Talking Animals Duncan Strauss

Dara Eckart–CEO of Friends of Strays, St. Petersburg’s oldest no-kill animal shelter, currently undergoing a significant transformation, including opening a cats-only adoption center, The Cat Box on July 1—outlines the shelter’s history, citing key milestones of the early years. Eckart explains that Friends of Strays began in 1978, when co-founder Jean Bomonti, who’d been volunteering at a shelter, became increasingly displeased by the sheer number of stray cats brought into that shelter, and how they were treated, including not-infrequently being euthanized. It’s fitting that Bomonti and her initial Friends of Strays friends traveled around St. Pete, rescuing stray cats, aiming to find homes for them, within a no-kill operation…when, 45-plus years later, the shelter is unveiling a new, free-standing building (bright-green, no less!), The Cat Box, entirely devoted to cat adoptions. Eckart recalls arriving at Friends of Strays some seven and a half years ago, and while not given a mandate, exactly, she says there had  clearly been a leadership void that she was expected to fill. Too, an expectation to run Friends of Strays as an business (Eckart had a  tech/business background, while no animal welfare/rescue experience.) She goes on to recount changes she implemented, which yielded bigger and better budgets—and what those things yielded, including the resources to hire an in-house veterinarian (at first, just one day per week, eventually full-time), and a director of development. A more polished, professional operation has other virtues, including attracting significant philanthropic gifts. For example, Eckart notes that The Cat Box represents the first of three phases of what will constitute the Schwartz Family Adoption Campus, while phase two focuses on the creation of the dog-only adoption facility, the Milkey Bone Dog House, as in the Milkey Family Foundation. And so on. (https://www.friendsofstrays.org/, https://www.facebook.com/FriendsofStraysAnimalShelter, https://www.instagram.com/friendsofstrays)
COMEDY CORNER: A special edition of the Comedy Corner today, in recognition of Friends of Strays’ new cat adoptions center, The Cat Box, I played Todd Barry’s recent “Tonight Show” set, which consisted of all cat material: “Pet Cats” (https://www.toddbarry.com/)
MUSIC: Rebekah Pulley’s “Talking Animals Theme,” instrumentals
NAME THAT ANIMAL TUNE:  We didn’t play “Name That Animal Tune” today.
 
AUDIO ARCHIVE:
Listen Online Now: https://talkinganimals.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/TAJune26Final.mp3 | Open Player in New Window

This was a truly distinctive edition of “Talking Animals”: For starters, the show was part of WMNF’s full day of special programming devoted to celebrating Juneteenth. Second, my two (in-studio!) guests were both stellar, veteran WMNF programmers: Harrison Nash, the universally-beloved DJ, in his 36th year at MNF, currently the host of “It’s The Music, Tuesday.” And Glen Hatchell, who spent 17 years at WMNF before leaving to fully pursue his passion for dogs, learning everything he could about training canines and their behavior. These efforts led to a job as the Behavior and Enrichment Manager at the Humane Society of Tampa Bay, as well as stints every 3-4 months on “Talking Animals,” presenting the show-length feature, “Ask The Trainer,” in which listeners are invited to call or email questions about their dogs or cats, particularly involving behavioral issues or training. Another trait that distinguished today’s show: It marked the 10th installment of “Ask The Trainer,” which we’ll summarize in a moment. We asked Harrison about his background and he briefly outlined his history at WMNF, having hosted shows that mainly featured the blues (usually including some zydeco) to the inherently more eclectic format of “It’s The Music.” Naturally, we also dedicated some time to discussing Juneteenth, including the history and growing recognition of the holiday. In response to my admittedly-difficult-to-answer-question, Harrison rattles off some of his favorite music artists. As for this 10th edition of “Ask The Trainer,” the session began with someone who wrote in to Glen about their dog Cooper, a 4 ½ year old, female Lab/Brittany Spaniel mix, who won’t walk on a leash—”she pulls the second you start a walk.” The writer had tried a variety of solutions: assorted specialty leashes, stopping as soon as Cooper pulled, treats, etc.—all to no avail…Other questions for Glen included one about a dog who loved to eat Hibiscus flowers—and another pooch, Arrow, who loves to eat poop—the Golden Doodle named Louis who has the not-uncommon habit of jumping on people he doesn’t know, even a query about Florida’s latest bear legislation, seeking to loosen the criteria for when it’s permissible to shoot the animals…Glen also noted that he recently retired from the Humane Society of Tampa Bay, and is now on something of a sabbatical, pondering his next professional move, hinting it will likely involve multiple species.
COMEDY CORNER: There was no Comedy Corner today.
MUSIC: Rebekah Pulley’s “Talking Animals Theme, Aretha Franklin (ft. The Boys Choir of Harlem), “Never Gonna Break My Faith, Nina Simone’s “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,”  instrumentals
NAME THAT ANIMAL TUNE:  We didn’t play “Name That Animal Tune” today.
AUDIO ARCHIVE:
Listen Online Now: https://talkinganimals.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/TAJune19FinalVersion.mp3 | Open Player in New Window

Dr. Eleanor Spicer Rice–an entomologist by training who’s appeared on the show multiple times, discussing ants, spiders, homing pigeons, and microbes (often tied to a book she’s written on the topic)—acknowledges that writing for young readers has officially become a trend for her, primarily discussing her second, just-published book in this series, while also briefly previewing the third. To fully clarify, the current book is “Your Pets’ Secret Lives: The Truth Behind Your Pets’ Wildest Behaviors,” its successor (due May 2025) will be “Undercover Conversations.” The initial book in this triad was “Unseen Jungle: The Microbes That Secretly Control Our Lives,” as with the new release, illustrated by Rob Wilson, an acclaimed artist with a beguiling style. Spicer Rice recalls the research she undertook for the new book, the joy she found in doing this research, and the kinds of findings she felt inclined to omit, which skewed towards mating behaviors. She also mentioned that she did not start preparatory work on the book already having a pet (or a pet secret life) in mind that she wanted to include. She allows that one virtue of writing for younger readers is they don’t typically require the extensive explanation of a given topic that she feels bound to provide when penning pieces and books primarily for an adult audience. But, I observe (as I did in our previous interview) that part of her books’ excellence is that—like the best films, literature, and animation—they operate successfully on both levels, for both vintages of readers. We delve into some of the surprising, sometimes revelatory tidbits Spicer Rice imparts in her breezy, conversational text, starting with the way numerous animals use the magnetic field to guide their movements and behavior, including how dogs align themselves using it to do their business. While still touching on canine concerns, we address the so-called dog “guilt face,” with animal behavior researcher Julie Hecht (whom Spicer Rice briefly interviews in the book) helping resolve the long-simmering debate over whether, when you get home and walk in on a scene of destruction or monumental mess, your dog looks guilty…is the dog feeling guilty? To find out, read the book! [Illustrations above by Rob Wilson]
 
ALSO: I spoke briefly with Forest Hecker, a community educator who’ll be teaching a class called “Florida-Friendly Landscaping ™ for Wildlife and Pollinators,” on June 27, in Sarasota. Hecker explains what constitutes the hallmarks of Florida-Friendly Landscaping ™–which include shying away from the use of pesticides and plants that require large amounts of water. Clearly, more than that, those who enroll are likely to learn how to attract birds, bees, butterflies and other small animals to their landscapes, and just generally how to go about designing a beautiful wildlife garden. Class details: Thursday, June 27, 9-10am ET,  at Twin Lakes Park 6700 Clark Road Sarasota, FL 34241. You can register for this class at ufsarasotaext.eventbrite.com or you can just show up–the class is free. After class, you’ll be offered a tour of the pollinator garden at Twin Lakes Park.
COMEDY CORNER: Kevin Nealon’s “Cows On The Roof” (https://kevinnealon.com)
MUSIC: Rebekah Pulley’s “Talking Animals Theme,” instrumentals
NAME THAT ANIMAL TUNE:  We didn’t play “Name That Animal Tune” today.
AUDIO ARCHIVE:
Listen Online Now: https://talkinganimals.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/TAJune12Final.mp3 | Open Player in New Window

Rhonda Eldridge–Executive Director of The Community Pet Project, which provides pet food and several other resources to homeless and at-risk communities throughout Hillsborough County—discusses the organization’s origin story, beginning in 2017 as an offshoot of a local rescue, before peeling off as a separate entity with 501c3 nonprofit status. The Community Pet Project was launched as, and remains, an all-volunteer operation. No one, including Eldridge, accepts any compensation, in order to direct all available monies to carrying out their mission. As for how that mission was conceived, Eldridge explains that at the outset of their efforts, it became clear that a sizable contingent of their homeless constituency not only owned pets, but maintained an unwavering attachment to them. Eldridge slips into an impassioned scene, responding to what’s clearly a composite character of snooty, insensitive folks who criticize the allocation of resources to homeless people with pets. Indeed, she describes how simple it can actually be for them to provide pet food to someone who is currently without housing, suggesting The Community Pet Project is highly flexible and accommodating, fully willing to deliver the food to, say, a park or a street corner. Eldridge outlines the programs and services The Community Pet Project now offers, including its Food Bank, Veterinary Financial Assistance, Fleece for the Furbabies, Warrior Cats of Hillsborough, and the newly-unveiled Save The Paw Paws (which provides booties to the to the dogs of the homeless, to protect their paws amidst blazing temperatures) She explains The Community Pet Project welcomes donations—whether monetary, food, other items—through its website or social media pages: http://www.communitypetproject.org/, https://www.facebook.com/communitypetproject, https://www.instagram.com/communitypetproject/

ALSO: I spoke briefly with Chef Mark Reinfeld, the award-winning vegan chef, educator, author, and guest on the show many times over the years. Today’s appearance was spurred by Reinfeld’s announcement that he’ll be teaching in-person cooking classes for the first time in many a moon—the pause owing, chiefly, to the pandemic, Reinfeld explained. It’s important to note these classes will be held in Boulder, Colorado, while also mentioning that other new courses he’s offering continue to be available via Zoom—namely, the 4-Week Vegan Cooking Immersion, a workshop starting August 19 that Reinfeld describes as “a deep dive in the main vegan and raw food culinary techniques….” Elaborating on the $1000 scholarship he’ll provide, on a need basis, for someone enrolling in the August workshop, he added that he will also discount the registration fee for those who mention Duncan Strauss/Talking Animals. Reinfeld also spelled out plans underway to put past cooking classes, workshops, and other content online, allowing visitors that head to a revamped website (for the Vegan Fusion Institute) to access that wealth of instruction and information. (https://www.chefmarkreinfeld.com)
 
COMEDY CORNER: Joe Zimmerman’s “Pet Snakes”  (Pt. 1/DS edit) (http://www.zimmermancomedy.com/)
MUSIC: Rebekah Pulley’s “Talking Animals Theme,” instrumentals
NAME THAT ANIMAL TUNE:  We didn’t play “Name That Animal Tune” today.
AUDIO ARCHIVE:
Listen Online Now: https://talkinganimals.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/TAJune5Final.mp3 | Open Player in New Window

Melissa Hoppert–a horse-racing writer for The New York Times, and one of two reporter-producers (with Times colleague Joe Drape) featured onscreen in the new horse-racing documentary, “Broken Horses,” a New York Times/FX production streaming on Hulu—recalls becoming enchanted with the horse racing realm as a young girl, after an uncle married into a horse breeding family, and she saw her first race.This spurred a discussion of how the horse racing world is propelled by multiple cultures, including, at the micro level, families who routinely visit one or more tracks, observe other rituals—often regarding clothing, food or drink—kids learn to read The Racing Form, and so on. These children pass all this along to their children. Over the course of generations, these family cultures seem to feed into—and help shape, really—the horse racing culture. Not coincidentally, a number of the talking heads featured in “Broken Horses” are members of multi-generational horse racing families. They tend to express concern about the sport’s darker trends—like “the rise of the super trainer,” as epitomized by Bob Baffert—that appear to have yielded more illicit drug use, and more clusters of horse deaths. Hoppert reflects on Baffert, a polarizing figure, who (as she points out in the film) has generated nearly $350 million in earnings, has trained the Triple Crown winners American Pharoh and Justify—among many notable victories—yet is currently suspended at Churchill Downs, chiefly owing to his horse Medina Spirit failing a drug test at the 2021 Kentucky Derby. She adds her thoughts on Churchill Downs extending the suspension, miffed that Baffert was sidestepping responsibility for the transgression, saying in an interview that he wouldn’t do anything differently. I asked her if she viewed Baffert as plus or minus for horse racing. Her answer: “both.” Hoppert articulates the contrasting viewpoints in the industry about implementing reformations—a bit of a culture clash—with tremendous amounts of money at stake, an evolution away from just big purses (which themselves have increased dramatically, the film states), to not only bigger payoffs for horse sales, but also lotto-like jackpots in the breeding market. She shares her optimism for the gradual efficacy of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA), a relatively new private organization that regulates the sport of Thoroughbred horse racing through the implementation of “a national, uniform set of integrity and safety rules that are applied consistently to every Thoroughbred racing participant and racetrack facility.” (https://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/new-york-times-presents) (Hoppert Photo Courtesy of The New York Times; Horse Photos Courtesy of FX Networks)
ALSO: I spoke briefly with Kelly Harris, owner of Goat Yoga Tampa about the class they were offering at Cigar City Brewing on Saturday, May 25. It’s not just a session of morning yoga, but—as the name suggests–one in which goats will jump around, interact & play during the class. Harris provides some brief history, both of goat yoga overall (founded in 2017, in Oregon), and Goat Yoga Tampa, noting that their 6 goats are pets who live with Harris and her family. She notes that goat yoga classes tend to be marked by natural goat behaviors, like jumping, which she explains is a natural movement as a prey animal, often exhibited in the classes when the yogis assume certain positions. Harris also points out a distinctive perk of their goat yoga classes: yogis get a cold one—a free beer—afterwards. They often have one or two classes scheduled, at various location—check their website or social media pages. (https://goatyogatampa.com/, https://www.facebook.com/goatyogatampa/, https://www.instagram.com/goatyogatampa/)
COMEDY CORNER: John Mulaney’s “A Horse In A Hospital”  **from a panel appearance on “Colbert” (https://www.johnmulaney.com/)
MUSIC: Rebekah [...]

Anton Ptushkin–director of the PBS Nature documentary profiling the efforts of Ukrainian citizens to rescue animals amidst the destruction of the war—describes the sort of travel pieces he produced as a YouTuber, before he morphed into a war correspondent. Ptushkin notes that this transformation wasn’t the product of a specific ambition, but rather, reflected an inevitable need he and his colleagues felt to cover the conflict unfolding across the country. Similarly, he says, the decision to make “Saving the Animals of Ukraine” was born of a desire to chronicle the war’s wreckage by telling the stories of these efforts to extricate an array of animals literally from harm’s way…and the potent parallel here between animals and people. Ptushkin first cites the story of Patron, a Jack Russell Terrier who becomes a bomb-sniffing dog, so effective at this work—at saving countless lives—that he was honored by UNICEF, named a UNICEF Ukraine official AmbassaDog. (I point out that–for those, like me, who are concerned about the risks for dogs deployed to locate mines—it was comforting to learn that Patron weighs too little to trigger an explosion.) Throughout “Saving the Animals of Ukraine,” Ptushkin tells a string of inspiring and compelling stories, some of which he shares in our conversation. Patron was one. Another was Shafa, the cat with “a mean face,” who was spotted in the bombed-out ruins of the seventh floor apartment where he’d been stranded for 60 days, with no food or water. In our chat, Ptushkin calls attention to the important detail that Shafa is 13-years-old. As depicted in the film, Shafa not only survived, but eventually became a social media star. And the Shafa saga clearly struck a chord, eliciting a big string of financial donations from people affected by Shafa—as a symbol of the war—and wanted to do something. Along the way, as the film (and conversation) unspools, we meet (and address) other notable animals, including: Bretzel, a lion who’d been confined to a very small enclosure near the front lines, so the shelling  was particularly traumatizing—he clearly has PTSD, mitigated by being relocated to a sanctuary in Spain; Dimitry Revnyuk, founder of the animal rescue organization Zoopatrul/Zoopatrol, is shown innovating methods to feed abandoned pets in locked apartments, and later, with some of the donations that have poured in, he constructs a shelter. (pbs.org/nature, facebook.com/PBSNature, instagram.com/pbsnature; youtube.com/naturepbs, tiktok.com/@pbsnature) [Photos by Anton Ptushkin]
ALSO: I played back the interview I’d recorded the previous day with Largo Police Sgt. Haley Sequiera. She’s the handler of Pension, the Department’s first therapy dog, brought in with the intention of providing comfort to Largo Police employees and to reduce the anxiety of crime victims. Sequiera recounts how she researched and otherwise undertook the preparations for implementing the department’s inaugural therapy dog program. She described Pension–a one-year-old rescue, a “mix”—and the thorough training the dog underwent, followed by the extensive extensive training Sequiera and Pension went through as a team, in preparation for this new assignment. Sequiera gives an account of how she and Pension—now officially deployed—spend their days. [Photo Courtesy of Largo Police Department]
COMEDY CORNER: Jim Gaffigan’s “A Good Dad/I Rescued A Dog” (https://jimgaffigan.com)
MUSIC: Rebekah Pulley’s “Talking Animals Theme,” instrumentals
NAME THAT ANIMAL TUNE:  We didn’t play “Name That Animal Tune” today.
AUDIO ARCHIVE:
Listen Online Now: https://talkinganimals.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/TAMay15Final.mp3 | Open Player in New Window