Posts Tagged ‘Haiti’

Blogging and spam: Real comments are welcome

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

I don’t really understand the mentality of spammers. What are their inane “comments” supposed to accomplish?

Take this one, which was attached to an earlier post about heroic dogs: “While researching for kennel training dogs on Thursday, I came across your blog and post regarding Marc the vet : Aversive Dog Training Techniques”. This has absolutely nothing to do with dogs that save people’s lives in Haiti, and nowhere on this site do we talk about Marc the vet, whoever he is.

Or this one: “The Major Indoor Soccer Society’s Milwaukee Breaker announced brain tumor Wednesday presumptuous MarcoTerminesi has been placed on their injured hoard record”. At least three copies of this paragraph of gibberish were slapped onto Chester’s Blog in hope of being published. Sorry, that’s what a spam filter is for.

And then there are the ones that come from Russia. You can tell they’re from Russia because the Cyrillic characters have changed to all question marks and the address is .ru.

I don’t know what these people hope to gain by trying to catch a ride on our coattails, but it ain’t working! We actively monitor the comments that come to Chester’s Blog.  If you have a legitimate comment and aren’t trying to make a sneaky attempt to publicize your business (what does auto insurance have to do with dogs?), we’ll publish it.

Rescued Dogs to the Rescue in Haiti

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

It’s not uncommon for a team of rescue dogs to show up at disaster sites. They were used after the tsunami in Myanmar, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and now, in Haiti.  There is one team that’s a little different. It’s made up of dogs that were themselves rescued.

The dogs come from the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation, based in Ojai, California. SDF  works exclusively with rescued dogs and trains them to rescue people buried alive. Most of SDF’s 69 canine search teams are certified by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The dogs undergo rigorous testing, in which they must find four to six victims in a pile of rubble. The pile may contain distractions such as food or cats. If they become distracted, they fail the test. SDF receives no government funds for training these dogs, but relies on donations. The full rescue training course costs $10,000 per dog.

It’s heartening to think that dogs that were saved from death in an animal shelter–society’s thow-aways–are now saving the lives of people in Haiti. In one rescue, a dog named Hunter (how appropriate!) found four little girls buried alive under four feet of concrete near Haiti’s Presidential Palace.  Good dog!