From Félicette the space cat to Dolly the sheep – which animals should be given a statue?

There is hardly any good news any more, so it was pleasing to hear of a crowdfunding campaign to raise money – £40,000 – for a bronze statue to honour Félicette, the first cat in space. Félicette survived her escapades – the only cat ever to do so – and returned to live in Paris in 1963 as a cause célèbre, nine lives still intact. Laika who? Inspired by this fearless feline, here are some animal peers also deserving of a monument.

Congo the chimp

Congo was one of the most prolific artists of the 1950s, producing 400 abstract expressionist works before the age of four. Pablo Picasso was reportedly a big fan and owned a Congo, and in 2005 three pieces by the chimp were included in a Bonhams auction (along with Warhols), selling for $26,000. Salvador Dali once said of a Congo painting: “The hand of the chimpanzee is quasi-human; the hand of Jackson Pollock is totally animal.” Sick burn.

Dolly and Shrek the sheep

Dolly was the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell. In a creepy sounding move, she was named after Dolly Parton because her DNA came from a mammary cell. I’d recommend placing Dolly on a plinth alongside Shrek, a merino sheep who escaped and was found in 2004, having been unsheared for six years. It’s thought he hid in caves to evade capture. Once rounded up, Shrek’s 60lb of wool was cut live on television. He raised $150,000 for charity and even met the New Zealand prime minister. What a baa-d ass.

Wheely Willy the chihuahua

Wheely Willy is the first of a long line of pets with disabilities who have found phenomenal success and been granted book deals and TV shows (see also: fellow doggos TurboRoo and Tuna Melt; Crisp P Bacon the piglet; Grumpy Cat and Lil Bub). Born in 1991, Willy was horribly abused as a young pup, leaving him with spinal injuries. He was fitted with one of the first wheelframes for dogs and became an international sensation: in Japan, members of the royal family got down on the floor to greet him. Sadly (and awkwardly), after a life of overcoming adversity, Willy died when his owner dropped him. He was 18.

Huberta the hippo

Huberta is “one of the most famous hippos in the history of South Africa”. One day in 1928 Huberta decided to go for a walk. An epic walk of 1,000 miles. She walked from the now KwaZulu-Natal province to East London – the East London in South Africa, that is – followed by curious journalists and adoring fans. The walk took three years, and 121 rivers were crossed. It was made illegal to hunt Huberta – until some numbskull did just that a month after she had settled.

Wild Love – The New Missy Dress 2018 Collections

I love this time of year so much. All the fabulousness of autumn is gathering pace outside my window while my email is filling up with all the 2018 bridal collections.

Missy Dress is well known for creating collections that bring a contemporary feel to classically elegant designs and these gowns continue that heavenly tradition.

Both collections are wonderfully made. The construction of each and every gown is superb and the Missy Dress signature level of attention to detail is evident throughout. Everything works so well – the fabric choices and combinations, the selections of embellishments, the shapes – and everything comes together to create these perfect dresses.

The 2018 collection from Missy Dress is all about elegance and femininity and I have to say that I'm totally in love with the dreamy, voluminous skirts. Missy Dress have managed to totally reinvent the silhouettes of the dresses in this collection and you just know that these gowns are going to be so incredibly flattering to wear.

Now I think there are so many reasons why you'll love the Missy Dress collection (err, hello gorgeous lace!) but these designs look even better when you wear them. The movement of the gowns is just heavenly thanks to the combination of materials and fabrics in each. The weight is perfect, the cut is perfect and the craftsmanship is excellent.

Finally, can we just take a moment to talk about those embellishments? The white gemstone hand embroidery is one thing but the fringes on the sleeves and necklines? That's so, so right.

The Missy Dress 2018 collection itself is just as wonderful and there's so much here that will steal your heart. This is a collection that's light and delicate and all of the dresses totally emphasise this. Think gowns buttoned top to bottom, skirts with centre openings and applications of lace and gauze godets that completely alter the look of the dresses giving a really unexpected touch of refined glamour to each.

I'm also a huge fan of the amazing off-the-shoulder necklines and detachable cap sleeves that we're seeing in the collection for the first time now. Cap sleeves are so on-trend right now and I'm really crushing on those sexy-yet-so-sophisticated necklines. It great to see that this collection let's you create your own style combinations for a truly personal wedding day look.

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.