Dogs Surfin' in the USA!

Even though I live at the Ocean half of the year I'm not a surfer dog.  I was born and rescued in Dallas, TX and lived there for 12 years before I found my house on the Jersey Shore.  Too late for me at this stage of dogdom to start surfing but I LOVE DOGS WHO SURF.

And even though it appears Summer is over, eighty brave pooches are taking their doggy paddle one step further when they hit the waves this weekend at the 6th annual Surf Dog Surf-A-Thon.

Helen Woodward Animal Center will host the largest surfing dog contest in the country, presented by Eukanuba, on September 11, 2011 at Dog Beach in Del Mar, California.

The fun will include costume and stunt competitions as well as vendor booths. But most importantly, as this story details, the dogs will hit the waves to raise awareness and money for orphaned pets while promoting responsible pet ownership.

Located in San Diego, Helen Woodward Animal Center is a unique, private, non-profit organization dedicated to saving the lives of animals and enriching the lives of people. For more than 30 years the no-kill animal center has provided humane care and animal adoption for orphaned animals, as well as animal-centered educational and therapeutic programs for people.

The competition will kick off with a special 9/11 tribute honoring all of the dogs involved in the search and rescue efforts in New York and Washington, D.C. following the events of September 11, 2001. 

For more information about the Surf Dog Surf-A-Thon, click here. And to all of my  BlogPaws friends who enjoyed meeting very special people, especially Mike Arms,  from the Helen Woodward Animal Center at BlogPaws 2011 here's to you.  We love you guys!!!

Animal Domestication, Foxes and Me - See for yourself!

Fox or Me?

More than one person has told my Mom that I look like a Fox from the back!  Well, here's a fascinating story from National Geographic. It turns out that some researchers tried to compress 15,000 years of breeding from foxes to dogs in just a few years, and they succeeded. In only nine generations they were able to breed a fox that was friendly to humans.

That's interesting enough, but it gets better. Here's a quote from the story:

Selecting which foxes to breed based solely on how well they got along with humans seemed to alter their physical appearance along with their dispositions. After only nine generations, the researchers recorded fox kits born with floppier ears. Piebald patterns appeared on their coats. By this time the foxes were already whining and wagging their tails in response to a human presence, behaviors never seen in wild foxes.

We just think that's amazing. The only thing they were breeding for was friendliness to humans, and they got floppy ears and coats that were more of a mixture instead of being all uniform.

Fox

Me

So may be there is something to what those researchers came up with.  There's a little fox in all of us MUTTS!  Nothin' wrong with being Foxy right? BOL!  Why don't you send pictures of your foxy tails to  me. I'll post them on my blog and we can vote on the tail that looks most like a fox and the winner will win a new foxy collar from Up Country! The Foxy Tail drawing will run from Sept 3 thru Sept 10th.  Send your Foxy Tails to customerservice@MyGenChan.com.  Photo needs to be taken from the posterior position and be clear. Be sure to include your name and email address so we can contact you!

9 - 11 Canine Hero Retires - Abby a Dedicated Lab

Eleven days after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Debra Tosch arrived at Ground Zero with her partner Abby to search for survivors.

“We turned this one corner and there it was: the collapsed towers. It was overwhelming, like, where do you even start?” Tosch recalls.

Abby, a black Labrador trained to lead rescue teams to trapped victims in disaster areas, was more assured. “She knew it was time to search,” says Tosch, the executive director of the Search Dog Foundation.  Once this very special team arrived find out what happened here.