My favorite for the day, though it made me very teary, was the story of Fiona, the blind dog found, and rescued from, the trash.
What’s yours?
That’s the one. I cried heartily.
Don’t have the brain power to google right now, but there was one about a man going on a trip into the African lowlands to see if he could find the gorilla he’d helped raise. It had been released into the wild several years previously. The man had no idea if the gorilla would even recognize him. The answer was yes.
The hardliners who staged a coup against Gorbachev shut down the newspapers, radio, TV and other media…but forgot to shut off the Internet (which at the time was a single 56k line from Moscow to Finland). Volunteers in the West kept that 56k line busy with compressed collections of news reports, and the folks at Relcom provided free and uncensored news from inside Russia during the coup.
So that makes me feel good.
The guy interviewed is Vadim Antonov, who was with the first commercial ISP in the Soviet Union, demos.su. With a typical hacker sense of humor, the mail machine at Demos was named “kremvax” after the rumored machine at the Kremlin that all e-mail had to pass through.
Equipoise would want me to point out the Happy Rhodes t-shirt Vadim was wearing.
I hadn’t heard the story about Batman getting stopped for not having tags on Rt. 29, but a lot of other people had. It turns out he’s this guy who dresses up like Batman and goes around to visit children in hospitals on his own dime:
Two men bought a lion cub in a department store in England (!), and once he got too big to keep, re-integrated him in the wild. Some time later they came to visit him, and he literally ran up and hugged them. D’awww.
With respect to the OP, stories like that kinda make me mad that they happened at all as much as they make me feel good that someone stepped in to fix things.
If you liked that story, how about the case of Patrick the dog, wrapped in a trash bag and stuffed down a trash chute to die:
WARNING: The gruesome pictures of Patrick in the first link are about as bad as you’ll ever see of a starved animal who survived.
Patrick at rescue – Warning, shocking and horrible photos!
Looks terrible, right? But he was rescued! Happily ever after@ Well, not quite. After Patrick became an Internet celebrity, the welfare organization that helped in his rescue went to court to seize him from his caretakers specifically because he would be a financially valuable “property” [their word!] for their fundraising efforts.
More details on why this is a bad idea
It was so obviously a bad idea the mayor stepped in and ordered the Associated Humane Societies to desist.
[--------------------------------------------------------------
A story that I found moved me with fewer negative emotions was the reunion of Cheryl and Roxy on the show Pit Bulls & Parolees.
Short version: Roxy the dog was left behind after her human Cheryl, a young addict, was hauled off to jail for heroin possession. The Villalobos Rescue folks from the TV show found Roxy, fending for herself, desperately defending her puppies.
After rescuing them all, for the next year (a long time for a dog) Villalobos kept Roxy, knowing nothing of Cheryl. Roxy was a “problem dog” for them – endlessly restless, pulling on her leash, throwing herself from side to side, relentlessly trying to get away. Obviously she could not be placed in a home, and she languished in the rescue, spurning the efforts of the staff to bond with her. It seemed she might become a “lifer,” stuck in the rescue’s kennels forever, driven by some unknown demons.
Finally Cheryl got out of prison, and discovered where Roxy was. She called Villalobos and asked for her beloved Roxy back.
With considerable reservations, the Villalobos folks brought Roxy out to see Cheryl.
[URL=“http://animal.discovery.com/videos/pit-bulls-parolees-an-emotional-reunion.html”]The result.](Patrick the Dog’s Miraculous Recovery – NBC New York"Here’s a happier update to Patrick’s story[/URL)
Look at how hard Roxy tried to get away from her handler, how she scans and searches in every direction. And then, suddenly, finally, it becomes crystal clear what Roxy had been looking for, and why she’d spent night and day trying to get away and resume her search. She wasn’t an aggressive dog or an untrainable dog or a crazy dog after all – she just had something important to do.
With respect to the OP, stories like that kinda make me mad that they happened at all as much as they make me feel good that someone stepped in to fix things.
If you liked that story, how about the case of Patrick the dog, wrapped in a trash bag and stuffed down a trash chute to die:
WARNING: The gruesome pictures of Patrick in the first link are about as bad as you’ll ever see of a starved animal who survived.
Patrick at rescue – Warning, shocking and horrible photos!
Looks terrible, right? But he was rescued! Happily ever after@ Well, not quite. After Patrick became an Internet celebrity, the welfare organization that helped in his rescue went to court to seize him from his caretakers specifically because he would be a financially valuable “property” [their word!] for their fundraising efforts.
More details on why this is a bad idea
It was so obviously a bad idea the mayor stepped in and ordered the Associated Humane Societies to desist.
A story that I found moved me with fewer negative emotions was the reunion of Cheryl and Roxy on the show Pit Bulls & Parolees.
Short version: Roxy the dog was left behind after her human Cheryl, a young addict, was hauled off to jail for heroin possession. The Villalobos Rescue folks from the TV show found Roxy, fending for herself, desperately defending her puppies.
After rescuing them all, for the next year (a long time for a dog) Villalobos kept Roxy, knowing nothing of Cheryl. Roxy was a “problem dog” for them – endlessly restless, pulling on her leash, throwing herself from side to side, relentlessly trying to get away. Obviously she could not be placed in a home, and she languished in the rescue, spurning the efforts of the staff to bond with her. It seemed she might become a “lifer,” stuck in the rescue’s kennels forever, driven by some unknown demons.
Finally Cheryl got out of prison, got herself clean, and discovered where Roxy was. She called Villalobos and asked for her beloved Roxy back.
With considerable reservations, the Villalobos folks brought Roxy out to see Cheryl.
Look at how hard Roxy tries to get away from her handler, how she scans and searches in every direction. And then, suddenly, finally, it becomes crystal clear what Roxy had been looking for, and why she’d spent night and day trying to get away and resume her search. She wasn’t an aggressive dog or an untrainable dog or a crazy dog after all – she just had something important to do.
.
Oh I’m a big giant sap anyway, but that Roxy story made me cry. Really! Sitting here in my office, boo-hoo crying.
There was one a while back about a village in Sudan who started planting trees in their fields, which greatly reduced starvation in the area. Then they started going around teaching other villages to do the same. I dunno, “family and tree” stories are the adult equivalent of “boy and dog/girl and horse” stories to me.