Backcasts archive: Through July 13, 2007
By Brett PaulyBlog calendar: July 13 | July 12 | July 10 | July 9
Old dogs finally have their own place to call home in Japan
With Fido casting votes in Washington state we touched on dogs yesterday, and we'll continue wagging that tale now.
Yep, researchers say Japan is experiencing a boom in pet ownership and its graying population of dogs – living longer due to better health care and a more balanced diet – can take advantage of the country's first canine retirement facility, the Associated Press reports from Tokyo.
The old dogs' home comes with round-the-clock monitoring by veterinarians and, get this, a team of puppies to play with the aging pooches to help them keep fit, a pet products company said recently.
Owners pay $800 a month to keep their dogs at the Soladi Care Home, according to a joint release by Soladi Co. and the Endo Veterinary clinic in Tochigi, in eastern Japan.
The home can accept 20 dogs at a time and will feed them specially fortified food.
Increased longevity has spurred doting dog owners to turn to vitamins, aromatherapy and even acupuncture to help their companions through their old age, according to the AP.
It seems only a matter of time before the bowwows get hearing aids, walkers, blue hair and early-dog dinner specials.
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Feds, anglers attempt to right the wrongs done to whales
We think anglers and antis can agree on this one: new rules to protect whales from meeting their demise in the tangled gear of fishermen.
Marine-gear entanglements and ship strikes are the top human causes of right whale deaths, the Associated Press reports out of Boston, and the National Marine Fisheries Service agreed to issue the new regulations by Oct. 1.
A key part of the proposed rules was a switch by lobstermen to rope that sinks to the ocean floor so whales don't get caught in it. Some lobstermen have objected, saying the heavier rope is costly and sometimes unnecessary.
But environmental groups argue adjustments are urgently needed to protect whales in general, and specifically the North Atlantic right whale, of which about 350 are left.
The new regs were proposed in early 2005, and the Ocean Conservancy and The Humane Society sued in February to force implementation. The National Marine Fisheries Service has agreed in a settlement to end the delay.
Mary Colligan, a fisheries service assistant regional administrator, said federal officials have been working through complicated issues quickly to ensure the rules are effective.
"It's important to move as fast as possible," she said. "It's also important to move in a very informed manner."
All in all, it seems like a whale of a right thing to do.
Elections officials find voter barking up the wrong tree
Duncan M. McDonald seems like a nice enough voter. It could be an everyman name, enough so that Jane K. Balogh, 66, of Federal Way, Wash., chose it as her Australian shepherd-terrier mix's handle … and used it on the pooch's voter registration form.
That's right, Duncan had been registered with the King County elections department for more than a year, the Associated Press reports from Seattle.
Balogh put her phone bill in the dog's name, then used that as identification when she mailed in the registration form in April 2006. In November, she wrote "VOID" across the dog's ballot and returned it with an image of a paw print on the signature line as Duncan's mark.
She admitted the ruse when an election official called, but Duncan was still sent absentee ballots for school bond elections in February and May.
Now the four-legged "constituent" is finally off the voter rolls. Elections director Sherril Huff said she canceled the voter registration this week, according to the AP.
"Quite frankly, the process did take too long, and it should have been addressed after the November election," said Bobbie Egan, an elections office spokeswoman.
County election procedures are being reviewed to provide speedier action against voting fraud, she said.
Balogh, registered her pet to protest a change in the law that she said made it too easy for non-citizens to cast ballots, the AP reports.
The removal of Duncan's voter registration came three weeks after Balogh was charged in King County Superior Court with making a false or misleading statement to a public servant, a misdemeanor. She pleaded not guilty to the charge in June.
A sheriff's investigator wrote that Balogh admitted registering the dog under false pretenses "to make a point that anyone could vote, even an animal."
A preliminary court hearing was pending.
Hey, if you were a voting canine, what measures would you check on the ballots?
• Free kibbles on Mondays
• Designated bark-always hours
• Walking the master on Fridays
• Cats sleep outside once a month
• "Dog-eat-dog" to be stricken from all usage
• The hottest part of summer to be renamed man days
• Restaurant leftovers must be carried out in people bags
• Fireworks ban
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800 cats spared the death penalty by rescuers
in China; former product-safety chief not so lucky
With all the extreme heat China has taken over its dire and wide-ranging product-safety issues and food and drug woes, it's no wonder Chinese cat lovers mobilized online recently to save a truck load of cats from the cooking pot, the Associated Press reports out of Shanghai.
Cat meat is considered a delicacy in southern China and cats are sold live to markets, where they are slaughtered fresh for customers, according to the AP.
Hmmmm, makes you wonder what the head of China's food and drug watchdog has to say about the matter. Oops, too late. Zheng Xiaoyu, the country's former product-safety chief, was executed today, the AP reports from Beijing. Zheng was sentenced to death in May for taking bribes to approve an antibiotic blamed for at least 10 deaths and other substandard medicines.
Well, at least those felines were spared the death penalty, and here's how it went down:
A standoff took place at a parking lot in a southern suburb of Shanghai. It continued for hours while cat lovers spread word of the incident online, eventually raising $1,320 in donations to buy the whole load.
Organizers now hope to place the cats in homes after posting their pictures and profiles on the Internet.
"They were so frightened," the China Daily quoted one of the rescuers, Huo Puyang, as saying.
"Some bit people when they tried to let them out of the boxes. Some still hide in dark corners and will not come out for food," Huo said.
Mother Nature abuse could be alleged in bank robbery
What's the best way to rob a bank branch?
Dressed as a tree, of course.
"He really went out on a limb," police Sgt. Ernie Goodno said after the Citizen Bank branch in Manchester, N.H., was held up Saturday morning by a man with leafy boughs duct-taped to his head and torso, the Associated Press reports.
Police said the tree dude didn't mention anything about having a weapon, just demanded cash, and was given an undisclosed amount.
Although the branches and leaves obscured much of the man's face, someone who saw images from the bank's security camera recognized the robber and called police.
Officers said James Coldwell, 49, was arrested early Sunday at his Manchester home and charged with robbery.
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Dem bones, dem bones, dem dino bones … yum!
Last week we touched on the poaching of rare giant tortoises for meat consumption.
Well, talk about eating the ancients: Villagers in central China spent decades digging up bones they believed belonged to flying dragons and using them in traditional recipes and medicines.
The calcium-rich bones were sometimes boiled with other ingredients and fed to children to treat dizziness and leg cramps. Other times they were ground up and turned into a paste applied directly to fractures and other injuries, scientist Dong Zhiming said recently, the Associated Press reports out of Beijing.
Turns out the bones belonged to dinosaurs, and now Dong and his colleagues are doing the digging.
Until last year, the fossils were being sold in Henan province as "dragon bones" at about 25 cents a pound, according to Dong.
He was part of a team that recently excavated in Henan's Ruyang County a 60-foot-long plant-eating dinosaur that lived 85 million to 100 million years ago. The find was shown to the public last week.
Dong said that when the villagers found out last year the bones were from dinosaurs, they donated 440 pounds to him and his colleagues for research. Over the last two decades, the villagers had dug up an estimated 1 ton of bones.
"They had believed that the 'dragon bones' were from the dragons flying in the sky," said Dong, a professor with the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. (Curiously, Dong takes his name as an amalgamation of "dragon" and "dino.")
I guess it must have been quite a bummer for those villagers to discover they were eating dinosaurs, not dragons, but we don't understand why. Don't they both taste like chicken?
(Btw, we were just kidding about the origins of Dong's name … but it makes ya think.)
About the author: Brett Pauly spent nearly six years editing and publishing ESPNOutdoors.com before moving on to produce the ESPN.com Sports Travel site.
He is a national award-winning writer and editor with 14 years of experience in the newspaper trade. The Evergreen State of Washington is where he makes his home. Click here to email him.
