truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

To get her reluctant terrier "Missy" to eat dog food, Elaine Larabie decided to be a role model and eat some herself, after which, Missy indeed began nibbling at it. The next day, both Larabie and Missy were in Ottawa, Ontario, hospitals, vomiting and foaming at the mouth. The incident occurred in March, during the first days of the alert over rat-poison-laced pet food, and doctors suspected that as the culprit, but no definitive conclusion was reported in the press, and both Larabie and Missy recovered.

To get her reluctant terrier "Missy" to eat dog food, Elaine Larabie decided to be a role model and eat some, herself, after which, Missy indeed began nibbling at it. The next day, both Larabie and Missy were in Ottawa, Ontario, hospitals, vomiting and foaming at the mouth. The incident occurred in March 2007, during the first days of the alert over rat-poison-laced pet food, and doctors suspected that as the culprit, but no definitive conclusion was reported in the press, and the Larabie and Missy recovered.

And in March, New York's Long Island Veterinary Specialists performed complicated hip-replacement surgery on a 1-year-old shorthaired cat, using a material about the width of a wooden matchstick. Oreo was discovered wedged in the crawl space of a house. (Dogs receive hip replacements almost routinely now, but cats were thought to be too small.)

The name dog breeders apparently give to the increasingly common crossbreed of a shih tzu with a bulldog (according to a March story in London's Guardian): bullshih.

Spain has long been criticized for its traditions of animal abuse, such as bullfighting and, until recently, one village's festive custom of tossing a live goat from a church tower. German animal welfare activists complained in March about another Spanish "sport": the flinging of live quail into the air (from a catapult) so that hunters can shoot them. (Germany also has its ugliness, according to a March Der Spiegel report, with certain villages' customs of clubbing a hung-up goose and poking a cat with a broomstick through a hole in a crate.)

American researchers in West Africa believe they've found the first instance of an animal (other than humans) building a multi-step weapon, after observing wild chimpanzees grab sticks from 1 to 4 feet long, sharpen the ends with their teeth, and murderously jab them into deep tree hollows where delicious bush babies may be nesting. Writing in the journal Current Biology, the team even reported observing the chimps tasting the tips after the stabs, to ascertain whether they had actually located a prey. (One of the researchers said the ferocity of the jabbing reminded her of the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho.")