200 cats, 200 dogs, one lab: the secrets of the pet food industry – podcast
news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Monday, 1 April - 04:00
Pet food is a £120bn industry, with vast resources spent on working out how best to nourish and delight our beloved charges. But how do we know if we’re getting it right? By Vivian Ho
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comics.movim.eu / TheyCanTalk · Sunday, 31 March - 23:02
approval
Cute, cuddly, and often crippled: look where the love of dogs has taken the British | Martha Gill
news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Saturday, 30 March - 19:00
From dachshunds to pugs, our canine friends are bred to better serve as emotional crutches or status symbols
You may have missed a recent international incident. Last week, we Brits got wind of a very worrying development across the Channel. “Sausage Dogs to be banned in Germany,” ran alarmed headlines in the UK press. The Germans, for their part, were so baffled by this response that they reported on it themselves. “Brits Fear for the German Sausage Dog”, ran a puzzled article in Bild , the country’s best-selling newspaper.
“ There will always be sausage dogs ,” a spokesman told the BBC, which was in turn reporting on the Bild story. “We will just never see any with legs one centimetre long.” They were not banning the breed, they explained, just proposing a law that could stop breeders making dachshunds more and more indistinguishable from actual sausages, thus worsening their knee, hip and back problems.
Continue reading...Digested week: Germany has the right idea on dachshunds. Dogs should be cuddly
news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 29 March - 10:48
Germans want to ban ‘torture breeding’ for extreme characteristics. Plus: don’t even think about swimming in British waters this Easter
I’ll say this for the Germans: when they’re right, they’re so right. Word reaches us that dachshunds are to be banned in Germany.
Continue reading...The pet I’ll never forget: Buddy the rescue dog, whose final walk brought him so much joy
news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Monday, 25 March - 11:00 · 1 minute
Loving us but hating other dogs, Buddy was a delight at home and a nightmare away from it. When his time came, we decided to give him one last outing
My partner, Paul, and I are dog lovers through and through but our office jobs meant it had never been practical, or fair, to have a dog of our own. In lockdown our working situations changed, however, so we visited Oxford Animal Sanctuary and met Buddy, a labrador/border collie cross. He was nine and very reactive to other dogs. Knowing he had spent three years in and out of kennels, we couldn’t bear the thought of leaving him in what must have been an incredibly stressful environment. So on 4 July 2020 we brought him home.
With us, Buddy was docile, gentle and obedient. He never barked or charged around; he was the perfect house dog. A real character, he loved waking us up by grabbing the corner of the duvet in his mouth and ripping it off. He adored playing football and always tried to join in when I attempted Yoga With Adriene or a Joe Wicks workout. But the sanctuary had warned that if he saw another dog he would become agitated and aggressive and want to charge at them. So every time we took him for a walk, Paul would have to go ahead and make sure the coast was clear.
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Dogs’ brain activity shows they recognize the names of objects
news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 22 March - 15:00
Enlarge / Wired for science! (credit: Marianna Boros, Eötvös Loránd University)
Needle, a cheerful miniature schnauzer I had as a kid, turned into a ball of unspeakable noise and fury each time she saw a dog called Puma. She hated Puma so much she would go ballistic, barking and growling. Merely whispering the name “Puma” set off the same reaction, as though the sound of it and the idea of the dog it represented were clearly connected deep in Needle’s mind.
A connection between a word and a mental representation of its meaning is called “referential understanding,” and for a very long time, we believed dogs lacked this ability. Now, a study published by a team of Hungarian researchers indicates we might have been wrong.
The idea that dogs couldn’t form associations with language in a referential manner grew out of behavioral studies in which dogs were asked to do a selective fetching task. The canines had a few objects placed in front of them (like a toy or a bone) and then had to fetch the one specifically named by their owner.
Dogs can understand the meaning of nouns, new research finds
news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 22 March - 15:00
Study confirms our canine companions can grasp more than simple commands – or at least for items they care about
Dogs understand what certain words stand for, according to researchers who monitored the brain activity of willing pooches while they were shown balls, slippers, leashes and other highlights of the domestic canine world.
The finding suggests that the dog brain can reach beyond commands such as “sit” and “fetch”, and the frenzy-inducing “walkies”, to grasp the essence of nouns, or at least those that refer to items the animals care about.
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comics.movim.eu / TheyCanTalk · Sunday, 17 March - 22:57
waiting
Number of abandoned French bulldogs increases sharply in England and Wales
news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Saturday, 16 March - 05:00
Exclusive: Number of such dogs that have been dumped rose from eight in 2020 to 582 in 2023, RSPCA says
They may be lauded in the show ring, adored by celebrities, and feature in myriad adverts, but the number of French bulldogs being abandoned has risen sharply in recent years, data suggests.
According to the RSPCA, the number of such dogs in England and Wales that have been dumped rose from eight in 2020 to 582 in 2023 – an increase of more than 7,000% in three years.
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