Let's Help Animals

You can see the scars of this recovering dog in the picture below….

Diamond had to overcome fire, smoke and her breed’s reputation to become a hero.

The 15-month-old dog is a pit bull — the canine of choice in dogfights, the dog most often cited in the news about vicious attacks and the most abandoned and euthanized dog in the country. But on Wednesday, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Los Angeles presented Diamond with their 29th annual National Hero Dog award.

Diamond’s owner, Darryl Steen, and his two daughters were asleep in their Hayward apartment on Oct. 24 when the dog started barking. The apartment was on fire.

“She means everything to me. If it hadn’t been for this dog, me and my girls wouldn’t be alive,” Steen said.

Steen grabbed his 9-year-old daughter Darahne and dropped her to safety out of a second story window. He said he couldn’t find his 16-year-old daughter, Sierra, who was hiding under a mattress in her father’s room. Diamond had found her; firefighters spotted the gray-and-white pit bull on the mattress shielding Sierra, Steen said.

Steen and Sierra were hospitalized for weeks with burns, and had to have skin grafts. Diamond spent six weeks at a pet hospital, being treated for burns and smoke inhalation.

The bill was over $5,500 but people were so generous and there were so many donations, some money had to be sent back, Steen said.

The 15-month-old pit bull had been with the Steen family about a year before the fire, Steen said. She was protective of his girls, but her allegiance had never been tested.

Steen and his daughters are living with his sister in Hayward, and Diamond is staying with their other relatives because they haven’t been able to find an affordable apartment that will take Diamond.

Some people worry that she weighs nearly 50 pounds and others are concerned about her breed, he said. But Steen, who will be able to return to his job at a warehouse in June, won’t give Diamond up, so he keeps looking.

He hopes the award helps the apartment search: “Hopefully it will, and I’ll be able to get a decent place with my dog.”

With her title, Diamond gets a plaque, dog food for a year, air fare to and from Los Angeles and hotel accommodations for her and her family. The spcaLA for 29 years has been recognizing the heroic efforts of a dog that is not formally trained for rescue or law enforcement.

But for all her heroics, Diamond isn’t without an Achilles’ heel.

“She likes the dog park and playing with me and the girls. But she doesn’t like cats. She is scared of cats,” Steen said.

The story with a few more pics HERE.

Stewart Fuller of Hiram, Ga., not only piloted airplanes, but he also built them and parachuted from them. He lived on a ranch and traveled the world, married and raised a family.

Later in life and living by himself, he rescued two dogs, Acee and Reesee.

When Fuller was diagnosed with cancer and learned he had only a short time to live, he vowed he would find a home for his beloved pets.

On April 7, Linda Schiller, founder and president of Eleventh Hour Rescue in Randolph, received an e-mail message that started, “My name is Heather, and I’m trying to help a dying man place his two beloved dogs.”

The sender, from a shelter in Pennsylvania, was contacting Eleventh Hour as part of a networking process that takes place regularly among shelters and rescue organizations when a special case arises.

Schiller contacted Fuller and was captivated by his life story and moved by his love for his dogs.
“We talked for hours, and only once during that conversation did he cry,” said Schiller. “He broke down when he told me he had promised Reesee and Acee that he would always love them and take care of them and nothing bad would ever happen to them. He told me he had saved Reesee from a shelter, but she had saved him from despair … and how they and Acee, a neighborhood stray befriended by Reesee, had become a happy family of three.

You can read the rest HERE.

This is kind of a crazy story out of China…thought it was interesting. It’s like Robin Hood meets the ASPCA.

Animal-rights activists are barking mad over news that trickled out over the weekend involving a truck full of 520 dogs that was stopped Friday on a highway en route to a slaughterhouse.

Discussion of the issue was rife over the next two days, particularly online, with people debating the merits of national laws protecting animals.

A man surnamed An saw the truck at the Tongzhou section of the Beijing-Harbin expressway at 11 am Friday. Suspecting the dogs were illegally acquired, he forced the truck to stop and asked others for help via his microblog, according to media reports.

“After overtaking my truck, An’s car abruptly braked, forcing me to make a panicked stop,” Hao Xiaomao, the truck driver, told the Global Times. “It would have been a rear-end collision if I had reacted slower.”

After seeing An’s blog, hundreds of animal activists began arriving at the scene with mineral water and food. Some celebrities and foreigners were also rumored to have shown up.

Their presence jammed the highway temporarily and forced police to shut down a nearby exit, according to reports.

The police later found that Hao had all the necessary paperwork, including regarding animal quarantine and immunity, for the dogs, but activists refused to abandon their rescue effort.

After nearly 15 hours, the incident ended with a pet company and an environmental conservation foundation co-buying the dogs for about 115,000 yuan ($17,606).

However, Hao said he still suffered a 20,000-yuan loss due to his failure to deliver the dogs to Jilin Province.

Accusing the activists of acting improperly, Hao, 33, said, “They were neither the police nor inspectors. Besides, their acts were too dangerous on a highway.”

You can read the rest HERE.

Also, here are some follow up opposing view articles HERE.

A puppy with horrific injuries was left for dead after being dumped in an industrial wheelie bin and buried under heavy bags.

The four-month-old Staffordshire bull terrier, named Earl by the couple who rescued him, had either been beaten up or hit by a car before being tossed into the large metal container in Congleton in Cheshire East.
The pup had a broken leg and one of his eyes had come out of its socket.

Earl might never have survived had it not been for boxer dog Duke, who was inside a car that had pulled up in a nearby car park.

Duke’s owner Jane Walsh, 39, let him out of the vehicle and he trotted straight over to the bin.
When Miss Walsh walked over to the bin she heard whimpering coming from inside.

‘I lifted the lid and saw something move,’ she said.
‘I thought it must be a rat at first and put the lid down.
‘Then I opened it again and saw this huge, swollen and bloody eye on a tiny face.’

To the rescue: Jane Walsh called her partner to help rescue Earl, who she heard whimpering in the bin, as Miss Walsh couldn’t reach into the four-feet high bin to rescue him, she rang her partner Shaun Wood for help.

You can read the rest HERE.

Anyone who has ever known the love of a dog gets what Ria Ghai means when she says her rescue dog rescued her.

He cheers her when she’s down. Spirits her from her desk when the challenges of her work – she is a doctoral student in biology at McGill University – threaten to overwhelm. Makes her feel safe.

“He’s got me out of the house on walks when I thought I was going to crack, and he’s been my friend to hold tight at night when I psych myself into thinking my house is haunted (yup, PhD student, still freaked out by ghosts) … I don’t know how I’d be getting through my PhD without him,” she wrote recently on the Mc-Gill Grad Life blog (blogs.mcgill.ca/ gradlife), where Ghai and others blog about the frustrations and rewards of graduate life.

Ray, as he is known, is a miniature bear-headed American Eskimo. He is blind – and almost certainly old. He is preternaturally quiet and still and he is endlessly patient. “If you put him down and he knows you are coming back, he waits, patiently – the biggest gentleman,” Ghai gushed the other day as Ray snuggled up against her, silent and unseeing, yet clearly basking in the warmth of her affection. He’s one contented dog, that Ray.

He came into her life nearly two years ago: she’d graduated from the University of Alberta with an honours degree in animal biology, and had a job at the Edmonton Humane Society as a behaviour specialist, working to rehabilitate aggressive or fearful animals to make them suitable for adoption. Ghai, 24, is passionate about animals.

Ray was brought in to the shelter after he was fished out of the North Saskatchewan River in Devon, a town south of Edmonton: the couple who found him bathed him and called animal control. He was in rough shape: emaciated, skin showing pink because his coat was so thin, tail all ratty, the fur on his paws stained brown from constant licking: a sign of depression, a veterinarian would suggest to Ghai.

You can read the rest HERE.

SARBI, the bomb-sniffing dog who was missing for more than a year in the wilds of Afghanistan, has joined Simpson’s donkey as the recipient of the RSPCA’s highest award for animal bravery.

At a ceremony at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra yesterday, the 10-year-old Labrador-Newfoundland cross had the Purple Cross pinned to her coat and was then mobbed by primary school children.

She is the ninth animal to win the award, and the second after Murphy, one of John Simpson Kirkpatrick’s Gallipoli donkeys, to win it for wartime service.

Sarbi went missing in September 2008 when a convoy of Australian and Afghan soldiers was attacked by insurgents in Oruzgan province.

Nine Australian soldiers were wounded in the engagement, and it was discovered in the aftermath that Sarbi had disappeared.

Soldiers searched for her, and the Australian defence force even considered offering a reward for her return, but to no avail.

You can read the rest and see a video of the ceremony HERE.

Sounds like the parents could use a tune up…but still a nice story.

4/3/11

When 22-month-old Tyler Jacobson wandered off into the dark woods surrounding his South Carolina home, he was wearing only his T-shirt and a diaper.

Rescuers using a bloodhound tracking team and an infrared-equipped search helicopter scoured the woods for the missing boy, but high winds and deep darkness forced them to call off their search until daylight Saturday.

Thankfully, the toddler had someone looking after him. One of his family’s dogs apparently had tagged along and stayed at his side through the night, keeping the boy warm and safe as temperatures dropped into the 40s.

“I believe that dog being with him is what kept him alive,” Kershaw County Sheriff Jim Matthews told AOL News in a telephone interview today.

“I was with one of my officers talking to the helicopter crew when we got the call, ‘They found him.’ And I was like, ‘Is he alive?’ We worried there was no way, because of the coldness and because he had been out there all night.

“When they said, ‘He’s fine,’ I’m thinking, Wow. How did that happen? And the answer is because of that dog.”

Tyler was reported missing about 8 p.m. Friday by his mother, Jacklyn Marie Jacobson, 25, who said that the child left the bedroom where she and her boyfriend were watching a movie to get some juice, according to local newspaper The State.

You can read the rest HERE.

This is a tad morbid, but I thought it was kind of interesting. My wife and I are actually going through some estate/will planning right now, and the subject of our 2 dogs came up. One would assume that a person relatives would know how important ones pets were to them and see that they had someone to take care of them, but I guess that is not always the case.

3/28/11

All Dogs Should Have a ‘Dogfather’ — If you die before your dog, who will take care of him?

Think of the overwhelming sadness you feel when your dog passes away. It can be a rough grieving process. You are upset, devastated, and sometimes, not sure how to go on.

Now imagine it from your dog’s point of view. Your owner passes away. The person who always fed you, took you for walks, cuddled with you and loved you is now gone. How do you go on?

Little Spritzer fell into this very predicament.

Spritzer is 16 years old and his owner passed away before he did, and to make matters worse, the owner’s family did not want him, so they took him to a shelter. It is one thing to be a young dog in a shelter, where the care is not the best, but to be an older guy and have to go through it is a little tough.

While there, he became covered with fleas, developed an abscess in his tooth, got sores on his tail and his fur started falling out.

When an area dog rescue group saw Spritzer’s picture and learned of his story, they decided they could not leave him in such a place. The group got Spritzer out to see if anyone out there might be willing to give the older guy a chance.

Spritzer went to a great foster home. They gave him a bath — actually two baths (as he was so infested that fleas were coming out of his ears). They gave him good food, love and glucosamine for joints. They took him to the vet and the rescue group paid to have his abscessed tooth removed. His health began to improve and he started doing great.

Some people showed interest in adopting him — mainly because of his heartbreaking story — but they eventually decided that he was too old. They didn’t want a dog that would die so quickly — as he is 112 in doggie years.

You can read the rest here.

March 10, 2011 3:35:00 am

by Lynne Terry, The Oregonian – Associated Press

PORTLAND, Ore. —A fiercely protective, elderly mutt is up for a national hero award for pestering her owner in the hours before he had a heart attack and then barking for help once it struck.

Ceili, a 15-year-old Lab-mix, usually spends much of her day lounging in her home in North Portland. But one steamy day last August, she clung to her owner, Danny Fincher, trotting behind him from room to room, sometimes blocking his path. When he sat down, she licked his arms and legs and then jumped on his easy chair, sniffing his breath.

“She was driving me nuts,” he said.

That evening, as he brushed his teeth, she tugged at his shorts. When he headed upstairs to bed, feeling knotted with indigestion, she nipped at his feet and pulled off a shoe, trying to prevent him from climbing the stairs. Ceili seemed to sense something was wrong and she was right.

Moments later, Fincher suffered the heart attack.

You can rest here.

Japan – Joe was once a staff favorite at the Longmont Humane Society. A beautiful Yellow Labrador Retriever with a passion for ball-play and boundless energy.

Joe’s size, enthusiasm and drive caught the eye of Sarah Clusman, an employee of the Longmont Humane Society. Coincidentally, Clusman was also the daughter of Judy Mize, a volunteer for the Search Dog Foundation (SDF).

The dominos fell into place for Joe to be discovered. Sarah filmed the enthusiastic dog repeatedly retrieving his beloved ball and uploaded the footage to YouTube.

Within days, Joe was occupying the passenger seat of an airplane next to SDF Canine Manager Karen Klingberg – Joe was no longer a number in a shelter.

Joe was destined for greatness as a search and rescue dog.

Joe sailed through his extensive training – wowing his trainers with his incredible drive, energy and determination.

After graduation, Joe was paired with Linda Tacconelli, a civilian handler from Santa Barbara, California. The two continue to train intensively to maintain the very specific, high level skill set needed for disaster search.

On March 11, 2011, Linda and Joe deployed to Japan with Los Angeles County Task Force 2, as one of the six Canine Disaster Search Teams trained by the Search Dog Foundation.

You can read the rest here.