Officer finds canine helping kitty.
A South Carolina resident called police on Monday to report she’d heard a dog barking since Saturday. When animal control officer Michelle Smith followed the noise down a steep embankment to a ravine, she found a 5-year-old dog — who was nursing a tiny kitten.
"I'm thinking that it just couldn't get back up with the kitten, and I don't think it was willing to leave the kitten," Smith said.
Study shows canines get a buzz from exercise.
A new study by researchers at the University of Arizona finds that human athletes aren’t the only ones who get a euphoric feeling from exercise — dogs do, too.
The researchers say the reason for the feeling might be a natural payoff for doing moderate to intense exercise. They found that after using a treadmill, both dogs and humans had a significant increase in endocannabinoid signaling, which sends reward signals to the brain.
Scientists trace canine domestication.
Dogs have been man’s best friend for so long that groups of genes related to the brain, diet and digestion, and disease have evolved in parallel over thousands of years. That’s according to researchers at the University of Chicago, whose study was published this week in the journal Nature Communications.
They suggest dogs' and humans' shared evolution was driven by their common environment.
Firefighters use a bucket ladder to retrieve both man and feline.
NEW YORK (AP) — Authorities say a New York police officer who tried to rescue a cat stuck in a tree got caught himself and needed a little help getting back down to the ground.
The Fire Department of New York says the incident happened Monday afternoon in the borough of Queens.
Rescuers went 'above and beyond the call of duty.'
A dog owner in Prince George’s County, Md., is thanking firefighters for “truly going above and beyond the call of duty” to take care of his dog when there was a gas leak in his neighborhood.
Owner James Hunt wasn’t home on Thursday when contractors nearby broke a gas line, forcing the evacuation of nearby homes. When he returned, he found a note written on a piece of cardboard from Fire Capt. Donny Fletcher. It explained that his crew had to break the door down to make sure no one was inside Hunt’s house.
They say every dog has its day, but in this state, they get an entire legislative session.
DENVER (AP) — As shelter dogs and cats were designated the official state pets Monday, Gov. John Hickenlooper also signed a measure requiring police to undergo training to prevent animals from being shot.
The measures passed the Colorado Legislature last month amid a combative lawmaking term, putting the state's four-legged friends among the big winners of the recently completed session.
Owner reunited with missing pooch.
On Thursday, Julie Schwab’s poodle-mix dogs Mator and Tinkerbell disappeared from their home in Elma, N.Y. While Mator found his way back home that night, Tinkerbell was still missing.
On Sunday, a turkey hunter spotted her on top of a 75-foot cliff near a waterfall in Elma. A local animal-control officer, volunteer firefighters and the sheriff’s office teamed up to rescue the pooch, hiking through a creek and hoisting a firefighter 15 feet up a rock face to reach her.
Here they come!
The ominous Brood II of cicadas has begun to emerge from the ground in their southernmost reaches in North Carolina.
As the ground warms up, they’ll begin to show up further north (along the East Coast, up to Connecticut) in bigger numbers.
"I've never seen so many in one location in my life,” said Billy Tesh, who runs a company called Pest Management Systems in North Carolina.
