today show.

Erica Daniel, a Florida woman who fosters dogs that need extra care, saved a pit-bull puppy from the trash and nursed it back to health from a debilitating, life-threatening medical condition. 11-week-old Harper was born with a condition called pectus excavatum, more commonly know as "swimmer puppy disorder," according to NBC's "Today." Puppies afflicted with the disorder lie flat on their chests with their arms splayed out, resembling a swimmer in mid-stroke. Most puppies with pectus excavatum don't survive, and Harper herself came very close to being put down before Daniel stepped in. Daniel had not originally intended to keep Harper alive, but simply to give the puppy one day of love ...

Get ready; the most depressing show on Animal Planet is back for a third season! "Confessions: Animal Hoarders" is the animal-focused version of the immensely popular genre of hoarding reality shows. Whereas other hoarding shows feature people who refuse to throw out any of their garbage for decades at a time, "Confessions" documents folks who own, let's say, "unreasonable" numbers of pets. We mean enough animals to make life unsafe and virtually unlivable for the hoarders and for the pets. To get an idea of what we're talking about, watch this interview with Yolanda, a "Confessions" hoarder to shared her story on "Today" this morning. Learn about how keeping 38 dogs and cats affects a ...

Rescuing puppies isn't for the faint of heart. Case in point, the daring puppy rescue that Zak Anderegg carried out while rappelling into one of Utah's slot canyons. Two weeks ago, Anderegg set out to explore the scenic Arizona-Utah border when he came upon a shocking site: an animal trapped at the bottom of one of the region's famous deep and narrow canyons. Looking over the canyon's edge, Anderegg thought the animal might have been a small calf. "And then the longer I looked at him, I realized he's actually a dog," Anderegg told "Today." An animal lover, Anderegg was exactly the right person at the right place and time to help save the pup's life. Anderegg called his wife and told her ...

Hope comes in many forms. In this case, it comes with eight adorable little paws and a whole bunch of stripes. Two rare Sumatran tiger cubs made their television debut this morning on NBC's "Today." The pair was born May 25 at the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium in Tacoma, Wash. Including these new additions, there are just 74 Sumatran tigers in captivity in North America and only a few hundred exist in the wild. The birth of these cubs is particularly remarkable because their mom and dad, Jaya and Bali, were pretty clueless when it came to continuing their critically endangered species: "Neither one could seem to understand what needed to be done," Andy Goldfarb, staff biologist at Port ...

PRODUCTION PLAYER! DO NOT DELETE. "Lost dog reunited with little girl": It's a story we've heard time and time again. While it's always touching, this particular reunion story, shared this morning on the "Today Show", has a little more drama than some. When Mollie, a German short-haired pointer, didn't come home one night, her family was understandably worried. Four-year-old Olivia Hartzog and her father, James, could hear Mollie barking, but they didn't realize until morning that she was barking from the bottom of a 33-foot dry well on their property, reports MSNBC. Olivia asked her father to just jump down and get her dog, but he knew it was more complicated ...