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All in Animal Heroes
Torrential rains and intense floods soaked southern Brazil last week, killing over 140 people and forcing more than 100,000 to evacuate. Amid the disaster in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, hundreds of volunteers are busy rescuing animals stranded by the rising water.
A Labrador retriever in Taiwan named Roger couldn’t cut it as a drug-sniffing police dog – apparently too playful to be a cop – but he has since emerged as a rescue dog and something of a media star.
Of all the ways to spend time staring at screens, may we suggest the Netherland's visdeurbel? That’s Dutch for “fish doorbell,” a crowd-sourced system to help migrating fish swim through Utrecht’s canals using an underwater camera and a website.
Hundreds of stray dogs are fleeing the Eastern Siberian town of UIan-Ude, near the Mongolian border, because the local government has decided to kill them. The strays’ saviors are Russian dog-lovers – from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vladivostok, and elsewhere – who make the long trek east and brave sub-zero temperatures to rescue the doomed doggos.
For more than two decades, the Transportation Security Administration has been clogging airports (or keeping us safe, depending on one’s point of view), aided in part by about 1000 bomb-sniffing canines across the country. This week 15 of these photogenic working doggos are honored in the newly minted 2024 TSA Canine Calendar.
In western Thailand just outside Kanchanaburi, an elephant sanctuary is home to a few dozen rescued domestic elephants. They’ve had a difficult time, either born into a brutal life of logging or retirees from the slightly less degrading tourism trade.
A scent-detecting dog named Dory has been sniffing out the location of sea turtle eggs on the Florida coast for the past five years or so. Researchers monitored her uncanny ability and found she was better at it than the human volunteers who normally scour the beaches.
Escaped murderer Danelo Cavalcante was finally nabbed this week after two weeks on the lam. US Marshals and the Pennsylvania State Police deployed search teams, armored carriers, horses, helicopters, and aircraft equipped with thermal imaging to catch the killer, but the ultimate hero in the capture was Yoda, a 4-year-old Belgian Malinois.
Wilson, the 2-year-old Belgian shepherd that helped find four children lost in the Amazon for 40 days, is himself now lost in the rainforest. The Columbian army is desperately searching for the national hero, last seen one month ago.
There were puns aplenty when Loki, a 5-year-old Rottweiler from Maryland received her “dogtorate” from the University of Maryland-Baltimore this week. With her new dogree confurred, Loki is now officially a dogtor, as declared on the school’s website.
Balto was a world famous Siberian husky, the lead sled dog in a 1925 mission that delivered life-saving medicine to Nome, Alaska in abominably frigid conditions. Now scientists have analyzed Balto’s DNA to find out what made him so tough.
When we last checked in on actor James Cromwell, he was super-glueing himself to a Starbucks counter to protest the inflated price of plant-based milk. This week he is attending to a new cause: a baby pig that had fallen (jumped?) off a truck on the way to the slaughterhouse.
Zoe, a new-mom orangutan at the Metro Richmond Zoo in Virginia, didn’t know how to breastfeed her newborn. A lactating human zookeeper showed her how. The zookeepers knew Zoe was not was not up to this basic task in 2021 when her first child was born, a baby boy that Zoe would hold at arm’s length, not close enough to feed or bond with. Because Zoe’s own mother had died unexpectedly when she was just nine months old, she never learned these essential skill sets.
Within hours after two huge earthquakes and hundreds of aftershocks rocked southeastern Turkey and northwestern Syria on February 6, rescue teams from around the world began to arrive in the disaster zone. Many first responders have worked nonstop since because that’s what good dogs do.
It turns out The Birds was not Tippi Hedren’s worst animal encounter in a movie. That would be Roar, a film that involved close contact with more than 150 untrained lions, tigers, leopards, and cheetahs. It has entered Hollywood lore as the most dangerous movie ever made.
Joaquin Phoenix turns 48 on Friday (October 28), which means the Academy Award-winning actor has been an advocate for animal rights for a solid 45 years.
The African giant pouched rat, also called the Gambian pouched rat, is a large, nocturnal rodent with terrible eyesight. It is also intelligent and fairly easy to train – mostly to seek out landmines, but its skill set is expanding.
Two animal-rights activists were acquitted this week of felony burglary and theft charges, five years after breaking into one of Smithfield Foods’ factory farms in Utah. After taking damning video footage of the farm’s horrendous conditions the pair departed with two piglets.
Pine Island, Florida, took a massive hit from Hurricane Ian. The overseers of the Malamu Manu Sanctuary, Will Peratino and partner Lauren Stepp, refused to abandon their island compound, choosing instead to save some 275 parrots (and two lemurs) from a horrible fate.
