Nominate Cats, Dogs and People for the Annual Humane Awards
March 3, 2009 by Peggy Rowland
Filed under Pets
Animals can be heroes too. The love in their hearts is often surprising. People who help animals are also very inspiring to many of us.
ASPCA recognizes these exceptional animals and people with annual Humane Awards.
Do you know a dog or cat who has performed a heroic act in the the last year? If so, nominate for ASPCA Dog of the Year or ASPCA Cat of the Year! The winning feline last year was a guide cat for a blind dog. The winning canine helped a young boy dealing with cerebral palsy.
Perhaps you know a kid under 14 who helped animals in some way. Then nominate for ASPCA “Tommy P. Monahan” Kid of the Year. The 2008 winner was a 12-year-old girl who launched an online site to help provide food to shelter dogs and cats.
Maybe you admire a member of the municipal police force, a firefighter, or other public service officer who went beyond the call of duty to help an animal. Please nominate that person for the ASPCA Public Service Award. Last year’s winner was a firefighter who saved an injured bear cub from a wildfire.
Other nominations are accepted in areas that don’t fit the above categories.
The nomination form at www.aspca.org/nominate will go live on April 1, so you have time to think about it. Deadline is Wednesday, July 15. Winners will be honored at the Humane Awards Luncheon in October in New York City.
(Images via stock.xchng)
I am actually planning out a photojournalist project called Animals and Humans:Saving Each Other.
If you have an amazing story of a human saving an animal or an animal saving a human or know someone that has a story I would love to document it in words and photographs.
Email me at info@gasparphotography.com
Here is my idea.
My dream project would be to create a photojournalistic document of animals that have saved human lives, as well as humans that have risked their own lives to save animals.
We have all heard stories of a dog waking their owner during a fire, but I want to show you the rare and unique ways in which we and other animals save each other – for instance the pig that saved her owner. The Daily Telegraph reported, “A pet piglet called Pru was praised by her owner after dragging her free from a muddy bog ” The owner said, “I was panicking when I was stuck in the bog. I did not know what to do and I think Pru sensed that. I had a rope with me that I use as a dog lead and I put it around her. I was shouting ‘Go home, go home’ and she walked forward, slowly pulling me out of the mud.”
Animals have also been known to sense disease in humans. Dogs have an amazing sense of smell and are believed to be able to smell cancer and even sense seizures before they occur in epileptic patients.
In capturing this relationship, I also would like to document humans that put their lives at risk to save animals. Even people that have no special bond with these creatures sometimes risk their lives to save them – like when the NY Times reported a story many years ago of a bridge engineer that one night saw a brown bag thrown from a car into dark waters, only to have a cat emerge from it. The cat fought her way up bridge cables but became exhausted partway up, and that is when the engineer risked his own life scaling down the steel and cables, until he was able to reach her. Then, exhausted himself, he made the torturous climb back up. He kept and named her Neptune.
This would be a dream project for me.
I care about animals so much so that I have been a vegetarian for many years. I would love to find and bring these stories to life, to educate and enlighten so that we can see how amazing animals really are and that they deserve the respect of humans for all that they do.
My goal would be to turn these stories and many more into a book to share with all.