Follow the Piper

MANX CATS

2012-02-24T08:18:00.000-06:00

A lot of people have heard of Manx cats, and that is probably because Manx cats don't have tails, which makes them different from most other kinds of cats. The reason Manx cats end up with no tails is because they are born that way And they are born that way because of a certain mutation in their genes that makes them have a shorter tail or no tail at all.

Manx cats come from the Isle of Man, which is an island off the west coast of England. In the Manx language, the Manx cat is called kayt Manninagh, but I have no idea how you pronounce this. And sometimes Manx is spelled Manks. Another word for Manx cats is stubbin, but this is an old word that isn't used much anymore. There were already tailless cats on the Isle of Man before the 18th century, and nobody knows exactly how they got there, but they probably came on ships from other places.

Over time, people made up stories about how the Manx cat lost its tail. One of the stories was that Noah closed the door of the ark on the cat's tail when it started raining, and accidentally cut the tail off. Another tale says that a rabbit and a cat mated, and their babies were tailless and long-legged, with a hopping gait. But the real truth is that the cats ended up without tails because of a spontaneous mutation in their genes. And then, because the tailless trait was dominant, and the gene pool on the Isle of Man was limited, this type of cat got to be pretty common there.

As it turns out, there are some other populations of tailless cats in places like Cornwall, in the south of England; on a Danish peninsula called Reersø; and on a Black Sea peninsula in Crimea. So the Isle of Man cats might have originally come by ship from one of those places.

Some Manx cats have no tail at all, and others have a little short tail. If you breed two Manx cats, you will get a litter of kittens with several different tail lengths. And if you breed a Manx cat to a regular cat, you will get some Manx kittens and some regular kittens.

Here are the names for different lengths of Manx tails:

Rumpy or dimple rumpy -- no tail at all, except maybe there is a tuft of hair in the spot where the tail would have been.
Riser or rumpy riser -- the cat has just a bump of cartilage under the fur.
Stumpy -- there is a partial tail of fused vertebrae, up to 1" long.
Stubby -- with a short tail of non-fused bones, up to half the length of a regular cat tail.
Longy, tailed, or taily -- a cat with a tail that is half- to full-length.

I think we can all agree that these are really funny-sounding names! They make me want to giggle, just reading them. But now that I know what the categories are, I can tell you how our little Manx rescue kittens fit into them: Jeeves is a rumpy, Janey is a stubby, and Jilly is also a stubby. This means that only Jeeves could be entered in a cat show as a Manx , because the Manx class is only for rumpies, risers, and stumpies. Stubby and Longy Manx cats have to go in the "Any Other Variety" class. But of course, Jeeves couldn't really be in a cat show because he doesn't have any registration papers.

Besides not having a tail, one of the other things that makes a Manx cat Manxlike is that their hind legs are longer than their front legs. This causes their rump be higher up than their shoulders, and their back to be arched or humped. In size, the Manx is small to medium, and usually weighs between 6 and 10 pounds.

Manxes have round heads, long necks, and large eyes. They can be short-haired or long-haired, but they all have a double-layered coat. The most usual colors are tabby, tortoiseshell, calico, and solid colors. A long-haired Manx is called a Cymric.

Cymric

Farmers like to keep Manx cats around because they are very good mousers, and sailors used to take them on their ships for the same reason. This breed is mostly social and friendly, but they might be a little shy with strangers. They are smart and playful and active. Sometimes they get so attached to their humans that they follow them around like a dog would.

There is a health condition called "Manx syndrome" or "Manxness," where the cats end up not just without a tail, but also with a spine that is too short. If this happens, there can be damage to the spinal cord and nerves, which can cause problems with the bowels, bladder, and digestion. Nowadays, this condition doesn't occur much because breeders have learned how to avoid it by breeding rumpy cats with stumpy cats. Of course, our little kitties that came from a barn were not bred in any kind of planned way, so I hope they will not end up with "Manx syndrome" or with any other bad thing wrong with them.

Anyway, now that I have told you all about Manx cats, I will also tell you that I was shocked to learn that not all tailless cats are Manx cats. This is because the same gene that makes Manx cats be tailless can mutate in any kind of cat, and then one or more kittens are born without tails. This type of cat is called a Domestic Tailless Cat. We can't call it a Manx because there is no way to prove that its ancestors came from the Isle of Man. But I'm sure that our kittens are real, true Manx kitties. We just need to take the time to trace their family tree back a little ways!

MY LIFE AS A NEUROTIC GREYHOUND, by Nicky

2012-02-23T08:30:00.000-06:00

Mom thinks that most greyhounds are neurotic, but that I am may be the most neurotic of all. Of course, she has not lived with all that many greyhounds, so it's quite possible that she is making a gross generalization. I will admit to having a few quirks, but hey, who doesn't? And it's their little quirks that make a person or a dog interesting, at least to my way of thinking.

Another thing Mom says about me is that I may be autistic. We don't even know if dogs can have autism, but Mom believes that if they can have it, I've definitely got it. One thing about some autistic people is that they like life to be always the same and very predictable, with everything in its place. I'm like this, because if anything looks wrong, I get all flustered. Like for example, if Mom hangs her coat on the stair railing, then the whole staircase looks different to me, and I don't know if it's safe to go up there or not. Or if there is a kitten on the stairs, I really can't possibly think about going up those steps, because who knows what might happen!

It's the same with coming in the back door from the yard. I have lots of trouble deciding if it's okay to come in, or if it's the right time to come in. When another dog is anywhere near the doorway, then I get very nervous about going through it -- especially if it's Barry, because sometimes he attacks me in doorways.

Here's where Mean Old Barry bit me on the face last week,
but Mom has started "managing" the situation,
and we hope it won't happen again!

While I'm trying to get up the nerve to come in the door, I always make circles, and I always go to the left, which is also called counterclockwise. I don't know why I go this direction. It just seems like the way I should go. If I went the other way, that would feel all wrong. But sometimes while I'm making circles on the patio, trying to decide whether to go in the house, Mom holds the door open so long for me that Jason runs out into the yard. Then Mom mutters bad words and goes out in the yard to try to catch him, which used to be easy when he was just a little kitten. But now he's a big kitten, and he knows lots more tricks to avoid being caught.

So in order to keep Jason from running out the door, Mom will pick him up and hold him while she's waiting for me to come in. But it looks strange for Mom to be standing at the door, holding a cat, and that makes me think maybe it's not safe to go in there. Or sometimes, just when I am about to go in the door, Mom makes a grab for Jason because he is about to run out the door. And that's very startling to me, so I have to go back to making circles for a while.

This is such a great place to take a nap!

Actually, there are a lot of times when I'd rather just stay out in the yard, especially if the temperature is nice, like in the 30s or 40s. I enjoy watching the squirrels in the trees, or digging holes, and I also find it pleasant to lie down in the sun and take a little nap. Mom gets frustrated sometimes if I won't come in when she thinks I should, but she's getting better about just leaving me outside for a while. One day she forgot I was out there, and she went away for several hours. I entertained myself by digging holes, howling at sirens, and snoozing. Luckily, it didn't rain or snow or even get very cold that day.

I spend a lot of time contemplating the scariness of the kitchen floor.

Anyway, once I do come back into the house, there is the matter of crossing the kitchen floor. The kitchen floor is a treacherous area because it has no carpeting or rugs. So before I can cross it, I usually have to work up my nerve by circling numerous times, and then I rush across to the living room, where there are some rugs. Mom says that there is a lot of texture in the kitchen floor tiles, so it shouldn't be all that slick. Also she says that if I would just walk across it in a normal way, like a regular dog, it wouldn't seem so scary. But I find it hard to believe a lot of the things that Mom says, and this is one of them.

The landing is just big enough for me to do some serious circling.

The stairs pose another huge problem for me because, let's face it, greyhounds are built for running, and not for climbing stairs. So whenever I decide to go upstairs, I usually have to do the circle process again. What I find to work best for me is to circle first at the bottom of the stairs, and then to go up the two steps to the landing and circle there for a while. Each time I come around to face the stairs, I have to decide whether I should go on up or not, and often I decide it's not quite the right moment. Sometimes it takes me five minutes or more of circling before I can finally go up the stairs.

The decision to go down the stairs is usually easier, although I find it helpful to stop dead in my tracks at the top of the steps before proceeding. This way, Mom can almost fall over me, then change her course to go around me and start down. That assures me that the plan really is for all of us to descend. I have to be careful not to go too fast, though, because a couple of times I have been known to trip and run head-first into the closet door at the bottom of the stairs.

My favorite place to sleep is on the big, round dog bed in Mom's bedroom. It's the kind of place where I can sprawl out in perfect comfort. If Mom has to go into the bedroom for some reason, like to answer the phone or to get ready for bed, I don't mind if she steps over me. Some dogs like to bite people who step over them, but I'm not that kind of guy. If Mom did what that silly obedience class instructor said to do, she would make me get up and move every single time instead of stepping over me, but she didn't like his methods, so she just steps right on over me.

Mom says I make funny breathing noises when I sleep,
but I wouldn't know about that because I don't stay awake to listen!

If Mom happens to be carrying something, though, like for instance, a laundry basket, I will jump up and run frantically out into the hallway. That's because I think it's very scary when Mom is carrying something. Who knows what she might drop on me? I could get killed! In general, I find that Mom is pretty klutzy, and she often drops things or bangs things around, all of which I find terribly unnerving. If she bangs a pan in the kitchen, for example, I will go scrambling up the stairs without even taking the time to circle first!

But getting back to the circling, it's not always about uncertainty and decision-making. Sometimes it's about being excited. Like if Mom is getting out my leash so she can take me for a walk, I go leaping around in circles because I'm so happy. And if it's dinnertime, and Mom is about to give me a nice bowl full of dog food, I will spin a whole bunch of circles in hungry anticipation. But I always circle to the left, as I said before, never to the right. Circling to the right would just be wrong.

Here I am sleeping with my head propped against the bed frame.
I think it makes an excellent pillow.

Well, I think I've gone on long enough about my charming idiosyncrasies. You can judge for yourself if you think I'm autistic or neurotic or if I just have a colorful personality. Mom says she still loves me, in spite of everything. And in the end, I'm glad that I'm not like other dogs, or even like other greyhounds, because what fun would that be?

A DOG NAMED UGGIE

2012-02-21T07:44:00.000-06:00

This coming Sunday night, the Academy Awards will be given out, but sadly, Uggie will not win one. I know this for sure because Uggie was not even nominated for an award, and the reason for that was because he is a DOG. I hope you can see that this is discrimination of the very worst kind, since Uggie is clearly a Very Important and Talented Movie Star, and he should be recognized as such.

Uggie is a very cute and energetic Jack Russell Terrier who was born in 2002, the very same year that I was born! His first two owners gave him up because he was "too wild," and he was about to end up in the dog pound. But then a man named Omar Von Muller heard about Uggie and took him in so he could find a new home for him. Mr. Von Muller is a well-known trainer of dogs and other animals for the movies. He decided that Uggie could maybe be a movie star because he was smart and was willing to work hard for yummy sausage treats. Also, Uggie wasn't afraid of things that he might find on a movie set, like for instance lights and cameras and strange people and loud noises.

So that's how Uggie started living with the Von Mullers and their 6-year-old daughter in North Hollywood. There are seven other dogs in this same household, and all of them work in the film industry. Uggie started his career by being in commercials and having small roles in the movies What's Up Scarlett, Wassup Rockers, and Mr. Fix It. His big break came when he played the role of Queenie in Water for Elephants. After that, Uggie went on a tour of the United States and South America with "The Incredible Dog Show." All the dogs in this group did tricks to entertain the audience. Uggie's trick was riding a skateboard.

A scene from Water for Elephants

The next big thing that Uggie did was he played the role of Jack in a silent movie called The Artist. This movie was made in the style of a movie from the 1920s, but it is really a very modern movie that only just came out in 2011. It got lots of Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, but Uggie did not receive any nominations because of being a DOG, like I mentioned before.

A scene from The Artist

While he was filming The Artist, Uggie had two stunt doubles, Dash and Dude, but mostly he did his own stunt work. Since the movie was silent, Mr. Von Mueller could just say the commands out loud instead of having to give hand signals. When the film had its premiere, Uggie got to walk on the red carpet with all the other stars. And when there started being a lot of Oscar buzz about The Artist and how it might get a bunch of nominations, an editor from Movieline, S.T. VanAirsdale, started a Facebook page called "Consider Uggie." But alas, Uggie did not get nominated for Best Actor or even Best Supporting Actor.

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) got questions from their members who wanted to know if they could vote for Uggie for Best Actor. And here's what BAFTA said: "Regretfully, we must advise that as he is not a human being and as his unique motivation as an actor was sausages, Uggie is not qualified to compete for Bafta in this category." Which is just silly and discriminatory, in my opinion, because if you give a convincing performance as an actor, who cares if you were inspired by pieces of sausage? Human actors are inspired by paychecks, aren't they? So what is the difference?

Uggie with Michel Hazanavicius, writer/director of The Artist,
and Penelope Ann Miller. (AP photo by Chris Pizzello)

But anyway, at the Cannes Film Festival last year, Uggie really did win an award, and it's called the Palm Dog Award. This was the 11th year for this award, which is given for the best canine performance. And then in France, Uggie got a special mention at the Prix Lumiere Awards, which is the French version of the Golden Globes. Also, because of the "Consider Uggie" campaign, Uggie is now in line for a Pawscar, which is an award that the American Humane Association gives to animals in films.

Another scene from The Artist

Then, best of all, on February 13, at the Golden Collar Awards, Uggie won in the category of Best Dog in a Theatrical Film. This was the first year for these awards, which were given out by Dog News Daily. Other dogs who were nominated in this category were Denver, the greyhound in 50/50, Hummer in Young Adult, and Cosmo in Beginners.

At the Golden Collar Awards

One dog that didn't get nominated at first was Blackie, a Doberman who was in the movie Hugo. But the film's director, Martin Scorsese, made a big stink about it, and about how it was unfair because Blackie played an antihero dog instead of a hero dog. So there was a write-in campaign, and after Blackie got 500 signatures, he was put on the ballot. But he still didn't win, because Uggie won.

Uggie takes a bow on the Graham Norton Show

For a while, there were rumors that Uggie would appear at the Academy Awards ceremony, and that he would do a little skit with Billy Crystal, who is the host. But it turns out that these rumors are false. Uggie's trainer has said that Uggie will retire now, except he might be willing to do some small roles in films or on TV. But he doesn't ever have to work all the long hours that he did when he was in The Artist. Which is good, because retirement is good. Just ask my mom, if you don't believe me!

JEEVES HAS SURGERY

2012-02-19T08:41:00.000-06:00

Yesterday Mom took Jeeves, our little yellow, tailless foster kitten, to the shelter to get some surgery. This was not just the regular boy-type surgery -- although they did that, too. This was a more complicated surgery because Jeeves had a hernia. Maybe you remember that I told you Mom felt a weird lump in the lower part of Jeeves' tummy area, but she wasn't sure what it was. Well, it turned out that it was a hernia, and Dr. Regan said it should be fixed right away.

Jeeves' incision

A hernia, in case you don't know, is where some part of your inside organs start poking out through a hole in the muscle wall that is supposed to hold everything together inside your body. There are lots of kinds of hernias, and you can get them in lots of different ways. One way to get a hernia is by lifting something heavy and making a rip in your abdominal wall, and then your guts start kind of squishing out through the hole. Usually, a hernia needs to be fixed because if your insides get stuck partway through the hole, they can get strangulated, and then very bad things will happen, including you might even die.

We think Jeeves got his hernia because Aunt Linda ran over him by mistake a few months ago. She was driving really, really slowly on her driveway, so that she would not run over any cats, but then she heard one screeching, so she pulled forward and got out to see if she had killed a cat or what. And Jeeves came out from under the car, and he was limping a whole bunch with his back leg. So Aunt Linda kept him inside for a few days, and he got better and stopped limping. After which, she thought he was fine. And when Mom saw him, she also thought he was fine, because he didn't walk funny or anything.

A dog with a really, really big hernia

Anyway, Mom took the kittens back to the shelter on Wednesday, and Dr. Regan looked at Jeeves, and she said he definitely had a hernia, and she said she didn't do hernia surgery because it was tricky, and sometimes the repair didn't hold together. But then Aunt Tania and Mom talked to Dr. Regan for a while, and finally she said she would try to do the surgery, but she couldn't promise that it would work.

So yesterday Mom took Jeeves there to get the surgery done, and she got to watch Dr. Regan do it, because she is used to watching Dr. Regan do spays and neuters, which is mostly the only kind of surgery that she does. Except one time Dr. Regan and Dr. Beth amputated a cat's leg, and Mom said that was kind of icky to watch. Oh, and another time Dr. Michelle took out a dog's eyeball. Ewwww!

A hernia in a human

Dr. Regan had to go very carefully and slowly to do the hernia surgery because Jeeves' body had tried to repair itself by growing some new blood vessels and tissue over the place where the intestines were sticking out through the rip in the muscle wall. You couldn't even see his intestines at all because they were under all the new stuff that grew there. But Dr. Regan wasn't trying to find Jeeves' intestines. What she wanted to do was find all the edges of the hole so that she could sew it up. And after a while, she found the original hole and then she pushed everything back inside and sewed the hole shut.

Jeeves' hernia looked sort of like this one,
but lots smaller, because he is a kitten and not a human.

We hope that this will solve the problem, even though Jeeves will probably still have a little bit of a bulge. Dr. Regan is worried that Jeeves might have some problems with his bladder later on because his bladder was also sort of involved as part of the hernia. She said it would be better to wait until he is older before finding him a new home because it's important to make sure his bladder is working okay.

When Mom brought Jeeves home, he was still kind of out of it, and he just sat in his cage like he didn't know where he was or what the heck happened to him. But later he started acting more perky, and he tried to climb out of his cage, and Mom took him out and held him for a little while. Jeeves has a really long incision, and a whole bunch of hair got shaved off his tummy. Mom gave Jeeves a crate of his very own so that he wouldn't start trying to play with his sisters and hurt himself. Maybe in a week or so, Jeeves can move back in with the girl kittens.

Hey! Let me out of here!

Oh, and do you know what? I have a hernia, too! My hernia is called an umbilical hernia, and it's right where my belly button is. I've had it my whole life, but it's not very big, and it doesn't bother me, so I don't have to get hernia surgery like poor little Jeeves did.

EAR MITES!

2012-02-17T08:18:00.000-06:00

One of the things that is wrong with our new little foster kittens is that they have ear mites. It turns out that cats tend to get ear mites more often than dogs do, which is not to say that dogs don't get them. Ferrets also get them, and so do bunnies. But humans don't usually get ear mites because they are always taking showers and cleaning out their ears.

Anyway, you can often tell if a cat or dog has ear mites by looking in its ears, and if you see this yucky black stuff that is sort of like coffee grounds, that is a good sign that there are some ear mites lurking in there. The black stuff is not the ear mites. It's just the waste or poop or whatever you call it that the mites produce. If you see the actual ear mites, they look white. You can see them without using a microscope, but they are very, very tiny.

View of an ear canal through an otoscope

Ear mites like to live in dark, warm, moist places, so an ear canal is a perfect sort of place for them. They don't burrow under the skin, but they might bite into it. And what they mostly like to do is eat ear wax and other stuff that the ear canal secretes. But the problem with having all these tiny ear mite bites is that bacteria or yeast can get in there and cause an infection. And if the infection gets too bad, it can make your eardrum burst, and you might even lose your hearing.

This is why, if you are a cat or dog, and you have itchy ear mites, you need to start scratching in a dramatic way and rattling your dog tags and doing whatever you have to do so that your human notices the problem and takes you to see the veterinarian right away.

The life cycle of the ear mite is only three weeks long, and here's how it goes: First the female lays her eggs inside the ear or else in the fur around the ear. After four days, the larvae hatch out of the eggs, and then they start eating the yummy ear wax and skin oils. They do this for one week, and then they molt into a protonymph, after which they molt again into a deutonymph. Now here's the really weird part: the deutonymph doesn't know if it's a male or a female until it mates with an adult male. If it ends up full of eggs, then it's a female. If not, it's a male.

Ear mites are very contagious, partly because the mites can move around easily and can survive away from a host animal for several weeks, if they have to. Now that we have kittens with ear mites here at our house, we all are at risk of also getting ear mites, so Mom is watching us closely to see if we start scratching our ears. But since the kittens are staying in their crate most of the time, except when Mom takes them out to pet them for a little while, we are hoping that nobody will get ear mites.

When Mom first took the kittens to the shelter, they got their ears cleaned out with cotton swabs, and then they also got some drops put in their ears that are supposed to kill the mites. I think they will get more drops later to take care of any mites that hatched out since the first treatment. There are several kinds of medications that kill ear mites, but the ones you buy in the drugstore don't work as well as the ones you get from a vet. At least that's what I read on the internet. Also, flea and tick preventives such as Frontline or Revolution will work to kill ear mites. All of us had our Frontline treatment just last week, so that's another reason we are hoping we won't get ear mites. Because life is hard enough without having itchy ears, at least in my opinion!

PEKINGESE DOGS

2012-02-16T08:32:00.000-06:00

Photo by Seth Wenig/AP

If you watched the second night of the Westminster Dog Show, you already know that the winner of the Best in Show award was a Pekingese named Malachy, or CH Palacegarden Malachy, if you want to use his formal name. This was not the dog that Mom and I and Mel and Barry wanted to win. Our first three choices were:
1. The Dalmatian
2. The Doberman Pinscher
3. The Kerry Blue Terrier

Well, except for Barry, who wanted the German Shepherd to win. Nicky was busy taking a nap upstairs, so he didn't have an opinion. But mostly, Mom kept saying, "Any dog except the Pekingese." But then the Pekingese won, and we were all disappointed.

AP photo

It's not that we have anything personal against the Pekingese breed. We just don't like the way the dogs are groomed when they are going to be shown, because they look like some kind of mop with a black bug face sticking out of it. Or at least that's how they look to me. Also we don't like how these dogs have been bred to have a certain look, which causes them to have a lot of health problems.

But since Malachy the Pekingese won Westminster, I decided I would tell you a little bit about him and about his breed. Last year, Malachy, who is 4 years old, was also in the BIS group, but the Scottish Deerhound won instead. When Malachy won this year, it was the first time since 1990 that a Pekingese has won Westminster. For Malachy himself, it was his 115th BIS win. The judge, Cindy Vogels, said that Malachy was "a super dog who had a stupendous night."

Pekingese dogs come from the Chinese city of Beijing, which used to be called Peking. This was where the Emperors lived, inside the Forbidden City. Only members of the royalty were allowed to own these imperial dogs, and if you stole one, you could be put to death. Pekingese dogs were thought to be semi-divine because they looked like Chinese guardian lions, who kept the evil spirits away. When people who weren't noble visited the Emperor, they had to bow to his dog. And when an emperor died, his dog was killed and buried with him so that it could protect him in the afterlife.

During the Second Opium War in 1860, five Pekingese dogs were captured by British soldiers and given to Queen Victoria. These five were the beginning of the Pekingese breed in the West. The first time Pekingese were shown in the UK was in 1893, and the breed was recognized by the AKC in 1909.

All that DNA testing that scientists have done lately with dogs has shown that the Pekingese breed is over 2000 years old. This means it was one of the first dog breeds to develop from wolves, which is also true of basenjis. Of course, if you look at a Pekingese, you would not think that it looks much like a wolf, but we have to believe what the DNA tells us.

Pekingese have a compact, muscular body, and bowed legs, which means they walk funny and not very fast. The ancient Chinese may have bred the dogs to have legs like this so that they would stay around and be nice little lap dogs, and not run off all the time. Pekingese have double coats, and they can be lots of different colors, although the most common are gold, red, or sable. They weigh between 7 and 14 pounds, and they are 6 to 9 inches tall. There are smaller pekes that only weigh about 6 or 7 pounds, and these are called "sleeve pekingese" because the emperors and empresses used to carry them around inside their big sleeves.

Writer Edith Wharton with two pekes

Because they have such flat faces, Pekingese may have breathing problems, and they can catch colds easily. Also they might have trouble with their eyes, such as getting eye ulcers or dry eyes or progressive retinal atrophy. Since they have long backs, they can sometimes injure the disks in their spines. But if they stay healthy, pekes can live for about 10 or 15 years.

The temperament of this breed is sensitive, independent, and very loving. They were bred to be companion dogs, and that is what they are good at, but they also make good watchdogs. If they are fed too much, it's easy for them to get too fat, and sometimes pekes can be difficult to housebreak.

So that's the story of the breed that won at Westminster this year. Malachy is supposed to be an excellent example of all that is best in his breed, but who can tell anything about him, under all that hair? Which is why I personally still wish the Dalmatian had won!

THE WESTMINSTER DOG SHOW

2012-02-14T08:30:00.000-06:00

Today is Valentine's Day, but I'm not going to talk about that. Instead, I'm going to talk about the Westminster Dog Show, which is the biggest and most important dog show in the U.S., and it always happens at this time of year in New York City.

Best of Breed Basenji, GiGi

Yesterday the basenjis were judged, and the basenji that won Best of Breed (BOB) was GCH Signet Meisterhaus Gossip Girl, whose call name is GiGi. We watched a video on the internet, and we saw the judging for BOB, so that's how we already knew who the winning basenji was. And guess what, the handler for this basenji was Erin Roberts, who was Gabe's breeder. Gabe called her "Mama Erin," but I just call her "Aunt Erin" because she is not my breeder. Anyway, Aunt Erin is a professional dog handler, so we usually see her when we watch Westminster and sometimes if we watch other dog shows on TV. Besides handling basenjis, Aunt Erin also handles affenpinschers and mastiffs and schipperkes and probably some other breeds.

Anyway, last night we watched the Hound Group on TV, and we wanted GiGi to win, but sadly, she didn't even make the cut. So after that, we were rooting for the whippet, and the whippet at least got Group 3. But the winner of the Hound Group was the wire-haired dachshund. Later on, we saw Aunt Erin showing an Italian Greyhound which was a very pretty dog, but it didn't win anything in the Toy Group. And after that, we saw her showing a schipperke, but it didn't win anything either. A German Shepherd won the Herding Group, which made Barry happy because he thinks it is very likely a distant relative of his.

Tonight we will watch the show again, and we will see the rest of the groups and then the Best in Show (BIS) competition, which is when the winner of each group comes out in the ring, and one of them wins a huge silver cup that looks like it would make an excellent water bowl, plus also a bunch of ribbons which I think would probably be fun to chew up.

This year's Westminster Dog Show is the 136th one, which makes it the second-oldest sporting event in the country, after the Kentucky Derby, which is only one year older. And now I will tell you how it all got started. Way back in 1876 or maybe even before that, a bunch of men used to get together in a bar in the Westminster Hotel in Manhattan, and they liked to talk about hunting and about their hunting dogs. So after a while, they decided to form a club, and they named it the Westminster Breeding Association.

In 1876, this new club helped put on a dog show in Philadelphia, where there was a big Centennial Exposition going on. This show was a huge success, so the Westminster club decided to have a show of their very own, where they could compare their hunting dogs. And they changed their name to the Westminster Kennel Club.

The next year, in 1877, the First Annual New York Bench Show of Dogs was held by the Westminster Kennel Club in the Hippodrome at Gilmore's Garden in New York City. There were 1,201 dogs entered in this show with an entry fee of $2 each, which included feed and care of the dog. In the catalog, each dog was listed as either "not for sale" or with a price in a range from $50 to $10,000.

Back in the days when the Westminster Kennel Club started holding annual dog shows, light bulbs hadn't even been invented yet, and neither had automobiles. This was also before the Brooklyn Bridge or the Washington Monument was built or before basketball was invented. It was even before the American Kennel Club was founded, which happened in 1884.

CH Warren Remedy, who won BIS the first three
years the prize was given

Anyway, the Westminster show kept on growing every year, and it is still the biggest group of dogs all together at one time. There is now a limit of 2,500 entries, with 173 different breeds. Starting in 1992, only dogs who have already won the title of Champion can be entered at Westminster. And if you win BIS one year, there is no rule that says you can't enter again the next year. But there has not been a repeat winner since 1972.

Basenjis were first shown at Westminster in 1946. No basenjis have ever won BIS, and only one has won First in the Hound Group, which was in 1972. In general, the Hound Group doesn't get to win BIS very often, like it's only happened 5 times since 1907, which is the year the prize started being given out. But that's still better than the Herding Group, which has only won BIS one time. On the other hand, Terriers have won 45 times, which seems totally unfair. I think that judges just like terriers better because they are feisty and have cute little beards.

2010 BIS Winner,
CH Roundtown Mercedes of Maryscot

The next best group for producing BIS winners is the Sporting Group, where there have been 19, then the Working Group with 15, the Non-Sporting Group with 10, and the Toy Group with 9. The breed that has won BIS the most often is the Wire Fox Terrier. They have won it 13 times, and Scotties have won 8 times. And two breeds that have never won, even though they are very popular breeds, are the Labrador Retriever and the Golden Retriever. So you can see just how totally unfair it all is.

2011 BIS Winner
GCH Foxcliffe Hickory Wind

But we still like to watch anyway, because we see breeds that we have hardly ever heard of, which would make them good topics to write about in my blog someday. And another thing that makes Westminster fun to watch is when something unexpected happens, like for instance last year, when a Scottish Deerhound won Best in Show. Her name was GCH Foxcliffe Hickory Wind, and she was the first Deerhound ever to win at Westminster. And after she won, she retired and became a mama dog, and on TV last night, they showed her puppies, which were really cute. But Mom said we couldn't have one because -- well, because of all the usual reasons.

WE HAVE NEW FOSTER KITTENS!

2012-02-13T08:50:00.000-06:00

First of all, before I tell you about our new kittens, I will just mention that Hamlet got adopted on Saturday during the adoption event at PetSmart! Hooray! We are all very happy for him, especially since he went to a home where he will have a very nice dad and a labradoodle sister to play with. At least we hope that Hamlet and his doggy sister will like each other and will be good buddies.

Jilly

Meanwhile, Mom spent her Saturday rescuing three more kitties from a barn so that we could foster them. The way Mom got these kitties was that she drove out to Aunt Linda's house, near Warrensburg, Missouri. Aunt Linda breeds basenjis, and then she shows them and wins lots of ribbons and stuff. Mom got her first basenji, Trixie, from Aunt Linda. I have been to Aunt Linda's house, too, but that was several years ago. Aunt Linda and Uncle Jerry live in the country, and they have horses and pastures and lots of dog kennels for the basenjis. Also they have guinea fowl, which are sort of like chickens except they are black-and-white. They make funny noises, and Aunt Linda says they are really stupid.

When Mom went there on Saturday, she got to see some new basenji puppies, who are 10 or 12 weeks old now, so they are not so new anymore. There used to be four of them, but now only two are left. One of the ones that is left is a little black-and-white boy that Mom thought was totally adorable, and she wished she could bring him home to be a little basenji brother for me. But she didn't because (1) we already have our Legal Limit of Dogs, and (2) a puppy costs $700, which is more than Mom wants to pay for a new dog. And anyway, she would rescue a dog first or get an adult dog from Aunt Linda, before she would buy a puppy.

Jilly

So after Mom saw the puppies, she rode with Aunt Linda to the barn in a pickup truck. And the reason they went in the truck was because it was loaded with a bunch of heavy feed bags that needed to go to the barn. It was a really cold day, and the temperature was like 20º with a wind chill that made it seem lots colder than that. But at least the wind wasn't blowing inside the barn, so that was good.

There was one horse in the barn, and it was a paint horse. Paint horses have spots on them, and they are like what the Indians used to ride. Also some of them have blue eyes, which look really strange in a horse. And there was also a trailer with lots of bales of hay in the barn, so it all smelled like hay, which is a very nice smell. Then besides the horse and the hay, there were a whole bunch of cats.

Mom had already met some of the cats because they were very friendly, and they came right up to her while she was on Aunt Linda's front porch, and they even let her pick them up, and they purred. So then they all went down to the barn when Mom and Aunt Linda drove down there.

Jeeves

Aunt Linda poured out a bunch of kitty kibble into pans and dishes, and the cats all started eating. Mom tried to count them, but they kept running around from one dish to another, so they were hard to count, but one time she got 22, and two other times she got 21. So one of those numbers might be the right one.

Anyway, Mom picked out two little tortoiseshell girl kittens, and then she decided to take a yellow tabby boy cat because he was especially friendly and cute. In the beginning, Mom thought she would only take girl cats because she was trying to find some kittens that were the very most adoptable. All three of these kittens are Manx kittens, which means they either don't have tails, or they have very short tails. The two girl cats have tails that are about 4" long, and the boy cat doesn't have any tail.

So Mom packed up the three cats into the carriers she brought, and she put them in her car, and she started driving to the Humane Society so that Dr. Regan could take a look at them. And right away, one of the kittens pooped, so it was kind of stinky in the car for a while.

"Hey! Too much love! Let me go!"

Mom decided to name the kittens Janey, Jilly, and Jeeves. Janey is the one that pooped in the carrier, and she keeps having diarrhea here at home, too. Jilly is really small and kind of thin. Jeeves is the biggest because he is the boy. Probably they are littermates, because where the girls have yellow patches, those patches are the same color tabby as Jeeves has.

Anyway, at the clinic, Dr. Regan checked out all the kittens and gave them vaccinations. She said they have their adult teeth, which should mean they are 6 months old, but they are small for their age, especially Jilly. She thinks this may be because they did not get a lot of fancy, expensive food, like the kind Mom buys for us dogs and cats. And Jilly may have been the runt of the litter or else the other cats kept crowding her out when she tried to eat.

It turned out that Janey has an upper respiratory infection, so the other two will likely catch it, too. And Jason and Charlie and Chloe could also catch it, but we hope they won't. Dogs can't get it because it is a virus that is only for cats. But dogs can get ear mites, which is another thing the kittens had. Also they probably have all kinds of worms, even though when Dr. Regan looked at Janey's poop under the microscope, she didn't see any.

Janey, with eye swollen because of
her respiratory infection

Janey and Jeeves are having diarrhea, and now Jeeves has decided he doesn't want to eat very much. Mom felt a strange lump inside Jeeves, so we are not sure what that is, but Mom did some in-depth research for fifteen minutes or so on the internet, and she learned that if a kitten has lots of roundworms, that can maybe cause a bowel obstruction. Or maybe it is a hernia or something. But we don't really know what Jeeves has because we are not veterinarians.

So anyway, our kittens have to stay in their crate in the living room all the time for like two or three weeks because they are being quarantined. The crate is not a very good sort of quarantine place, but it's the best we can do. So far, the kittens don't seem to mind being in their crate. They just sit there and watch everything that is going on, and whenever one of us dogs comes near, they hiss and growl. Jason would like to play with the kittens, but he can't do that right now because of the fact that they are in quarantine.

Janey

That's all I know about our new kittens right now, so I'm going to stop writing. Mom says it is very nice that we got some sweet little kittens just in time for Valentine's Day, but I would much rather have a big, juicy bone to chew on!

TWO GREAT DANES NAMED LILY AND MADDISON

2012-02-11T07:30:00.000-06:00

Back in October, there was a big news story in the UK about two Great Danes named Lily and Maddison. These two dogs were given up by their owners because they couldn't care for them. But these were not just any Great Danes. They were special for the reason that Lily was blind, and Maddison was Lily's guide dog.

The reason Lily was blind was because she had entropion when she was a puppy, which is a condition I told you about in a previous blog entry. Lily's entropion was so very bad that her eyelashes grew into her eyes, and she had to have her eyes removed. So Lily learned to follow Maddison around everywhere, and they were the best of buddies, and they never wanted to be apart.

But, like I said, the people who owned these two dogs couldn't keep them anymore, and last July they brought them to the Dog Trust Shrewsbury, which is in Shropshire, England. Lily was five years old, and Maddison was six. The people at the adoption shelter started trying to find homes for the two dogs, but nobody wanted to adopt two gigantic dogs together.

Then in October, the story was in all the news, and everybody saw it, and suddenly there were hundreds of phone calls from people who wanted to adopt the two dogs. The couple who got chosen to adopt the two dogs were from Cheshire, and they converted their garage into a big dog house just for the two girls. So the Great Danes went there to live, and everybody thought they would live happily ever after.

Except that things didn't work out that way. Because what happened was that not long after the dogs moved to their new home, Lily started attacking Maddison. Probably this was because she was feeling really stressed. Their humans tried several times to get the girls to accept each other again, but they just couldn't get along anymore.

So Lily went back to the shelter, and in December, not long before Christmas, she got adopted. It took a little while for her to get used to her new home, since she is blind, but by New Year's, she had settled in very nicely. Her family said she enjoyed going for walks, and she liked to play with her toys.

And that is the end of the story, at least as far as I can tell, because the shelter said they would not do any more updates. Which means that there really was a happy ending, but it wasn't the one people were expecting. And sometimes that's how things happen in life!

STILL MORE CHINESE ART

2012-02-09T08:13:00.000-06:00

This is the last of the Chinese art that Mom took pictures of at the art gallery when she was there for the Chinese New Year celebration. There are no dogs in this group, but there are some horses and camels, so I hope you will like looking at this artwork.

The first one shows a man riding a horse. The man seems to be a warrior, since he and his horse are wearing armor. The man used to be holding something in his right hand, like maybe a lance or a can of soup, but now it is gone.

Here's another horse. Some of the ceramic Chinese horses you will see have short legs and wide butts. This is because in the beginning, the horses in China looked like that. People probably used them more for meat and as pack animals than for riding. But then they saw the tall, lovely horses that the Mongolians had, which could run really fast. So the Chinese kept fighting the Mongolians, partly so they could get some of those nice horses for themselves, which they did.

This horse is from the Tang Dynasty, which lasted from 618 to 906 C.E. You can always tell a Tang Dynasty horse because it has a short little tuft of a tail. Also the Tang artists used a 3-color lead glaze that has yellow and green and brown in it. And when they paint their ceramics, they let some of the glaze drip down because I guess they liked that look.

This is the head of the Tang horse. The horse almost looks real, and the bridle is very fancy.

A camel with two humps is called a Bactrian camel. These kinds of camels live in central Asia, like in Mongolia and the Gobi Desert and places like that.

Here's a woman on a Bactrian camel. She is trying to get her camel to stand up, and it looks like she used to have a rein in her hand. At the same time, she is nursing a baby. This is an early example of multi-tasking. Anyway, the woman is shown as being kind of a fat, ugly foreigner with no modesty. The gallery collections book says she is a Turkic caravan woman. Lots of people and their camels came into China on the Silk Road, and this woman was probably an example of that.

This camel only has one hump, which is called a Dromedary. This kind of camel mostly came from Arabia and the Middle East. I think the camel has his mouth open because he is complaining about having to carry a heavy pack.

Okay, so that's all the horses and camels, but here's an ox. He seems to be looking up in a submissive way, like he's saying, "Please don't make me pull the cart right now. I just got settled down for a nap!"

This is a very scary face, but I don't know what it's supposed to be. Maybe it's a dragon. But maybe it's one of those temple guardian guys. I just don't think I would want to wake up in the middle of the night and see him looking at me!

One of Mom's favorite pieces at the gallery is the statue of Guanyin of the Southern Sea. It came from a temple in China, and it is all carved out of wood that has been painted. It dates back to the Liao Dynasty (907--1125). Guanyin is sometimes called the Goddess of Mercy, except that this particular figure at the gallery is male. The original Guanyin came from the Sanskrit Avalokitesvara, which was the male form.

Guanyin is what is called a bodhisattva, which is someone who takes a vow that when they become enlightened, they will then work for the enlightenment of everybody else. Or something like that. I don't really know much about Buddhism.

Guanyin has a very special place in a room that looks sort of like a temple. If there are not too many people there, you can hear a recording of chanting, but when Mom was there for the Chinese New Year, she couldn't really hear it because there were too many people around. If she had good ears, like a dog, she would have been able to hear it in spite of all the noise.

The last thing that Mom saw was a Chinese yo-yo demonstration. These yo-yos are not like the ones that just go up and down on a string. These yo-yos are bigger, and you toss them around on a cord that goes between two sticks that you hold in your hands.

First there was a group of fairly young kids who were doing the yo-yo thing in public for the first time.

Then there were some older girls who could do some fancier tricks.

After that, the teacher did a bunch of stuff with lighted yo-yos. Mom thought it looked like it would be fun to learn this yo-yo stuff, but you would have to have pretty good coordination.

So anyway, that's the end of the Chinese art that Mom took pictures of, which you are probably glad to hear because now we can move on to other exciting topics, as soon as I think of some!

GRAY WOLVES

2012-02-08T08:33:00.000-06:00

The gray wolf is also called the common wolf or Canis lupus. There
used to be a lot more wolves in the world than there are now, but there are still enough around so that they are not considered to be a threatened species.

The green parts are where the wolves are right now,
and the red parts are where they used to live.

Now that scientists have figured out the sequence of the dog's DNA, they can say for sure that wolves are the one and only ancestor of dogs. There is only a 1.8% difference in the DNA between dogs and wolves, and that's even smaller than the difference between wolves and coyotes, which is 4%. Probably, the wolf's ancestor was an animal called Canis lepophagus, which lived during the Miocene era. It was small and had a narrow head. And it might have also been the ancestor of the coyote.

Gray wolves are slender, muscular animals with very strong necks. In fact, a wolf has so much strength for its size that it can turn over a frozen horse or moose carcass all by itself. Wolves can also run as fast as 38 miles per hour. And they can keep running for 20 minutes, but probably not that fast the whole time.

Wolves have several ways to stay warm in cold weather. First of all, they have a very heavy double coat of fur. This fur is so warm that a wolf can be comfortable sleeping outside when it's 40º below zero. All the wolf has to do is stick its nose between its back legs and cover its face with its tail. This is the way I like to sleep in cold weather, too, so that is even more proof that wolves are my ancestors.

Another thing wolves can do is they can make less blood flow close to their skin, which helps them save heat. Wolves' footpads are on kind of a separate heating system, so their feet stay just above the temperature where the tissues would start to freeze.

Not all gray wolves are gray. Some gray wolves are white, blond, cream, ochre, brown, or black. In Eurasia, you probably won't see a black wolf because this color is the result of wolves' having mated with dogs. Since the wild wolf population is smaller in Eurasia, there was less of a chance for dogs and wolves to mate than in America.

The idea that some people have about the wolf pack is based on packs of unrelated wolves in zoos. In this type of "pack," there is an alpha pair who mate and all the other wolves have to be subordinate and fight their way up to be the alpha. But in the wild, a pack is just a mated pair and their pups. As soon as the pups get old enough to have families of their own, they leave the pack. This might be anytime from 5 months of age to 5 years.

Wolves mate for life, and the male does not usually go out and mess around with other females, like male dogs do. Except that if his mate dies, then he will go find another one. Mating usually happens in the late winter, and then the female wolf will stay in a den that is somewhere in the central part of the pack's territory so that there won't be any problems with other packs. The litter of 5 or 6 pups is born in the summer. The mama wolf doesn't leave the den for the first few weeks. Her mate brings food for her and for the babies. Pups first leave the den when they are about 3 weeks old. By the time they are 6 weeks old, they can run fast enough to get away from scary, dangerous things.

Every wolf pack has its very own territory, and that's where they hunt for food. The pack spends about 50% of its time in the central part of the territory, which is usually about 14 square miles. Every day they go out roaming around, looking for prey, and they travel 15 miles or so. Packs sometimes work together to bring down prey, but a lot of times a single wolf or a mated pair can do a better job of hunting. When they are working as a group to hunt, wolves can do some very clever things. For example, one wolf might distract a herd while the rest of the pack attacks from behind. Other times, the pack might chase the prey onto crusted ice or over precipices, ravines, and steep slopes to slow them down.

Wolves like to eat big animals like bison, elk, and deer. But if they can't get one of those, they are happy to eat marmots, beaver, hares, badgers, foxes, weasels, ground squirrels, mice, hamsters, or voles. Another yummy thing they like to eat is waterfowl, and they like the eggs, too. If food is really hard to find, wolves will eat lizards, snakes, frogs and large insects, not to mention dead animals they find lying around. Wolves will even go to cattle burial grounds and slaughter houses to look for a meal.

Of course, as everybody knows, wolves like to howl. And the reasons they howl are (1) to get the pack together, usually before or after a hunt, (2) to send out an alarm, especially near a den site, (3) to find each other during a storm or in territory they aren't familiar with, and (4) to talk to each other across a long distance. When wolves start howling, they don't all howl on the same note. What they do is harmonize, and that makes it sound like there are more wolves there than there might really be.

Like basenjis, wolves don't do much barking, although they might bark a few times if they are startled. They might growl if they are having a discussion about who gets to eat the food. And also, the pups growl while they are playing. Wolves whine if they are feeling anxious, curious, or intimate. Also a whine can be a form of greeting, or it might be used while feeding pups or playing.

So that's some basic information about my distant ancestor, the wolf. People have written whole books about wolves, so there is a ton of stuff that I could say about them, but I don't have that much time. At least not today. But maybe someday I will tell you something more about them because wolves are really pretty cool.

A SHORT LITTLE UPDATE

2012-02-06T08:24:00.000-06:00

Mom spent all evening hogging the computer last night, and that means I couldn't get my blog entry written. I was so annoyed that I just had to go take a nap. Some people were busy watching the Super Bowl last night, but we don't do that at our house because we don't like football.

Anyway, the latest news is that our little blue boy, Boris, went to his new home on Saturday. He got adopted by a very nice family from Ft. Riley, Kansas, where there is an Army base. So now Boris will be an Army Cat, and he will have two little boys to play with him. Gregor got adopted a couple of weeks ago, but maybe I already told you that.

Hamlet went to PetSmart with Mom on Saturday, and he sat around looking shy and scared all day, or at least that's what Mom said. People didn't hardly even look at him because he is a black kitty, and also because he was not showing off his lovely personality. So Mom left him out there in a cage because Aunt Tania said that would be a good idea, and he will have to stay there for two or three weeks. Then if he doesn't get adopted, Mom can bring him home again for a while. We are trying not to think about our poor little Hamlet sitting out there, all lonely in a cage.

So we don't have any kittens at our house right now, except for Jason, which seems strange. Jason misses having other kittens to play with, so he has started getting into more mischief again. And Mom found out that some of the naughty things that she thought were being done by Hallie were really maybe done by Jason. Oh, and did I mention that Hallie went to her new home a week ago today?

So getting back to Mom's hogging of the computer, the reason she was doing it was because she had to write a paper about the Underground Railroad in Kansas. I thought maybe the Underground Railroad was like a subway or something, but it turns out to be a way of hiding escaped slaves and helping them get to a place where they won't have to be slaves anymore. There was a lot of this going on right before the Civil War.

Anyway, one of the conventions that Mom is helping plan is about a lot of historical stuff, and there will be a booklet full of articles about different topics, and Mom said she would write about the Underground Railroad. So maybe, since she already did all that nice research, I will tell you all about the subject in another blog entry, even though it doesn't have much to do with dogs, except when bloodhounds got used to help track down slaves that ran away.

Well, that's all of my update except for one more thing, which is that today is the 60th anniversary of when Queen Elizabeth II first got to be the queen. I'm just hoping that she will give her corgis some extra-yummy treats so that they can help her celebrate!

MORE CHINESE ART AT THE GALLERY

2012-02-05T08:24:00.000-06:00

Well, I gave you a little break from Art so that you would not get too tired of hearing about it, but now I am back to the subject again. The problem is that Mom took so darned many photos when she went to the gallery for the Chinese New Year celebration thing, and now she expects me to use them all. It's not easy being Mom's dog, but I'm trying my best!

So anyway, here's a fun ceramic piece that shows a pig in a pen and also a latrine. Most people would not think to put a latrine in their artwork, but this artist did. And I guess this is how people really had their latrines made, so that you went up to the little outhouse, and you squatted there and did you pooping or peeing. Then maybe the pig would eat some of it. Or not. I'm not sure what all pigs eat, but I believe they have a varied diet. Anyway, the stuff that fell down from the latrine, plus some of the stuff in the pig pen was probably used on the fields to make the crops grow better.

I like this next one a lot because it has a dog in it. And there's also a man, and he is threshing some grain. Then he will grind up the grain on the round mill wheel thing. Meanwhile, the dog is watching for mice or rats, so he can chase them away from the grain.

In this one, a man is looking over his flock of sheep. Except that he's riding one of the sheep, which seems like a strange thing to do. Mom told me that the card for this artwork said the man was riding a sheep so that he could get a better view of the other sheep. This seems like a dumb explanation because (1) sheep are too small to hold up a person, and (2) there are so few sheep in the pen that it would be easy to get a look at them all by just climbing up on the wall. So my theory is that maybe this is really a young boy who is riding a sheep because his parents wouldn't buy him a pony, which is what happened to Mom when she was a kid because her parents also would not buy her a pony. Except that she didn't have any sheep to ride either.

Here is a wall panel with two tigers and a horse.

And in this same panel, there is a man with a bird following him around. The man has shoes with curled-up toes, like the kind Santa's elves wear. And the bird might be a peacock or some other kind of bird that is all fancy and proud of how beautiful it looks.

Here are two storks with something in between them that might be another type of bird or else a baby stork.

These are tigers with very swirly stripes. And under each tiger there is another animal, which at first I thought was a rabbit. But then I looked some more, and I decided it was an antelope or deer or something like that because these animals seem to have long legs with hooves at the ends of them. So why are these animals under the tigers? Are they some prey that the tigers killed and will now eat? Or are the tigers protecting the animals for some strange reason? This is a true mystery which, sadly, was not explained on the card that talked about the art.

I really like this ox and his cart. His harness has big tassels that are totally stylish and cool. And the cart wheels have those big, knobby things that are also very cool. This ox cart would have been put in a tomb so that the person buried there would have a way to get around in the next world.

This is a ritual wine vessel, made out of bronze. Of course, the best thing about it is the lid handle, which looks like a dog. At least that's what Mom and I think. When Mom saw this wine vessel at the gallery, she asked one of the docents what kind of animal was on top of it, and the docent said she didn't know. But she did agree that it looked sort of like a dog.

Here is a Chinese bell, except that usually there would be a whole set of them, hanging from a bar. And they would be different sizes, so you could have different pitches. These bells are rung by hitting them and not by shaking or swinging them.

This is the last one I'm going to show you today, and what it is is a model of a tower, maybe two and a half feet tall, and it would go into a tomb, probably to give the dead person someplace to live. In this tower, you can see one person standing on the level just above the front doors. The tower might be a model of the house the dead person used to live in, or it might be the kind of house he wished he had lived in.

We don't know if this person had a dog or not, but I think this house would be a fine one for a dog to live in!

A STATE DOG FOR KANSAS?

2012-02-03T09:03:00.000-06:00

Kansas might be getting its very own State Dog, and guess what it will be: the Cairn Terrier! When I first heard this, I couldn't figure out why a Scottish dog like the Cairn would be chosen for the official dog of Kansas. But then I learned that it's because of Toto in The Wizard of Oz, which was set in Kansas, of course. Except for the part that took place in the Emerald City. Anyway, in the movie, Toto was a Cairn terrier, like I already told you, even though in the book he was more of a mutt.

KC Star photo

In the Kansas City Star yesterday, there was an article about a class of first-graders at a school called Liberty View Elementary, which is in Olathe, Kansas, and they are lobbying very hard for Toto -- I mean the Cairn Terrier -- to be the State Dog. Olathe is part of the Kansas City area, but it's way down in the southwest corner of the area.

Anyway, these first-graders were studying Kansas, and they learned that there is a state tree and a state song and a state salamander. So they decided they wanted to ask the legislators to make a new State Something. They came up with lots of ideas, and finally they thought there should be a state fish. But then they found out there already was a state fish.

Right after that, though, State Representative Ed Trimmer introduced a bill in the Kansas State House to make the Cairn Terrier the State Dog. The first-graders thought that was an excellent idea, so they started writing letters to lots of people in the legislature, asking them to pass the state dog bill. In less than a week, they wrote almost 100 letters and also made a bunch of signs. This way they got to practice their writing skills and also learn about how laws get made.

Their teacher, Molly Gentz, said, "Kansas has big issues, but I just feel like this is something that has been an amazing learning experience for my kids."

Cairn Gavrinis

And now that I told you about how the Cairn Terrier might get to be the State Dog of Kansas, I will tell you a little bit about this breed. Cairns are the very oldest of the terrier breeds, and they got started in the highlands of Scotland and the Isle of Skye. They were used to hunt foxes and badgers among the cairns.

A cairn is a pile of rocks, and it can be big or little, tall or short. Some cairns are really big, and they were used for burial sites. Other cairns are like markers show you where a trail goes or where the very tip-top of a mountain is.

1879 Painting of Cairn Terriers
by Fanny Moody

Anyway, in the beginning, there were just a bunch of terriers, and they were all grouped together as "Skye Terriers." The Cairn Terriers were first entered in dog shows in the UK as Short-haired Skye Terriers. But the Kennel Club wouldn't accept that name because the people who bred real Skye Terriers didn't like it. So Cairn Terriers got their very own name and were bred separately. And the same thing happened with West Highland White Terriers and with Scottish Terriers.

Cairn Terriers have a double coat, and it can be any of these colors: cream, wheaten, red, sandy, gray, or brindle. Pure black, black-and-tan, and white are not permitted. If a Cairn is white, it has to be registered as a Westie. Cairn Terriers weigh 13-18 pounds, are 9-13 inches tall, and live 10-15 years.

People who know Cairn Terriers say they are "big dogs trapped in a small dog's body." They are feisty, adventurous, intelligent, tough, and loyal. They love to dig, and they love to hunt for vermin, because that is what they were bred for, of course. They are good family dogs, and they will protect their humans, but you have to keep them on a leash so that they don't go running off to chase a squirrel and get hit by a car. This is the same as with basenjis and greyhounds and probably some other breeds, too.

So that's the story of how Kansas might get a State Dog. As far as I know, Missouri has not thought about having a State Dog, but if they ever do, I think the basenji would be a good choice!

RUSSIAN BLUE CATS, by Jason

2012-02-01T08:25:00.000-06:00

I think it's about time to talk about cats, and since Piper doesn't seem to want to do it, I'm going to do it myself. And the kind of cat I chose to talk about is the Russian Blue, since we have had our very own "blue boys" here who are supposedly Russian Blues. Anyway, Gregor already got adopted last week, but Boris is still here, and lately he's been driving Mom nuts by climbing all over her and all over the computer keyboard and playing with the little arrow thing on the screen while she's trying to type. Mom says I used to do the same thing, but I can't believe I was ever so naughty!

Okay, now I'm going to tell you about Russian Blue kitties, and first of all, I will say that they are a blue-gray in color. If they have any white spots on them, like Boris does, they can't be in a cat show. But Boris told me he doesn't care about that. Well, actually, he said, "What's a cat show?" and I think that means he doesn't want to be in one.

Russian Blues have a double coat, and the outside coat is made out of "guard hairs" that are silver at the tips. The undercoat is soft and furry. Another thing that Russian Blues have is green eyes, like really deep green eyes, like one of those green bottles. If they have yellow or blue eyes, then they are not Russian Blues. Well, except when they are kittens, because all kittens have blue eyes at first.

The origin of Russian Blues was in Russia. And to be exact, they probably came from a port city called Arkhangelsk, and that's why they are sometimes called Archangel Blues. The breed just happened naturally, and not because somebody crossed one kind of cat with another kind. The first Russian Blues got to England and Northern Europe by coming on ships in the 1860s. And the first time a Russian Blue was in a cat show was in 1875, in England. In the beginning, all kinds of blue cats were shown in the same class, but finally in 1912, the Russians got a class of their very own.

There were a few Russian Blues in America before World War II, but most of them stayed in Russia and Scandinavia until after the war. Then American breeders started combining English and Scandinavian Russian Blues to come up with the breed that we have here today. A lot of cats have bluish-gray coats, but it doesn't always mean they are real, true Russian Blues.

In the 1970s, a woman in Australia bred a solid white Russian Blue, and there is also a black Russian Blue. I don't know about you, but when I try to think about a blue cat that is really white or black, my little brain starts feeling like it might explode, so I mostly avoid thinking about such things. Anyway, even though the Australians have Russian White and Russian Black cats at their cat shows, here in the U.S., the Cat Fanciers Association is smart enough to know that a blue cat cannot be white or black.

Russian Blues are friendly, intelligent, and gentle cats. They can be sensitive to how their human is feeling, and they get along well with children and other pets. They love to play with all kinds of toys, and some of them will even play fetch. They are kind of shy with new people, but they are very affectionate with people they know. And in fact, they can be pretty demanding of attention.

Anyway, here's why I think Boris isn't a true blue Russian Blue kitten, although he might be a mix:
1. He has white spots on his chest and tummy.
2. He doesn't really have silver tips on his fur.
3. His eyes aren't green enough.
4. He doesn't have a pedigree, so who know who his parents really were?

On the other hand, Boris has mauve-colored foot pads, which Russian Blues are supposed to have. But even if he isn't a purebred, that doesn't mean he's not a very nice kitten, and I've been having a lot of fun playing with him. Hamlet likes to play with him, too. We think Boris will get adopted this Saturday because a family is coming all the way from Fort Riley, Kansas to PetSmart to meet him. We're hoping that Hamlet will get adopted on Saturday also, because if he doesn't, he is going to have to stay in a cage out there, just like I did, and I can tell you that it was no fun doing that!

DRAGONS AT THE ART GALLERY

2012-01-30T07:34:00.000-06:00

Here are some of the dragons Mom saw and took pictures of at the art gallery on Friday night. This first one is called Zoomorphic Spiral, and it's from the 9th century BCE. I know these things because this piece of art has its picture in Mom's museum catalog book. I had to look up zoomorphic, because the book does not explain what it means. And it turns out that it means the use of animal figures or symbols in art and literature. So now we all know a new word.

Here is another dragon, and it's a very cute little guy who seems to be walking along in a jaunty way. This dragon is only about 4" tall. He is not in Mom's book, so I don't know what he is called, but I think "Ralphie" would be a nice name for him. What I do know is that this dragon is made out of bronze, just like the zoomorphic one is.

In case you are wanting to make your very own bronze, here's how you can do it. First you need some copper ore and also some tin ore. Then you smelt them together, and that makes bronze. Before people figured out how to make bronze, they used stones as tools and weapons, and that was called the Stone Age. Then they started using copper, but it was a pretty soft metal, so it was always bending and breaking. After that, people mixed arsenic with copper, and that made the copper a lot stronger. So the first kind of bronze was made of copper and arsenic. But arsenic was poisonous, and probably it made a lot of people sick, so when somebody figured out that tin would work better than arsenic, everybody was happy.

The Bronze Age started in different places at different times, which is confusing for art historians, but the National Gallery of Art in Washington says that the Chinese Bronze Age was the "period between about 2000 BC and 771 BC." This means that the people in Mesopotamia were already making bronze for quite a while before the Chinese started doing it. Maybe the first bronze was brought from Mesopotamia to China, but maybe the Chinese just figured out how to make it all on their own. Nobody knows for sure.

Anyway, that's enough about that. Here's another dragon that Mom found in the museum, and it is carved into a stone that goes above the door to a tomb. I like this dragon quite a bit because it has interesting curlicues and polka-dots.

This Ritual Disc is carved from jade. Mom and I thought it had dragons on it, but the museum catalog says the animals are tigers instead. I think it's a mean trick for them to make tigers that look like dragons, so that people can't even tell them apart. And I've decided to just pretend that they really are dragons and put them in my dragon-themed blog anyway. So there!

Now we have a couple of urn things, and they might have been made to put inside a tomb, but Mom can't remember for sure, and they aren't in the book. This first one has a typical sort of dragon, with scales and all the regular dragon stuff.

And this second one is really different, because it looks more like it's a girl dragon with a softer shape and flowers on it. I think this girl dragon is smiling at the boy dragon, and if they got together, they could make a bunch of baby dragons.

I don't know who all those guys are on the urn. Maybe they are just people who like to hang out with dragons in the hopes that some of the good luck and majesty of the dragons will rub off on them.

And now that I've been inspired by the power of all these dragons, I think I will go take a power nap!

CHINESE NEW YEAR AT THE ART GALLERY

2012-01-29T08:32:00.000-06:00

Outside the gallery

Friday night Mom went to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art to help them celebrate the Chinese New Year. A whole lot of other people also went there to help with the celebration, so Mom had to park a few blocks away because the garage was totally full. Every year, the art gallery has a great big party for the Chinese New Year, and they do this because the gallery has one of the best collections of Asian art in the whole country, especially Chinese art. Mom went one other time to the gallery for the Chinese New Year, but that was several years ago.

Waiting for the dancing to start

Anyway, I am going to show you some pictures that Mom took and tell you about the stuff that was going on. I couldn't go along with Mom to the art gallery because they don't allow dogs there, except for service dogs. But I don't think I would have liked it very much because big crowds of people make me nervous. Also there were loud drums and cymbals and other scary things like that. So I was glad to stay home and let Mom tell me all about it afterwards. I just wish she had brought me a pork dumpling instead of eating them all herself.

The dragon procession

Okay, so one of the things that happens at Chinese festivals is a Dragon Procession or maybe a Dragon Dance. They only had a procession at the gallery, and their dragon wasn't all that big. Mom saw much bigger dragons when she was in China, but I guess you can't expect too much here in Missouri.

What happens in the Dragon Dance is that a bunch of people carry a dragon on poles, and they can make it do all sorts of interesting things, such as having the body go up and down in waves, so it looks like the dragon is swimming. And then they can also make the dragon swirl around in spirals and do fancy things like that. In China there are Dragon Dance contests, but I don't think there are any contests like that in Kansas City.

Lion Dance

The Dragon Dance got started back in the Han Dynasty, which was a really long time ago, and it might have begun as part of a harvest festival. And it may have also been used to heal people or keep them from getting sick.

Another thing Mom saw was the Lion Dance, which she said was very cool. There were two lions, and each lion was made of two people. The person in front held up the head of the lion and made its mouth open and close. Also the lions had big eyes with long eyelashes, and they could blink their eyes, so it looked like they were flirting with you. The person in the back part of the lion had to be really strong because sometimes he held up the front person on his thighs and made the lion look like it was rearing up on its hind legs and was very tall.

The lions danced to the beat of a drum and the clash of cymbals being hit together. Sometimes the lions rolled over on the floor, which meant that both ends of the lion had to roll over at the same time. Mom thought this would be hard to learn to do. And also it would be hard for the front person to roll over while holding that great big lion head.

A child petting the lion's head

There were some people at the gallery playing traditional Chinese musical instruments. One of these is called a gu-zheng, or sometimes just a zheng. It can have between 13 and 21 strings, and each string has a bridge of its very own. In the old days, the strings were made of silk, but nowadays, they are mostly metal. You play the strings by plucking them with fake fingernails that you put on your fingers.

Woman playing the gu-zheng

The er-hu is sort of like a violin, except it only has two strings. Also you don't stick it under your chin when you play it. The bottom part that is down in your lap is like a little drum made of wood. That's where the er-hu makes its sound. The strings are usually tuned to D and A. Then the player makes different pitches by touching the strings with his left hand while bowing them with his right hand. Modern er-hu strings are metal, but they used to be made of silk or nylon.

Three men playing er-hu

This instrument is called a pipa, and it is sort of like a lute with 4 strings and 30 frets. You hold it in a vertical way to play it. Pipas go back at least 2000 years. Over time, they were developed so that they can now play full scales instead of pentatonic ones. I don't know what that means, but Mom said that people who know something about music will understand.

Pipa player

Okay, well, these are just a few of the many things Mom saw at the Chinese New Year celebration. She also looked at a bunch of artwork in the new Chinese galleries that just got opened up. So later on I will try to show you some of the pictures she took. There were lots and lots of dragons, but also some camels, oxen, sheep, and even some dogs!

A LOYAL DOG IN CHINA

2012-01-27T07:36:00.000-06:00

This is a story that is a lot like the story of Greyfriars Bobby, which is a story I already told you, except that this story is in China, and it took place not very long ago. And what happened was that this past November, a man named Lao Pan died, and he was 68 years old. He lived all alone in the village of Panjiatun, which is in Shandong Province. This province is on the eastern edge of China, with a coast on the Yellow Sea. Not that it really matters, but I thought I'd tell you the location anyway, since I went to all the trouble to look it up.

Lao Pan was not married, and he did not have many relatives, but he had a yellow dog who loved him very much. I wish we knew the name of this dog, but we don't.

After Lao Pan died, some people cleaned out the room where he used to live, and his dog disappeared. After a while, the villagers noticed that the dog was staying by Lao Pan's grave. He stayed there for 7 whole days without any food.

When the BBC reported the story of Lao Pan's dog, they talked to one of the men who lives in the village. He said, "I saw the dog when I was working on the field, and I called him, and wanted to bring him back home, because I also have a dog. I gave him a steamed bun when he came to my home. The dog caught the bun and ran back. I caught him, but he ran even faster to the tomb, and stayed there."

So the people of the village started taking food and water to the dog, and they were planning to build a kennel for him near the grave. I hope they have done this by now, because it's winter in China, and a dog could get cold sitting outside by a grave all the time!

WORDS AND PHRASES

2012-01-25T08:37:00.000-06:00

BARKING UP THE WRONG TREE

I particularly wanted to talk about this phrase because it has to do with dogs, and I am a dog. But I will just say that I never bark up the wrong tree because I am a basenji, and basenjis don't bark! Hahahaha! Hunting dogs will sometimes bark up the wrong tree, though, and they do it because they chase a squirrel or raccoon until it goes up a tree, but then this sneaky animal jumps over onto the branch of a different tree. So the dogs are left barking up the trunk of the first tree, but that's not where their prey is anymore.

People can bark up the wrong tree, too, even though people don't usually bark. When people bark up the wrong tree, it means they are chasing after the wrong idea, or maybe they are going about something in the wrong way. They might also be following a false lead or blaming the wrong person for something.

The thing I don't like about this phrase is that it makes dogs look stupid, but mostly it's hound dogs that seem to bark up the wrong trees, so I guess that's okay because hounds can be kind of dumb anyway. Well, at least that's my opinion.

TO GO TO POT

This is a common phrase that you probably know and use a lot, but do you know where it comes from? It has kind of a sad and horrible origin because it is about animals that are old and not much use to farmers anymore, so they are killed and made into stew in a pot. People were saying "go to pot" all the way back in the 16th century and maybe before that.

Nowadays people mostly mean that something has gotten worse or has been ruined when they say it went to pot. This is called a metaphorical meaning, but cooking meat in a pot is a literal meaning.

One book I looked at had a different origin for this phrase, and what it said was that it had to do with blacksmiths, because blacksmiths threw broken pieces of metal into a pot. Then later, they melted these pieces down and made something else out of them. Nobody else said anything about blacksmiths, though, so this origin is probably not the right one, even though I like it better than thinking about animals getting cooked in a pot.

AMPHORA

If you go to a museum, you might see an amphora, especially if you are looking at ancient Greek or Roman stuff. Amphoras were jugs with two handles that were used to store or transport all kinds of things such as wine, olive oil, grapes, fish, grain, or anything you wanted to put in them. Usually the amphoras were ceramic and had a pointed base that was put down into soft sand or into a stand. When the amphoras were packed into a ship, they fit together very nicely, and they were tied with ropes to keep them from rolling around and getting broken.

Some amphoras were very fancy, with scenes from history or mythology painted on them. And there were amphoras of different sizes, from 12 inches to 5 feet tall. The Romans used one size of amphora as a unit of measurement, which was a volume of one cubic foot.

The earliest amphoras were found in Banpo, China, and these date back to 4800 BCE, which was the Neolithic Period. By about 3500 BCE, the Phoenicians were using amphoras, and then everybody in the ancient world started using them. Since they were cheap and easy to make, they were just broken up when they got to wherever they were going.

Archeologists like amphoras because they are often found in old shipwrecks, and sometimes their contents are still okay, which is pretty amazing, and the archeologists can learn interesting things about ancient people.

LIONIZE

When I looked at this word, I thought it must mean to turn somebody into a big, scary, roaring lion. But it turns out I wasn't quite right about that. What it means is that you idolize somebody and treat them like a celebrity. You look at this person with respect and put them on a pedestal, so they are kind of like a king, in the same way that a lion is the King of Beasts. I guess that TV show, American Idol, is mostly about lionizing people, but we don't watch it at our house, so I don't know for sure.

ARCANE

If something is arcane, then it is very mysterious and hard to understand. It is the kind of thing that you need special knowledge so you can understand it. Which means that only a few people do. Things that are mystical and occult are arcane. Masonic rituals are arcane, and so is Cabala, which is a sort of Jewish mysticism. And I think cats are arcane because they are pretty hard to understand sometimes!

AURIFEROUS

People who pan or mine for gold are looking for places that are auriferous to do it. That's because if something is auriferous, it contains gold. Finding gold can be a good thing because you can get rich that way. But sadly, most of the gold that is easy to find has been found already. Which doesn't stop people from going out there and trying anyway. If Mom ever decides to pan for gold, I will not help her because I don't want to get my feet wet. But if she wants to mine for gold, I will be glad to dig some holes for her, because the more gold Mom finds, the more dog food she can buy!

THE YEAR OF THE DRAGON

2012-01-23T08:17:00.000-06:00

The Dragon is the fifth animal in the Chinese zodiac, and it is the only sign that is not a real animal. It is also the most powerful symbol because a dragon is made up of parts of other animals such as the tiger, fish, snake, and eagle. The Chinese do not see the dragon as scary and evil, like people in Western cultures do. Instead, they see the dragon as a wise, powerful, and superior ruler.

My mom was born in a Water Dragon year, which is what 2012 is also, so this is supposed to be a very lucky year for her. But actually, it turns out that this year could be a lucky one for most everybody. It's a year when a lot of things in your life could change, and it's a good time for new beginnings. You could start a business, make some smart investments, and earn a bunch of money. Just be sure to save some of that money and not spend it all, like a Dragon person might do. Oh, and if you want to get married, this year would be an excellent time to do that.

In the Chinese calendar, today is the start of the year 4709. This number is counted from when the Yellow King became the king of China in 2697 B.C.E. The Yellow King was the very first king of China, and he is not the same as the first emperor of China, who was somebody different.

This is a little bit confusing, but here is something that is even more confusing. The Chinese New Year, which is today, is not really the beginning of the Year of the Dragon. That's because the Year of the Dragon begins on the Start of Spring, which will be on February 4, 2012. The Start of Spring is the first day of the Tiger month, which is the first month of the year in the Chinese Fortune-Telling Calendar system. So, are you confused yet? I am. Which is why I decided to just go ahead and talk about the Year of the Dragon anyway, even if it doesn't officially start until February 4.

Okay, now I will tell you about people who were born in a Dragon year. Since the Dragon is such a powerful symbol, Dragon-year people can be dominant and ambitious. They are also smart and talented. They like challenges, and they aren't afraid to take risks. Dragon people prefer doing things by themselves, in their own way, and they are often successful. They can have tempers that are quick and fiery, like a dragon, and they might use their sharp dragon-tongues to say things that are sarcastic and biting.

But underneath, dragons have a soft belly, and that means Dragon people have a "soft spot" for those in need. They like to help others out, but Dragon people don't like to ask for help for themselves. They are loyal friends and they will do anything to protect the people they love. The Dragon is a hard worker and is usually lucky. He is charismatic and gets lots of attention. A Dragon person is also proud, enthusiastic, and passionate about life.

People who were born in Water Dragon years are calmer than regular Dragon-year people because water calms fire. They can see things from someone else's point of view, and they don't always think all their own opinions are the right ones. It seems like this would mean that Mom would see more stuff from my point of view and let me have more things that I ask her for, but it doesn't really work that way, so this part about Water Dragons may not be very true.

The way the dragon got started being so important to the Chinese was like this: more than 4,000 years ago, there were two big tribes in China, plus a bunch of smaller tribes. Each tribe had an animal symbol. The two large tribes joined together, and they chose the dragon for their symbol. The Han Chinese, which is the biggest ethnic group in China, still call themselves the descendants of the dragon.

So anyway, I want to wish everybody a lot of good luck in the Year of the Dragon. It could be a very good year for you, but don't do any of those bad Dragon things such as spending your money as fast as you make it or losing your temper a lot!

SNOWY OWLS

2012-01-21T08:27:00.000-06:00

Usually, snowy owls live way up north in the Arctic. But sometimes they run out of owl food, and then they have to fly down south to places like Missouri to spend the winter. Which is why there have been reports of snowy owls around here lately, and also in other parts of the U.S. In some years, these owls have been seen as far south as Texas, Georgia, southern Russia, northern China, and even in the Caribbean. If you look on the nice map I found, you will see the green parts, which are the owls' summer range, and the blue parts, which are how far south the owls sometimes go in winter.

What snowy owls most like to eat is lemmings, cute little rodents that live in the arctic. Lemmings look pretty yummy in the pictures, so I don't blame the owls for liking to eat them. Oh, and by the way, it is not true that lemmings jump off of cliffs and kill themselves. There was a Disney film back in 1958 that showed lemmings doing that, but it turns out that the photographers set it all up and herded the lemmings off the cliff.

A lemming in the snow

But getting back to snowy owls, they will settle for eating lots of other things, if they can't have lemmings. These other things include meadow voles, deer mice, hares, muskrats, marmots, squirrels, rabbits, prairie dogs, rats, and moles. Also they like to eat birds such as ducks, geese, pheasants, grouse, coots, grebes, gulls, and songbirds. Sometimes they eat fish or dead animals, too, so as you can tell, they are not too fussy about their diet.

A snowy owl in Kansas

Snowy owls go out hunting during the day, unlike many other owls who prefer to hunt at night. Their favorite times to hunt are dawn and dusk. Mostly an owl hunts by sitting on a fence post or someplace, where it waits until some prey wanders by. Owls have really excellent eyesight and hearing, so when they notice some prey, they swoop down and grab it with their long, sharp talons. An adult owl needs to eat up to 5 lemmings per day, or 7 to 12 mice.

Owls don't chew their food because of course they don't have any teeth. They might tear up bigger pieces of meat, but when they catch some kind of small prey, they just swallow it whole. Then the juices in their stomach digest the good parts, and the other stuff, such as fur, bones, teeth, and feathers, gets made up into a little pellet thing that the owl pukes up. Biologists like these pellets because they can take them apart and find out what the owls are eating.

Adult males are almost totally white, but females and young owls have some bars and scallop patterns in their feathers. The size of the owls is between 20 and 28 inches long, and their wingspan is 49 to 59 inches. Snowy owls are one of the heaviest species, with a weight of 3.5 to 6.6 pounds. In the wild, they live about 9.5 years, and in captivity, they can live for 35 years.

The mating of snowy owls happens in May. Then they build a nest on top of a mound or boulder, or sometimes they use an old eagle nest. The nest site has to be in a place where the owls can see all around to watch for predators. The female lays between 5 and 14 eggs, depending on how much food is available. If food is really hard to find, the owls won't raise any chicks at all that year.

Anyway, it takes about 5 weeks for the eggs to hatch. The female sits on the nest the whole time, and the male brings her food to eat. Also he guards the nest. Both parents will fight any predators that come around, even wolves. Other types of predators they might have to fight off include foxes, ravens, dogs, and other raptors. The baby owls learn to fly after about a month, but their mom and dad keep on watching after them for about 10 more weeks. In the wintertime, some snowy owls migrate, but others stay on the breeding ground all year.

The Oglala Lakota Indians thought of the snowy owl as the symbol of North and the North Wind. They admired the owls so much that a warrior who did well in combat wore a cap of owl feathers to show his bravery.

The province of Quebec, in Canada, has adopted the snowy owl as its official bird.

And if you ever read any Harry Potter books or saw any of the movies, you will know that Harry had a snowy owl named Hedwig as a pet.

I asked Mom if we could get a Hedwig of our very own, but she said we do not have enough lemmings in our yard to feed a snowy owl. And if an owl got really hungry for lack of lemmings, it might just decide to eat a small basenji!

MOM GOES TO THE ART GALLERY, Part 3

2012-01-19T08:58:00.000-06:00

Well, in case you are tired of looking at pictures of art that Mom saw at the gallery, you will be glad to know that this is my last entry on that subject. At least until Mom goes there again!

There are no dogs in the stuff I'm going to show you today, but there are a couple of ceramic bears. One of them has a chain in his nose. I'm not sure why, unless he was a captive bear who was used for dancing or bear-baiting. Also, I might mention that he looks a little like a pig, but the card with information about this piece said it was a bear.

And here's another bear that doesn't look very much like a bear. I think this bear looks more like a mouse, or maybe like a cross between a mouse and a monkey. But I have not been to art school, so that is why I don't understand these things.

This is a big plate that is called a charger. I don't know why anyone would call a big plate a charger, but that's the name for it. Anyway, this one has a picture of a hare painted on it. At first, I thought the animal was an antelope, but Mom told me the card in the museum said "hare," and the museum people should know. This charger was made in England around 1700. I can tell you this interesting fact because there is a picture of this charger in Mom's book about the gallery collection.

Now, here is a charger of another kind, which is a horse that charges into war. It makes more sense to me to call a horse a charger than to call a plate a charger, but nobody asked for my opinion, as usual. The point of this horse is really just to show off the armor he is wearing. When Mom was a little girl, this was one of her favorite things to see in the whole art gallery because she was crazy about horses.

This armor dates back to 1565, which means it is very old. Men used to wear stuff like this when they were jousting or when they went into battle. The armor was very heavy, so the horses had to be really strong. I don't think it would have been much fun to wear this kind of armor, but I guess it was more fun than getting whacked with a sword. And anyway, only rich warriors could afford fancy armor. The poor farmers who went off to war were probably lucky if they even had a pitchfork to fight with.

Well, that's pretty much all the artwork with animals in it, unless you think of demons as animals. This painting is called The Last Judgment, and it was made by a German man named Lucas Cranach the Elder. Mom only took a picture of the corner of the painting that shows Hell, where you can see some sinners and some demons. I'm not sure what the demons are doing to the sinners, except that the demons have beaks like birds, and they are sticking their long tongues out. One demon has a bayonet sort of thing. Anyway, I guess it is meant to be scary, but I think those little demon guys are kind of cute and could make good pets. Either that, or they might be tasty to eat, like birds are.

Here's a little Egyptian boat sort of thing that might be an incense burner or something like that. It wasn't really made in Egypt, though. It was made in England, and it's supposed to look like it came from Egypt and could be floating down the Nile, if it could float, which it probably can't.

Mom took pictures of a couple of teapots because she liked them. I think this first one looks kind of like modern art, but it was actually made in about 1760 in England.

And this other one is probably also from the 18th century, although Mom didn't take notes, like I told you in some of my earlier entries.

Then finally, here is a little jug that was made especially to put sack in, which is a dry white wine that came from Spain and the Canary Islands. It was very popular to drink in the 16th and 17th centuries in England. The interesting thing about this jug is that it belonged to a man named William Allen, which you can tell because his name is painted right on it. And also the family crest is there.

Mom was wondering if maybe William Allen was a distant relative of hers, because Mom's last name is Allen, and her relatives came from England, which is where this jug is from. Of course, there is a small possibility that there was more than one William Allen, and if one of them was related to Mom, it would be hard to know if this jug belonged to him or to some other William Allen.

Someday, Mom wants to do a bunch of genealogy research to find out who all her distant relatives were, but until she has time for that, she says she will just think of the sack jug as having been in her family a long, long time ago.

OUR NEW FOSTER KITTENS!

2012-01-18T08:13:00.000-06:00

Boris

On Monday, Mom brought our new foster kitties home from the shelter. I thought they were going to be BLUE, but they are really just gray, so I was disappointed. Mom said that that shade of gray in a cat or dog is called "blue," and that these kittens are supposed to be Russian Blues. Their names are Boris and Gregor, which are Russian names. We did not get to name them because they already had names when Mom got them.

Gregor

Mom calls the kittens The Blue Boys, and she says all we need now is a Pinkie. I have no idea what she is talking about, but it has something to do with some famous paintings or something. Anyway, these kittens do not look anything like a painting, if you ask me. Also, they sound mean, because they hiss and growl a lot. Well, at least Gregor does.

There were two other kittens in the same litter with Boris and Gregor, and the other two were also boys. But they looked way different. They looked more like Siamese cats. Mom met them at the shelter, too, and they were scared and hissy, just like Boris and Gregor. Probably this is because the kittens aren't socialized and they are afraid of new places and new people, which is only natural, but I have to say I don't like being hissed at and growled at all the time.

Gregor

Anyway, you can tell Boris apart from Gregor because Boris has a white spot on his chest. He has another white spot on his tummy, and there is also a teeny tiny white tip on his tail. Gregor is all gray -- er, blue -- with no white spots. Also Gregor is smaller than Boris, and he hisses more, like I said before.

So far, Mom has just kept the Blue Boys in the crate in the living room, except for when she took them in the back room to play for a while yesterday morning. Last night when we were watching TV, Boris kept meowing, so I think he wanted to come out of the crate, but Mom didn't want to let him out. She is afraid that if she lets the kittens out right now, especially Gregor, she will never find them again because they will hide under the sofa or someplace.

Boris

Okay, well, that's enough news about kittens. I have some other news to report, which is that my last blood test showed that my cortisol levels are exactly right, and I can just stay on the same maintenance dose of that expensive chemo drug that I've been taking. I only have to take one-fourth of a pill two times a week now, so it will last much longer, and Mom will not run out of money so fast.

Oh, and Nicky got his blood test results back, too, and all his liver values were normal instead of being really high. So Dr. Griswold sent the results to Dr. Grigsby, the internist, and we are waiting to see what she wants to do next. Because we still think Nicky has something wrong in his intestines, which means he will probably have to have an endoscopy. And that won't be cheap, so I hope Mom still has money left over afterwards to buy dog food!

OPRAH WINFREY'S DOGS

2012-01-17T08:26:00.000-06:00

Oprah Winfrey is very famous, so that means most everybody has heard of her, and I don't have to explain who she is. The way she got famous was by having a talk show on TV for a long time. Also she has a magazine called O, and a television network called OWN. What's even more important is that Ms. Winfrey is very rich, which is amazing, since she started out being really poor when she was a little girl. But she got a job in radio and then later in television, and she was very good at doing talk shows and getting people to tell her interesting personal things about themselves. So that's why her show got to be so popular, and why she made a bunch of money.

Ms. Winfrey with Sadie

Ms. Winfrey is ranked as the richest African-American of the 20th century, and for a while she was the only black billionaire in the whole world. She is the greatest black philanthropist in American history, and some people have called her the most influential woman in the world.

Of course, the best thing about Oprah Winfrey is that she loves dogs. The breeds of dogs that she seems to love most are cocker spaniels and golden retrievers. I have tried to sort of put together the most recent history of Ms. Winfrey's dogs, but it's a little confusing, so I hope I got it right.

Sophie and Solomon

I will start in 2005, when Ms. Winfrey already owned two cocker spaniels named Sophie and Solomon. Sophie was black, and Solomon was more of a chocolate color. In that same year, Ms. Winfrey decided to adopt two golden retrievers. She went to a breeder to get them, and she ended up bringing home three pups instead of just two. These three were named Layla, Luke, and Gracie.

The 3 golden puppies

Then in May of 2007, a very sad thing happened when Gracie was out with her dog walker, and she got ahold of a small ball that belonged to Sophie. Gracie started playing with this ball and then she swallowed it and it got stuck in her throat. She choked to death, even though the dog walker and a security guard tried very hard to save her.

When Gracie died, Ms. Winfrey was very, very sad, and she cried a lot. She said, "I do not believe in accidents. I know for sure that everything that happens in life helps us to stay alive." She also said that Gracie did more living in the two years of her life than most dogs do during a much longer life. "Every moment of her life Gracie lived as if it was the last moment," Ms. Winfrey said in her magazine. "Her life became a gift for me."

Do some people really look like their dogs?

About a year after that, in March 2008, Sophie the cocker spaniel died. She was 13, and she had kidney failure. Ms. Winfrey devoted a whole TV show to the memory of her dog. "Sophie gave me 13 years of unconditional love. She was the true love in my life." And then in November of that same year, Solomon also died. He was 14 years old, which is pretty old for a cocker spaniel, I think.

Sadie

The next dogs that Oprah Winfrey adopted were two cocker spaniel puppies from the PAWS animal shelter in Chicago. These puppies were named Ivan and Sadie. But sadly, they got sick right away with parvovirus. Ms. Winfrey took them to the vet, who tried very hard to save them, and Sadie lived, but Ivan didn't.

A couple of years ago Ms. Winfrey decided that she wanted a couple of springer spaniels, and some springer puppies showed up at PAWS, so she adopted them. Their names are Sunny and Lauren, and they are sisters. And as far as I could figure out, those were the most recent dogs that joined the Winfrey family.

Sunny and Lauren

But here's something that really shocked me: Oprah Winfrey has announced that she will leave $30 million for her dogs in a trust fund so that they will be taken care of after she dies. All of her dogs are fed by a special chef, have their own nannies, and also have their own websites. If the dogs don't use up all the $30 million before they die, I wonder what will happen to the rest of it. Maybe I should write to Ms. Winfrey and ask her if I can have it!

HALLIE IS GETTING ADOPTED!

2012-01-15T08:30:00.000-06:00

Well, guess what! My little foster sister Hallie got adopted yesterday, except she hasn't gone to her new house yet, and she's still here with us. Mom took her to PetSmart again, and there were fewer people there than last week, but one cat got adopted right away.

Some people came by, and they looked at Hallie and said she was cute, but everybody was mostly playing with a couple of black kittens. They used Hallie's toy to play with the black kittens, which didn't seem fair, but that's the way it happened.

Then Aunt Tania got a phone call from a couple who were already going to adopt a black kitten named Maverick. This kitten is at Aunt Tania's house, or some such place, so Mom has never met him. And neither has Hallie. Anyway, this couple wanted a second kitten so that the kittens could be buddies and play together and not get lonely. So Aunt Tania told them that they might like Hallie, and it just so happened that they had already been looking at Hallie online. Then Aunt Tania said that Hallie was at PetSmart, and they should come and meet her. So they did.

Mom said that Hallie seemed to like these people, and she didn't squirm or growl or anything, like she did with some people who held her earlier. Hallie just sat in the man's arms like it was where she belonged. And then she sat in the woman's arms in the same way. So the man and woman said "We like her." And they signed the contract and paid a deposit, but they did not take Hallie home with them.

And the reason they didn't was because they are about to go on a trip to Nicaragua for a week or so, and they don't want to take their kittens home and then run off and leave them. So that is why Hallie is staying with us until about the first of February, which is when she will go to her new home.

Mom took this photo of Hallie with her new mom and dad, but she took it with her cell phone, and she says that her cell phone takes bad pictures. I think it is probably the fault of the photographer that the picture is bad, but Mom doesn't agree. Anyway, she will use a real camera to take a picture when Hallie actually goes away.

And here's some other exciting kitty news: tomorrow we will get two brand new foster kittens! They are both boys, and they are Russian Blue kitties. Yesterday they got neutered, but they are staying at the Humane Society until Mom goes there tomorrow. We don't know if they already have names or if we will get to name them. I think the kitten population may be sort of getting out of control here, but sadly, nobody pays any attention to what I think.

The reason we are getting these two new foster kittens is because there was a woman who had a bunch of cats, and then the cats had kittens, and so she ended up with 15 kittens. Aunt Tania's group, Divapets Rescue, is taking the 15 kittens, and also helping the woman get her adult cats fixed. So Mom is getting two of the kittens, but we don't know much about them yet, like I told you before. Aunt Tania says that lots of people like to adopt Russian Blue kitties, so she thinks they will get adopted fast. Anyway, they can already go to PetSmart next Saturday because they are now fixed, so that's good.

Aunt Tania brushing a big, furry cat named Johnnie

Of course, we still have Hamlet here, but he can't be adopted yet because he is still taking antibiotics to cure his urinary tract infection. After he finishes the medicine, then he has to wait a week, and after that, he will get a urinalysis. If his urine looks okay, he can get adopted. But he might have crystals in his urine, or he might have been born with something wrong inside him, and in that case he will probably get put to sleep because the rescue group can't afford expensive surgery, and nobody will want to adopt a kitten who may always have urinary problems. So we are hoping that the antibiotics will make him all better, and that he won't ever have any trouble again.

CAPTAIN WERNER VON BACHELLE'S DOG

2012-01-14T08:16:00.000-06:00

Captain von Bachelle joined the 6th Wisconsin Infantry in April 1861, which was almost as soon as the Civil War started. He was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in Company F, then was promoted to 1st Lieutenant in December, and to Captain in May, 1862. It is likely that Captain von Bachelle was born in Germany and grew up there. He served as an officer in the French army for a while before he immigrated to America.

The regiment that Captain von Bachelle was in was called the "Black Hat" Brigade. This was because they liked to wear black hats, as you can see in the painting. At first they mostly guarded stuff around Washington, D.C., but after about a year, they got into their first battle at Second Bull Run. They fought so bravely that soon they were known as "The Iron Brigade of the West."

One day a Newfoundland dog wandered into the soldiers' camp. Everyone knew that Captain von Bachelle liked animals, so the dog was given to him. We don't have any pictures of this dog, and we don't even know his name, but we do know that the captain loved him very much and taught him to do military salutes and other tricks. The two of them were the very best of buddies, and they stayed together all the time.

On September 17, 1862, Company F of the 6th Wisconsin fought at the Battle of Antietam. This turned out to be the bloodiest single-day battle in all of U.S. history, with 3,600 people killed and 17,000 wounded. Captain von Bachelle led his men bravely forward into a cornfield, where lots of people were getting shot. Later a Union soldier described it like this: "Every stalk of corn in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as could have been with a knife, and the slain lay in rows precisely as they stood in their ranks a few minutes before."

The captain and his men kept on fighting, and then Captain von Bachelle got hit by several bullets and died right there where he fell. His men soon began to retreat, and they called the newfoundland to come with them, but he would not leave his master's side. Major Rufus Dawes later wrote that the dog "was found upon the morning of the 19th of September lying dead upon [von Bachelle's] body. We buried him with his master. So far as we know, no family or friends mourned poor Bachelle, and it is probable that he was joined in death by his most devoted friend on earth."

You can see the gravestone for Captain von Bachelle in the officers' section of Antietam National Cemetery. The stone doesn't say anything about the captain's brave and faithful dog, but we know that they are very happy together, wherever they are now.

MOM GOES TO THE ART GALLERY, Part 2

2012-01-11T08:39:00.000-06:00

When I first heard that Mom was going to the art gallery, I told her that she should take pictures of as many dogs as she could find in the artwork. And since Mom has gone to lots of obedience classes, she sometimes actually does what she is told to do!

Mom and Aunt LaDene were really only planning to see the two exhibits that I already told you about in my last entry, but then they got distracted and went in the room that has all the ceramics in it, which is one of Mom's favorite rooms. And after that, Aunt LaDene said she wanted to see the cloister, and in order to get to it, they had to walk past a bunch of other artwork. A lot of this artwork was religious, but sometimes there are dogs even in religious paintings, maybe because God made dogs, the same as he made people.

Anyway, here is a really big boy dog that is by the entrance to the ceramics room. He is on one side of the door, and there is a girl dog on the other side. I guess they have to be kept apart so they don't make puppies. Each of these dogs is 19 inches tall, and they have big holes in their backs, like maybe you are supposed to plant geraniums inside them. Except they don't really have any geraniums in them right now.

The two dogs have a date of 1724, and it's written right on their collars, which is how we know what year they were made. But we don't know if they came from Germany or from England.

This is a tankard, which is something you can drink ale out of. Dogs usually like to drink out of something wider and more shallow, but a tankard is designed for humans to use, and not for dogs. This one is from England, like maybe in the 17th century, and it shows a bunch of hounds chasing a fox. Or at least they are probably chasing a fox, because that's what hounds usually chase. You can't really see what they are chasing because that is around on the other side.

Mom did not write down any notes about the stuff she took pictures of, and this was partly because she did not have a pencil and paper with her. And also she was too lazy to take notes. Some of the artwork is in Mom's book about the gallery's collection, but some of it isn't. So sometimes I can tell you more about stuff than other times. This is totally Mom's fault, so don't blame me!

This little dog is not in the book. He's only about 4" or 5" tall. His mouth is kind of funny-looking, but he has intersting designs all over him. He's from England, like a lot of other stuff in the ceramics room.

Here's another little dog and a great big rabbit. If I were that dog, I think I would be afraid that the rabbit would kill me and eat me to get revenge for all the times that dogs have killed and eaten rabbits!

This box is supposed to be for sticking flowers in it to make sort of an arrangement or bouquet. But the most important thing about the box is that the man on it is going for a nice ride on his horse, with his faithful dog trotting along in front.

Mom found two paintings that had dogs in them, so she took pictures of them. The first painting is called The Knighting of Saint Martin by the Emperor Constantine, and the man who painted it was Bernard van Orley. He was Flemish. Saint Martin is wearing something that looks like a dress, and he has hair that is very curly, so at first Mom thought he was a woman.

Anyway, the best part of the painting is the two dogs in the lower left-hand corner. They look like they are probably greyhounds. My brother Nicky thinks every painting should have a greyhound in it!

Okay, then there is this very strange painting that we don't even know who painted it. Mom started looking at it because she liked all the bright, fun colors. The other paintings in that gallery were very dark and religious-looking, but not this one. So when Mom looked at it, she was shocked to learn that it was really a picture of a saint being roasted to death over some coals. We don't know for sure which saint it was because Mom didn't take notes, like I told you before. But I did some research, and I learned that there was a St. Lawrence who got killed in this nasty way. So maybe it's him. Or not maybe not.

Anyway, in the picture that Mom took, you can just barely see the saint's hands, and you can also see the hot fire under him. And on the lower left of the painting, there is a little dog. But the amazing thing about this dog is that you can see right through him. This is called being translucent. It's strange that the painter made the dog in this way, because you can't see through any of the people or anything else in the picture. It's like the artist couldn't decide if he should include the dog or not, and so he painted it in lightly, just to see if he really wanted a dog in the picture. Then he never went back and finished the dog. At least that's my theory.

I think there would be some good things about being a translucent dog, like for instance, you wouldn't have to get x-rays if something was wrong inside you. Mom thinks this would save her some money by not paying for x-rays, but she's not sure she would want to look at all of her dogs' insides all the time.

Okay, well, that's enough about artwork for right now. Mom took a few more pictures that I might talk about, but they don't have dogs in them, so they will have to wait until the next entry.

MOM GOES TO THE ART GALLERY, Part 1

2012-01-09T08:20:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, Mom and Aunt LaDene went to the art gallery. First they ate lunch in the Roselle Courtyard, where Mom says the food tastes very good, but I wouldn't know about that because Mom has never brought any food home for me.

After lunch, Mom and Aunt LaDene saw two exhibits, and it was the last day for those exhibits, so they just barely saw them in time. One exhibit was work by an artist named Romare Bearden. He was born in 1911, which is the exact same year that my Grandpa Claude was born. Mr. Bearden grew up in the south, and he liked to make pictures of people living there, like this one, for example:

Some of his pictures were painted with oil paints, and others were collages. And he liked to make prints in lots of different ways.

Later on, he moved to New York, and he made a lot of pictures of jazz musicians. This probably means that he enjoyed listening to jazz. Also I think he liked bright, bold colors, because he put a lot of them in his artwork.

Some of his pictures are very complicated, and it's hard to figure out what is going on.

Other pictures are easier, like this one, which is called The Fall of Troy. It is part of a whole series of paintings that Mr. Bearden did that showed some of the stories from the Illiad and the Odyssey.

Romare Bearden died in March of 1988, of complications from bone cancer. Here's a picture of him. I guess he had at least one cat, but I don't know if he ever had any dogs. I think he should have had a basenji, but nobody asked my opinion on this subject.

The second exhibit that Mom and Aunt LaDene saw was called "To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America." There were several artists in this exhibit, but Mr. Ault probably had the most pieces. Mr. Ault liked to paint what he saw around him, and he mostly painted in a flat, realistic style. This is a picture of his studio, which I think should have included a dog sleeping in front of the heater, but once again, nobody asked for my opinion.

Mr. Ault kept painting this one particular place called Russell's Corners, which seemed to be just sort of a wide spot in the road, and not a real town or anything like that. One time he painted it in daylight.

But mostly he painted it at nighttime.

Also, he painted this barn in the moonlight, which is a little spooky, but also kind of interesting because of the shapes and colors and stuff. Looking at all these snowy pictures makes me feel cold, though, and then I want to curl up in a ball and make sure my feet stay nice and warm.

Mr. Ault was sort of a sad, depressed man, and that may be why he painted so many dark-looking pictures. He died in 1948 from drowning, and it's likely that his drowning was not an accident. Here's an icy-looking waterfall that he painted.

Anyway, I am sorry that Mr. Ault drowned himself. I like his paintings because when you look at them, you can understand right away what is happening, which is not true with some people's paintings.

Mom took a bunch of other pictures at the gallery, and in my next entry, I will show you some of them.

PORTUGUESE PODENGOS

2012-01-08T08:49:00.001-06:00

This is a dog breed that comes from Portugal, as you can probably guess from the name. And these dogs are very, very cute, mainly because the short-haired ones look a lot like basenjis, except with shorter legs and straighter tails. There are also wire-haired podengos, also very cute, but they do not look nearly so much like basenjis.

Portuguese podengos come in three different sizes: pequeno (small), medio (medium), and grande (large). Then in each size group, you can have either smooth or wire coats. Colors can include yellow, fawn, red, or black with white markings. So if you want a podengo, you have lots of choices you need to make.

In Portugal, this breed is very popular, and it has been around for a long, long time. Podengos first got to the Iberian Peninsula about 2,000 years ago. They came with the Phoenicians from Asia Minor. You can see carvings of podengos on 11th century Portuguese churches, and they first show up in literature in the 14th century. Portuguese sailors used to take podengos with them to keep mice and rats from eating the food stored on their ships.

Podengo Grande

Podengos are very good hunting dogs. They use both scent and sight to hunt, just like basenjis do. Usually the dogs go out ahead of the human hunters, and when they find game, they either kill it and bring it back to the humans, or else they wait for the hunters to catch up and shoot the game. The pequeno podengos are used to hunt rabbits, the medios for rabbits and wild boar, and the grandes for wild boar and deer.

Podengo Medio

The podengo pequeno is about 8" to 12" tall and weighs 9-13 pounds. The medio is 16" to 22" tall and weighs 35 to 44 pounds. The grande is 22" to 28" tall and weighs between 44 and 66 pounds. In the U.S., 75% of the purebred podengos are the pequeno size, and 85% of these have wire coats. The breed has very few inherited health problems because people haven't messed with the podengo's breeding as much as they have with some other breeds.

In general, the podengo is an intelligent, brave, and affectionate dog. It is a good watchdog and a good companion. Podengos can compete in lure coursing, flyball, agilty, tracking, rally, and obedience. In Europe, the breed has been recognized for registration by several groups. In the U.S., the AKC made the Portuguese Podengo Pequeno eligible to compete in the Miscellaneous class starting January 1, 2011. Dogs' wins can be recorded, but registration is not open yet for the breed.

Organizations that recognize all sizes of the podengo in the U.S. are the United Kennel Club, American Rare Breed Association, the North American Kennel Club, and the American Sighthound Field Association.

One of Mom's friends, my Aunt Erica, who lives in Oregon, adopted a dog named Spencer from a shelter a few weeks ago. She thought she was adopting a basenji mix, because Spencer was smaller than a basenji and had a straight tail kind of like a fox tail. But then somebody told Aunt Erica that maybe Spencer was a Portuguese podengo, and now we all pretty much think that is what he is. Anyway, I would like to thank Spencer for giving me the idea for this blog entry, because I'm not sure if I had ever even heard of Portuguese podengos before he came along!

WHAT MOM'S BEEN UP TO

2012-01-06T07:36:00.000-06:00

Here's some news about all the latest stuff that has been keeping Mom busy. Some of it has to do with dogs and cats, and some of it doesn't. If you ask me, I think Mom should spend all her time doing stuff for dogs and cats, but she doesn't always agree, and it's hard to argue with Mom.

Right before Christmas, Mom went to an estate sale, which is one of the bad habits she has got into lately. This estate sale lasted for 3 days, and Mom didn't get there until the 3rd day. She was shocked to find that there were still a lot of items left there, even after people had been picking over them for 2 days already. This probably means that the people who lived there were sort of like hoarders and they had a ton of belongings that needed to be sold.

Anyway, since it was the 3rd day of the sale, everything was 66% off, which Mom thought was a good deal. So she bought a few things, including a dirty sort of pink rug that looked really pretty after she washed it, and now she is using it as a placemat to feed the cats on. Also she got some other blankets and stuff, and she bought a little doggy figurine that was made in Japan. This dog is totally goofy-looking because it has much bigger eyes than any real dog would ever have. But Mom thought the dog was kind of cute, mainly because it had those great big eyes. She didn't even notice until she got the dog home that it had a broken leg that had been glued back on. But she only paid about 50 cents for the dog, so she didn't care if it had a broken leg. And anyway, whoever glued the leg back on did a good job.

Last Thursday our little foster kitten Hazel got adopted. A woman came to the house to meet her, and she played with all the kittens, but she was really only interested in Hazel. So after a while, she took Hazel home with her. On that same day, a man came over to fix some things that weren't working in our house, like the garage door opener. Except that nothing was wrong with the opener. The problem was really the circuit breaker or something like that. Anyway, Barry and Mel had to go to daycare for the day because Mom didn't want them to bite anybody.

Hazel's new mom sent us a picture of Hazel sleeping with the family's weimaraner, Libby. Hazel has a new name now, which is Jinx. She seems to be happy living with the two dogs and the two humans there, so that's good.

Now we only have two kittens that need to get adopted, but Hamlet started having blood in his pee, and Mom had to take him to see Dr. Regan at the Humane Society. Mom took Hallie there too, because Hallie had a sort of lump under her spay incision. Dr. Regan put them both on antibiotics and told Mom that the kittens couldn't go to the adoption event on New Year's Eve. But they are going to go to the one tomorrow, so we have our paws crossed, hoping that people will see how cute they are and will want to adopt them right away.

In the meantime, Hamlet and Hallie have learned how to get over the child gate and go into the big cats' room. Which means that Mom is leaving them out of their crate more, because if they need to use the litter box, they can just use one that the big cats use.

And speaking of litter boxes, Mom bought a new one and filled it up with litter yesterday, so now the cats have 3 litter boxes. Mom has been annoyed at Charlie because he kept peeing and pooping in the bathtub, so she is trying to make him happier by having lots of choices of litter boxes.

Also Mom went to Target the other day and bought a new bath mat because the old one had got peed on, plus it was old and ugly anyway. And while she was there, she decided to buy a new shower curtain, too, because the one we had was old and ugly, just like the bath mat, and it had mildew and stuff on it, which might have come out if Mom had ever washed it, but she was too lazy to do that.

So yesterday Mom threw away the old bath mat and shower curtain, and she scrubbed out the tub, and she used Nature's Miracle to try to get rid of any pee or poop smell, and then she hung up the new shower curtain. It is very colorful and bright, and it has elephants on it. Mom said that if there had been a shower curtain with dogs on it, that's what she would have bought, but they only had elephants. Well, besides boring vines and leaves and stripes and stuff like that. But anyway, I just want to make it clear that having elephants on our shower curtain does NOT make us Republicans. And that's all I'm going to say about politics because I don't want to get people mad at me!

Okay, so I think the only other thing I need to tell you about is a new art print that Mom bought Saturday. She bought it at an antique shop that is pretty close to our house. This print has a dog in it, so that makes it a very good picture to have on the wall. It also has a bird and a boat. We would like to know who painted this picture, but there is no signature that we can find on it. Mom saw two other prints by the same artist in the shop, and one of the other ones also had a dog, but Mom only bought one print because she was trying not to spend too much money. I think this is a good plan because the more money Mom saves, the more she can spend on dog treats!

BEATRIX POTTER and PETER RABBIT

2012-01-05T08:37:00.000-06:00

Peter Rabbit is a cute, but very naughty little bunny who is the main character in a book that was written by Beatrix Potter. Peter was based on a real rabbit that Ms. Potter owned when she was a child, and that rabbit's name was Peter Piper. The other rabbits she had as a child were named Josephine, Mopsy, Flopsy, and Benjamin Bouncer.

Age 9

Beatrix Potter and her brother Bertram grew up in Victorian England. They weren't allowed to have other children as friends, so they played together, and they had lots of pets to play with, too. Here are some of the pets they had: frogs, lizards, water newts, snakes, mice, birds, a tortoise, and rabbits. Beatrix and Bertram spent a lot of time studying these animals and drawing pictures of them.

Age 15

Bertram went off to boarding school, but Beatrix stayed home and studied with a governess until she was 18. She learned languages, literature, science, and history. She had private art lessons, but she pretty much liked to paint things in her own way, using watercolors. She also kept a secret diary which was written in a code that she made up herself.

First edition

In 1893, Ms. Potter wrote a picture letter to the 5-year-old son of one of her former governesses. This little boy had been sick for a while, and Ms. Potter wanted to cheer him up with the story of a rabbit named Peter. Later, in 1901, she paid out of her own pocket to print 250 copies of the little book, which was called The Tale of Peter Rabbit. These copies cost one shilling each, and they sold very quickly, so Ms. Potter printed 200 more of them.

After that, she convinced Frederick Warne & Company to print 8,000 copies of the book. This first edition came out in 1902, and the book has never been out of print since then. It has been translated into 36 languages, and 45 million copies have sold. Which makes it one of the best-selling books of all time.

So anyway, what happens in the book is that Peter lives with his mother and his sisters, Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail. They walk upright and wear clothes, and they live in a rabbit-hole under a fir tree. Mrs. Rabbit tells her children never to go into Mr. MacGregor's garden because that is where their father met his sad fate and ended up as part of a pie.

But when Mrs. Rabbit goes shopping, and the girl bunnies go out to gather blackberries, Peter sneaks into Mr. MacGregor's garden. He finds lots of yummy veggies there, and he eats so many of them that he gets sick. Then Mr. MacGregor sees Peter and starts chasing him. Peter loses his jacket and shoes during the chase, and he has several close escapes from the farmer before he finally gets away.

Mr. MacGregor uses Peter's jacket and shoes to make a scarecrow, which seems like it would be a very small scarecrow, and not the kind of thing that would scare a big, black crow. But I am not a farm girl, so I don't know much about these subjects.

Meanwhile, Peter runs home and arrives there feeling all tired and sick. His mother puts him to bed with a dose of camomile tea. But Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail get to have a nice supper of bread, milk, and blackberries because they have been such good little bunnies.

All together, Beatrix Potter published more than 23 books. The ones that people know best were published between 1902 and 1922. Ms. Potter used the money she got from her writing to buy a home in the Lake District of England. This area is in the northwest part of England, not too far from Scotland. When Ms. Potter and her brother were young, their parents used to take them to the Lake District and to Scotland for family vacations.

Hill Top Farm

The place where Ms. Potter lived was called Hill Top Farm. She spent a lot of time there and even used it as the setting for some of her stories. In 1913, when she was 47, Ms. Potter married William Heelis, who was a lawyer from the Lake District town of Hawkshead. Ms. Potter became a prosperous farmer and breeder of Herdwick sheep. She bought many farms in the area so that the land could be preserved. When she died in 1943, she was 77 years old. She left most of her property to the National Trust, and now it is part of the Lake District National Park.

Oh, and here's something else that's interesting about Beatrix Potter. She figured out that she could make a Peter Rabbit doll and patent it, which she did in 1903. Then she came up with a Peter Rabbit board game. This meant that Peter Rabbit was the first licensed character ever, and over the years, many types of products have been made using him and other characters from Ms. Potter's books.

Ms. Potter at Hill Top Farm

So that is the story of Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit. Ms. Potter was more than just a writer and illustrator. She was also a businesswoman, a scientist, and a conservationist. The Hill Top Farm where she lived is still there, and tourists can go inside it. Mom was in it one time, and Mom has also been on hiking trips in the Lake District twice. Mom says everyone who goes to England should see the Lake District because it is so beautiful.

Ms. Potter and a dog named Kep, 1915

MORE FUNNY STUFF THAT PEOPLE SAY AND WRITE

2012-01-04T08:23:00.000-06:00

Well, I was going to write a blog entry about some deep and important topic, of which I have a few in mind. But Mom, my Chief Research Assistant, was way too busy to help with the in-depth research. Also, she was hogging the computer because she was writing something called the "President's Page" for the cactus club's newsletter. Mom is the president of the club, and that is why she has to write this thing every month. Mostly, she just rambles on without saying anything very interesting, but sometimes she really does say something important. Of course, it's never as good as what I'd like to be writing in my blog, if Mom weren't hogging the computer.

Anyway, I had to come up with something easy and fast to write about, so that is why you are getting to read some more things from Mom's collection of silly stuff people say and write. And tomorrow I hope I can write a really meaningful and good entry.

We are cogs on the road of life.

It's like I'm Joan of Arc, carrying a torch for the whole game.

I'll have to cross that bridge when it gets here.

They've gone too far into the precipice.

We need to clear up some ruffled feathers.

They're beating down my doorstep.

Tell me on what planet on earth this is done.

He passed away due to a raptured appendix.

FATHER TIME

2012-01-01T08:56:00.000-06:00

Father Time is an old guy who usually shows up about this time of year, and sometimes you see him hanging out with Baby New Year. Father Time always has a really long beard, and he likes to carry around a scythe or an hourglass or maybe a pocket watch. The idea is that he represents the end of the old year, and Baby New Year represents the start of the new year. The amazing thing is that after only 12 months, Baby New Year will turn into Father Time, and he will look old and worn-out and will have a very long beard.

The image of Father Time is a combination of two characters. One is the Grim Reaper, or Death, who usually wears a black, hooded robe and carries a scythe. The other one is Chronos, who was one of the Titans in Greek mythology, and who ruled over Time.

I don't know why people say Time is a Father. To me it seems like maybe we should have Mother Time instead. The reason I think this is because it takes lots of time to nurture and grow things, which is what a mother does. My mom says that Time is a man because we live in a patriarchal society, which means that the tradition has been for fathers to rule their families, and for men to run businesses and government. This does not really seem fair, but nobody asked me, unfortunately.

Anyway, I went looking for pictures of Father Time and Baby New Year, and I found a whole bunch of them, which I am now going to show you because they are pretty interesting.

Sometimes Baby New Year is a young child instead of being a baby in diapers, like for instance in this picture.

And in this 1897 picture, Baby New Year is actually a girl!

The same thing is true in this photo from 1900. But even if Baby New Year is a girl, she never seems to grow up to be Mother Time. There are only Father Times.

An artist named Edmund Dulac made this painting of Father Time in 1906. I don't know who that beautiful woman in the glass ornament is, but Father Time seems to be very interested in her. Also you will see that the hourglass has wings, which probably means that "Time flies when you're getting old."

Here's a very old painting of Queen Elizabeth I from about 1610. No one knows who painted it because people didn't always sign their work in those days. Anyway, this painting is kind of sad and creepy because it shows Father Time behind the queen's right shoulder, and Death looking over her left shoulder. Meanwhile, some cherubs are taking the crown off of her head. Maybe this means that she is old and about to die, and the burden of being the queen is being lifted off of her. Or maybe it doesn't mean that at all. I am better at being a literary critic than at being an art critic.

Here's an old greeting card design that shows Father Time with an angel following him around. I think he got startled by the angel, and that's why he dropped his hourglass.

I was kind of worried because I only saw white men playing the role of Father Time. But then I thought maybe this meant that people of African descent never got old and died. Which would be a good thing, because as a basenji, I am of African descent myself. But after that, I found a Father Time of color. I didn't find any Baby New Years of color, though, so I'm not sure what's up with that.

Here's a picture I like a lot that was painted by an artist named Akeem, and it shows Father Time dancing with Mother Earth.

In this picture, Father Time looks kind of upset, like he can't believe the whole year will be over in just twenty more minutes. A cartoonist named Michael J. Ruocco made this drawing.

Here's a painting by someone named missmanda11, and it shows Father Time in some kind of weird, psychedelic dream. Mom says this picture looks like it might have been done by Salvador Dalí in about 1968, but it wasn't.

Scarlet Ibis Designs painted Father Time on an ostrich egg and put a satin lining in the egg. You can own this egg yourself for only $950.

Or another artistic thing you can do is get Father Time tattooed on an intimate part of your body. Actually, I kind of like this design, except for Father Time's strange eyes.

And finally, here's Tom Ruegger's picture of a happy Father Time with a crying, egghead Baby New Year.

Which brings me to my wish for all my faithful blog readers to have a very good 2012, with lots of smiling and laughing, and very little whining and crying!

THE MAN WHO GOT EATEN BY HIS DOGS

2011-12-30T08:23:00.000-06:00

This is a terrible, but totally true story about something that happened in September in Indonesia. And what happened was that a 50-year-old man named Andre Lumboga went out of town to celebrate a festival. He was gone for 14 days, and he did not leave any food or water for his 9 dogs. I cannot believe anybody would do such a thing, but this seems to be what Mr. Lumboga did.

Of course, the dogs got really, really hungry because of not having any food, so after a while, they killed the two weakest dogs and ate them. And then when Mr. Lumboga got home, they jumped on him and tore him apart and ate him, too. I'm thinking he might have been surprised by this and also sorry that he did not arrange to have his dogs fed while he was gone. It kind of makes you wonder what the heck he was thinking, or if he was thinking at all.

At first, nobody knew that Mr. Lumboga had been eaten by his dogs, but then a neighborhood guard noticed that Mr. Lumboga's suitcases were sitting out in front of his house, all lined up, as if he had just arrived home. And after five days of seeing the suitcases sitting there in the same way, the guard went up to the house, and he smelled something yucky, so he called the police.

By the time the police found out about the situation, the dogs were hungry again because they had had several days to digest Mr. Lumboga. So the dogs tried to eat the policemen, too, and the policemen had to "paralyze" them. I hope this was just a temporary thing, but I don't know if it was or not. Anyway, the police found Mr. Lumboga's skull in the kitchen, and the rest of his body was in the front of the house. Not that there was a whole lot of the body left.

None of the reports I read explained what happened to the dogs afterwards. I hope they didn't get killed, but I am afraid they might have. It's probably better not to know these things. Anyway, I think Mr. Lumboga got what was coming to him since he left the dogs without any food or water.

The part of Indonesia where Mr. Lumboga and his dogs lived is called Sulawesi Island. The pictures I found of this island show lots of nice mountains and beautiful beaches. Also there are some very interesting native houses that look really different from American houses. Pictures like these made me think that Sulawesi Island might be a good place to visit. But I also saw pictures of people killing hogs and bulls for wedding feasts and other special occasions. And I learned that in Sulawesi Island, it is very common to eat dogs, bats, and forest rats.

So now I'm thinking that it would be best for all dogs to stay as far away from Sulawesi Island as possible. At least that's what I plan to do!

MY VISIT TO THE INTERNIST, by Nicky

2011-12-28T08:30:00.000-06:00

Does this nose make me look handsome?

Yesterday, Mom took me to see a special doctor called an internist. Her name is Dr. Grigsby, and Mom met her once before on the horrible occasion last January when Gabe had a ruptured bowel. Dr. Grigsby was the one who figured out what was wrong with Gabe and then put him to sleep after Mom agreed that was the best thing to do.

So I was a little nervous, going to see this internist person, because I thought maybe she would decide to put me to sleep, too. But I was relieved to find out that Dr. Grigsby just wanted to figure out why I feel yucky and grumpy and have diarrhea so much of the time, and make me feel better.

Mom has already spent a lot of money on me to get blood tests done and also an ultrasound. And what we learned from all this expensive stuff was that I have high liver values in my blood. Also I have high folate levels, which might have something to do with vitamin B. It's all very confusing to a dog who was only bred to run races and not to understand chemistry. The ultrasound, which cost $315, didn't show anything unusual that was happening inside me. But the high folate levels meant that I have a "diffuse intestinal disease." This disease might be inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), like Gabe had, or it might be lymphoma, which is a type of cancer, or it might be an overgrowth of bacteria.

A dog getting the inside of his guts
revealed through endoscopy

My regular vet, Dr. Griswold, said I needed endoscopy to figure out what was going on in my intestines, and that's why Mom took me to see Dr. Grigsby. Endoscopy is where they stick a long tube thing way down into your throat or up your butt, and it has a light and a camera on it, so they can see what's inside your guts. Also they can get little snippets of your intestines, and then they can look at these under a microscope and see what is going on in there.

But Dr. Grigsby looked at all the information from the tests I've had, and she told Mom that maybe a couple of things were wrong with me, and one had to do with my liver, and the other was happening in my intestines. She thought we should start with the liver, and she said she could stick a needle right straight into my liver and suck out a few cells and look at them.

So Mom left me there most of the day, and I had another ultrasound to make sure Dr. Grigsby knew where my liver was so that she would stick the needle in the right place.

These are some liver cells,
and those big yellow
blobs are bile.

After the doctor looked at the liver cells, she called Mom and said that I do not have cancer in my liver, which is very good news. But what I do have is a whole lot of bile pigment that is not supposed to be there. This means that the bile is not draining out of my liver in the proper way. Dr. Grigsby sent my liver cells to the lab so that they could look at them, too, because they might see something that she didn't see. When she hears from them, she will call Mom.

I did a little bit of research on bile, and I learned that it is made by the liver and stored in the gallbladder. And what it's used for is to help you digest the fats that are in your food. Bile also has this stuff in it called bilirubin, which is a really funny word to say. Anyway, my blood tests showed that I had way too much bilirubin. The interesting thing about bilirubin is that it is what makes your pee yellow, your poop brown, your bruises turn yellow, and lots of things yellow if you are jaundiced. I wonder if having too much bilirubin could turn me into a yellow lab. I hope not, because I don't think I'd want to be a lab. I really prefer being a greyhound.

Dr. Grigsby prescribed some medicine to help me not have diarrhea so much, and I also some medicine to make my liver better -- except Mom hasn't picked up those pills from the drugstore yet. And now we just have to wait until we hear from Dr. Grigsby again. Meanwhile, I plan to take lots of naps because that is something I excel at doing.

GUESS WHAT! I'M GETTING ADOPTED! by Jacen

2011-12-27T08:24:00.000-06:00

I got a super-cool Christmas present, and do you know what it was? Mom told me that she is going to adopt me! But only if I want her to. Well, duh. Of course, I want her to! What have I been working for all these weeks, with my seductive purring and alluring displays of charm?

So it's all decided, and Mom just has to do the paperwork. Aunt Tania said Mom would not even have to pay an adoption fee for me, which Mom was happy about, but it makes me feel a little cheap. Still, it's a huge load off my shoulders not to have to think about going to that scary PetsMart place again. Nope, I can just stay here at home, where I belong, with my big brother Charlie and my big sister Chloe, and all the crazy dogs. Oh, and Mom. She's the best mom ever, and I really mean that, even if she's not going to pay an adoption fee for me.

The first thing Mom said she would do is change my name to Jason. Okay, that's actually the same name, but she said it's a more sensible way to spell it. Also she told me I would have to go to Dr. Patricia's office and introduce myself to everybody there and get a microchip. Chloe says it hurts to get a microchip, and she knows this because she had to get one after that time when she went walkabout. So I am not looking forward to that, but I guess it will be worth it to get to stay here with Mom.

The three little kittens got spayed and neutered this past Thursday, so now it's their turn to try to get adopted. And Mom says she will absolutely not adopt any more cats, so I just got in under the wire! Mom is going to send photos and bios of the kittens to someone named Harriet, so that she can put them on Petfinder. Then on Saturday, Mom will take the kittens to PetsMart so that everybody can see how adorable they are and adopt them. Well, I say, "Good luck with that!"

But Aunt Tania says our kittens will be the smallest ones there, and people really like to adopt little kittens. Also lots of cats usually get adopted during January. So we are hoping that our kittens really will find homes very soon. I will miss having them around to play with, but Mom says there might be more foster kittens here someday that I can play with.

Meanwhile, I am enjoying life in my forever home. Mom treats me like one of the big cats, so I get to eat with Charlie and Chloe. At first, I just ate out of whichever of their dishes I wanted to eat out of, but lately Charlie has been getting some special blue pills because he kept puking last week. So now I am using my little yellow dish, and Mom supervises us to make sure Charlie eats all his food because it has his medicine in it. And while we are eating, Barry stands out in the hall and whines because he is hungry, and he wants Mom to hurry up and feed the dogs.

At night, I usually sleep with Mom in her bed, but sometimes I sleep with Chloe or with Charlie. They are pretty good about letting me snuggle with them, and one time Mom found us all three sleeping together in the same bed. I like doing this because it feels nice and cozy and warm, like sleeping with my littermates. Except I can't remember for sure if I had any littermates, but I think I probably did. Mom told me that somebody found me as a stray and took me to Animal Control. I don't know much about what happened to me before that, but I think my mama and my littermates must have got lost somehow. Anyway, I hope they all found nice humans to live with, like I did.

REINDEER

2011-12-25T09:16:00.000-06:00

Reindeer are called caribou in North America, and they look a little different from the reindeer in Europe and Asia, but they are all known by the scientific name of Rangifer tarandus. Also, they all like to live in the Arctic and Subarctic, where the weather is pretty darned cold. Some people who live in those regions hunt reindeer, or they keep them as domestic animals to pull sleds and provide milk, meat, and skins.

There are a lot of reindeer around, so we don't have to worry about them going extinct. But a long time ago, in the Pleistocene era, there were even more reindeer in the world, and you could find them living as far south as Nevada, Tennessee, and Spain. Nowadays most of the reindeer live in Scandinavia, Greenland, Alaska, and Canada. Except for the nine that live with Santa at the North Pole.

Caribou live in the green part and reindeer in the red part.

Reindeer fur is really warm, which it has to be, since the reindeer insist on living in such cold places. They have a thick, woolly undercoat, with a longer overcoat made of hollow hairs. The air in the hollow hairs makes very good insulation for the reindeer.

There are several different colors of reindeer fur. The reindeer that live farthest north, such as the Peary caribou, have the whitest fur, and they are also the smallest type of caribou. Further south, the Woodland Caribou are the largest and have the darkest fur.

Like other kinds of deer, reindeer grow antlers, and usually both sexes have them. The males have bigger antlers than the females. Old males lose their antlers in December, young males in the spring, and females during the summer. Reindeer have the largest antlers of all deer. Only moose have bigger antlers.

Reindeer have special noses that are built with lots of surface area inside their nostrils. This makes it so that when the cold air comes inside their noses, it is warmed first before it goes on to their lungs. And then when they breathe out, the moisture in their breath is condensed, so that it keeps their mucous membranes from drying out.

A very cute girl and a very cute reindeer calf in Mongolia

Another thing that's special about reindeer is their hooves. In the summertime, their footpads get spongy, which makes it easier to walk on the wet, soft tundra. But in the winter, the footpads get small and tight, so that the edge of the hoof has traction on the ice and snow. Also, this helps the reindeer dig down in the snow to find reindeer moss, which is the lichen they most like to eat. In the summer, they also eat willow and birch leaves, sedges, and grasses.

The mating season for reindeer is from late September to early November. The males get into big fights about who will mate with which female. They use their antlers to fight with, and the males who are the most dominant might get to mate with 15-20 females. The calves are born in May or June. After 45 days, they can graze on their own, but they usually continue suckling until autumn.

Reindeer have a lot of predators. The calves seem to be especially yummy, and they are favorite meals of golden eagles and wolverines. Brown bears and polar bears will eat reindeer of any age, and so will gray wolves. Reindeer can usually outrun the bears, but wolves are faster. A pack of wolves might follow the same reindeer herd for several months and just catch one to eat whenever they get hungry.

North American caribou migrate farther than any other land mammal. They sometimes travel 3,100 miles in a year, covering 390,000 square miles. In Europe, some types of reindeer migrate, but they don't go as far. Caribou travel between 12 and 34 miles a day when they are migrating, and since they can swim really well, they will cross any lakes or rivers that get in their way. They can run at speeds of 37 to 50 mph.

I don't know who first decided that Santa Claus traveled around in a sleigh with flying reindeer. Maybe if I did enough research, I could figure this out, but I'm not going to do the research right now. What I do know is that Santa's reindeer first got their names in 1823 when a man named Clement Clarke Moore wrote a poem called A Visit from St Nicholas. To be honest, I think it would be kind of scary to have a bunch of reindeer landing on the roof and a fat man coming down the chimney. So I would rather just get my gifts from Mom!

THE NORTH POLE

2011-12-23T08:42:00.000-06:00

The North Pole is at the very tip-top of the earth, like the farthest north you can ever go. Except there is no actual pole there, so it's hard to know if you are really at the North Pole or not. People say that Santa and his elves and his reindeer live at the North Pole, but I'm not sure this is true, because why would anybody want to live in such a cold place? But I'll let you believe whatever you want to believe.

A really old map of the North Pole,
made by Gerardus Mercator in 1595

Anyway, if you were standing on the exact site of the North Pole, any direction you went from there would be south. The North Pole is also called the Geographic North Pole, and it is at the latitude of 90º North. This is also called true north, and it is exactly opposite the South Pole. The Geographic North Pole is different from the Magnetic North Pole because the Magnetic North Pole is not true north. Instead, it is based on the magnetosphere of the Earth, and it is always moving around.

Both the North Pole and the South Pole have a bunch of ice on top of them, but the South Pole is located in Antarctica, and the North Pole is in a frozen ocean. So even if you set up a pole at the North Pole, the ice where you put the pole would move around some, and then your pole would be in the wrong place. The ice at the North Pole is about 7 to 10 feet thick, and the sea at the Pole is 13,930 feet deep. The closest land to the North Pole is Kaffeklubben Island, which is off the northern coast of Greenland, about 430 miles away. But nobody lives there.

The town of Alert

The closest place where any people actually live is a town called Alert, in the Qikiqtaaluk Region of Nunavut, Canada. This town is located 508 miles from the Pole. Alert was named for the HMS Alert, which was a British ship that wintered near there in 1875-76. The permanent population of Alert might be as many as 10 people, but there are other people who just stay there part of the time. In Alert there is a weather station and also a military intelligence station. I don't know if any dogs live in Alert, but if they do, I hope they have really thick fur coats!

Starting way back in history, people wanted to go to the North Pole. I don't know why, except maybe just because it was there. Some sailors tried getting there in ships, but mostly they got stuck in the ice, and some of them died. Other people tried to go there with dog sleds.

The Peary Expedition

On April 6, 1909, a U.S. Navy engineer named Robert Peary said he and Matthew Henson reached the Pole, along with four Inuit men. They took a picture of themselves when they got there, but they did not include their sled dogs in the picture, which doesn't seem fair, if you ask me. Anyway, since nobody on the trip was really trained in navigation, some people said later that Peary did not find the right spot where the Pole was.

The first flight over the Pole was made on May 9, 1926 by Richard E. Byrd and Floyd Bennett, but later it turned out that their solar sextant wasn't very accurate, or something like that. So they probably didn't really get to the Pole either.

On May 12, 1926, a Norwegian explorer named Roald Amundsen flew from Norway to Alaska in the airship Norge. This trip had accurate proof that it really crossed over the Pole. After that, the first people to walk on the Pole, and to be in the right place when they did it, was a group from the Soviet Union who landed a plane there on April 23, 1948.

USS Skate

The first submarine to cross the North Pole was the USS Nautilus, on August 3, 1958. Then on March 17, 1959, the USS Skate surfaced at the Pole, which made it the first naval vessel to do that.

If you had to live at the North Pole or the South Pole, you should choose the North Pole because it's at sea level, and that makes it warmer there. Which may be why Santa lives at the North Pole. In January, the temperature ranges from --45ºF to --15ºF. In the summer, temperatures average about freezing. The highest temperature recorded at the North Pole was 41ºF, which is way warmer than the record high of 7.7ºF at the South Pole.

A grinning Russian ship at the North Pole

In the wintertime at the North Pole, the sun is always below the horizon, so it's pretty dark. And in the summertime, it's always light because the sun is above the horizon. Also in winter, there are Northern Lights, and those are really cool to look at.

Polar bears live pretty close to the North Pole, but the only thing for them to eat at the Pole itself is Santa's elves, and they are too small to be worth the trip up there. Other animals that live close to the Pole are the ringed seal and Arctic foxes. Some birds that have been seen at the Pole are the snow bunting, northern fulmar, and black-legged kittiwake.

The amount of ice in the polar cap is getting to be less and less, which is a problem for animals like polar bears and walruses, who like to spend their time on ice floes. It's also a problem because when the ice melts, the sea levels go up. This means that some islands could get totally flooded, and so could some cities near the coast, such as New York City. The reason the ice is melting is because the average temperatures are rising, and the reason the temperatures are rising is because of Global Warming. Some people don't believe in Global Warming, but I do. I believe in it even more than I believe in Santa Claus!

But speaking of Santa, where did the idea first come from that he lives at the North Pole? Well, it might be because a long time ago, in Greek mythology, there were these superhuman, godlike people called Hyperboreans, and they lived really far north, even farther north than Thrace. The North Wind, which was called Boreas, supposedly lived in Thrace, so the Hyperboreans lived "beyond the Boreas" in a perfect land where the sun shone 24 hours a day. Which is what happens in the Arctic during the summer. And since Santa Claus is sort of a superhuman figure, people started to think he must come from the northern land of Hyperboria, which we now call the North Pole.

Webcam view in July 2011

Anyway, if you want to know what's going on at the North Pole at any time of day or night, you can go look at the NOAA North Pole webcam. Besides pictures, there is all sorts of information about temperatures and weather and stuff like that. And if you're lucky, maybe you will get a glimpse of Santa loading up his sleigh for his big trip on Christmas Eve!

JEFFERSON DAVIS AND TRAVELER

2011-12-22T07:37:00.000-06:00

This might be a picture of Traveler.
If not, it probably at least looks sort of like him.

Jefferson Davis was a president, but he wasn't the president of the United States. Instead, he was president of the Confederate States of America, which was a new country that the southern states made during the Civil War.

Mr. Davis was born in Kentucky in 1808. He went to West Point and then fought in the Mexican-American War. He got elected a Democratic Senator from Mississippi, and after that, he served as the U.S. Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce. When he finished being in the Pierce administration, Mr. Davis went back to being a senator from Mississippi. He thought that the South should not leave the Union, but he did believe that states had the right to do that if they chose to.

On February 9, 1861, after Senator Davis had resigned from the U.S. Senate, he was picked to be the provisional President of the C.S.A. Then in November he was elected to a 6-year term as president. And nobody even ran against him. President Davis kept that office during the entire Civil War.

After the War, Mr. Davis went to a place called Beauvoir to do some writing. Beauvoir was a home that was located near the coast, in Biloxi, Mississippi. It was owned by a friend of the Davises, Mrs. Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey. She had named her home "Beauvoir," which is French for "beautiful view." Mr. Davis liked the house so much that he bought it from Mrs. Dorsey.

Mrs. Sarah Dorsey

When he began staying at Beauvoir, Mr. Davis met Traveler, a dog that he soon came to love very much. Mr. and Mrs. Dorsey took a lot of trips abroad, because they were rich, and when they were in the Alps, they bought a mixed-breed puppy that had a Russian bulldog for a father. The Russian bulldog seems to be a breed that isn't around anymore, so I couldn't find any pictures of Russian bulldogs.

Anyway, the Dorseys trained their puppy, Traveler, to be a bodyguard for Mrs. Dorsey. One time when they were on a camping trip in the Arabian desert, Mr. Dorsey found out that one of his Arabian servants was stealing from him. So he had the man punished. After that, Mr. Dorsey went on a 2-day trip, and he left Mrs. Dorsey with an old Arab sheik to take care of her, and Traveler was there to guard her. In the middle of the night, Mrs. Dorsey woke up when she heard a man scream. It turned out that the thief who had been punished came back with a big knife to get his revenge by attacking Mrs. Dorsey. But Traveler heard him and pinned him down.

Another time, when the Dorseys were in Paris, Mrs. Dorsey wore a bunch of expensive diamond jewelry to a party. After the Dorseys got back to their hotel, Mr. Dorsey went out to smoke with some friends, and Mrs. Dorsey went to bed and fell asleep. She woke up when she heard the sounds of a fight. A thief had followed her back to the hotel to try to steal the expensive jewelry. Traveler attacked him and bit him in the throat. This man was one of the worst criminals in Paris. He was sentenced to be hanged, but before that could happen, he died from his throat wound.

After Mrs. Dorsey died, Traveler became Mr. Davis's dog. They hung out together all the time, and Traveler was a good guard dog for Mr. Davis, just like he had been for Mrs. Dorsey. The doors and windows of Beauvoir never had to be locked because Traveler always made sure nobody got in unless they were allowed to. When Mr. Davis wanted Traveler to know that it was okay for somebody to be there, he told the dog, "This is my friend," and let Traveler check the person out by giving them a good sniff. After that, Traveler accepted the person and let them go wherever they wanted to on the property.

Even though Traveler could be fierce as a guard dog, he was very gentle with children. He let them pull his hair, pound on him, and ride him like a pony. He especially liked to play with Mrs. Davis's little niece.

Another thing that Traveler liked to do was chase fiddler crabs on the beach. Whenever he managed to herd a bunch of them into the sea, he would bark and kick up sand to show how happy he was. But if he was walking with Mr. Davis on the beach, he acted like a very serious body guard and did not chase the crabs. He knew it was his job to keep his master safe, and if Mr. Davis got lost in thought and walked too close to the water, Traveler would steer him back up the beach a ways.

Jefferson Davis in 1885

One day Traveler got very sick, and Mr. Davis brought the best doctor in the area to try to make him well again. But nothing the doctor did made Traveler feel better. Mr. Davis and the doctor sat up all night with Traveler, and at daybreak, Traveler died with his head on his master's knee. Mr. Davis was very sad, and he said, "I have indeed lost a friend."

Traveler was buried in a wooden coffin in the front yard of Beauvoir. A stone was put on the grave to mark it, but later the stone disappeared. Mr. Davis died in 1889. For a number of years, members of the Davis family lived at Beauvoir, but finally it was turned into a presidential library. During Hurricane Katrina, the house was badly damaged, but it has now been repaired and is open again.

I asked Mom if we could go to Mississippi to the beach so that I could chase the crabs. Mom said that might be fun to do sometime, and I said "How about next week?" Mom said she didn't think we could go that soon. So who knows when we'll get there, if we ever do.

AARDVARKS

2011-12-20T08:16:00.000-06:00

On Friday Mom went to an estate sale, and she bought an aardvark. She thought at first that she was buying an armadillo, but the more she looked at it, the more she decided it was an aardvark instead of an armadillo. And one reason she thought this was because the animal was carved out of that soapstone stuff that people in Africa make carvings out of to sell to tourists. There was a zebra at the sale, too, carved out of the same kind of stone, but Mom did not buy it. She only bought the aardvark.

Mom's aardvark

Well, when I saw Mom's aardvark, I became inspired to write about aardvarks in my blog, so I did some research and I learned that aardvarks live in most parts of Africa, except not in the Sahara Desert. There are lots of them, so they are not in any danger of going extinct.

The scientific name for aardvarks is Orycteropus afer, which is Greek for "digging-footed from Africa." The name aardvark is an early Afrikaans word, and it means "earth pig" or "ground pig." The animals were called this because they live in burrows in the ground, and also they look a little like pigs, even though they are not even remotely related to pigs.

Other names for aardvarks are "antbear" or "anteater," but aardvarks aren't related to the South American anteater either. In fact, aardvarks don't have any close relatives at all, so that may be why they don't have family reunions. Their closest relatives are elephant shrews, sirenians, hyraxes, tenrecs, and elephants.

Aardvarks have tough skin with some coarse hair on it. Their toes have wide, flat nails that are really good for digging. Their long snouts have a flat sort of disc at the end where the nostrils are. The aardvark's mouth is shaped like a tube, and its tongue is like a long, sticky worm that can be 12 inches long.

The whole reason aardvarks are made like this is so they can dig termites out of their mounds and eat them. Termites and ants are almost the only things that aardvarks eat, which frankly, does not sound like a very yummy or well-balanced diet to me. But aardvarks seem to do fine on it. Adults weigh between 110 and 180 pounds, and they live as long as 23 years in captivity.

Termite mounds can be really tall!

In Africa, where the aardvarks live, it gets very hot, so during the day they stay in their burrows where it is cooler. Then at night they come out and look for termites. Aardvarks don't have very good eyesight, but they can hear really well, so they are always listening for predators. Also they have a great sense of smell, and they can sniff out termite mounds or ant colonies. During the night, aardvarks usually go an average of 1 to 3 miles while hunting, but sometimes they go as far as 18 miles in one night.

This mound got dug into, probably by an aardvark.

When an aardvark finds a termite mound, it digs in very quickly and starts snarfing up the termites. The aardvark can close its nostrils to keep dust out of its nose, and its thick skin protects it from insect bites. Aardvarks can dig 2 feet deep in only 15 seconds, even though they move much more slowly when they are just walking around. During one night, an aardvark can eat as many as 50,000 termites or ants.

Real aardvark burrows have much smaller openings.
This one is probably in a zoo.

Besides eating termites, digging burrows is something that aardvarks also do a lot of. They usually have a main burrow, which is big and has lots of escape routes. And then they may have several smaller burrows where they can just hang out during the day. When they are sleeping in their burrow, they close up the entrance with dirt, so it doesn't even look like there is a burrow there. Abandoned burrows are used by smaller animals such as the African wild dog.

Aardvarks live by themselves unless it is mating season. After mating, a female aardvark waits 7 months and then one cub is born that weighs about 4 pounds. After 2 weeks, the cub can leave the burrow and follow the mother. By 14 weeks, it is eating termites, and it is weaned by 16 weeks. At 6 months, a cub can dig its own burrow, but often a cub will stay with its mom until the next mating season.

The main predators of aardvarks are lions, leopards, hunting dogs, and pythons. Also there are some African tribes that hunt aardvarks for their meat. If an aardvark is trying to get away from a predator, it can dig a burrow really fast, or else it can run in a zig-zag way. Sometimes it will use its claws, tail, and shoulders to defend itself, and its thick skin also helps protect it.

In African folklore, the aardvark is admired because of how hard it works to find food, and also because it is not afraid of soldier ants. Some African magicians make a charm out of parts of the aardvark, mixed with the root of a certain tree. A person who has this charm is supposed to be able to go through walls or roofs at night. Burglars like to use this charm, and so do young men who want to visit girls without the permission of the girls' parents.

I think aardvarks are funny-looking, and it might be interesting to have one at our house, but Mom says we do not have enough termites to feed an aardvark, or at least she hopes we don't!

MORE OF MY FAVORITE TV SHOWS

2011-12-19T09:16:00.000-06:00

A long time ago, I wrote about some of the TV shows I like the most. I still watch some of those shows, but other ones aren't on the air anymore. We don't know if they got totally cancelled or if they are just taking a long vacation. If they got cancelled, this is very sad, because I really liked watching Dogtown and also Dr. G: Medical Examiner. But we haven't seen them for a long time, so we think maybe these shows aren't being made anymore.

Luckily, there are some new shows to watch instead of those old ones, so that makes me happy. Anyway, here's a list of some of my favorite shows now.

1. Bones
This show was on my list before, and I still like it because it has lots of bones in it. The only thing that would be better than seeing all those bones on TV would be chewing on them personally. At the end of the last season of Bones, Dr. Brennan and Agent Booth finally admitted that they were in love with each other. It only took them like 14 seasons to figure this out, and then when they did, they got in bed together and made a baby. The baby hasn't been born yet, but she will be born sometime this season, probably in the middle of some exciting and scary story line. So we are waiting to see how it happens.

2. Hoarders
and Hoarding: Buried Alive
Hoarders was on my list before, but now there is also a second show about hoarding. Mom and I are still watching these shows out of morbid fascination, because we can hardly believe that people live like that, except we know it is true. These people are really sick, and they need lots of counseling and "after care" to keep from filling their houses up with stuff all over again. It is a very sad situation, and it makes a lot of people get mad at each other because they think their mother or father or whoever loves their stuff more than they love their family. Which, sadly, is sometimes true.

3. Confessions: Animal Hoarding
This show is even more horrible to watch than the regular hoarding shows, because it is animals that are being hoarded. Usually it's dogs or cats that people hoard, but sometimes it's birds or rats or rabbits or snakes or horses. What mostly happens is that the people start out keeping a few pets or rescuing a few animals, and then things get out of control. And pretty soon the people can't afford to get medical care for their animals or even to feed them properly, and lots of times there are dead animals in the house that the people don't even know about. Plus it smells really icky because of all the pee and poop. Actually, I think it might be interesting to smell so much pee and poop, but Mom says it would not be healthy, especially if you had to breathe that stinky air for a long time.

Anyway, this show is not having any new episodes right now, so maybe the producers are out making some new ones. We will have to see if it comes back later on.

4. Pit Bulls and Parolees
We just started watching this show a few weeks ago, and we think it is pretty interesting. It's about a woman named Tia Torres, and she has a pit bull rescue called Villalobos, which is located in California. The Torres family also consists of two daughters and twin sons. All of the kids are at least teenagers, but it's hard to tell how old they are, exactly. We don't know where Mr. Torres is. We do know that he was in prison sometime in the past, and so Ms. Torres understands how hard it is for a person on parole to get a job. Maybe Mr. Torres is back in prison, or maybe he died, or maybe he and Ms. Torres got a divorce. Anyway, he's not on the TV show, but some of the parolees are. Ms. Torres will hire them if they like dogs and are willing to work hard and be honest and stuff like that.

So what happens on this show is that Ms. Torres is always getting calls from somebody who wants her to come and rescue a pit bull. In one episode, there was a dog chained out in a field in the sun without any water or food. And in another episode, some people moved out of their house and left a pit bull and her puppies. Then another time everybody was trying to catch a stray bulldog that was living in a 40-acre field. And they finally did catch her, but it took like a week or something.

Meanwhile, people come to Villalobos to adopt pit bulls, and Ms. Torres tries to match them with the dog that's best for them. So on this show there are lots of happy-ending stories. At Villalobos, there are at least 150 dogs, and most of them need homes, so if you want to adopt a pit bull of your very own, you can go here to look at the available dogs.

5. Fatal Attractions
This is another show that you might call morbidly fascinating. It's about people who like to keep exotic pets. And these are not just any exotic pets, these are animals that can hurt you really bad or even kill you. Some examples of these animals are tigers, lions, chimpanzees, poisonous snakes, crocodiles, bulls, and hyenas.

Usually, what happens is that people get these pets when they are little and cuddly, and the people believe that they have bonded with the animal, and that it will never turn on them. But lots of times they are wrong. So they end up with some horrible scars, or they lose an arm, or they get killed. Or if they don't, then somebody else they know does.

But for some reason, these people are totally obsessed with these dangerous animals, and even if they almost die from an attack, some of them will keep tempting fate by having the animals around.

6. Body of Proof
This show is sort of like Dr. G: Medical Examiner, except that Body of Proof is about fictional autopsies instead of real ones. And also all the people who are getting the autopsies have been murdered. The star of the show is Dr. Megan Hunt, who is played by Dana Delaney, who is very pretty and sexy. Mom gets annoyed because Dr. Hunt always wears dressy clothes and high heels to crime scenes and also while she is doing autopsies. Of course, she puts on a lab coat to protect her clothes, but Mom thinks that the shoes are not practical for walking around in the woods where some of the bodies are. And also shoes like that would hurt your feet if you had to stand around in them for several hours while you were doing an autopsy. But this is how you can tell that the show is not real, because Dr. G would never wear that kind of shoes while she was doing autopsies.

So anyway, those are some of my favorite shows right now. Mom has some other shows that she also watches, but they don't have any animals or bones in them, so I usually fall asleep while they are on!

MY HORRIBLE WEEK AT PETSMART, by Jacen

2011-12-17T07:40:00.000-06:00

I have just spent an entire week plus one day at PetSmart, trying to get adopted, and I can tell you it was NO FUN! But finally, Mom came and liberated me yesterday afternoon and brought me back home where I belong. Of course, it was Mom who took me there in the first place and abandoned me, so I've had eight whole days to be mad at her. But now that I'm home again, I think I might be starting to forgive her.

At PetSmart, there are a whole bunch of cats and kittens, and all of us were in little cages in a room behind a glass wall. The cages just have a litter box, a food dish, a bowl of water, and a box sort of thing that you can sleep in. Actually, it's more like shelves than a box. Or maybe you could say it's kind of a bunk bed for kitties.

Anyway, most of the kittens who were there were about my age. Aunt Tania calls us "teenagers." In one big, double cage, there were four teenage kittens together, so they could keep each other company. But I was in a cage all alone, and I didn't have anyone to play with or snuggle with. Mom said she tried not to think about me being there, feeling all abandoned and lonely, but she thought about me anyhow. I'm not sure I believe her, because if she was really thinking about me, she would have come and rescued me much sooner.

The people who work at PetSmart were nice to us, and they fed us and cleaned out our litter boxes every day. Then while the store was open, people would come in and look at us cats, and a lot of times, little kids would put sticks with feathers on them through the cage doors. We were supposed to play with the feathers, but I didn't always feel like doing that because having strange people around makes me nervous. And also, I can't just play or perform on command, like some silly dog would do.

Aunt Tania came sometimes to visit us and check on us and clean out our cages, and she would play with me while she was there. But really all I wanted was to go back home again. Which is why I was so happy to see Mom when she came to get me yesterday.

Back at home, I found everything pretty much like it was when I left, except that the three little kittens were bigger, and now they go upstairs and all sorts of new places. Also Chloe and Charlie hissed at me some. They probably thought they got rid of me, but here I was, back again! The dogs sniffed me over pretty good, but they didn't seem to mind that I was there. That tall dog, Nicky, has funny bandage things on his legs. I'm not sure what's up with that.

I spent the evening reacquainting myself with the house and playing with the little kittens. Mom bought them a new tunnel toy while I was gone, and it's a lot of fun to play in. Finally, I just curled up on Mom's lap and purred while she did her email, and then I slept in her bed all night. This is the way life should be, I think.

Mom says I will have to go back to PetSmart in a couple of weeks to stay there again for a while, and this time I might get a kitten buddy in my cage with me so I won't be so lonely. But I don't want to go back there. I just want to stay here. Mom says she has too many animals already, and she shouldn't adopt me, even though she would like to. But maybe if I really turn on the charm, I can make her change her mind!

A DOG NAMED SNOOPY

2011-12-15T08:49:00.000-06:00

Most everybody knows who Snoopy is, because he's a very famous dog who does lots of funny things. The only bad things about him are (1) he's not a real dog, and (2) he's a beagle and not a basenji. But besides that, Snoopy is pretty much the perfect dog.

Snoopy was invented by Charles Schulz, who spent many years drawing the Peanuts comic strip. Mr. Schulz was born in 1922 in Minneapolis and grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota. When he was a kid, an uncle gave him the nickname "Sparky," because there was a horse named Spark Plug in the Barney Google comic strip. Sparky's family had a dog named Spike, and this dog ate strange things such as pins and tacks. Snoopy was based a little bit on Spike, except that Spike was a pointer and not a beagle, like Snoopy.

The first cartoon strip that Mr. Schulz drew was called Li'l Folks, and it was published from 1947 to 1950 in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. After that, the United Feature Syndicate agreed to publish it starting October 2, 1950, with the name Peanuts.

Snoopy was a pretty ordinary dog in the beginning. At first it wasn't even clear whose dog he was, but then it turned out he belonged to Charlie Brown. Later in the strip, everyone found out that Snoopy was born at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm, and he had 7 siblings. First he was owned by a little girl named Lila, but then her family had to move to an apartment where dogs weren't allowed. So they took Snoopy back to the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm. After that, Charlie Brown's parents bought Snoopy for him because some other kids had thrown sand in Charlie Brown's face.

For the first two years, Snoopy didn't say anything, but then on May 27, 1952, his thoughts began to show up in word balloons. At first, the thoughts were just one word at at time, such as "FOOD!" But as time went on, Snoopy started thinking more thoughts. Also he got to be more like a human than like a dog. He even started walking around on two legs!

Snoopy liked to pretend all sorts of things about himself. Sometimes he was a World War I pilot and other times he was Joe Cool or a lawyer, hockey player, figure skater, or the first dog to fly solo across the Atlantic. He was always writing novels that started with "It was a dark and stormy night." He mostly got rejection slips for his novels, but once he got one published. Except that nobody bought it.

Snoopy fell in love several times, but usually the girl dog he loved left him for a golden retriever. He loved root beer and pizza, playing the accordion, and being the shortstop on Charlie Brown's baseball team. He could do a very happy Snoopy Dance, and he could also whirl his ears around and fly like a helicopter.

The doghouse that Snoopy lived in had all kinds of things inside, like a carpeted foyer, a den, a library, a guest room, a stairway, a basement, a television, a bed, a pool table, and an original Van Gogh. But mostly, Snoopy spent all his time sitting or sleeping on top the doghouse, in all kinds of weather. I don't know why he did this, but I guess it made him happy.

Snoopy's best friend was Woodstock, who was a little yellow bird. Snoopy led a scout troop with Woodstock and some of his bird friends in it. Woodstock always talked like this: '''''''' but Snoopy could understand him because they were such good friends.

Spike was one of Snoopy's brothers, and he was in the comic strip more than Snoopy's other siblings. Spike lived in the desert and had saguaro cacti as friends. The area where Spike lived was a lot like Needles, California, where the Schulz family lived from 1928 to 1930.

There were lots and lots of movies and products made of Snoopy and the Peanuts gang. You can still buy this stuff and see the movies on TV, especially at Christmastime. But there are no more new Peanuts comic strips. This is because, sadly, Mr. Schulz had some small strokes, and he also had Parkinson's, which made it hard for him to draw. Then he got colon cancer, and it was spreading through his body. So on December 14, 1999, Mr. Schulz retired, even though he didn't want to.

On February 12, 2000, Charles Schulz died in his sleep of a heart attack, and the very next morning, the last Peanuts strip he ever drew was published. Mr. Schulz and his family had decided they didn't want anybody else to draw the comic strip, so that's why there are no new ones. But you can still read it in a lot of newspapers or online or in books. So in a way, Snoopy and all his friends never get old, and they always seem to be doing something new. Which is a very good thing, if you ask me.

SOME EXCELLENT CAT QUOTES, by Charlie

2011-12-13T08:18:00.000-06:00

The trouble with this blog is that there's too much stuff about dogs in it, and not enough about cats! I have told Piper this more than once, but she just says, "If you don't like it, get your own blog!" Well, Chloe and I might do that if we didn't have such a busy schedule of cat-napping. Maybe someday our schedules will lighten up a bit, but in the meantime, I guess we will just have to be content to write in Piper's blog, at least when she deigns to let us!

Anyway, today I have compiled some really good quotes about felines, and I now present them for your edification and enjoyment.

The cat could very well be man's best friend but would never stoop to admitting it.
--Doug Larson

What greater gift than the love of a cat? --Charles Dickens

It is impossible to keep a straight face in the presence of one or more kittens.
--Cynthia E. Varnado

Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.
--Joseph Wood Krutch

If a cat does something, we call it instinct. If we do the same thing, for the same reason, we call it intelligence. --Will Cuppy

You can keep a dog; but it is the cat who keeps people, because cats find humans useful domestic animals. --George Mikes

Cats can be cooperative when something feels good, which, to a cat, is the way everything is supposed to feel as much of the time as possible. --Roger Caras

Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose.
--Garrison Keillor

There is, incidently, no way of talking about cats that enables one to come off as a sane person. --Dan Greenberg

Cats are the ultimate narcissists. You can tell this by all the time they spend on personal grooming. Dogs aren't like this. A dog's idea of personal grooming is to roll in a dead fish. --James Gorman

If cats could talk, they wouldn't. --Nan Porter

MORE WORDS AND PHRASES

2011-12-12T08:08:00.000-06:00

STICKY WICKET

This phrase came from that crazy game of cricket that British people are always playing. Nobody much in the U.S. plays this game or even understands how to play it, unless they are from someplace like the U.K. or Australia or Pakistan or Sri Lanka. But a lot of Americans do know that the phrase sticky wicket can be used to describe a situation that is, well, sticky, or difficult.

Anyway, to get more literal about it, the surface that you play cricket on is called the "wicket." So if you are playing in a sheep pasture, for example, and it has rained, the field is all sticky with mud. This causes the ball to bounce in ways that you might not expect, which makes it hard to bat the ball. Or something like that. All this would make more sense if I knew how to play cricket.

A sticky wicket can also be called a sticky dog or a glue pot, but "sticky wicket" is more fun to say because it almost rhymes, so I think that is why people use this phrase more than the other two. Besides, I don't like to think about a "sticky dog" because a dog who gets all sticky will need to have a bath, and what fun is that?

SKEDADDLE

If you see a big, scary monster coming toward you, you should definitely skedaddle! At least that's my advice. Skedaddle is another word that's fun to say, and it's a word that got invented right here in America, during the Civil War. Maybe there were lots of soldiers who had to skedaddle during battle, and that's what made it a such a good wartime word. Then after the war, people just kept on finding reasons to skedaddle, so we are still using the word today.

Probably, skedaddle came from scaddle, which is British dialect that means "to run off in a fright." Scaddle is also a Middle English word for "wild," "timid," or "skittish."

ANTIGODLIN

I never heard this word before, and neither did Mom. It is used mostly in the south and west parts of the U.S., and it means the same thing as sigogglin (SY-gog-lin, sy-GOG-lin), which comes from the Appalachian region. Either of these words can be used to talk about something that is crooked or leaning or lopsided. Like for example, if you aren't a very good carpenter, and you build a doghouse in your back yard, and it looks like it's about to fall over, and your dog is afraid to even go in there, then that doghouse is antigodlin. Not only that, but it is on the skewgee, which is another useful word I never heard of before.

Actually, sigogglin is archaic now, but some people still say antigodlin or antigogglin. These words date back to about 1895 or 1900, and they might have come from the British dialect goggle, which means to shake or tremble. Then if you change goggle to godlin and put anti in front of it, you get a meaning of "against God" or something that is unnatural. But of course, nobody is totally sure if this is how the word got started or not.

DRESSED TO THE NINES

This phrase means that you are dressed up in really fancy clothes, but it's hard to know what the number nine has to do with getting dressed up. The same problem is involved with the phrase "the whole nine yards." Some people have said that it took nine yards of cloth to make the kind of suit you would wear when dressed "to the nines." Another theory is that "to the nines" came from "to thine eynes," which was an old-fashioned way of saying "to the eyes." So in other words, you are dressed up all the way to your eyeballs.

One man who wrote about this phrase, and who is named Gary Martin, thinks that "nine" in this phrase just means "a lot." Another idea is that nine is a very special number because it is the highest single digit, so it stands for the best or for perfection.

GONZO

This is a word that can be used to talk about anything that is really strange or bizzare or freaky. There is a gonzo style of journalism that was invented by a writer named Hunter S. Thompson, and in this type of writing, the reporter talks about the action while he is right in the middle of it. Part of what the writer says is true experience, and another part is fiction. An example of this is a book that Mr. Thompson wrote in 1971 called Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

A gonzo can also be a crazy person or a fool. It can be someone who is unconventional or who writes in the exaggerated style of gonzo journalism. Oh, and Gonzo is also a character on Sesame Street.

Probably this word came from the Italian word gonzo, which means a fool or a simpleton. Or it might be from the Spanish word ganso, which is a goose or a dullard.

Mom says she is going to start calling us dogs "gonzos" because it seems like a good word to describe us, but I don't know why she would say that.

ENGLISH BULLDOGS

2011-12-10T08:36:00.000-06:00

Most people know a bulldog when they see one, even if there are no bulls anywhere around. That's because bulldogs have those smooshed-up faces and all those wrinkles that make them look different from most other dogs. There are actually several kinds of bulldogs besides the English Bulldog, like for example the American Bulldog, Olde English Bulldogge, and the French Bulldog. But I am only going to talk about the English Bulldog today.

Bulldogs are very stocky dogs, with wide shoulders and a wide head. They have thick folds of skin on their brows, and over their muzzles they have another fold of skin called a "rope." The skin under the neck is loose, and their lips are droopy. I think a bulldog looks like it was left in the oven too long, and its face totally melted. Either that or it ran into a brick wall, and its face got all scrunched up. Some people really like this look in a dog, but frankly, I think basenjis are much cuter!

The coat color of a bulldog can be red, fawn, white, brindle, or piebald. Their hair is short and sleek, and it doesn't need much grooming. A male bulldog usually weighs 55-60 pounds, and a female weighs about 45 pounds. The bulldog's tail is short and curled, and that happens naturally, so the tail doesn't have to be docked.

If you look at a bulldog, you might think it is a grumpy dog, but this is not true. Most bulldogs are friendly and gentle, and they make good family pets. They are protective and tolerant of children. And since they don't need a whole lot of exercise, they can live in an apartment. But it's not healthy for them to get overweight, which means they shouldn't just sit around and watch TV all day.

Because of their short faces, bulldogs don't do well in the heat, and they need someplace shady or air-conditioned to hang out on a hot day. They especially like to lie on a nice, cool floor. Those short faces also make them snort and breathe heavily. Besides which, they snore loudly and they are "the most relentless farters in the canine world."

British people first started to think of bulldogs as a particular breed of dog back in 1500 or maybe even earlier. But they spelled the name of the dog Bondogge or Bolddogge, probably because everybody spelled words in all sorts of weird ways in those days. Anyway, the dogs were used in the sport of bull baiting, so that's why they were called "bulldogs."

Bull baiting was a mean and nasty sport, where a bull was tied up, and dogs tried to grab it by the nose and pin it to the ground. During this process, the bull usually gored or tossed or kicked several dogs, and some of the dogs died. People bet money on the dogs, and they began breeding bulldogs that were heavier and meaner and had stronger jaws. Bull baiting and the similar "sport" of bear baiting got to the peak of their popularity in England in the mid-1800s. But then in 1835, the Cruelty to Animals Act was passed, and it made these activities illegal. After that, there was no reason to keep breeding fighting bulldogs in England, but emigrants to America took the dogs with them and used them on farms to catch or corner a bull long enough to get a rope around its neck.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, people started trying to make the bulldog gentler, so that it could be a pet. Also they crossed bulldogs with pugs, and after a while, the breed ended up being shorter and wider and having a smooshed face. The modern English Bulldog does not have the right kind of jaw shape to grab a bull's nose and hang on. Also it couldn't breathe well enough to do all the running it would need to do while fighting a bull.

English bulldogs are popular school mascots.
This is Handsome Dan, the original Yale mascot.

The American Bulldog, since it kept on being a working dog longer than the English Bulldog, has a longer muzzle and is less stocky. But like I told you, I am not going to talk about that breed today.

English Bulldogs live about 7-11 years. Some of the health issues they might have are heart problems, cancer, allergies, cherry eye, hip dysplasia, and luxating patellas. More than 80% of bulldog litters are delivered by Cesarean section because of how big the puppies' heads are. The folds on the bulldog's face need to be cleaned every day to make sure there are no infections there.

Well, that's all I know to tell you about English Bulldogs. Someday maybe I will tell you about some other kind of bulldog.

SONNET FOR A MUTT, by Piper's Mom

2011-12-09T08:17:00.000-06:00

Shall I compare thee to a rottweiler?

It’s hard to guess while thou art still so young.

Thou hast brown feet and mostly blackish fur,

And two or three black spots upon thy tongue.

Perhaps thou com’st instead from collie stock,

With ancestors who herded woolly sheep,

And now thou dream’st of chasing thine own flock,

With clever nips and barks, while thou dost sleep.

Or German shepherd thou mayest be, in part,

A dog that’s smart and suitable to train

For search-and-rescue or the special art

Of tracking criminals through snow and rain.

But all that truly matters, in the end,

Is that thou art my Dog, my dearest Friend!