Lily with Doberman Rescue Alliance Wisconsin needs sponsors!

Lily is a cropped and docked, black and rust Doberman with Doberman Rescue Alliance Wisconsin, inc. 

She was super skinny and in poor health when they took her in, but even now that she's safe and sound in a foster home, she can't walk! She can stand with assistance now, and has improved marginally, but they aren't really sure of the underlying cause, and feel an MRI for diagnostic purposes is the way to go.

(picture from DRAW web page)

Canine News Roundup

The weather is blah and my post is late and so you're getting some interesting dog news that I've seen recently. Enjoy!

Apparently many US athletes at Sochi are adopting stray dogs. Russia's official solutions to stray dogs in general, and at Sochi specifically, were heartbreaking at best, and but for the diligent work of some individuals forming rescues, many  many dogs would have been euthanized for the sake of public appearances. Our country has a stray dog problem as well, though at least they tend not to be viewed as "biological trash" (or one might hope not).

In other (and even happier?) news, scientists have discovered/decided that dogs do, in fact, know what we're saying. Or at least understand that we are speaking to them, as they have centers in their brain dedicated to speech, discovered in another study using MRI. They're also sensitive to emotions (but I'll be you knew that already!).

I last wrote about Detroit here in November (I think) when I posted about an organization who was doing "Thanksgiving Dinner" for Detroit's stray dogs. Well, on February 18, animal advocates in Detroit stayed overnight in dog houses, to "raise awareness about the dangers of leaving pets outside at night". I understand that my dog values are not everybody's dog values, nor are they necessarily common, but it blows my  mind that people will regularly leave their pets outside through all sorts of temperatures and weather. If they changed even one person's mind, it's worth it, and I hope they reached a lot of people, and changed a lot of minds. Dogs (and cats) die outside in the winter. They're mammals, just like people. These are not difficult facts.

Practically Human, But Better

By now, you've probably heard or even read the article "Dogs are people, too" in the New York Times (in the opinion section, despite the usages of Science™ to carry out the experiment. That's telling, n'est-ce pas?) If you haven't, in a nutshell, the neuroscientist on the case, Gregory Berns, trained (with positive methods and help from a dog trainer) a team of 12 dogs to voluntarily go into an MRI, wearing a pair of noise blocking headphones, and stay there perfectly still for the duration of a brain scan wherein they confirmed brain activity that is indicative of canine emotions.

OCD in Dobermans may help shed light on OCD in people

So, last year I did mouth swabs for Elka and sent them in. I haven't heard a blessed thing back from the study, and bu there was another study that's being reported on this week, on hoarding genetics. I know I was excited to read the linked article, because I was all "Oh hey, Dobermans!" Then, of course, it was about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) which is a considerably less positive thing to associate with "my" breed. But there's discussion of how Doberman OCD can give insight into human OCD, and that's pretty rad.