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DELIGHTS from ETSY
Beautiful Victorian Christmas stockings
Luxury fabrics hand pieced and embroidered with beadwork embellishments. Suitable for men, women, and sophisticated children. Click to bigify.
Cody, a chocolate Labrador Retriever, is up for Employee of the Year because the customers love him.
His owner Karim Manour started bringing Cody to work the early shift about five months ago at a gas station and convenience store in Clearwater, Florida. Since then he’s been promoted from store pet to valued employee.
He even has his own little company shirt and name tag. He attracts a lot of new customers and delights children when he puts his paws on the counter. Source
I don’t know how things are in Florida, but I have a feeling that when the bureaucrats hear about this, Cody will get his termination notice.
Except for guide and service dogs, almost everywhere dogs are prohibited from coming into stores that sell or serve food. And it isn’t just food stores.
In Ohio, Franklin, a Basset Hound, accompanied his human, Matt Schwendiman, to work each morning at his one-chair barber shop. He greeted customers and kept order in the shop. Everyone loved Franklin.
Then a state inspector visited the shop and decreed that animals are not allowed in Ohio barber shops. Franklin was banned from his owner’s shop.
After Franklin spent a few lonely months in exile, his supporters were able to get him reinstated at the barber shop. A state law had to be changed to allow Franklin to take his rightful place. Franklin’s story
Maybe Cody could start lobbying Florida lawmakers now.
Following a big Thanksgiving dinner, this post is either appropriate or wildly inappropriate.
Roxy, a 2-year-old Basset Hound, doesn’t like to be alone. So when she was left with a friend of her owner, she was invited to trot along on a trip to the hardware store.
Left to wander around, she apparently developed an appetite for metal construction materials and ate some nails, 138 of them by actual count. Amazingly none punctured her digestive track and the veterinarian was able to remove them all.
See the video, including the amazing x-ray, from CNN
In what has been called “a victory for common sense,” a rare occurrence in dealing with government bureaucracies, this 4-year-old dog will not have to spend the next five months locked away in total boredom.
Darcy, a 4-year-old Border Collie, is a trained and experienced Search and Rescue dog in the UK. In early October she was taken to Indonesia to search for survivors in villages under the rubble of an earthquake.
When she returned she was subjected to UK quarantine laws. She would have to be locked away for six months even though she has been inoculated against rabies and is the only S&R dog that the Essex Fire and Rescue Service has.
This meant she couldn’t do her on-going training that every working dog must do (and loves) and she would be prevented from helping in any UK emergency, including a terrorist attack. Anyone who knows anything about dogs can only imagine how miserable a trained, working Border Collie would be held in a cage for six months.
Fortunately, after the fire service, Members of Parliament and 9000 supporters on Facebook protested that Darcy should be exempt from quarantine laws, a compromise was worked out. She will now spend the remaining five months in Lexden, Colchester, where she is ordinarily based and will continue working with her handler.
She will still need to be confined under laws to keep rabies out of the UK, but at least she can do what she loves to do with the person she loves to be with.
Sort of a working Border Collie house arrest.
Source: BBC
Some time back I wrote a post about a dog that survived in the grille of a car after being hit. And recently a deer had an encounter with a grille.
Here are pictures of one lucky coyote.
Daniel East and his sister Tevyn were traveling along Interstate 80 near the Nevada-Utah border going around 75 mph when a coyote ran in front of the car. Thinking they had killed the animal, they continued driving for the next 8-10 hours until they reached their destination just outside Nevada City.
Eight hours, two fuel stops, and 600 miles later they found the wild animal embedded in their front grill - very much alive.
They called a local Wildlife Rehabilitation Center and Jan Crowell, a volunteer, brought a catch pole, an animal carrier, gloves and blankets. When she arrived, East and his sister were dismantling the front of the car in order to release the animal.
When the grill was pulled forward, the coyote poked his head out. Eventually they were able to get enough removed so that the coyote could be freed.
Crowell put the loop of the pole around his neck and put him into a dog carrier.
“No broken bones, no internal injuries…nothing,” Daniel said. Only a few scrapes on the bottoms of his feet.
The coyote was taken to the rehabilitation facility. It remained there until Thursday, when it managed to push up the steel at the bottom of a kennel to free itself, Crowell said. It hasn't been seen since.
And that shouldn’t surprise anyone.
Video at KCRA-News.
Since I first wrote about Nubs in March 2008, he has become quite a celebrity.
Nubs is a dog who adopted Major Brian Dennis in Iraq. He was a two-year-old German Shepherd-Border Collie mix who had been running wild before he and Major Dennis found each other. When he was a puppy, an Iraqi sliced off most of his ears to make him more tough looking. Hence the name “Nubs.”
The bond was so strong that when Dennis’ unit moved 70 miles away, Nubs tracked him to the new location two days later. That’s when Dennis knew that they should never be separated.
Together with family and friends they raised $3500 to bring Nubs to the United States.
Since then they have appeared on TV with Conan O’Brien and Ellen DeGeneres among others and have been the subject of a top selling children’s book, "Nubs: A Marine, a Mutt and a Miracle."
The success of “Marley and Me” has apparently convinced filmmakers that there is money in feel good dog movies. Warner Brothers has bought rights to the book and will turn the story of Dennis and Nubs into a movie. Justin Zackham, author of "The Bucket List" will write and produce the film.
A Lithuanian man, 22-year old Svajunas Beniukas, has been arrested and charged with animal cruelty after internet users identified him from the video he posted on line.
The video shows him holding a little brown dog, Pipiras, and laughing as his friend records it on his mobile phone. He checks to make sure no one is watching, jokes about dogs flying and then drops Pipiras off the bridge. Pipiras lands yelping and lies twitching on the ground.
But despite falling over 20 feet and sustaining multiple fractures and internal injuries, vets said the dog would survive.
"He's lived with me for four to five years," Petras Dunskaitis, the dog's 70-year-old owner told a Lithuanian newspaper. "He didn't deserve such a fate."
It was originally posted on a Lithuanian website, but soon spread across the world, even to Facebook through the efforts of a group of 3000 called “Lithuanian Dog Support Group.”
Lithuanian police said a key breakthrough was tracing the local website, www.15min.it, where the footage originally appeared. The website's users identified the man as Beniukas. Source
He could spend up to a year in jail. But think of it this way: for the rest of his life whenever anyone Googles “Svajunas Beniukas,” his name will come up many times as the degenerate who laughed as he threw a little dog off a bridge and pissed off the world.
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