Spay and neuter: avoid animal cruelty KY February 25 is Spay Day USA... Statistics demonstrate the sad fact of life for most cats and dogs: 'Each day, 70,000 puppies and kittens are born. As long as these birth rates exist, there will never be enough homes for all the animals...' When you take an animal to an animal shelter, it is probably a death sentence for your former pet... A cat or dog is euthanized every 7 seconds... [Kentucky Daily News]

In this week's New Yorker, Larissa MacFarquhar reviews 'The Pawprints of History', Stanley Coren's latest dog book. Coren has written other notable dog books, which include 'The Intelligence of Dogs,' and 'How to Speak Dog.' .... In this one, Coren explores on the impact of past civilizations on dogs and the impact of dogs on civilizations ... a daunting task, since dogs can't talk and have no oral or written history...

'One wonders what a modern dog would think, for instance, about the reign of the shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, born in the Year of the Dog, 1646. Tsunayoshi felt so strongly about the welfare of dogs that he instituted the Laws of Compassion... Under these laws, not only injuring or killing but even ignoring a dog might be punished by death, and many people were forced to commit ritual suicide as a consequence. In one particularly rigorous month in 1687, more than three hundred people were put to death ... in the course of Tsunayoshi's thirty-year reign, somewhere between sixty thousand and two hundred thousand people were either put to death or exiled for animal-welfare violations...' [New Yorker] (fascinating stuff... I'd buy this book, just to learn more about the history of man's relationship with dogs...   the shogun did not go down in history as a shining example of the Laws of Compassion... he sounds like another Hitler [Hitler also adored dogs and animals, ate vegetarian, and massacred humans].)