Las Vegas – Pain In The Bud

A dog who was abandoned by his owner at a Las Vegas airport has a happy ending to his ordeal after he was adopted by one of the police officers who responded to the initial abandonment call.

The sequence of events began on Feb. 2 at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas. A woman was trying to board with her goldendoodle — a medium-size breed that is a cross between a golden retriever and a poodle — when an airline employee told her she needed paperwork proving the pooch was a service animal. Emotional support animals don’t need paperwork and aren’t certified by any agency, public or private, but service dogs must be trained and certified.

Instead of trying to work the problem out, the woman abandoned her dog, leaving him tied to a post near the departure gate. The airline’s staff called police and when officers arrived, they found the woman waiting to board her flight.

The woman pictured with Jet Blue the dog before abandoning him at the airport. Still image from a video provided by Las Vegas PD.

She was insistent she’d done nothing wrong, according to Las Vegas police, and said she could find the dog again after returning home because he has a tracking device. That excuse didn’t fly, and neither did the woman– officers pulled her off the departure line and arrested her for abandoning an animal.

In a positive twist of fate, one of the officers who responded that day had been looking to adopt a dog of that same breed and had already applied and been cleared by a local shelter. He was just waiting for the right dog.

The officer, Skeeter Black, adopted the abandoned good boy and named him Jet Blue after the airline. Jet Blue joined his new family on Sunday after undergoing the usual veterinary checks, quarantine and a 10-day mandatory hold with animal control.

“We’re very excited to add him to our family,” Black said when animal control handed three-year-old Jet Blue off to him. “We’re gonna enjoy him. He’s gonna be very much loved.”

As for the Las Vegas Police Department, the brass issued an exasperated statement reminding people that animals are living beings with their own feelings.

“We can’t believe we have to say this,” police wrote in a post, “but please don’t abandon your dog at the airport — or anywhere else.”

Header image via Las Vegas Metro Police.

Army of the Dead, the long-awaited post-apocalyptic heist movie from director Zack Snyder, has a simple premise: Las Vegas has been overrun by zombies and cordoned off behind massive corrugated steel walls, becoming a kingdom for the undead who are ruled by a handful of intelligent and incredibly dangerous “alpha zombies.”

A Japanese businessman (Hiroyuki Sanada) approaches a famed zombie killer (Dave Bautista) and tells him he’s got $200 million in a vault inside one of the now-inaccessible casinos. If Bautista and his team can fight their way in and get the money, half of it is theirs to keep.

The catch? They have a little more than a day until the US government plans to drop a low-yield tactical nuke on the city to wipe out the zombie plague.

Bautista and his crew hire a coyote (French actress Nora Arnezeder) to get them inside the city, and as they make their way toward the Las Vegas strip, they hear a blood-curdling roar. A four-legged figure approaches, obscured by dust, smoke and the ruins of abandoned cars, until it climbs on top of one of the vehicles and we see it properly for the first time — it’s a pissed-off zombified white tiger!

“Valentine,” Arnezeder says, turning to her huddled companions. “One of Siegfried and Roy’s.”

The zombie tiger, she explains, patrols the outskirts of the zombie “kingdom,” making a light snack of anyone who ventures too close.

Army of the Dead — “We’ll kill some zombies, grab the cash and play some slots. You know, make a day out of it!” Image credit Clay Enos/Netflix

Later in the movie there’s a scene in which the alpha zombie leader rallies all of his undead — including Valentine — and sends them en masse toward the hotel where the protagonists are trying to crack the safe and get at the piles of cash inside.

Snyder makes a great show of the endless zombie hordes thundering toward the hotel with Valentine among them, and it looks like the big cat is going to lead the charge until he stops, yawns and settles down on the hood of a car for a nap.

Is there anything more feline than that?

As it turns out, Snyder and his team were looking for a big cat expert to help them nail the tiger’s signature gait and physical tics as they created the CGI felid, and the consultant who agreed to provide them with feedback was none other than Big Cat Rescue’s Carole Baskin. As Variety notes, production on the movie began long before Baskin became a household name with the release of Netflix’s Tiger King documentary.

Although the inclusion of a zombie tiger was a fun surprise, my all-time favorite tiger from zombie fiction is The Walking Dead’s Shiva. She’s got a compelling backstory: The character Ezekiel was a zookeeper before the apocalypse and, realizing no one was tending to the animals as the world was collapsing, he risked his life to get back to the zoo and feed the trapped creatures.

When he got there, Shiva was so malnourished and hungry that her gratitude for Ezekiel’s intervention was obvious. Gambling that the powerful tigress — whom he’d taken care of for years — wasn’t going to hurt him, Ezekiel opened her enclosure to set her free. But rather than run off on her own, Shiva decided to stay with her human friend, and the two became inseparable as the world ended.

While Valentine was just another zombie, Shiva fought the undead, and she was badass. The show also earned praise from animal rights groups after opting for CGI instead of using a real tiger. The special effects team responsible for Shiva did such a fantastic job that viewers were convinced she was the real deal.