内容摘要：Raramuri Indigenous woman Gloria Vega, right, watches a neighbor wash clothes outside her home in Cuauhtemoc, Mexico, Thursday, May 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Martin Silva Rey)

Raramuri Indigenous woman Gloria Vega, right, watches a neighbor wash clothes outside her home in Cuauhtemoc, Mexico, Thursday, May 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Martin Silva Rey)

As a dispatcher in a busy call center in Wales, Worrall has to be unflappable, patient and able to efficiently handle the most stressful calls in which a delay of seconds or minutes could be the difference between life and death.She understands that some people have a different gauge of what is life-threatening and an emergency. But it’s still frustrating when someone phones the emergency number to say they’re locked out of their house and cold or their dog jumped in a river and won’t swim back — calls she also fielded.

“We just ask everybody to find alternative pathways before phoning for an ambulance,” she said. “The ambulance service is for those who are experiencing life-threatening problems.”Worrall’s craziest call came one afternoon when a man phoned to say his son’s pet alligator had escaped and was hiding under the sofa.“I asked if he’d been hurt, and he said, no. He was scared,” Worrall recounted.

He wanted paramedics to help him corral the toothy reptile.“I told him that we wouldn’t be sending an ambulance for something like that. And he said, ‘So you’re not going to send me any help until I get bit, is that right?’ I went, ‘That’s correct.’”

The Welsh Ambulance Service isn’t alone in publicizing the wacky calls they got last year. The South Western Ambulance Service in England this week said more than a quarter of the 1 million-plus calls it fielded last year did not merit sending help.

The non-emergency calls included a person looking for assistance in finding their walking stick, a patient who had fallen off a chair — who was already in the hospital — and a woman who complained of having a “horrendous nightmare.”Dogs can’t blow candles, after all. So Venus’ owner intervened, drawing a breath and extinguishing the flames to a round of applause before serving her black mixed-breed a bite of meat-flavored birthday cake.

“Venus is like my daughter,” gushes Victoria Font, founder of Barto Cafe, a bakery making cakes for canines just south of Argentina’s capital of Buenos Aires.About two decades ago, a birthday party for pampered pets featuring a custom cake for dogs may have struck Argentines as bizarre.

Petrona licks her lips in front of her meat-flavored cake during her third birthday celebration at a park in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Sunday, April 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)Petrona licks her lips in front of her meat-flavored cake during her third birthday celebration at a park in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Sunday, April 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)