A miracle dog from Missouri is making a big difference for thousands of abandoned animals in the Triad. Quentin managed to survive a trip to the gas chamber in 2003. Now he’s convincing local leaders to shut down theirs.

“There’s this dog standing on a pile of dead dogs,” says Quentin’s adopted dad Randy Grim.

“It’s illegal in at least five states that I know of to use a gas chamber and here in North Carolina it’s the primary method of euthanasia,” Grim says.

The triad is just one stop on his cross-country mission.

“Get rid of the gas chambers and switch over to lethal injection, the more humane way.”

In order to share Quentin’s story, Grim says he had to witness a gassing first hand.

“One dog went into seizures. Another was defecating and howling. It was so horrible. Two dogs were fighting. It wasn’t this peaceful, fall asleep.”

“I never have liked the gas chamber,” says Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page.

He says thousands of unwanted animals have been gassed in Rockingham County every year for more than a decade. Then the Sheriff got a visit, and a lot of information, from Grim.

“Of course he brought Quentin in here. I had Quentin in here. He had another dog named Stinky. He was in here. They were talking about how these animals have been rescued,” Page says.

Now, he says things in Rockingham County will change.

“This new contract coming up July 1, I’d like to get away from the gas chamber and when we do have to put animals down, go to the euthanasia method of lethal injection,” Page says.

Grim says Burlington officials also promised him they’d stop using gas. Across the country, he says 50 gas chambers have closed since Quentin’s story was published.

YOU’VE heard of pampered pooches – now meet Bert the spoilt bunny.

While most rabbits have to make do with a hutch in the garden, Bert revels in luxury in his own double bedroom.

He also has the run of his owner Nina Whitehead’s four-bedroomed house.

But he needs the space… for one-year-old Bert is a monster.

A continental giant rabbit, he tips the scales at a hefty 20lbs and is two-and-a-half feet long.

And he is going to get even bigger as he has another six months’ growth left.

Proud “mum” Nina, aged 25, said most people thought it was odd that Bert had his own bedroom and lived in the house.

“He is as house-trained as a dog or a cat,” she said.

“But if you train them when they’re young, any rabbit can live quite happily and safely in a house.”

Nina has converted a bedroom in the Redditch house she shares with her partner into “Bert’s den”.

“It’s a double room and we’ve put in a cage, a bed, all of Bert’s toys and his litter tray,” she said.

“Because he’s so big we had to buy a dog bed for an Alsatian.

“But he doesn’t always sleep there as he pretty much has the run of the house and sleeps wherever he likes.”

Bert also has a monster appetite and munches his way through two big bowls of food a day, as well as treats of apples and carrots and his all-time favourite food – toast.

Nina, a management support officer for a Solihull company, said: “He’s very friendly and loves human company.

“When I sit down he’ll come and lie next to me. He used to sit on my lap but now he’s too heavy.”

San Diego County bird lovers warmly welcomed the long-absent California condor yesterday, saying the Boeing 747 of birds is something every enthusiast wants to see.

They were reacting to the announcement that a female condor took a spin around San Diego County’s mountains this week after flying up from Mexico. As of Wednesday, the 3-year-old condor was winging around Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, according to satellite tracking by the San Diego Zoo.

The critically endangered birds are being reintroduced into the wild in Mexico and Central California. Before this, the last documented sighting of a condor over San Diego County was in 1910, zoo officials have said.

“It’s just a thrill, the thought of having condors returning to San Diego County, and I think most birders feel the same way,” said Sue Smith, a past president of San Diego Field Ornithology.

Bird lover Philip Pryde remembers feeling a sense of urgency about condors in the late 1980s.

That’s when wildlife officials announced plans to remove the nearly extinct condor from the wild and place it in breeding programs such as the one at the San Diego Zoo’s Wild Animal Park, near Escondido.

Pryde hopped into his car and headed north to Los Padres National Forest, where condors were known to fly.

“I was determined I was going to camp there until I saw them,” said Pryde, a past president of the San Diego Audubon Society. “Fortunately, I saw one within 12 hours.”

There’s just something about the California condor, bird lovers say: not a pretty face, but an awesome, 9-foot wingspan that makes it North America’s largest bird.

“Birders want to see every species they possibly can, but the condor obviously has a mystique beyond practically anything else,” said Philip Unitt, the San Diego Natural History Museum’s curator of birds and mammals. “It is its rarity, compounded with its size and struggle with survival.”

Unitt also made the pilgrimage to Los Padres in the late 1980s, but he had no luck with a sighting.

The California condor population dipped to just above 20, its lowest point, in the mid-1980s. In 1992, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service-led effort began reintroducing the birds into the wild in Santa Barbara County.

Since 2002, zoologists have released 11 condors in Baja California’s Sierra San Pedro de Martir National Park, about 125 miles south of the border.

Condor enthusiasts hope the Mexico and Central California groups will eventually merge, making San Diego County’s mountains a part of their regular flight path.

Pryde said that if condors started to breed here, “that would be nirvana.”

It’s a reality show with a difference. On a visit to Chhatbir zoo the last thing you expect to see is a man atop a tree whistling away to glory, a wildlife guard making loud, strange noises and another one busy beating a drum.

No, it’s not even an effort to recreate a tiger hunting scene from yesteryears. In fact, what greets visitors at the zoo is wildlife authorities pulling off every trick in the animal management book to lure a 11-month-old white tiger to go back to its enclosure.

The tiger is one of the two such cats brought from Delhi zoo some days back and released from captivity on Saturday morning, and has since then been playing hide and seek with zoo keepers.

Probably, it’s trying to convey something — the weather, the living place, or maybe just a day or two of solitude.

Whatever be, zoo officials, after losing a few from the tribe recently, are now too fond of the cat to leave it alone.

On Monday, they tried to push the female tigress near the wire mesh and grills of the locked enclosure, hoping that it may at least respond to feminine sweet-talking.

Field director Dharmender Kumar and zoo warden Neeraj Gupta seemed the most worried of all, finding it difficult to chose from options being suggested by all except those inside cages.

Recent criticism for showing negligent in handling the felines in captivity too proved a hindrance as officials dared not touch any tranquilliser or any other medical aid, fearing the worst.

The official reason, however, remained: “It is only a child enjoying all those mood swings.”

A mother cat in China has adopted a mouse, letting it join her family of newborns.

The cat was brought into a children’s clothing store to catch mice, reports Yanzhao City News.

A mother cat in China has adopted a mouse, letting it join her family of newborns /Lu Feng.

Ten days ago, the cat gave birth to five kittens.

“She stays in the box all day long, taking care of her babies, but three days ago, my colleague found a small mouse playing with the kittens,” said a spokesperson for the store in Shijiazhuang city.

“The cat was protecting the mouse, and would become alert if anyone came too close.”

The store staff threw the mouse out once, but immediately the cat ran to bring it back and let it play with her kittens.

Experts say it’s quite exceptional, but that maybe the cat became lenient after becoming a mother.

The largest of the world’s “big cats”, the Amur tiger, has bounced back from the brink of extinction after the charity WWF disclosed that it had reached its highest population for more than a century.

The Amur is a magnificent beast, its glossy gold and black coat gleaming as it pads its way on huge paws across the snowy wastes of Siberia and northern China. The tiger has been hunted relentlessly by those who covet its gorgeous fur, or want to exploit the fabled healing qualities of its crushed bones for traditional Chinese medicine. Or those who simply want to kill this giant of nature to hang its head as a trophy on the wall.

The prospects for the Amur tiger, also known as the Siberian, Korean or Manchurian tiger, have looked grim for many years. It was poised to join the white-fin dolphin of the Yangtze river as the latest species made extinct by man’s unstoppable encroachment. Everyone thought the tiger was dead as a dodo.

However, a census by the Russians this year showed there were 480 to 520 Amur tigers living on the remote edge of Siberia.

This puts the total world population at about 600, said Alexei Vaisman, head of the Russia WWF’s anti-animal trafficking programme. Mr Vaisman said that at one point, the tigers were close to being extinct. The creature’s main habitats are eastern Russia and north-east China. The tiger can grow up to 3.3 metres long and weigh as much as 300kg (660lb). They are fierce beasts that have been known to attack bears.

To survive the bitterly cold Siberian winter the tiger has fine, long fur and a thick coating of fat. Its coat is lighter than other tigers and its big paws function like snow shoes as it crosses the icy terrain.

A fully grown Amur usually lives in an area with a diameter of 100 to 300 kilometres, and uses its urine to mark the boundary that other tigers cannot breach, according to experts.

The Russians count the tiger population every three or four years and the population has stabilised at the highest level the food chain can sustain.

The Soviet Union banned tiger poaching in the 1950s, rescuing the species, and a joint programme between the WWF and the Russian government in 1994 nearly doubled the population.

While the overall figures are encouraging, the problem still remains that the tiger’s habitat is diminishing in north-east Siberia, where there are only around 40 left, said Mr Vaisman.

“I’m a pessimist on the survival of the Amur,” he said. “I think it could go.”

A major problem remains the use of crushed tiger bones in traditional Chinese medicine to cure impotence. The skeleton of an Amur tiger can fetch £10,000 on the black market.

The Chinese have also banned tiger-hunting and have also been trying to introduce artificially bred Amur tigers into the wild. Chinese scientists claimed last year that 12 of the animals bred in captivity had developed instincts to survive in the wild, four years after being released from a breeding base.

In December last year, a coalition of environmental groups organised a group of volunteers to go to north-east China to clear snares that were a threat to the animal’s survival.