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Heart-breaking pictures emerged of the moment that a giraffe said goodbye to a terminally ill zoo worker, who’d spent most of his adult life cleaning the animal’s enclosures. Zoo maintenance worker Mario had terminal cancer; he asked to go for one last time to the giraffe enclosure at Rotterdam’s Diergaarde Blijdorp Zoo. Attendants wheeled the 54-year-old into the enclosure on his hospital bed. Within minutes, the giraffes approached him and began to nuzzle and kiss him. The Ambulance Wish Foundation, which transported Mario to the zoo, said that Mario has little mobility and finds speaking very difficult, saying, “However, his face spoke volumes”. Kees Veldboer, the founder of the AWF told Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, “These animals recognised him, and felt that (things aren’t) going well with him. (It was) a very special moment. You saw him beaming”. Mario, who has a mental disability, also said goodbye to his colleagues at the zoo, where he worked for almost 25 years. The AWF relies on 200 volunteers to help make the last wishes of terminally ill patients come true by transporting them in specially designed ambulances.
Various studies suggested that animals could sense illness in humans, including diseases with no visible symptoms. Marine, a Labrador retriever, was successfully trained in 2011 to detect people suffering with bowel cancer. Sniffer dogs also proved successful in identifying patients with lung cancer. A 2007 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that a cat could identify people who were dying of a terminal illness at a nursing home. Oscar the cat appeared to “predict” a patient’s death by sitting next to their bed and keeping a vigil there until they died, which was usually a few hours later. Researchers noted that if someone forced him out of the patient’s room, he’d become distressed and would continue to meow outside the door, researchers noted. Oscar presided over the death of 25 residents during his time at the home. Physicians and nursing home staff viewed his presence at the bedside of a patient as an almost absolute indicator of impending death, allowing staff members to tell families in time.
21 March 2014
Heather Saul
The Independent (UK)
Voices from Russia 
19 March 2017. Russian Sappers Enroute to Palmyra to Demine the City
Tags: Animal, Animal training, animals, Battle of Aleppo (Syrian Civil War), Dog, dogs, engineers (military), K-9 dogs, military, military animals, military dogs, Palmyra, patriotic, patriotism, political commentary, politics, Russia, Russian, Russian Army, sappers, Syria, Syrian Civil War, trained animals, war and conflict
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Here’s a Russian sapper preparing to embark for Syria, to demine liberated Palmyra. He’s got his canine friend along to help him! Russian sappers, alongside their Syrian, Iranian, and Hizbullah counterparts, have already demined much of liberated Free Aleppo. They’ll do the same in Palmyra… yes, these guys are on guard for peace, too… keeping the world safe from the likes of McCain and Clinton.
One last thing… these guys are going to Syria with the full blessing of the Syrian government. The Americans going there didn’t ask permission of Syria… that makes them aggressors and invaders. Wouldn’t that make the American Establishment (both Republican and Democratic) eligible for a “war crimes trial?” Perspirin’ minds wanna know…
BMD