Free Republic

A Southern California woman who illegally registered her dog to vote and cast ballots in two elections has had her criminal case dismissed after pleading guilty and paying for anti-voter fraud billboards featuring her own pet, prosecutors announced Thursday. Laura Lee Yourex, 64, of Costa Mesa, was initially charged with five felonies after authorities discovered she had registered her dog, Maya Jean Yourex, to vote and submitted mail-in ballots in the animal’s name during California’s 2021 gubernatorial recall election and the 2022 primary election. According to the Orange County District Attorney’s Office, the dog’s vote was successfully counted in the...

Luna, the 10-year-old Jack Russell terrier from California who was lost in Yellowstone National Park since early September, has been reunited with her owner and is going home. Rescuers caught the dog Wednesday after she managed to survive the cold, feed herself and avoid coyotes in the wilderness for more than a month. “The dog that was loose in the Canyon Village area has been captured and is alive and well,” Yellowstone National Park spokesperson Linda Veress confirmed to SFGATE. At a veterinarian’s office Wednesday with Luna and the dog’s owner, rescuer Katie Boucher gave SFGATE an update on Luna’s...

Human beings tend to be anthropocentric. That is, we often see ourselves as evolution's magnum opus despite the fact that, as biomass goes, we're insignificant compared to plants and other animals. For instance, scientists estimate that there are more than three trillion trees on Earth—a number that even dwarfs the amount of stars in our galaxy. And when you add the populations of the more than 380,000 other plant species, the total becomes mind-boggling. Nonetheless, many of us assume that we're the smartest, most conscious beings on Earth. But what if consciousness isn't a feature limited solely to humans—and what...

The 2026 Dog Photography Awards have recognised photographers from around the world, with around 1,900 entries submitted from 50 countries. The competition says it aims to highlight the work of established dog photographers alongside emerging talent, with images judged across six categories: Portrait, Action, Studio, Dogs & People, Documentary and Open. The 2026 prize pool includes €2,500 ($4,000 AUD) in cash and an engraved trophy. Katie Brockman from the United States was awarded the title of Dog Photographer of the Year for her portrait of a pit bull, a species she describes people holding complicated feelings for.

A San Diego sheriff’s K-9 was brutally stabbed in the face by a suspected burglar in Escondido Saturday. The Sheriff’s K-9 Unit team was assisting the Escondido Police Department with an ongoing burglary at a business just before 12:30 a.m. The suspect, 35-year-old Eric Rodriguez, held a large stick and threw objects at responding Escondido police officers. Cops tried to de-escalate the situation, but Rodriguez ignored all warnings and refused to comply, authorities said. Officers then deployed the sheriff’s K-9 — a six-year-old Belgian Malinois named Nike — to apprehend the suspect, but Rodriguez responded by mercilessly stabbing Nike several...

PETA, the organization widely known for its over-the-top progressive activism for animals, is refusing to condemn Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed after serious animal abuse allegations came to light from his tenure as Detroit’s health director. A report from the Daily Mail found that El-Sayed was the subject of whistleblower complaints after he ascended to the post of health director in Detroit. Under his watch nearly 4,700 cats and dogs were euthanized, and an untold number died from malnutrition and lack of medical care, all while being subject to unsanitary conditions. The problem grew so bad that one former employee...

JUST IN: Indian animal abuser Shri Thanedar, who defrauded investors and drove his first wife to suicide after using her for a green card, has been crushed in his primary. Best known for repeatedly filing frivolous impeachment articles against President Trump and for the small mammal that lives atop his head, Thanedar now joins Jasmine Crockett, Eric Swalwell, Al Green, Dan Goldman, and others in the unemployment line. Denaturalize and deport this loser now.

They're undeniably cute, but they'd also be a pretty annoying pet. Last fall, a study of raccoons found that these city-dwelling trash pandas are beginning to look different than their rural cousins in the U.S.—they appear to be domesticating themselves. It wouldn’t be the first time a wild animal species manipulated humanity for its own benefit. Dogs did it at least 14,000 years ago, discovering that befriending garbage-producing humans resulted in tastier, more abundant scraps and less arduous lives on their own. New genetic data indicates that cats feeding off the abundant rodents plundering human food stores domesticated themselves for...

A Chinese AI startup says it has cracked the code on what your dog is trying to tell you, and the internet is having a field day with it. The company behind PettiChat claims its wearable device can translate pet vocalizations and behavior into human language with up to 95 percent accuracy. That number went viral after Polymarket posted the claim to X. PettiChat describes itself as the “world’s first real-time pet translator” and is currently raising money on Kickstarter. The device is a small wearable that attaches to a pet’s collar and pairs with a smartphone app. According to...

A genetic study of the remains of four 2,000-year-old dogs recovered from two archaeological sites on the Korean Peninsula suggests that the canines belonged to a lineage separate from other dog populations in East Asia, according to the Korea JoongAng Daily. It had been previously thought that dog populations in East Asian shared a single lineage. Hyeongcheol Kim of the Gaya National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage, Suyeon Kim and A-reum Yu of the National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage, and their colleagues determined that ancient Korean dogs resembled the Australian dingo and the New Guinea singing dog. Korean dogs...

A 50 year-old Florida woman was viciously mauled to death by a pair of bloodthirsty pit bulls, only to be found by her heartbroken husband who said he’ll “never get the image out of my mind.” Donnell Smith returned to his Brevard County home shortly after 1 p.m. on Tuesday — after helping neighbors across the street — and noticed his wife, Jodi Cowan, and their small dog had disappeared, according to WESH 2 News. Smith then suddenly heard Cowan’s cries for help in the distance, the outlet reported. “I saw the silhouette of the two dogs dragging my wife...

STATESBORO, Georgia; ANDERSON, South Carolina––The 2026 record pace of fatal dog attacks, especially pit bull attacks, remains ahead of the 2025 pace, when dogs killed 84 Americans, 64 of whom were killed by pit bulls. Pit bulls in the two weeks of May 2026 killed two babies in reported incidents. Other dogs are unknown to have killed anyone. The deaths of the two infants brought the total number of U.S. fatal dog attacks for the year to 32, 23 by pit bull. " . . .The first May 2026 pit bull victim, Lillian Drue Bradford Harris, of Statesville, Georgia, “was...

Has Ithaca gone to the dogs? A new memoir calls the Upstate New York city the “most depressing college town in America.” Isabel Klee, a New Jersey native, has risen to social media fame through documenting her work rehabilitating medically complex and severely neglected rescue dogs — and showing their transformation from timid, shut-down animals into happy, thriving pets. Klee’s new memoir, “Dogs, Boys and Other Things I’ve Cried About,” chronicles her coming-of-age years after high school and her early experiences living in New York City, but it also includes a blunt look back at her short-lived college experience in...

Bringing a dog into your life is a big commitment, especially when it comes to large dog breeds. While they can be loyal, loving companions, they also come with unique challenges that aren’t always obvious at first glance. Size, strength, temperament and health needs all play a major role in whether a big dog is the right fit for your lifestyle. That's why for new or even experienced pet parents, it's important to think beyond a pet's appearances and popularity. Just because a giant dog is well-known or beautiful doesn’t mean it’s the best choice for your home. * *...

A North Hollywood couple’s routine walk around their neighborhood quickly turned into a nightmare after they discovered their dog had accidentally ingested meth. Nikolas and Jenifer Dorhoutmees enjoy regular walks through their neighborhood with their 3-year-old Australian cattle mix named Uni. While visiting North Hollywood Park, Uni began sniffing around. Soon after, they noticed the dog’s condition had changed drastically. “Drooling, diarrhea, all of it,” Jenifer told KTLA’s Chris Wolfe. “We checked her gums, they were white.” Unsure what was happening, the couple rushed Uni to the veterinarian. Then, Jenifer said she remembered KTLA covering a similar story in November...

On April 18, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department was alerted to a family who was searching for a 49-year-old woman. The woman, who had a traumatic brain injury, was reported missing after she failed to return home from a walk. Authorities searched for hours but had no luck tracking the woman down. That’s when deputies decided to call in Keva and Naji, two bloodhounds they hoped could help lead them to the woman. Working off a scent from the woman’s pillow, Naji and Keva set off quickly, hot on the trail. “She’s on a 15-foot leash attached to her...

On April 26, 1986, Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near Pripyat, Ukraine, exploded—a combination of poor reactor design and serious mismanagement had caused the worst nuclear disaster in human history. Fast forward 40 years, and things have changed. While the horrific death, illness, and environmental degradation caused by the meltdown will never be completely forgotten, the area surrounding Chernobyl has come to provide a rare scientific opportunity. Today, it is a living laboratory for scientists exploring questions (many of them genetic) regarding long-term exposure to high levels of radiation. Frogs, for example, have adapted darker skin colors to protect against radiation....

According to a Phys.org report, Weronika Tomczyk of Dartmouth College and her colleagues examined more than 300 dog bones recovered from the site of El Castillo de Huarmey in northern Peru, where a royal tomb of the Wari Empire was uncovered. "Only some remains were found in undisturbed contexts, while most came from the fill disturbed by the looters' activity in the 1980s," Tomczyk said. She and her colleagues focused their study on mandibles or tibias in an effort to avoid sampling the same dog more than once, resulting in a group of at least 20 individuals of various ages,...

A new observational study of 197 cancer patients taking a combined ivermectin + mebendazole protocol is going viral on social media — and for understandable reasons. At six-month follow-up, 84.4% of respondents reported clinical benefit (no evidence of disease, regression, or stable disease), and nearly half (48.4%) reported either tumor regression or no current evidence of disease. The combination was well tolerated, with only mild, mostly gastrointestinal side effects. The paper, posted on Zenodo about a week and a half ago, is the largest structured real-world look at this specific repurposed-drug pairing published to date.This post is a summary. The...

As we told you last week, almost all of the 4,500 refugees who have come to America in the last several months are Afrikaners, or whites from South Africa. They're fleeing a nation that routinely discriminates, harasses, and kills Afrikaners, and have — unlike so many others — a legitimate claim to asylum and refugee status. The Left is supremely unhappy about this, of course, because they really only like certain kinds of refugees. The Afrikaners include women and children, show up waving American flags, and will assimilate into our culture instead of attacking, raping, and murdering us.