Curt Long

Sadly, there is no shortage of scenes like this one, showing wild animals forced to live among our waste — and that’s because there’s plenty of waste going around. Every year, roughly 14 billion tons of plastic enter Earth’s oceans, putting countless animals’ lives in peril. But hope is not lost.

“We need smart policies that encourage manufacturers to move away from throwaway plastic,” Elizabeth Murdock, director of the Pacific Ocean initiative for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), told The Dodo earlier this year. “[We need] individuals who understand the impacts our trash has on vulnerable marine life and make personal choices that help reduce the trash in our oceans.”

According to the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office in California, the little black cat simply showed up a couple of days ago outside one of their stations in Eden Township. Tiny though he was, the kitten appeared to have some grand ambitions.

“We think he was trying to walk on as a K9 unit and refused to leave until he got into the building for an interview,” the sheriff’s office wrote online. “Once in the sergeant’s office, he took over the printer and had a little nap.”

Last week, on July 4, Fletcher accompanied his owner Nicki Wyatt-Park to an Independence Day party held at a friend’s place. They have a large yard, so the location was perfect for Fletcher, a curious pup who loves to explore.

That’s where he discovered the object of his dreams.

“He found this rogue volleyball and brought it to me,” Wyatt-Park told The Dodo. She assumed it belonged to her friend. “I was like, ‘Oh no! Fletcher’s destroyed your ball.’ But they said it wasn’t theirs.”

The ball, it seems, had been discarded — but it wasn’t trash in Fletcher’s eyes. It was a treasure.

After confining Oolu in a safe, enclosed space where she couldn’t run away or get hurt, Ritch contacted Hope for Paws, and rescuers Loreta Frankonyte and Eldad Hagar drove out to the port to meet sweet Oolu. When they arrived, they approached her slowly, as they didn’t want to scare her, and the confused senior dog watched them from a safe distance.

The RSPCA received a call about the horse and his plight, and rescuers quickly rushed out to the river to assess the situation. The horse appeared to be too injured and stuck for rescuers to get him out on their own, so they called on the South Wales Fire & Rescue Service for a little extra help. They were able to use their equipment to carefully pull the horse up to safety.

“We’re so grateful to South Wales Fire & Rescue Service, who were able to assist us and get this horse out of the [river],” Selina Griffiths, an inspector with the RSPCA, said in a press release.

“I went outside to feed my dogs and they were nowhere to be found,” Fraustro told The Dodo. “I called all my friends and family to help me look for them. We put up flyers around the neighborhood. I drove to different shelters around my area, but I had no luck.”

Fraustro didn’t want to believe that her dogs were really gone, but after two months of visiting shelters, she finally gave up.

“I thought I’d never see my dogs again,” Fraustro said. “When they left, they took a piece of my heart with them. I never replaced my dogs because losing them was too painful.”

But nearly three years later, Dodger returned to Fraustro’s life just as suddenly as he had left it.

“If you can imagine being abandoned, going to a shelter, having her babies taken away, going to a kennel, having pneumonia so bad she could barely breathe, going through all the trauma that she did and she was really such a nice dog,” Smith said. “The woman wouldn’t just separate them and let them eat. Normally I will work with the person in keeping the dog so they aren’t bounced around — even send in a trainer — but this time all I said was, ‘Here’s my address, just return her.’”

The rhino, who came to be called Spartacus, was limping and obviously in pain.

“He was shot in the upper right front limb, in an attempt to poach his horns,” Saving the Survivors, an organization that fights to save wild animals who have been victims of poaching attempts, wrote on Facebook. “In the process [he] sustained a fracture of the humerus.”

Inside a home, a baby chimp wearing a onesie jumps up and down as he wraps his little arms around a man’s neck for a hug.

He nestles his furry head onto the man’s shoulder as they embrace, calling out with loud screams of excitement.

It’s a “cute” scene that has been shared millions of times online — but the backstory is anything but heartwarming. Limbani the chimp is reuniting with his supposed “rescuer,” as the caption states, but it’s highly likely that he was actually bought from a breeder and torn away from his mother, animal welfare experts say.

The next morning, Easdale realized that the young dog had a very big secret. “I noticed her nipples and I thought, ‘Uh oh, she has babies down there,’” she said.

The skinny dog had started producing milk, and Easdale knew she had to try and find the hidden babies.

Easdale and a friend returned right to the deserted riverbed and strapped Mama to a long leash. With miles of terrain to canvass and time running out, the dog wouldn’t budge. Easdale realized she would have to get creative if Mama was going to give them any direction.

“At first, she was not going to show us where her babies were, so we sat down and played sounds of puppies crying on YouTube,” Easdale said. “Finally, she looked up at us, got up and led us to her water source. She laid down and drank for a long time, cooled down, and then she looked at me and I said, ‘OK, let’s go girl.’ And she led us all the way to her babies.”

They should have been in the wild, exploring the world and learning to hunt by their mothers’ sides.

But instead, they were locked inside a man’s upstate New York house, just a few months old and destined to be sold off as pets.

Last week, officials with New York Department of Environmental Conservation and rescuers from World Animal Protection (WAP) seized four servals and two caracals, both wild species native to Africa, from a home in Buffalo. The cats are illegal to keep and sell in New York, but are commonly bred and sold into the pet trade within the United States.

So the man, who lives in Liberia, bought the baby chimp and, because the little animal’s family had been killed by wildlife traffickers, named him Survivor. The man said that Survivor’s forehead had even been grazed by a bullet when poachers attacked his family. He truly was a little survivor.

But keeping Survivor as a pet turned out to be much more complicated than the man expected. As Survivor grew, he became stronger. Because he had no trees to climb, he tried to climb all over the house, leaving destroyed furniture in his wake.

Sometimes, having a sweet tooth can get you into trouble.

That was the problem for one little possum in Loganholme, Australia, last week when he stumbled upon an open jar of Nutella that someone had thrown away.

Hoping to get a taste of what was left in the jar, he stuck his head inside — and then couldn’t get it back out.

Get Started

Welcome Back, ().

at

Has your work information changed?

Welcome

Please review the fields below for completeness and accuracy prior to submitting.

Welcome Back, ().

Has your work information changed?

Gaming laptops, once immune to price pressures, are the latest segment in the mobile space to see true competition at the cash register. The latest gaming laptop to attack the market is the Dell G7 15, which starts at just $850. (My review unit, considerably upgraded from the base specs, runs closer to $1,200.)

The G7 15 is a 15.6-inch machine that can only be described as a bit of a beast. The 30mm of thickness isn’t out of the ordinary, but its 6.3 pounds of weight put it at the top of the class, half a pound heavier than HP’s Omen 15 and a pound and a half bulkier than the Gigabyte Aero 15. If you don’t plan to tote the monster around campus, that may not matter, so let’s consider what does: Performance.

While it’s outfitted with an 8th generation Intel Core i7, 16GB of RAM, and two storage devices—a 128GB SSD and a 1TB hard drive—the centerpiece is the video card, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060. It’s not quite the state of the art, but it’s close enough, and it powered the G7 to some impressive benchmark scores in my testing, including some of the best I’ve seen on 3DMark, VRMark, and high-end video game framerate tests. General app performance—which can suffer on some gaming rigs—is also top-notch, as is battery life, which I clocked at 5 hours. Connectivity includes three traditional USB ports, a USB-C port, full-size HDMI, Ethernet, and an SD card slot.

Now, if that performance doesn’t meet expectations, you can always upgrade the G7. It’s got arguably the easiest upgrade pathway of any laptop built to date: A single screw on the bottom of the chassis allows the entire bottom panel to pop off, giving you access to RAM, the SSD, the hard drive, and the battery. Even an amateur could upgrade most of these components in a matter of minutes without a hiccup. The only problem I encountered: One of the many plastic tabs holding the panel in place (I counted 23) broke off when I removed it the first time.

Of course, the G7 is far from perfect, as low prices invariably lead to compromises. While the touchpad is so-so, the keyboard is completely unacceptable, with mushy response and minimal key travel. The fan is loud and runs often, and the screen, while it offers a wide viewing angle, is very dim compared to the competition. I found stability to be fine on the whole, except for a nagging crash issue I encountered during video playback.

Lastly, opinions about the design are bound to vary, but I find its angled chassis and plasticky grilles to be hopelessly dated, needlessly adding weight and size to an already over-large machine. In an era of brushed aluminum and carbon fiber, there’s just a ton of plastic here, from the lid to the thick frame around the LCD. For what it’s worth, the laptop is available in two colors; pick white or black.

Given the affordability of the machine, many of these flaws feel surmountable, the keyboard issue being the only real deal-breaker here. While it doesn’t really merit a hands-down recommendation, gamers without deep pockets may find this an appealing proposition.

MacBook Pros are becoming worthy of their “Pro” moniker again. Apple just refreshed its line of professional laptops, a move that had been recently rumored. The new MacBook Pros, which go on sale today, get a bump in processor speeds, RAM, and internal storage. They also allow you summon Siri at all times by using just your voice.

The announcement shows how Apple is leaning heavily into its marketing around creative professionals, just as its education announcement a few months ago leaned heavily into the creative aspects of education devices. And that makes a lot of sense for Apple. At the same time, though, these updates aren’t addressing all of the issues that users have had with recent generations of MacBook Pro, nor do the updates apply to the entirety of the Mac laptop line.

For example, the new MacBook Pros also have new keyboards. But the keyboards haven’t been completely redesigned, which is notable considering the reams of grief caused by the previous design. This also means there could potentially still be issues with Apple’s ultra-thin, butterfly-switch keyboards, even on the new machines.

Enhance!

The updates are coming to two laptop models: the $2,399 15-inch MacBook Pro and the $1,799 13-inch MacBook Pro. The 15-inch model now has a six-core processor. It’s been upgraded to an 8th generation, Intel Coffee Lake CPU (core i7 and, for the first time in this laptop, a Core i9), with 2.9 gigahertz and with Turbo Boost up to 4.8 gigahertz. It ships with Radeon Pro discrete graphics, and can be configured with up to 32 gigabytes of DDR4 memory and up to 4 terabytes of solid-state storage, double the amount in the previous model.

Thanks to a T2 chip, which showed up previously in the iMac Pro, you can now summon Siri by simply shouting at your machine. Previous MacBook Pros required you to click a button, but now Siri is hands-free. The display isn’t getting any kind of resolution bump (or a touchscreen), but it does now have Apple’s alternating display temperature function, called True Tone, which means additional sensors have been built into the laptop. It has the same Touch Bar and Touch ID capabilities as previous models.