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Wounds Talk When People Don't: Wound Forensics Establish Recent Dogfighting...
When police raid a dog fight in progress, they can often obtain witnesses by offering to drop or reduce charges against spectators or minor participants in exchange for testimony against the...
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Western Range Operations Get Labor Department Approval to Continue to Import...
Employment issues arise occasionally among those who train and use dogs for professional purposes. The most common example in my experience concerns the pay of law enforcement personnel who care for...
View ArticleUpdated Report on Facility Dogs Helping Victims Testify about Abuse
In the last year, more courts have allowed dogs to be in the witness box while children testify about abuse, often with the abuser only feet away. Several states have recently enacted legislation to...
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Keeping the Homeless and Their Pets Together in Shelters and Housing: A Call...
Via dell' Independenza, Bologna, October 2014 (courtesy Joan Ensminger)Alessandro, I will call him, spends many days on the west side of the Via dell’ Independenza in Bologna, Italy, several blocks...
View ArticleFDA Food Production Rules Grant Access to Guard and Pest-Detection Dogs, but...
The Food and Drug Administration has thousands of pages of regulations regarding the growing and manufacturing of food for human consumption, among which are rules about animal waste, which is a...
View ArticleLabor Department Proposes Service-Animal Rules for Job-Training Agencies and...
The Department of Labor has shown little inclination to issue regulations regarding service animals. In the entire of Title 29 of the Code of Federal Regulations there is only one reference to a...
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GAO Chides TSA for Failure to Place Bomb Dogs at Airport Checkpoints
A report of the Government Accountability Office published February 17, 2016, summarizes recommendations the GAO has made since 2003 concerning the Transportation Security Administration's...
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Dying for Better Warning Labels: The Short and Lonely Life of the Laboratory...
In Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go (made into a movie in 2010), children at an isolated English boarding school do not have parents but rather guardians who continually encourage them to...
View ArticleVA Finalizes Transport Rules for Service Dogs: They Actually Listened to Me...
In May 2015, the Department of Veterans Affairs proposedto amend its regulations concerning transportation of persons for “examination, treatment, and care” under the Veterans Transportation Service...
View ArticleChild Witnesses on the Stand with Dogs at Their Feet: Judges Deal with...
The law on dogs accompanying children and vulnerable witnesses during testimony continues to develop, both in terms of courts accepting the practice and state legislatures enacting statutes to permit...
View ArticleIf Your Dog Doesn’t Alert, We Can’t Search the Car, So Let's Call that Jump...
Gregory Heald was stopped for a traffic infraction on July 16, 2015. During the stop, a K-9 team performed a sniff of the vehicle, which led to a search during which police discovered narcotics,...
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Dog Parks Become a Permanent Feature of the American Landscape
Interstate 40 Rest Stop RulesIn 2011, Fran Breitkopf and I drafted model dog park code provisions and rules for an article that was posted on the website of the Animal Legal & Historical Center of...
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Transportation Department Gets Specific about Service Animal Relief Areas in...
On August 5, 2015, the Department of Transportation published a final rule in the Federal Register regarding service animal relief areas (SARAs) in airports, requiring that most airports have one such...
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Does a Facility Dog that Accompanies a Child Witness to the Stand Have to Be...
The Only Witness for the DefenseThere is no doubt that service dogs learn skills that are useful when it comes to designing a training program for a facility dog whose function is to remain calm at the...
View ArticleCalifornia Supreme Court Brings Flawed Station Identification Procedure Back...
On May 13, 2001, Geraldine Myers disappeared from her home in Riverside, California. Her car was found in Las Vegas, Nevada, but her body has never been found. Myers was 82 years old. In the early...
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Monograph on Dogs of California Aboriginal Cultures Published
I have completed a monograph, published by the Land of Oaks Institute in the California Cultures Monograph Series (ISSN 2333-9667), which can be downloaded at no cost in iBook or pdf format. Go the the...
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The Dog at the Last Supper (Franciscan Monastery, Hvar, Croatia)
Detail of Last Supper of Matteo Ingoli, HvarMatteo Ingoli, born in Ravenna between 1585 and 1587, worked in and near Venice, but died young when a plague hit northern Italy in 1631. Among the...
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BOOK REVIEW:Hazuki Kajiwara, Surviving with Companion Animals in Japan: Life After a Tsunami and Nuclear Disaster. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Social Problems. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2020)....
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Service Dogs Sometimes Belong in Shopping Carts: Justice Department Amends a FAQ
In a webpage the Department of Justice has posted, Frequently Asked Questions about Service Animals and the ADA, one question and DOJ answer now read as follows: Q31: Are stores required to allow...
View ArticleVA Issues Final Animal Access Rules for Facilities; Allows Service Dogs for...
The Department of Veterans Affairs has issued final rules regarding animals, including service and therapy animals, on VA property. 80 Fed. Reg. 49157 (August 17, 2015). The proposed rules were...
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From the Battle of Vega Real to Birmingham: The Lasting Legacy of the Dogs of...
John J. Ensminger (2022). From hunters to hell hounds: the dogs of Columbus and transformations of the human-canine relationship in the early Spanish Caribbean. Colonial Latin American Review,...
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Was the Battle of Vega Real Really a Battle, or Just the Beginning of a...
There is something uncomfortable about the Battle of Vega Real. If one accepts the accounts of Bartolomé de las Casas and Ferdinand Columbus, it should be listed as the first major battle between...
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April 29, 2020
April 29, 2020, was perhaps the worst day of my life. Chloe was scheduled to die. I had made an appointment for her to be euthanized by our veterinarian, Dr. R, who had been treating Chloe for most of...
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The Dog at the Feet of Archbishop Tenorio
Fig. 1. Tomb of Archbishop Pedro Tenorio (d. 1399) (taken by the author, October 2016).Pedro Tenorio, born about 1328, was archbishop of Toledo from 1377 until his death in 1399. His tomb is in the...
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Dogs in the Margin of a Medieval Jewish Manuscript
Haggadah of Barcelona, c. 1340There is a page of the mid-fourteenth century Haggadah of Barcelona, presently on display in the Prado Museum in Madrid, which depicts a section of the Passover Seder, Ha...
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