Live data from Hacker News

Woman who never stopped updating her lost dog's chip reunites with him after 11y

cbc.ca

61–70 of 178 posts

Re: Woman who never stopped updating her lost dog's chip reunites with him after 11y

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hahaha definitely not a furry. I had some magnets implanted and was looking into other subtle body mods and thought an NFC chip would be fun. I bought the magnets and the chip from dangerousthings.com I went to a piercing shop to get it done by a guy who does silicone implants and other less common body modifications. It's not common. The only other people I've met with chips are the guy who implanted it and my girlf…

was this a couple decades ago or so? i remember reading a blog about someone who implanted a magnet in the tip of one of their fingers and then put a chip in the skin between the thumb and forefinger.

You might be thinking of a blog called Feeling Waves. https://feelingwaves.blogspot.com That's where I heard about it too. He had magnets custom coated in some sort of Teflon like material. I ordered some magnets from him in 2009 but then couldn't find anyone who would implant them. I was living in Fargo, ND at the time and had called a bunch of tattoo and piercing shops as far away as Omaha and nobody would do it.

A few years later and I was living in Tacoma. I found a guy in Seattle, John Durante, who does all kinds of body mods. So I got one of the Dangerous Things magnets implanted in my finger. I still had those magnets from the blogger, but John wasn't going to install mystery objects into a client haha and he already had some magnets on hand.

Maybe a year or 2 after that I had moved back to Fargo. Somehow I came across a guy, Ian Bell, out of St. Cloud, MN who also did some more extreme body boss. He implanted the NFC chip in my hand. Later on I had him implant a magnet in each ear, in the tragus. The idea with that was I could wear a coil necklace hooked up to an audio jack and I'd have implanted headphones. That didn't really work. The magnetic field is much to weak. It did work if I held the coil up to my ear, so that was a near trick, because the audio was audible from a few inches away. The magnets in my ears were stronger than the magnet in my finger, so I was able to hang paperclips off of them and that was a fun party trick. The ear magnets had to be removed after several months because the casing had cracked and the magnets were disintegrating, causing my ears to swell and hurt. I forgot what the magnets were coated in, but it was a different coating than the finger magnet; the finger magnet is still in there and fine today.

The magnet removal sucked and I was dumb about it. Only one bothered me at first so I left the other one in there. Well, the 2nd one started to bother me a bit later and by the time I was like ok I should get this taken out, the only person within 1400 miles who would do it was out of state. So I went to a walk in clinic and explained the situation and I'm pretty sure they thought I was crazy. They scheduled me for a surgery that was a couple of months out and I had a vacation to Australia coming up. I ordered some scalpels off Amazon and tried to DIY. I couldn't do it. I asked a friend, and she couldn't get it either. At this point my ear was swollen, discolored, and had some scalpel cuts. So I flew to Australia with a messed up ear. I tried to meet up with the owner of a piercing shop in Sydney who Ian had hooked me up with but he was in Perth while I was in Sydney. Suffered for the next month. Got back home. Ian cut it out.

I typed all this on a phone and I'm not going to proofread it. Sorry

Re: Woman who never stopped updating her lost dog's chip reunites with him after 11y

#62
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Please keep cats indoors - they kill all the local wildlife. I have a cat and it stays indoors exclusively.

This is a widely-cited myth, and almost impossible to measure in practice. What does "all the local wildlife" even mean? Is the threat here that birds are going to go extinct because of cats? Not likely, and the burden of proof is on the people repeating this mistaken belief. Using "think of the birds" as a justification for imprisoning your cat for their entire lives is also pretty crummy. It's called wildlife becau…

> Free-ranging cats on islands have caused or contributed to 33 (14%) of the modern bird, mammal and reptile extinctions recorded by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List [1]

Cats are probably a leading cause of mortality in birds. [2] Domestic cats are not native to North America. The birds here would not have evolved to avoid them (and beyond that, domestic cat numbers are not limited by prey availability because they're pets bred and fed by humans).

You'll find plenty of studies with evidence that domestic cats are probably bad for bird populations. [3][4]

But to be fair, buildings/glass windows kill a lot of birds too. [5]

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380

[2] https://www.fws.gov/library/collections/threats-birds#:~:tex...

[3] https://www.mdpi.com/1424-2818/13/7/322

[4] https://wildlife.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wsb.737

[5] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Re: Woman who never stopped updating her lost dog's chip reunites with him after 11y

#63
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are banned in Ontario, Canada for a good reason and banned in UK for the same reasons. The only time my dog was ever randomly attacked was a pitbull and you quickly learn talking to other dog owners how common this is. Nothing clears out a dog park like a pit bull showing up.

I suspect the reasons are (generously) keeping them out of the hands of people who would treat them poorly and perpetuate the stereotypes, or (less generously) ignorance and fear.

There are plenty of statistical studies out there that pit bulls specifically cause both a significant plurality of dog bites and significantly worse injuries than other dog breeds.

For example:

https://blog.dogsbite.org/2016/10/table-retrospective-level-...

https://www.dogsbite.org/dog-bite-statistics-studies-level-1...

Re: Woman who never stopped updating her lost dog's chip reunites with him after 11y

#64

> her beloved pit bull, Forty-Cal, had been missing for 11 years. > He's super docile and friendly. Always has been. Are pit bulls known for being docile?

Ingenuous question. You know they have a bad reputation.

The main problem with pit bulls, AIUI, is that they can be aggressive towards other dogs. Also, assholes buy them (due to their reputation) and then encourage aggressive behavior.

I've met some pit bulls owned by nice people and the dogs were super friendly and especially very tolerant of children.

Re: Woman who never stopped updating her lost dog's chip reunites with him after 11y

#65
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just what the owners tend to say after the dog has ripped some child apart. It's the "I didn't know it was loaded" defense.

The dumbest thing I’ve done in the last ten years was stick my hands in the mouth of a “docile and friendly” pitty to extract a screaming puppy. Only afterward did I realized I almost destroyed my livelihood. My partner Google stalked the owner and discovered that he’d been force to surrender another pit bull two years earlier.

The lucky ones learn about the finger in the butt and hind leg wheel barrow maneuvers before they have to use them.

Re: Woman who never stopped updating her lost dog's chip reunites with him after 11y

#67
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a widely-cited myth, and almost impossible to measure in practice. What does "all the local wildlife" even mean? Is the threat here that birds are going to go extinct because of cats? Not likely, and the burden of proof is on the people repeating this mistaken belief. Using "think of the birds" as a justification for imprisoning your cat for their entire lives is also pretty crummy. It's called wildlife becau…

> Free-ranging cats on islands have caused or contributed to 33 (14%) of the modern bird, mammal and reptile extinctions recorded by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List [1] Cats are probably a leading cause of mortality in birds. [2] Domestic cats are not native to North America. The birds here would not have evolved to avoid them (and beyond that, domestic cat numbers are not limited b…

Thank you for the well-sourced reply.

Suppose it's true that cats are bad for bird populations. The implication is that just because birds are dying, it's okay to snatch a cat. More than that, that cats should be imprisoned for their entire lives, when they naturally want to roam.

Someone can take one side of this ethical debate or the other, and both sides probably won't agree. I personally find it sad that people would place the well-being of birds above that of a wonderful, furry companion that clearly belongs to someone.

The logic also doesn't quite line up: I was hoping someone would try to justify why it's okay to kill flies but not birds, since that's the real counterargument to this one. Especially when they kill flies with their own hands.

So much of life boils down to "we're the apex species and we do what we want." But such is life. I find it difficult not to call out the absurdities when they appear, though.

To the topic at hand, how exactly is this quantified? I suspect that word "contributed" is doing a lot of work here. [2] seems to admit as much:

> True estimates of mortality are difficult to determine. However, recent studies have synthesized the best available data to estimated ranges of mortality to bird populations in North America from some of the most common, human-caused sources of bird mortality.

The numbers in [2] are admittedly pretty startling. But it looks like they come from one report labeled "2013a". Any info on where to find it, or what it even is? Otherwise it's easy to call [2] a citation when in fact no evidence whatsoever is being presente.

[4] is much better. https://wildlife.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wsb.737 But cats are still only a contributory factor, not the main cause; the report says they're the second leading cause of admissions, not the first. So, high, and worth thinking about.

But again, the cost here is "removing, by force, someone's beloved pet." I'm not above saying that we should probably care about cats more than birds, because of the emotional bonds they form with humans. After all, that's why we're fine with flies being killed, right? No emotional bonds.

Re: Woman who never stopped updating her lost dog's chip reunites with him after 11y

#68
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are banned in Ontario, Canada for a good reason and banned in UK for the same reasons. The only time my dog was ever randomly attacked was a pitbull and you quickly learn talking to other dog owners how common this is. Nothing clears out a dog park like a pit bull showing up.

I suspect the reasons are (generously) keeping them out of the hands of people who would treat them poorly and perpetuate the stereotypes, or (less generously) ignorance and fear.

How they're raised makes a big difference, but natural instinct is natural instinct. It's just like how chihuahuas were bred to be small, but pit bulls were bred to fight other dogs.

Re: Woman who never stopped updating her lost dog's chip reunites with him after 11y

#69
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are banned in Ontario, Canada for a good reason and banned in UK for the same reasons. The only time my dog was ever randomly attacked was a pitbull and you quickly learn talking to other dog owners how common this is. Nothing clears out a dog park like a pit bull showing up.

I suspect the reasons are (generously) keeping them out of the hands of people who would treat them poorly and perpetuate the stereotypes, or (less generously) ignorance and fear.

Maybe Pitbulls are bi-polar more often than other dogs.

Re: Woman who never stopped updating her lost dog's chip reunites with him after 11y

#70
post #38

was the dog a stray for 11 years? or just owned by someone? I'm not following what actually happened

I listened to the podcast linked in the article, and my understanding of the timeline is:

- The owner originally had two dogs. Both disappeared from her backyard one day. One dog returned home. The other vanished without a trace.

- Eleven years later, a random girl found the missing dog outside. She befriended the dog and brought him home. She talked with her parents and contacted ACCT Philly, who in turn found the original owner through a microchip.

Does this make sense? To me, this story managed to be a rare mix of heartwarming, insightful and frustrating.

Post reply on HN