Paw Prints.
"True, feel-good stories from the world of pets, found and curated for the Talking With Pets family. We do not retell them, we point you to them, with a little Talking With Pets flavor along the way."
"This is the first edition built end to end the way Paw Prints is meant to run. It is also the longest, at five picks, because it is where we worked out the shape: one story from somewhere specific, one about an animal that is not a dog or a cat, and one thing we simply did not know before."
The dog who cried when the walk was over
A Bronx family said goodbye to Kippy, their dog of ten years, last October, and quickly realized how much of daily life she had shaped. Barie-Lynne and her five grown children start looking for a new dog, with her son overseas even weighing in. Then her daughter Surie, an ASPCA Adoption Center volunteer, mentions a particular dog from her walking rounds, for a reason that turns out to say everything.
“I had no reason to go anywhere. It was difficult. Having a dog is an essential part of our family.”
Read the full story at ASPCA Newsroom →Story and quote via ASPCA Newsroom
The 15,000th kitten had a name
July 10 marks National Kitten Day, and this year the ASPCA has real cause to celebrate: its Los Angeles Kitten Foster Program just cared for its 15,000th kitten. That milestone kitten, a partially blind three-month-old named Juno, arrived at the county animal care center by way of a Good Samaritan and needed real medical support to get by. What her foster caregiver did next is exactly the kind of story this program was built around.
“The 15,000th kitten, Juno, was brought into the Los Angeles County Animal Care Center, Baldwin Park by a Good Samaritan. At roughly three months old, this partially blind kitten was in need of medical support.”
Read the full story at ASPCA Newsroom →Story and quote via ASPCA Newsroom
One bird, one last chance
By October 1918, Major Whittlesey's battalion was cut off behind German lines in the Argonne Forest, and their own side's artillery had started landing on them by mistake. Whittlesey had already sent two messenger pigeons that never made it. There was exactly one bird left in the loft, a hen named Cher Ami, and exactly one chance left to get a message out before the barrage found its mark.
“We are along the road parallel to 276.4. Our own artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. For heaven’s sake, stop it.”
Read the full story at History.com →Story and quote via History.com / Smithsonian NMAH
A memory care community's afternoon with the dogs of Champs Chance
At Azalea Gardens Memory Care in Tallahassee, residents, families, and neighbors spent an afternoon making blankets, toys, and treats by hand, for dogs they had never met. The dogs belonged to Champs Chance, a nearby rescue quietly working through a hard stretch. Some of them came along to meet the people making things for them. By the end of the day, the community had done more than craft a few gifts for some very good dogs.
“It’s heartwarming, it’s really been rough on us, really rough, so to have any kind of community support has been, really has lifted all of our spirits.”
Read the full story at WCTV →Story and quote via WCTV
What your dog already knows about your mood
A two-session study out of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology put dogs through the same training task twice, once after their owner watched a neutral video, once after a happy, sad, or neutral one. The dogs didn't comfort a sad owner the way people might expect. But something else changed: how well they learned. Read the full study for what researchers think this means for how we train, and treat, the dogs already in our homes.
“By better understanding how dogs respond to human emotions, researchers hope that humankind’s relationship with our best friend will only improve, leading to improved training regimes, fewer confrontations, and new areas of cooperation.”
Read the full research summary at Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology →Story via Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology
Paw Prints curates and links to reporting by others, with full attribution. We do not claim authorship of the original stories, and every headline above goes straight to the people who did the work.
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Good stories about animals, found and pointed at. Nothing else.