We have a top dog in the Metro East area! Uno (show name Champion K-Run’s Park Me in First) is a beagle that just won top hound at the 132nd Westminster Dog Show at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Uno’s co-owner and breeder is Kathy Weichert of Belleville, Ill.

Uno will compete tonight (Tuesday, Feb. 12) to see if he can bring in Best of Show. In the 132 years of the Westminster Dog Show, a beagle has never won that title. We’ll have to wait and see if Uno’s brown eyes melt the judges.

Though it’s kind of old news now, I feel these items are worth mentioning:

On Saturday, Feb. 2, The Telegraph ran a story about two dogs, yellow Lab mixes, that wandered into Olin Community Credit Union in Bethalto and wanted to take up residence. The employees of the credit union turned the animals over to the Madison County Animal Control, where the dogs were to be euthanized if not claimed.

In a follow-up story reported in The Telegraph on Feb. 5, Partners for Pets, an organization started in 2005, stepped in. According to their Web site, Partners for Pets volunteers visit animal shelters looking for animals that are facing death or, as their Web site states, too “fragile” for shelter life. To make a longer story short, Partners for Pets rescued the Labs from certain doom.

I hadn’t heard about Partners for Pets. It gives me hope that at least some of the animals left at the mercy of human beings might get a second chance. You can learn more about Partners 4 Pets by going to the petfinder.com Web site.

And speaking about animals left at the mercy of human beings, there have been two recent incidents in the Alton area of dogs chained behind a house and left to starve. I would urge people in the community to be aware of those people in their neighborhood who own dogs and chain them out day after day. If you suspect an animal isn’t being cared for, call animal control. If animal control feels the animal is being taken care of, no harm done. If the animal is not being taken care of, then you may have saved its life. To use a quote attributed to Edmund Burke, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing.”

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