CANBERRA – An Australian biotechnology company has invented a contraceptive implant for male dogs that also calms them down.

Peptide Technology Ltd applied to Australia's National Registration Authority this week to register its canine contraceptive which operates through a single hormone implant under the skin between a dog's shoulder blades.

Trials are underway to develop a similar product for cats and female dogs.

Tim Trigg, managing director of subsidiary Peptech Animal Health, said he hoped to win approval to sell the product in Australia within 12 months.

"It's a product that will suit dog owners who abhor the thought of de-sexing and want an alternative," Trigg told Reuters on Tuesday.

"The implants calm down a dog and you can switch it off for a while but then stop the implants and breed again."

Peptide has been granted patents for the contraceptive in the United States, the European Union and New Zealand and will seek to register and sell in those markets after winning approval in Australia.

EU shrugs off backache to tackle stress at work

BRUSSELS – Stress comes second only to back pain as a health complaint among European Union workers, but it is Public Enemy Number One in a campaign launched on Tuesday to beat the problem.

Work-related stress hits almost 28 percent of workers in the 15-nation EU. That's the equivalent of the population of Spain.

EU officials in Strasbourg, the eastern French city which is one of the homes of the European parliament, used a 12-foot stress ball to kick off the campaign.

They said stress costs the EU economy more than 20 billion euros ($19.8 billion) each year.

Back pain, which afflicts one in three workers, was the subject of a similar drive two years ago.

With the causes and effects of stress already well studied, the campaign will focus on raising awareness, encouraging workers and employers to discuss it and finding ways of giving workers more control over their jobs.

The EU's Agency for Safety and Health at Work, which is running the campaign, said four in every 10 workers faced monotonous work or tight deadlines and one in three was stressed by the lack of control they had over their working conditions.

British pensioner, 108, starves herself to death

LONDON – One of Britain's oldest women has died aged 108 after a month-long hunger strike in protest at being moved to another care home, according to her granddaughter.

Alice Knight, a great-great grandmother, refused food and medical care after she had to transfer to a new private residential home because her previous home had closed due to lack of funds.

"She made the conscious decision not to live and starved herself to death," Knight's granddaughter, Diane Self, told the Daily Telegraph. "She would have been alive today if it had not been for the move."

Knight moved into her new home in May but she missed her old residence, where she had lived for six years, so much that after a few days she refused to eat or even open her eyes.

"It was awful. We watched her get thinner and thinner," said Self. "Her dignity was taken away from her in the last month of her life and it is a tragedy that we can treat our old people like this."

The owners of Laurel Lodge in Norwich, eastern England, where Knight lived until she died, said staff had tried their utmost to help the pensioner to settle in.

"She was only here for a short time before she died and just wouldn't settle in," a spokeswoman told Reuters.

Paws for thought in Katherine Harris campaign

MIAMI – Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, a key player in the 2000 presidential election recount battle, faces a dogged opponent in her campaign for Congress – a border collie-German shepherd mix.

Charter boat captain Wayne Genthner of Sarasota, Florida, said he planned to enter the name of his dog Percy as a write-in candidate for the Republican primary ahead of the November election.

"We hope by running a canine against a nationally known political person we can draw attention to voter disenfranchisement and disconnect," he said.

Harris has set her sights on a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and is viewed as the favorite to win in her district in the Sarasota area.

Genthner said he wanted to satirize what he viewed as absurdities and injustices such as campaign finance, which he said put running for office out of reach of ordinary people.

Since election rules would prevent a dog from running, Genthner said that later this month he would send in the papers entering himself as a write-in candidate – a person whose name does not appear on the ballot but can be inscribed by voters. But Percy would be the name voters would write and Genthner said he intended to act merely as "campaign manager."

Rats behind mysterious Argentine cattle mutilations

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – Recent mutilations of cattle and horses in the Argentine countryside were the work of rodents, scientists said, not ritualistic slayings by extraterrestrials or vampires as some farmers feared.

Argentina's national food and animal health inspection service Senasa sent its own "X-Files" scientists to the remote plains to look into the deaths of farm animals found mutilated and drained of blood. Frightened farmers claimed to have seen bright lights and UFOs in the area where the deaths occurred.

But Senasa officials said the dozens of livestock whose genitals, tongues and other organs appeared to have been removed with surgical precision were victims of rodents, foxes or other animals.

Senasa said the farm animals likely died from common infections and wild animals later mutilated the corpses.

"We see these as natural deaths (and) there is clear evidence of the presence of rodents and birds which led us to our conclusions," Senasa President Bernardo Cane told reporters.

The strange circumstances surrounding the deaths – one horse's hoof had a circle drawn into it and some animals were surrounded by charred grass – led some locals to insist the deaths were the work of little green men, vampires or a satanic cult. Senasa gave no explanation for the burned grass and the circle on the hoof.