The Japanese Macaque

This is a video of the Japanese macaque taken from the BBC’s new "Life" documentary series.

Video:  The Japanese Macaque

Video: Monkeys swimming in Japanese Hot Springs

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World’s Oldest Dog Dies At Age 26….Requiescat in pace

Posted on December 6, 2011by Ad rem

Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened. ~ Anatole France

A male cross-breed dog, Pusuke, is seen in this file photo from Dec. 24, 2010.

(ABCNews)…Pusuke, listed by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s oldest-living dog, died in Japan on Monday. He was 26 years old — or somewhere between 117 and 185 in “human years,” according to various calculations. There is no official method for converting dog years to human years.

The dog’s owner, Yumiko Shinohara, said the male cross-breed died at Sakura in the Tochigi prefecture, north of Tokyo, according to the Kyodo news agency.

Pusuke was reportedly eating well and staying active until Monday, when he lost his appetite and had difficulty breathing. Pusuke died peacefully, minutes after his owner returned home from a walk.

“I think (Pusuke) waited for me to come home,” she said, according to Kyodo.

Born in April of 1985, Pusuke was recognized last December as the world’s oldest-living dog.

The oldest-known dog on record, according to Guinness, was an Australian cattle dog named Bluey, who lived to the ripe old age of 29 years and five months before it was put down in November 1939.

Source:  The Last Refuge  – h/t to Tolline Enger

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The Oldest Dog in the World… Unofficially Anyway

Are they barking mad? Japan’s smallest police dog is a Chihuahua called ‘Momo’

Meet Japan’s smallest police dog – all 6.6 lb of her.

In what is a world first, a long-haired Chihuahua named ‘Momo’ passed her exams to become a police dog in the western Japanese prefecture of Nara last fall.

The brown-and-white dog was one of 32 successful candidates out of 70 dogs, passing a search and rescue test by finding a person in five minutes after merely sniffing their cap.

‘Any breed of dog can be entered to become a police dog in the search and rescue division,’ said a Nara police spokesman.

But he admitted that news a Chihuahua had been entered may still come as a surprise to many.

‘It’s quite unusual,’ he said.

Television footage showed the seven-year-old Momo bounding across grass or sitting proudly, long hair blowing in the breeze.

Momo will be used for rescue operations in case of disasters such as earthquakes, in the hope that she may be able to squeeze her tiny frame into places too narrow for more usual rescue dogs, which tend to be German Shepherds.

The public response to the news of Momo’s selection took police by surprise, the spokesman said, adding: ‘The phone’s been ringing all afternoon.’

‘It’s quite rare for us to have a Chihuahua work as a police dog,’ the spokeswoman said.

Chihuahuas, named after a Mexican state, are the smallest breed of dog.

‘We would like it to work hard by taking advantage of its small size,’ a Nara police department official told the Sankei Shimbun daily.

Enlarge

The brown-and-white Chihuahua, a first for Japan and perhaps the world, was one of 32 successful candidates out of 70 dogs

Enlarge

Go get em girl: Momo takes part in a police dog examination, managing to find a person by merely sniffing a cap he had been wearing

Source:  The Daily Mail

Man rescues dogs seen on Fukushima plant’s webcam — TEPCO demands they be returned during “ghoulish and bizarre” conversation

June 27th, 2011 at 12:33 PM

Return our dogs, TEPCO demands, The Australian, June 28, 2011:

The Australian yesterday revealed the story of animal rescue “guerilla” Hiroshi Hoshi’s mission to the plant to grab two Japanese Shiba dogs spotted wandering around on a webcam trained on the facility.

Yesterday, Mr. Hoshi said one of [TEPCO]‘s managers, who called himself Mr Igarashi, made a “ghoulish and bizarre” phone call to him soon after he rescued the dogs, suggesting they had become company property.

“He sounded that those dogs actually belong to TEPCO, because they were found at privately owned area of the plant,” Mr. Hoshi told The Australian. [...]

Return our dogs, TEPCO demands

A MAN who snatched two dogs to safety from the grounds of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has revealed the plant’s disgraced operator TEPCO later rang him to assert ownership over them.

The Australian yesterday revealed the story of animal rescue "guerilla" Hiroshi Hoshi’s mission to the plant to grab two Japanese Shiba dogs spotted wandering around on a webcam trained on the facility.

Yesterday, Mr. Hoshi said one of the plant’s managers, who called himself Mr. Igarashi, made a "ghoulish and bizarre" phone call to him soon after he rescued the dogs, suggesting they had become company property.

"He sounded that those dogs actually belong to TEPCO, because they were found at privately owned area of the plant," Mr. Hoshi told The Australian.

"We will never give them away — we are the guardians of those two dogs."

The dogs, thought to be sisters, were first seen at the plant earlier this month, three months after the nuclear accident, and were found to have absorbed significant amounts of radiation.

Nevertheless, they have been given a clean bill of health and were given to a couple in Yokohama.

Mr Hoshi, 55, has been making a series of unauthorized missions into the radioactive zone to rescue distressed animals. Yesterday, he received an offer to collaborate on rescue efforts from an NGO called Japan Earthquake Animal Rescue, comprising Japan’s best-known animal welfare organizations.

The organization has government permission to operate within the 20km perimeter around the nuclear plant, but Mr. Hoshi has been critical of the slowness of its members to act to ease the suffering of the thousands of animals in the area.

"I am still deciding whether I should accept this offer to join forces," he said.

JAPAN

Animal Lovers Raid Fukushima to Save Radioactive Dogs

Sam Biddle — There may be many lost animals of Fukushima, but you can strike two off that list: daring civilians spotted two pooches on a Fukushima livestream, then slipped behind nuclear lines to rescue the "atomic dogs." This, my friends, is heroism.

The pooch raiders, part of the Hachiko Coalition of Japanese animal welfare enthusiasts, infiltrated the evacuation dead zone (and the perimeter of the plant itself) in search of two dogs they caught on the plant’s live webcam, roaming without food, care, or protection from constant radiation.

According to the Hachiko crew (itself named after a beloved Japanese dog, legendary in the annals of canine history), these dogs were not only a tragic sight, but posed a threat to humans—what happened if they got dosed up on radiation and then wandered back to civilization? TEPCO and the Japanese government have been letting critters roam free this entire time, despite repeated calls for a thorough animal removal plan.

So they did it themselves. Donning hazmat suits, the volunteers drove to the plant, found the dogs, and sped out of there to a nearby veterinary hospital, where the two dogs were decontaminated and treated for their radiation exposure. The furry couple received two and three μSv of radiation respectively, which is low for humans, but for dogs—we’re not sure. We’ll keep track of the atomic duo for you, but for now, they appear to be happy, healthy and in (non-radioactive) hands.

This is probably the single happiest story to come out of Fukushima, so go ahead and soak it up. [via Hachiko Coalition]

Video: Fukushima 1F LIVE 20110602a

Gizmodo.com

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Japanese Risk Radiation in Evacuation Zone to Rescue Stranded Dogs

Against All Odds:  Japanese Dog Found Weeks After Tsunami

JAPANESE RISK RADIATION IN EVACUATION ZONE TO RESCUE STRANDED DOGS

TOKYO (AP) — When Etsumi Ogino saw a news photo of a pack of shelties wandering through an abandoned town near Japan’s tsunami-damaged nuclear plant, she thought of her own 13-year-old canine Kein and jumped into action.

“My heart trembled,” said Ogino, a 56-year-old volunteer at an animal shelter in Chiba prefecture. “They looked just like my dog. I started searching for them right away.”

The picture that sparked the rescue.

She and others around Japan called Asahi.com, the website of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, which had run the photo. An Associated Press photographer had snapped that photo and others of the dogs on an empty street in Minami Soma city, an area evacuated because of radiation fears.

On Saturday, the AP gave her details of where the dogs were spotted.

Ogino relayed the information to a team of animal rescuers called Sheltie Rescue. By then, the group had been getting emails from dog lovers around the country about the abandoned pack.

Through emails and Internet research it was established that the owner of the dogs was a breeder in Minami Soma. The group contacted the Fukushima city branch of the Japan Collie Club, tracked the owner down by phone at a shelter and got her go-ahead to rescue the dogs.

In the wee hours of Sunday morning, seven volunteers left Tokyo and drove over broken roads and past demolished houses to meet three other volunteers in the ghost town that Minami Soma has become. Some had prepared radiation suits and others wore simple vinyl raincoats.

The first two to arrive found the pack around the Odaka train station, near the owner’s home, where the AP team had last seen them.

“They were waiting for their owner,” said Tamiko Nakamura, a volunteer who went with the group from Tokyo.

The dogs had been left some dry food, and weren’t starving.

It took a while to entice them with snacks, and six or seven were bundled into each car. The group saved 20 dogs in all.

Most were taken to a veterinary clinic in Kanagawa prefecture just west of Tokyo. Others are being cared for by individuals in other areas.

The owner, worn down by the disaster and worrying about her dogs, was “extremely happy,” Nakamura said. She said the owner did not want her identity revealed.

Nakamura only regrets that some of the dogs in the pack ran away and countless others are still stranded in the evacuation zone.

“There are still some left behind,” she said. “I’m concerned about them and want to pull them out.”

—

Associated Press writer Eric Talmadge and photographer Hiro Komae spotted the dogs in Minami Soma on April 7th.

Source:  the Blaze  -  Cross-Posted at:  Just One More Pet

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Against All Odds:  Japanese Dog Found Weeks After Tsunami

AGAINST ALL ODDS: JAPANESE DOG FOUND ALIVE AT SEA THREE WEEKS AFTER TSUNAMI

Miraculous: three weeks after an earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan, a dog was found alive at sea by the Japanese Coast Guard. According to The Daily Mail, the dog survived by living in a partially submerged house that was swept to sea.

Rescuers had hoped to find more tsunami survivors living inside the house but after tearing the roof open, it was found to be empty apart from the dog.

Despite its three weeks at sea, the medium-sized brown dog seemed to be in reasonably good condition considering its ordeal.

The discovery of the dog is a rare glimmer of hope in Japan where thousands of people are believed to have perished in the disaster.

The nation is now gripped by the ongoing nuclear threat posed by the unstable Fukushima plant as workers continue to battle to restore vital cooling systems damaged by the quake.

 

Video:  Stranded Tsunami Dog Rescued in Japan

h/t to the Blaze – by: Emily Esfahani Smith – Cross-Posted at Marion’s Place