In our diverse world, individuals from both the human and animal kingdom can be born with unforeseen physical abnormalities. While some are greeted with open arms and acceptance, others are subjected to unfavorable treatment and exclusion due to their distinctive traits. An exceptional puppy named Skipper, with six legs and two tails, had to overcome numerous obstacles as she was abandoned by her mother.
Meet Skipper, a delightful crossbreed of Australian Shepherd and Border Collie. She was born on February 16 in Oklahoma alongside eight other siblings, but her situation was far from typical. Unlike her healthy brothers and sisters, Skipper was born with a combination of congenital conditions that made her case a truly miraculous one. In fact, she is believed to be the first of her kind to survive with these conditions. Sadly, her mother abandoned her, but fortunately, she was taken in by Neel Veterinary Hospital where she received the care she needed. Neel Veterinary Hospital recently shared her heartwarming story on their Facebook page.
Have you ever heard of Skipper, the remarkable canine? Well, this furry friend is anything but ordinary. It turns out that Skipper’s uniqueness stems from a rare condition that resulted from her mother’s pregnancy. Vets at the hospital believe that Skipper’s unusual state was caused by an incomplete split of an egg that was supposed to develop into twins. Fascinating, isn’t it?
Despite the challenges Skipper faced early in life, she has managed to overcome them with her tenacity and the timely medical attention she received. Furthermore, Skipper has duplicate organs from her waist down, but they function correctly, ensuring that she stays healthy. All of these factors contribute to making Skipper an extraordinary and one-of-a-kind dog.
Skipper, the six-legged puppy, has been receiving a lot of love and support from people worldwide. Although some worry about her health, her caretakers have reassured everyone that she is doing great and is free from pain or discomfort. Neel Veterinary Hospital has no intention of euthanizing her as they believe that she will lead a happy and fulfilling life. They are excited to see where her journey takes her.
To keep everyone updated, the hospital has created a Facebook page dedicated to Skipper’s progress. The page has already gained over 55 thousand followers, which demonstrates the immense interest and support for Skipper and her unique story.
Dogs actually do respond better when their owners use cute ‘baby talk’, study finds
Dogs’ brains are sensitive to the familiar high-pitched “cute” voice tone that adult humans, especially women, use to talk to babies, according to a new study.
The research, published recently in the journal Communications Biology, found “exciting similarities” between infant and dog brains during the processing of speech with such a high-pitched tone feature.
Humans tend to speak with a specific speech style characterised by exaggerated prosody, or patterns of stress and intonation in a language, when communicating with individuals having limited language competence.
Such speech has previously been found to be very important for the healthy cognitive, social and language development of children, who are also tuned to such a high-pitched voice.
But researchers, including those from the Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, hoped to assess whether dog brains are also sensitive to this way of communication.
In the study, conscious family dogs were made to listen to dog, infant and adult-directed speech recorded from 12 women and men in real-life interactions.
As the dogs listened, their brain activities were measured using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan.
The study found the sound-processing regions of the dogs’ brains responded more to dog- and infant-directed than adult-directed speech.
This marked the first neurological evidence that dog brains are tuned to speech directed specifically at them.
“Studying how dog brains process dog-directed speech is exciting, because it can help us understand how exaggerated prosody contributes to efficient speech processing in a nonhuman species skilled at relying on different speech cues,” explained Anna Gergely, co-first author of the study.
Scientists also found dog- and infant-directed speech sensitivity of dog brains was more pronounced when the speakers were women, and was affected by voice pitch and its variation.
These findings suggest the way we speak to dogs matters, and that their brain is specifically sensitive to the higher-pitched voice tone typical to the female voice.
“Remarkably, the voice tone patterns characterizing women’s dog-directed speech are not typically used in dog-dog communication – our results may thus serve evidence for a neural preference that dogs developed during their domestication,” said Anna Gábor, co-first author of the study.
“Dog brains’ increased sensitivity to dog-directed speech spoken by women specifically may be due to the fact that women more often speak to dogs with exaggerated prosody than men,” Dr Gabor said.
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