A Chance Encounter.
1. An off-duty secret service agent fatally shot a dog that was out for a walk in a Brooklyn neighborhood on Monday night. Neighbors were stunned that a chance street encounter with a pet would end in its death. The agent told police officers that the dog had charged at him, he fired once, striking the animal and killing it. A neighbor relayed the owner's experience that while out for a walk, the Belgian Shepard named Bambi did her business under a tree, but she wandered around the street corner while the owner picked up her stool. That’s when the agent shot the dog. Last fall, the Justice Department published the Law Enforcement Dog Encounters Training handbook in response to police departments across the country facing public outrage and potential lawsuits after run-ins with aggressive family pets resulted in officers shooting the animals. Monday’s incident is the latest in unfortunate law enforcement dog encounters, hopefully one of the last. (via New York Daily News, New York Post, New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal)
2. Spotify has made playlists and a podcast for dogs to listen to in their owners' absence, after finding that nearly 74% of UK pet-owners play music for their animals. The audio-streaming company has launched a podcast featuring soothing music, "dog-directed praise", and messages of affirmation narrated by actors to alleviate stress for dogs who are home alone. Playlists aimed at pets offer tracks selected by algorithms to match pets' characteristics such as energetic or slow. Spotify found in a survey that one in four pet-owners play music for their pets to listen to when they are away from home, with 42% of owners saying their pets have a favorite type of music. (via Reuters)
3. At first glance, Bello might look more cute than formidable. But watch her work — running lickety-split alongside rows of trees, occasionally sitting under one to signal she has sniffed out the disease — and you might arrive at the opposite conclusion. Bello and her handler work for F1 K9, a Florida firm that trains and provides dogs for an array of purposes, including the detection of agricultural disease. The duo represent a government-backed effort to counter the devastation caused by Huanglongbing, or HLB, a bacterium that prevents fruit from ripening. The USDA has spent the better part of 15 years studying dogs’ capability to sniff out HLB, and it has found that the animals do so with 99% accuracy. (via The Washington Post)
4. Biologists at Stockholm University, have observed eight-week-old wolf puppies retrieve a thrown ball at the urging of a stranger, without any training. The researchers say that if the ability to engage with people this way is present in some wolves, it seems likely that it was present in the ancient wolves, now extinct, that were the ancestors of dogs, rather than evolving from new mutations during domestication. This is the first evidence, reported Thursday in iScience, of this kind of responsiveness in untrained wolves, The ability to engage with humans in play is proving to be “a very old trait” that goes back to the very beginning of dog domestication. (via The New York Times)
5. Dog training generally requires a human dog trainer, but what if it didn't and delivered better results? That's the promise of a startup called Companion Labs that has unveiled its first AI-driven dog-training machine in conjunction with the San Francisco SPCA. The CompanionPro trainer looks like a Soviet-era space heater but contains image sensors, a Google Edge TPU AI processor, wireless connectivity, lights, a speaker and a proprietary "treat launcher" that delivers all-important training rewards. Companion promises the machine will "excel at performing repetitive tasks with perfect consistency and infinite patience," according to a TensorFlow blog post by the company. (via CNET)
6. Taylor, a 4-year-old English springer spaniel, has been among the hard working rescuers during Australia's bushfire crisis. When told: "Koala, Find!", Taylor ventures out into burnt-out bushland, finding injured marsupials by sniffing out the scent of their fur or their faeces, also known as scat. Each time she finds a koala, she is rewarded with a tennis ball or culinary treat. A $50 million emergency wildlife recovery program launched by the federal government earlier this week will focus on the survival of the iconic native animal. Taylor, meanwhile, has been focused on finding injured koalas since she was just a few months old and is now an expert. (via The New York Times)
7. Why are Irish Setters so red? Geneticists at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine now have an answer for why some dogs have more intense coat colors than others. While their wolf ancestors are muted in color, domestic dogs have been bred into a variety of hues from white and golden through brown to black. Researchers found a region of DNA on the dog chromosome 15 that can have multiple copies related to coat color. When they looked across a range of breeds, dogs with a higher number of copies of this region had more intense coat colors. Wolves have just a single copy on each chromosome 15. (via Science Daily)
Dog Photo of the Week
By Thomas Shapiro, Tika the Insta-famous pup. @tikatheiggy
Dog Video of the Week
By ABC News. Duke, the civil service dog.