Yes, you read that right.  There is now a dog that glows under UV light.  Her name is Tegon.

A research team from Seoul National University (SNU) said the genetically modified female beagle, named Tegon and born in 2009, has been found to glow fluorescent green under ultraviolet light if given a doxycycline antibiotic, the report said.

The researchers, who completed a two-year test, said the ability to glow can be turned on or off by adding a drug to the dog’s food.

Lovers of dog science will remember SNU from their controversial (yet ultimately confirmed) dog cloning breakthrough which resulted in the adorable Snuppy.

[Reuters]

Recently, a dog in Jerusalem got uppity and entered the courts and would not leave. This prompted some judges to remember that they had cursed a lawyer 20 years early to have his spirit enter a dog, because in traditional Judaism dogs are impure creatures. Naturally, they issued a verdict that the lawyer dog should be stoned to death. Luckily for the dog, it escaped before its sentence could be carried out.

“A Jewish rabbinical court condemned to death by stoning a stray dog it feared was the reincarnation of a lawyer who insulted its judges, reports say.

The dog entered the Jerusalem financial court several weeks ago and would not leave, reports Israeli website Ynet.

It reminded a judge of a curse passed on a now deceased secular lawyer about 20 years ago, when judges bid his spirit to enter the body of a dog.

The animal is said to have escaped before the sentence was carried out.”

[BBC]

“Members of Britain’s Special Air Service (SAS) special forces have begun parachuting into enemy strongholds in Afghanistan with Taliban-seeking German shepherds strapped to their chests.  Once on the ground, the dogs hunt for Taliban insurgents in buildings and — with cameras strapped to their heads sending back video — act as forward scouts for the British special forces unit.”

Cry havoc, indeed.

[Wired]

In a scene right out of The Wizard of Oz a dog survived a 20-mile flight through the air.

Strong winds in Gesztered, Hungary lifted the dog, who was seeking shelter from the storm in his dog house, high into the air. When the newly-renamed ‘Lucky’ was found by the combined efforts of the Red Cross and it’s owner it was shaken but otherwise unharmed.

Was this an accident with a happy ending, or are dogs just now catching up to the Wright Brothers?

[Digital Spy]

After travelling the colonized world in the dark cargo hold of British superstition, and eventually arriving in America only to be unpacked amidst the rabble and row of the antebellum South, black dog sightings began to taper off. Though Britain still has its fair share of them gnashing and panting their way through narrative fiction, most recently in children’s books by authors like J.K. Rowling and Neil Gaiman, the animals themselves, be they ghostly protectors or feral, storm-conjured assailants, seem to have faded in the wake of UFOs, lake monsters and yetis. But while these flesh and blood anomalies howl through people’s nightmares and rattle the windows of their dreams, the shadow of a black dog looms silently over the culture.

It was Winston Churchill who famously described his depression as “his black dog.” This analogy of oppressive emotional darkness to a ghostly, dynamic animal, restless and possessed of cold, raw strength, a sinewy beast that snarls, howls and collapses between states of dreadful kineticism and crushing inertness, has become an increasingly popular image for both sufferers and researchers of the disorder. An Internet search for “black dog depression” yields links to multiple books, organizations and blogs, some of which, most notably an American non-profit and an Australian institute, even employ the phrase “black dog” in their names or titles. Churchill’s eloquent repurposing of the legend reconstituted the beast as something more terrifying than an irritable ghost – the black inner lining of human desperation.

Meanwhile, various animal shelters and kennels are still trying to find ways to overcome what’s known as “black dog syndrome,” which is the term associated with the national dearth of black dog adoptions, leading, unfortunately, to a wealth of black dog euthanizations. Obviously, there are several non-supernatural factors that contribute to the problem, including potential adopters’ perception that black dogs are overly common and the very real issue that, due to their color, some darker animals do overheat more easily, but, when surveyed, dog owners have also expressed a real and enduring superstition linking black canines to misfortune and injury.

What began centuries ago as tales of foul, hungry beasts piloting giant forks of lightening down into churches has evolved into potent metaphor and residual superstition, creating something less striking, but far more solid, than the ethereal manifestations that once prowled the graveyards of England.

While many of North America’s early black dog tales come verbatim from those of Europe, centering around phantasmal hounds pacing Anglican graveyards, the story gained new cultural life in the wake of the civil war as white Southerners began reporting the appearance of strange, spectral canines, some of which were missing legs or heads, around various slave cemeteries.

It’s unclear as to when these reports began, but it seems fair to suggest that the sightings partially emerged out of burgeoning latent guilt at the concordant institutions of slavery and systemic racism in America. The guardian canines, then, represented a post-mortem sentry protecting the remains of disenfranchised people who had found freedom in death. It’s a nice explanation, but a bit too pat. The ragged, mutilated appearance of these spirits hints at an underlying ignorant fear that, just as whites have sleek, pure-bred animals watching their graves, the blacks must have ragged, mangy beasts guarding theirs.

Unlike European cemeteries, with their regimented lines of headstones and kempt vastness, slave cemeteries were usually small, out of the way and devoid of permanent grave markers. Many were started by white land owners who neither regarded the slaves as people nor wanted to lose valuable tracts of land to non-mercantile ritual. Even after slavery ended, and blacks were able to claim many of these burial grounds, the minimalist interment procedures continued. Rather than fetishize death, like Europeans did, through the construction of stone markers and statuary, many former slave families chose instead to craft markers from wood or local flora as a means of embracing the naturalness of death and the basic humanity, rather than socio-cultural personhood (which slaves weren’t granted anyway), of the deceased (many slave cemeteries also lack the formal grid structure of Western burial grounds, conserving space and allowing loved ones to be buried together in the same plot).

It’s reasonable to suggest that some dog sightings came out of this cultural difference, refracted through the lens of racism, which led some White visitors to interpret the floral grave markers not as memorials, but rather as hoodoo charms placed carefully by vengeful hands – dark folk magic, in the form of a ghoulish hound, protecting the sacred earth from disruption.

This variation on the black dog legend perfectly reflects the way in which folklore adapts to address perpetually changing cultural fears and concerns, legitimate or not.

Friday: Black dogs today

An eerie weather vane depicting a dog riding a bolt of lightning still stands atop the Suffolk church where, in 1577, an electrical storm propelled the specter of a black canine down into the holy sanctum. The apparition killed two praying supplicants and badly burned another before sublimating back into the amethyst sky and the roar of thunder.

From Hades’ babysitter Cerberus to the hound of the Baskervilles, dark canines have loyally heeled alongside European folklore and literature for centuries; the British Isles are uniquely overstocked with tales of sinister black dogs. Direct instruments of death, omens of misfortune and sentinels of the netherworld are among the most common vocations foist upon these ubiquitous ebon heck puppies (also called Hell Hounds or Grims), which are most often encountered during electrical storms or at places of transition – a dark silhouette at a crossroads, a black, starlit ghost in a cemetery or a pacing shadow, immune to moonlight, circling a hanging tree.

Dogs are natural scavengers with a heightened olfactory sense. Even in the wake of domestication, they are drawn to the blood and the meat of dead or dying animals, and pursue odors far too subtle for the human nose to detect. That this natural predilection toward, and ability to sense, the smell of the wounded and deceased – the very scent of death – could neither be trained nor bred out of them partially explains why they’ve historically been linked to supposed crossover spaces where the world of the living and the world of the dead bleed into each other like the soft-edged tendrils of colliding fog banks.

The idea of domestication itself, when paired with the already fevered imaginings of pre-enlightenment, Satan-phobic Western society, could have easily catalyzed tales devil dogs. When a blindly obedient animal can be taught to hone, focus and direct its strength, cunning and ferocity, it becomes an extension of its owner’s will. As man has always charged the devil and his minions with using man’s own free will, intellect and cunning against him, it’s no surprise that creatures like Cerberus and black dogs were imagined. After all, what’s more malevolent than co-opting the loyalty of man’s best friend and siccing the beast upon him?

The Britons’ nightmare of a loveable-mutt-turned-Beelzebub’s-PA proved indelible enough to survive the tumbling trek across the mighty Atlantic…

Wednesday: Black dogs and the American South