North Little Rock animal shelter feeling strain

THE ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

When a stray dog or cat is brought into the North Little Rock Animal Shelter from outside the city limits, a green tag will distinguish it from those brought in from within the city.

“The county ones go down first before the North Little Rock dogs and cats,” Billy Grace, North Little Rock’s Animal Control director, said of having to euthanize those that aren’t adoptable as pets and aren’t claimed by an owner within a few days.

In 2009, North Little Rock’s animal shelter in Burns Park took in 1,863 dogs and 1,148 cats from North Little Rock, Grace said. Another 656 dogs and 116 cats were brought in from the county, for a total of 3,783 animals. Read more.

News with a Bite

Animal attraction at Arkansas Literary Festival

Dog (and other animal) lovers can be forgiven if they’re a little bookish next month. The Arkansas Literary Festival, to be held April 8-11, has invited an author and an illustrator, each noted for children’s books featuring dogs and other creatures. Rich Davis of Siloam Springs has been a professional artist for over 25 years, and has illustrated several books, including the beginning-reader series written by Cari Meister about a dog named Tiny, and the 2001 book Scat, Cats! by Joan Holub. His 2005 book with Kersten Hamilton, Firefighters to the Rescue, was chosen to be distributed worldwide by the Dolly Parton Imagination Library literacy program.

Japan dolphin hunt town shrugs off Cove’s Oscar

TAIJI, Japan — The gala crowd in Los Angeles cheered as The Cove won the best documentary Oscar with its grisly portrayal of dolphin hunting. Half a world away, residents of the small Japanese village shown in the film abhorred the attention and said it won’t end their centuries-old tradition. In Taiji on the rocky coast of southwest Japan, residents gathered in whale eateries with names like “Tail” and rolled their eyes Monday when told of Oscar laurels for the film, which they see as yet another biased foreign take on their culture. The village of 3,500 people has been hunting dolphins and whales since the early 1600s.