A stray cat that survived two trips to a Utah animal rescue centre gas chamber now has a new home.
Officials at West Valley City’s animal shelter say the cat named Andrea had not been adopted for 30 days when employees tried to put her to death in October. She survived, so they gassed her again. Shelter officials detected no vital signs and presumed she was dead after the second try, so they put her in a plastic bag in a cooler. But when they checked the bag, they saw she had vomited and had hypothermia, but was alive. The shelter then decided to stop trying to kill her.
The cat has since been adopted and shelter chiefs are investigating why the gassing failed.
Pig dung deters young people
It may not be the most conventional way of tackling crime, but an English city council has claimed success after using pig dung to eject teenagers from a woodland where they used to drink and take drugs.
Elderly residents of Middlesbrough, in northeast England, had complained that young people were smoking cannabis and drinking alcohol in a woodland area near the Coulby Newham housing estate. In response, officials thinned out the trees so the area was more visible from paths and then spread a thick layer of pig manure on the ground – which has proved highly effective in deterring wayward teens.
Woman sues over hybrid claims
A woman who expected her high-tech hybrid to be a high-mileage machine wants car maker Honda to pay for not delivering the 50mpg it promised.
But rather than being one of thousands in a class-action lawsuit, Heather Peters has taken her fight to the small claims court and says it could lead to similar cases throughout the world. Experts say Ms Peters, of Los Angeles, has a better chance of winning her case in a court with more relaxed standards and could get a payout many times higher than the few hundred dollars offered to class-action plaintiffs.
Ms Peters argues that the Japanese manufacturer knew her 2006 Civic Hybrid would not achieve the 50mpg as advertised before a judge in Torrance, California.
Feline’s comeback
The owners of a cat that went missing four years ago got a surprise when they were reunited with her. Willow, who is now 10 years old, disappeared after being let out to play from her home in Princetown, Devon, in 2007, and was finally found in Plymouth.
“We had almost given up hope that we would ever find her again and it was a really wonderful experience to know that she had finally come home,” owner Cristel Worth said.
Endangered exports
UK zoos may soon start exporting endangered Amur leopards to Russia as part of a captive breeding and release programme to save the big cat.
There are estimated to be just 25 to 35 Amur leopards left in the wild in the Russian Far East, with numbers driven down by poaching of both the cat and its prey and damage to its habitat from activities such as logging and forest fires.