Remember to include pets in your disaster evacuation plan

The Daily Examiner, 19 November 2019: 

With 99 per cent of NSW officially in drought and 53 per cent, including the Clarence Valley, in high fire danger, residents getting ready to evacuate need to remember to include pets in their disaster plan. 

Bushfires, floods and tropical cyclones are an increasing reality around the country. 

World Animal Protection is encouraging people to be prepared by planning ahead – and have disaster packs for cats, dogs, horses, birds and small animals available to help. 

“Many people don’t have a disaster plan that includes their pets,” World Animal Protection director Simone Clarke said. 

“We know from looking at past disasters that people can make last-minute decisions to try to keep their pets safe, putting themselves in danger in the process. 

“Pets must be part of emergency planning, not just to protect them but to keep your family safe too.” 

World Animal Protection’s top disaster preparation tips are: 

Prepare a disaster survival kit for your pet with food, water, medicine, identification and a favourite toy for comfort. 

Put it in an easy-to-access spot and check it regularly to keep it up to date 

Identify a “safe house”, such as a friend’s house, pet-friendly motel or animal shelter where you can take your pet during a disaster 

Practise your plan so your pet is used to moving into their carrier. This will ensure you and your pet can move fast and stay calm in an emergency 

Display a rescue sticker on your doors and windows to alert emergency responders that there are pets in the home that need to be rescued. 

Put your pet’s name on the sticker so emergency personnel can call out to them Update your pet’s ID so that rescuers can contact you if they find your pet in an emergency. It’s best to get your pet microchipped so it’s easy to update contact information. 

Visit www.protectyourpet.org.au to plan for your pet. 

One hundred & thirty-three dog attacks have been recorded in Clarence Valley so far in 2019

The Daily Examiner, 20 August 2019, p.6: 

There have been 133 recorded dog attacks across the Clarence Valley this year, with most of the attacks avoidable.

In an attempt to curb the problem, Clarence Valley Council has released a brochure to inform dog owners of their responsibilities.

Council regulatory services supervisor Tim Brenton said if people had taken two simple steps most of this year’s dog attacks could have been avoided. 

The first was to make sure dogs were always on a lead when being taken for a walk and the second was to ensure yards were properly fenced. 

“The seriousness of the attacks varied, but these were the common threads,” Mr Brenton said. “Unless they are in an off-leash area, dogs must be on a leash if they are outside their property. 

“Dog owners need to take all reasonable steps to ensure their dog is confined to the property where it is kept.” 

The brochure, called Take the Lead, will be distributed widely around the Clarence Valley and available at the council’s customer service centres in Grafton and Maclean. 

“Having a dog is wonderful,” Mr Brenton said. “But having a dog comes with responsibilities and this brochure aims to make people aware of those.” 

The brochure also contains a list of off-leash areas around the Clarence Valley and some of the penalties that apply for breaches of the Companion Animals Act.

Pet care in the home at during the festive season

https://www.123rf.com

The Daily Examiner, 18 December 2018, p.7:

We’d like to make sure your pet stays happy and healthy this silly season. Here’s a list of potential pet hazards to watch out for:

1. Christmas dinner and leftovers are too rich for our pets and can cause nasty tummy upsets and even pancreatitis. Stick to “pet approved” treats.

2. Macadamia nuts are popular at Christmas and can be toxic for dogs, leading to muscle weakness, vomiting and tremors.

3. Sultanas and raisins can cause kidney failure in dogs.

4. Barbecue skewers can be catastrophic for pets so take care to ensure your pet doesn’t accidentally ingest a skewer (which falls on the ground for example) and never feed your pet cooked bones - both can lead to the need for emergency intestinal surgery.

5. Chocolate – dogs can’t metabolise the theobromine in chocolate, and ingestion can lead to an increased heart rate, tremors, seizures and even death. The darker the chocolate the more toxic and the size of the dog and amount ingested also plays a part in the severity of the symptoms.

6. Decorations such as tinsel and fairy lights are very attractive to pets but can lead to a gastric obstruction if eaten.

7. Ribbons from presents are super attractive to cats and if ingested can lead to a nasty gastric obstruction requiring emergency surgery.

8. The Christmas tree might be an attractive indoor “pee tree” but can also be a falling hazard.

9. Lots of guests can cause your pet to become stressed and even lead to them trying to escape – make sure they have a safe and quiet place to retreat to.

10. Christmas lilies can cause kidney failure in cats. The stamen, leaves and stems are all potentially toxic as is the water they are stored in, so it’s best not to have them in the first place.

11. Snakes are out and about and will be all summer so take care in long grass, around water or areas where there are rodents (grain sheds and chook pens).

12. Heatstroke – never leave your pet in the car during the warmer weather. Even on a mild day the temperature inside a car can reach a dangerous level in minutes. Leaving a window down will not help either, so don’t risk it! If you have any questions about the health/safety of your pet, we are always here to put your mind at ease.

CREDIT: Riverbank Animal Hospital

Quotes of the Week

“You can’t tell me what to do, you’re not my dog!”  [Anon]

“Take your hundred dollar hat on your 1 dollar head and get back to rorting the system for you own greed you lying, dribbling fraction of a man.”  [Self-confessed reformed journalist Ronnie Salt tweeting about the Nationals MP for New England NSW, 6 August 2018]

Who can provide Coco with a permanent loving home?

What's not to love about this happy face?

​

"Coco" is a 10 month-old female Dalmatian-cross dog.

She has been the only dog in the household and has been rendered homeless because of the difficulty associated with keeping a dog in rented accommodation.

At the moment she is temporarily housed in the Lower Clarence Valley on the NSW North Coast and is desperately in need of a permanent home.

"She is an affectionate and beautiful dog once she gets to know you.

"She loves the water, walks, and just being with you in the garden where she will happily chew on a bone or chase and drink the water coming from the garden hose, or occasionally give you the ball back."

Coco has had all her vet work done and is ready for a loving home."

If you can offer "Coco" a forever home please contact Gabby on (02) 6645 7081.

Doggone right to have fun

Letter to the editor in The Daily Examiner 14 August 2013:

Doggone right to fun

JOHN Fraser in his letter to the editor appears to be totally intolerant of all dog behaviour and perhaps wants all dogs on lead, even in allocated lead-free areas.

Claiming a dog ran up to him and instantly started to bite him - perhaps the event is coloured by his apparent lack of understanding of dogs and their behaviour.

I do not wish to take away the fact that there are indeed some aggressive dogs out there and they should always be on a lead in a public place, but it is more rare than common that you will be attacked while walking along the beach.

Dogs will run and play and you will, as you will with children, get in the way of their play. It is not aggression and something that is innocent.

One can't complain that a dog is simply enjoying frolicking along the beach. I have seen people get dirty looks simply because a dog has trotted past them or trotted alongside them going along its merry way. With these types of people the dogs can do no right. It is often these people who get aggressive and the dog is scared off.

Dogs along the beach, for the majority of the time, get along with one another and greet people with a sniff or a wag of tail and sometimes an over enthusiastic jump, which generally has the owner apologising for and correcting the dog's behaviour.

I have rarely come across aggressive dogs in my many years of walking dogs along the beach and I have come across fewer lousy dog owners along the beach. I have not had any uncontrolled dog run up to me and 'attack' me as John has described of his 'many times uncontrolled dogs have run at me or my partner'. This just isn't normal. No one has that much bad luck so many times walking along the beach!

I believe John Fraser's letter comes from more overreaction and lack of understanding than it does of any real problem. I believe this as I see the reaction from the very few people who walk along the beach without animals and who do not like the idea it is also a leash-free area. They overreact to the slightest thing a dog does, from its walking past them, greeting them with a touch of a wet nose on their hand or as it bounds along well past them. There are many more non-leash-free areas you can visit without any terror of being brushed past by a dog.

He emotionally claims "something must be done to stop this.." claiming an elderly person unable to walk well would be hurt by such pooches. These elderly often have dogs with them (and don't think it is always the little fluffies they have) or if they are so poorly balanced they are not inclined to visit the beach.

By claiming something must be done the usual mentality comes into play by the 'few buggering it up for the majority'. Yes, the whingers who whinge over everything animal, those squeaky wheels and those troublemakers claiming 'something must be done' are the ones who bugger it up for the majority of sensible people who understand the behaviour, John.

Celeste Warren

Yamba

The Story of Floss

 

David Bancroft may have moved from APN’s The Daily Examiner to its Rural Weekly, but he turns up from time to time on the newspaper website which was his old stomping ground.

 

This is his story of the faithful farm dog Floss in two parts:

 

POOR Floss loved to chase vehicles - tractors, cars, the milk truck - just about anything. Her downfall was she was very bad at it and despite incident after incident and hour upon hour of trying to teach her to stay away, she persisted and failed.We were aware of at least a dozen times when she was run over, but believe there were many more as she would often turn up with a surprise injury.Floss was of mixed breed, a mongrel, an ugly but loyal companion with enough cattle sense to be of help on the farm….Still, she became somewhat famous. An ABC television crew came to our place to do a feature piece on dairying. My father's face featured for about five seconds; almost all the rest of the footage was of the dog….

DESPITE being perhaps the ugliest dog I've ever seen, Floss was a great mother and companion.

We never knew her breeding, but from her shape and colouring, she may have been part dachshund, part whippet and part kelpie.

If you're going for appearance, it's not a promising combination.

Together with the multiple road traumas she experienced from chasing vehicles (described last week), the end result was not pretty.

But she was a brilliant mother. She had 13 pups in her first litter and never had fewer than that.

It was a mad scramble for them all to get fed but, ugly as she was, Floss was also perhaps the most patient mother I've seen.

It was a bit of a struggle giving that first litter away, but after that we had no problems. They were in demand.

She produced terrific working dogs, which, happily, looked very little like their mother.

But finding homes for the pups created a few problems of its own.

When the last of the pups from that first litter was rehomed, my mother started losing shoes.

My mother initially thought she was just being careless but as more went missing, she investigated.

And she found Floss had commandeered the lot and taken them back to her den.

She was only interested in my mother's shoes - they had become her surrogate litter.

Singing for her supper - a little blogger light relief

 

 

http://youtu.be/ljKE_hugFfc

 

Catvertising - the new reality?

World's first catvertising agency

http://youtu.be/IkOQw96cfyE

Have you seen Chloe the Staffy?

In The Daily Examiner yesterday.

LAST Thursday night there were a series of loud explosions somewhere in the Grafton area.
I vaguely remember hearing something but didn't pay too much attention.
On Saturday night while our family was away it happened again.
Apparently though, it went on for sometime and rumour was that it continued until around 1am.
Our six-year-old staffy dog is very sensitive to these sounds and so would be many other dogs.
Since Saturday night our dog has been missing.
I hope she has been found and kept safe, as a search on Sunday morning failed to find her.
She is a loving dog and would not hurt anyone.
Her name is Chloe and she is black and dark brown.
To the senseless idiots (there is no other word) that created this disturbance, that's all you are - idiots.

TONY FOULSTONE Grafton NSW

Oh for goodness sake - leave me with something!

I'm doing my best to reduce my consumption level and live within a smaller environmental footprint in response to the threat of global warming - like a lot of other Australians I suppose.
I re-use where possible, limit the amount of household waste I produce, purchase second-hand goods in preference to new, shop locally, buy Australian almost exclusively when it comes to groceries, avoid buying food with ingredients which were produced by denuding rainforest, limit my meat eating to flesh that is less carbon intensive, walk everywhere I can or get public transport, don't load my garden with chemicals and I'm getting quite miserly when it comes to electricity and water.
So why do I feel like too much is being asked of me?
Because Larvatus Prodeo has opened my eyes to the fact that someone somewhere has written a book called "Time to Eat the Dog? the real guide to sustainable living" and those authors obviously want me to feel guilty about having a pet.
What next will I have to offer up on the altar of climate change - the heart of my first born?

Katz
Grafton

Guest Speak is a North Coast Voices segment allowing serious or satirical comment from NSW Northern Rivers residents. Email ncvguestpeak at live dot com dot au to submit comment for consideration.

Mischief's bad utterances cost him a date with Max

It seems the Northern Territory is the place to be if one wants to meet a talking feline.


After the news about Mischief the talkative cat broke another NT cat's owner declared that her cat Max was also a talking cat.

Mischief, who featured previously on this site, was all set to meet and have a chat with Max. Well, that's what Mischief's owner Robert "RJ" Duncan thought was on the cards.

However, Max's owner Mrs Snowball put a stop on any dalliance involving Mischief and Max.

The Northern Territory News reports that Mrs Snowball declined Mr Duncan's invitation because she doesn't want her cat picking up Mischief's bad habit of swearing.

According to Mrs Snowball, her cat Max can pronounce all her family members' names. Clever Max can even pronounce names with double syllables.

Sadly, there are no pics of Max - he's camera shy.

pic of Mischief from NT News

Heard about Mischief the foul-mouthed feline?

A bloke in the Northern Territory reckons his pet cat Mischief can speak English and has a vocabulary of seven different words.

The Northern Territory News reports that ex-boxer Robert 'RJ' Duncan, of Palmerston, claims his cat can say seven words: mum, no, now, what, f**k, pr*ck and why.

"He can't say 'dad' yet, which is a bit of a pr*ck. That's how he got the word 'pr*ck' I reckon, because I say it a lot."

When the Northern Territory News first visited Duncan, 34, and his wife Sandra, 32, at their Gray home, the house-bound moggie grumpily declined to comment.

Instead, he scratched Mr Duncan a few times before bolting to his bedroom and barricading himself in his cupboard.

During a second visit, Mischief was much friendlier - and more talkative. All gathered heard him speak to Sandra, calling her "mum".

Mr Duncan said the two-year-old cat - which he and his wife adopted from his feral mother in Katherine - was most vocal at night.

An den iz sed - cats out number p@rn on the Internet?

Salon and Sarah Hepola via a link from Larvatus Prodeo:

For what it's worth, I didn't mean to be a cat person. I grew up with a healthy, sneering disdain for the painfully middlebrow antics of "America's Funniest Home Videos," for the "Hang in there!" posters of kittens clinging precociously to a tree limb. But there was this orange tabby, and blah blah blah, and suddenly my clothes are covered in stubborn fur. Thing is, to be a cat person is something of a private affair. We don't meet at the park and throw sticks. We don't parade our animals down the block or stand around, chatting awkwardly while our pets sniff each others' rear ends. Whatever your cat does -- the way he curls up like a croissant and snores, the way he pads frantically about the bed at 4:30 a.m., paw to your face -- is largely between you and the torn furniture. Which is another reason I think cat culture erupted online, the same reason people get pets in the first place: It's nice to know you're not alone. Other people's cats do this stuff, too.........

In fact, I would submit that cats and kittens might outnumber porn at this point.

"You're probably right about that," says Scott Lamb, a senior editor at the trend-spotting site Buzzfeed. "That might be for the very prosaic reason that producing anything involving kittens is just so much easier than producing porn." After all, we're a nation of shutterbug narcissists, and cats are the closet thing at hand. "Panda ownership is not so common," he says, "but perhaps if it were, panda videos would be even more popular."

Hear that Senator Conroy? We're all probably more interested in kittehs than ti - well you get the picture.