An Oklahoma City woman spent 43 hours upside-down in a vehicle after a wreck along an Oklahoma highway was saved by her four dogs, rescuers said.

Betty McCord, 78, has organized the annual Red Andrews Christmas Dinner for more than 30 years. However, while driving to see family in Hughes County three weeks ago, she wrecked, flipped upside-down and spent nearly two days trapped in her 1986 Oldsmobile.

“There was no way I could get out. There was no way. I tried for two and a half days to get out of there, and I couldn’t,” McCord said.

The car disappeared deep into the woods and landed on its top. The steering wheel busted McCord’s teeth, and the force of her forehead shattered the windshield.

“I thought I was dead. I didn’t know what the hell it was,” she said.

However, rescuers said McCord’s four Shih Tzu dogs — Mack, Misty, Ally and Tinkerbell — likely kept her alive by licking her face to keep her alert, long enough for Oklahoma Highway Patrol Trooper Tyson Wright to notice some car tracks veering off the road.

“You couldn’t see the car, (and) I still couldn’t see it from right there,” Wright said.

McCord described how the trooper came to help her.

“He stuck his little head right in that window (and said), ‘Lady, are you all right now?’ I said, ‘I will be if you get me the hell out of here,’” she said.

That he did, smashing a window and calling for help, as well as getting Gatorade for Betty and her dogs.

“I will never forget how they acted, not just the wreck. I just won’t forget how they acted,” McCord said of her pets.

She said she is still pretty sore and is staying with family for now.

“It was just a hell of a mess, just to be frank about it … all I can tell you is I was lucky that I got found. That’s all I know,” McCord said.

Plans for this year’s Christmas dinner, she said, are still on track.

Izzie the Great Dane had been expecting four new pups, but after going into labour she just kept delivering, and delivering, and delivering.

Twenty-four hours later, the new mum was celebrating the arrival of 15 new babies – six short of the world record.

It has all comes as something of a shock to owners Gemma Caroll, 24, Mark Bibby, 38, who could not quite believe how the new arrivals just kept coming.

Now the family, including daughter Charlotte, 11, of Ewesley Road, Sunderland, have found themselves with a few more mouths to feed.

The three-year-old pedigree actually had 18 pups, but sadly, three did not survive.

The healthy pups have kept Izzie busy with more mouths to feed than she could manage so Charlotte, of Houghton Kepier School, dad Mark and his partner Gemma have been lending a helping hand with bottled milk.

Izzie had nine blue pups, five dogs and four bitches and eight black pups, six bitches and two dogs.

Gemma, a customer accounts manager for City Financial, said: “It is just crazy. We never expected her to have so many, but mum’s doing great.

“She looked very thin after she had given birth, but obviously with 18 puppies inside her, everything she ate was going straight into them.

“My friend who works at a restaurant has been saving all the leftovers for her and she’s been eating all of them so she’s back on form now.”

Mark, a self employed property
developer, originally bought Izzie as a present for his daughter, but then decided to breed from her.

Each puppy is expected to fetch more then £750 because they are pedigree and Izzie and the father come from families of champions.

The litter has started eating solids and exhausted mum is managing to get a bit more rest. But as the puppies get stronger, the family know they will become more of a handful.

Gemma said: “We are in the process of registering them with the Kennel Club and hoping to sell them all, but we will be very picky about the home the puppies go to.

“Great Danes are fantastic dogs and they are gentle giants. Izzie weighs eight-and-a-half stone and she makes a great guard dog because she has a big bark on her, but she has never gone for any of us.”

Jane Fryer said her kitten Skittles sometimes too closely follows the example of the members at the fraternity where he lives with Fryer’s boyfriend.

“[Skittles] will run around the room at full speed and try to climb up everything. He has no fear, just like the frat boys,” Fryer (sophomore-hotel, restaurant and institutional management) said. “I feel, that being in a fraternity, Skittles has taken on many of the aspects of a person living in that environment: large amounts of sleeping and lounging followed by senseless running in circles around the room.”

Fryer’s concerns could be confirmed by a new British study, which says pet owners may want to consider kicking their bad habits before their pets start following their examples.

The study, conducted by professor Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire in England, states that, over time, animals are likely to pick up their owners’ characteristics.

Results of the yearlong study, which will continue for the next six months, show that pets and their owners share many personality traits.

“I am a pretty happy and independent person. My cat is laid-back, and I am, too,” Amber Grieb (junior-management) said. “I guess in a way our personalities are pretty similar.”

Currently, about 2,500 pet owners have completed the survey.

“When you look at the data, you see that dog owners are spontaneous and fun-loving; cat owners tend to be emotionally sensitive and independent; and reptile owners don’t care too much for other people,” Wiseman said.

Wiseman said the most surprising result of his study is that 60 percent of fish owners said their fish have a good sense of humor.

“They are the most content in our sample and they are the ones claiming their pets make them laugh the most,” he said.

Penn State professor Michael Arthur, who teaches GEOSC 040, (The Sea Around Us), does not believe fish share his sense of humor.

“I’ve detected some whimsy in fish. They’ve never laughed at my jokes, though, so I’d have to disagree with these results,” Arthur said.

Previous studies, like that featured in the Psychological Science journal from the University of California in 2004, have found that pet owners often physically resemble their purebred dogs. Judges in the study found that they could match the dogs and their owners solely by their pictures.

Valerie Beam, owner of Meow Meow Pet Sitting, 214 Homestead Lane, said she believes people choose pets that are most like themselves.

“There are cat people and there are dog people. It makes sense that people who are quiet and busy are going to chose to buy a cat rather than a dog,” Beam said. “But that’s not to say that animals don’t have personalities. If I didn’t have a friend, my cat would be one because I swear she knows what I’m talking about.”

Wiseman said it is likely that animals have a big impact on the way their owners think and behave because owners spend time everyday with their pets. He also said the study results could be a product of perceived personality.

You’ve heard of dogs being used to sniff out bombs, drugs, even track people when their trails go cold.

But how about dogs that can sniff out potentially dangerous mold in people’s homes?

One company says it’s true. They say their 3-year-old Giant Schnauzer is a four-legged mold inspector.

These days Ebony is making the rounds- especially in homes like this where sales are pending.

Families know the dangers of mold so they contact Top Dog Inspection Services.

“Absolutely it could be a deal breaker. The home is the number one investment people make usually and so when they’re buying a home they don’t want any hidden surprises,” said owner Mike Lanius.

A preliminary walk-through revealed an area possibly affected by mold. Then enters Ebony.

“Her nose is like an x-ray. She can see behind the walls, what’s going on behind walls,” Lanius said.

Ebony sniffs her way around until she finds a trace. She helps the human inspectors find mold that they can’t always see or smell.

Her owners say she’s not only a family pet, but a colleague.

“She enjoys being with the family but honestly she really enjoys working and she’s a much better pet now that she has a job to do,” said Melenda Lanius.

And Ebony has attracted a segment of dog-loving clientele.

“There’s a lot of people that love animals and love pets and it’s a great way to relate to your customers,” Melenda said.

“Every morning I’ll ask her if she’s ready to go to work and she beats me to the door every day,” Mike Lanius said.

Top Dog inspectors still take air samples or swab mold for further testing.

As many as 130 species of birds were spotted by teams of bird lovers in a day-long ‘race’ held in Thiruvananthapuram and Kollam.

The exercise was held as part of the HSBC India Bird Race organised by KeralaBirder, a bird lovers group on the Internet. In Thiruvananthapuram, the race was organised by the green groups ‘Warblers and Waders’ and ‘Thanal.’ The race was also held in Kottayam, Thrissur, Malappuram and Kozhikode on Sunday.

The highest number of bird species — 92 — were spotted from the wetlands of Punchakkari and Vellayani near Thiruvananthapuram. The ‘bird of the day’ — the greater spotted eagle, a migratory bird — was sighted in this area as was the Black-crested Baza (Karimthoppi Parunthu). While 68 species of birds were spotted in Kakkamoola, 62 species were spotted in Arippa in the Kollam-Thiruvananthapuram border area.

Fifty-four species of birds were spotted in and around the Museum complex in the city. C. Susanth of Warblers and Waders told The Hindu here that the sighting of so many birds in wetlands underlined the need to conserve these areas. “It is not common to sight the greater spotted eagle in Thiruvananthapuram. Many migratory birds were spotted during the race today. This shows that wetlands are crucial to the survival of a large number of birds,” he said. The lower-than-expected number of sightings in the Kallar-Ponmudi belt needs to be investigated further. This could be due to some climatic change or damage to the environment, he added.

After the race, the bird lovers — about 80 of them, grouped into a dozen teams — got together at a city hotel to share their experiences. The prize for the best team was given to the group that went to the Vellayani-Punchakari areas. The chief guest on the occasion was poet Sugathakumari.

Though the days of sun drenched hours are gone for a while, the birds of the air are still abundant in the skies of their middle Tennessee homes, including those in Bedford County. Their sonnets of song glide on the autumn breezes as the leaves sail the currents they share with the winged friends.

For the Pyrdum family of Shelbyville, the shorter days and cooler temperatures are a bittersweet time. Not only have the hours of light limited their ability to stay outside, but the frosty mornings have curtailed many of the early morning visits they have come to enjoy with a friend named Lucky.

Lucky is a mockingbird, Tennessee’s state bird, who is indeed very lucky.

This past spring, Darlene and Phillip Pyrdum’s daughter, Karen Pyrdum Williams, was enjoying an afternoon of lawn cutting in the bright sunshine when she noticed something tiny in the grass.

“She and her husband were out mowing when they spotted something in front of the mower,” Darlene began. “She called me excited with a rather unusual request.”

It would seem the tiny newborn had fallen from the nest. Because the nest was obviously too high in the tree to be seen or found, Darlene’s daughter brought her the bird to extend the mother’s touch to the fragile creature, who didn’t even have feathers.

“We couldn’t determine what kind of bird it was at first, because it just had a bit of down but no markings,” Darlene said. “Karen knows I am an animal lover. I can’t stand for anything to hurt.”

She hurriedly prepared a home for the new baby. Using the internet, Darlene learned as much as she could about raising a bird.

“I guess the Lord knew about this long before I even had a thought about it because for some reason I had started raising meal worms about a year ago. That, of course, was the number one food source of this little baby, that had to be fed every hour.”

And thus the process began.

Carefully stowed in a basket of towels for warmth, Lucky the bird began to grow. Soon her tiny basket was too small and a large box became her home, all the while Darlene fed her around the clock.

“As the temperatures warmed and she grew a little, I gradually started taking her outside a little at a time. I was wondering how I was going to teach her how to eat on her own. I was her only mommy. She was big enough to begin eating out of my hand.”

Darlene said the little bird began to be adventurous. At first she would only sit with Darlene on a bench under a tree but gradually found a route to her shoulder and sat there, viewing the world with the protection of her “mommy.”

“I asked my husband to take an old mailbox and make her a home,” Darlene said. “We put it up in a tree, hoping that she might stay in it at night once she was ready to be on her own. It took a lot of persuasion to get him to do it, but he did. Lucky finally grew on him too. I painted the name “Lucky’s House” on the sides of the mailbox. She would sit on the lid, but she never slept in it.”

The Pyrdums let Lucky come and go as she pleased around the house. According to Darlene, the bird had a set time to eat each day, three times a day, having outgrown the continual feedings. She was gradually left outside and allowed to find her way in life without her mommy.

Just as Darlene had found that tapping taught the bird to eat, she also found ways to help her learn to fly.

“I had to be her teacher,” said Darlene. “I took that responsibility and was very proud when she finally flew around the yard. At first she stayed very close to the house and always returned to eat. I would look out and she was be sitting on the back of the bench we enjoyed with her, waiting on her meal worms.”

It didn’t take long for Lucky the Mockingbird to truly spread her wings and fly.

“We noticed by mid-summer that she was getting later in coming back each day,”

Darlene said. “By the tenth week, on a Saturday morning, she didn’t come for breakfast. We looked for her all day to come. Finally late that afternoon, I heard a faint chirp like Lucky’s.”

Hoping that the bird had returned to the “nest,” Darlene looked into a neighbor’s tree and saw the little bird sitting there, among her new friends and family.

“She had made friends,” said the proud ‘mom,’ “with friends of her same breed. I knew that this time would come for her, but only God knew when that time would be.”

Mother Nature soon replaced Darlene, and the little bird joined its peers. Healthy and happy, the little bird that fell from the sky, returned to fly there.

“She gave us joy,” said Darlene of the bird who hasn’t returned to their home. The Pyrdums see several mockingbirds each day and have a feeling that a particular one is their grown up winged friend.

Like the biblical story of Joseph, what was perhaps done by unkind siblings had a purpose that only God could discern.

“If she was pushed out of her nest, I’m sure, in her way, she thanked them,” Darlene said. “She got to live the life of a queen as a bird named Lucky.”

Tina and Studla will be given some time to bond with their newborn - a 247-pound female African elephant - before visitors to the Montgomery Zoo view them outdoors.

The newborn arrived Friday and has not yet been given a name, zoo spokeswoman Sarah McKemey said Sunday. She said the community will be involved in naming her.

She said Tina has been living at the 40-acre zoo for two years and Studla - an African name for stout - is on loan from Lowry Park in Tampa, Fla.

McKemey said Tina had a natural delivery without complications.

“Mom and baby seem to be doing wonderful,” she said. “This is our first elephant birth.”

A veterinarian is close if case a problem occurs, she said.

McKemey said visitors to the zoo can view the newborn through window glass.

“But they’re going to wait until mom and baby bond, then introduce her to other elephants, before going outside,” she said.

The zoo has three female elephants including Tina, who is 23 years old.

The zoo’s elephant facility opened on Nov. 11, 2005 with the goal of becoming a breeding center.

Deputy zoo director Marsha Woodard said the newborn was only the third African elephant born in the United States this year. It will start a new bloodline of African elephants in the U.S., Woodard said, because his father, Studla, came directly from Africa.

Boo Boo the Chihuahua is the world smallest dog.

At just four inches tall, the diminutive dog in Raceland, Kentucky now has the very big title of smallest in the world. The Guinness Book of World Records made it official.

Lana Elswick says her Chihuahua Boo-Boo was born the size of her thumb. Elswick says from the beginning she knew her dog was special, but it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that she knew just how special.

The Guinness Book now considers the full-grown though petite pet the smallest dog in the world, nearly an inch smaller than the previous record holder.

A Dallas family lost everything when fire ripped through their home around 5:30 a.m. Sunday.

The family was sound asleep when an electrical outlet caught fire in the 2600 block of Birmingham Avenue in South Dallas.

Clifford Brown and his mother Betty were asleep when the fire broke out. Then their family dog Lucy jumped on Betty’s bed.

“The dog woke my mom up,” said Clifford. “Then I heard the boom and thought someone had broken into the house.” He said he knew right away he had to rescue his 76-year-old mother.

“I was screaming and hollering for him, and he couldn’t get through. There was so much smoke,” said Betty.

The smoke and the intense heat made it nearly impossible to reach the bedroom.

“I had to go all the way around and snatch the bar door open,” said Clifford.

“When he jerked the door down, he fell on the sidewalk, and I fell in the yard,” said Betty. “I didn’t think he was going to get me up, but he said, ‘Oh yeah. I’m getting you out of there.’”

Not much was salvageable from the home. Only one picture of Betty’s grandson was saved.

The family did not have home owner’s insurance, but they say they have many family members in the area that can help them.

Early this year, when villagers discovered a huge male tiger trapped in an abandoned well in the largest of India’s tiger preserves, they did a remarkable thing: They concocted a handmade rope-and-bamboo ladder, lowered it into the well and set the big cat free.

And when India’s most notorious gang of tiger poachers showed up in the park and began setting traps, an angry band of local forest dwellers, bows and arrows drawn, ambushed and arrested them. Today many are in jail.

Those are rare acts in India, where tigers are disappearing at an astonishing pace.

A century back, India had 40,000 of the emblematic cats. But five years ago the number was down to 3,700, and today scientists say there are fewer than 1,500, most in scattered small reserves.

Poachers, feeding a Chinese market hungry for tiger skins and bone, have cleared some reserves of the big cats. Incursions by land-hungry peasants and their livestock have eaten away at other parks. Armed Maoist rebels have made some reserves impossible to patrol. And India’s government is considering a bill to hand over two-thirds of national tiger-reserve land to landless peasants. But in Nagarjuna Sagar, a sprawling reserve in southeast India, tigers are holding on thanks to an innovative campaign by local conservationists, who have quit trying to evict villagers and extremist rebels from the park and instead won them over to the tiger cause.

Saving tigers “is more about managing people than managing animals,” said K. Thulsi Rao, an assistant state forest officer, head of biodiversity research at the reserve and the mastermind of Nagarjuna Sagar’s people-friendly conservation approach.

“If you address people’s needs, the rest is taken care of,” he said. “When you make people the partners of management, there is really a lot of change.”

Conversing, conserving

Nagarjuna Sagar, split by the mighty Krishna River, doesn’t look much like a traditional wildlife sanctuary. The park, which encompasses more than 1,000 square miles, is home to a massive hydroelectric dam and a popular shrine that draws millions of Hindu pilgrims each year. Heavy traffic plies paved roads cut through the open forestland.

Perhaps most troubling, nearly 120 small villages lie within the boundaries of the hilly park, including 22 settlements in the reserve’s core conservation area, which under Indian law is supposed to be free of human inhabitants.

When Rao arrived at the reserve in 1994, its forests were full of Naxals, India’s homegrown Maoist rebels. The rebels had recently shot dead one of the forest service’s best rangers and had forbidden others from entering the woods.

Villagers in the park, fed up with a government program that paid them only a third of the value of any livestock killed by tigers, were pouring pesticides on livestock carcasses and poisoning the cats.

Neighbors of the reserve, with the approval of the populist Naxals, were leveling large sections of the woods for firewood to sell, selectively felling the forest’s valuable teak trees or bringing in huge herds of cattle to graze. The reserve’s tiger population, which once topped 80, had fallen to fewer than 40.

Rao, who had a background in ecodevelopment efforts, decided the Naxals were the reserve’s biggest problem.

The new forest officer headed into the woods to talk to them, armed only with 600 slides and a presentation on the philosophical merits of conservation. Told by a Naxal leader that the forest service cared more about animals than people, he argued that if the forest disappeared, the people would lose their livelihood and home.

The next day, to everyone’s surprise, the Naxals issued a ban on woodcutting in the park.

Rao also went to visit woodcutter villages outside the reserve, where rangers had long been greeted by men waving axes. Insisting he would listen to their concerns, he discovered that people hated being treated as thieves, struggled to survive on $2 a day as woodcutters and would have preferred farming but had no water for irrigation.

Calling in local non-governmental organizations and raising development funds from India’s government and international bodies like the World Bank, Rao began paying locals $2 a day to replant degraded forest areas in the Krishna River’s water catchment area and helped them rebuild abandoned irrigation channels. He helped villagers plant new cattle-grazing areas outside the reserve and targeted conservation education programs at the area’s most notorious poachers and smugglers.

In the park’s core, he assured 2,000 aboriginal Chenchu forest dwellers that the government no longer wanted to evict them, but preferred to hire them to monitor the cats’ movements. And he and others persuaded the government to boost its compensation for cattle kills to full market value.

Today, satellite photos show massive regrowth of forest within Nagarjuna Sagar, and large-scale regeneration of grazing land outside the park. The region’s water storage lakes are full for the first time in decades. Tiger poisonings have virtually stopped and political talks with the Naxals are under way.

Sakria Mudavat, 40, a former woodcutter living on the fringes of the reserve, today gets several crops a year of rice, lentils and castor beans from his once-barren land. He earns $125 a month, up from $12.50, enough to put both his children in school.

“We’re very happy now,” said Gamli Bai, 75, a leader of Mudavat’s village. “If anybody comes [to poach], we will stop them.”

Venkataiah, 30, a Chenchu tiger tracker living in a grass and woven bamboo hut deep in the reserve’s teak and crocodile bark forest, also reports seeing tiger cubs on his rounds.

“Slowly, they are increasing,” he says of the big cats, whose numbers today are estimated by rangers to have risen to about 80.

The reserve’s tale is the exception in India, where tiger numbers remain “precariously low,” according to the Sujoy Banerjee of the World Wildlife Federation’s India office. Activists fear the government bill to transfer reserve land to peasants would be a death sentence for wild tigers in the country.

Extending lessons learned at Nagarjuna Sagar may prove difficult given that many of India’s reserves are smaller, even more imperiled and facing crushing pressure from India’s growing population of 1.2 billion.

But learning how to deal with tigers’ human neighbors, everyone agrees, is a crucial step toward saving them.

“Every 10 miles there’s a new problem in tiger conservation,” said John Seidensticker, a leading tiger expert at the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park. “You’re never done saving them. You just keep working on it.”