If you’re like me, the big game you really look forward to every Super Bowl Sunday is “Puppy Bowl” on Animal Planet. Next year, we dog lovers are in for a double treat: To bring attention to older pups who need forever homes, Animal Planet is adding “Dog Bowl” to its game-day lineup.
Like “Puppy Bowl,” the players in the hour-long “Dog Bowl” will be pooches from shelters and rescues across the United States, The Wrap reports.
“‘Puppy Bowl’s’ goal is to promote animal adoption so as many animals as possible can find their forever homes,” Patrice Andrews, general manager of Animal Planet, told The Wrap. The same will be true for the network’s new competition.
“Dog Bowl” will air on Animal Planet prior to “Puppy Bowl XIV,” during the show “Road to Puppy Bowl” hosted by animal advocate and bestselling author Jill Rappaport.
The players will be “going nose to nose for touchdowns, furry fumbles and ultimately the win,” according to Animal Planet. “After the game of tail tugs and ear pulls is over, they all end up winners as they find their forever homes.”
It’s a little early, but mark your 2018 calendars for February 4. In the meantime, enjoy some of the greatest moments in “Puppy Bowl” history.
Over the past few years, service dogs who accompany students and teachers to school have earned their rightful place among the class photos in yearbooks. This really cool trend continues this year with Alpha, the service dog for Andrew “A.J.” Schalk, a junior at Stafford High School in Falmouth, Va.
Ever since Alpha was only 4 months old, the black Lab, now 3, has been assisting Schalk as a diabetes detection dog.
“The amazing thing about Alpha is that he knows 20 to 40 minutes before my blood sugar actually does go low or high due to his amazing sense of smell,” Schalk, who has type 1 diabetes, told Buzzfeed News. “He has saved my life multiple times already, by waking me up in the middle of the night to extremely low blood sugars, which are very dangerous.”
Schalk asked the yearbook staff if his lifesaver’s photo could be included, and they were all totally on board with it. So Schalk brought Alpha along when he got his own picture taken.
“The only thing they changed was the camera height,” he told Buzzfeed News. “They just had to lower it a little, ha ha.” (Maybe next year they can lower it just a little bit more, LOL.)
“Where you see A.J., you see Alpha, and he’s just one of the gang,” the school principal, Joseph Lewis, told NBC Washington.
“He has been a great companion and added a lot of happiness to my school’s environment,” Schalk told Buzzfeed News. “It brightens people’s days seeing him in the halls or in my class and I love being able to have that effect on people.”
Class of 2016
Last year a photo of Presley, a 5-year-old Goldendoodle, appeared next to that of Seph Ware in the yearbook for Good Hope Middle School in West Monroe, La.
Ware, now 15, has had Duchenne muscular dystrophy since he was 3 years old and is confined to a wheelchair. While Ware was attending middle school, Presley helped him by picking up things he dropped, turning on lights, opening drawers and performing other tasks in the classroom and at home.
School officials came up with the idea of including Presley’s photo in the yearbook.
“Seph says that it took about 10 minutes to get Presley to look at the camera — and who knows how many shots,” his mom, Lori Ware, told AL.com.
After Presley’s yearbook photo was shared on Facebook, it went viral.
“We’re kind of stunned at all the attention,” Lori Ware told FoxNews.com. “It’s humbling. I’m glad Presley is making the world happy.”
Caramel is a service dog belonging to Rebecca Thomas, who is hearing impaired and teaches American sign language at Blaine High. For the previous 10 years, Caramel had joined her in class.
Dakota, a certified therapy dog, belongs to Vicky Camancho, who teaches a special education class at the school and brings in Dakota once a week.
“The students love seeing the service dogs in the yearbook,” Thomas told Yahoo Canada.
Including the two dogs in the yearbook started in 2013, when Dakota’s photo was taken for an identification badge on class picture day.
“When we got the disc of student and staff photos, we automatically flowed the pictures into the yearbook page sections,” Faculty Adviser Jill Farrell told the Star Tribune. “The editors and I giggled like mad when we saw that a picture of Dakota was included in the images.”
Lynn Florman, head of the special education department, told Yahoo Canada the photos send a positive message.
“Sometimes the unique services they provide are not understood or valued by others, so seeing them recognized in such a public and memorable way as a yearbook sends a strong message to all that they are an integral part of the team that supports our students,” Florman said.
When a tornado with 120 mile-per-hour winds tore through northwestern Wisconsin Tuesday, it took two lives and destroyed dozens of homes.
One of the destroyed mobile homes belonged to Ron Belcher of Prairie Lake Estates. He was home with the two dogs he considers his children, Cocoa the Husky and Taz the Pomeranian, when the EF2 tornado struck.
“It came up all of a sudden and then it was so loud, and it got so dark,” he told WQOW. “Your windows are already busted, and … the roof came off. And then things were just flying, refrigerators flying, it was just unbelievable.”
Belcher was knocked unconscious by a collapsing wall. When he woke up, his home was in shambles and, most importantly, Cocoa and Taz were nowhere to be found. He feared the worst.
Emergency responders found Belcher and took him to a hospital, where he was treated for several broken bones, cuts and a head injury.
As Belcher recovered, a wonderful Marshfield Clinic nurse named Ciara Rockow took it upon herself to go looking for Cocoa and Taz. Her kind efforts quickly paid off. She found both of them, alive and well, at the Animal Hospital of Chetek.
Two days after Belcher thought he’d lost his dogs forever, hospital staff brought Cocoa and Taz to his bed.
“This is God’s gift, that’s what keeps me moving no matter how many bad things happen,” Belcher, whose recovery is expected to take six to eight weeks, told WQOW.
Their happy reunion was caught on video — grab a tissue or 10!
If Marshfield Clinic has a Nurse of the Year award, here’s hoping it’s bestowed upon Rockow.
Also deserving plenty of accolades are all the people who generously donated much-needed supplies to the Animal Hospital of Chetek. The hospital is caring for displaced pets free of charge.
“We’ve had an outpouring of people asking to help with the pets affected by the tornado,” the hospital stated on its Facebook page Thursday. “We have all the supplies we need and the Humane Society of Barron County is going to help us make arrangements to foster some of the pets that have been found.”
If you want to help, according to the hospital the best way is to make a donation to the Humane Society of Barron County or to the Veterinary Care Foundation (select Wisconsin and Animal Hospital of Chetek).
George and Amal Clooney could easily afford a super expensive designer dog from a breeder, but that’s just not how this dog-loving couple rolls.
After falling in love with Mollie, a 4-year-old Basset Hound they saw on Petfinder three years ago, George and Amal drove over to the San Gabriel Valley Humane Society in Southern California and adopted her in person. They brought along one of their other rescue dogs, a Cocker Spaniel named Louie, to make sure he and Mollie got along.
Three months later, the Clooneys found out about Nate, a scruffy terrier having a hard time getting adopted from LuvFurMutts Animal Rescue in Fairfield, Ohio. Nate, who’d been rescued from a hoarding situation, had birth defects that were a turn-off for some potential adopters.
“When we took Nate to adoption events, people would stare and kids would point,” the rescue wrote on its website. “Several people applied to adopt him but then said no when they met him. … The lowest point came when an adopter cried when she met him and said she would be depressed the rest of her life if she had to look at him every day.”
But LuvFurMutts saw Nate as “a handsome, charming, sweet and normal little boy” — as did the Clooneys. A beloved terrier belonging to George’s parents had died the year before, so George thought Nate would make a perfect Christmas present for them.
“What is impressive is the fact that George picked Nate out, and Nick and Nina accepted Nate just the way he is,” wrote LuvFurMutts. “They could have any dog in the world, but they chose to adopt a dog who was crippled and could have been with LuvFurMutts for life.”
The Clooneys also made a donation to the rescue to cover the cost of Nate’s previous surgeries.
Help for 9 Rescued Cockers
Speaking of donations, fast forward about a year and a half. After hearing that Camp Cocker Rescue, a dog rescue organization based in Sherman Oaks, Calif., had just taken in nine Cocker Spaniels from a terrible backyard breeding operation, George and Amal, who are expecting a new family member of the human persuasion soon, donated $10,000 to the organization. Both of their babies of the canine persuasion — Louie and another dog, Einstein — were adopted from the rescue.
“You can imagine how blown away we were when we heard that a $10,000 donation was pledged to our doggies,” Camp Cocker wrote on its Facebook page. “After we all did happy dances and cried with happiness for this unbelievable matching donation offer — we then asked the donors … if we could reveal their names to our supporters in order to help us reach our big goal this month.”
As for those nine rescued Cockers, “So far, we are looking at two ear ablation surgeries, a bilateral mastectomy, a cherry eye surgery, nine dentals (all have never seen a vet in their lives and need extractions) plus the usual spay surgeries and lab work on all nine dogs to get a baseline of where they all are health wise,” according to the Camp Cocker Rescue website.
Camp Cocker Rescue is currently having a donation drive where contributions will be matched by the Clooneys’ generous donation.
“We have a philosophy where we want to be very inclusive of all of our supporters and it’s important to us that no matter how small of a donation, every person feels like their donation is meaningful and that we appreciate them,” Camp Cocker founder Cathy Stanley told PEOPLE.
Back in January 2016, as California Highway Patrol officers approached a car parked on the side of the 710 Freeway in Los Angeles, the woman behind the wheel, Tiffini Tobe, took off and lead the officers on a slow-speed chase. It ended in Long Beach when officers used the PIT (precision immobilization technique) maneuver to make Tobe’s car spin around and stop.
Tobe got out of her car along with three of the six Pit Bull mixes who were inside it. After they ran up to Tobe, was lying face down on the freeway and about to be arrested, the dogs started running around, their tails wagging. They were soon joined by the other three dogs in the car.
What could have been a terrible situation was avoided, because the CHP officers were able to stop traffic on both sides of the freeway. (My sincere gratitude to those CHPs, considering that some cops would have likely shot the loose dogs). Animal control officers from City of Long Beach Animal Care Services were able to corral all six dogs.
“This gives a whole new meaning to the term PIT maneuver,” ABC7 cleverly wrote on its Facebook page at the time.
The six Pit Bulls corralled after the car chase, including three puppies, their mother and two other dogs, had “no obvious signs of significant injury or illness,” Ted Stevens, manager of Long Beach Animal Care Services told NBC Los Angeles. “So far they’ve shown no aggression. They appear bright, alert, responsive, friendly.”
Being taken to the Long Beach city animal shelter may have been the best thing to ever happen to Tobe’s dogs.
The previous year, Tobe had been charged with a misdemeanor count (that’s all?!) of failing to provide veterinary treatment after one of her dogs had chewed the skin off a rear foot, exposing the bone. The 4-year-old Pit Bull was suffering from hypertrophic osteopathy and had to be euthanized. Tobe was ordered at the time not to have any pets.
When she failed to show up for a hearing a few weeks before the car chase, a warrant was issued for her arrest. After she was arrested by the CHP, Tobe was charged with a felony count of reckless driving and misdemeanor counts of DUI, resisting an officer and driving without a license.
But Tobe’s dogs had much more fortunate outcomes. The puppies and one of the adult dogs were all soon adopted. The remaining two dogs, sisters Brittney and Honey, were transferred to the spcaLA P.D. Pitchford Companion Animal Village & Education Center in Long Beach.
Brittney became involved in spcaLA’s award-winning violence prevention program, Teaching Love and Compassion (TLC). She spent a month visiting a middle school with five other shelter dogs, helping the students learn to treat animals and all living beings with kindness and compassion.
In January, one year after the car chase, Brittney was finally adopted. “It is a true testament to the dedication of the spcaLA staff and volunteers that Brittney has found her forever home,” Madeline Bernstein, spcaLA president, said at the time. “They regained her trust in humans as they helped her overcome her inhibitions. For her to finish her shelter stay working with kids is truly extraordinary.”
As a further testament to the dedication of spcaLA, Brittney’s sister, Honey, has also just been adopted, 15 months after the car chase.
“It couldn’t be a better situation for her,” Bernstein said. “A true Hollywood ending.”
Photo via YouTube
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