Sign of the foo. Photo © TimParkinson, via Creative Commons and flickr.com/timparkinson/

Sign of the foo. Photo © TimParkinson, via Creative Commons and flickr.com/timparkinson/

In the recent Incident of the Abandoned Ford Thunderbird, the Sooke resident who found the abandoned car, complete with registration papers, in the woods near Bear Creek posted a scathing rant online and notified police.

Instead of immediately fining the car’s owner under the conservation and motor vehicle acts, the RCMP turned the incident into a learning opportunity. They gave the owner a choice: remove and properly dispose of the vehicle within a given timeframe, or face fines of up to $3000.

The related media and online coverage served to remind us all of the laws against dumping garbage and unwanted goods on private and public lands.

The Capital Regional District defines illegal dumping as any activity by which waste materials are intentionally disposed of in an unauthorized location. This includes abandoning used goods on sidewalks, in alleyways and other public spaces. It includes the dumping of waste on logging roads and other rural spaces, and other ways of ridding oneself of garbage at another’s expense.

A 2011 survey of the region’s municipalities, recycling depots and non-profit recycling organizations indicates the most common materials illegally discarded here are furniture and mattresses, and the most frequent locations are along municipal boulevards.

I beg to differ. Far fewer sofas, mattresses and so on are left to rot along the region’s roadways in any given month than bags full of dog doo are left to decorate the bushes, trees and trails of our parks and green spaces….

Read the rest of this editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist….

Dog doo wars. Photo © Newtown Grafitti, via Creative Commons and flickr

Dog doo wars. Photo © Newtown Grafitti, via Creative Commons and flickr

Dogs are attuned to their people, but who is in charge. Photo © Stefan Holodnick, dailyinvention.com, via creative commons.

Some dogs show more intelligence than most people. Or so their owners tell me.

Perhaps thinking of one’s four-legged best friend as brighter than one’s children—perhaps not one’s children, but possibly one’s in-laws—goes with the territory of being a dog owner. Much like people universally describing their driving skills or their children’s giftedness as better than average.

I don’t know if the “my dog is smarter than most people” phenomenon is universal to two-legged members of clan Canis. I do, however, know I am required by friends to adjust my vocabulary in certain canine company. Forbidden words include W-A-L-K, T-R-E-A-T, B-A-L-L and C-A-T.

According to University of B.C. psychologist and canine-intelligence expert Stanley Coren, dogs can learn about 160 words. Exceptionally bright pooches can attain a vocabulary of about 300 words….

Read the rest in the Victoria Times Colonist….

 

Killer kitty catches mouse. Photo by Chris (Eisenbahner)

A neighbour’s cat adopted me last year. When she’s bored and I’m home, she visits. She gets a lap to nap on. I get a cat without kitty litter, cat food, or hair on everything.

It also keeps her safe, during each brief visit, from becoming roadkill, eating or drinking noxious substances, and from stalking birds, squirrels, garter snakes and other garden wildlife.

I’ve never seen her hunt, but why would she differ from other cats?

Because Felix (or Felicia) the cat is deadly. When scientists from the Smithsonian Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service scaled data from local surveys and studies to the national level last year, they estimated that domestic cats in the U.S. kill 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals. Every year….

Read the rest of this editorial in the Victoria Times Colonist

 

Additional sources:

Stephen Raverty: Veterinary pathologist

Toxoplasma gondii-Infected Marine Sentinel Species

Impact of free-ranging wildlife: Nature Communications

orca off southern Vancouver Island, by Thomas Forster

Canadian Geographic, July 2009

A black Labrador retriever named Tucker is helping researchers determine why orcas summering off southern Vancouver Island are dying.

Tucker lends his nose to science by standing in a moving open-decked motorboat and sniffing the wind to detect orca scat floating on the surface of the Strait of Georgia and Haro Strait. His human colleagues, including Sam Wasser, director of the University of Washington’s Centre for Conservation Biology, scoop of the greenish brown goo and later analyze its hormone levels.

“Killer whale scat doesn’t stay afloat long, and it’s about the same colour as the water,” says Wasser, who uses dogs to study elephants, caribou, spotted owls and other at-risk species. “Without a dog, we’d have a hard time getting enough samples.”

Because Tucker can smell the poop from a long way off, the researchers needn’t crowd the whales. Preliminary analysis of hormones in the scat suggests that boat traffic stresses orcas.

The results from samples collected since 2006 also indicate the whales’ preference for Chinook salmon may be causing them to starve. Stress hormones in the scat peak and thyroid hormones plummet from September through December, when the salmon are at their scarcest. Thyroid hormones help regulate metabolism. When an animal starves, levels drop and metabolism slows. Wasser says the hormone levels mirror observed orca death rates.

“In 2007, thyroid levels in the samples were highest, and no whales died. They were intermediate in 2006, when there was five percent mortality, and lowest in 2008, when mortality decreased to eight percent.”

More samples are needed to confirm the results. Wasser and Tucker will return to the straits to patrol for poop this summer.