Hurricane Harvey rescues: California groups helping displaced animals

Rescue groups in California and throughout the country are mobilizing to help pets displaced by Hurricane Harvey and subsequent flooding in Texas and Louisiana.

RedRover, a national nonprofit animal welfare organization based in Sacramento, is headed to Texas later this week to help the SPCA of Texas provide daily care and comfort for animals rescued and relocated to Dallas, Texas.

Wings of Rescue, based in Livermore, has several cargo planes filled with crates and supplies standing by in El Paso, and the group already has begun evacuation flights.

The volunteer pilots of Wings of Rescue fly pets to areas where they stand better chances of being adopted. In this case, they are flying pets to safer parts of the country, where they will be cared for until they can be reunited with their owners.

The group is working with the Humane Society of the United States, Greater Good, Freekibble and Rescue Bank.

Planes left Lafayette, Louisiana, on Monday carrying 88 dogs and 20 cats bound for temporary care in San Diego. On Tuesday, 100 dogs will be transported from San Antonio to shelters in Oregon and Washington, and on Wednesday, another 100 dogs are scheduled to fly out of San Antonio to Morristown, New Jersey.

RedRover officials and volunteers expect to be in Texas by Thursday.

“RedRover Responders appreciate the opportunity to help comfort and care for these animals and bring some relief to the aid teams during this crisis,” RedRover Director of Field Services Beth Gammie said. “We haven't seen this type of unprecedented flooding in more than a decade. Our hearts are with the people and animals of Texas during this difficult time.”

RedRover Responders volunteers, who wear bright red shirts, are trained to care for and shelter large numbers of animals after they have been rescued from natural disasters. Volunteers provide the workforce that enables local communities to address their animal needs following a natural disaster.

The organization has more than 3,800 trained volunteers in the United States and Canada, and is able to deploy volunteers quickly when communities become overburdened by a crisis.

In its 30-year history, RedRover has responded to more than 180 natural disasters and other crises, including Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005; Hurricane Isaac and Superstorm Sandy in 2012; the Oklahoma tornadoes in 2013; flooding in Gonzales, Louisiana in 2016; and the dam crisis in Oroville in 2017.

To help the pets displaced by Hurricane Harvey, you can donate to any of these groups.

One thing animals share in common: the sound of screaming

Charles Darwin, when musing about the evolution of emotion, pointed out the similarities in how animals mouth off. "With many kinds of animals, man included," he wrote in 1872, "the vocal organs are efficient in the highest degree as a means of expression." Pigs grunt while eating, he noted. They scream while terrified. Darwin theorized that emotional sounds could be traced back to a common animal trait.

Now researchers are investigating the idea Darwin posed more than 100 years ago. They've demonstrated that humans can detect an animal's arousal — which can range from low (asleep) to high (frenetic).

We can sense excitement in the sounds of species as different as frogs and pandas, the researchers say. The scientists also suggest that these sounds are part of a very old "signaling system."

"Our study shows that humans are naturally able to recognize emotional arousal across all classes of vocalizing animals," said Piera Filippi, who studies the evolution of cognition and communication at the Vrije University Brussels in Belgium. Filippi and her colleagues, psychologists and biologists from Germany, France, the Netherlands and Canada, published their study Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. "This outcome may find an important application in animal welfare, suggesting that humans may rely on their intuition to assess when animals are stressed."

The scientists asked 75 college-age people to listen to sounds from nine species. To check for consistency across languages, the group included English, German and Mandarin speakers. The researchers collected 180 recordings of animal vocalizations, reflecting high or low levels of excitement.

This was not excitement like the kind you'd find at Six Flags. Instead, these were desperate or negative screams: the sounds of frogs in competition for mates, monkeys reacting to danger or ravens confronted by a dominant bird. Representing our species were actors speaking in Tamil, asked to read lines as if increasingly upset. The subjects had to identify which vocalization, out of paired sounds from the same species, represented higher arousal.

"Humans performed better than expected by chance," Filippi said. As you might suspect, they accurately selected humans acting out emotional distress (95 percent correct) over humans talking regularly.

But the excited giant panda (94 percent) was close behind, followed by the aroused hourglass tree frog (90 percent), African bush elephant (88 percent), American alligator (87 percent), black-capped chickadee (85 percent), pig (68 percent), common raven (62 percent) and a monkey called a Barbary macaque (60 percent).

"These results suggest that fundamental mechanisms of vocal emotional expression are shared among vertebrates," the authors wrote. Put broadly, every unhappy land-dwelling four-legged animal sounded unhappy in a similar way.

Harold Gouzoules, a bioacoustician and animal behavior expert at Emory University in Atlanta who was not involved with this research, called this study a "significant contribution" toward answering the questions that had puzzled Darwin. "It goes beyond previous studies of mammals and birds to include reptiles and amphibians," Gouzoules said. "That also makes it challenging to understand."

It struck Gouzoules as odd that humans were better at identifying arousal in tree frog sounds than for the monkeys. But Filippi said that it was possible the difference in emotional intensity of the low and high monkey calls was "less extreme" compared with the other species' sounds. "However," she said, "finding that humans perform better in evolutionarily more distant species corroborates the hypothesis that this is a biologically rooted ability."

What's more, Gouzoules argued that this study does not get to what Darwin would have considered emotion. "If emotions are equivalent to a carrot cake," he said, then arousal is like the "wheat before it becomes flour."

Arousal is an important dimension of emotion, but "it doesn't equate to assessing emotional processing," he said. He offered the example of a chimp baring its teeth. "A person will describe that as a smile. They would read it as emotional — they'd get that, easy," he said. But "they'd get it dead wrong," Gouzoules said. (These chimp facial expressions are in fact "fear grins.")

The authors acknowledged that this research would benefit from physiological data. Having brain recordings or heart rate might paint a clearer picture of the animals' true feelings.

Filippi also wants to repeat the experiment, but with a twist. "We are currently running the same study on black-capped chickadees, in order to assess their ability to identify emotional intensity," she said. So we may soon know whether these little birds can tell the difference between an excited or relaxed panda.

Local Volunteers Become National Therapy Animal Team Evaluators

Silent Sidekicks' Volunteers, Stacey Coventry and Elin MacKinnon, and Silent Sidekicks' Founder, Danielle Ireland McGuckin, became the newest Pet Partners Evaluators in the United States, this month. Team Evaluators are Pet Partners volunteers who are licensed to conduct the Pet Partners skills and aptitude evaluation required for registration as a therapy animal team. Evaluators play a critical role in ensuring safe and well-qualified Therapy Teams.

Pet Partners is the national leader in demonstrating and promoting positive human-animal therapy, activities and education. Nearly forty years since the organization's inception, the science that proves these benefits has become indisputable. Today, Pet Partners is the nation's largest and most prestigious nonprofit registering handlers of multiple species as volunteer teams providing Animal-Assisted Interactions.

Pet Partners teams interact with a wide variety of clients including veterans with PTSD, seniors living with Alzheimer's, students with literacy challenges, patients in recovery, people with intellectual disabilities and those approaching end of life. The impact of these interactions is felt one million times a year. Pet Partners' curriculum and continuing education for licensed instructors, evaluators, and handlers is the gold standard in the field.

It takes a lot of work and dedication to become a registered Pet Partners Team Evaluator. To qualify they successfully completed an intense six-week hybrid training program that included online coursework, discussion groups, and an in-person practicum in New Hampshire.

Danielle, Stacey, and Elin will be continuing volunteering their services through Silent Sidekicks, Maine's first Animal-assisted Therapy nonprofit organization, including hosting Pet Partners Evaluations across Maine.

Rangers reaction says goodbye to Yaz, a triple crown winning cat

 

TORONTO - I've had pets all my life so I've dealt with the heartbreak of their death. It's never easy, especially for those pets with a great disposition, the ones who really seemed loyal and loving. Those kinds of pets are why we have them in the first place.

That describes our cat, Yaz, who passed away Friday afternoon. He had been sick for a couple of months and his death does not come as a total shock, but that no lessens the blow because he was such a wonderful companion.

I've had many cats in my life. My parents always had a cat, sometimes two, along with dogs. I've loved having both as pets. I understand why many people dislike cats, especially compared with dogs. Cats aren't as needy as dogs and don't show their affection as readily as dogs will. I'm fine with that.

But Yaz wasn't like that. Yaz was more like a dog. He would fetch toy mice. He'd drop a toy at your feet and expect you to throw it for him. He'd do it over and over until he got tired. He also wanted your affection, whether you were sitting at your desk, on the couch or in bed. He wanted to sit on your lap, curl up and sleep contently. He loved a good scratch session on his neck and under his chin. I could get him so relaxed that his legs would eventually start stretching out in different directions.

Yaz was named after Red Sox legend Carl Yastrzemski. Yaz's brother is named Fenway. My wife Laura is a Red Sox fan, if that wasn't obvious. (She also likes the Rangers, so back off.)

Yaz had to have a cancerous leg amputated in November 2015 and it was awfully expensive. If he could live pain-free, however, it was a no-brainer decision. He healed up and eventually was back to his old self, fetching mice and happy to be alive. We don't regret the expense at all.

Life goes on, of course. We'll move on and remember him fondly. The videos and pictures of him will probably bring sadness for a while but hopefully we'll be able to eventually remember him for who he was, a one-of-a-kind cat.

One more thing: Thanks so much to all of you who sent your well-wishes on Twitter. If I did not reply with a thank you know that I saw your message and it was much appreciated. I was running out of time before the game started and also I did not want to start annoying people with a bunch more tweets about my cat. Thank you for your thoughts!

Here's the Rangers reaction from a loss at Rogers Centre:

1. More than a loss — A.J. Griffin's intercostal strain, which will send him to the disabled list Saturday, may not seem like a massive problem with Tyson Ross waiting in the wings but consider this: Ross hasn't pitched in a major league game since Opening Day 2016 and he's unlikely to go deep in his starts the rest of the year. Dillon Gee will join the team from Triple A Round Rock and be used out of the bullpen, according to manager Jeff Banister. Depending on how long Griffin is down, the Rangers' rotation, which had been the rock of the club through most of the first two months, is now dealing with its second injured starter (also Cole Hamels).

2. Rougned's return — Rougned Odor downplayed the rivalry and history with the Blue Jays before the game and he sounded and looked genuine. Odor is trying to distance himself from the infamous punch thrown at Jose Bautista, refusing to sign memorabilia relating to it and generally has tried to downplay any lingering animosity. That's all understandable and respectable. Plus, you can understand why the same tired topic would get annoying for Odor.

3. Rougned's revenge — Having said all that, there was no doubt some massive satisfaction for Odor when he quieted Blue Jay fan boos with a three-run homer in the ninth inning that pulled the Rangers to within 7-6. The Rogers Centre crowd booed every time Odor came to the plate. They booed him before the game when the starting lineups were announced. Odor was 0 for 3 with a strikeout before his homer.

4. Stop, or not — Elvis Andrus appeared to run through a stop sign by third base coach Tony Beasley in the third inning and was thrown out at home plate. In Andrus' defense, the stop sign may have come late, and in the moment perhaps Andrus thought he could beat the throw. He wasn't and instead of having runners at second and third with one out, the Rangers had a runner at second with two outs. Odor lined out to left to end the inning, a fly out that would have scored Andrus from third on a sac fly.

5. Big bulllpen lift — Reliever Austin Bibens-Dirkx was forced to replace Griffin in the second inning and did an honorable job of saving the bullpen with four innings of relief. He allowed three runs (including two solo homers) but if he's unable to get the Rangers deep in the game before Jeremy Jeffress came on in the sixth, the already staggering bullpen would have been decimated for the rest of the series. Jeffress, allowed the third run against Bibens-Dirkx to score on a wild pitch but otherwise turned in his best outing in nearly two weeks. The Rangers needed that. He needed that.

Animals in medicine cared for like the heroes they are

The animal research industry has a history of silence that we are beginning to understand must be broken. The public doesn’t have the information needed to understand what happens in our facilities. They’ve been inundated by propaganda that, at best, misrepresents us and at worst, spreads hate and fear. The public is almost exclusively exposed to this nearly always false, fantastical, fanatical misleading information. This isn’t fair to the public, to those of us who work in this industry, or to our animals.

During a recent interview, I was asked what I wanted the public to know about my job in animal research. My answer may have been too simplistic. Please allow me to give a more complete answer.

What I want the public to know is the truth.

I chose a career in animal medicine initially because I believed in ensuring the good health of animals and animal welfare, and because I believe in the great value of serving as an advocate.

When I was in vet tech school, a facility visit was arranged as we prepared to graduate and choose our career paths. One of our instructors urged us strongly to consider a path in animal research. He said we would never see the level of animal suffering in the research setting as we would in private practice. I have years of experience in both settings, and I can tell you without hesitation that he was absolutely right.

Some of the public hates us and our industry for what they think we do, because they’ve been misinformed. In an animal medical research facility, there are two groups of employees — the research group and the husbandry group. The researchers are kind to the animals and treat them with the utmost dignity. They want them to be happy and healthy. The animals do not make very good models if they are sick or depressed, and also the researchers want them to be treated as the heroes they are for leading patients to hope and healing.

Medical research doesn’t include the types of things that people see in extremists’ photos and videos. There are no cosmetics involved, no uncontrolled pain and no drug overdoses. Researchers are not going room to room inflicting pain on every creature in their path. The reality is researchers are seeking cures and comfort for humans and animals alike. How could this group of professionals whose careers are focused on helping possibly be focused on spreading cruelty? I challenge the doubting public to justify this misconception.

The other group is the husbandry group, which provides food, shelter, health, peace, love, toys and so much more to the animals. The husbandry group does not conduct research on animals. Instead, we take care of them as if they were our own. We refer to them as our own because we feed them every day, play with them, give them treats and as many special things as we can — every single day. Caring for these animals is the sole reason the husbandry group exists. We grieve when we lose them and celebrate when we send them to a new forever home. We know everything about them — which toys are their favorites, which foods they like, who is their favorite person and even their favorite music.

I want the public to understand everything we do in a research facility is guided by many, many regulations. We undergo inspections several times a year — often unannounced — by several different agencies, including the United States Department of Agriculture.

I want the public to know environmental conditions are strictly controlled. For example, if an animal room’s temperature gets even a degree out of range, we must respond and correct it immediately — no matter the hour of the day or night. Recently, I drove in to work to check on a mouse whose water valve had stopped working at 1 a.m. Now tell me people like me feel nothing.

Telling the public about those of us who work in animal research may not change opinions, but I want to break the silence.

I want real information to be available so, no matter what opinions are formed, they are formed only after considering and knowing facts.

Finally, I also call on others in this industry to follow me and tell the story from our side, to be transparent and open the door to the truth to dispute and dispel the myths about animals in medical research.