Official guidance says ammonia in animal urine should be watered down to stop it corroding bark

A neighbourhood in Vienna has introduced guidelines for dog walking, including the use of bottled tap water to rinse away urine and protect vulnerable trees.

Neubau, an up-and-coming, densely populated district dotted with cafes and galleries, rolled out the Schönes Gassi (nice dog walk) campaign this week.

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© Photograph: Georg Hochmuth/APA/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Georg Hochmuth/APA/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Georg Hochmuth/APA/AFP/Getty Images

Struggling to breathe, so big she could barely walk, Pumpkin practically begged for help when we met. Before long I was taking her home

Pumpkin arrived at our animal shelter in March, after her owner passed away. As CEO and president of SPCA Cincinnati, I expect something heartbreaking when my team asks me to see an animal – perhaps they have been neglected or abused. Pumpkin was neither. She was dirty and had some fleas but that was not our concern. She was severely obese.

At 25lb (11.3kg), Pumpkin could barely move. Her legs were bowed from the weight and she walked with a waddle. Examining her wasn’t easy. Her breathing became so laboured that she turned blue.

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© Photograph: Courtesy of Chris Seelbach

© Photograph: Courtesy of Chris Seelbach

© Photograph: Courtesy of Chris Seelbach

Toxicology helplines report 42% increase in calls involving animals poisoned by drugs and nicotine

A record number of pets are ingesting recreational drugs and requiring veterinary care in the UK, figures shared with the Guardian reveal.

Last year, the UK’s only emergency poison centre for animals received its highest ever number of calls involving animals poisoned by cannabis, cocaine, magic mushrooms and nicotine, and it is on course to do so again this year.

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© Photograph: Christina Bluhme/AP

© Photograph: Christina Bluhme/AP

© Photograph: Christina Bluhme/AP

People often forget social rules when dogs are involved, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. But you’ll have to say something if you want things to change

• Read more Leading questions

A good friend of mine stays with me regularly when she comes into town. She brings her husband and two dogs that don’t get along with my dog. They’ve “used the bathroom” in our house before. I try to be nice and help clean or pretend it doesn’t bother me so that they feel comfortable. But when she asks for a weekend to come back with everyone, I kind of dread it. I enjoy seeing her and she’s a great friend. I think our friendship would be better if she stayed somewhere else, but I would feel bad if she stayed in a hotel and I don’t think she’d visit as often. She cleans up after the dogs and whatnot, but I like my home to be my safe haven. This friend doesn’t handle confrontation well, but is understanding. What can I do to handle this?

Eleanor says: It sounds as though you’re in the jam we all get into when we try to smooth things over: you can have the social ease of pretending something is fine; or the outcome from confessing it isn’t, but not both simultaneously.

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© Illustration: Wikimedia Commons

© Illustration: Wikimedia Commons

© Illustration: Wikimedia Commons

Super Auto Pets is a free browser-playable auto-battler game. Buy animals for your team, combine them, feed them and send them into battle. Originally released in 2021, produced on a shoestring using emoji for graphics, it stood out for its appealing style, quick play and approachable mechanics and remains popular in a crowded genre. Quickstart: Play > Arena > Start.

Auto-battlers are a genre of game about recruiting and refining a team of some sort. Each round, the team competes against another player's without any direct control. With each round, winners are rewarded, losers punished, and you have new opportunities to upgrade and tweak your team until you hit the win limit or run out of lives and crash out. They rocketed to mainstream popularity in 2019 with the DOTA 2 mod Auto Chess. An official equivalent, DOTA Underlords followed. The creator of the original mod produced a standalone mobile-focused game which arrived late in the boom and saw comparatively little success. The biggest auto-battler is likely Hearthstone Battlegrounds - an experimental mode for the free-to-play Blizzard cardgame that ended up eclipsing the popularity of the original game, spawning a new subgenre of imitators and a crisis of "how do we monetise this!?" In comparison to its maximalist peers, Super Auto Pets is small, low-key, and approachable. Free to play in browser (registration required to track progress) or by standalone application. The game's supported by making more complex alternative rosters of animals available to purchase. The original core roster is always free, as are rotating weekly custom rosters. Because users of the same roster are matched against each other, players are always on perfectly even footing.

From writer and host Cassie Workman and producer Lilly Wachowski, it's the first episode of Cassie Workman Is Witchy AF, a new Youtube series in which Cassie discusses the history of occultism. In this episode she (along with some infernal assistance) discusses Aleister Crowley, focusing on his time at the repeatedly burned-to-the-ground Boleskine House and drawing comparisons to a more modern child of privilege.

Dog behavior experts offered a variety of explanations for why Nash the golden retriever wagged his tail and carried a toy near a man who broke into his owner’s home.

Technologies like CRISPR are giving us new ways to create the dogs of our dreams — and a reason to reckon with our past mistakes.

© Mary Conlon/Associated Press