A 12-year-old cocker spaniel named Precious has a new spring in her step after receiving a pacemaker implant in her neck earlier this month.

Her owner, Nancy Luhn, admits she was surprised when Dr. Robert E. Martin suggested a pacemaker. An irregular heartbeat caused syncope (syn-ko-pe) spells that made Precious briefly lose consciousness and fall due to lack of blood flowing to the brain.

But when the Luhns faced the choice of either going with the pacemaker or having Precious put to sleep, their decision was clear.

“My husband (Anthony) said, ‘She’s been loyal to us for 12 years, and we’re going to be loyal to her,” Mrs. Luhn explained. “We call her our “pacer puppy” now.”

The Luhns drove Precious to the Auburn College of Veterinary Medicine where Dr. Michael Tilson implanted the pacemaker on July 1.

St. Jude Medical donates pacemakers for animals with defects that make them unsuitable for humans, explained Jennifer Harper, an RN an sales representative for St. Jude.

Precious not only survived the operation but was doing great for the first three days, but during a check-up, Ali Windham, a St. Jude radiology technician and technical service specialist, found an irregularity in the pacemaker that required an adjustment.

The following Saturday, Harper and Dr. William Holland examined Precious again at Care. Dr. Holland decided he needed more technical advice, so he called Dr. Jeffrey Hall, a veterinarian who works for St. Jude but is an adjunct professor at Auburn. He explained to Dr. Holland what he needed to do to make sure Precious didn’t need to return to Auburn. She will go back later this month for a check-up if there are no further complications.

The pacemaker is set at 70 heartbeats per minute, and when the dog’s heart drops below that level, the pacemaker kicks in.

“It’s been an interesting experience for us,” Dr. Holland said, adding that not every dog with cardiac problems is a candidate for a pacemaker.

He views the procedure as an example of the increasing ways animals can benefit from medical procedures that help humans. It is a first for the clinic, and Precious is the first dog in Dothan to receive a pacemaker as far as Dr. Holland and the other veterinarians at Care Animal Center know.

Since the pacemaker was donated, Mrs. Luhn said the operation wasn’t as expensive as she thought it would be, costing slightly less than $2,000.

She thanked everyone who helped Precious, including the staff at Care Animal Center, St. Jude Medical, and Dr. Ray Dillon, an internal medicine and cardiologist veterinarian; Dr. Tilson; Dr. Richard Presley, the attending veterinarian; Dr. Hall, and Chris Schierber, a fourth year veterinary student who answered many of her questions over the phone.

“A lot of people think we’re crazy, added Mrs. Luhn, “and we are. We’re crazy about our dog.”

A Belgian Shepherd dog called Storm has become the world’s first pet to be fitted with a prosthetic paw.

It is believed to be the first time that such an operation has been carried out and could provide hope for many humans.

What makes the false limb special is that the dog’s skin can grow into the metal.

Storm, who lives in Oxshott, Surrey, had a leg removed when it became infected with an aggressive tumour earlier this year.

The operation was carried out by Noel Fitzpatrick, a veterinary surgeon based in Farnham, Surrey, who specialises in repairing the damaged limbs of pets.

“The technology is not just the first time that the implant type has been used outside the human finger,” Mr Fitzpatrick said.

“Because it has been implanted into the radius of the forearm of the dog, it will act as a model for human amputees in the future and provides hope for people without feet or hands.”

He now hopes that the pioneering operation will go on to benefit victims of July 7 bombings and soldiers returning from Iraq.

Storm’s owners, Francesca and Derek Taylor, had the foot amputated rather than having him put down.

At 6:30 p.m. Thursday, a one-year-old bald eagle flew gracefully toward the wild blue skies before about 350 people on Sauvie Island, some kneeling so those standing behind could witness its release.

The scene came a week after the bald eagle’s comeback took it off the U.S. endangered species list. There are about 10,000 pairs of bald eagles nationwide; Oregon is home to 500 pairs, according to the Audubon Society.

“We could’ve released it on the day of the removal (from the list), but we wanted to make sure the eagle was ready to go,” said Bob Sallinger, conservation director of the Audubon Society of Portland. He held the bird for about five minutes to let it get its bearings before soaring off.

Don Kruger, owner of Kruger’s Farm Market, where the eagle was released, was excited about the event at his farm’s first Thursday concert of the summer.

“It’s drama, but it’s not Disneyland,” Kruger said. “You never know what’s going to happen when it comes to animal life.”

A Scappoose resident found the eagle in her yard June 18 and called the Audubon Society to come get it. “There’s a large bird that’s the size of a German shepherd in my yard,” Sallinger recalled the woman saying.

When the 11-pound female bird arrived at the Audubon Society’s Wildlife Care Center in Portland, it couldn’t fly and suffered neurological symptoms from a toxin or an impact injury, Sallinger said. It spent 10 days in a hospital cage.

Sallinger said goodbye, and the eagle soared out of sight in a mere 30 seconds. Then the New Iberians band launched into “I Can See Clearly Now.”

It’s sleek, fast, cute — and pink.

A charter-boat captain from Lake Charles, La., photographed a rare pink dolphin a couple of weeks ago in Calcasieu Lake, an estuary just north of the Gulf of Mexico in southwestern Louisiana.

According to Calcasieu Charter Service’s Web site, Capt. Erik Rue was on the lake June 24 with fishing customers when five dolphins came into view — four normal-looking gray ones, and a bright pink one that appeared to be an adolescent.

“It appears to be an uncanny freak of nature, an albino dolphin, with reddish eyes and glossy pink skin,” the Web site reads. “It is small in comparison to the others it is traveling with and appears to be a youngster traveling with mama.”

There is a species of pink dolphin that lives in the Amazon River in South America, but this one appears to be a more common bottlenose dolphin.

Dressed in a mesh bodysuit, white hairnet, and purple apron, Litza Flores ran her finger along the top of the 3,400-pound pressure cooker one last time to make sure it was clean.

“Are you ready?” Flores asked Susan Gee, the quality assurance manager at the Quakertown dog-food plant.

Gee pulled out a swab and dabbed the stainless-steel machine. If the daily high-pressure wash, or the chemical foam bath, or the chlorine hand-scrub had left behind any trace of protein on the giant pressure cooker, the chemical swab would find it.

“A good flashlight helps, too,” said Gee, whose job is to keep the plant operating at human-food standards.

The kettle was spotless during the inspection at the end of a recent workday. And Flores was one step closer to earning a Wal-Mart gift certificate for keeping her sanitation record pristine.

Freshpet, the Secaucus, N.J., company that owns the plant, has standards. The manufacturer of all-natural dog food, launched last summer, began shipping products from the Quakertown plant in August to just 75 stores. By the end of 2006, they were in 200 stores. That is expected to grow to 1,000 by next month.

Sales projections for the year have risen to $50 million from $10 million to $15 million. They are being driven by a big industry recall during the spring and by pet owners who increasingly treat their animals as family members and demand a greater variety of healthy, tasty treats for their pets.

“I think it is a new initiative in the pet-food category that will continue to grow,” said Jim Kidwell, marketing manager for Family Owned Markets, which carries Freshpet’s Homestyle brand at its 12 grocery stores in Pennsylvania and Maryland. “There are a lot of people out there who view their pets as kids.”

Last year, Americans spent $15.4 billion on pet food, according to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association. This year, that number is projected to reach $16.1 billion. That is up from $12.8 billion six years ago.

While large manufacturers are consolidating - Nestle S.A. bought Ralston Purina Co. in 2001, and Del Monte Foods Co. bought the Meow Mix Co. and Milk-Bone in 2006 - smaller companies also are finding their footing. That’s because the pet-food market is becoming increasingly diverse, said Mark Finke, pet-nutrition expert for PetSmart Inc., a retailer of pet products.

And pet parents - a nomenclature the industry coined to describe passionate pet owners - are creating just the market for firms such as Freshpet, which mixes brown rice, carrots, peas and flaxseed oil with meat in its dog food.

“Why would they feed them stuff they’d never feed their children?” asked Scott Morris, Freshpet’s cofounder and head of marketing.

At the 30,000-square-foot Quakertown plant, about a dozen workers churn out two brands of sausage-shaped product: Homestyle Select and Deli Fresh. Neither was recalled.

To assure freshness, the food is refrigerated at 34 to 38 degrees and must be sold within 90 days.

The pet-food scare began late in January when the first deaths of dogs and cats were reported. So far, the Food and Drug Administration has received reports of 15,000 deaths, although it cannot confirm that they were linked to a poisonous ingredient from China that caused the recall.

Freshpet says it now uses only domestic ingredients. In March, the company cut its European supplier of taurine, an amino acid. It wanted to avoid any negative perception customers might associate with a foreign supplier, Morris said.

The company has outperformed the industry trend so far this year. Since December, sales of the top 35 dog foods have declined more than 9 percent, according to Information Resources Inc., a Chicago research company.

At Freshpet, sales nearly doubled during the same period.

“There are not a lot of times in life you get in front of things,” said Morris, who worked at Ralston Purina and then Meow Mix before colaunching the company. “But we were in front of it when the recall happened.”

But whatever boost the recall gave Freshpet might be waning.

Opinion surveys in April and May by the Pet Food Institute showed that 73 percent of consumers were confident or very confident that their pet food was safe.

MERCED NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE — The brownish-gray “sample” was about the size of a quarter and didn’t smell like much to a human.

But Rio, a 95-pound German shepherd with a discerning nose, sniffed out the bit of dried kit fox poop in a landscape littered with Frisbee-sized cow pies.

“Good boy!” said handler Deborah Smith, rewarding Rio with a slap on the back and a few seconds of play. Then the pair resumed their scientific prowl for poop.

Rio is a scent detection dog, trained to find a variety of animal scat (that’s poop to you and me) and even plants.

He and Smith, a wildlife biologist and dog trainer/handler, represent a leading edge of research in the San Joaquin Valley as scientists collect more information about the endangered kit fox.

“[In] the use of scent dogs for work with endangered species … she is one of the pioneers,” said Patrick Kelly, a zoology professor and coordinator of the Endangered Species Recovery Program based at California State University, Stanislaus.

Smith, Kelly and five others were recognized this spring for scat-detection surveys that detailed the regional distribution of kit foxes within the San Joaquin Valley. The Arkansas-based Southwestern Association of Naturalists honored the research project conducted by university scientists and collaborators at the Smithsonian Institution.

Smith has successfully combined interests in canine training and wildlife biology. She began blending the two in the 1990s as scientists formalized the use of dogs as an effective, non-invasive alternative to research methods such as trapping.

Today, Smith is a founding partner in the nonprofit Working Dogs for Conservation Foundation. The Montana-based organization participates in research, training and conservation projects around the world.

Smith, who works out of the Stanislaus County town of Hughson, said the scenting ability of a dog is far greater than a human. For example, a person can smell dinner in the kitchen, but a dog can sort out each ingredient.

Still, dogs like Rio — an eight-year veteran whose repertoire also includes grizzly bear, black-footed ferret and invasive spotted knapweed plants — are special.

Few canines have the nose, work ethic and temperament for the job, Smith said. Detection dogs also must have an obsessive streak because the reward system is often built around their favorite toy.

Rio is trained as a generalist, which means he detects but doesn’t discriminate among scat from gray, red or kit foxes. Laboratory tests determine the species and can even pinpoint an individual fox based on DNA.

“Scats are a wealth of information,” Smith said. “It’s not just poop.”

Smith’s work locally has focused on the pint-size San Joaquin kit fox, added to the federal endangered species list in 1967. It is considered an umbrella species in the San Joaquin Valley, which means that conserving the kit fox and its habitat helps shelter other sensitive plant and animal species.

The kit fox, which generally eats rodents and insects, is an integral part of a balanced ecosystem and the region’s natural heritage.

“It’s like any heritage, you just don’t want to lose pieces of that completely,” said Brian Cypher, a research ecologist and associate director of the recovery program in Bakersfield.

The graceful, big-eared kit fox weighs 4 to 5 pounds — about the size of a house cat. It seeks the protection of a den during the day and moves at night.

They are “the ballet dancers of the dog world,” Kelly said.

But their numbers have declined over the decades as cities, agriculture and industrial development displaced habitat and cut off travel routes.

Smith and Rio recently searched for evidence of kit foxes on the potentially prime real estate of a scrubby 2,500-acre portion of the Merced refuge.

On a blazing morning, Smith strapped on Rio’s orange “search dog” vest and dumped a cooling bucket of water over his body. She already had hidden several old scat samples — retrieved from refrigerated plastic bags — to motivate Rio.

“Find it,” she said firmly.

Rio, whose résumé includes about 1,000 kit fox scat discoveries, zoomed into action. He ignored the funky deposits of grazing cows and stalled over what looked like a tiny dirt clod.

When Smith couldn’t spot the poop, Rio pointed to it with his snout.

His reward was a frenzied tug-of-war with Smith over his toy, a blue rubber bulb attached to a rope. After a shot of bottled water and a few minutes panting in a shadow cast by humans, Rio trotted back on the job.

Typically, Rio spends about four hours in the field. But the day’s soaring temperatures made that impractical.

He didn’t locate any new poop during the hourlong search — not too surprising, since the most recent kit fox sighting on the refuge was seven years ago.

Experts say it’s important to repeat searches because populations can vary from year to year. Surveys also provide information about the three fox species and results can help mold conservation plans.

Kit foxes generally are most plentiful in western Kern County and along the west side of the Valley. Several hundred live in Bakersfield, adapting to city life by using canal banks as travel corridors to link dens at golf courses, storm drainage basins and other makeshift homes.

“About half the high schools in Bakersfield have kit foxes living on them,” Cypher said.

Near Fresno, it is “exceptionally rare” to spot kit foxes, Kelly said.

Beyond the use of detection dogs, researchers seek the animals using motion-triggered cameras and spotlight surveys — spilling light into the dark to reflect eyes.

But those methods can be inexact. On the Merced refuge, cameras have snapped useless pictures of cow bellies. On spotlight surveys, it can be tough to accurately identify an animal.

Dogs like Rio supply clear evidence. Said Kelly: “The proof is in the pudding — or in this case, it’s in the scat.”

Liz Lerch loves cats, but not having to clean their mess out of a litter box, or spending hundreds of dollars on litter over the life of a cat.

So when she got two 4-month-old kittens from a shelter, she vowed to train them to use the toilet in her Lombard home.

Following advice from the book, “How to Toilet Train Your Cat,’’ Lerch put cardboard over the toilet, then a plastic planter holder with a hole in the middle of the bottom, filled with litter. She gradually removed the litter and widened the hole, until there was no litter and the hole was as big as the bowl.

Each time cats Carl and Stewie used the potty, she gave them positive reinforcement — praise, petting, play or food.

There were mishaps of course, but those were blamed on an unfortunate bout of irritable bowel syndrome.

After nine months of practice, the cats now use the toilet on their own and seem perfectly happy. And, yes, humans use that toilet too.

Some visitors, like a guy who worked on Lerch’s garage door, are a little freaked out by her cats’ routine, but most of her friends had a positive reaction.

“My friends all want to see it happen,’’ she said. “They think it’s cool, and want to know why nobody toilet trained their cats.’’

Not a new idea

Toilet training cats is not new. Jazz musician Charles Mingus wrote publicly about training his cat decades ago. The practice got more recent boosts from a toilet-trained Jinx in the movie “Meet the Parents’’ and coverage at online sites like Craigslist or karawynn.net.

Cat owners can buy kits from outfits like CitiKitty.com, which sells toilet-training covers for cats. Some owners even train their cats to flush by putting a toy on the handle.

Lerch’s cats get wet sometimes splashing the water with their paws, but they’ve never fallen in.

Still, not everyone is jumping on the toilet-training bandwagon. Some people don’t want to share a toilet with a cat or find their unflushed presents.

What about instincts?

Others, like Betsy Lipscomb, who sells cat supplies and writes the online advice site Cats International, say cats need litter to meet their instincts to dig and cover their waste. She cited cat owners who’ve tried toilet training and ended up with soiled carpets.

“Some people want to make their pets into little people with furry coats,’’ she said. “It’s going to backfire when you can’t satisfy the cat’s natural instincts.’’

Before Liz Lerch had success with Carl and Stewie, she learned through experience that some cats just won’t go without litter.

She previously tried potty-training her cat Springsteen, but when she tried to take out the litter, he drew a line in the clay sand.

“He would meow and walk up and down and look at it and act like he had to go,’’ Lerch said. “He’d look at you like, ‘I gotta go but there’s nowhere to go and you took my stuff.’”

She kept flushable litter in the box, but eventually that became more hassle than it was worth to clean.

“When you step out of the shower and into cat litter all over the floor, it’s not the most pleasant thing,’’ she said.

Ultimately, she gave in and let her cat return to the traditional litter box, figuring he was set in his ways at age 10.

American Humane Association training manager Karen Spaulding said her group has no stance on the issue, encouraging what works for both owner and kitty.

“I had a friend that did it beautifully and never had a problem,’’ she said, “but you might need the right cat and the right situation.’’

Two Rottweilers and a cat in the same room is hardly a recipe for a happy home.

But Sky and her tiny charges are a proud mum and pups with a difference. For this almost unidentifiable bundle of fur is a rather special family unit and is set to take many people by surprise.

A litter of six puppies were rejected by their mum Roxy straight after being born on Monday, leaving them in a precarious position.

Owner David Page quickly made the decision to do what he could to save the lives of the tiny pups.

“They were born at my property in Haddiscoe near Beccles and the mum instantly refused to look after them for whatever reason, I think she may have been stressed by the birth,” said Mr Page.

“I was worried of course, so I dried the puppies off and put them in my car, got them under the heater and drove them back to North Walsham, where I live.

“I was really hoping for the best, I took them to the vets where they had a good look and got them on antibiotics. We have lost several of them to pneumonia unfortunately.

“When I got home I sat down to have a think about what to do next and decided to have a go with Sky.

“I put the four which were still alive at that stage in her box very gently, one by one alongside the kittens Sky has also got with her at the moment - just to see what happened.

“They snuggled into her straight away.”

Mr Page is feeding the puppies on a combination of Sky’s milk and special puppy formula milk from the vet. Now two more of the puppies have died, but the future of those which remain looks to be in good paws.

“It is very much fingers crossed now, but they all seem happy and it’s going well,” said Mr Page.

“Obviously it’s very unusual, people always talk about how ‘they fight like cat and dog’, but in this case I’m hoping they will grow up to be the best of friends.

“I am intending to keep them all and I imagine when they are all older they will all get on very well.”

And Mr Page’s wife Joanne said: “We will be trying to get some milk from Roxy as well, as it will help the pups build up their resistance to illness.

“But we can’t leave them together, we will just have to do our best.”

The situation has at least one exact precedent, with an almost identical case in America reported earlier in the year.

In February it was reported that in Connecticut workers at an animal charity used a cat which had recently had kittens to adopt a six-day-old Rottweiler puppy that was rejected by its mother.

The puppy, named Charlie, was nursed alongside a number of kittens born to a cat called Satin.

UK — A SEABIRD so rare it had reportedly only ever been seen in Europe twice before, was discovered in Brean Down on June 29.

The Indian yellow-nosed albatross - one of only 73,000 left in the world - is classed as endangered by Bird Life International, the global organisation behind bird conservation, and had flown into town from the South Atlantic.

Bird enthusiast Hugh Harris alerted Secret World wildlife rescue in East Huntspill to the extraordinary discovery - after the bird landed at his home in Brean.

Hugh told the Weekly News that he found the bird, which has a wingspan of over two metres, looking exhausted as it walked around on his drive.

He said: “My wife and I couldn’t believe it when we saw it, at first we thought it was just a large seagull or falmer.

“I picked the bird up and was surprised at how light it was - we then took it to Secret World where we were told what it was, and were absolutely dumbstruck.”

A peacock that roamed into the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant was attacked by a man who vilified the bird as a vampire, animal-control authorities said.

Beaten so fiercely that most of his tail feathers fell out, the bird was euthanized, said Richard Gentles, a spokesman for the city’s Center for Animal Care and Control.

“It’s just unbelievable that someone would do something to a poor, defenseless animal and do it in such a cruel fashion,” he said.

The peacock, a male several years old, wandered into a Burger King parking lot in the New York borough of Staten Island and perched on a car hood Thursday morning. Charmed employees were feeding him bread when the man appeared.

He seized the iridescent bird by the neck, hurled it to the ground and started kicking and stomping the creature, said worker Felicia Finnegan, 19.

“He was going crazy,” she said.

Asked what he was doing, she said, the attacker explained, “‘I’m killing a vampire!’”

Employees called police, but the man ran when he saw them. Authorities were looking for the attacker, described as in his teens or early 20s.

It was not clear how the bird made his way to the Burger King, but a Staten Island resident who raises peacocks said he had given some to a person who lives near the restaurant.