AN UPDATE ON KITTEN CARSON

I was going to write about some important, educational topic today, but then I decided to write about my kitten foster brother instead, because that is the topic I think is most interesting right now, and it's my blog, so I can write about anything I want!

Actually, I'm not sure why I think Carson the kitten is interesting, because he really doesn't do much.  Here are the only things he likes to do:
1.  Sleep
2.  Eat
3.  Poop
4.  Pee
5.  Meow in a high-pitched, annoying way
6.  Crawl around looking goofy because he can't really walk yet

Mom says that this is all Carson can do right now because he is so young.  She said I was once a tiny puppy, and that's all I did, too, but I don't remember that, so I think Mom is just making it up.

Anyway, yesterday Mom set up our biggest crate so that Carson would have a place to learn how to walk and do other kitten things.  She put newspapers in it and a blanket and a box with more blankets to help keep Carson warm when he's sleeping.  And also Mom put duct tape all around the bottom of the crate because she was afraid Carson might get his head stuck in there and break his neck or something.

Then after that, she put Carson in the crate.  Barry and I were really, really interested in Carson, and we sniffed him through the sides of the crate.  Barry kept woofing and lunging at Carson and sticking his foot in there and trying to grab Carson and eat him.

So I was forced to growl at Barry and warn him to keep away from MY kitten, because I don't want Barry to eat Carson.  Here's a picture of me growling at Barry, and he backed off because I sounded so fierce.

I would like to play with Carson, and I did a play bow and everything, but Carson just ignored me, which sort of hurt my feelings.  At first he took a nap in the big crate, but then he woke up and crawled out of his bed and started doing his funny, creeping walk thing all around in the crate.

And after a while, he even stuck his little bitty feet out of the crate, and I licked them, but there are very sharp claw thingies on the ends of his feet!  Then Carson started trying to climb up the inside of the crate, which Mom said was surprising that he could even do right now since he's so young.

Barry kept trying to get at Carson, and Mom was holding him back because she did not want Barry to bite Carson's foot off.  Then finally, Mom put a muzzle on Barry, which Barry didn't like, but at least she didn't have to worry about Carson getting hurt.

Well, unless I decide to bite his foot off myself.  Mom is hoping that that idea has not come into my mind, but it makes her nervous not knowing exactly what I'm thinking or planning.  Ha!  And I am not going to tell her, either, because I like to keep her in the dark.

Okay, that's pretty much all I have to say about Carson right now, but Mom wanted me to tell everybody that the white hair is all falling off my cute little muzzle because of my Cushing's Disease, and now I look even stranger than I did before.  Someday maybe my hair will grow back, but right now it's mostly just falling out.  I feel like a little old man who is going bald!

People keep asking Mom how I am doing, and the answer is that I am pretty much the same because we are just trying to get my cortisol level back up again, but not as high as it was before I took those really expensive pills.  So I am just taking one-half prednisone pill every day, and I have to do that for two months.  Then after that, we have to do the $280 test again to see where my cortisol level is.  It's kind of a slow and annoying process, but there's nothing we can do about it.  And at least now I have my kitten to keep my mind off my problems!

Read More

Doggy Trivia

The name of the dog on the Cracker Jack box is Bingo.

The average dog has 42 permanent teeth.

Female dog bites are twice as numerous as male bites.

Wolves probably evolved from an animal called Tomarctus, which lived about 15,000,000 years ago.

The Institute for the Study of Animal Problems, in Washington, D.C. did tests that show that dogs and cats are either right-pawed or left-pawed, just like people are right-handed or left-handed.

In ancient Greek literature, when Odysseus finally arrived home from the Trojan Wars, after being away for 20 years, the only one who recognized him was his old dog, Argos, who wagged his tail and then fell down dead.

About 1 million dogs in the U.S. have been named the primary beneficiary in their owner's will.

Most dogs have pink tongues except for the chow, whose tongue is black.

Every year $1.5 billion is spent on pet food, which is four times the amount spent on baby food.

The expression "three dog night" came from the Eskimos, and it means a night so cold that you have to have three dogs in bed with you, so you can keep warm!

Read More

We Have a KITTEN!

Mom went to the Humane Society yesterday, and you'll never guess what she brought home with her!  It was a teeny tiny, itty bitty KITTEN!  Mom never meant to bring home a kitten, but she did.  We're not going to adopt the kitten.  We're just going to foster him until he is old enough to go someplace to be adopted.

This is where the kitten lives, in his special crate
with a blankie and a heated disk thingy under it.

We don't know a whole lot about the kitten, like what happened to his mama or if he had any littermates, but here's what we do know about him.  A big, strong construction worker found him at a construction site on maybe Friday.  Then this big, tough guy went to Petco and bought some fake milk like you give to kittens when they don't have a mama cat to nurse from.  And the man fed the kitten every two hours all weekend.  But the man couldn't keep the kitten because he has some other pets, so he brought it to the shelter on Monday morning, and the nice people at the shelter took the kitten and said they would find someone to foster it.

Well, Mom didn't know about any of this, and she just happened to go to the front desk to buy some Frontline because it was time for her to put it on us so we won't get fleas and ticks.  And the woman working at the desk was holding this little tiny kitten to keep it warm and happy, and she asked Mom if she wanted to hold him, so Mom did, and Mom liked the kitten, and she ended up bringing him home.

Mom never had to feed a kitten or a puppy by hand before, so she is just hoping she can keep the kitten alive.  He is very noisy, even though he is very small.  I don't know how he can find so much to meow about, at his young age, but he does.  We think he might turn out to be a long-haired cat, but we don't know for sure.  He is black all over, without any white on him.  Or maybe he is gray, but probably he is black.  I think he would be cuter if he had some white markings, like I have, but nobody asked me.

Kittens are very messy when they eat!

When Mom brought the kitten home, she held him so that Barry and I could sniff him all over, and then Barry decided that Mom was giving him a squeaky new toy to play with, and he tried to bite it on the head, but Mom didn't let him do that.  I was a very good girl, and I didn't try to eat the kitten, so Mom said she was proud of me.

Mom showed the kitten to Chloe, and Chloe hissed at him.  Charlie also hissed at him.  I guess they don't want to have another cat in the house.  Mel and Nicky didn't go anywhere close to the kitten, and I think that's because they are afraid of him!

His eyes are blue right now, but maybe they will change color later.

Dr. Michelle, at the shelter, said the kitten was about 2 weeks old, but Mom looked online at how kittens develop, and she thinks he might be more like 3 weeks old because his ears stand up, and he is trying to walk around a little, but he is not very good at it, so I think he needs to start practicing.

Mom said she might name the kitten Carson, like Kit Carson, who was a famous explorer or something like that.  She thought of this name because it's like Kitten Carson, get it?  Well, anyway, SHE thought it was funny.  But Mom is not sure if she gets to name the kitten or not.

You call that WALKING?  hahahaha!

Last night Mom made Carson sleep downstairs in the kitchen, so we didn't have to listen to his loud meowing all night.  She got up about 2:30 and went downstairs and fed him a whole bunch of milk, and then we all went back to bed.  The nice lady at the shelter told Mom that if she just fed the kitten once during the night, that would be enough, and she didn't have to get up every two hours to do it.  So we were all very thankful for that!

Read More

CONJOINED ANIMAL TWINS

Most people have heard of conjoined twins, or "Siamese twins," as they are sometimes called.  These twins are joined together somewhere on their bodies, and they often share internal organs such as livers or brains.  The reason these twins are called Siamese twins is because back in the 1800s there was a really famous pair named Chang and Eng Bunker, who came from the country of Siam, which is now called Thailand.  These twins traveled around with some circuses, and lots of people paid money to see them.

Anyway, the same thing that happens to people sometimes happens to animals, and the result is conjoined twin animals.  Except that we don't hear about it as much because (1) conjoined animals might not even be able to get out of their mom and be born, or (2) they might get born, but they are born dead, or (3) if they are born alive, they usually can't survive for very long, especially not in the wild.



No one is totally sure how conjoined twins happen, but there are two theories.  The older theory is that the egg gets fertilized in the womb, and then it splits in two, but it doesn't split completely.  This theory is called fission.  The newer theory that people now think is more correct is that the fertilized egg splits completely, but then the stem cells in the twins start looking for similar stem cells (because this is what stem cells do), and they end up growing parts of the twins back together.  The name of this theory is fusion.

Then there's another kind of weird twin, and it's called a parasitic twin.  This type of twin happens when one of the twins is dominant, and the other twin stops developing.  So the twin that is a parasite ends up having only certain parts, like maybe legs or a head or something, and it is completely dependent on the other twin that got fully developed.  Which is why it's called a parasite.

Okay, so that's enough explanatory stuff.  Now we need to look at some pictures.  I tried very hard to find photos that are real, true photos and not ones that are photoshopped, but it's difficult to tell the difference sometimes, so I'm sorry if I got fooled.

These two rattlesnakes were joined at the neck -- if you can say that a snake has a neck.  Some people found them at a construction site in Arizona and brought them to the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum.  The museum asked a veterinarian named Dr. Jim Jarchow to separate the snakes, so he did surgery on them.  He thought they were just joined by soft tissue, but it turned out that the top two vertebrae were also joined.  So he cut through the bones, too, and now the snakes are two separate snakes.

Here are two Nile Tilapia that live in an aquarium in Bangkok, Thailand.  They were 8 months old when this picture was taken.  They have found a way to make their situation work just fine.  The smaller fish goes around upside-down, looking for food, while the bigger twin protects him.

A man in Arkansas found two young barn swallows that are joined at the hip by skin and maybe also by muscle tissue.  It is very rare to find conjoined birds because of course they would not be able to fly, so once they got old enough to need to fly around and get their own food, they would die.

The rest of the pictures I found are of what I think are parasitic twins, and not really conjoined twins.  There are several examples of animals that have two heads.  The scientific word for having two heads polycephaly, just in case you ever need to know.

This cat is named Lil Bit, and when he was born, the vet told his mom that he would probably not survive.  But she really wanted for him to live, so she fed him every 15 minutes from an eye-dropper.  I'm not sure when she got any sleep,  because she did not explain that part.  Anyway, after 2 or 3 months of feeding him like that, she started him on real cat food.

Lil Bit has two mouths, two noses, and four eyes.  Vets think that he may also have two brains because one face can go to sleep while the other one is awake, and the two pairs of eyes can blink independently.  Both faces eat and breathe, and one face can sneeze without the other face sneezing.  Lil Bit's mom says "When he purrs it is like he is purring in stereo."










Here are a couple of examples of snakes with two heads:

The rest of the examples I found are mostly of animals with extra legs, which is a condition that I think would make it hard to walk very well, unless you were really well coordinated.

I looked for some pictures of conjoined dogs.  I couldn't find much, but I did find this puppy fetus that was preserved in a jar.

Also I found a dog with six legs.

And then, finally, I found what I was looking for!  Aren't they cute?

Read More

A NEW SPONSORED CHILD!

Mom used to sponsor a girl in Ghana, which is a little country in West Africa, and this girl's name was Linda.  Mom sponsored Linda for 5 or 6 years, and then suddenly we got a letter from Plan USA that said Linda's family had moved away.  We don't know where they moved to, but we know that where they used to live there wasn't much rain, and it was hard to grow any crops.  So somebody bought up a lot of land and was going to make a pineapple plantation.  And that's why Linda's family moved somewhere else.

Alexandra

Anyway, Mom got to pick a new child to sponsor, and she decided that since she already sponsored a bunch of kids in Africa and Asia, maybe she should sponsor one somewhere else.  So she decided on South America, even though she has two kids in Ecuador and one in Peru and none in Central America, unless you count Haiti.

So Mom told the Plan website that she wanted to sponsor a girl who was between 14 and 16, anywhere in South America.  And the girl that showed up first was Alexandra, from Colombia.  So Mom agreed to sponsor her, without even looking at any other choices.  Alexandra just turned 15 last week, and she has a twin brother whose name is Alexander.  They live with their mother in a house that is made out of unfired mud bricks, with a corrugated metal roof.  Their father is "absent," so we don't know if that means he went somewhere else to get a job and support the family or if it means he abandoned the family.

Alexander and Alexandra

Mom and I did not know a whole lot about Colombia, but we did some in-depth research, and now we know more than we did before.  Colombia is located at the northwest end of South America, and Panama hooks up with it.  In fact, Panama used to be part of Colombia, but later it got to be its very own country.  Colombia is the only country in South America that has a coast on both the Atlantic and the Pacific.  It was named for Christopher Columbus, even though he never actually went there personally.

The department of El Chocó is in orange.
Quibdó is the little spot in the department.

The town where Alexandra lives is called Quibdó, and it was founded in 1654 by some Jesuit priests.  It is located in the department of El Chocó.  A "department" is what we would call a "state."  I don't know why the South Americans use this word for it, but they do.  Anyway, Quibdó has a population of about 150,000 people.  It is on the bank of the Atrato River, which if you look at the photos below, you can see it is really wide and muddy-looking.  I would not want to fall into that river because I am afraid I would drown.  Also there might be crocodiles or something in it, but we did not research whether there are any or not.

Quibdó on the Atrato River

So this department of El Chocó is mostly flat and full of jungles.  It is a really hot and humid place, and it rains all the time there.  One website I looked at said that Quibdó is the 5th wettest place in the whole world, but the Plan information said it was the 2nd wettest place.  So I don't know who is right and who is wrong.  What I do know is that every month, they get between 20 and 30 inches of rain, which adds up to about 354 inches every year.  And this is another reason why I would never want to live there, because you know how much I hate having to go out to potty in the rain!  Oh, and the minimum average temperature all year round is 86ºF, and the maximum average is 90ºF.  So this means it's either hot or hotter all the time, and we think they probably don't even have air-conditioning!

The marketplace

The people who live in Quibdó make a living by doing stuff like driving motorcycle taxis, loading and unloading cargo, selling fruit and fish and other stuff in the market, working in domestic service, and mining.  We don't know how Alexandra's family gets along, since the father is "absent" and the mother is a housewife.  But Alexandra and her brother go to school, so the family must get some income somehow.

Another view of Quibdó

Okay, so maybe you are wondering how there got to be lots of black people from Africa living in Colombia.  Well, it turns out that their ancestors came there as slaves, just like what happened in the U.S.  The Spaniards started out using the native people to do their work, but then the natives kept dying, so the Spaniards imported African slaves beginning about 1500.  The main work the slaves did was in gold mines, on sugar plantations, and on large cattle ranches.

Slavery was abolished in 1851, but life was still hard for the Afro-Colombians.  They had to live in isolated places in the jungle in order to stay safe.  Then in 1945, the department of El Chocó was created especially so that the Afro-Colombians would have a place where they could govern themselves and keep their culture alive.

The Cathedral

No one knows exactly how many people of African descent live in Colombia, but they probably make up 21% of the population.  About 75% of these people live in cities, and the rest live in rural areas.  Colombia has the 3rd-largest black population in the western hemisphere, after Brazil and the U.S.

In Colombia there is a group of scary, bad people called Las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia -- Ejército del Pueblo, or FARC-EP for short.  In English this means The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia -- People's Army.  This group says that it is fighting for the poor peasants against the rich people, and it believes in Marxist and Leninist ideals.  But the governments of the United States, the European Union, Canada, Colombia, Chile, and New Zealand say that FARC-EP is just a bunch of terrorists.  FARC-EP is always going around kidnapping people and killing people and making money off of the illegal drug trade.  So the Colombian people are afraid of them, and many have had to leave their homes because of all the bad fighting that FARC-EP has caused.

Homes on the Atrato River

But I read on a website about traveling to Colombia that it is safe to visit Quibdó as long as you stay in town, because there are lots of soldiers there to keep you safe.  But if you wander off into the jungle, who knows what will happen to you!  You might get kidnapped by FARC or step on a land mine or get swallowed by a boa constrictor.  Which is another reason why I am perfectly happy to stay right here at home and learn about Mom's new sponsored child from a safe distance.

Read More

THE STRAY DOGS OF MOSCOW

In Moscow there are tons of stray dogs, and they are all very smart, which is how they stay alive.  Some of these dogs are so smart that they have even learned how to ride the subway!  All together, there are probably about 35,000 stray dogs in Moscow, which is 84 dogs per square mile.  Five hundred of these live in subway stations, and maybe 20 of them ride on the trains.

The dogs that get on the subways beg for food or else take a nap until their stop comes, and then they get off.  You might wonder how they know which stop is the right one, and here are some ways that they might be able to do this:
1.  They can tell by how long they are on the train that it is time to get off.
2.  They recognize the name of the station when the recorded voice announces it.
3.  They know how the station smells.
4.  They use several of these methods together.

The subway dogs like to use the cars at the ends of the trains because those are the cars that are less crowded.  Also another thing that stray dogs have learned is to cross busy streets when there is a green light.  The people who have studied these dogs think they know when to cross because of the little walking-man light, and not because of the color of the traffic light.

Some of the dogs have figured out a very clever way to get food from people.  What they do is they wait until somebody buys food from a kiosk on the street, and then they sneak up behind the person and suddenly bark very loudly.  If the person is startled enough, they will drop their food, and the dog will gobble it up.  One type of food the dogs especially like to get this way is shawarma, which is a popular kind of Eastern food eaten in Moscow.

The Moscow dogs all look pretty similar to each other, except for being all different colors.  They are medium-sized, and they have thick fur, wedge-shaped heads, and almond eyes.  A biologist named Andrei Poyarkov, who used to study wolves, is now studying the stray dogs in Moscow.  The number of wolves in all of Russia is between 50,000 and 60,000, and the number of stray dogs in just the city of Moscow is about 35,000.  So this means the dogs live close together and are always meeting up with each other.  But because of this, they are much less aggressive towards each other than wolves are.  The leader of a dog pack is not the strongest and most dominant, like the leader is in a wolf pack.  Instead, it's the smartest dog.  That's because the other dogs know their leader has to be smart so that the pack can survive.

Mr. Poyarkov says that the stray dogs of Moscow are in the process of evolving back from being domesticated toward being wild again, like wolves.  He has divided the dogs into four types, and the way he did this was by looking at how the dogs got their food and how socialized they were with people.

He calls the first group "guard dogs" because they usually hang out with a security guard at someplace like a warehouse, garage, or hospital.  They think of this place as their territory, so they help guard it, and in return they get fed regularly.

Dogs in the second group are okay being around people in general, but are not bonded with any one person.  These dogs can figure out who is likely to give them food, and so they will go up to this person and act all friendly and wag their tails, and sure enough, the person will give them some food.  Mr. Poyarkow calls these dogs the beggars.  They live in small packs with a very clever alpha dog.  Younger dogs and those with low positions in the pack learn to beg by watching other pack members.

The third group of dogs is sort of okay with people being around, but they don't go right up to them.  Mostly they get their food from trash bins and by finding scraps in the street.  Their interaction is with other stray dogs and not really with people.

The truly wild dogs are in the fourth group.  They are scared of people and avoid them.  These dogs get their food by hunting it and killing it, so they eat mice, rats, and maybe a cat sometimes.  They live in wooded park areas or near industrial complexes.  They like to come out at night when there aren't so many scary people on the streets.

Some people think that Moscow should try to get rid of all the stray dogs, but other people like to have them around.  A few months ago there was a plan to round up all the dogs and send them to a place about 150 miles away from the city.  But animal rights people said this would be like sending the dogs to a concentration camp.  They got 2,000 signatures of famous artists and musicians who thought the plan was bad, and now the city has decided not to do it.

There have been other plans that involved shelters and spaying and neutering the dogs, but these programs might not make much difference in the dog population.  Mr. Poyarkow says that the amount of food available will keep the number of dogs about the same.  Also, most pups born don't survive to be adults, and if they do, they are basically taking the place of an adult that has died.  The length of a Moscow dog's life is about 10 years.  You can't adopt these dogs as pets, either, because they were born feral and grew up that way, and most of them can't even stand being kept indoors.



So that's the story of Moscow's stray dogs.  I don't want to go to Moscow, personally, because I don't want to have to beg for my food.  I would rather just have it handed to me in a bowl twice a day!  Also it gets way too cold in Moscow in the winter, and I don't like to wear sweaters or coats.  Plus people in Moscow speak Russian all the time, so I would never know what the heck they were saying to me.

Read More