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Ken Wahl has added the 1990 Golden Globe award he received for his starring role in the television series “Wiseguy” to the reward being offered for information leading to the arrest of whoever glued a cat to a southern Minnesota highway.

“Men who pick on cats are sick cowards that have control issues, since cats are half wild and independent,” Wahl told Radar Online. “We’re not just finding a kitten killer, we are preventing this person becoming a serial killer.”

Timothy, a 10-month-old kitten, was found glued to a Minnesota highway last month in freezing temperatures. The kitten had also been struck by a vehicle. Despite attempts to save the cat, he died ten days later.

Wahl’s donation comes on top of more than $12,000 already donated to the reward being offered by Second Chance, an animal rescue organization in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

“Rescue Ink” is also stepping in to try to find the cat killer, according to Wahl, who is retired from acting and living in Arizona.

A first grade class in Florida has bid farewell to Murry, the fluffy white dog who served as their class mascot. 

For 10 years, Murry, who belongs to teacher Karen McGehee, had served as mascot of her classes at Astoria Park Elementary School in Tallahassee.

Adopted from the Tallahassee animal shelter, Murry only visited the class a few times a year, but his picture was displayed prominently in the classroom, where McGehee would warn misbehaving students, ”Remember, Murry is watching,” or “I don’t think Murry would like that, do you?”

She stamped his doggy image on the children’s especially good papers. His face was on the cover of her students’ sticker books. And he was the subject of a book, written by the class, called “Our Class Pet,” according to the Tallahassee Democrat.

“I think all kids, or at least most kids, love animals, especially dogs,” said Karen Hollenbeck, whose four children all passed through McGehee’s class and bonded with Murry. ”They accept you as you are — they ask no questions and give no criticisms.”

When Murry died, in December, ”we all cried,” said McGehee, who’d prepared for the dog’s demise.

She’d talked with  a grief counselor who provided tiny heart-shaped pillows with paw prints on them, enough for every child when she told them of Murry’s death. Murry’s vet donated dog-angel pins for each child in the class, as well as cards bearing Murry’s paw print and locks of his white hair.

McGehee also wrote a personal letter to parents about losing Murry and sent her students home with handouts on children and pet loss that Mezzina had given her. Because Murry had been adopted from the animal shelter, McGehee set up a box for donations for animals at the Tallahassee shelter — toys, treats, old towels and blankets.

McGehee, who is nearing retirement, isn’t sure if she’ll get another mascot for her classes.

“Murry was one of a kind,” she said. “He was special,”

Westminster host David Frei lost his dog Teigh earlier this month.

Teigh, a therapy dog, passed away Jan. 9 at age 14, USA Today’s Paw Print Post reported yesterday.

Frei is the director of communications for Westminster, co-host and analyst of the dog show and president and CEO of Angels on a Leash, an animal-assisted therapy group.

Teigh was the first dog allowed in the Bone Marrow Transplant unit at New York Hospital; the first dog to visit at the Ronald McDonald House in New York City, helping to create a thriving therapy dog program there; the first therapy dog allowed to visit in-room at Mt. Sinai; and he was part of a historic pilot program that brought the first dogs ever allowed at Sloan Kettering.

Frei and his wife, Cheri, a chaplain at the Ronald McDonald House, lost another one of their dogs, Belle, last year.

On the streets of Moscow, the evolution of dog is playing out in reverse.

So contends Andrei Poyarkov, a biologist and wolf specialist who has dedicated himself to studying the city’s vast population of strays — the 30,000-plus dogs that, while learning such new urban skills as using the subways, are in reality moving back to something closer to a wolf-like state.

His efforts were recounted in an enlightening piece in yesterdays Financial Times.

Poyarkov began studying the strays in 1979, starting with those living near his apartment and the ones he encountered on his way to work. He made recordings of the sounds that the strays made, and began to study their social organization. He photographed them and mapped where each dog lived.

Poyarkov, who works at the A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution, says Moscow’s strays are somewhere between house pets and wolves, in the early stages of the shift from the domesticated back towards the wild. It’s a process that he believes can’t be reversed, at least not in individual dogs. The strays are resistant to domestication, and many can’t stand being confined indoors.

Most of Moscow’s strays rarely wag their tails, are wary of humans and show no signs of ­affection towards them. A few remain comfortable with people, but more have moved on to a second stage, where they will approach people only to get food.

A third group interact mainly with other strays and get their food from garbage bins.

The last of Poyarkov’s groups are the wild dogs. “There are dogs living in the city that are not socialized to people. They know people, but view them as dangerous. Their range is extremely broad, and they are ­predators. They catch mice, rats and the occasional cat. They live in the city, but as a rule near industrial complexes, or in wooded parks. They are nocturnal and walk about when there are fewer people on the streets.”

Minty of Downalong. Black Bean. Esquire Mulatto. Georgia Judy. Tipsy. Petey’s Repeat. You can find them all — or their graves, at least — at Di-Lane Plantation in Waynesboro, Georgia.

Hidden under moss-draped oaks on the former quail hunting preserve of a New York millionaire is a cemetery for bird dogs — much like the Alabama coonhound cemetery we featured a few weeks ago,.

Rob Pavey, outdoors editor of the Augusta Chronicle, recently dropped by the bird dog cemetery at Di-Lane Plantation, which he originally wrote about in 1998.

More than 70 bird dogs are laid to rest at the cemetery, which is in the center of 8,100 acres that once belonged to Henry Berol, heir to Eagle Pencil Co. Berol died in 1976 and the plantation was purchased in 1992 by the Army Corps of Engineers as a public wildlife area.
 
“It’s gotten to be a real point of interest since the state took it over,’’ said wildlife biologist Haven Barnhill of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, which manages the property.

“Today, velvety moss creeps between the bricks along the front wall and the wrought iron cemetery gates are rarely opened,” Pavey wrote. “But the marble monuments are a testament to a glorious bird-hunting past.”
 
There’s Sierra June, buried in 1968, whose epitaph reads, “needless departure.” Lucky Lady’s tombstone points out that she was unlucky. Wrangler Sam’s refers to him as “almost great.” Tarheel Jack, according to his grave marker “met an early death due to neglect.”
 
Today, in addition to public hunting, hiking and recreation opportunities, Di-Lane Plantation is used for research programs designed to foster the return of Georgia wildlife, including quail, Barnhill said. Plans call for the cemetery to remain as it is, preserved for future generations.

(Photo: Augusta Chronicle)

Here — just because it all seems so circular — is a Japanese trailer for an American movie based on a Japanese legend.

The soon to be released “Hachiko: A Dog’s Story”  is an Americanized version of the true account of the Akita who waited everyday at the train station for his master, a University of Tokyo professor, to return home from work. When his master died on the job, Hachiko continued the vigil — for another 10 years.

In the American movie, Richard Gere plays the professor, with Rhode Island substituting for Japan.

Hachiko was brought to Tokyo by his owner, Eisaburo Uyeno, a professor in the agriculture department at the University of Tokyo. For a year, the dog greeted him at the end of the day at Shibuya Station. In May 1925,  Professor Uyeno, after a stroke, died at work. While the dog was passed on to new owners, he continued to go to the train station everyday, in hopes of seeing his owner.

A bronze statue of Hachiko is now a permanent fixture at the train station in Shibuya, and his mounted remains are kept at the National Science Museum of Japan in Tokyo.

You can find the trailer in English on YouTube. The movie — and you can count on it being a tearjerker — was originally scheduled to come out in August 2009. It will be released in the U.S. by March.

It seemed like nearly everybody wanted to adopt Angus T. Loner, a gigantic mastiff who lived for years as a stray outside a Nebraska meatpacking plant.

So the local humane society decided that’s who should have him — everybody.

Angus was known by most in the town of Grand Island as the ”Swift dog” — due to his having lived outside the JBS Swift & Co. meatpacking plant for more than four years. A trucker had dumped the neutered pup while making a delivery to the plant.

For years, plant workers fed the dog meat scraps, bones and their lunch leftovers and set out dinner for him nightly. A  neighbor provided  shelter by leaving a barn open. Local police and animal control workers kept close tabs on the dog, according to the Grand Island Independent.

Over the years, there were more than 500 attempts to catch him — none of which succeeded until December, when he was tranquilized and brought to the Central Nebraska Humane Society.

The humane society, as Angus became more social, began taking applications from those interested in adopting him. But between the many townsfolk who wanted to take him, all those who had helped care for the dog over the years and hoped to have continued access to him, and Angus’ sometimes unruly behavior, the humane society decided it would be best to keep him, allowing him to serve as its official greeter, mascot and spokesdog — to be, in a way, a community dog.

Angus has become attached to his new caretakers — so much so that “he’s gone from being scared of people to severe separation anxiety,” said Laurie Dethloff, the society’s executive director.

When society staff set him up in the spacious cat play area overnight, Angus chewed the carpet and platform from the cat nesting tree and ripped the sill off the room’s front window.

“We didn’t want to set him up for failure,” Dethloff said of placing him for adoption. Society officials decided keeping him would be a way to continue to share him with the public and honor what he represents. “For one, he has an awesome story to tell — about abandonment and a compassionate, caring community,” said Dethloff, who now takes Angus home with her at night.

Angus, the Independent reports, has come a long way from the dog that cowered in a corner and eluded those who tried to trap him. He still needs to gain a little weight, and the humane society is working on getting him up from six to 10 cups of dog food a day.

Angus is estimated to be about five years old.  While the first name the humane society chose for him comes from his size, and the meat he survived on over the years, his middle initial — T — doesn’t stand for anything.

Angus, on the other hand — the dog a whole town adopted — clearly does.

(Photo: Barrett Stinson, The Grand Island Independent)

A Florida man was hit by a bus and killed when he tried to save a dog that wandered onto the highway.

John Christopher Morgan, 22, of Lakeland, was buying  beer at a Plant City convenience store Friday night when he saw a stray dog run onto State Road 60, according to the Tampa Tribune.

According to his friend, Jason Braden, Morgan ran to save the dog and was hit by a bus. The Florida Highway Patrol said the driver of the bus has not been charged.

Morgan moved to Florida from New Jersey about a year ago to take care of his aunt, said Braden. About two weeks ago, both men lost their jobs when the Florida Police and Trooper’s Association went out of business, Braden said.

Braden said Morgan’s remains, will be cremated and sent to New Mexico, where his father lives.

Braden described his friend as “an easy-going guy who would give the shirt off his back to anyone. He was the most caring person I had ever known. If he didn’t have it, he would get it. He would always put others before himself. That is why he is where he is now.”

The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) have  agreed to head up a coalition of groups to address the needs of animals in Haiti following the earthquake that devastated the country.

In addition to the massive humanitarian crisis, there are an estimated 5 million head of livestock in the country (mostly goats), a large stray dog population, an untold number of companion animals, and native wildlife all adversely affected by the earthquake, according to an IFAW press release.

“This is a massive challenge and animal non-profits need to cooperate as much as possible,” said Ian Robinson, IFAW’s Emergency Relief Director. “We’re already concerned about a possible outbreak of rabies, leptospirosis, or another zoonotic disease. We need to set up vaccination and feeding programs as soon as possible. Finally, we need to get acute, critical care to the animals that need it most. There’s a lot to do. More than we can do alone.”

Currently, a team is staging in the Dominican Republic waiting to get into Haiti to begin work. IFAW and WSPA have also begun to stock a mobile clinic with vaccines, antibiotics, bandages, food, and other supplies in anticipation of bringing direct aid to animals.

“We’re not certain exactly what we’ll be doing, when we’ll start, or what challenges we’ll face,” said Robinson. “But we know a few things: we’re prepared, we’ve set up a system to work together with other groups, and, given the scale of this disaster, we know we’ll be there a long time.”

The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) saves animals in crisis around the world. Headquartered in the United States, it has representation in 15 countries and 1.2 million supporters around the world.

A California firefighter and his search dog located three girls trapped alive since Tuesday in the rubble of Haiti’s devastating earthquake, the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation says.

Bill Monahan and his border collie, Hunter, were searching a neighborhood near the Presidential Palace, going through the remains of a four-story building, when Hunter gave a bark alert. Monahan passed the three children water in bottles tied to the end of a stick.

Rescue workers from California Task Force 2 pulled the girls from the wreckage and provided first aid, according to a foundation press release.

Monahan and Hunter were trained by  the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation, which partners rescue dogs with firefighters, and trains them to find survivors buried in the aftermath of disasters.

Monahan reported finding the survivors to the foundation headquarters in Ojai, California.

Monahan and Hunter are continuing to search, along with six other foundation teams in Haiti with California Task Force 2 and Florida Task Force 1. Their progress can be followed on the foundation’s Twitter and Facebook pages.

The National Disaster Search Dog Foundation is a non-profit organization whose mission is to strengthen America’s emergency response network by producing highly-trained canine-firefighter disaster search teams.

Since its founding in 1996, the foundation has rescued hundreds of dogs and trained 105 search teams, 72 of which are currently active. SDF Teams have been deployed to 66 disasters including the World Trade Center attacks and Hurricane Katrina and state and local emergencies such as earthquakes, mudslides, building collapses, train derailments and missing person searches.

The foundation’s dogs are among hundreds from across the globe that have been seen to Port Au Prince. In the video below, a rescue team from Fairfax, Virginia searches for victims.