Like many animal caretakers, Rosemary Greenway puts on a little music to calm her horses. Music has powers to calm the savage beast, and all that. But now the Performing Rights Society says that playing the music at the Malthouse Equestrian Centre constitutes a public performance and she must pay a licensing fee of about $150 a year. The PRS says the audience it's concerned about is the stable staff of two, not the 11 horses who live at the stable, which is next to a military airport, which makes all kinds of scary noises.

Greenway turned the radio to a classical station. "The staff are not bothered whether they have the radio on or not, in fact they don't particularly like my music and turn if off when I'm not around," she told the Daily Telegraph.

PRS is the equivalent of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. It collects royalties for artists. But these groups around the globe have a hobby of trying to drum up fees from inappropriate targets. Finnish taxi drivers have to pay a fee to play the radio. In the UK charities, car repair shops, home businesses and even the police have come under scrutiny. In the U.S. bookstores and the Girl Scouts have squirmed. WIRED speculates it will start charging music in Second Life, too.The Nascent internet radio industry may collapse under the weight of these rules.

Last fall companies in Europe got this pitch: Save Your Logo, or, more specificially, save the threatened animal that's made your logo so catchy over the years. Lacoste just became the first company to jump on board. René Lacoste, a famous tennis player in the twenties, was nicknamed "the Crocodile" because he was fierce, so his Izod shirts bear the creature. The company announced their new project with pride: "LACOSTE is the international brand the most clearly associated with an animal. The brand's commitment to the preservation of crocodiles seems natural as this animal is part of LACOSTE's history and identity."

This is no goofball little plan or trifling publicity stunt. It's something we're probably going to see more of. Behind the plan are some of the biggest names in finance and and conservation. They hope private-public partnerships save some species. The World Bank, the Global Environment Facility, which funds environmental projects that support sustainable development and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (known as the IUCN or the people who place species around the globe on the spectrum between "least concern" to extinct.) The World Bank is obviously more concerned about economic development, but they're in here because it's a way to bring cash into developing countries. People are willing to travel to see animals in the wild, especially rare ones.

Some animal owners may be turning their sick or disabled dogs and cats in to shelters because they feel they can't afford them during the recession.

The Pittsburgh Post found recently that their local shelters are seeing lots of cats with broken legs or asthma. The editor wrote in to Al's Morning Meeting to say that the shelters say they think they've seen a greater percentage of animals with special medical needs since the recession. Their statistics were scarce, but it certainly adds up.

A survey in Veterinary Economics last fall found that half of pet owners would cut vet costs in a recession and 75% would cut pet supplies. In other words, people sensibly were more likely to cut expenses that just supported a pet's extravagant lifestyle. What's a luxury item for a dog? This week Unemploymentality featured a funny picture of a dog on the street with a sign "Will Work for Snausages" after the owner announced he was cutting out the beloved dog treat. Last fall the Kennel Club had another, much happier survey showing 96% of us would give up Starbucks -- something we mainly consider just a lifestyle splurge.

But the vet survey also makes sense. After all, people are trying to game their own health by delaying or rushing surgeries according to whether they hope they'll get health insurance or fear they'll lose it. Potentially money-saving surgeries like vasectomies are up, while luxury-like procedures such as Lasiks are down, Daniel Hamermesh pointed out.

The hopes for creating the world's largest wild horse sanctuary have dwindled in the last month. Last fall, Madeleine Pickens, wife of oilman T. Boone Pickens, proposed buying or leasing a million acres of land out West to save the 30,000 some wild horses that the Bureau of Land Management is keeping in holding pens. Now the BLM is claiming the plan won't work because of issues of money and location. "We tried to thank her politely," Ron Wenkler, the BLM's director for Nevada obnoxiously said.

In case you haven't checked into the mess that is our country's wild horse conservation program, here's the backstory: We used to have about 2 million wild horses but that dwindled as we took their land. Wild horses starved, were shot by ranchers or rounded up and sold for dog meat -- until the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971.

The BLM originally estimated we had 17,000 horses left, but were wildly off. We had 42,000. We originally gave horses 54 million acres, but cut that down to 35 million. The BLM continually cuts the population it wants to mis-manage on the range. Right now it has 33,000 roaming, but it wants to cut that to 27,000. The agency had less than 10,000 in holding in 2001; now it's triple that. Each year it rounds up mustangs and tries to sell them at auction to people who at least promise to take good care of them.

The U.S. Mint rolled out a new Lincoln-themed penny over a month ago. But I still have not seen any. At first I was asking clerks in stores "Got any of the new pennies?" I quickly discovered that nobody had any idea that the Mint was rolling out four new designs for the penny this year and gave up on that tactic.

This week President Obama brought science back into the Endangered Species Act, effectively overturning a wild diversion of the law by the Bush administration last summer. Bush decided that federal officials didn't have to bother to consult with scientists when they decided whether logging or mining would impact a species on the brink of extinction. And at the time Bush didn't even want to consult with the public, ramming it though in 30 days, accepting public comment only by snailmail. Rolling Stone called it Bush's last-minute regulatory spree a "final F.U." to the country and the gutting of the ESA "the most jaw-dropping" part. Hundreds of thousands of people wrote in despite the obstacles -- and Bush pretty much ignored them.

"Throughout our history, there's been a tension between those who've sought to conserve our natural resources for the benefit of future generations, and those who have sought to profit from these resources. But I'm here to tell you this is a false choice," Obama said. Republicans, who hate the Endangered Species Act like it was some kind of flag-burning illegal immigrant lesbian, have long contended that the law costs more money than its worth.

We used 10% more coupons in the fourth quarter of 2008 than we did during the same time last year, according to Inman, a company that processes promotions. For the whole year we collectively reached into our wallet and pulled out 2.6 billion pieces of ratty paper. But that's nothing compared to the 7.9 billion pieces of indignity we used in 1992 at the end of the last recession.

The recession is leading us all to do things we'd rather not. Coupons are one of them. The company says coupon use was actually down for most of 2008, but really surged in November and December. Coupons are shifting from supermarkets to mass marketers and getting more valuable. And sellers are using them more: they produced 317 billion last year.

So it's still less than one in 100 coupons turned in, even in the worst economy in most of our lifetimes. Why? Because we hate coupons. They make us feel like we're being led around to not only buy what an ad sells us, but carry around little scraps of paper, treat them like currency and risk the wrath of some unruly clerk who finds some reason not to accept them. (And here I know I am biased from living in New York City, where grocery stores refuse coupons with impunity and glee.)

I just feel like a sucker using a coupon: surely for the cost of printing 100 coupons and processing mine, someone could have just lowered the price a little. Store coupons -- as opposed to those issued by a manufacturer -- are the worst: just have a sale, don't put me through the little song and dance. As the economy gets worse I may become desperate enough to use them, but for now I'm cutting back in other ways that don't feel so grubby.

Now that Obama is in control of the government, one of the big priorities of animal advocates -- even bigger than getting the Obama family a shelter dog -- is the elimination of the USDA's Wildlife Services Department, which spends $117 million a year in a Sisyphean quest to exterminate predators.

They kill about 1.5 million birds (mainly starlings) and 150,000 animals (mainly coyotes). All of this is in the name of protecting livestock -- or, in the case of the starlings, grain -- and ironically, often grain farmers are growing for birdseed. The beef and sheep producers say they lose $125 million a year to predators and claim the number would be much higher without the federal help.

The number of humans bit by sharks declined in 2008 and the leading shark attack researcher blames the recession. George Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack File, says sharks bit 59 people around the world in 2008, down from 71 the year before.

Sharks bit fewer people not because they evolved in any way or some new shark repellent was deployed, but, Burgess says, because people worried about money took fewer vacations to places where they might find themselves in the water with sharks. I think Burgess is right. His theory should also make us reconsider the various hysterias over other kinds of animal attacks, animal-related car accidents and animal nuisances in human territory. Are the animals causing the change or are we?

Look at all kinds of recreation-related deaths, you see a bit of a slump since 2005. According to the latest figures available from the National Vital Statistics Report , the death rate fell from 826 per 100,000 in 2005 to 810 in 2006. The diseases were pretty constant. It's the accidental deaths that fell slightly. As we did less and risked less, we died less. About 750 fewer people died in car accidents. Only 777 died in the accidental discharge of a gun, down from 789 in 2005. About 100 fewer drowned. (Some kinds of accidental deaths, like falls, were up.) Because vital statistics lag incredibly--for something so vital--we don't have more recent figures. But my guess is they continued to fall. If sailing, yachting and golf had fatalities I'd bet they'd really be down.

The typical way to figure out if an animal that bit you has rabies is to kill it, cut off its head and express ship it-- unfrozen--to your state health department for a test that will take 10 to 14 days. The state probably won't charge you, but you'll pay shipping costs, spend weeks worrying and--depending on the situation--begin preventive shots that cost $1,500 to $2,500 per person. (Though, on the bright side, they're just shots around the wound, arm or buttocks, no longer the painful stomach injections people scare each other with.)

So, you can see why a $50 test that can detect rabies in an animal's saliva in a half an hour would be such a huge breakthrough. (You can't test rabies by blood.) And that's just what Dyne Immune says they've got. Though it warns that you can't totally trust the negative results: "A negative result does not guarantee that rabies is not present." It did test the procedure at their local animal shelter, where a kitten tested positive, then died the next day.

If this works out, the potential is huge. About 40,000 Americans are treated for exposure to rabies every year. That costs about $80 million. Two or three people die each year, according to the CDC. In 2006, states paid to test 6,400 animals. Only 6% of the animals had rabies, but all had to die for the test. That includes 318 cats and 79 dogs. Only 1% of cats and 0% of dogs tested positive.