It wasn’t long before local animal control officers showed up, but they soon learned they were going to need a much larger truck to gather this herd. They were simply outnumbered.
The fierce munching continued for nearly another hour, until the owner of the goats arrived with a trailer.
As it turns out, the animals are actually part of a land-clearing company called We Rent Goats, which brings in herds of goats to eat weeds or other overgrown areas. As shown by their clear passion for eating, they seem glad to oblige.
Thankfully, the tiny dog will be just fine since she got medical treatment right away — but the situation could have been much worse given her size. Marijuana is toxic to dogs, and severe side effects from exposure can include tremors, seizures and even comas.
With the availability of marijuana increasing, whether medicinally or otherwise, cases of pet poisoning are also on the rise, says Lynn Buzhardt, DVM, of the Veterinary Centers of America.
“The idea of pets getting high on marijuana may seem comical, but it’s no laughing matter,” Buzhardt warns. “The bottom line when it comes to marijuana use and pets is: Be careful. Keep all forms of marijuana, medical or recreational, out of reach of your pet.”
Over the past 12 months, several animals have died, including a beluga and a walrus, according to Phil Demers, a former senior marine mammal trainer at Marineland — yet the park hasn’t uttered a word about these deaths.
“He was the cutest thing ever,” Johnson told The Dodo. “They were saying that normally it’s easy to have puppies adopted because everyone loves puppies. But because of his teeth, a lot of people were turned off by him. And because he’s a Rottie, people also weren’t interested.”
The woman, a local resident named Rhonda, took him to a vet right away to get him help. She knew the little guy had so much more life left, so she contacted Erin Brinkley-Burgardt, founder of Hog Haven Farm, a pig rescue and sanctuary based in Colorado.
“He had a broken jaw, so Rhonda cared for him for about three weeks to help [him] heal,” Brinkley-Burgardt told The Dodo. “Then, on July 26, we met halfway so I could bring him back to the sanctuary.”
The bruised little piglet had come a long way in three weeks, and Brinkley-Burgardt was so excited to finally meet him. Traveling to a new place, though, was scary for him.
It was a heart-wrenching incident just waiting to happen.
During a circus performance in Moscow, Russia, late last month, a tiger and a lion shocked the audience when they started attacking one another in the ring.
A video of the performance shows a trainer leading a young lion across the ring past a tiger, who was seated at the sidelines. As the lion passes, the tiger suddenly leaps across and pounces on top of the lion, knocking him over onto the ground and going for his throat.
Sunny and Georgia could not be more different if they tried. While 7-year-old Sunny, an American Staffordshire terrier, is incredibly adventurous and always excited to greet any new people who cross her path, 8-year-old Georgia, a Chihuahua, is much more cautious and reserved, and tends to follow behind her sister, letting her take the lead in most situations. Despite their differences, the pair could not love each other more, and get incredibly upset any time they’re apart.
“They are very sweet,” Lavenda Denney, executive director of the SPCA of Winchester, Frederick and Clarke Counties, told The Dodo. “They give kisses and are very expressive. When you walk to their kennels they quit barking and tilt their heads to the side to check you out. Big happy puppies.”
Country and Zeus are handling shelter life fairly well due to their sweet and goofy personalities, and they rarely have any problems — unless someone tries to separate them. As soon as the brothers are apart, even if it’s just for a little while, they whine and cry endlessly until they’re finally reunited. They love each other so much, and they’re not afraid to let everyone know it.
While corn snakes are common pets, in the wild they’re native to the southeastern U.S., which means the snake would struggle to survive on her own in the colder Indiana climate. The man then noticed another corn snake nearby who had already passed away, and that’s when he knew that he had to take her with him.
The man took the snake and transferred her into the care of his son and his son’s girlfriend, Avery Cook, who both have experience caring for reptiles. As soon as they saw her and heard her rescue story, they immediately agreed to take her in.
What would it take for you to delete all of your tweets? What would it take to delete your social media accounts?
These are the questions Arielle Pardes and Lauren Goode grapple with on this week’s Gadget Lab podcast (Mike is out this week; he lost his voice, undoubtedly from shouting into the void). Earlier this week Arielle visited Instagram, where the Facebook-owned company unveiled new tools for “digital wellness”; essentially, tools that let you keep tabs on how long you’ve been on social media, so you can cut back if it’s making you feel bad. And our WIRED colleague Emily Dreyfuss wrote about her tweet-deleting experiment – as well as the immediate sadness she felt upon deleting all of her tweets. Social media: Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.
Some notes: You can read Arielle’s story here about Facebook and Instagram’s efforts around “digital wellness,” a term about as meaningful as moon juice. Emily Dreyfuss’s latest story about deleting her tweets can be found here.
Recommendations this week: Arielle recommends WIRED’s multi-part package on how to read. Yes, you read that right. It’s a series of stories about the joy of reading, in all forms. Check out Arielle’s story on audiobooks here. Speaking of books, Lauren’s been reading “Paradise of the Blind,” a novel published in the late 1980’s about post-war Vietnam (the book has been banned in Vietnam). And as a bonus recommendation, she suggests you check out the very last episode of “Too Embarrassed to Ask,” her previous podcast with Recode’s Kara Swisher.
Send the Gadget Lab hosts feedback on their personal Twitter feeds. Arielle Pardes is @pardesoteric and will be back next week. Lauren Goode is @laurengoode. Michael Calore will be back next week, and can be found in the meantime at @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. Our theme song is by Solar Keys.
How to Listen
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Since the advent of the consumer drone (not so long ago, really), making a purchasing decision around new flying machine has involved weighing a list of compromises. Want high quality images? You’re going to have a big drone that’s tough to maneuver. Want something portable? Your footage will look like garbage. Want something easy to fly? You’re getting a glorified toy that will fall apart in a light breeze.
DJI, the world’s leading manufacturer of consumer drones, tried to solve this last year with the Mavic Pro. While that easy-to-fly, foldable drone did check many of the boxes, the camera wasn’t stellar. With this year’s Mavic Air, however, DJI has finally arrived at a product design with just the right mix of flyability, portability, and image quality. In other words, the DJI Mavic Air is where all drone-shopping quests should begin, and it’s also where most of them should end.
Going Up
DJI
The Mavic Air is smaller than the Mavic Pro—at 6.6 inches long, 3.2 inches wide, and 1.9 inches tall, it’s about an inch more compact in both length and height. Given the name, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that it also weighs significantly less; just over 15 ounces, versus the Mavic Pro’s near-26 ounces. The result is a drone that slips into a jacket pocket and doesn’t feel weird to keep there. The remote control, which uses your smartphone as its screen, is svelte, too; complete with joysticks that can be removed and stowed within the remote’s body.
But don’t let the name fool you. Unlike the MacBook universe where Pro is the top of the line and Air is code for “underpowered,” in Mavic Air is the machine with more professional utility. Both drones have cameras that shoot 4K video, but if you zoom in on the Mavic Pro footage, the image doesn’t hold up. The drone tries to compensate for this lack of detail by digitally oversharpening the image. With the Mavic Pro, you also have to tap-to-focus on the screen, or you’re liable to get blurry images. You may not want to do that while you’re trying to keep both hands on the wheel, so to speak.
The Mavic Air footage, however, looks great without you really having to do anything. It has a slightly wider angle lens (24mm versus the Pro’s 28mm) which is better for capturing sweeping landscapes. You don’t have to tap to focus. And oh yeah, it shoots 4K video at 100Mbps versus the Mavic Pro’s 60Mbps, so you get more image data and more overall detail. It seemed to have better dynamic range, as well, though I wasn’t able to do a one-to-one comparison.
Eye Captain
The Mavic Air also beats the Pro in terms of sensors and smart features. While the Mavic Pro has forward-looking obstacle avoidance, the Air’s obstacle-sensing eyes look forward and backward. The anti-collision system generally works really well. I tried crashing the drone into myself going forward and backward, and it refused to fly too close to me. Instead, it went up and over me, or around me. (Obstacle avoidance doesn’t work in Sport Mode. Try it there and you will lose a nipple.) The obstacle-sensing tech is especially important for some of the smart features the drone has, such as active tracking, where it can follow you, or lead you from the front. If you’re trusting it to fly itself, then you really want to know that it’s not going to slam into anything.
Animation by DJI
The Air can also obey hand gestures. You can tell it to lift off by extending your hand straight toward it with your palm perpendicular to the ground. Move that same flat hand up, down, and side-to-side to change its position. Move your two hands apart, and the drone pulls back for a wider shot. Make a frame with your index fingers and thumbs to have it start shooting video. It’s neat in that it makes you feel kind of like a Jedi, but I think the gesture stuff is largely a gimmick. You still need to have the remote control handy to put it into gesture mode, and you also need to keep it within in case something goes wrong.
Limited Exposure
The Mavic Air has a whole suite of camera tricks it can do, but I had mixed results when trying to use them. While kayaking in the middle of a lake I was able to get it to follow me, lead me, and even keep me in profile, which made for some awesome looking video. Once, despite only being 20 yards away from me, the drone lost radio contact and attempted to land itself at the point where the flight started—which was now in the middle of the water. Luckily it reacquired the signal and I was able to abort the return-to-home function before the Mavic Air drowned itself.
Some test footage shot by the author.
Other smart features like the Orbit mode (which makes the drone fly in a circle around you) refused to engage at all, and I could never figure out why. I also had to recalibrate the compass almost every time I turned the drone back on, which requires you to hold the drone and move it around in a series of spirals. Not a big deal, but if you’re chasing a sunset or a humpback whale and are trying to get the drone into the air now, have to pause to recalibrate it can be very frustrating. I’m hoping these bugs will be ironed out in future software updates.
Perfect Landing
Those caveats aside, I love this drone. I’ve been reviewing these things for more than five years, and of the dozens I’ve tested, I found myself pulling this one out far more often than any other. The portability is a win; tossing it into a small hiking bag is no big deal. You’ll probably forget it’s even there. Now, DJI’s Phantom 4 Pro certainly shoots better images—they’re incredibly cinematic and clear, thanks to its larger image sensor—but that drone was so big and cumbersome by comparison to the Mavic Air that I rarely brought the larger one on hikes. To paraphrase Chase Jarvis: The best drone is the one that’s with you. And I’m more likely to have the Mavic Air with me than any other drone I’ve used. It already has a suite of accessories available from third-party companies, like the excellent neutral density filters made by PolarPro. Screwing one of those onto the camera lets you slow the shutter speed down and get an even more film-like look.
While the Air has a slightly shorter flying time than the Pro (it maxes out at 21 minutes versus the Pro’s 27 minutes), it can fly just as fast and just as far. The Air also has better slow-motion capabilities (120 frames per second instead of the Pro’s 96fps). The improved obstacle avoidance makes it a lot safer for beginners to fly it too, though I’m looking forward to the next Mavic to offer obstacle avoidance in all four lateral directions.
Factor in that the Air is still somehow $200 cheaper than the Pro, and the purchasing decision becomes a no-brainer. Honestly, I’d probably recommend the Air even if it were $200 more than the Pro. $800 is still a lot of money, and the price only goes up when you buy one or two spare batteries, which you definitely should. But if you’re looking at getting into aerial photography, or if you’re a serious backpacker and space and weight are at a premium in your pack, the Mavic Air is definitely the way to go. It’s the balance point I’ve been looking for this whole time.
“Melon-headed whales have a very rounded head, and rough-toothed dolphins have a very long, gently sloping rostrum, or beak,” Robin Baird, a researcher for Cascadia Research Collective, told The Dodo. “Instead of having a rounded head like a melon-headed whale or the long, sloping rostrum of a rough-toothed dolphin, it had something in between. So it had a sloping rostrum, but a relatively short one.”
Eager to figure out what this animal was, they used a humane method to obtain a skin biopsy sample, and then got it tested in the lab.
“We would love it if someone would adopt him outright and take on his medical bills because then we could save more animals, but we know that that’s not likely,” McKelvey said. “So now we’d like to get him a lifetime foster … somebody who will give him security and shelter and love and attention, and bring him in for his vet appointments with us. Essentially, it would be their dog, and they would help make all the decisions with us and everything, but we would just pay for the medical bills.”
Henry actually has a foster mom right now — but she travels a lot, and Henry goes back to the shelter while she’s away.
“He was afraid at first but eventually he came out after about 10 hours of waiting,” Vielsack said. “I was really scared that I would have to watch him die in there.”
Fortunately, Jimmy did make it out — and a trip to the vet confirmed that he’d survived the ordeal relatively unscathed; he had lost quite a bit of weight, however.
Baloo had dragged the sprinkler out of the backyard and through the doggy door. He had been playing with the sprinkler inside for at least a few minutes, and water was everywhere — soaking Wohr’s lamp, ceiling fan, TV, leather chair, coffee table and photo albums.
It took a combination of elbow grease and Mother Nature to get things back to normal in the household. “After about five big towels and leaving the back door open for an hour and a half with temperatures at 107 outside, things started drying up,” Wohr noted.
Baloo has been obsessed with sprinklers ever since temperatures started spiking in June, and since then Wohr has had trouble separating her playful dog from his favorite water toy.
The large kangaroo standing inside his house then provided an immediate explanation. “I haven’t even seen a kangaroo in my life,” Ahokavo told local news.
The kangaroo was, understandably, just as freaked out as Ahokavo. And the blood splattered around was actually the animal’s own, from some scratches he got when he hurled himself through the window.
At a loss, Ahokavo contacted the police, who then contacted Five Freedoms Animal Rescue, a local organization run by Manfred and Helen Zabinskas. They rushed over to help.
The park, known for its local elk, buffalo, grizzly bears and coyote, can be a dangerous place to visit if proper safety precautions are ignored — as can any area where wild animals are common.
“Never approach animals or block traffic to view them. The animals in Yellowstone are wild and unpredictable, no matter how calm they appear to be,” the National Park Service cautions. “Always stay at least 100 yards (91 m) away from bears and wolves, and at least 25 yards (23 m) away from all other animals, including bison and elk.”
Jones posted the tense video on her Facebook page, along with the caption, “#dontdrinkandbuffalo.” While it’s unknown if the shoeless man was actually inebriated or not, provoking a bison into a face-off certainly isn’t a decision made soberly.
Some foxes followed the tourists around the enclosure, pulling at their clothes and begging for treats. These aggressive begging and fighting behaviors are a symptom of overcrowding, and living in a mid-to-high-stress environment, Rob Laidlaw, executive director of Zoocheck, a wildlife protection agency, told The Dodo.
In Japan, foxes primarily inhabit sparsely populated mountainous areas, or the outskirts of villages. They do not naturally come into contact with humans or, for the most part, other foxes, he said.
In singularly unsurprising news, Brookstone has filed for bankruptcy. The company will shutter its remaining 101 mall storefronts, officially closing out an era that began its fade years ago. Even if you won’t mourn its disappearance—even if you haven’t stepped inside a mall since the Mallrats era—it’s worth a moment of appreciation, and a full accounting of what’s been lost.
Brookstone debuted in 1965, a year after the Beatles first came to the United States, and a year before Star Trek boldly took it where no TV show had gone before. It was born as a catalog, a sort of proto-Amazon, promising “hard to find tools” within its pages. The stores came later, in the early 70s, eventually becoming as endemic to suburban shopping malls as Auntie Anne’s and Claire’s and that arcade with the double-screened X-Men game.
When you think of Brookstone now, you think of its massage chairs. How could you not? That’s what got you in the door, after an enervating hour of roaming the Borders aisles and soaking in the cologne at Abercrombie & Fitch. Brookstone offered a vibrating oasis with heated lumbar support.
It was more, though. During the height of the mall era, Brookstone carried gadgets that were both sublime and absurd, often at the same time. Before Bluetooth’s ubiquity, it sold wireless headphones with a range that barely encompassed a dorm room. In the aughts, you could nab a self-contained sea monkey habitat that looks like an orb from Labyrinth. And of course there were, and still are, the foot baths.
During the height of the mall era, Brookstone carried gadgets that were both sublime and absurd, often at the same time.
“Brookstone has always been a place of discovering new things,” says Brookstone public relations director Paul Donovan.
That includes some eventual mainstream hits as well; Brookstone was among the first to carry Parrot drones and iRobot vacuums, Tempur-Pedic beds and Fitbit wearables. But its main appeal was that sense of discovery, the joy of the inessential. What do you get the person who has everything? Something so niche from Brookstone—a “fermentation crock” designed specifically for sauerkraut, say—that it’s guaranteed to delight, or at the very least to surprise.
“Brookstone offers a number of unique and innovate products created by third parties who—prior to their relationship with Brookstone—do not have access to wide distribution channels,” the company wrote in its bankruptcy filing. In other words, the weird little gadgets and toys that remind you that tech doesn’t have to conform to perfectly chamfered rectangles. It can be janky and odd and unexpected, and all the more fun for it. “Brookstone has always been a place you go when you don’t know what you want,” says Donovan.
To be clear, not all of that is going away. This isn’t even Brookstone’s first bankruptcy. It’ll retain its online presence, and its 35 airport stores will remain open. It’s not the same, though. You go to a Brookstone at the airport out of necessity; it just happens to sell the nearest pair of headphones or two-tone neck pillow. It was discovery that brought you to the Brookstone at the mall.
That will hold true until the remaining locations shutter. But the long collapse of the shopping mall in the US is well-documented. Brookstone isn’t its first victim, and won’t be its last. If anything, it’s remarkable that it held on so long. Its contemporary, Sharper Image, shut down its last 86 stores in the summer of 2008.
‘Brookstone has always been a place you go when you don’t know what you want.’
Brookstone PR director Paul Donovan
Something else may be at work in Brookstone’s retreat as well. Losing foot traffic surely was the knockout blow, but its online and airport sales dropped steadily from 2015 to 2017 as well. It might be this: When Brookstone reigned, all gadgets were a little weird, a little risky. Not everything had a chip in it. But over the last decade, increasingly commoditized hardware has ceded the spotlight to software, to systems. In a world like that, Brookstone’s oddities and innovations have a hard time breaking through.
Still, Donovan sees opportunities ahead. The company has an airport store redesign on the way, and traditional retail operations still active in China.
Meanwhile, online, Brookstone recently instituted a “Makers Showcase” that gives promising crowdfunding projects a platform. Donovan touts the Royole RoWrite Smart Writing Pad, a digital slab you can draw on, and zap the file to your iPad or Android device over a Bluetooth connection. He likes the GeoOrbital Pavement Electric Bike Wheel, which promises to “Convert your manual bicycle into an e-bike with a 20mph top speed.” Scrolling through the page, you’ll also find a “smart pillow,” and a Google Assistant shower speaker. And pretty quickly you realize that it’s true: Brookstone stores are closing, but its spirit lives on in these affable oddities.
“There’s been a democratization of innovation; more people can invent stuff. But somebody’s got to be there to put it all together, to find the good stuff and present it to you in a place that you trust and understand, and that’s always been Brookstone’s job,” says Donovan.
Getting people there will remain a challenge. The internet’s a lot bigger than a mall. And while Brookstone will carry on as an online source of last-minute Father’s Day and graduation gifts, there was nothing quite like walking into the store, knowing the unexpected was waiting for you on its shelves.
Next, the dog, now named Marshmallow, was rushed to a veterinarian for treatment — but Kyriakopoulou had saved him from more than just the aftermath of the fire.
Judging from Marshmallow’s overgrown coat, it is believed that he had been living as a stray, unloved and alone. That was about to change.
