Starting today, eight Bay Area shelters are offering free spaying/neutering to pit bull owners. Although a few shelters, such as the East Bay SPCA offer the free service year-round, the organizers of Bay Area Pit Fix Week are hoping that by offering spaying/neutering this week, the lives of thousands of pit bulls (and the people they otherwise might maul if not for being fixed) will be spared. more ›

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Remember the case we told you about last Friday, about the guy who killed someone with a mechanical robot dog? Well, the judge in the case (at left) got hit by a light-rail outside the San Jose federal courthouse yesterday around lunchtime. The judge was taken to the hospital but is reported to be okay enough to keep presiding over the trial. more ›

The hunter becomes the hunted, when an investigator for the Peninsula Humane Society is herself investigated for running an illegal dog breeding farm and keeping illegal livestock at her Colma house. She claims it's all a setup, that all those golden retrievers and goats are her pets, and that people are invading her privacy. more ›

--No one objected to the Peninsula Humane Society moving after all. more ›

We're breaking with our Blotter tradition of SF crime movie clip art because, well, we can't find two other animal-related stories to post an Animal Roundup and -- would you look at how cute that marmoset is??? The Peninsula Humane Society responded to a call from an engineering student in East Palo Alto who saw a monkey running on a neighborhood fence, which turned out to be a member of the species known as the world's smallest primate. Awwww. No one knows how the marmoset got to EPA, no one in the area has a permit to own one, and they're sending this little guy to Primarily Primates, a sanctuary near San Antonio. more ›

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). The seniors might be barred from graduation and charged with animal cruelty. We feel badly for the chickens and all, but the thought of school administrators with nets chasing down a chicken running down, say, the math hall, does bring a begrudging smile to the face, doesn't it? more ›

Six orphaned ducklings are in foster care at the Walnut Creek Lindsay Wildlife Museum, after an errant left-turner failed to make way for their mother as she was crossing North Main and Parkside. It's very sad, yes, but this article is also kind of hilarious (and it spells "quack" without the c, which we think is kind of controversial). Also, we learned that If you're trying to attract ducks to your backyard pool, you should take out those inflatable swans and motorized boats, which scare them away. From small water creatures to large -- remember our buddy the angry sea lion in Berkeley? He's back! ....and a man in Redwood City had an odd stoplight experience -- just as he pulled up to the intersection of Whipple and Elwood, a 40 foot tree fell on his convertible. "The car was so full of branches we couldn't see him," said the Redwood City battalion fire chief. Making matters weirder, when the fire department got there, they found a nest of baby raccoons at the bottom of the tree. They extracted convertible man, and had the Peninsula Humane Society deal with the babies. The man wasn't injured. Picture of ducklings from ABC 7 more ›

Saturday: It's POMO 2006, which means all sorts of Filipino stage performances at YBCA. Our POMO pick is "Bronze Lit: FilipinoAmerican Voices in Literature", at 2 p.m. today, in which writers including Jaime Jacinto, Jason Bayani, Jason Perez, Jean Vengua, Leny Strobel, Marianne Villanueva and Barbara Jane Reyes read from their works. And it's free! more ›

An elderly Novato animal lover was sent to jail after getting in a fight with a trapper over a skunk. (Skunk pictured above, from CBS 5). The 82-year-old man and his wife were trying to release a skunk that the property owner had trapped. Unfortunately, a county trapper was also there. The trapper, there with his son, shouted, "Do not release the skunk, sir!", at which point he claims the man charged him. The trapper's son admits to tackling the activist in a bearhug, but says he only did it after the activist tried to take his father's gun. The trapper says after they let the activist up, he then tried to run them over with his car. The activist says he was attacked and are looking to press charges against the trapper. Does this seem vaguely like a Pepe LePew plot to anyone else? ABC 7, meanwhile, is proudly touting its coverage of cruelty to chickens through the use of "battery cages," in which up to 10 hens are squeezed into a single cage. After they aired footage taped by the East Bay Animal Advocates, Trader Joe's has agreed to stop selling battery-cage eggs under its own name (though it'll continue to sell battery-cage eggs from other producers), and the Humane Society has filed a lawsuit against the State of California, claiming that public funds were illegally used to promote battery-caging in general. ....and someone in Pleasanton saw two great horned owls going at it. Birds do it, bees do it: owlets should emerge in about a month. more ›

After we got back home from our Christmas vacation, we found we had ourselves a problem. We just couldn't find any space in our closet for the new, beautiful, hand-knit Christmas sweater we got from our elderly aunt. No question, this sweater is a keeper (reindeer were hot on the fall runways in Milan last year) so our only choice is a judicious weeding of the current contents of our tiny closet. more ›

Aw, SFist Eve -- look at the little bunny rabbit! The Oakland Animal Shelter is looking for people to help foster the 30 baby bunnies they found being illegally sold at an East Bay flea market, where they found 6-8 bunnies all crammed into a tiny box. The bunnies are too young to be spayed/neutered or to be adopted, but the shelter is running out of space for 'em. No, you may not pick one up to give as a holiday present either; the shelter won't allow it. From the small to the large -- divers raced out to free a humpback whale that had gotten entangled in crab pot lines near the Farallones Islands, just off the San Francisco coast. The whale had somehow managed to get wrapped around four times in lines weighing about 90 pounds total, which were cutting into its blubber and dragging its blowhole under water. When they freed the whale, it reportedly gave them all a quick nuzzle before swimming away (presumably as fast as possible). And starting today, the Peninsula Humane Society will begin adopting out the animals rescued from the Gulf Coast. The national Humane Society asked local shelters to wait until Dec. 15 to allow hurricane victims as long as possible to reunite with their pets. Before adopting, do note -- you may be asked to surrender it if its original owner shows up. more ›

So what happened with all those stories we've been telling you about all week? Fret no more! Here's your answers! *Madison Nguyen beat Linda Nguyen, 62% to 37%, for the District 7 San Jose city council seat. (Apparently people liked Madison's prior political experience, and may have been turned off by the flyers accusing Madison of having affairs with married men.) *Barry Bonds hit an almost-home run in his first game back, which was ruled a ground-rule double due to fan interference. He hit a single last night. No Old Navy splashdowns yet -- but only five games back from first in the division. *A second shipment of animals from Louisiana arrived yesterday, and will be housed in Marin and the Peninsula Humane Society. Awwww. *And it's day two of the Sutter healthcare workers' strike at Cal Pacific. Picture of Madison Nguyen from her campaign website more ›

Well, maybe they're not sending human evacuees to the Bay Area anymore, but we're definitely taking the four-legged kind -- the first organized evacuation of pets from the devastated Gulf Coast arrived at SFO yesterday afternoon. The flight had a layover in San Diego, where 50 dogs were dropped off, and then flew to San Francisco with 30 dogs and 20 cats. The airlift was organized by Texas philanthropist T. Boone Pickens, who donated $50,000 to charter the plane and is seeking more donations to charter more planes to airlift out another 30,000 animals (with about 1000 ultimately to come here). The first group of pets are going to the Marin Humane Society and the Sacramento SPCA. MHS is looking for as much help as possible with the pets -- you can donate cash, time at the shelter (cleaning kennels, doing laundry, or the dreaded "data entry"), pet supplies, or foster some of the animals (if you live in Marin). You won't be allowed to adopt the animals just yet, because MHS will be trying to reunite pets with their owners (but you can foster-to-adopt if the animals turn out to be abandoned). Photo of dog too sick to travel by crate from the Chron by Mark Costantini more ›

KRON 4 viewers are the best! After seeing a heartwrenching news clip on KRON 4 about a kitten stuck in a pipe for two days, a KRON 4 watcher who works as an excavator was moved to go down to the pipe and help find Smoky the cat. Thanks to his help, the rescuers were able to locate Smoky in the pipe and get her out. She's doing fine, thanks for asking! The only other animal news around here is pit bull-related. So the Peninsula Humane Society is offering $10 to anyone who brings in a pit bull to be spayed or neutered. And two pit bulls who attacked two people and three dogs at the end of May in McLaren Park were found to be "vicious and dangerous" by Animal Cops SF hero and Dog Court Judge Officer Bill Herndon, and will be euthanized. One of the dogs had mangled the hand of a guy trying to break up the fight, and the other had disemboweled (yikes!) another dog (which survived!). more ›

As we mentioned, SFist will be Docing around the clock at the fourth San Francisco Documentary Film Festival. There are so many fascinating films playing that you really owe it to yourself to catch a couple this week or next. more ›

A passenger was stabbed yesterday afternoon at the MacArthur BART station -- the reports are sketchy, but it sounds like a teenage girl got in an argument with another woman on a Fremont-bound train. They both got off at MacArthur, and the girl attempted to stab the woman in the stomach, missed, and got the woman in the shoulder instead. The girl fled, with the woman chasing after her, but got out of the station before anyone could catch her. We heard on KRON that the victim was transgendered and the girl may have committed a hate crime, but no one else seems to have confirmed that yet. A woman in Menlo Park was at home when she suddenly heard a window break and noises from her upstairs bedroom! Burglars! She called 911 and the cops hustled on over. They got her out. They surrounded the house. They cautiously went upstairs ..... and found a terrified red-tailed hawk that had crashed through the window and deposited its half-eaten meal (a baby crow) on the woman's bed. The bird was taken in by the Humane Society, which says it's doing fine and should be released back into the wild soon. "I never thought my windows were clean enough for this to happen," mused the homeowner. And former A's and Giants pitcher Vida Blue has been summoned to San Mateo County Court next Monday to explain why he hasn't done the community service he was sentenced to after his DUI arrest last year on 101. Blue was recently arrested on another DUI in Scottsdale, Arizona in March. more ›

summary of crime in the Bay Area. more ›