Dog News Round Up II

December 7, 2011

I’m still trying to get through a backlog of links to compelling articles about our canine pals, so here we go with Round 2:

DiscoveryNews reports on a piece in the  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology describing the health benefits of pet ownership. They include a link to an article about the role of pets in human evolution. For more on this topic, I highly recommend Temple Grandin’s Animals Make Us Human, available in paperback from Amazon for only 6 bucks.

The Dogs of War: Beloved Comrades in Afghanistan.“We consider the dog another Marine,” says Capt. Manuel Zepeda, the commander of Company F, Second Battalion, Sixth Marines. From the New York Times.

I Sniff, Therefore I Am. Are Dogs Self-Conscious? by Robert Krulwich at the NPR Science Blogs. Regardless of the position scientists take on this topic, I have my own opinion. One of my dogs has clearly entered into a pact with Satan and I’m assuming you need to be self-conscious to accomplish this.

A South Korean Dog Farmers’ Association festival to promote the tradition of eating dog meat was cancelled back in June due to protests by activists, as reported by Animal Planet.

Is it possible to make a case for eating dogs, given that millions are euthanized every year while people on Plant Earth go hungry? Read this piece from the Global Post to explore this admittedly difficult topic. On this subject the Global Post’s in-depth article Dog Meat Mafia is required, if unpleasant, reading.

The controversy over the number of required and recommended vaccinations for dogs is examined in Vaccines ‘are making our dogs sick as vets cash in’ from the UK Mail Online. I’m remain uncertain if the science is settled as far as blaming illnesses in dogs on over-vaccination.

The broader subject of human vaccinations is clearly muddled in the public mind these days as life-saving, disease preventing vaccinations for humans are under attack by ignorant celebrities and the anguished parents of autistic children. The lesson here is clearly, don’t take your medical advice from former Playboy playmates.

What’s the harm, you ask? Go to this site and learn: Jenny McCarthy Body Count.

For more facts, see also the books of Dr. Paul Offit, Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All and Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure.

Find out who are the Top Ten Dog of Science in Dogged Research from Scientific American.

Does your dog (or other pet) sleep in your bed? Learn about the potential risks in Warm Nights, Cold Noses from the New York Times.

And all these years I thought Cat Scratch Fever was just a dumb Ted Nugent song.

We should, I think, always remember that pro-gun and anti-drug activist Nugent claims he didn’t know the lyrics to “Journey to the Center of the Mind” – a hit from his first band The Amboy Dukes in 1968 – were about drugs. Sure, I believe that. A rock and roll band singing about drugs in 1968? What a ridiculous claim.

 

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