tendons at the back of her other foot had died due to crushing of the blood supply and the tissue had all fallen off, leaving raw bone exposed.

In order to regrow tissue and cover the bone, a collagen mesh made out of pig’s bladder was used. The various broken bones were then placed in a scaffolding of pins called a SPIDER (Secured Pin Intramedullary Dorsal Epoxy Resin Frame) until the bone and tissue healed.

The new total knee replacement implant was designed by Dr. Fitzpatrick,Professor Gordon Blunn and Mr. Jay Meswania of OrthoFitz Implants. It is made of two parts which are linked together with a hinged mechanism so that the knee ligaments – which had all been shredded – would no longer be required and the knee could no longer dislocate. Uniquely, the implant was custom-designed based on a scan of Missy’s knee and
exactly fitted Missy’s measurements, both in terms of the size of her bones and the range of motion of her knee joint. The three-inch long implant is made out of stainless steel and is bonded to the thigh bone and the shin bone using cement.

Dr. Fitzpatrick added: “The most difficult thing about the operation was miniaturizing the implants and matching the hinge motion to allow walking, running and jumping, which cats do a lot of. A human patient with a knee replacement would probably walk and maybe even run but would rarely expect to jump.”

The operation took two-and-a-half hours to cut the old damaged knee out and replace it with the new implants.

After twelve agonizing weeks of treatment, her owners were over the moon to take Missy home to pamper her and treat her to her favorite chicken dinner.

Ms. Morris now faces a huge vet’s bill but said, ‘Missy is a valuable member of the family and we would do whatever possible provided she has a good quality of life.”

She added, “Noel is a genius. He makes it possible for animals to have the same level of care as humans.”

A First Amendment battle is brewing in the Supreme Court over dogfight videos.

Robert J. Stevens, an author and small-time film producer who calls himself an “educator” specializes in pit bulls. He was sentenced to 37-months in prison under a 1999 federal law that bans trafficking in “depictions of animal cruelty.” Although Stevens, 69, had nothing to do with the dogfights shown in his videos, he did compile and sell tapes showing them.

He was sentenced under a law that bans trafficking in depictions of animal cruelty.

The Supreme Court is set to hear his case on October 6, which has divided animal rights groups and free-speech advocates. The central issue is whether the court should deem a category of expression as so vile that it deserves no protection under the First Amendment. The last time the court did this was in 1982 and the subject was child pornography.

Dogfighting is illegal in all 50 states. The 1999 federal law was primarily aimed at cracking down on depictions of such conduct.

Steven’s recent prosecution has raised several issues regarding the nature and social worth of the videos. Defense experts claimed that the films had educational and historical value, noting that much of the footage came from Japan, where dogfighting is still legal. A veterinarian who testified for the prosecution said the videos depicted terrible suffering, including scenes of dogs that were “bitten, ripped and torn” and “screaming in pain.”

According to the New York Times, while there is biting in the dogfighting videos, the fights are not bloody. Steven’s video, “Catch Dogs and Country Living,” shows pit bulls being trained to attack hogs and then hunting wild boar. The encounters are gory and brutal. Mr. Stevens participated in the hunting and filming, which bears some resemblance to nature documentaries.

The 1999 law applies to audio and video recordings of “conduct in which a living animal is intentionally maimed, mutilated, tortured, wounded or killed.” It does not matter whether the conduct was legal when and where it occurred so long as it would have been illegal where the recording was sold.

This means it may be a crime for an American to sell a video of a bullfight that took place in Spain (where bullfighting is legal).

Several news organizations, including The New York Times, filed a brief supporting Stevens saying that the 1999 law “imperils the media’s ability to report on issues related to animals.”

In a brief supporting the government, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) said that “gruesome depictions of animal mutilation” targeted by the law “simply do not merit the dignity of full First Amendment protection.”

But there are hints in the videotapes that Stevens knew that people participating in dogfighting in the United States were doing something illegal. While he was careful to protected the identities of U.S. participants and spectators, he did not do so for those involved in the Japanese dogfights or in the video of dogs attacking hogs.

The Supreme Court has never ruled that speech about nonsexual violence (most notably in video games) is beyond the protection of the First Amendment.