Free Republic

Authorities removed a 750-pound alligator from a residence in upstate New York last week, officials announced Friday. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation wrote in a Facebook post that its officers seized a 750-pound alligator from an individual’s residence in Hamburg, New York on March 13. The department noted that the individual had a license for the alligator but that it had expired in 2021. The department said the individual “built an addition to his house and installed an in-ground swimming pool for his roughly 30-year-old alligator, and allegedly allowed members of the public to get into the...

Betsy Bueno got the call from a neighbor on July 10. “It’s really bad with the dog and the horse, Betsy,” her acquaintance said. “Can you please go check?” So Bueno drove roughly a half-mile north of her home, to a field abutting Petaluma Hill Road in unincorporated Sonoma County, to a scene she had visited many times in the preceding months. This time it was much worse. A large German shepherd had taken a brown and white horse (known as a paint) to the ground, and was viciously attacking it. The exhausted horse thrashed and shrieked, but was unable...

GALT, Calif. (AP) -- An unarmed animal control officer was shot and killed in Sacramento County on Wednesday while trying to retrieve pets from a home whose owner was evicted the previous day. The officer had gone to the home to rescue dogs and cats authorities thought had been left behind, a day after Joseph Francis Corey was served an eviction notice and a sheriff's deputy changed the locks. The officer - Roy Curtis Marcum, 45, of Elk Grove - and a bank employee knocked on the door when Corey fired a shotgun through the door, striking the officer in...

Title from Drudge to fit word requirement. A puppy euthanized by veterinarians has risen from the "dead." The black-and-white pooch was one of five young dogs "put to sleep" Saturday at a shelter in Sulphur, Okla., News 9 in Oklahoma City reported. Each dog was checked and confirmed to be dead, then the 3-month-old and his four siblings were placed in a trash bin. On Sunday morning, an animal control officer looked into the bin and discovered that the one pup somehow survived. "He was just as healthy as could be," Scott Prall told News 9. The puppies were selected...

This is a great video of an animal control officer untangling a dog from a wire fence. The officer has a helmet cam on which I guess some cities now do probably more for protection from lawsuits like they do in police cars. Well the officer finally gets the dog free, but the part you are going to find very funny and cute is what happens at the end of the video. So the video may be a bit longer than most I offer, but please stick with it to the end, I promise you will be pleasantly surprised...

DUDLEY, Mass., Nov. 4 (UPI) -- A Massachusetts town outlawed owning three cats without a kennel license after a man complained his neighbor's felines were hurting his lawn. Voters at a Dudley town meeting Tuesday night approved the addition of the new language to a town bylaw, which will impose a $100 per day fine for violations, after a local man complained that some of the 15 cats owned by Mary Ellen Richards had destroyed his grass, the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram & Gazette reported Wednesday. Richards said at the town meeting that she now plans to put her house up...

The complaint that led to her firing began as a routine missing dog case. Rochester resident Janet Torren said her 4-year-old dog, Shai, went missing on Sept. 18 after it escaped while she was visiting her son’s home on Birch Street. Torren said the dog had a microchip implanted in her ear. She said she called the microchip company, 24PetWatch.com, and learned the Stoughton dog officer had scanned the chip into the system on Sept. 18. Torren said she called the dog officer on Sept. 21, and Bousquet said in a taped message that she had no knowledge of the...

After 30 years remodeling homes, Orson Crisler lives a retiree’s life with his family in a modest house on M Street in central Louisville. On a hot day last July, one of Crisel’s family members — a rottweiler, one of six — ran into the street. Within moments a friend returned the wayward canine, but it was too late: A neighbor had called Louisville Metro Animal Services, and the responding animal control officer determined Crisler’s dogs, which were safely inside at that point, were not properly enclosed, hadn’t received proper shots and needed to be impounded. The officer reportedly entered...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - The police department says officers had no choice but to shoot and kill a black bear wandering around the northwest part of the city Monday night. Officers said the bear became aggressive as it ate garbage and bird seed from homes along Kramer Court. Residents reported seeing the bear going through their trash cans around 9 p.m. Rudy Kane, who lives on Kramer Court, had just returned home from a camping trip when he noticed the bear in his yard. He said he a bear at two different times Monday. "Well I was in this house and...

My community has a problem with feral cats. The animal control department has a no-kill policy so they never seem to be able to catch them, muchless reassign them. Animal-rights wackos continue to feed them and never neuter them. Consequently, the females are constantly pregnant and we now have an over-population that no one wants to deal with. If you do not have a big dog in your yard, your grass (and doormats, outdoor furniture, etc.) will reek from the waste these cats spread everywhere. Has anyone else had a problem like this? What has your community done?

When Rossana Belfiore was dragged down a Pleasantville street last month while trying to stop three pit bulls from killing her fiance's dog, it was the last straw for Linwood lawyer Joseph Jacobs. "It's gotten to the point where every other day you pick up the paper and and there's another problem with pit bulls somewhere in the country," said Jacobs, whose activism spurred state Sen. James "Sonny" McCullough, R-Atlantic, to prepare new legislation to force pit bull owners to muzzle their animals while in public. A muzzle, McCullough said in a statement, "is a minor inconvenience for the animal's...

My aunt who has been a champion dog breeder for 50 years just had the Washington Co. VA animal control (acting on an anonymous tip) swoop down on her like she's some kind of criminal. She went to court yesterday because all of her dogs were confiscated. They charged her with inhumane treatment and animal neglect. All that the judge said she was guilty of was not keeping her animals absolutely clean. She's 76 years old. They were well-fed,healthy and all of their vaccinations were up to date.I heard on the radio today that animal control was giving them all...

Urban foxes are attacking and killing pet cats because they are struggling to find enough food to eat in British towns and cities. Cat owners have reported an increasing number of attacks and pest control specialists say that the use of wheelie bins, rather than bin bags, for rubbish disposal is partly to blame because it has deprived many foxes of an easy source of food. There are no plans to start a cull of urban foxes Gordon Manson, a pest controller from Balerno, near Edinburgh, says that the number of fox-related calls he receives has doubled. "The population has...

When Pets Attack Sure, crime is down, but have you heard about the pack of wild dogs? A Border collie’s near-death experience, and the stubborn loophole that makes the streets of Manhattan a dog- eat-dog world. By Rebecca Skloot Eight months ago, if you’d told me I’d be obsessed with a little old Greek guy and fantasizing about killing his dogs, I’d have said you were nuts. If you’d said a little old Greek guy’s pack of eight junkyard dogs had been roaming the streets of midtown for years attacking people and tearing apart their dogs while city officials said,...

DEERFIELD BEACH, Fla. - Three days before Hurricane Charley hit Florida, the 150 or so parakeets nesting in a power substation in Deerfield Beach seemed blissfully unconcerned. So did the ones in seven huge communal nests on the communications tower of the Broward County Sheriff's office a mile or two away. Jon-Mark Davey, a devoted observer, owner and defender of monk parakeets, was showing the nests to a reporter and said the birds knew when a storm was coming. So it may have been their forecasting that made them appear so devil-may-care in their stick condominiums on light poles and...