As if being stung by thousands of bees wasn’t already bad enough, he was abandoned at a shelter after the incident by his family.
The deaf Pit Bull, subsequently dubbed Stinger by rescuers, came at the shelter covered in life-threatening blisters all over his body.
As they couldn’t treat a dog in this bad of condition, they planned on euthanizing him.
That’s when Carri Shipaila, who operates LuvnPupz rescue in Greater Grand Rapids, MI, stepped in to help. As soon as she heardaout Stinger, she hopped in her car and drove nearly an hour to take him up from the shelter.
Regrettably, his family declined to take him, so she immediately began to work to save Stinger’s life. They treated his stings, as well as a subsequent skin infection and sarcoptic mange.
Unfortunately, he wound up having Pemphigus, an autoimmune illness, which he will suffer for the rest of his life.
Because of the costs of his care, he will never be up for adoption, but he did find a loving forever home with a foster and will continue to receive care and therapy from LuvnPupz.
Stinger has come such a long way from when he first was dumped at the shelter. His painful blisters have finally healed and he has a gorgeous white coat.
He is such a lively, loving dog and is enjoying his new life in a loving home!
Dogs actually do respond better when their owners use cute ‘baby talk’, study finds
Dogs’ brains are sensitive to the familiar high-pitched “cute” voice tone that adult humans, especially women, use to talk to babies, according to a new study.
The research, published recently in the journal Communications Biology, found “exciting similarities” between infant and dog brains during the processing of speech with such a high-pitched tone feature.
Humans tend to speak with a specific speech style characterised by exaggerated prosody, or patterns of stress and intonation in a language, when communicating with individuals having limited language competence.
Such speech has previously been found to be very important for the healthy cognitive, social and language development of children, who are also tuned to such a high-pitched voice.
But researchers, including those from the Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, hoped to assess whether dog brains are also sensitive to this way of communication.
In the study, conscious family dogs were made to listen to dog, infant and adult-directed speech recorded from 12 women and men in real-life interactions.
As the dogs listened, their brain activities were measured using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan.
The study found the sound-processing regions of the dogs’ brains responded more to dog- and infant-directed than adult-directed speech.
This marked the first neurological evidence that dog brains are tuned to speech directed specifically at them.
“Studying how dog brains process dog-directed speech is exciting, because it can help us understand how exaggerated prosody contributes to efficient speech processing in a nonhuman species skilled at relying on different speech cues,” explained Anna Gergely, co-first author of the study.
Scientists also found dog- and infant-directed speech sensitivity of dog brains was more pronounced when the speakers were women, and was affected by voice pitch and its variation.
These findings suggest the way we speak to dogs matters, and that their brain is specifically sensitive to the higher-pitched voice tone typical to the female voice.
“Remarkably, the voice tone patterns characterizing women’s dog-directed speech are not typically used in dog-dog communication – our results may thus serve evidence for a neural preference that dogs developed during their domestication,” said Anna Gábor, co-first author of the study.
“Dog brains’ increased sensitivity to dog-directed speech spoken by women specifically may be due to the fact that women more often speak to dogs with exaggerated prosody than men,” Dr Gabor said.
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