WILD AFRICAN DOGS

There are lots of different names for these dogs, and here are some of them:  African Wild Dog,  African Hunting Dog, Cape Hunting Dog, Painted Dog, Painted Wolf, Painted Hunting Dog, Spotted Dog, and Ornate Wolf.  And those are just the names in English!  The scientific name is Lycaon pictus, and it comes from the Greek word for "wolf" and the Latin word for "painted."

The Wild African Dog is a canid, just like wolves and foxes and basenjis and golden retrievers are, but it is the only canid that's still left of the Lycaon genus.  That genus decided to branch off from the doggy family tree about 3 million years ago and do its own thing.  And the result is that now the Wild African Dog has such different genes that it can't even mate with a regular wolf or dog.  It can only mate with its own kind.

Painted Dogs are tall and kind of skinny.  They usually weigh between 40 and 75 pounds, and they are about 30 inches tall at the shoulder.  The dogs in southern Africa are mostly bigger than the ones in eastern or western Africa.  They are the only canids with no dewclaws, and that's not because their breeders cut them off when they are puppies!

Every Wild African Dog has a different pattern of spots, so it is pretty easy to tell them apart.  These dogs like to live in packs because they are very social animals.  And just like in wolf packs, only the alpha male and female make puppies, but the whole rest of the pack helps feed and take care of the pups.  In fact, the whole pack is so nice and thoughtful that everybody shares food with any weak or sick members, and not just with the puppies.

Mating can happen at any time of year, but it's more usual between March and June, which is the last half of the rainy season.  Then after about 70 days, the litter is born, and it can be anywhere between 2 and 19 pups.  When it's time for puppies to be born, the pack finds a den that was dug by some other animal, usually an aardvark.  The pups are weaned when they are about 10 weeks old.  Then when they are 3 months old, they leave the den and start running with the pack.  They learn to kill small animals by the time they are 8-11 months old, and they get really good at hunting by the age of 12-14 months.  The life span for a Wild Dog is about 4-8 years.

The diet of African Wild Dogs is all made up of meat, and their favorite animals to eat are gazelles, springboks, kudu, and wildebeest calves.  When they are hunting animals like this, they work together as a pack, and they communicate by making weird little chirping and squeaking sounds.  They don't try to sneak up on their prey.  They just find a herd of animals and make them start running.  Then they pick one animal to kill that is maybe old or sick, and they just keep on chasing it until it can't run anymore.  After that, they kill it by ripping its gut open, which is kind of bloody, but at least the prey dies quickly.

Wild Dogs are really good runners.  They can go as fast as 35 m.p.h. for 3 miles or maybe more.  Some packs are able to kill bigger, scarier animals such as zebras or warthogs by using a special strategy.  One dog grabs the tail of the prey, and another one bites its nose.  Then they hang on while the rest of the dogs try to rip open the animal's tummy.  This way of hunting may actually be something that the younger dogs are taught by the older ones, and not one that is learned by instinct.  At least that's what the researchers think who have studied this matter.

Anyway, the African Wild Dog pack hunts at least once a day, usually at dawn or dusk, because they hunt by sight.  In the middle of the day, they mostly hang out in the shade and sleep.  African Wild Dogs are probably the best hunters in the whole world because they kill almost 80% of the prey they go after.  Everybody thinks that lions are good hunters, but lions only kill 30% of their prey.

There used to be lots and lots of Painted Dogs in Africa, like about 500,000 in 39 countries.  But now there are only between 3,000 and 5,500 in maybe as few as 14 countries.  This means the species is ENDANGERED.  And there are several reasons for how they got that way.  One reason is that the Wild African Dog needs a really huge hunting range of 150 to 500 square miles.  Well, except for when the pack is busy raising puppies in a den.  And because they need so much territory, they don't fit very well into the African national parks.  So this means that the packs start running through ranches and farmland, which makes people unhappy, and then they want to shoot the dogs.

Game hunters sometimes also kill African Wild Dogs, and so do lions and hyenas.  Also there are diseases that might kill Wild Dogs, such as rabies, distemper, and parvovirus.  People are working to save the Wild African Dogs, which is a good thing.  There is something called the Painted Dog Conservation effort, which is based in Hwange National Park, in western Zimbabwe.  This group is working with local communities to try to keep some nice habitat for the Wild Dogs to live in.

Of course, there are a bunch of Wild African Dogs in zoos, but none of the information I read even mentioned them, so I don't know how many there are.  We have some here in the Kansas City Zoo, like probably 5 or 6.  They are one of Mom's favorite animals to see because she likes their spots and markings and giant ears.  But it's also sad to see them in a little fenced area instead of running around on the plains of Africa.  I wish there didn't have to be so many sad things in life, but there are, and I don't know how to make them be happy!

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A Dog Named Smoky

Smoky was a very special dog heroine of World War II, and the most amazing thing about her was that she only weighed 4 pounds!  Smoky didn't start out to be a war dog, but a soldier found her in a foxhole in the jungle of New Guinea in 1944.  Then he sold her to an American Air Force PFC named Bill Wynne for a couple of Australian pounds, which was $6.44 in American money.  And the reason he sold the dog was because he was in the middle of a poker game, and he needed some money so he could keep playing.

When Private Wynne first bought Smoky, he didn't even know what kind of dog she was, but then he saw a picture of the breed in a National Geographic magazine, and that's how he found out she was a Yorkshire Terrier.

Anyway, Private Wynne started training Smoky right away.  He taught her a bunch of basic obedience stuff, and then he started teaching her all kinds of tricks.  Smoky was smart, and she learned fast.  All together, Smoky was with the 5th Air Force, 26th Photo Recon Squadron for 18 months.  She and her dad flew 12 combat air/sea rescue and photo recon missions.  They survived typhoons, kamikaze attacks, and lots of other yucky stuff.

Smoky had to live in the New Guinea jungle and the Rock Islands, where it was really hot and humid.  She slept with her dad in a tent, on a blanket made out of a green felt card table cover.  She ate C-rations and sometimes Spam.  She didn't get medical care or a special doggy diet, like the "real" war dogs did, but she stayed healthy, and she ran on coral for four months without getting sore paws.  The Yank Down Under Magazine gave Smoky an award for being the "Best Mascot in the South Pacific."

One time, when the troops were working on an airfield taxi strip, Smoky did a really heroic thing to help out.  She went through a pipe that was 70 feet long, 8 inches in diameter, and partly full of dirt, pulling a string that was attached to some very important phone wires.  It only took her a few minutes to do this, but if the men had had to dig up the pipe to put in the wires, it would have taken at least 3 days of hard and dangerous work out in the open.

Besides being a heroic war dog, Smoky was also the very first therapy dog ever, at least according to research done by Animal Planet.  Smoky started her therapy career in July, 1944, when she went with some of the nurses at the 233rd Station Hospital in New Guinea to visit the wounded soldiers that were coming in from the Biak Island invasion.

At the end of the war, Smoky went home with her dad to Cleveland.  While they were on the ship, she had to hide in an oxygen mask carrying case, but as soon as they got home, Smoky became famous, because her picture and story were in the Cleveland Press.

For the next 10 years, Mr. Wynne took Smoky all around the country to entertain people with her tricks.  She was able to do really clever things, such as walking on a tightrope while blindfolded.  There was a Cleveland TV show that Smoky was on a lot, and it was called Castles in the Air.  Back in those days, TV shows were live, and not taped, which meant you had to do stuff right the first time.  Anyway, Smoky did 42 TV shows without ever repeating a trick!  And another thing she did was she visited lots of veterans' hospitals to entertain the patients there.

I am sad to say that on February 21, 1957, Smoky died.  She was about 14 years old by that time.  Mr. Wynne and his family buried Smoky in a World War II .30 caliber ammo box in Cleveland Metroparks, Rocky River Reservation, in Lakewood, Ohio.

A bronze sculpture of Smoky was placed exactly over her grave on Veterans Day, November 11, 2005.  The monument is dedicated to "Smoky, Yorkie Doodle Dandy, and Dogs of All Wars."

Not too long ago, William Wynne wrote a book about Smoky and all her adventures.  The name of the book is Yorkie Doodle Dandy:  A Memoir:  Or the Other Woman Was a Real Dog.  You can buy this book at Amazon.com and probably some other places, too.  I told Mom we should buy it, but she said we are way behind in reading all the other books we have, so she is not going to buy it, even though it is probably a very interesting book.

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OFFICIAL STATE DOGS AND CATS

You probably know that states have a lot of official stuff, such as state flowers and state birds and state mottos.  But did you know that some states have official animals and fish and insects?  There are a few that even have state dogs and state cats, but not enough of them do, if you want my opinion.

For example, I'm sad to say that the state of Missouri, where I live, does not have an official dog or cat, but it does have a state animal, which is the Missouri mule.  And Kansas, which is right next door to us, has the American bison, but it doesn't have a state dog or cat either.

Texas, which is where I was born, has a state dog that is called the Blue Lacy.  I have to admit that even though I am a Texas girl at heart, I had never heard of this breed of dog.  But it turns out that some brothers, Frank, George, Erwin, and Harry Lacy, invented this breed back in the 1860s.  They bred English Shepherds, greyhounds, and wolves together with maybe a little coyote thrown in.  The blue lacy dogs were meant to be herding dogs that could work the family's wild hogs, just like in the book Old Yeller.  So anyway, this is the only type of dog that started out in Texas, so that's why it's the state dog.

Maryland has both a state dog and a state cat, and so does Massachusetts.  The state dog of Maryland is the Chesapeake Bay Retriever, which is a type of hunting dog that was bred to help duck hunters in the cold water and marshes around Chesapeake Bay.  Maryland has an official state sport, but it is not duck hunting, it is jousting.  So their choice of dog has nothing to do with their choice of state sport.

The state cat of Maryland is the calico, which is not a breed, it's a color pattern.  But I guess it was nice of them to choose a state cat, even if it's not a particular breed.  And anyway, calico cats are pretty, plus they have the same three colors as the Baltimore Oriole, which is the state bird of Maryland, so that's why calicos got to be the state cat.

In Massachusetts, you can find the Boston Terrier as the official state dog.  This makes sense because Boston is an important city in Massachusetts, and it's where the Boston terrier got its start, which I told you about in a previous blog entry.  

The official state cat of Massachusetts is the tabby cat, which is a color pattern and not a real breed, the same as the calico cat.  I'm not sure why the people of Massachusetts chose the tabby cat to be their state feline, but I guess they had their reasons.

And while I'm talking about state cats, I will go ahead and tell you that the only other state that has one is Maine, and it's the Maine Coon Cat, which really is a breed, as my kitty brother, Charlie will tell you because he is supposedly a Maine Coon Cat, even though he has never been anywhere close to Maine.

Well, okay, now it's time to talk about more state dogs.  In Alaska, you've got the Alaskan Malamute, which is a good choice, since that breed got its start in Alaska, and it also takes part in the state sport, which is mushing.

The Catahoula Leopard Dog is the official dog of Louisiana.  I already wrote a whole entry about this breed, and it is my second all-time most popular blog entry.  But what I didn't tell you then, because I didn't know this, is that the state sport of Louisiana is boar hunting.  And the Catahoula Leopard Dogs are used to control the hogs by barking right in their faces.  Since hogs don't like this and since they also have sharp tusks, the dogs wear Kevlar vests, chest armor, and wide collars to keep from getting hurt.

New Hampshire has the Chinook as its state dog.  This is another breed I had not heard about, but it turns out that a man named Arthur Treadwell Walden, who lived in New Hampshire, developed the breed, and he did it all from one dog named "Chinook" who was born in 1917.  Chinook was Mr. Walden's lead dog when he went on the Byrd Antarctic expedition in 1929.  So he bred Chinook with huskies used in Peary's North Pole expedition.  What he ended up with was a sled dog that helped make the sport of mushing popular in New Hampshire, but the official state sport is not mushing, it's skiing.  

In North Carolina, people like to go coon hunting, so they chose the Plott Hound as their state dog because it is used in this sport.  Plott hounds came from Germany originally, and they were mostly used to hunt boars there, but in 1750 a man named Johannes Plott came to North Carolina from Germany and brought some hounds with him, and he got the breed started in this country.

South Carolina also chose a hunting breed as its state dog, the Boykin Spaniel.  A man named L. Whitaker Boykin did a lot of breeding to get a little spaniel for hunting and retrieving that could ride in the small boats that hunters used in the swamps. 

The Great Dane is the official state dog of Pennsylvania, but I don't know why.  Maybe the people in that state just wanted a really big dog to be their official canine.  Or maybe all the people who came over from Germany and settled in Pennsylvania happened to like Great Danes a lot.

Virginia picked the American Foxhound as their state dog, and this is because George Washington, who lived in that state, pretty much developed that breed.  But I already told you about that in my blog before.

And the last state I'm going to tell you about is Wisconsin, where the official dog is the American Water Spaniel.  This breed got started in the middle of the 19th century, and nobody knows where, exactly, but the best guess is that it was probably developed in the Fox River and Wolf River valleys of Wisconsin.

So that is the whole story of official state dogs and cats.  Maybe more of them will get to be officially chosen by states pretty soon.  I think I'm going to lobby the Missouri legislature to make the basenji the state dog of Missouri.  And the reason why basenjis should be chosen is because I live here!  Then maybe, while I'm at it, I can get them to make the Missouri state cat be the dilute tortoiseshell, like Chloe, or else the tuxedo cat, like Charlie.

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President George W. Bush and His Pets

George W. Bush is the son of President George H.W. Bush, who I already told you about.  You probably remember that the older Bushes owned Millie, the springer spaniel who had a litter of puppies in the White House and who also wrote a best-selling book.  Well, when the younger George Bush got to be president in 2001, he still had one of Millie's puppies, who was named Spot Fletcher, and she moved back into the White House, where she had first been born.  Spot Fletcher was named after Scott Fletcher,  who was the shortstop of the Texas Rangers when Mr. George W. Bush used to own the team.  And even though Spot Fletcher sounds kind of like a boy's name, the dog it belonged to was really a girl.

Well, before I tell you more about President Bush's pets, I will just tell you a little bit about the man himself.  He was born on July 6, 1946, and he grew up in Texas.  He went to Yale University and to Harvard Business School.  Then he worked in the oil business for a while.  He married Laura Welch in 1977.  In 1994, he was elected Governor of Texas, and he ran for President in 2000.  He got elected, but it was a close election that had to be decided by a group called the Electoral College, and a lot of people were angry about how the election turned outxddc.  But Mom said I shouldn't talk about politics, so I won't.

Anyway, when President and Mrs. Bush and their twin daughters moved into the White House, they had Spot the springer spaniel, like I already told you.  And also they had a Scottish Terrier named Barney, who was born on September 30, 2000, in New Jersey.  His mother, Coors, was owned by Christine Todd Whitman, who was the former Environmental Protection Agency Director and the former Governor of New Jersey.  Ms. Whitman gave Barney to Mr. Bush as a gift.

Barney got to be famous right away because he had his own website and he made videos for YouTube with people such as Dolly Parton, Tony Blair, and Karl Rove.  The president loved Barney very much and liked to play ball with him on the White House lawn.  He said that Barney was "the son I never had."  When the war in Iraq was going badly and the president's poll ratings went down, some people said that Mr. Bush was using Barney as a WMD -- a "weapon of mass distraction."  Personally, I don't see anything wrong with that because dogs are good at loving you, no matter what, and that helps distract you from all the bad stuff that's going on.

But speaking of bad stuff, a sad thing that happened during President Bush's first term was that Spot got old and sick and had to be put to sleep.  She was 15 when she died, so she had a long and good life.

After that, there were just two pets in the White House, Barney and India, the cat.  India was a totally black cat that the Bush family adopted when she was a kitten in 1990.  At that time, the Bush daughters were 9 years old.  India lived in the Texas governor's mansion, and then she lived in the White House, so she had some pretty nice places to live in.

Some people in the country of India got very upset about the First Family's having a cat named India because they thought it was an insult to the Indian nation.  In the state of Kerala, more than 100 dogs were supposedly re-named "Bush" to get back at President Bush for his cat's name.  Also an effigy of Mr. Bush was burned in protest.  The real truth is that the cat had not been named for the country of India.  Instead, she was named for a Texas Rangers player, Rubén Sierra, who was called "El Indio."  So the Bushes did not change the name of their cat.

India did not get to be as famous with the press and the American people as Barney did, but she did show up in some of the videos that were made of the Scotty.  On January 4, 2009, India died at the White House, when she was 18 years old.  The First Lady said, "India was a beloved member of the Bush family for almost two decades.  She will be greatly missed."

The last First Pet while President Bush was in office was Miss Beazley, who was also a Scottish Terrier. In fact, she was Barney's niece.  President Bush gave Miss Beazley to Mrs. Bush as a birthday present in 2005.  The name came from Uncle Beazley, who was a dinosaur in the children's book The Enormous Egg, by Oliver Butterworth.  After Miss Beazley joined the family, she soon started getting more privileges than Barney ever got.  But this seems only fair to me because a girl puppy is bound to be much cuter and sweeter than a boy puppy.  At least that's my opinion.

Anyway, everyone in the White House got kind of grumpy in 2008 when President Bush and the Republicans weren't very popular anymore, and the Democrats won the election.  Barney was so grouchy that he bit a couple of people.  The first person he bit was the public relations director for the Boston Celtics, Heather Walker.  He bit her on the wrist and broke the skin, so she had to get all bandaged up.

The second person he bit was Jon Decker, who was a Reuters news reporter.  Mr. Decker got bit on one finger and had to get a tetanus shot and antibiotics.  Both of these people got bitten by Barney when they tried to pet him.  I don't know why Barney decided to bite, but maybe he felt scared and threatened somehow.  Or maybe he just needed to have his thyroid tested.

Anyway, the Bush family moved out of the White House in January of 2009, when the Obamas moved in.  Of course, they took Barney and Miss Beazley with them, and the whole family moved to a house in Dallas.  Well, except for the daughters, who were all grown up and had already gone off to live their own lives.  Now Mr. Bush does some public speaking, and he also wrote a book about his life.  And as far as I know, he is still playing ball with his Scotties out on the lawn.

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THE JACKRABBITS OF ODESSA, TEXAS

Do you remember when I told you about the herd of colorful bison in Oklahoma City?  Well, my friend and faithful blog reader, Aunt Ann, wrote a comment to tell me that in Odessa, Texas, which is near where she used to live, they have big, colorful jackrabbits all over town.  So because it is the Year of the Rabbit, I did some research on this topic, and I found pictures of the jackrabbits in Odessa, and now I am going to share some of these pictures with you.

But first I will tell you that a jackrabbit is not really a rabbit.  A jackrabbit is a hare.  And the difference between a rabbit and a hare is that a hare has longer ears and longer legs than a rabbit has.  Also, rabbits live in burrows in the ground, and hares make a little scooped-out nest on top the ground.  Hares are born with fur and with their eyes open, and rabbits are not.  The way that jackrabbits got their name is that they reminded people of burros, because of their long ears.  So people started calling them "jackass rabbits," and later just "jackrabbits."

Anyway, it turns out that the city of Odessa already had a jackrabbit statue before they got all the painted ones.  This statue was called the "World's Largest Jack Rabbit," and the man who had the idea to make it was former Attorney General John Ben Shepperd, when he was the Odessa Chamber of Commerce president in 1962.  Everyone liked the idea of having a statue, and since there are so many jackrabbits in Texas, that's what kind of statue they decided to get.  It's made of fiberglass, and it's 8 feet tall.

The jackrabbit statue cost $2,300 to make, and it is named Jack Ben Rabbit.  One time some school children tried to get a mate for the jackrabbit because they thought he looked lonely.  But they did not succeed in this.  Another time some people tried to steal the statue, so now it is bolted to a cement slab.  Lots of tourists come to see the jackrabbit and have their picture taken with it.  Close to the statue, there is a historical marker, and here's what it says:

                         THE JACKRABBIT
True plains Rabbit.  Lives only in the west.  Burro-like ears gave him his name.  Color is protective, blending with sand and dry grass.  Very long legs make him a swift runner, clocked at speeds to 45 miles an hour.  Object of hunts with Greyhounds.  Was prized by plains Indians for food and fur.  To white man a reminder of desert-hard life.  In drouth and depression, meat source for thousands.  Subject of tall tales.  Actual hero of world's only Jackrabbit Rodeo, in Odessa, May 1932.

Anyway, so now there are a whole lot of jackrabbits in Odessa.  They are all over town, and they are painted all different colors.  A lot of them are painted to go with the business that sponsored them.  You can see more jackrabbit pictures on this website.  The photos were posted there in 2006, so I guess that is the year these jackrabbits first hopped into town.

I like looking at the pictures of the jackrabbits, but they are way taller than a basenji such as myself, so I'm not sure I'd like to see them up close and personal.  I know they are not supposed to be real, but what if it turned out they were?  I would hate to be eaten by a giant bunny!

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DOG-N-JOG, by Nicky

Yesterday morning Mom set the alarm so we could get up at 4:30, which is really early!  Even the cats weren't awake yet, so they hadn't started meowing to be fed.  And we dogs for sure weren't awake yet!  But Mom got up and started doing all the regular morning stuff, even though it was still dark outside.  So of course we had to get up, too, and get with the program.

Anyway, it turned out that the reason Mom made us get up so early was so that she and I could have a special adventure called Dog-n-Jog.  Mom goes to this event almost every year, but I had never been there before.  One year Mom took Barry, and another year Mom took Mel.  Mom never took Gabe, though, because she figured he would bite all the other dogs there, and that wouldn't be a nice thing to do.  Also, she has never taken Piper, because Piper doesn't like to walk.

Dog-n-Jog is a big fundraising event for the Humane Society of Greater Kansas City, so that's why Mom likes to go there.  Sometimes she helps with the adoptable dogs, and sometimes she raises money and actually walks.  This year, Mom and I walked for a whole mile.  But first, we raised a bunch of money.  We raised $360 all together, which is more than Mom has ever raised before because she is not a very good fundraiser.

The other thing we did at Dog-n-Jog was we helped out at the REGAP booth, and I stood around, looking handsome and showing people what nice dogs greyhounds are.  Mom talked the REGAP people into having a booth at Dog-n-Jog this year, which they haven't done for several years, and that's why she thought she had better work at the booth.  Also, it's the reason why we had to be there so early, although when we got there at 6:30, the booth was pretty much already set up.

We thought that there would be horrible, scary thunderstorms during Dog-n-Jog, because there was a 60% chance of that happening.  But by some miracle, the storms didn't come, so we didn't get wet and scared.  Mom saw a bunch of people she knew from the Humane Society, and she introduced them to me.  Also there were some people there from Dr. Patricia's office, so we got to talk to them.

Oh, and then a lady came up to us who recognized me by my old name, Gator, because she knew me a long time ago when I was still at the Woodlands racetrack, before I got adopted the first time.  She fussed over me a whole bunch, and then she brought her husband back later, and he petted me a whole bunch, too.  I remembered them both, and I leaned on them because I always lean on people who are petting me.

We saw lots of different kinds of dogs, and I got to sniff quite a few of them.  Besides mixed breeds, here are some of the other types of dogs we saw:  Great Danes, Yorkies, Chihuahuas, Scotties, Westies, Dachshunds, Shiba Inus, Smooth Fox Terriers, Huskies, German Shepherds, Golden Retrievers, Belgian Tervurens, Labrador Retrievers, Corgis, Whippets, Beagles, Pitbulls, Dobermans, Rottweilers, Boxers, Labradoodles, Poodles, Swiss Mountain Dogs, Miniature Schnauzers, Shih Tzus, Border Collies, Shelties, and two Leonbergers.  Mom was very excited to see the Leonbergers, because she had never met one in person, so she took me over to meet them.  We probably saw more dog breeds than this, but I can't remember the other ones right now.  We did not see a single basenji, though, which I was sad to have to tell Piper.

Finally, it was time for us to do our one-mile walk, which we did pretty fast because it made me nervous to have so many dogs all around us, walking with their humans.  I've never done anything like that before.  It sort of reminded me of my racing days, but it was different from that because humans don't run on the same track with dogs.  At first, I kept cutting in front of people, which is good racing strategy, but then Mom would pull me back and apologize to the people, so I figured out that we weren't really running a race, and I shouldn't use my racing strategy techniques.

We went around twice, which added up to a mile, and when we were almost finished, I had to stop and poop in the middle of the street.  But Mom picked it up, and then we continued on.  There were people with big, fancy cameras there, taking pictures, and Mom tried to make me walk where we would be sure to get our picture taken.  We won't know until Thursday, though, if we are in any of the pictures, because Thursday is when they will post all the pictures online.  Meanwhile, if you want to see the video that one of the TV stations took of Dog-n-Jog, you can go here and look at it.

Mom also paid $5 to have a nice, posed picture taken of the two of us.  That is the picture you can see at the top of this blog entry.  Mom says that I look way too serious, and like I'm not having a good time.  But that is because I was rather anxious about everything that was happening, so I really wasn't having a very good time.

There was also a photographer there who was taking a bunch of photos just of the greyhounds because REGAP is going to make a calendar for next year and sell it to raise money.  This photographer took a ton a pictures of me while another woman, Aunt Kathy, did silly things behind her, like whistling and throwing a hat in the air.

Well, I think that's all the important stuff I have to say about Dog-n-Jog, except that I was so tired when we got home that I had to flop down and take a really long nap.  Mom took a nap, too, because she had to go to a concert yesterday afternoon.  And while she was gone to the concert, Barry was very bad, and he got a bunch of stuff off the table and ate it up completely, even though Mom had it under a stapler and a book and some other things.  And what he ate up turned out to be some Very Important Bills that Mom was supposed to pay by the end of the month, except now she doesn't even know which bills they were or how much she was supposed to pay.

So Mom is pretty upset with Barry, and she has now moved everything that is made of paper off the table and put it in higher-up places.  I don't know if that will really help, but she thinks maybe it will!

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ROUNDWORMS AND HOOKWORMS AND WHIPWORMS, OH MY!

I already told you about tapeworms and heartworms in my blog, and today I'm going to tell you about three more kinds of nasty worms that get inside of dogs and other animals.  Even humans can get these worms, so everybody needs to learn about them.

Sadly, puppies and kittens are often born with worms already inside them, because they get the worms from their mothers.  And if they don't get the worms before they are born, they can get them through their mom's milk.  This is why puppies and kittens usually have to be de-wormed several times while they are still young.

Roundworms are the most common kind of worm for dogs to have.  You can get them by eating a small animal such as a mouse that has worms, or by eating poop with roundworm larvae in it.  Or you can be born with roundworms, like I already said.

When the roundworms get to be adults, they like to live in your intestines.  The worms can be 6 or 7 inches long, and they look sort of like spaghetti.  Sometimes they come out in your poop or you can puke them up, but mostly they just hang out in your small intestines and eat the tissue and fluids there.  If you have too many roundworms, they can make you lose weight, have hair that looks dull, and get a pot belly.  If the worms get into your lungs, they can make you cough.  Puppies can actually die from having too many roundworms, but older dogs don't usually die from having them.

Roundworm head

The way to find out if you have roundworms is to have your veterinarian look at your poop under a microscope.  If there are roundworm eggs in the poop sample, then you will have to take some kind of de-worming medicine.

People can get roundworms if they have dirt or poop on their hands that has larvae in it.  This happens more often with children than with adults because children like to play in the dirt, and they might forget to wash their hands before they stick them in their mouths.  In humans, the roundworm larvae don't turn into adult worms, but the larvae get into several parts of the body and make them inflamed, which doesn't feel very good.

Hookworms are really nasty because the larvae can bore right into your body through your skin, which makes an itchy place where they went in.  The adult worms have teeth that are like hooks, and they grab onto the inside of your guts, where they sit around eating your blood and tissues.  This makes you feel yucky, and you also have diarrhea with blood in it, and then you get anemic because you don't have enough red blood cells.

These worms are easy to get, and they are especially bad for puppies and kittens because they gobble up your blood and protein, so you feel tired and you don't grow very much.  And if you don't get any medicine to kill the worms, you can get congestive heart failure and die.

Hookworm head

Humans can get hookworms just from walking around barefooted where there are larvae.  Or they can also get hookworms when infected dirt gets in their mouths.

Hookworm larvae migration.  Ewwww!

The last icky worm I'm going to talk about today is the whipworm.  These worms got their name because they are shaped kind of like whips.  If you have whipworms in your yard, it's really hard to get rid of them because their eggs lie around for a long time, maybe for years, and even cold weather doesn't kill them.

A dog can get whipworms by eating some dirt or poop that has eggs in it.  Then the eggs hatch in the large intestine, and the larvae grow up to be adult worms.  Whipworms use their mouths like little spears to cut the inside of your intestine and eat the blood and yummy fluids.

If you get a lot of whipworms, they can make you very sick.  You can get anemic and dehydrated, and you can also have bloody diarrhea.  Plus you might lose weight because you don't feel like eating.  Whipworms only make small numbers of eggs, and they don't make them regularly, so sometimes the vet has to look at your poop several times before being sure that you have these worms.  That is why if a dog has diarrhea all the time, he is usually treated for whipworms, even if it's not proven that he really has them.

Well, that's more than enough about this yucky subject.  The main things that you should learn from what I said are to keep your yard cleaned up so there isn't a lot of poop lying around.  And if you are playing in the dirt, you should always wash your hands really well before you put your hands in your mouth.

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