Monthly Archives: August 2016
Handler who left K9 in hot car charged with animal cruelty | WPMT FOX43
Harrisburg, PA – The dog handler who allegedly left a K9 unit in a hot car in July, leading to the dog’s death, has been charged with cruelty to animals. State Police charged Chad Holland, 40, of Lock Haven, for leaving the K9 unit ‘Totti,’ a 2 year-old Labrador Retriever trained as a drug detection dog, in a vehicle at SCI Rockview on July 7th. Holland did not provide Totti sustenance, drink, and access to cool shelter that would have protected him against the dangerous heat which caused his death, according to the State Police report.
The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections also issued a release. Totti’s death was a tragedy that deeply saddened the DOC community. Secretary John Wetzel says he is committed to ensuring such a devastating event never occurs again.
Holland and his supervisor were removed from their positions with the Drug Interdiction Unit.
“We took the death of Totti very seriously and have taken a number of steps to ensure our K9s are safe no matter the weather,” said Secretary Wetzel. “These K9s are valued members of the DOC law enforcement team and we are committed to keeping them safe in our care.”
Actions taken to date are:
Change of Leadership in the Drug Interdiction Unit.
• The two individuals involved, a captain and a sergeant, were reassigned to positions at SCI Rockview.
• A senior DOC officer with military K9 experience has been assigned to lead the Drug Interdiction Unit.
A written K9 policy directive has been implemented outlining the care and handling of K9s in-vehicle, and while on-duty or off-duty
• No K9s will be left in the vehicle for any reason when the handler is not in vehicle.
• When deployed overnight the handler and K9 will stay in pet friendly hotels.
• Placards will be posted on dashboard constantly reminding the handler of K9 in vehicle.
The DOC has purchased portable kennels and every institution now has a portable kennel where the K9 will be placed on downtime. Also, each handler was issued a portable kennel in the event they are out in the community conducting work.
The DOC is in the process of tinting windows/and adding rain guards to assist in climate control for the K9s.
The DOC also is examining the purchase of extreme weather alarm equipment for K9 vehicles.
On July 7, 2016, Totti, a member of the Drug Interdiction Unit team, was left unattended in a hot vehicle for three hours. The two-year-old dog was unconscious but alive when he was discovered. First aid was rendered at the scene and he was rushed to an area veterinarian. Despite the emergency treatment, Totti died several hours later from a heat-related seizure while in veterinary care.
Petition · To State and National Media Outlets: Protect the Privacy Rights of Victims of Violent Crime · Change.org
Lightning strike kills 323 wild reindeer in southern Norway – the deadliest lightning strike ever recorded
August 2016– NORWAY– More than 320 wild reindeer have been found dead after a single lightning strike struck a mountain plateau in southern Norway, local officials say, making it deadliest lightning strike ever recorded. The incident is believed to have happened on Friday afternoon when thunderstorms hit Hardangervidda National Park, which is located in southern Norway and is a popular destination for tourists, featuring one of the country’s largest glaciers. The incident was first reported on Friday evening after a hunting supervisor found the group of dead reindeer on the Hardangervidda mountain plateau, but it took until Sunday before officials could visit the site to assess the situation.
“Our people in the field have found 323 dead reindeer, of which 5 had to be put down due to injuries,” said Elin Fosshaug Olsø, a spokeswoman for the Norwegian Environment Agency. All of the dead reindeer were found in…
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Pay Farmers for Damages Caused by EPA Mine Spill
Over a year after EPA workers accidentally released toxic wastewater into the Animas River, many affected farmers have yet to be reimbursed. We demand that they be compensated for their losses at once.
Catch Killer Who Cut Off Water for Wild Horses
Wild horses were found dead of dehydration, after someone sabotaged their water supply in an act of pure cruelty. Demand that the person responsible is found and given the maximum sentence possible.
Remove Dangerous Chemicals from Drinking Water Supply
Millions of Americans are at risk from unsafe levels of dangerous chemicals in their drinking water. Demand immediate action to address this dire public health crisis.
Source: Remove Dangerous Chemicals from Drinking Water Supply
Save Bees From Highly Toxic Pesticides
Bee populations are plummeting and scientists are blaming toxic bee-killing pesticides. These pesticides make nectar and pollen deadly to the bees who eat it. Life on earth depends on healthy bees, so we must take action to ban these pesticides before it’s too late.
Applebee’s, It’s Time for Vegan Options!
Please sign the petition asking Applebee’s to introduce vegan options.
Man Who Killed Police Dog Sentenced to 45-Years in Prison
Source: S.m. Gibson at theantimedia.org
A 23-year-old Ohio man has been sentenced to 45 years in prison after exchanging gunfire with Canton police in January. This week, a judge sentenced Kelontre Barefield to be incarcerated for 11 years on multiple burglary charges and 34 years for the death of Jethro, a three-year-old German Shepherd who served as a member of the department’s K-9 unit. Both sentences are to be served consecutively.
Barefield pled guilty to charges pertaining to the death of the canine and various other charges in an unrelated aggravated robbery case.
According to the head trainer of Canton PD’s K-9 unit, Eric Stanbro, Jethro died after being shot three times while responding to Barefield’s robbery of Fisher Foods, a local Canton grocery store. Police shot Barefield in the ankle during the altercation.
In March, a letter of condolence for Jethro to the department from an 11-year-old girl went viral.“I [sic] sorry about Jethro. So here is my allowance for…
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Speak Out For Tigers & Big Cats NOW!
FINAL TWO DAYS! One of the most important actions we can take to help stop the abuse and exploitation of captive tigers and big cats like our beautiful boy Tony is to speak out for them by submitting comments to the USDA asking them to STOP allowing public contact with dangerous animals – cubs and adults.
Wildcat Sanctuary has made it super easy to do at the following link – providing more info and comment examples. Please see their post here: http://www.wildcatsanctuary.org/but-mama-where-did-the-tiger-cub-go and TAKE ACTION TODAY!
Thank you TWS for your guidance on this important issue and for providing exemplary homes and care to these amazing cats. (Wildcat Sanctuary is one of three sanctuaries that has a standing offer of a home for Tony.)
Wolves Wiped out in Washington State
This sad news has just been released by the Center for Biological Diversity:
“More grim news out of Washington state: Snipers have killed four more wolves — three adults and a female pup. The Profanity Peak wolf pack family has been shattered, reduced to just one adult struggling to care for the four surviving four-month-old pups.
The killing of this pack — which, once it’s done, will have wiped out 12 percent of the wild wolves in the state — has been authorized by Washington’s wildlife agency despite evidence that a rancher placed his cattle right over the pack’s den. Robert Weilgus, director of the Large Carnivore Conservation Lab at Washington State University, told reporters that “This livestock operator elected to put his livestock directly on top of their den site; we have pictures of cows swamping it.” We can’t allow this kind of provocation to keep leading to…
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Three sea otters shot to death near Santa Cruz ; Reward offered (California, USA)
August 29th, 2016. SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — Three sea otters were shot to death near Santa Cruz and officials have offered a $10,000 reward to anyone who can provide them with information regarding the fatal shootings.
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Petition · CITES: Save African Elephants · Change.org
Petition: Help Free Lasah The Elephant In Malaysia
Petition: Utah: Don’t Allow Nearly 500 Cougars to be Killed for Trophies
Petition: Demand Mandatory Microchip Scans Throughout Texas, Texas
Stop Brutal Slaughter of Endangered Gray Wolves
A pack of 11 endangered gray wolves is slated for execution because the animals have been preying on local livestock. Denounce this barbaric plan and demand that a more humane solution be found.
Prime Minister of Canada the Honorable Justin Trudeau: Please urge South Korea to ban the dog and cat torture and consumption! PETITION
Hello PyeongChang! It’s time for you to be exposed for your Horrific Cruelty Against Our Best Friends?
Arkansas man’s ‘poop-tastrophe’ Facebook post goes viral | WPMT FOX43
LITTLE ROCK, Ar.– An Arkansas man’s Facebook post has gone viral, being shared over 300,000 times. His story, one of the smelly variety, is one that many have enjoyed and been able to relate to. In fact, he even created a graph to help create a visual for you to connect to the story.
Here is Jesse Newton’s post, with the full text being found below:
Newton’s full post:
So, last week, something pretty tragic happened in our household. It’s taken me until now to wrap my head around it and find the words to describe the horror. It started off simple enough – something that’s probably happened to most of you.
Sometime between midnight and 1:30am, our puppy Evie pooped on our rug in the living room. This is the only time she’s done this, so it’s probably just because we forgot to let her out before we went to bed that night. Now, if you have a detective’s mind, you may be wondering how we know the poop occurred between midnight and 1:30am. We were asleep, so how do I know that time frame?
Why, friends, that’s because our Roomba runs at 1:30am every night, while we sleep. And it found the poop. And so begins the Pooptastrophe. The poohpocalypse. The pooppening.
If you have a Roomba, please rid yourself of all distractions and absorb everything I’m about to tell you.
Do not, under any circumstances, let your Roomba run over dog poop. If the unthinkable does happen, and your Roomba runs over dog poop, stop it immediately and do not let it continue the cleaning cycle. Because if that happens, it will spread the dog poop over every conceivable surface within its reach, resulting in a home that closely resembles a Jackson Pollock poop painting.
It will be on your floorboards. It will be on your furniture legs. It will be on your carpets. It will be on your rugs. It will be on your kids’ toy boxes. If it’s near the floor, it will have poop on it. Those awesome wheels, which have a checkered surface for better traction, left 25-foot poop trails all over the house. Our lovable Roomba, who gets a careful cleaning every night, looked like it had been mudding. Yes, mudding – like what you do with a Jeep on a pipeline road. But in poop.
Then, when your four-year-old gets up at 3am to crawl into your bed, you’ll wonder why he smells like dog poop. And you’ll walk into the living room. And you’ll wonder why the floor feels slightly gritty. And you’ll see a brown-encrusted, vaguely Roomba-shaped thing sitting in the middle of the floor with a glowing green light, like everything’s okay. Like it’s proud of itself. You were still half-asleep until this point, but now you wake up pretty damn quickly.
And then the horror. Oh the horror.
So, first you clean the child. You scrub the poop off his feet and put him back in bed. But you don’t bother cleaning your own feet, because you know what’s coming. It’s inevitable, and it’s coming at you like a freight train. Some folks would shrug their shoulders and get back in bed to deal with it in the morning. But you’re not one of those people – you can’t go to sleep with that war zone of poop in the living room.
So you clean the Roomba. You toss it in the bathtub to let it soak. You pull it apart, piece-by-piece, wondering at what point you became an adult and assumed responsibility for 3:30am-Roomba-disassembly-poop-cleanups. By this point, the poop isn’t just on your hands – it’s smeared up to your elbows. You already heard the Roomba make that “whirlllllllllllllllll-boop-hisssssssss” noise that sounds like electronics dying, and you realize you forgot to pull the battery before getting it wet. More on that later.
Oh, and you’re not just using profanity – you’re inventing new types of profanity. You’re saying things that would make Satan shudder in revulsion. You hope your kid stayed in bed, because if he hears you talking like this, there’s no way he’s not ending up in prison.
Then you get out the carpet shampooer. When you push it up to the rug – the rug that started it all – the shampooer just laughs at you. Because that rug is going in the trash, folks. But you shampoo it anyway, because your wife loved that damn rug, and you know she’ll ask if you tried to clean it first.
Then you get out the paper towel rolls, idly wondering if you should invest in paper towel stock, and you blow through three or four rolls wiping up poop. Then you get the spray bottle with bleach water and hose down the floor boards to let them soak, because the poop has already dried. Then out comes the steam mop, and you take care of those 25-ft poop trails.
And then, because it’s 6am, you go to bed. Let’s finish this tomorrow, right?
The next day, you finish taking the Roomba apart, scraping out all the tiny flecks of poop, and after watching a few Youtube instructional videos, you remove the motherboard to wash it with a toothbrush. Then you bake it in the oven to dry. You put it all back together, and of course it doesn’t work. Because you heard the “whirlllllllllllllll-boop-hissssssss” noise when it died its poopy death in the bathtub. But you hoped that maybe the Roomba gods would have mercy on you.
But there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. After spending a week researching how to fix this damn $400 Roomba without spending $400 again – including refurb units, new motherboards, and new batteries – you finally decide to call the place where you bought it. That place called Hammacher Schlemmer. They have a funny name, but they have an awesome warranty. They claim it’s for life, and it’s for any reason.
So I called them and told the truth. My Roomba found dog poop and almost precipitated World War III.
And you know what they did? They offered to replace it. Yes, folks. They are replacing the Roomba that ran over dog poop and then died a poopy, watery death in the bathtub – by no fault of their own, of course.
So, mad props to Hammacher Schlemmer. If you’re buying anything expensive, and they sell it, I recommend buying it from them. And remember – don’t let your Roomba run over dog poop.
UTIs and Food Additives
SYNTHETIC FOOD ADDITIVES and URINARY TRACT/ BLADDER INFECTIONS
You won’t find the FDA very interested but scholarly scientific studies have linked synthetic additives in commercial (non-organic) chicken to recurrent urinary tract infections. Studies have also linked antibiotics in chicken to increases in antibiotic-resistant urinary tract infections in women. Other synthetic and industrialized food additives that have been linked with urinary tract and bladder infections (including interstitial cystitis (“painful bladder syndrome”), sensitive bladders, and frequent, recurring bladder infections or irregularities) include:
Animal antibiotics (of the types commonly found in commercial, non-organic chicken)
Synthetic animal growth hormones (found in commercial, non-organic meats and poultry)
Artificial sweeteners (found in a wide variety of processed foods)
BHT (a preservative common in everything from breakfast cereals, to butter, to snack food)
Calcium Propionate (the industrialized version is commonly used as a preservative in a wide variety of processed foods)
Nitrates/Nitrites (common in processed meats…
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Vegan Potato Salad Recipe | The Friendly Fig
Stop Immoral Price Gouging for Life-Saving EpiPen | Keystone Progress
Dog Whose Throat Was Slit After Being Tortured Deserves Justice
PETITION
A dog’s throat was slit after being tortured and repeatedly stabbed. A video of the savage killing shows the dog being tied by the neck to a horse’s back, then brutally killed. Please sign this petition to bring the dog justice and demand that the accused killers are vigorously prosecuted.
Source: Dog Whose Throat Was Slit After Being Tortured Deserves Justice
Petition: Demand that Baylor football player Ishmael Zamora be kicked off the football team for beating an innocent dog
3 Rescued Dogs Who Saved Their Family Members’ Lives This Year | Care2 Causes
Watch these three videos and then go hug your dog…🐕
http://www.care2.com/causes/3-rescued-dogs-who-saved-their-family-members-lives-this-year.html
Louisiana Is Running Out Of Places For Rescued Animals To Go
By Christian Cotroneo
Aug. 24, 2016
When an animal rescue team came across a couple of horses tied, abandoned and wilting under the hot Louisiana sun, it must have seemed like a triumph.
They had gotten to the horses, left behind in the scramble to flee parts of the flood-wracked state, just in time.
But it didn’t take long for members of Guardians of Rescue to realize that finding these forlorn animals was only the beginning.
Where do they take them? Which shelter or sanctuary — already crammed beyond capacity — had room for a couple of horses?
Much like the Louisiana flood itself, it’s easy to chalk up the heroics in the first few days of America’s worst disaster since Hurricane Sandy as a victory. And move on. Many of the people who put their lives in danger to save thousands of animals did just that.
Humane Society of Louisiana
From his vantage on the sopping ground of the the Baton Rouge area, Robert Misseri has seen the rescue effort recede along with the high waters.
And it couldn’t come at a worse time.
“Now that the floods have receded, the aftermath is 10 times worse,” Misseri, who founded Guardians of Rescue in 2010, tells The Dodo. “It is total insanity.”
Instead, despite rescuing countless abandoned animals, Misseri’s team is being met, time and time again, by the same sad chorus at animal shelters: No more room.
Robert Misseri’s team arrived in the aftermath of the Louisiana floods.
Guardians of Rescue
The group did manage to find a temporary home for the pair of dehydrated horses. But as more and more animals appear — Misseri says many terrified pets are only emerging from hiding now — the problem of housing them becomes increasingly dire.
Especially since many animal shelters in the region were destroyed in the deluge.
St. Tammany Humane Society
“A challenge we are dealing with is that all of these animal shelters are full,” Misseri explains. “We are out in the field trying to get animals and there are no place to put them.
“We picked up twenty something animals yesterday, but there is no place to go.”
Guardians of Rescue
Of course, it would help if more owners stepped forward to claim their pets. But Misseri says the disaster hasn’t yet reached that point.
In fact, he sees the overall rescue in several distinct phases. The first was the immediate response to fast-rising waters, which involved “anybody who could get animals to high ground or break them off of chains.”
MIKE ANDERSON
Then came the water rescue, which saw people patrolling neighborhoods that had suddenly turned into canals looking for animals in the water or clinging to debris.
JOSH PETTIT
The next phase, where Misseri says the effort is at now, is crucial. The floodwaters have receded, revealing the full extent of the catastrophe — and the toll it’s taken not only on the people who lived in these neighborhoods, but also their pets.
Parishes in the Baton Rouge area appear like ghost towns, abandoned by humans but still, in many cases, home to dogs who had been left chained on dry islands. Or on rooftops.
All of them need immediate help.
Humane Society of Louisiana
“We knew the aftermath was going to be complicated and many animals would be languishing,” Misseri says. “People don’t realize this. They think, OK, whatever is saved was saved in the flood. Whatever dies, dies.’
“But there are animals that need to be rescued this second. People forget about that.”
And even when you find animals, where do you take them?
Although Misseri says every available space is spoken for, his group is still finding tentative homes for them. But the waves of four-legged refugees shows no sign of abating.
Denham Springs Animal Shelter
“This is when you see dogs coming out of hiding and from the high points. It is way worse than it was,” Misseri says. “If they are left, these animals will suffer and die.”
And the people who are still spending every sleepless moment saving animals in Louisiana are not about to let that happen. But they will need another kind of hero.
Think that could be you? Consider making a donation of supplies or money to Guardians of Rescue through its Louisiana Rescue page. And if you know of any animal in the Baton Rouge area who needs to be rescued, contact the group at info@guardiansofrescue.org or call 888-287-3864.
Heroes Are Saving Thousands Of Animals In The Louisiana Floods
People Are Risking Their Lives To Save Animals From Louisiana Floods
Christian Cotroneo
The Cats of Cuba Need You – Network for Animals
Petition · Minister Lee Dong-Phil: Support and Pass the new Animal Protection Law in South Korea! · Change.org
Please watch these important videos and sign the petition!
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