Assistance Monkeys, Ducks, Parrots, Pigs and Ducks ... Should the law protect them? My Latest New York Times Magazine Story

Update: The Culture Dish move is now complete, and the new Culture Dish feed is now live. Please update your subscription and we'll see you over on the new site!

I know, I told you Culture Dish was moving, and it did. But I've been having problems with the new site (hard-to-read font, plus its feed isn't activated yet, alas), so I wanted to post a quick note here to let folks know about my latest New York Times Magazine story, Creature Comforts, which just went online today. It's about the use of nontraditional service animals -- including monkeys, miniature horses, parrots, snakes, goats, even ducks -- and the legal battles surrounding them. The print version will hit the stands this Sunday. I've posted about the story in detail on my new blog, along with photos of the animals I wrote about, video footage of Panda the guide miniature horse, and much more. So come check it out.

Photo caption: Skloot interviewing Richard the agoraphobia service monkey ...

Having a Good Pet Death

My latest pets column, The Good Good-Bye, has just hit the stands in the July issue of Prevention Magazine. As you'll see, it's about something near and dear: Dealing with the loss of a pet both emotionally, and logistically.

In my 10 years as a veterinary technician, I helped euthanize many animals, including one of my own, so I understand that side of the death experience all too well. What I didn't know until I set out to write this column was what an enormous industry pet death has become: You can get an incredible variety of pet urns and coffins (including lifesized ones), you can have your pet's hair or ashes turned into a diamond, you can cryopreserve your pet in case science catches up with science fiction to make cloning possible (don't count on that one), you can even have your pet freeze dried in a variety of natural positions, so you can keep it with you at home looking frighteningly lifelike. Okay, yeah: Some of it is definitely bizarre. But hey, like I said in my column, if this stuff helps people recover from losing pets, who cares it seems weird to others.

On another note: I've finally arrived in Memphis, where I'm surrounded by boxes and lacking an Internet connection at home. So this blog will continue to be pretty quiet for a while. But more news from The South soon ...

New Pets Column Now Live

I'm happy to report that I am now writing a monthly column about Pets for Prevention magazine. An editor at the magazine contacted me after reading this article I wrote about my dog Bonny plus several animal-related posts on this blog -- she suggested I combine my love of animal stories with my decade of experience as a veterinary technician to write a regular series for Prevention (which I thought was a fabulous idea).

My first column just hit stands in their June issue (now available in grocery stores everywhere) -- it's called "Feeding Disorders," and it was inspired by this post about pet obesity, which I wrote when the FDA approved a crazy new diet drug for dogs (interestingly, that is one of my most widely read posts, perhaps in part because of the amazing photograph I posted with it).

Stay tuned for more columns, which I'll post here each month as they run. And feel free to email me any tips or suggestions for future columns.

A Sad Day: FDA Approves First Dog Obesity Drug

The FDA just announced that they've just approved the first-ever obesity drug for dogs, which really makes me cringe. Why? Because dogs don't have eating disorders -- their owners have feeding disorders.

This summer, I adopted a new dog after she ran in front of my car on an interstate. She was starved, so I took her home and fed her. And fed her. And fed her. She weighed 20 pounds and could eat a heaping cup of food in 28 seconds (yes, I timed her). But that was fine, because she needed all the extra calories she could get. Then, about three months later, during a good wrestling match, I realized I couldn't feel her ribs anymore. Suddenly, she'd gone from being emaciated to being pudgy. So I did exactly what everyone else with a pudgy dog should do: I started feeding her less. Instead of getting a heaping cup at each meal, she got 2/3 of a cup. Three weeks later, she wasn't pudgy anymore. That's the amazing thing about dogs and weight: Humans control their calorie intake, and there's nothing dogs can do about it. If your dog needs to lose weight, you feed it less food.

It's true that there's an epidemic of canine (and feline) obesity right now, just like there's an epidemic of human obesity. Which is no coincidence: People don't exercise, which means their dogs don't exercise. When people eat, they feed their dogs scraps, so the dogs gain weight right along with their owners. And don't even get me started on the ingredients in dog food.

But there are other less obvious problems: Owners often have no idea how much they should feed their dogs, and if they follow the guidelines on most dog food bags, they're probably going to have obese dogs, because pet food companies encourage overfeeding. I had a 125 pound dog who lived to be 16 and was never an ounce over or under weight. If I'd followed the guidelines for his food, he'd have eaten 2 1/2 times what I actually fed him, and surely become obese. My very healthy 17 year old dog Bonny eats 1/4 the recommended amount, always has.

During my years as a veterinary technician, I saw many dogs die or become paralyzed from obesity. Today, when I see an obese dog on the street, I want to walk up to its owner and say, You love your dog, right? Then why are you killing it?

If it's come down to this, and people are unable to control themselves when it comes to feeding their dogs, I'd rather see dogs medicated than dead. But I hope vets who prescribe this stuff paste a sticker on every bottle that says, Dogs don't need obesity drugs. They need owners who will feed them the right amount, cut back when necessary, and make sure they get exercise. (Perhaps the FDA should consider a self-control drug for humans with dog feeding disorders.)

Cuteoverload

Yes, it's true ... I, like thousands of other sensible people out there, am completely addicted to Cuteoverload. And I'm not ashamed to admit it.

But it's not like I haven't gone very public with animal obsession several times already ... sometimes quite aggressively.

Unnecessary Dog and Cat Killing in S. Korea

Okay, this is absolutely awful: South Korea has just announced that they're going to begin slaughtering about 600 dogs and "an unspecified number of cats" because of fears over bird flu. There's a big outbreak of it there in chickens, so the South Korean government has been slaughtering those the thousands to prevent the virus's spread, which is what they're supposed to do, according to the WHO. Fine. But now they're going to slaughter all the dogs and cats in the area?! This is insane. There has never been a single case of dogs or cats catching bird flu and passing it on to humans. There is, in fact, no scientific evidence that such a thing is possible. Several Asian countries have been criticized for not taking the risk of avian flu seriously, so it's good South Korea isn't doing that ... but this is ridiculous.

More Talking Dogs

For those who were properly impressed by the singing basenji I posted about last week, I give you Gibson (pictured left) the world's tallest dog (honest), who happens to be able to say "I love you." Really, check out his site and click on the paw under his picture. If you're like me, you'll click it compulsively about 20 times to hear it over and over again ... (thanks for that tip, Sarah!)


The other thing you'll do if you're like me: After verifying that Gibson is indeed the world's tallest dog, you'll waste far too much time looking at lots of other amazing things ... the world's longest rabbit ears, for example, or my personal favorites: Most tennis balls held in the mouth (pictured right) and fastest car window opened by a dog. Good stuff.

Catching Up

I just got back from several weeks of writing stories in hotel rooms and speaking at the 412 festival in Pittsburgh (pictured left, with Michael Rosenwald and Daniel Nester, talking about freelancing) and the Nieman Narrative Nonfiction conference in Boston, where I spoke about freelancing, writer/editor relationships, and narrative science journalism (including a panel with the wonderful Michael Pollan). The highlight of Nieman for me: hanging with Joe Sacco and Stacy Sullivan and finally getting to meet Marc Abrahams (I must hear the end of that story, Marc!)

Because of all my travels, the blog has been a bit quiet. To catch up a bit, here's a quick round-up of things I've been wanting to post about:

* A doctor in New York got the go-ahead to do the first ever womb transplant, which I find amazing: Elective organ transplantation for a non life-saving organ? No thank you.

* After a few scandals and a congressional investigation, the National Institutes of Health has finally tightened their ethics rules to restrict researchers' abilities to earn money from outside sources. As a result, a new survey says, though 73% of NIH researchers believe those new rules will increase the credibility of the organization, almost 40% say they're looking for new jobs because of the tighter restrictions.

* A group of children born as part of "Font of Life," -- the project Hitler developed to create a breed of people that fit his idea of the perfect human (blond hair, blue eyes, non-Jewish, etc) -- met for the first time as adults recently, to talk about the trauma they've experienced over their origins.

* The Chinese have admitted what experts have known for some time but haven't been able to prove: That they take organs from prisoners for transplantation, and Americans buy them on the black market.

* And a study found that elephants can recognize themselves in the mirror. How scientists figured this out is pretty fascinating, though it always frustrates me when researchers seem shocked to find that animals are just as intelligent/feeling/whatever as we are...

Singing Basenjis

I absolutely love this: Basenjis are always billed as barkless dogs, which most people take to mean they're quiet dogs. Not so. They, like malamutes, can't bark, but they can do all kinds of other things with their voices and often do. Much to the surprise of many new basenji and malamute owners, they're two of the most vocal breeds out there. Having had a malamute for 16 years, there's nothing I love more than the sound of a non-barking dog making noise ... it's melodic, nearly verbal, and totally hilarious. So I was very pleased to see that someone has recorded this wonderful duet for Basenji and flute. I laugh very hard and very loud every time I listen to it. Thanks to Marc over at Improbable Research for posting it.

Speaking of Dr. Seuss ...

In an earlier post, I mentioned that tomorrow is the anniversary of Dr. Seuss's death. Well ... Thanks to Boing Boing, I just came across another Dr. Seuss fact very worth mentioning: The Dr. Seuss Taxidermy Collection (!), which is an absolutely fabulous thing. From the gallery's website:

"Seuss embarked on an ingenious project in the early 1930s as he evolved from two-dimensional artworks to three-dimensional sculptures. What was most unusual for these mixed-media sculptures was the use of real animal parts including beaks, antlers and horns from deceased Forest Park Zoo animals where Seuss’s father was superintendent. Unorthodox Collection of Taxidermy was born in a cramped New York apartment and included a menagerie of inventive creatures with names like the “Two Horned Drouberhannis,” “Andulovian Grackler,” and “Semi-Normal Green-Lidded Fawn.” Shortly after Seuss created this unique collection of artworks, Look Magazine dubbed Seuss “The World’s Most Eminent Authority on Unheard-Of Animals.” To this day, Seuss’s Unorthodox Collection of Taxidermy remains as some of the finest examples of his inventive and multi-dimensional creativity."

In case anyone is feeling generous, I thought I should mention: I would like any or all of the taxidermy collection for my birthday, which also happens to be tomorrow. ;-)

His secret art collection is quite wonderful too. Given my current status as a writer actively worrying about her book, my personal favorite is certainly, "Self Portrait of an Artist Worrying About His Next Book," pictured right, which really nails it. The book he was worrying about when he painted this: "Green Eggs and Ham."

The Immortal Dog?

Carl Zimmer has a great post over at The Loom about an incredible phenomena going on in dogs right now: Sticker's Sarcoma -- a tumor that's actually transmissible from dog-to-dog through licking and mating.

The amazing thing is this: A group of scientists just conducted a study to figure out what's going on with this tumor, and they found that all of these tumor cells -- regardless of which dog the tumor is from -- have the same genetic markers. Which means they all came from the same dog. Scientists have now traced this cancer back to its roots and found that it's most likely the remnant of one Asian dog or wolf who died 200 years ago, or more. A dog who has achieved an immortality similar to that of Henrietta Lacks, the woman I'm writing my book about.

Carl invoked Henrietta in his post, which does a great job explaining this phenomena and the paper just published on it:

"So here's the big question which the authors [of the scientific paper] don't tackle head on: what is this thing? Is it a medieval Chinese dog that has found immortality? If so, then it resembles HeLa cells, a line of cancer cells isolated from a woman named Henrietta Lacks who died in 1951. After her death, scientists have propagated her cells, and in that time they have adapted to their new ecological niche of Petri dishes, acquiring mutations that make it grow aggressively in the lab. One biologist even suggested that the cells should be consider a new species.

Scientists put Henrietta's cells into a petri dish to grow them in the 50s, and they're still alive today. The seriously freaky thing about this dog-thing is, no scientist took a sample from some dog and helped it live in culture. This whole thing happened naturally. Which is seriously freaky. Though this cancer isn't usually fatal -- it appears to vanish a few months after it appears -- this is yet another reminder that all those scientists of the 50s who were ridiculed for thinking viruses caused cancer were right. And they knew it: Decades ago, they actually injected HeLa cells into people to prove their point, and the result was similar to the dog cancer: small tumors grew, but soon vanished.

Alien Found (then lost) Inside of a Duck

I've always had a thing for animal x-rays. I had a huge collection from my days as a veterinary technician: An x-ray of a dog who swallowed a dozen fish hooks; another who'd swallowed pounds of stones; an entire Burmese python; a cat that swallowed a snake whole -- it curled up in the cat's stomach so it looked like the cat was actually pregnant with a snake. But like a moron, I lent my beloved x-ray collection to an artist for a project, then she ran off with them (the evil artist: Her name was Linda Sasso -- if you run into her, tell her I want my x-rays back).

All of this is to say, I was quite pleased to hear that a group in California recently x-rayed a duck and found nothing less than the head of an alien in the duck's stomach. The San Francisco Chronicle covered the finding well:

"As if crop circles weren't proof enough that extraterrestrials are among us, an alien has now been found in the stomach of a duck. That, at least, is the conclusion reached by workers at the International Bird Rescue Research Center in Cordelia (Solano County) when they viewed an X-ray image they took of a sick mallard. Right there, in the duck's ventriculus, or gizzard, is the shocking image of a grimacing, bald-headed being. How it got there, nobody knows, but when an autopsy was performed after the bird died of unrelated causes, the alien had mysteriously disappeared."

Here, in case you missed it in the big x-ray, is a close-up of said alien. Fortunately, it doen't look particularly mean. The executive director of the bird rescue center said, "We're a 35-year-old organization, and we've seen a lot of things -- bullets, fish hooks -- but this is the first time anything like this has shown up. I don't know my aliens well, but it looks like one of those with the big eyes and the long fingers."

I've seen this sort of things many times ... in my x-ray collection, I actually had several images of aliens inside of animals. Like this duck, in the end, they're not really aliens -- it's food mixed with air (artistic indigestion, that's what I always called it). But you've gotta love the images.

Why I Don't Live Near Alligators

In the past, I've mentioned that I like living in a city like NYC because it means I don't have to deal with things like quicksand and crocodile-eating pythons. Well, add this to the list of reasons I'll never live in Florida with the alligators.

Vet Clinic Faked Dog's Death

Not long ago, a couple in Allentown, PA took their German shepherd Annie to the vet for euthanasia -- the dog was two years old and severely epileptic. But instead of putting Annie down, the vet faked her death, then found her a new home. Annie's owners found out and sued:

"Dana and Gary Ganyer said they cried while watching what they thought was the death of Annie ... But Annie was not euthanized ... Instead, the lawsuit says, the dog was given a sedative to make it appear she was dead. The clinic then gave Annie to a new owner, Gene Rizzo of northeast Philadelphia, who cared for the dog until he had her euthanized Nov. 2, the lawsuit says. "When I heard she was still alive I literally screamed and went into hysterics," Dana Ganyer said. The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, accuses Mill Pond Veterinary Clinic, Mill Pond Kennels and three of its employees of fraud, negligence and defamation" (AP).

I completely understand the temptation to fake a dog's death. I was a veterinary technician for more than ten years -- I worked in regular clinics, emergency rooms and animal morgues. I've euthanized many many animals. In most cases, this was actually a beautiful thing -- a peaceful end to suffering. But every once in a while, people turn to euthanasia for wrong reasons ... the dog is too much work, it sheds too much, they don't have time for it. When that happened, we'd try to convince owners not to do it. If we had kennels in the clinic, we'd take it and find it a home. If we didn't have kennels, we'd call an animal rescue group to take it. If the owner insisted on euthanasia, we simply refused to do it. No vet I worked for would ever fake a dogs death, but we talked about doing it every time.

This case doesn't actually sound like wrongful euthanasia: "On June 30, the Ganyers received a call from the former clinic employee, who told them Annie was still alive, and a few days later they drove to Rizzo's home. According to the Ganyers, Annie could barely walk and was ''bloated, her coat was grey, her eyes bulged and it appeared she had hip ataxia, all side effects of phenobarbital.'' A few days later, she lapsed into a coma after a seizure and was actually euthanized. It's hard to fathom how this vet could have thought keeping this dog alive was the right thing to do under any circumstances.

This isn't the only case of its kind: A similar lawsuit was filed in March by woman whose vet agreed to euthanize and cremate her cat, but didn't. I'm not surprised to hear that vets are doing this -- I've always assumed this happened, but few cases have actually been documented. To me, this doesn't mean it isn't happening, it just means some vets get away with it (and when it's wrongful euthanasia, it's hard not to say, more power to them).

Of Note: Fish Tricks

Today's Pittsburgh Post Gazette ran a story about a local man and his son who've trained their goldfish to do the limbo, play football and shoot a soccer ball into a net. The fish's owner, Dean Pomerleau, has written an e-book (called "Fish School Manual"), which he's selling through his website for the low price of $5.95, which means that you too can teach your fish to do tricks ("Money Back Guarantee"). His website is a must-see: It's got videos of fish playing soccer, dancing, you name it.

The website says, in big bold letters, "This is NOT a joke." That's right. Truth is, teaching fish to do tricks is nothing new. People have been training their goldfish for years: The first book on the subject was published in 1995, but people have been doing it far longer than that. When I was working on my story about fish medicine (and interviewing people who spend thousands of dollars taking their pet fish to the doctor), I met several people who'd taught their fish to dance, swim through hoops, swim little flips on command. As one of my favorite fish vets always says, "Fish are a lot smarter than we give them credit for."

Fish Medicine Audio Slide Show Now Live

As I mentioned a while ago, I just finished a mini-documentary on the world of fish medicine for PBS's Nova ScienceNOW series. I also did an in-depth photo and audio slide show for the ScienceNOW website, which explores the most common pet-fish ailments, and the ways fish owners diagnose and treat them (MRIs, CT scans, fish surgery, chemotherapy, you name it -- all for pet fish). This piece is a follow up to Fixing Nemo, a story I did about fish surgery and fish medicine for the New York Times Magazine

The audio show is now live, so take a look. [Update: The entire show is now available online. You can visit the Nova ScienceNOW website to watch the show online, listen to the audio slideshow, and read an extensive Q & A with Dr. Greg Lewbart on fish medicine.]

The full show, which airs on Tuesday October 18th at 8pm (EST) on PBS, is a follow up on my New York Times Magazine article, Fixing Nemo, which ran last year. It covers current developments in the field, and it's filled with incredible footage of goldfish laser surgery, fish owners explaining the intense bonds they develop with their fish, and more. So mark your calendars, and tune in!

Of Note: Python Explodes After Eating Alligator

Really, the headline on this one says it all. Rangers just reported that a 13-foot python ate a 6-foot alligator, and the result wasn't pretty. The snake tried to swallow the gater whole -- then the snake exploded.

Apparently, clashes between pythons and alligators are becoming increasingly common in the Everglades, where people have developed the annoying habit of dumping their pet pythons when they get too big to keep around the house (say, six feet long, or more). This has the makings of a tremendous problem: They're encroaching on an $8 billion dollar Everglades restoration project by eating the native otters, the endangered birds ... and now the alligators? Encounters like this simply aren't natural -- these snakes are a native species of Asia. They're not supposed to be fighting Florida alligators. But this is the fourth battle of its kind.

Frank Mazzotti, a University of Florida wildlife professor, is quoted by VZW News (which isn't online or I'd link to it) saying that in this case, the alligator and python "were probably evenly matched in size ... if the python got a good grip on the alligator before the alligator got a good grip on him, he could win." But, he says, after being swallowed whole, the alligator apparently clawed at the pythons stomach from the inside, causing the snake to explode. The remains found by the rangers were a mess: The alligator's hind end protruding from the snake's midsection; the snake's stomach still wrapped around the alligator's head, shoulders and front legs ...

This is an unfortunate blow for the folks in the Everglades restoration project -- they've been hoping the alligators might control the rapidly growing Burmese python population. "This indicates to me it's going to be an even draw," Mazzotti said. "Sometimes alligators are going to win and sometimes the pythons will win." Then, in one of the most striking understatements of the day, the BBC quotes Mazzotti saying "Clearly, if they can kill an alligator they can kill other species ... it means nothing in the Everglades is safe from pythons ..."

See, now that's just one more reason I live in New York City: No pythons, no alligators, and no quicksand ...

On The Road Again & Fish Medicine

As you may have figured out from my air silence the last couple weeks, I'm on the road again. This time I'm in Pittsburgh, where I'm teaching at the University of Pittsburgh as a visiting writer for the fall semester (in the Cathedral of Learning, pictured left).

I got to Pittsburgh a few days ago after an exhilerating week in Baltimore teaching at the Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Summer Writers Conference -- an intensive event filled with readings, panel discussions and heavy workshopping. I teach there every August, and it's always one of the best parts of my summer ... like geek summer camp for writers, only better. It's endless fun.

From Baltimore, I headed straight for a crazy-fun week in North Carolina with Dr. Greg Lewbart, where I filmed a segment for Nova ScienceNOW about fish surgery. That's right: Fish medicine. There's a whole field of veterinary medicine devoted to treating fish. We're talking MRIs, CT scans, bloodwork, surgery, pain medications, you name it -- procedures that cost hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars, to treat pet fish. Everything from fancy koi to regular goldfish people win at fairs. I wrote about this last year in a New York Times Magazine called Fixing Nemo, but the Nova segment will cover fresh ground: It explores new developments in the field, and really getting into the isue of fish personality, and the relationships people form with their fish. It does all of this with beautiful television footage, which means that when it airs (October 18th on PBS) you can see this stuff with your own eyes -- you can watch a fish surgery performed by one of the nation's top fish vets (known in the field as "The Big Fish"), and you get to meet several personality-filled fish, and the people who love them. I'll post a reminder about it when the time is closer.

Of Note: Grizzly Bear-Sized Catfish Caught in Thailand

That's just unbelievable. Those guys just caught a catfish the size of a grizzly bear. It's actually a sad story: The giant catfish is critically endangered -- they caught this female and tried to strip her of her eggs with hopes of breeding her offspring in captivity to increase their numbers. But the fish died, so they ate it. According to National Geographic, "Mekong people believe it's a sacred fish, because it persists on plant matter and 'meditates," and "eating the fish is supposed to bring good luck ... the Chinese believe that catfish meat boosts intelligence and prolongs life."

That particular catfish was the biggest freshwater fish on record. Check out the photo gallery, it's very impressive.

Of Note: Counting Sheep

Yesterday in Turkey, a single sheep ran off a cliff to its death, and 1,500 other sheep followed it. This is amazing to me. The first 450 sheed actually died, but the rest survived after landing on the pillowy mass of the others who'd jumped before them. The AP reported that the "stunned Turkish shepherds, who had left the herd to graze while they had breakfast, watched as nearly 1,500 [sheep lept] off the same cliff."

What I want to know is, where were those shepherds eating breakfast?? I mean, how far does a shepherd stray from his flock for a meal? They could see the sheep, but they couldn't get to them before 1500 jumped? And what about sheep dogs? Where were they? Hanging out with the shepherds hoping for scraps? I mean, even my dog Bonny would know something funny was going on if she saw all those sheep running off a cliff, and she's a half-breed herding dog who's never seen a sheep, let alone herded one. She nips my heels if I start running, and I don't even have to be headed toward a cliff. So what gives? Obviously the blame for the mass-suicide falls on that first sheep, but the whole thing just baffles me a little. I want more details.

What amazed me most was this: "The estimated loss to families in the town of Gevas, located in Van province in eastern Turkey, tops $100,000, a significant amount of money in a country where average GDP per head is around $2,700." That's tragic.

I first heard about this story on my cell phone's news ticker -- it was actually the top breaking news story last night, which makes me wonder about the media outlet my phone service uses to determine what qualifies as breaking news. It's definitely an interesting story, don't get me wrong -- it raises all kinds of questions about pack psychology. But breaking news on a flashing red banner in the middle of my phone? Wow.