It’s time to resume your island getaway — and possibly incur more virtual debt. (We see you, Tom Nook.)
Nintendo announced Thursday that its cozy social sim “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” is getting a Switch 2 upgrade. “Animal Crossing: New Horizons — Nintendo Switch 2 Edition,” which will offer improved visuals, mouse controls, an in-game megaphone that uses the console’s built-in microphone and multiplayer enhancements, will be released Jan. 15.
In addition to allowing players to experience the game in 4K when playing on their TV, the upgraded edition of “New Horizons” will enable them to utilize the mouse controls on the Joy-Con 2 controller when redecorating their homes, creating custom designs and writing messages on the bulletin board.
The megaphone, which will be available at Nook’s Cranny, can be used to locate fellow villagers by calling out their names. “New Horizons” players also will be able to play online with up to 12 other Switch 2 edition players and use a webcam.
A free update for all “Animal Crossings: New Horizons” players, regardless of console, will also be available Jan. 15. This will include access to a new resort opening on the pier, which will allow players to decorate guest rooms and purchase new items at a souvenir shop. The update will also see the “Animal Crossing” world’s familiar grumpy mole, Resetti, offering a “reset service” to clean up a player’s island.
Other offerings include the option for players to upgrade their home storage to hold up to 9,000 items — including trees, shrubs and flowers — and the ability for Nintendo Switch Online members to design and save up to three islands that they can collaborate on with friends online. New Nintendo-themed goods, including playable classic Nintendo console games, and Lego items also will be available within the game through the update.
Released in 2020 for the Nintendo Switch console, “Animal Crossing: New Horizon” became a balm during the COVID-19 pandemic by offering players a way to connect and be social during quarantine and uncertain times. The fifth main installment of the “Animal Crossing” franchise would go on to become one of the best-selling Switch games ever.
The pooch went missing during a journey from Buenos Aires to Barcelona, prompting a claim for losses from the owner. Now the European Court of Justice has handed down its ruling
The ruling is a blow for pet owners (stock photo)(Image: Getty Images)
Pets on flights can be classified as baggage, the European Court of Justice has ruled.
In a blow for pet owners, the ruling means that airlines are not required to pay higher compensation if the animal is lost.
The ruling was handed down by Europe’s highest court, the ECJ, after it was asked to intervene in the case of a lost dog. The pooch went missing during a journey from Buenos Aires to Barcelona, prompting a claim for losses from the owner.
Mona, the dog, had been put in a special pet crate, only to escape on the way to the plane. Mona was never found, prompting a claim of €5,000 (£4,340) for “non-material damage” by the passenger, and a six-year court case.
The airline involved, Iberia, accepted liability for the loss of the pet but not the size of the claim.
The Spanish court that heard the case then referred it to the ECJ, asking whether the concept of “baggage” in the Montreal Convention governing air travel incorporated or excluded pets traveling with passengers.
“According to the Montreal Convention, other than carriage of cargo, aircraft perform international carriage of persons and baggage,” the ECJ wrote, summarising its judgment.
“The concept of ‘persons’ corresponds to that of ‘passengers,’ with the result that a pet cannot be considered to be a ‘passenger,'” it said. “Consequently, for the purposes of air travel, a pet falls within the concept of ‘baggage’ and the compensation for the damage resulting from the loss of a pet is subject to the liability rules for baggage.”
A key point was that the passenger had not submitted a special declaration of interest in delivery. That is a formal step that involves paying an additional fee, which would have allowed them to increase the liability limit for the precious cargo.
The Spanish airline argued it exceeded the liability for lost luggage without any special declarations as to the crate’s contents.
“The dog got out of the carrier, started running near the plane and could not be recovered,” the ECJ papers say.
It was heard at the earlier court hearing in Spain that despite an intense campaign on social media launched by Mona’s owner, the dog has never been recovered.
The dog owner’s lawyer in Madrid, Carlos Villa Corta, said he disagreed with the arguments made in the Luxembourg court. “I believe that a great opportunity has been missed to continue raising awareness of the rights of animals and the people who care for them. Ultimately, the ECJ considers that pets do not deserve special or enhanced legal protection compared to a simple suitcase,” he said, the Guardian reported.
According to Spanish reports on the first court case, it was ruled that because a special declaration about the animal was not made before the flight, the pet owner was entitled to only €1,578.82.
In a statement, the ECJ said: “The fact that the protection of animal welfare is an objective of general interest recognised by the European Union does not prevent animals from being transported as ‘baggage’ and from being regarded as such for the purposes of the liability resulting from the loss of an animal.”
Diane Keaton died in Los Angeles on Saturday at age 79, and her family says the cause was pneumonia.
Family members of the Oscar-winning actress shared a statement with People confirming Keaton’s cause of death and saying they were “very grateful for the extraordinary messages of love and support” they had received in recent days.
The outlet first reported the news of the screen icon’s death Saturday, saying the Los Angeles Fire Department had responded to her home that morning and transported a 79-year-old woman to an area hospital. Initially, the family did not disclose the cause of death and asked for privacy as they processed their grief.
In Wednesday’s statement, Keaton’s family members said the star had a deep love for animals and was passionate about supporting the unhoused community. They encouraged people to honor her memory by donating to a food bank or animal shelter.
Keaton was known for her powerful performances in iconic pictures such as Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather” movies and Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall,” which earned her the 1978 Academy Award for lead actress. She was also nominated for lead actress for her roles in “Reds” (1981), “Marvin’s Room” (1996) and “Something’s Gotta Give” (2003).
Born in Los Angeles in 1946, Keaton rose to fame through her late 1960s New York stage career, earning a Tony nomination at age 25 for her role in Allen’s 1969 theatrical production of “Play It Again, Sam.”
Later in her career, she became a muse for writer-director-producer Nancy Meyers and starred in four of her movies. She was a noted trendsetter known for her fabulous on-screen outfits and, more recently, for sharing her style on Instagram, where she amassed 2.6 million followers.
Keaton’s death was widely mourned by theater, movie and fashion lovers alike.
“She was hilarious, a complete original, and completely without guile, or any of the competitiveness one would have expected from such a star,” wrote actor Bette Midler on Instagram. “What you saw was who she was.”
“Diane Keaton wasn’t just an actress: she was a force,” wrote actor Octavia Spencer on Instagram, “a woman who showed us that being yourself is the most powerful thing you can be. From Annie Hall to Something’s Gotta Give, she made every role unforgettable.”
Times film editor Joshua Rothkopf contributed to this report.
Katie Price has been subject to a brutal swipe by animal charity PETACredit: GettyThe organisation has created the Grim Reaper of Pets costume seemingly based on the starCredit: X/PETAShe has a chequered history with pets – which has sparked a petition to stop her owning animalsCredit: Splash
To complete the spooky look, there’s a black and silver scythe included within the Grim Reaper for Pets get-up.
Talking of the significance of the October outfit, PETA Vice President for UK and Europe Mimi Bekhechi told MirrorOnline: “Too many animals have met a grim fate under Katie Price’s ‘guardianship.’
“This Halloween costume may be a joke – but the message is not: being responsible for lives and needs of animals who are entirely dependent on you is serious business.
“And anyone who doesn’t treat it as such needs to stick to stuffed toys.”
They added of the costume: “All proceeds support work to promote responsible animal guardianship, as well as spay/neuter surgeries to help fight the homeless-animal overpopulation crisis!”
The parent of five was branded ‘grim’ and ‘grim reaper’ by the charityCredit: SplashKatie has been struck by a series of pet tragedies, including many animal deathsCredit: SplashPETA has urged her to ‘stick to stuffed animals’Credit: Splash
A member of Spain’s Civil Guard inspects one of several kennels in which hundreds of animals were found dead and several more endangered at an illegal breeding facility that was announced on Saturday. Photo Courtesy of the Spanish Civil Guard
Oct. 11 (UPI) — A hidden breeding facility in Spain was found to contain the remains of 250 animals and 171 live animals that were endangered and recovered to receive veterinary care.
The illicit breeding facility was located in the back of a warehouse in Meson do Vento in Ordes, Spain, the Spanish Civil Guard announced Saturday.
The warehouse manager has been detained and faces charges for alleged animal abuse, professional intrusion in the field of veterinary medicine and illegal possession of protected species.
Most of the deceased animals were dogs and birds, including Chihuahuas, and some of the animals found living fed on the remains in the absence of food.
Many were in “different stages of decomposition, some even mummified,” the Civil Force said, as reported by CBS News.
Exotic birds, dwarf horses, chinchillas, chickens and ducks were among those found living, as well as dogs.
The kennels and cages housing the animals were covered in excrement, which contributed to the dangers faced by the remaining animals.
Civil Guard officers also found a large supply of expired medicines and other veterinary materials that lacked prescriptions.
Spanish authorities have discovered several animal trafficking rings this year, including one in which two men had more than 150 exotic species kept and an unlicensed pet store in Nules.
Officers also broke up an online ring based in the Balearic Islands that trafficked large cats, including pumas, lynx and white tigers.
The site of the latest illicit pet breeding facility was located in northwestern Spain and about 350 miles north of Lisbon.
A MANIPULATIVE fraudster who fleeced an elderly woman out of almost £300,000 before fleeing to Tenerife is facing down a six-year prison sentence.
Pamela Gwinnett, 62, continued to stealmoney from Joan Greene, 89, after the pensioner passed away, treating her as a “cash cow to be milked.”
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Gwinnett fled to Tenerife after she got caught
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A court heard that Joan was made to believe her family hated her in the final months of her lifeCredit: MEN Media
Gwinnet claimed she was the grandmother’s carer but isolated frail, vulnerable Joan from her family.
She accused family members of mistreating the widow and did everything she could to keep them away while she fleeced her “golden goose.”
She would steal hundreds of thousands of pounds from the elderly woman, using the money to pay for botox and expensive meals before fleeing to Tenerife after getting caught.
Gwinett denied charges of fraud and theft but was found guilty by a jury at Preston Crown Court.
After discovering ex-accountant Joan was wealthy Gwinett concocted a lie, convincing Joan that her family were stealing from her pension.
Gwinett even moved Joan into a care home to keep the pensioner close when Covid hit in March 2020.
After the pandemic ended she took Joan home but padlocked the gates of her bungalow and changed the landline number in a bid to stop Joan’s family from getting in touch.
A court heard that the last months of Joan’s life had become “pock marked with increasing periods of bewilderment and confusion.”
Joan also became doubly incontinent, but instead of looking after the elderly woman Gwinett “bullied” her.
Gwinett would cover for Joan’s professional live-in carers for two hours a day, billing the pensioner for the time.
Woman duped into sending ‘Brad Pitt’ £700k after falling for ridiculous AI scam pics of star getting ‘cancer treatment’
Judge Michael Maher said: “On one occasion, [one of the carers] found to her horror that you had left Joan covered in her own faeces in bed at the end of your two-hour shift.
“On another occasion, you barked at her to relieve herself in her incontinent pad.”
Eventually one of Joan’s carers became so concerned that she arranged for Joan’s family to visit.
The meeting sparked a massive argument with video from the incident featuring Joan complaining that she doesn’t know what’s going on.
Footage also picked up Joan mentioning money problems despite her being a well off woman.
By the time Gwinett’s power of attorney over Joan was suspended she had already robbed £161,000 from the pensioner.
She even managed to steal a further £119,000 by opening a joint account and transferring Joan’s cash into that.
Judge Maher said Joan’s family “are devastated by the fact that Joan in the fog of her deterioratingmental healthmay well have believed the lies you were pedalling and made her isolation all the more solitary and lonely.”
Joan’s step-daughter Katherine Farrimond, 65, said Joan believed in her final years that her family “hated her” and “didn’t want to see her’” because to Gwinett’s “lies.”
In April, Gwinett applied to vary her bail conditions so she could fly to Tenerife, saying she hoped to scatter her late brother’s ashes there.
Her request was denied but she still brazenly boarded a plane just hours later and has remained there since.
The judge added: “I sincerely hope that Ms Gwinett is extradited back to the UK to serve this sentence for these egregious offences.
“It is an affront to justice and the rule of law for this defendant to be allowed to remain in Tenerife.”
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Gwinett once left Joan ‘covered in her own faeces’Credit: MEN Media
On a blue-sky afternoon, kayakers paddle past dozens of sea lions lolling in the sun and make a beeline toward the sea otters lounging on beds of eel grass at Elkhorn Slough on California’s central coast. The playful predators not only generate millions of dollars in tourism revenue, but their voracious appetite for destructive species has revived this sprawling estuary while making the region’s carbon-sequestering kelp forests more resistant to climate change.
The U.S. government determined in 2022 that reintroducing sea otters to their historic range on the West Coast would be a boon to biodiversity and climate resilience, laying out a road map to restoration that would cost up to $43 million.
But as the Trump administration moves to slash funding for wildlife programs, a nonprofit co-founded by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur is stepping in to raise nearly that amount to finance and coordinate what would be a complicated, years-long effort to connect isolated populations of sea otters. So far it’s raised more than $1.4 million of its $40-million target.
“We are coming in at a time when we’ve seen these dramatic cuts from the federal government and conservationists are facing major funding gaps,” says Paul Thomson, chief programs officer at the Wildlife Conservation Network, the San Francisco nonprofit that launched the Sea Otter Fund earlier this year. In August, a veteran U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official, Jen Miller, left the government to run the fund.
Sea otters prey on invasive green crabs, which fostered the return of eel grass at Elkhorn Slough.
(Rachel Bujalski/Bloomberg)
The initiative could be a harbinger of a future where private donors assume a more prominent role in financing and advancing wildlife restoration as climate impacts multiply.
While philanthropies have helped fund sea otter work, the Fish and Wildlife Service, which listed the Southern sea otter in California as threatened in 1977, assumes the cost of the species’ recovery as well as funding state and private research. “Sea otter recovery and supporting healthy coastlines go hand in hand, including finding ways to support the needs of our local fisheries,” a Wildlife Service spokesperson said in a statement, noting the agency has funded ongoing research.
Future support is uncertain, though, as the Trump administration proposes eliminating programs that underwrite sea otter science, including grants for state endangered species programs.
Understanding otter networks
Sea otters once inhabited the Pacific Rim from Japan to Mexico. By the turn of the 20th century, hunters had wiped out 99% of the population to satisfy demand for the animal’s pelt, known as “soft gold” for its luxurious warmth.
Since then, scientists successfully reintroduced otters to Alaska, British Columbia and Washington State, but that leaves a nearly thousand-mile stretch of coast from central California through Oregon without the animals.
“Adding sea otters completely changes the configuration of the food web and that has profound consequences for the structure of the nearshore ecosystem,” says Tim Tinker, an independent sea otter scientist who does research for the University of California at Santa Cruz.
He’s developing computer models to simulate the myriad factors that will determine where and which animals should be reintroduced, as well as risks and survival rates. Future versions of the model could also project the potential impact on fisheries.
The Sea Otter Fund is financing Tinker’s work, recruiting him to model restoration scenarios, the kind of research he previously has conducted with government funding. It’s the latest animal fund from the Wildlife Conservation Network, co-founded in 2002 by former software entrepreneur Charles Knowles. Ongoing campaigns fund the recovery of African elephants, lions, pangolins and other animals.
Michelle Staedler studies sea otters at Elkhorn Slough.
(Rachel Bujalski/Bloomberg)
The fund also underwrites marine biologist Michelle Staedler’s position on an Elkhorn Slough research team run out of UC Santa Cruz. “We’re really trying to understand the sea otters’ social networks,” she says.
Charting otters’ social graph is key to future restoration efforts. Past reintroductions have involved capturing random sea otters in the wild and relocating up to hundreds at a time, which resulted in high mortality of resettled animals. Of the 140 otters relocated off Southern California’s San Nicolas Island between 1987 and 1990 in a federally funded project, only about 15 animals initially survived. More than a quarter of the transported otters swam more than 150 miles back home.
Scientists say any future reintroductions will be highly targeted, selecting sea otters that are part of social groups whose bonds make them more likely to stay put and thrive. To lay that groundwork, Staedler spends a day on Elkhorn Slough twice a week, motoring through the estuary on an electric skiff to record the genders, locations, relationships, interactions, diets and caloric intake of tagged otters.
“Elkhorn Slough serves as a petri dish and the research work there will be critical for doing restoration,” says Knowles. State funding for that project has expired, however, and the Sea Otter Fund is considering replacing the loss.
Staedler keeps records of the sea otters on Elkhorn Slough.
(Rachel Bujalski/Bloomberg)
“This wave has been building”
Elkhorn Slough is California’s second-largest estuary, and the 7-mile-long outlet to Monterey Bay also serves as a real-time laboratory for how sea otters can rehabilitate degraded coastal ecosystems and benefit local economies.
In the early 1990s, invasive green crabs that made their way there destroyed eel grass meadows that serve as habitats for fish, shellfish, sea turtles and birds. Then a few sea otters began to venture in just as the Monterey Bay Aquarium began to release rehabilitated orphaned otters there. They feasted on the green crabs, consuming an estimated 120,000 of them a year, according to a 2024 paper.
As crab numbers plummeted, the eel grass returned and spawned an aquatic Serengeti. Today, there’s more than 120 sea otters at the estuary, which has fostered local ecotourism businesses that rent kayaks to visitors and take them on otter-spotting excursions, generating $5 million in revenues annually and creating more than 300 jobs, according to a 2023 study.
Kayakers approach a sea otter in Elkhorn Slough.
(Rachel Bujalski/Bloomberg)
Sea otters also have kept kelp-eating purple urchins in check on the central California coast when one of its other predators, the sunflower sea star, died off during a marine heat wave a decade ago. On California’s otter-less North Coast, the loss of sunflower sea stars wiped out more than 90% of the region’s kelp forests, triggering the collapse of fisheries.
But the competition that relocated otters’ prodigious appetites could pose to Northern California and Oregon commercial shellfish fishers worries Lori Steele, executive director of the West Coast Seafood Processors Assn. “It’s very difficult to really fully understand and account for the potential damage to a shellfish population that a very small number of sea otters could do,” she says.
The Wildlife Service found that impacts on fishing communities pose the biggest risk of sea otter introduction. If relocation moves forward, the agency will conduct an extensive review and consultations with state and federal agencies and tribal groups.
Until then, Jen Miller, the senior manager of the Sea Otter Fund, aims to keep the money for the work flowing. “It feels like this wave has been building and building and with just the right resources could crest to surf sea otter restoration to success,” she says.
Tyrese Gibson faces one charge of cruelty to animals stemming from a September incident in Fulton County, Ga., that left a neighbor’s 5-year-old dog mauled and dead.
The Fulton County Sheriff’s Office booked the 46-year-old singer-actor, a staple in the “Fast and Furious” film franchise, on Friday. He was released on a $20,000 surety bond. Attorney Gabe Banks said in a statement that Gibson voluntarily turned himself “to answer for a misdemeanor warrant.”
“Despite what others might say, throughout this entire process Mr. Gibson has cooperated fully with legal authorities and will continue to do so until this matter is resolved,” Banks said. “Mr. Gibson once again wants to extend his deepest condolences to the family who lost their dog and respectfully asks for privacy and understanding as this matter is handled through the appropriate legal channels.”
Police said earlier this week that Gibson failed to turn himself into law enforcement after an arrest warrant was issued stemming from a violent incident involving the actor’s Cane Corso dogs. On the night of Sept. 18, a neighbor of the “Morbius” star let her small spaniel out to her yard and returned five minutes later to find the dog had been attacked. The dog was rushed to a veterinary hospital but did not survive, police said.
The Cane Corsos were then seen at the house, where the owner called police, saying she was afraid to go outside. Animal control officers responded and were able to keep the dogs back while the neighbor went to her vehicle.
The arrest warrant issued for the movie star was part of an “ongoing issue” following multiple calls about the dogs in the last few months, Fulton County Police Capt. Nicole Dwyer said. Gibson received multiple warnings before the warrant was issued, and police also attempted to cite him before the attack, Dwyer said, but Gibson was not at his Atlanta home.
Police had a search warrant for Gibson’s property on Sept. 22, but the actor and the dogs were not there.
In a statement shared to the actor’s Instagram page on Wednesday, Gibson and Banks expressed condolences to the family “who lost their beloved dog in this tragic incident.” The “Transformers” and “Baby Boy” star said his heart “is truly broken,” the note said, and that “he has been “praying for the family constantly, hoping they may one day find it in their hearts to forgive him.”
The statement said that the attack occurred while Gibson, who “accepts full responsibility for his dogs,” was out of town. The actor has since rehomed the two adult dogs and their three puppies, the statement said, adding “the liability of keeping them was simply too great.”
Gibson also issued a personal statement, describing his passion for dogs and declaring that his animals have “never been trained to harm.” He said he has been in Los Angeles with family, mourning the death of his father.
“Please know that I am praying for you, grieving with you, and will continue to face this tragedy with honesty, responsibility, and compassion,” he added.
In another Instagram statement shared Tuesday, Banks explained that Gibson’s decision to bring the Cane Corso dogs into his home was for security against stalkers who had been “randomly showing up at his home” in recent years. Banks said that the dogs “never harmed a child, a person, or another dog” until the September incident.
Gibson said Tuesday: “I had no idea I would ever wake up to this nightmare, and I know the family must feel the same way. To them, please know that my heart is broken for you. I am praying for your healing and for your beloved pet, who never deserved this. I remain committed to facing this matter with honesty, responsibility, and compassion.”
The lead of the horror-tinged heart-tugger “Good Boy” is a copper-colored retriever named Indy who pads around an eerie house deep in the New Jersey woods investigating its mysterious creaks, shadows and smells. Like the Method-style actors of “The Blair Witch Project,” he goes by his real name onscreen. An ordinary dog without a whiff of Hollywood hokum, Indy doesn’t do implausible stunts like Lassie or Rin Tin Tin or comprehend anything that his owner, Todd (Shane Jensen), says besides simple phrases: sit, stay and, gratefully, the title itself. But we’re invested in the mindset of this mundane hero. His nose twitches are as dramatic as an ingenue’s gasp.
First-time feature director Ben Leonberg raised Indy as a pet first, movie star second. Along with his wife, Kari Fischer, who produced the film, Leonberg shot “Good Boy” in his weekend house, staging scenarios for Indy to explore until he had enough material for a (barely) full-length spook show. Even at 72 minutes, “Good Boy” is belabored in the middle stretch. It would make a fabulous one-hour TV special.
Using his personal footage, Leonberg (who also edited the film and did its gorgeous, inky-wet cinematography) opens with a montage of Indy growing up from a tiny puppy to a loyal best friend. We love the dog more in five minutes than we do some slasher final girls who’ve survived several sequels. Indy is the most empathetic scream queen of the year so far — and I mean that literally as his breed, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling retriever, is known for its high-pitched wail. American Kennel Club lists the Toller as the U.S.’s 87th most popular dog. I expect this movie will lead to an uptick. (Steve Martin already has one.)
What’s wrong in Indy’s new home? A pair of tragedies wind together like vines, although from the dog’s point of view, the distinction between them isn’t always obvious. This battered two-story home with ominous scratches on the basement door has been in Todd’s family for six generations, as the cemetery out back proves. Bequeathed to the youngish urban hipster by his grandfather (indie cult icon Larry Fessenden), a misanthrope who willed his taxidermy collection to a vegan, it’s a good place to disappear.
Todd, who’s in bad physical and emotional shape, has isolated himself in this scraggly, foggy forest to get some privacy from his sister, Vera (Arielle Friedman). There’s also a past death that the dog is able to perceive. A sniff of a rotting old chair frightens Indy so much, he wets the rug.
“Scaredy pants,” Todd teases Indy. The dog can’t explain what only he knows.
Several unnerving things are happening at once, including the presence of a silhouetted stalker, old bones that give the dog nightmares and Todd’s unpredictable mood swings. There’s also a ghost in the movie, I think — at least, there’s a heavy hinge that shouldn’t be able to open without a spectral nudge. Indy stands about two feet tall, so the camera often stays at that height too, gliding close to the floor where the view from under the bed looks as big as an airplane hangar.
A realistic dog’s-eye view of a creepy cabin is a good hook, although people hoping to see an otherwise satisfying genre thriller will feel a bit underwhelmed that Leonberg and his co-screenwriter Alex Cannon are conflicted about pushing the scary elements of the film too far into the supernatural. With a complicated backstory off the table (Indy looks restless whenever adults are having a conversation), the movie taps into our burgeoning belief that animals do have a special sixth sense, like how hospice workers know to pay special attention to whoever gets night visits from the resident pet.
Still, “Good Boy” doesn’t stray too far from the film’s core strength: a normal dog doing normal dog things. In a twitch, a head tilt or a whine, Indy communicates his emotions: curious, lonely, contented, confused, fretful, desperate or petrified. There’s no CG in the dog’s performance, no corny reaction shots and no use of animal doubles either. Todd’s own legs, however, are often doubled by Leonberg, an onscreen switcheroo that’s possible because the lens doesn’t tend to look up.
I liked the plot better on a second watch when I knew not to expect Jamie Lee Curtis on all fours. The ending is great and the build up to it, though draggy, gives you space to think about the interdependence between our species. Dogs are wired to be our protectors and yet, through generations of nurturing, they’ve come to trust that we’ll also protect them. The inarticulate betrayal in the film is that Todd isn’t making good decisions for anyone. His bond with Indy is pure and strong, yet one-sided in that Todd is too distracted to ease the dog’s fears. Indy is bereft to be left alone for long stretches of time in a strange house. But he can’t do a thing about that, nor the sputtering electricity, the fox traps in the brush and the neighbor (Stuart Rudin) who skulks around in hunting camouflage.
In Todd’s facelessness, he’s a stand-in for whatever you want: absentee parents, a struggling partner or child or friend. There’s a scene in which he comes home in obvious need of a cuddle, only to push his dog away. Maybe you’ve been both people in that shot: the person overwhelmed by their own pain and the loved one who has no idea how to soothe them. It’s terrifying to love someone this much, to give them the full force of your devotion only to get locked outside.
Consciously or not, Leonberg has made a primal film about helplessness. Watching it, I was knocked sideways by a sense memory of how it felt to be a child. Like Indy, kids get dragged around to places they don’t want to go to for reasons that aren’t explained, and when they whine, they’re commanded to pipe down. Even as we get older — when our own point of view can stand taller than two feet — the things that truly scare us are the ones that make us feel small and confused.
‘Good Boy’
Rated: PG-13, for terror, bloody images and strong language
The third episode of Coldwater had viewers reaching for their remote controls as they blasted the ‘disturbing’ scenes aired in the ITV prime-time drama
Viewers of Coldwater were left scrambling for their remote controls as they slammed the ‘disturbing’ scenes broadcast during the third episode of the ITV prime-time drama.
Andrew Lincoln plays John in the crime thriller, which airs on ITV1 on Sundays and Mondays and is available to stream in full on ITVX.
The six-part series charts the journey of John and his family as they relocate to the rural Scottish haven of Coldwater following John’s witnessing and response to a violent incident in a London park.
However, John grows increasingly exasperated with his restrictive and tedious life as a middle-aged house husband, his concealed rage threatening everything he cherishes.
Andrew Lincoln plays John in Coldwater(Image: ITV)
Despite longing for a more peaceful future for his family, he faces new challenges when he develops a friendship with neighbouring resident Tommy (Ewen Bremner), a seemingly charming man and devoted husband to local minister Rebecca (Eve Myles), with John becoming caught up in a series of disturbing events whilst falling into Tommy’s snare, reports the Daily Record.
During the third episode which broadcast on Sunday, September 21, audiences watched sinister Tommy (Ewen Bremner) kill pet cat Harlequin.
However, the unsettling scene sparked a wave of criticism on social media.
One viewer commented: “now the cat was a step too far! Absolutely no need to show that.”
A second posted: “I thought we moved past killing animals in shows, viewers hate it and it’s unnecessary. Yes it’s not real but it’s too disturbing, I immediately give up on shows for that so ITV you lost a viewer, only weak writers use animal deaths for a desperate attempt at tension. “
John has got himself caught up in Tommy’s web(Image: ITV)
A third added: “It’s gone too far #Coldwater There’s no humour, or ‘art’ in plain cruelty. I’ve kept with it, but no more.”
And: “Wish they wouldn’t have cruelty to defenceless animals in these dramas.”
Andrew Lincoln has revealed that he turned down the role in Coldwater twice before finally agreeing to take it on.
The Walking Dead actor explained: “I got sent the script and loved it, it made me laugh in all the wrong places, made me squirm with recognition, and constantly surprised me with the unpredictability of the characters, but it made me scared as well.
“I was quite scared about playing a character that was so unpleasant and weak and emasculated, and I wasn’t quite sure tonally where it sat.
“So I said no twice to it and then I had a lovely chat [with writer David Ireland] and couldn’t walk away from it.”
Coldwater continues on ITV1 tomorrow and it’s available to stream on ITVX
SACRAMENTO — State lawmakers approved a bill Monday that would ban online pet dealer websites and shadowy middlemen who pose as local breeders from selling dogs to California consumers — the latest move to curtail the pipeline from out-of-state puppy mills.
Assemblymember Marc Berman (D-Menlo Park) said Assembly Bill 519 will help ensure buyers aren’t misled about where their puppies come from after a Times investigation last year detailed how designer dogs are trucked into California from out-of-state commercial breeders and resold by people claiming to be small, local operators.
“AB 519 would close this loophole that allows this dishonest practice,” Berman said.
California became the first state in the nation with a 2019 law to bar pet stores from selling commercially bred dogs. That retail ban, however, did not apply to online pet sales, which grew rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Berman’s bill would ban online marketplaces where dogs are sold by brokers, which is defined as any person or business that sells or transports a dog bred by someone else for profit. That would include major national pet retailers such as PuppySpot as well as California-based operations that market themselves as pet matchmakers. AB 519, which now heads to Gov. Gavin Newsom for his consideration, applies to dogs, cats and rabbits under a year old.
Puppy Spot opposed the bill, writing in a letter to lawmakers that it would dismantle a system they say works for families — particularly those seeking specific breeds for allergy concerns. PuppySpot CEO Claire Komorowski wrote to Berman in May that their online marketplace maintains internal breeder standards that exceed regulatory mandates.
“We believe this bill penalizes responsible, transparent operations while doing little to prevent the underground or unregulated sales that put animal health and consumer trust at risk,” PuppySpot CEO Claire Komorowski wrote to Berman in May.
The bill does not apply to police dogs or service animals and provides an exemption for shelters, rescues and 4H clubs.
“This measure is an important step in shutting down deceptive sales tactics of these puppy brokers and lessening the financial and emotional harm to families who unknowingly purchase sick or poorly bred pets,” Attorney General Rob Bonta wrote in a letter of support for the bill. “By eliminating the profit incentive for brokers while preserving legitimate avenues for Californians to obtain animals, AB 519 protects consumers, supports shelters and rescues that are already at capacity, and advances California’s commitment to the humane treatment of animals.”
Two other bills stemming from The Times’ investigation are expected to pass the Legislature this week as lawmakers wrap up session and send a flurry of bills to the governor. The package of bills has overwhelming bipartisan support.
AB 506 by Assemblymember Steve Bennett (D-Ventura) would void pet purchase contracts involving California buyers if the pet seller requires a nonrefundable deposit. The bill would also make the pet seller liable if they fail to disclose the breeder’s name and information, as well as medical information about the animal.
The Times’ investigation found that some puppies advertised on social media, online marketplaces or through breeder websites as being California-bred were actually imported from out-of-state puppy mills. To trace dogs back to mass breeding facilities, The Times requested Certificates of Veterinary Inspection, which are issued by a federally accredited veterinarian listing where the animal came from, its destination and verification it is healthy to travel.
The California Department of Food and Agriculture has long received those health certificates from other states by mistake — the records are supposed to go to county public health departments — and, in recent years, made it a practice to immediately destroy them. Dog importers who were supposed to submit the records to counties largely failed to do so.
The Times analyzed the movement of more than 71,000 dogs into California since 2019, when the pet retail ban went into effect. The travel certificates showed how a network of resellers replaced pet stores as middlemen while disguising where puppies were actually bred. In some cases, new owners discovered that they were sold a puppy by a person using a fake name and temporary phone numbers after their new pet became sick or died.
SB 312 by state Sen. Tom Umberg (D-Orange) would require pet sellers to share the travel certificate with the state agriculture agency, which would then make them available without redactions to the public. An earlier version of the bill required the state department to publish information from the certificates online, but that was removed amid opposition.
“Given the high propensity for misleading consumers and the large volume of dogs entering the state, the health certificate information is in the public interest for individual consumers to review to confirm information conveyed to them by sellers and to also hopefully be helpful to humane law enforcement agencieds as they work to investigate fraud and malfeasance,” said Bennet said Monday in support of Umberg’s bill.
Phibro Animal Health(PAHC -1.56%), a veterinary pharmaceutical and nutrition provider, reported earnings for Q4 FY2025 on August 27, 2025, covering the three months ending June 30. Driven by its largest-ever acquisition and strong international appetite for its medicated feed additives, the company’s sales, adjusted earnings, and profit margins all surpassed expectations. GAAP revenue reached $378.7 million, up 39% from the previous year. Adjusted diluted earnings per share (EPS) climbed to $0.57 from $0.41, also beating consensus expectations. Management described the result as a step-change, reflecting both solid underlying product demand and successful integration of new product lines, though a decline in gross margin showed that rising input and distribution costs remain a concern.
Metric
Q4 2025
Q4 2024
Y/Y Change
Adjusted Diluted EPS (Non-GAAP)
$0.57
$0.41
39 %
Revenue
$378.7 million
$273.2 million
38.6 %
Adjusted EBITDA (Non-GAAP)
$50.0 million
N/A
N/A
Adjusted Net Income (Non-GAAP)
$23.2 million
$16.7 million
39 %
Gross Margin
29.0 %
31.9 %
(2.9 pp)
Phibro Animal Health’s Business and Strategies
Phibro Animal Health manufactures and sells products that support animal health and nutrition across more than 90 countries. Its main product lines include medicated feed additives, which help prevent disease in livestock; nutritional specialty products that enhance animal health; and vaccines to combat specific animal diseases. The company’s clients include food producers, veterinarians, and animal health distributors.
Recently, Phibro has focused on expanding its reach and product portfolio through acquisitions and global growth. The October 2024 purchase of Zoetis’s medicated feed additive portfolio added 37 products and six new manufacturing sites to its business. Success in this market relies on regulatory compliance, strong product innovation, and a global presence, with about 55% of animal health sales coming from outside the United States.
Quarter Highlights: Growth, Product Mix, and Margin Trends
The quarter marked a pivotal moment for Phibro, with GAAP revenue climbing 39% compared to the prior year. The acquisition of Zoetis’s medicated feed additive (MFA) products played a central role, contributing $94.5 million in additional sales. Animal Health segment sales increased by 53%, primarily due to the Zoetis MFA acquisition. Vaccine revenues grew 21%, fueled by high demand in Latin America, while nutritional specialties posted solid gains of 11%.
Adjusted EBITDA, a measure of profit excluding both non-cash and one-off items, rose faster than revenue, up 49%, reflecting successful integration of acquired assets and improvements in operating leverage. Adjusted net income followed suit, reaching $23.2 million. Phibro’s ability to quickly benefit from the recent acquisition shows its execution on large, cross-border deals and boosts its long-term earnings potential.
Not all trends were positive, however. Gross margin, a measure of how much profit remains after covering production costs, slipped from 31.9% to 29.0% (GAAP). Management cited several causes, such as higher distribution costs, inventory write-offs, and a less favorable product mix. Despite these cost pressures, adjusted gross margin for the full fiscal year rose slightly, showing that the cost impact was most pronounced in the fourth quarter.
Looking at the company’s broader portfolio, Mineral Nutrition sales (GAAP) inched up 3%, while Performance Products rose 13%. Mineral Nutrition and Performance Products Adjusted EBITDA increased $4.4 million and $2.9 million, respectively, with Mineral Nutrition’s adjusted EBITDA up 4% and Performance Products by 38%. Free cash flow was $41.8 million, just below the previous period. Phibro maintained its quarterly dividend at $0.12 per share, continuing a stable return to shareholders.
Business Segments and Drivers: Product Lines Explained
The company’s core Animal Health segment is built on three main product lines: medicated feed additives (medicines delivered in animal feed), nutritional specialties (products that enhance animal health and growth), and vaccines (biological products to prevent livestock disease). The recent strength in this segment has been driven mostly by medicated feed additives, especially the new Zoetis-acquired products, which led to a 77% year-over-year jump in sales for this line. Vaccines saw demand rise due to success in international poultry markets.
Mineral Nutrition products supply trace minerals like copper and zinc, important for healthy livestock. Growth here was modest but steady, driven by broader demand for feed minerals. Performance Products comprise specialty chemicals used in industrial applications, rounding out Phibro’s diversified offerings. Each of these areas supports the company’s efforts to reduce dependence on any single customer group or geographic market.
Financial Outlook and What to Watch
For FY2026, management expects continued double-digit growth. Guidance points to net sales between $1.43 billion and $1.48 billion, representing about 12% projected growth. Adjusted EBITDA is anticipated to rise 25%. This outlook reflects management’s confidence in continued growth across all segments.
Investors should watch margin trends closely. The drop in quarterly GAAP gross margin, if it continues, could signal sustained cost or mix pressures. Free cash flow and leverage levels are also important to monitor, as integration and expansion require capital, and gross leverage ended the year at 3.1x. Management made no notable changes to its dividend policy, with a quarterly payout of $0.12 per share continuing as before.
Revenue and net income presented using U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) unless otherwise noted.
Motley Fool Markets Team is a Foolish AI, based on a variety of Large Language Models (LLMs) and proprietary Motley Fool systems. The Motley Fool takes ultimate responsibility for the content of these articles. Motley Fool Markets Team cannot own stocks and so it has no positions in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
“We are suffering, world. We need humanitarian aid – food and medicine – whether by airdrop or by opening ground routes. We cannot survive in this condition,” Othman Angaro, from a displacement camp in el-Fasher, told Al Jazeera.
Angaro described how he and his family rely on livestock fodder known as ambaz, a type of animal feed made out of peanut shells.
Another woman, veterinarian Zulfa Al-Nour, told Al Jazeera that her family relies daily on a charity kitchen called “Matbakh Al-Khair” for a single meal, amid a total lack of external aid.
She called for urgent international intervention, including airdrops of humanitarian supplies, warning that even the ambaz fodder is nearly depleted.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) last week warned about starvation in the el-Fasher region. Starvation has reached the most severe level on the United Nations-backed food security scale – ‘IPC Phase 5’, indicating full-blown famine – it said on Friday.
The two-month siege of el-Fasher has complicated aid efforts.
The RSF has blocked food supplies, and aid convoys trying to reach the city have been attacked, locals said. Prices for the goods smuggled into the region cost more than five times the national average.
Outbreak of cholera
An outbreak of cholera in the North Darfur state, of which el-Fasher is the capital, has further added to the misery.
Deaths due to the water-borne disease have risen to 191 in the region, which has witnessed months of fighting between Sudan’s army and the RSF, according to a government official.
At least 62 people have died from the disease in Tawila in the North Darfur state, the spokesman for the General Coordination for Displaced Persons and Refugees in Darfur, Adam Rijal, said in a statement on Monday.
Nearly 100 people have also died in the Kalma and the Otash camps, Rijal added, both displacement camps located in the city of Nyala in South Darfur state.
Some 4,000 cases of cholera have been reported in the region, according to the statement.
In recent months, more than half a million people have taken shelter in Tawila, some 60km (37 miles) west of el-Fasher, the state capital, which has been under two months of siege by the RSF rebels. Most of the Darfur region is under the rebel control except for el-Fasher.
‘Too weak to survive’
Meanwhile, with Sudan in the throes of the rainy season, along with poor living conditions and inadequate sanitation, the outbreak of cholera is only worsening, warn aid groups.
Cholera was first identified in early June in Tawila and has since spread to numerous refugee camps, according to NGO Avaaz.
Nearly 40 people have died due to cholera in the Jebel Marra area, a district of West Darfur state.
Doctors Without Borders, or MSF, is operating two cholera treatment facilities in Tawila housing 146 beds – coordinating nearly the entire medical response to the outbreak.
Last month, it warned that “much more” needs to be done to improve “access to water, hygiene, and medical care to curb the spread of the outbreak in the midst of the rainy season”.
Samir, a former teacher displaced to el-Fasher with his family, told Avaaz last week that the situation was “catastrophic” and that the cholera outbreak was being exacerbated by widespread hunger.
“People are dying because they are too weak to survive,” he told the NGO.
“Their immune systems are compromised from severe malnutrition. People are starving in the displacement camps.”
مدينة الفاشر في ولاية شمال دارفور غرب السودان بتعيش مجاعة قاتلة بسبب فرض الحصار عليها من قبل قوات الدعم السريع المدعومة من الامارات المجاعة دخلت المرحلة الخامسة يعني مجاعة كاملة ووضع كارثي اتكلموا عنهم#الفاشر_تموت_جوعاََpic.twitter.com/1aNfuGY9nH
Translation: “The city of el-Fasher in North Darfur state, western Sudan, is experiencing a deadly famine due to the siege imposed on it by the Rapid Support Forces backed by the Emirates. The famine has reached the fifth stage, meaning a full-scale famine and a catastrophic situation. Speak about them.”
Meanwhile, fighting continues.
“The RSF’s artillery and drones are shelling el-Fasher morning and night,” one resident told the Reuters news agency.
“The number of people dying has increased every day, and the cemeteries are expanding,” he said.
On Monday, Emergency Lawyers, a human rights group, said at least 14 people fleeing el-Fasher were killed and dozens were injured when they were attacked in a village along the route.
The UN called for a humanitarian pause to fighting in el-Fasher last month as the rainy season began, but the RSF rejected the call.
Fighting between the two groups first erupted in the capital Khartoum in April 2023. It has since spread to several regions of the country as the army chief and de facto head of state, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, jostles for power with RSF chief Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo.
The war has killed tens of thousands and displaced nearly 13 million people, according to UN estimates, resulting in one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.
Federal immigration agents raided a Home Depot in Barstow last month and arrested a man who had his 3-year-old pit bull, Chuco, with him. A friend managed to grab Chuco from the scene and bring him back to the garage where he lives. The dog’s owner was deported to Mexico the next day.
The SPAY(CE) Project, which spays and neuters dogs in underserved areas, put out a call on Instagram to help Chuco and an animal rescue group agreed to take him, but then went quiet. Meanwhile, the garage owner took Chuco to an undisclosed shelter.
After repeated attempts, SPAY(CE) co-founder Esther Ruurda said her nonprofit gave up on finding the dog or a home for him, since “no one has space for an adult male Pittie these days.” So “the poor dog is left to die in the shelter.”
Chuco, a roughly 3-year-old pit bull, whose owner was deported last month. A friend took Chuco in, but his landlord reportedly dropped the dog at a shelter and would not say which one.
(SPAY(CE) Project)
It’s not an isolated incident. Since federal immigration raids, primarily targeting Latino communities, began roiling Los Angeles in early June, animal rescues and care providers across the county are hearing desperate pleas for help.
At least 15 dogs were surrendered at L.A. County animal shelters due to deportations between June 10 and July 4, according to the county’s Department of Animal Care and Control.
Pets belonging to people who are deported or flee are being left in empty apartments, dumped into the laps of unprepared friends and dropped off at overcrowded shelters, The Times found.
“Unless people do take the initiative [and get the pets out], those animals will starve to death in those backyards or those homes,” said Yvette Berke, outreach manager for Cats at the Studios, a rescue that serves L.A.
Yet with many animal refuges operating at capacity, it can be difficult to find temporary homes where pets are not at risk of euthanasia.
Fearing arrest if they go outside, some people are also forgoing healthcare for their pets, with clinics reporting a surge in no-shows and missed appointments in communities affected by the raids.
“Pets are like the collateral damage to the current political climate,” said Jennifer Naitaki, vice president of programs and strategic initiatives at the Michelson Found Animals Foundation.
Worrying data
Cats curiously watch a visitor at the AGWC Rockin’ Rescue in Woodland Hills. Manager Fabienne Origer said the center is at capacity and these pets need to be adopted to make room for others.
With shelters and rescues stuffed to the gills, an influx of pets is “another impact to an already stressed system,” Berke said.
Dogs — large ones in particular — can be hard to find homes for, some rescues said. Data show that two county shelters have seen large jumps in dogs being surrendered by their owners.
The numbers of dogs relinquished at L.A. County’s Palmdale shelter more than doubled in June compared with June of last year, according to data obtained by The Times. At the county’s Downey shelter, the count jumped by roughly 50% over the same period.
Some of this increase could be because of a loosening of requirements for giving up a pet, said Christopher Valles with L.A. County’s animal control department. In April the department eliminated a requirement that people must make an appointment to relinquish a pet.
Rocky, a 7-year-old mixed-breed dog, has been at AGWC Rockin’ Rescue for three years.
There’s no set time limit on when an animal must be adopted to avoid euthanizing, said Valles, adding that behavior or illness can make them a candidate for being put to sleep.
And there are resources for people in the deported person’s network who are willing to take on the responsibility for their pets, like 2-year-old Mocha, a female chocolate Labrador retriever who was brought in to the county’s Baldwin Park shelter in late June and is ready for adoption.
“We stand by anybody who’s in a difficult position where they can’t care for their animal because of deportation,” Valles said.
Some rescues, however, urge people not to turn to shelters because of overcrowding and high euthanasia rates.
Rates for dogs getting put down at L.A. city shelters increased 57% in April compared with the same month the previous year, according to a recent report.
L.A. Animal Services, which oversees city shelters, did not respond to requests for comment or data.
Already at the breaking point
Fabienne Origer, manager of AGWC Rockin’ Rescue, with Gracie, a 4-week-old kitten found on Ventura Boulevard and brought to the center a week ago.
Every day, Fabienne Origer is bombarded with 10 to 20 calls asking if AGWC Rockin’ Rescue in Woodland Hills, which she manages, can take in dogs and cats. She estimates that one to two of those pleas are now related to immigration issues.
The rescue, like many others, is full.
Part of the reason is that many people adopted pets during the COVID-19 crisis — when they were stuck at home — and dumped them when the world opened back up, she said.
Skyrocketing cost of living and veterinary care expenses have also prompted people to get rid of their pet family members, several rescues said. Vet prices have surged by 60% over a decade.
“It’s already bad, but now on top of that, a lot of requests are because people have disappeared, because people have been deported, and if we can take a cat or two dogs,” Origer said. “It’s just ongoing, every single day.”
Wounds you can’t see
Assistant manager Antonia Schumann pets a couple of dogs at AGWC Rockin’ Rescue.
Animals suffer from the emotional strain of separation and unceremonious change when their owners vanish, experts said.
When a mother and three young daughters from Nicaragua who were pursuing asylum in the U.S. were unexpectedly deported in May following a routine hearing, they left behind their beloved senior dog.
She was taken in by the mother’s stepmom. Not long after, the small dog had to be ushered into surgery to treat a life-threatening mass.
The small dog is on the mend physically, but “is clearly depressed, barely functioning and missing her family,” the stepmother wrote in a statement provided to the Community Animal Medicine Project (CAMP), which paid for the surgery. She’s used to spending all day with the girls and sleeping with them at night, the stepmom said.
From Nicaragua, the girls have been asking to get their dog back. For now, they’re using FaceTime.
Shirley and Bruno lounge in their space at AGWC Rockin’ Rescue. They have been there for five years.
Now such a line could draw attention, so the Alliance staggers appointments, according to Jose Sandoval, executive director of the Panorama City-based organization that provides education and services to Latino families.
“It’s hitting our ‘hood,” Sandoval said, “and we couldn’t just sit there and not do anything.”
Within two hours of offering free services — including vaccines and flea medication refills — to people affected by ICE raids, they received about 15 calls.
CAMP, whose staff is almost entirely people of color and Spanish speaking, is mulling reviving telehealth options and partnering to deliver baskets of urgently needed pet goods. It’s drilling staffers on what to do if immigration officers show up at the workplace.
“Humans aren’t leaving their house for themselves, so if their dog has an earache they may hesitate to go out to their vet, but animals will suffer,” said Alanna Klein, strategy and engagement officer for CAMP. “We totally understand why they’re not doing it, but [pets] are alongside humans in being impacted by this.”
CAMP has seen a 20%-30% increase in missed appointments since the first week of June, for everything from spay and neuter to wellness exams to surgical procedures. After a video of an ICE raid at a car dealership near CAMP’s clinic in Mission Hills circulated in mid-June, they had 20 no-shows — highly unusual.
“We’re forced to operate under the extreme pressure and in the midst of this collective trauma,” said Zoey Knittel, executive director of CAMP, “but we’ll continue doing it because we believe healthcare should be accessible to all dogs and cats, regardless of their family, socioeconomic or immigration status.”
In 2022, Robert Ellis pledged $200,000 to create a garden in the Los Angeles Zoo’s bird theater.
By January, the city of Los Angeles had sued its nonprofit partner, the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Assn., amid longstanding tensions over spending and other issues.
Ellis, a GLAZA board member, redirected his donation to a fund for the nonprofit’s legal fees.
At stake in the messy divorce between the city and the association is a nearly $50-million endowment that each side claims is theirs and that funds much of the zoo’s special projects, capital improvements and exhibit construction.
The city’s contract with GLAZA, which governs fundraising, special events and more, ends Tuesday, leaving the zoo in a precarious place, with no firm plan for how to proceed.
The elephant exhibit is empty after the last two Asian elephants, Billy and Tina, were transferred to the Tulsa Zoo.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
The zoo, which houses more than 1,600 animals, has become increasingly dilapidated. Exhibits including the lions, bears, sea lions and pelicans have closed because they need major renovations. The last two elephants, Billy and Tina, recently departed for the Tulsa Zoo after decades of campaigning by animal rights advocates over living conditions and a history of deaths and health challenges.
The 59-year-old zoo, which occupies 133 acres in the northeast corner of Griffith Park, is struggling to maintain its national accreditation, with federal regulators finding peeling paint and rust in some exhibits.
U.S. Department of Agriculture inspectors and the Assn. of Zoos and Aquariums found a “critical lack of funding and staffing to address even the most basic repairs,” L.A. Zoo officials wrote in a budget document in November 2024.
A sign designating a closed exhibit is posted in an animal enclosure at the Los Angeles Zoo.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
Meanwhile, attendance has declined to a projected 1.5 million visitors in 2024-25, down about 100,000 from the previous year, the zoo said, citing “outdated infrastructure” and closed exhibits as part of the reason.
“We’re not vibrant like we should be,” said Karen Winnick, president of the city Board of Zoo Commissioners.
GLAZA has been the zoo’s main partner since it opened in 1966, handling fundraising, special events, membership, publications, volunteers and sponsorship.
The zoo’s $31-million operating budget comes largely from tickets and other sources, with only 1% to 2% directly from the association, according to City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo.
But the indirect amount is higher, since GLAZA raises money through membership and special events, depositing some of it in a fund that covers most of the zoo’s budget.
Outside of the operating budget, the group also raises money for facility renovations and programs such as animal care, conservation and education.
Through a spokesperson, Ellis and other GLAZA board members declined to comment.
Devin Donahue, a lawyer for GLAZA, said in a statement that the nonprofit “spent more than 60 years building up an eight-figure endowment that the City of Los Angeles is now attempting to seize without concern for the intent of the donors who chose to give to a trusted charity, and not to a city running a billion-dollar deficit. To remove GLAZA’s safeguarding hand from Zoo funding would be catastrophic for both the LA Zoo and its animals.”
A flamingo basks in water at the Los Angeles Zoo.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
One GLAZA insider blamed the conflicts on Zoo Director and CEO Denise Verret, saying she has tried to take power away from the association since she assumed the role in 2019.
Another source familiar with the relationship said that zoo officials believe they don’t need GLAZA and have wanted to end the partnership for years.
“They [the city] believe they could do this on their own,” said the second source, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the partnership amid the ongoing litigation. “There’s a lot of animosity, as opposed to it being a healthy relationship or one of gratitude.”
The relationship between the zoo and GLAZA has been fraught for decades, stemming from issues regarding money and power, said Manuel Mollinedo, who was zoo director from 1995 to 2002.
“They would make the zoo literally beg for money,” Mollinedo said. “The problem with GLAZA is they see themselves as an entity only responsible in answering to themselves. They don’t see themselves as an organization there to support and work with the zoo.”
Mollinedo said he always thought the zoo would be better off taking some power away from GLAZA and instead partnering with different organizations.
GLAZA has accused the zoo of not properly spending the money that the association raises.
“Notwithstanding red flag warnings of disrepair at the Zoo, enclosure and exhibit closures, and troubling risks to the health and safety of the Zoo’s animals, the City has failed to spend money raised by GLAZA and available to it for necessary remediation,” the nonprofit said in court papers.
In 2023, more than 20 years after Mollinedo left the zoo, city officials announced that they would open up “requests for proposals” for organizations interested in performing GLAZA’s functions, in what they described as an effort to promote fairness and transparency and ensure that the zoo was getting the best services.
By initiating the application process, the city showed that it had no interest in continuing its “overarching partnership” with the organization, Erika Aronson Stern, chair of the GLAZA Board of Trustees, said in a letter to Mayor Karen Bass in October.
GLAZA declined to apply and announced that it would be walking away, along with its nearly $50-million endowment.
A giraffe watches as people pass by its enclosure at the Los Angeles Zoo.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
Some of the endowment money still needed to spent on the zoo, according to donors’ wishes, and GLAZA would transfer that money to the facility — but it refused to cede control of the fund.
Late last year, the city sued the association, arguing that it was the rightful owner of the endowment.
“GLAZA has only been permitted to raise funds on behalf of the City, never on its own exclusive behalf,” wrote Deputy City Atty. Steven Son.
GLAZA said it does have the right to raise funds for itself and asserted that the city has been mismanaging zoo money for years.
Los Angeles Zoo Director Denise Verret stands in front of an area of the zoo slated for redevelopment. The 20-acre expansion would include a new hilltop Yosemite lodge-style California Visitor Center with sweeping views of a 25,000- square-foot vineyard.
(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
Verret, the zoo’s director, spent exorbitant amounts on activities unrelated to the zoo, GLAZA alleged in court documents, including $22,000 on a party celebrating her own appointment in 2019, $13,000 improving her office and $14,000 on the assistant director’s office.
The association also said in court documents that it provided at least $1.7 million at Verret’s request for conservation organizations that are “separate and distinct” from the zoo.
Verret argued in court papers that her use of the money was appropriate. She modernized “1960s-era” administrative offices, and her welcome party helped “strengthen relationships.” Conservation is one of the zoo’s “core purposes,” she said, noting that GLAZA didn’t raise the spending questions until after the city sued.
In a statement, Verret said the zoo is prepared to be on the international stage for the Summer Olympics in 2028.
“With the new structure and … new business partners in place, the L.A. Zoo is in a very healthy place now and continues to focus on its mission,” she said.
As for fundraising, she was less clear.
“Although we are still developing plans to establish a new fundraising model, we are future-focused with our priorities and efforts grounded in the gold-standard care and well-being for the animals at the zoo,” she said.
On Wednesday, a judge ruled that GLAZA cannot solicit donations “that are not for the exclusive benefit of the Los Angeles Zoo” and may not use funds from the endowment without the city’s permission. The question of who controls the endowment is still open.
Donahue, the GLAZA lawyer, called the judge’s ruling “wrong on the law and facts, deeply flawed analytically and not in the best interest of the Zoo, its animals, its donors, or the people of Los Angeles.” He said was confident that an appellate court would reach a different decision.
As the lawsuit moves forward, the City Council is working to approve new contracts with other organizations to handle concessions, memberships and other functions. City employees perform many core jobs, such as feeding and caring for the animals, but volunteers supplied by GLAZA, including the docents that gave tours, played a major role in the zoo’s day-to-day operations.
“It’s really a shame that it has devolved to this point,” said Ron Galperin, a former city controller who conducted a special review of the relationship between the nonprofit and the zoo in 2018 and found it “cumbersome and confusing.”
Galperin has advocated for the zoo to be run as a public-private partnership, with the city leasing the land and animals to an organization like GLAZA that would run it, similar to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art or the Hollywood Bowl.
The city previously explored that option after the 2008 financial crisis, but it was opposed by unions that represent zoo workers, as well as by animal rights activists who believed there would be less transparency surrounding the care of the animals.
About 73% of accredited zoos are managed by non-government entities — 57% by nonprofits and 16% by for-profit organizations, according to a study by the Assn. of Zoos and Aquariums.
Winnick, the Zoo Commission president, believes a privately run zoo would raise funds more effectively and save the city money.
“We need new governance for our zoo, and this is the time to do it, with our city overwhelmed by so many problems,” she said. “It would serve people of L.A. and the community for us to go into public-private partnership.”
Instead, the city will run the zoo piecemeal, with at least two organizations taking over what GLAZA once did.
The city recently came to an agreement with SSA Group, LLC to run membership, special events and publications, while The Superlative Group will run sponsorship programs. The city plans to manage volunteers itself.
But the zoo still has not found a fundraising partner.
“For the city to lose a fundraising partner at this point in time, with the deficit we have and visitors we’re expecting to L.A., is sad,” said Richard Lichtenstein, a former member of the GLAZA board and a former zoo commissioner, who said he was speaking as an individual and not on behalf of the association.
“The city does deserve, and its residents deserve, a first-class facility, and without a funding partner, it is difficult to see how the zoo is going to be able to maintain itself as a world-class facility,” he said.
By Peter Brown Little, Brown Books for Young Readers: 48 pages, $20 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.
There are rare moments in the culture when a children’s book resonates with everyone. Parents who buy the book for their kids find themselves moved by a story that is not intended for them but somehow speaks to them. Peter Brown’s “The Wild Robot” is one such book.
A tender-hearted fable about a robot who washes ashore on a remote island and goes native, the 2016 middle-grade novel from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers has spawned two sequels and last year’s hit (and Oscar-nominated) adaptation from DreamWorks Animation, with book sales for the series topping 6.5 million worldwide. Brown has now created a picture book titled “The Wild Robot on the Island,” a gateway for those still too young to read the original work.
“This new book gave me a chance to create these big, colorful, detailed illustrations, while still maintaining the emotional tone of the novel,” says Brown, who is Zooming from the Maine home he shares with his wife and young son. “I’ve added some little moments that aren’t in the novel to give younger readers an introduction and when they’re ready, they can turn to the novel.”
“The Wild Robot on the Island” picture book is geared for a younger audience than Brown’s earlier children’s novels featuring Roz the robot and friends.
(Peter Brown / Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
The new book’s mostly-pictures-with-some-words approach is a return to Brown’s earlier work when he was creating charming fables for toddlers about our sometimes fraught, sometimes empathetic attitude toward nature. In 2009’s “The Curious Garden,” a boy encounters a patch of wildflowers and grass sprouting from an abandoned railway and decides to cultivate it into a garden, while 2013’s “Mr. Tiger Goes Wild” finds the title character longing to escape from the conventions of a world where animals no longer run free. This push and pull between wilderness and civilized life, or wildness versus timidity, has preoccupied Brown for the duration of his career, and it is what brought Brown to his robot.
“I was thinking about nature in unlikely places, and the relationships between natural and unnatural things,” says Brown, a New Jersey native who studied at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design. “And that led to the idea of a robot in a tree.” Brown drew a single picture of a robot standing on the branch of a giant pine tree, then put it aside while he produced other work. But the image wouldn’t let him go: “Every couple of months, I would think about that robot.”
Brown began researching robots and robotics, and slowly the story gestated in his mind. “Themes began to emerge,” says Brown. “Mainly, the idea of this robot becoming almost more wild and natural than a person could be. That was so fascinating to me that I wanted to let this thing breathe and see where it took me.”
Brown knew the involved narrative he had imagined wouldn’t work in picture book form; he needed to write his story as a novel, which would be new territory for him. “When I pitched the idea to my editor, she basically said, ‘Pump your brakes,’ ” says Brown. “If I was going to write, I had to include illustrations as well. The publisher thought it was a bit of a risk. They wanted pictures in order to sell it, because of what I had done in the past.”
(Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
Brown locked himself away out in the wilds of Maine, in a cabin with no Wi-Fi, and got down to it. “I was nervous, and my editor wasn’t sure, either,” says Brown, who cites Kurt Vonnegut as a literary influence. “I realized there was no other option but for me to do it. And once I got into it, I had a blast.”
Like all great fables, Brown’s story is deceptively simple. A cargo ship full of robots goes down in the middle of the ocean. Some of these robots, still packed in their boxes, wash ashore on a remote island. A family of otters opens one such box, which turns out to be Roz, Brown’s wild robot. As Roz explores this strange new world, she encounters angry bears, a loquacious squirrel and industrious beavers, who regard her as a malevolent force. But the robot’s confusion, and the animal’s hostility, soon dissolve into a mutual understanding. Roz is the reader’s proxy, an innocent who acclimates to the complex rhythms of the natural world. Eventually she is subsumed into this alien universe, a creature of nature who allows birds to roost on her chromium shoulder.
“Roz has been programmed to learn, but her creators, the men who built her, don’t expect her to learn in this particular way,” says Brown. “And so she uses that learning ability to mimic the animals’ behavior and learns how to communicate with them. Roz is the embodiment of the value of learning, and part of that is adapting, changing, growing.”
The story isn’t always a rosy fairy tale. There are predators on the island; animals are eaten for sustenance. Real life, in short, rears its ugly head. “It gets tricky. Life is complicated, right?”, says Brown. “But thanks to Roz’s influence, all the animals discover how they are all a part of this interconnected community.”
Roz adopts an abandoned gosling that she names Brightbill, and the man-made machine is now a mother, flooded with compassion for her young charge. Their relationship is the emotional core of Brown’s series. At a time when the world is grappling with the increasing presence of robotic technology in everyday life, Brown offers an alternative view: What if we can create robots that are capable of benevolence and empathy? Roz reminds us of our own humanity, our capacity to love and feel deeply. This is why “The Wild Robot” isn’t just a kid’s book. It is in fact one of the most insightful novels about our present techno-anxious moment, camouflaged as a children’s book.
The author kept his underlying fable intact in the new “Wild Robot” picture book.
(Peter Brown / Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
“Technology is a double-edged sword,” says Brown. “There’s obviously a lot of good that is happening, and will continue to happen, but in the wrong hands it can be dangerous.” He mentions Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling book “The Anxious Generation,” and Haidt’s prescriptions for restricting internet use among children, which Brown endorses. “I don’t have a lot of answers, but I just think we need to reinvest in our own humanity,” he says. “We have to make sure things are going in the right direction.”
In subsequent books, the outside world impinges on Roz’s idyll. “The Wild Robot Escapes” finds Roz navigating the dangers of urban life and humans with guns, while a toxic tide in “The Wild Robot Protects” leaves the animals scrambling for ever more scarce resources. None of this is pedantic, nor is it puffed up with moral outrage. Brown knows children can spot such flaws a mile away. Like all great adventure tales, Brown’s “Wild Robot” stories embrace the wild world in all of its splendor, without ever flinching away from it.
“In the books, I just wanted to acknowledge that the world is complicated, and that people we think are bad aren’t necessarily so,” says Brown, who is currently writing the fourth novel in the “Wild Robot” series. “Behind every bad action is a really complicated story, and I think kids can handle that. They want to be told the truth about things, they want to grapple with the tough parts of life.”
This Morning viewers were left unimpressed on Monday’s show as they slammed a segment involving two dogs dressed in Bridgerton outfits.
Viewers of This Morning were left outraged by a segment featured in Monday’s programme.
Upon resuming their presenting roles after a week off, Ben Shephard and Cat Deeley greeted two pooches on the ITV show, suitably dolled up as characters from the popular Netflix series Bridgerton.
The pair of pups had bagged accolades at the latest Greenwich dog show for their uncanny resemblance to the regency styles showcased in Best Bridgerton Lookalike category.
Lola, the winner, donned an elegant blue gown with a perched crown atop her wig—a sight to behold, with her owner making sure it stayed put.
Charlotte, the French Bulldog who nabbed second place, sported a blush pink frock coupled with a golden blonde wig, report Wales Online.
As the segment unfolded, Cat couldn’t contain her laughter over the costumes and extended her kudos, although the lighthearted atmosphere didn’t translate to the audience at home.
This Morning viewers reel ‘this is ridiculous’ as animal segment sparks fury
People on X, previously known as Twitter, promptly voiced their dismay, labelling the canine costuming as ‘cruel’.
One person criticized: “Poor dressed up dog must be so hot with all that crap on! If you want something to dress up, buy a doll! So cruel! Makes me so angry.”
Echoing the sentiment, another shared: “Sorry that dog is not happy! #thismorning.”
Additionally, a viewer suggested: “I’d suggest, if you have to hold the costume on the dog at all times, it’s probably time to stop.”
Viewers were not impressed with the segment on the show
Some animal lovers were left fuming after the segment, with one viewer tweeting: “ffs this is just ridiculous it’s animal cruelty that’s what it is…”
Another critic blasted: “This show is so twisted. Preaching one minute, the next showing this type of content. Perhaps get Dr Scott on at the same time!”
One concerned fan posted: “I hate seeing stuff like this encouraged on TV #ThisMorning” While another disgruntled viewer commented: “This is just ridiculous….. Just let you dogs be f****ng dogs and not an attempt to make you relevant.”
However, not everyone was opposed to the segment, with one amused viewer simply tweeting: “2 Victorian Dogs. Ah Ha.”
Greenwich’s annual dog show added a new category this year, Best Bridgerton Lookalike
During the chat with the owner, it emerged that Lola had attempted to remove her crown before going on air, with Cat observing: “She seems very happy! Both of them seem so happy.”
The owner agreed: “Yes, I think she’s alright now, she’s settled.”
Ben then raised the issue of animal welfare, asking: “There will be people asking, ‘Are the dogs happy?’ because dressing dogs up can sometimes get some criticism. Are they happy wearing the outfits? She seems pretty unbothered.”
Charlotte’s owner explained that her pet was accustomed to wearing clothes, saying: “She’s pretty used to wearing clothes in general; when we go out, I tend to dress her up and try to coordinate our outfits.”
This Morning continues weekdays on ITV from 12:30pm
Loretta Swit, the Emmy-winning actor best known for her time as Maj. Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan on the TV version of “M*A*S*H,” died Friday in her New York City apartment, her representative confirmed to The Times. She was 87.
Swit was found by her housekeeper around 10 a.m., according to publicist Harlan Boll, who said he had been on the phone with her at 11 p.m. local time Thursday night — 2 a.m. Friday in New York. Her doorman saw her drop something in the mail at 4 a.m. Friday, New York time, Boll said, and six hours later, she was gone.
The actor — born Loretta Jane Szwed on Nov. 4, 1937, in Passaic, N.J. — loved playing Hot Lips so much that she was the only performer other than Alan Alda who stayed on the series from its pilot in 1972 through its much-watched finale in 1983. “M*A*S*H,” set during the Korean War, was a sitcom but also more than that to Swit.
“There is, I think, an intelligence behind the humor,” she told The Times in 1977. “The audience is huge, and they deserve to be entertained on the highest level we can achieve.”
Though her portrayal of the libido-driven blond in fatigues and Army boots catapulted Swit to household-name status, she had been in acting since before her 8th birthday in stage productions and musicals in New York. She left home at 17 to work in the theater, temping at secretarial jobs while studying at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
A confessed workaholic, Swit moved easily from comedy to drama, acting in “Same Time, Next Year,” “Mame” and “The Odd Couple” before moving to Los Angeles to star in “M*A*S*H.” She appeared in iconic series such as “Hawaii Five-O,” “Mission: Impossible” and “Mannix,” and had a productive television career until very recently.
Her most recent TV appearance was as herself in the 2024 Fox tribute special “M*A*S*H: The Comedy That Changed Television.”
Her theater work was plentiful, and in addition to Broadway, off-Broadway, regional and national work, included shows in Southern California. She joined Harry Hamlin in “One November Yankee” at the NoHo Arts Center in 2012, three years after doing a reading of the play with a different actor at the Pasadena Playhouse.
“M*A*S*H” filmed its outdoor scenes at Malibu Creek State Park, where the set was re-created for fans’ enjoyment in 2008.
“It’s thrilling to be honored in this way,” Swit told The Times that year. “I think if I had to sum it up, what we’re most proud of is that we made everybody come together. And I think this will also bring people together.”
Swit was nominated for 10 Emmys for her Hot Lips role and won for supporting actress in a comedy, variety or music series in 1980 and 1982. She garnered four Golden Globe nominations for her work on “M*A*S*H,” in the lead and supporting actress categories, but did not win.
She was given a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame in 1989, near what is now the home of Amoeba Music.
An animal lover, Swit set up the SwitHeart Animal Alliance to prevent cruelty and end animal suffering. The alliance worked with numerous nonprofit organizations and programs to protect, rescue, train and care for animals and preserve their habitat, while raising public awareness about issues that concern domestic, farm, exotic, wild and native animals.
She created an art book, “SwitHeart: The Watercolour Artistry & Animal Activism of Loretta Swit,” which includes 65 of her full-color paintings and drawings and 22 of her photographs. Proceeds went to animal causes, and the 2016 Betty White Award from the group Actors and Others for Animals was but one of the many honors she received for her philanthropic work.
Former freelance writer T.L. Stanley contributed to this report.
Staycee Dains was about a month into her job overseeing the Los Angeles city animal shelters when an employee openly defied her.
Dains asked the employee to clean a kennel. Instead, the employee picked up a hose and sprayed a dog in the face, Dains said.
Dains thought the employee should be fired, but she said the city’s personnel department recommended five days of leave.
Mayor Karen Bass hired Dains in June 2023 after promising to make L.A. “a national model for animal welfare” by turning around its troubled shelters, where dogs may live in overcrowded and dirty kennels and volunteers have complained that animals sometimes don’t get food and water.
But in an interview with The Times, Dains said she felt powerless to solve entrenched problems that included severe understaffing and employees who mistreated or neglected animals.
She said she was repeatedly told by the personnel department, which functions like a human resources department at a private company, that she couldn’t fire problem employees. She also clashed with one of the unions that represents shelter employees.
At one point, Dains even reached out to L.A. County prosecutors for help.
“We need to tell the unfiltered, unvarnished truth about what is happening in the shelters,” Dains said.
In August, after a little more than a year as Animal Services general manager, Dains went on paid leave. A few days later, a top Bass advisor told Dains that her last day would be Nov. 30 and that she was free to resign before then.
Zach Seidl, a Bass spokesperson, pushed back on Dains’ accusations.
“Many of these characterizations are misleading and some are just plain inaccurate,” he said in an email.
Dains, in a series of interviews, said the city does not provide enough funding to meet the basic needs of the animals in its six shelters.
During Bass’ first year in office, amid critical reporting by The Times and others about conditions in the shelters, the mayor offered an 18% budget increase — far less than the 56% the Animal Services department had requested. The following fiscal year, her budget proposal slightly lowered the department’s funding.
Dains, who previously held top shelter jobs in San José and Long Beach, said her employees were desensitized to the suffering of the animals after witnessing it day after day. The understaffing was so bad that three people were responsible for 500 dogs: cleaning kennels, setting up adoptions and working with the medical team, she said.
“I couldn’t sleep knowing that animals were just in those hellholes suffering,” said Dains, who now works at a shelter system in Sacramento. “It was awful.”
Dains, who made about $273,000 a year in L.A., said she witnessed some of her employees “terrorizing” dogs by banging on their kennels, or spraying them with water to move them back. She told the employees to stop the behavior, but some said they had been trained to treat the dogs that way, she said.
To ensure that animals were fed and their enclosures cleaned, Dains suggested starting a schedule that tracked when each task was done. But a union representative worried that the information could be used to punish employees, Dains said.
Ultimately, Dains said, she dropped the proposal because of the opposition from the union, Laborers’ International Union of North America Local 300. A representative from the union declined to comment.
Dain said that personal entanglements and gossip among employees sometimes made it hard to hold them accountable.
Some supervisors had had sexual relationships with their subordinates, which led them to overlook the employees’ poor work performance, according to Dains. Others used the “dirt” they had on co-workers to protest when confronted about their own behavior, she said.
Dains said she suspected that some employees were sleeping during night shifts instead of cleaning cages or doing paperwork. She showed The Times a photo of dog beds arranged on the floor of a staff room like a “nest.”
She said she also witnessed employees watching videos on their phones, rather than working. Others ignored people who walked into the shelter looking to adopt a pet, she said. Some employees told her that colleagues failed to give food or water to cats and dogs.
At the same time, Dains said, other employees went “above and beyond constantly” to make up for those who didn’t pull their weight.
“There’s a significant portion of staff that just aren’t doing their jobs,” she said. “I saw this constantly.”
Dains put some of the blame on supervisors, who were “not requiring them to perform.”
When she tried to discipline supervisors, she faced pushback, she said.
After she put a supervisor on leave who was accused of bullying people, Laborers’ International Union of North America Local 300 filed a grievance against her, Dains said.
A spokesperson for the personnel department declined to comment.
At the same time, Dains acknowledged that she should have been tougher on some of the assistant general managers who reported directly to her. But she said she wanted to maintain working relationships with them.
It is a “tricky thing to do to start writing up executive-level managers that you are trying to work with,” she said.
A shelter employee, who requested anonymity because he didn’t have permission to talk to the media, agreed with Dains’ assessment.
“There’s no accountability, there’s no repercussions,” he said. “And the staff who do work have to work twice as hard.”
A report last year by Best Friends Animal Society, which highlighted the poor conditions in the shelters and suggested possible solutions, criticized Dains as the “biggest barrier” to improvement.
The shelters lacked written protocols, and the euthanasia policy “changed five times in the last year” without communication about the changes, the report said.
According to a Times analysis, the number of dogs euthanized at city shelters from January through September last year increased 72% compared with the same period the previous year. The number of dogs entering the shelters increased each year since 2022, but the number put to death far outpaced the population gain.
In the crowded conditions, animals started behaving poorly and suffered “mental and emotional breakdown,” according to the Best Friends report. That made them less likely to be adopted and more likely to be euthanized.
Dains, in her interview with The Times, defended her euthanasia decisions, arguing that it wasn’t safe for the animals, staff, volunteers or the public to “warehouse” dogs in kennels for months or years.
She said that there was no euthanasia policy when she arrived and that the department was creating one during her tenure.
Bass was Dains’ boss, but Dains’ main contact was Jacqueline Hamilton, deputy mayor of neighborhood services. Dains said she spoke often with Hamilton and told her about the personnel problems and other issues. But Hamilton didn’t offer any meaningful help and didn’t want her to publicize the poor conditions at the shelters, Dains said.
“I am not getting any movement or traction,” Dains told The Times, describing her work experience.
Seidl, the Bass spokesperson, said Dains “was given support to succeed, including assistance in communicating the status of the department to the public and decision makers.”
Dains said that shortly after she became general manager, she asked Deputy Dist. Atty. Kimberly Abourezk, who worked on animal cruelty cases, to send a letter to the mayor about poor conditions at the shelters.
Venusse D. Dunn, a spokesperson for the district attorney’s office, said Abourezk didn’t send the letter because she visited city animal shelters and didn’t find evidence of any crimes.
The office “is not in a position to tell another agency how to operate their facility,” Dunn said.
Annette Ramirez, a longtime Animal Services staffer, is now interim general manager. The “severe overcrowding crisis,” as the department described it in news release this month, continues.
SIERRA VALLEY, Calif. — Standing among his cattle in a broad green pasture, beneath a brilliant blue sky about an hour north of Lake Tahoe, rancher Dan Greenwood surveyed the idyllic landscape and called it what he feels it has become: a death trap.
Behind him, a 3-month-old calf that had been mauled by wolves the night before lay in the grass with deep wounds on its flanks. Two of its legs were so badly injured they could barely support the calf’s weight when it tried to stand. The animal’s agitated mother paced a few feet away.
Greenwood wrapped his hand around one of the calf’s ankles and gently rolled it onto its back to inspect the savage bite wounds.
The first wild wolf monitored by scientists via an electronic collar crossed from Oregon into California in 2011. Today, there are seven established packs in the Golden State.
(Malia Byrtus / California Wolf Project/UC Berkeley)
He was trying to decide whether to give the calf another day to see if it could recover enough to keep up with its mother — or put it out of its misery before the wolves returned to finish the job.
“If I can just walk up and grab him, then so can the wolf,” Greenwood said with a pained look on his face. “That’s not a challenge for them at all.”
What is a challenge in the rugged expanse of the Sierra Valley right now is keeping up with all the calls coming in from ranchers whose cattle have been mauled by wolves. Across the valley, which straddles Sierra and Plumas counties, there have been 30 confirmed wolf attacks since March, 18 of them fatal, said Sierra County Sheriff Mike Fisher.
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That doesn’t include a deer that was attacked in a subdivision just outside the small town of Loyalton as stunned residents looked on in disbelief, or the massive, frenzied elk that was chased onto a front porch in the middle of an April night and slaughtered by two wolves. A terrified 21-year-old stood on the other side of the front door, clutching a pistol and wondering if someone was trying to break in.
Once the “ruckus” died down enough for him to open the door and peek outside, Connor Kilmurray said, he saw “blood everywhere, it was smeared on the walls and the door. … It was definitely a massacre.”
When Fisher arrived to investigate, he was relieved that the desperate elk, which weighed hundreds of pounds, hadn’t crashed straight through the front door and into the living room with two snarling wolves on its heels.
Sierra County Sheriff Mike Fisher shows where wolves slaughtered an elk late at night on the front steps of a home in Loyalton.
“If it had just been a foot over, two feet over, that would have been quite an awakening,” Fisher said.
For ranchers, the solution to the growing problem in California’s rural northern counties seems obvious: They want to shoot the wolves preying on their cattle.
But while wolf populations are large enough that hunting them is allowed in much of the American West — in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming — they are still listed as an endangered species in California. Killing a wolf here is a crime punishable by a fine of up to $100,000 and up to a year in prison.
Local authorities say there have been 30 confirmed wolf attacks on cattle in the Sierra Valley since March, 18 of them fatal.
Whether Sierra Valley ranchers would face such consequences is another question. The wolf attacks feel so out of control, said Sierra County Dist. Atty. Sandra Groven, that she would not pursue charges against a rancher who kills a wolf caught preying on cattle.
Groven cautioned that she was not giving carte blanche to poachers to engage in “outrageous conduct,” or issuing a license for anyone to “go on a killing spree.” But given the frequency of wolf attacks in the valley recently, she said, she doesn’t see how she could bring charges against one of her neighbors for defending themselves or their property.
“Bottom line, I would not prosecute,” Groven said. “What are they supposed to do? Run up and wave their arms and say, ‘Go away’?”
The struggle between ranchers and wolves is as old as herding itself, and nobody interviewed for this article wanted to repeat the sins of the past: By the early 20th century, wolves in the United States had been hunted to near extinction. Only a small pack remained in northern Minnesota when then-President Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act in 1973 and wolves were added to a list of protected animals.
With their numbers still low two decades later, government biologists reintroduced wolves from Canada to central Idaho and Yellowstone National Park. In the years since, they have prospered and slowly migrated across the West.
“We feel like our hands are tied,” rancher Dan Greenwood says of his efforts to protect his cattle from wolves. “We’re exhausted, and there’s zero help.”
(Andy Barron / For The Times)
The first wild wolf monitored by scientists via an electronic collar crossed from Oregon into California in 2011. Today, there are seven established packs in the Golden State, with an estimated population of about 70 wild wolves.
State wildlife biologists and other conservationists excited at the prospect of a wolf comeback assumed the predators would target their natural prey, mostly deer and elk. But decades of logging and climate change have vastly altered the forests and terrain in much of Northern California, leaving deer and elk in short supply. Instead, many of the wolves have taken to hunting the lumbering, docile, domesticated cattle grazing in plain sight on wide-open pastures.
When that happens, ranchers say, it’s like someone coming into your store and stealing from the shelves. Nobody pretends cattle are pets — they’re bred and raised to be slaughtered. But no business can survive for long without some way to protect the merchandise.
To defend the livestock, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife promotes non-lethal “hazing” of the predators, which can include firing guns toward the sky, driving trucks and ATVs toward wolves to try to shoo them away and harassing them with noise from drones. But according to local ranchers, none of that seems to work, at least not for long.
And that has led to near rebellion in California’s northeastern counties, including Sierra, where local authorities have declared a state of emergency and are begging state officials for permission to more aggressively “remove” problem wolves.
The reason hazing doesn’t seem to work, according to ranchers, is that the wolves appear to have no fear of humans. And the cattle, which have gone generations without having to deal with these apex predators, seem to have forgotten how to defend themselves by sticking together in herds.
Turning such naive, docile cattle loose in sprawling pastures is a little like turning “me loose in downtown L.A.,” said Cameron Krebs, a fifth-generation rancher in eastern Oregon who has been dealing with aggressive wolves for years. “I might get hurt, might run into the wrong person, might get run over by a car, just because I don’t have the sense to look both ways,” he said with a laugh.
Krebs has become something of a hero in environmental circles for his dedication to finding non-lethal ways to co-exist with wolves, which boil down to making sure the animals in his herd stick together — the way wild buffalo and elk do — so it’s harder for wolves to single out and separate one of them.
But that takes a lot of time and manpower, and there are inevitably wolves that outwit even the most well-intentioned efforts. “At that point, you need to be able to shoot them,” Krebs said. “It’s just one of the tools in the toolbox.”
UC Davis researchers Tina Saitone, left, and Ken Tate mount a camera to capture wolf activity.
A camera attached to a fence port monitors wolf activity.
Back in the Sierra Valley, Greenwood said he saw his first wolf in 2018, from his living room window, standing over a calf it had just killed. “It was just taunting me,” Greenwood said in disbelief.
But things didn’t get really bad until 2022, when he lost nearly two dozen animals to the increasingly brazen wolves. Since then, he said, he has been fighting an exhausting, losing battle.
“I felt really, really bad as we were shipping cows in here in May,” Greenwood said, standing in an immense pasture on a portion of his ranch in nearby Red Clover Valley. “It’s beautiful up here; there’s plenty of grass growing. Everything’s right for them, except there’s wolves circling in the hills just waiting for those trucks to get here.”
He’s versed in the non-lethal techniques promoted by environmental advocates and embraced by the Department of Fish and Wildlife, but his shoulders slumped and his eyes searched the horizon as he explained how impractical they seem to him now.
“Profit margins are so, so thin,” he said, noting that some people seem to think all ranchers are as rich as Kevin Costner’s character on “Yellowstone.” But his reality is nothing like TV.
“It’s just me and another guy running 1,200 acres of irrigated hay and 600 cows,” Greenwood said. “I could maybe get all of these cows into a corral at night if I had six guys on horses helping me,” but there’s no money for that.
“We feel like our hands are tied. We’re exhausted, and there’s zero help,” Greenwood said.
UC Davis researcher Ken Tate points to wolf fur caught on a barbed-wire fence.
In 2021, the state set up a $3-million pilot project to reimburse ranchers for cattle lost to wolves and help pay for non-lethal deterrents, such as flags tied to electrified fences and lights affixed to fence posts.
But Greenwood said by the time he finished filling out all the paperwork for the cattle he lost in 2022, the state money had run out. “I still haven’t seen a dime,” he said.
Arthur Middleton, a professor of wildlife management working with UC Berkeley’s California Wolf Project, said he’s been taken aback by how bold the wolves are becoming in the Sierra Valley.
In April, while a TV news crew from Sacramento was filming an interview with the sheriff in a cattle pasture, two gray wolves appeared in the background stalking the livestock, Middleton recounted. The sight of them so close to the road in broad daylight, with a noisy news crew filming nearby, was like nothing he has witnessed in many years of working on wolf recovery.
“That just goes to show what an incredible challenge ranchers and wildlife managers have on their hands,” Middleton said.
For many Sierra Valley residents, the question is no longer whether problem wolves are going to be forcefully removed, it’s who is going to do it. Pissed-off ranchers? Or environmental professionals working with an eye to eliminate the most prolific cattle killers while preserving the rest of the pack?
There’s a joke circulating in the valley this spring: “Shoot, shovel and shut up,” Groven said. She added that she doesn’t think any of the ranchers have followed through on the implied threat, but said it would be hard to blame them if they did.
Fisher, the sheriff, said he would like the authority to shoot a wolf he believes poses a risk to human safety — like the pair that chased the elk onto someone’s front porch. But he thinks the Department of Fish and Wildlife should be responsible for “removing” wolves that habitually attack cattle.
“They’re very patient,” rancher Dan Greenwood says of using non-lethal methods to scare off wolves. “They just outlast you.”
Greenwood said he’s not advocating for the elimination of the wolves. He just wants to be able to protect his livestock.
He saw the wolves moving among his cattle the night the 3-month-old calf was mauled and another one was killed. Following the law, he kept his hands off his gun and revved up his ATV, chasing the predators more than a mile away, hoping that was far enough to keep the cattle safe.
It wasn’t. “They’re very patient,” Greenwood said. “They just outlast you.”
The 3-month-old calf? It died of its wounds before the wolves could return.
