Stray Pup Follows Cyclists 1,100 Miles From China to Tibet
This dog puts The Incredible Journey to shame. When a group of Chinese cyclists heading from Kangding in the Sichuan province to Lhasa, Tibet, found a stray dog sleeping in the road, they stopped to feed her a drumstick. To their surprise, the pup decided she didn’t want to lose her new friends. She trailed them the rest of the day.
At first the bikers thought the dog was just hungry or running for fun. They assumed she’d stop when she got tired. But amazingly, the tiny mutt never gave up. She followed them — on paw — for more than 1,100 miles over 20 days. The cyclists named her Xiao Sa, or “Little Sa,” and, at the end of the trip, took her home to Kangding.
“She climbed 10 mountains over 4,000 meters high,” writes Oddity Central, “and ran on uphill sections where many bikers prefer to take the bus. The only portion of the journey where Xiao Sa didn’t have to run was on a steep slope in Litang, where downhill speeds reach 70 km per hour, which made it impossible to catch up. So the cyclists made a cage for her and gave Sa a ride to the bottom, where she resumed her journey on foot.”
Kickass Dad of the Day: When Stuart Chaifetz learned that his 10-year-old son, Akian, was being violent and disruptive in class, he was puzzled. He knew Akian, who has autism, to be mild-mannered and sensitive, and had a hunch that something more was going on. But after several meetings with a team of school officials created to help special-needs students, nothing changed. So Chaifetz did what any concerned parent would do.
On the morning of Friday, February 17, 2012, I wired my son and sent him to school. That night, when I listened to the audio my life changed forever. I heard my son being bullied by his teacher and aide. The six and a half hours of audio I had proved that my son wasn’t hitting the teacher because there was something wrong with him — he was lashing out because he was being mocked, mistreated and humiliated. His outbursts were his way of expressing that he was being emotionally hurt at school.
The New Jersey father has since launched a website full of damning evidence and aFacebook page, and he is petitioning the state to change legislation so that teachers who bully children are immediately fired. The aide has been fired, but the rest of the staff have merely been relocated.
“I seek a full and public apology from all those adults who were in my son’s class for what they did to him,” Chaifetz says. “It is also far past time that these issues are allowed to be hidden from public view.”
