Can you take your pet overseas with you if you move to another country? Animal Airways, a global pet-flight and relocation provider based in London, has established a new division that focuses on pet owners' need for professional veterinary guidance when shipping pets worldwide.
"Animal Airways noticed the demand for professional veterinarian services on a global level for shipping pets," says Eytan Kreiner, D.V.M., head veterinarian at Animal Airways.
"The veterinarian support team includes flight veterinarians from all continents, speaking more than 10 languages, available at all times for every matter."
The support team will offer pre-flight advice regarding flight-related treatments, vaccinations, microchips, and pet passports in response to the new rules and regulations required by countries and airlines for pet import and export.
The team's service begins with a 24/7 hotline for general information and continues until the pet is safely transported to its destination. In addition to advising pet owners. Animal Airways also advises companies that collaborate with the organisation.
For more information about Animal Airways, visit www.animalairways.com
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Is a dingo smarter than your dog?
We dote on our dogs, serve them meals and let them sleep inside on cozy beds. These once-wild beasts have taken easily to domesticated life, but new research shows that humans' close relationships with dogs have caused them to lose their non-social problem-solving skills.
Ph.D. candidate and lead author Bradley Philip Smith and his colleague Carla Litchfield from the School of Psychology at the University of South Australia, put domesticated dogs and dingoes through a problem-solving test known as "the detour task." Australia's native breed, dingoes have adapted to life in the outback after their ancestors arrived on the continent with humans thousands of years ago. As a result, they have developed more wild characteristics than Max or Sadie.
The detour task requires the animals to travel around a transparent barrier to obtain a reward, in this case, a bowl of food. The barrier was a V-shaped fence with detour doors that either swing inward or outward. Researchers placed the food bowl inside or just outside the intersection point of the V barrier.
All of the dingoes found the food reward in about 20 seconds, using the detour doors whenever possible.
Domesticated dogs, on the other hand, looked puzzled and confused. They pawed at the fence, dug at it and even barked, likely out of frustration and to call for help.
Smith and Litchfield published their findings, titled "How well do dingoes (Canis dingo) perform on the detour task?" in the journal Animal Behaviour {Vol 80, Issue 1; 155-162).
Prior research showed that wolves, like the dingoes, aced this test. "Wolves will outperform dogs on any problem-solving tasks that are non-social," Smith says. "Dogs are great at social tasks - communicating with humans, using humans as tools, learning from humans via observation - whereas wolves are much better at general problem solving."
Ph.D. candidate and lead author Bradley Philip Smith and his colleague Carla Litchfield from the School of Psychology at the University of South Australia, put domesticated dogs and dingoes through a problem-solving test known as "the detour task." Australia's native breed, dingoes have adapted to life in the outback after their ancestors arrived on the continent with humans thousands of years ago. As a result, they have developed more wild characteristics than Max or Sadie.
The detour task requires the animals to travel around a transparent barrier to obtain a reward, in this case, a bowl of food. The barrier was a V-shaped fence with detour doors that either swing inward or outward. Researchers placed the food bowl inside or just outside the intersection point of the V barrier.
All of the dingoes found the food reward in about 20 seconds, using the detour doors whenever possible.
Domesticated dogs, on the other hand, looked puzzled and confused. They pawed at the fence, dug at it and even barked, likely out of frustration and to call for help.
Smith and Litchfield published their findings, titled "How well do dingoes (Canis dingo) perform on the detour task?" in the journal Animal Behaviour {Vol 80, Issue 1; 155-162).
Prior research showed that wolves, like the dingoes, aced this test. "Wolves will outperform dogs on any problem-solving tasks that are non-social," Smith says. "Dogs are great at social tasks - communicating with humans, using humans as tools, learning from humans via observation - whereas wolves are much better at general problem solving."
Monday, August 23, 2010
Canine Amputees Assist Researchers
A dog with three legs might be a pitiful sight to see, but researchers at the university of lena in Thuringia, Germany, view the dog's misfortune as an opportunity to learn more about odd-limbed locomotion.
A research team led by Martin Gross, a Ph.D. candidate with the university's locomotion laboratory, used 10 high-tech infrared cameras to record canine amputees walking and running on a treadmill.
Some dogs were missing a forelimb; others were missing a hind limb. Researchers outfitted the dogs with reflective markers, which allowed the scientists to track their movements with pinpoint precision. They mapped out each dog's gait and movement characteristics, and compared them to others.
The researchers found that the dogs employed varying coping techniques or "compensation strategies" depending on which limb was missing. The strategies used to compensate for missing forelimbs proved more complicated than those for missing hind limbs.
If a forelimb was missing, the dog's remaining limbs had to adapt to coordinate with one another, a process the researchers called "gait compensation." With a hind-leg amputation, however, they found that the forelimbs continued to act as they would normally in a four legged dog. Why the difference? Researchers speculated that because dogs' forelimbs carry more body weight, the dogs needed to compensate to account for the lack of support.
The study is part of the European Union's Locomorph project, an ongoing research project that seeks to develop a more comprehensive understanding of locomotive activity, and improve robot efficiency and usability. The findings were presented at the Society for Experimental Biology's annual meeting in Prague in luly.
A research team led by Martin Gross, a Ph.D. candidate with the university's locomotion laboratory, used 10 high-tech infrared cameras to record canine amputees walking and running on a treadmill.
Some dogs were missing a forelimb; others were missing a hind limb. Researchers outfitted the dogs with reflective markers, which allowed the scientists to track their movements with pinpoint precision. They mapped out each dog's gait and movement characteristics, and compared them to others.
The researchers found that the dogs employed varying coping techniques or "compensation strategies" depending on which limb was missing. The strategies used to compensate for missing forelimbs proved more complicated than those for missing hind limbs.
If a forelimb was missing, the dog's remaining limbs had to adapt to coordinate with one another, a process the researchers called "gait compensation." With a hind-leg amputation, however, they found that the forelimbs continued to act as they would normally in a four legged dog. Why the difference? Researchers speculated that because dogs' forelimbs carry more body weight, the dogs needed to compensate to account for the lack of support.
The study is part of the European Union's Locomorph project, an ongoing research project that seeks to develop a more comprehensive understanding of locomotive activity, and improve robot efficiency and usability. The findings were presented at the Society for Experimental Biology's annual meeting in Prague in luly.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Dog smells out cancer in urine
Researchers from Tenon Hospital in Paris have shown that a dog can discriminate between urine from confirmed prostate-cancer patients and urine from healthy men.
For a year, Jean-Nicolas Cornu, M.D., and Pierre Bigot, MD, trained a Belgian Malinois to identify urine from; men with prostate cancer. They then presented the dog with six urine samples, one of which came from a man with prostate cancer.
The dog was trained to sit in front of the urine he considered cancerous.
Out of 66 tests, the dog chose the correct sample 63 times and chose a false positive (a healthy sample) three times.
"The dog is certainly recognising the odour of a molecule that is produced by cancer cells," Cornu says. "The problem is that we don't know what this molecule is, and the dog cannot tell us."
The next step, he says, is to determine precisely what the dogs are sniffing and to develop an "electronic nose" to detect it.
The study, titled "The Use of Canines for Prostate Cancer Detection: Towards a Non-Invasive Alternative Screening Tool" was first published in The Journal of Urology, April 2010, Vol. 183, Issue 4, Supplement.
For a year, Jean-Nicolas Cornu, M.D., and Pierre Bigot, MD, trained a Belgian Malinois to identify urine from; men with prostate cancer. They then presented the dog with six urine samples, one of which came from a man with prostate cancer.
The dog was trained to sit in front of the urine he considered cancerous.
Out of 66 tests, the dog chose the correct sample 63 times and chose a false positive (a healthy sample) three times.
"The dog is certainly recognising the odour of a molecule that is produced by cancer cells," Cornu says. "The problem is that we don't know what this molecule is, and the dog cannot tell us."
The next step, he says, is to determine precisely what the dogs are sniffing and to develop an "electronic nose" to detect it.
The study, titled "The Use of Canines for Prostate Cancer Detection: Towards a Non-Invasive Alternative Screening Tool" was first published in The Journal of Urology, April 2010, Vol. 183, Issue 4, Supplement.
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