Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Critter foo
Kitty!
This one is probably old news to many of you, but I saw it for the first time today. (They were making a point about bonding between doctors and their patients. I wonder, who is the lion?)
Christian the lion reunites with his owners . . .
D.
You can spend all you like on toys . . .
But sometimes the old favorites reign supreme.
You know. Like paper bags.
D.
In what universe is it possible to medicate a cat?
Work must be too easy, so life’s throwing curves; today, for example, I had to race home, pick up Mist, and take her to the vet. I managed to get Mist back home and get myself back into work only 20 minutes behind schedule. Whew.
She’s had a herpetic conjunctivitis since we got her, and I gather this isn’t something she’ll ever be fully rid of, but which will bother her from time to time. Recently, she became even more squinty-eyed than usual, so I made an appointment for the vet. The vet and her assistant rather effortlessly restrained and medicated Mist (vet tech holding, vet doing the deed). The medication part was pretty slick shit: with one hand, the vet pushed back on the upper lid, while with the other she pushed down on the lower lid and squirted a ribbon of ointment into her eye.
“Just do that three times a day until she sees me again,” she said, and to my dropped jaw she added, “Well, at least twice a day.”
I figured that with three of us here at home, perhaps we could get the job done. Wrong.
I’m reminded of the ad . . .
So we need a companion video where some dude says, “Medicatin’ a cat. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s easy.”
Is there anything more slippery than a cat? Anything more elusive? I tried to hold her just as I’d seen the vet hold her earlier today, but it was a total flail. Jake couldn’t hold her, either, and we were concerned that too much of this would destroy the tenuous trust she has for him (and he’s the only one she trusts). Finally, he decided to try to sneak some into her eye on a Kleenex, since she does permit him to wipe her eye. This might have worked.
Medicating cats is hard. Don’t even get me started on that old stuff-the-pill-down-her-throat business — we’ve flailed on that, too, believe me. Once, we even boarded her for a few days just so we wouldn’t have to be the ones to medicate her.
Sweet Jesus, it’s easier cleaning ear wax from a two-year-old.
D.
And then there was one
One good thing about mammals: they don’t croak over dead when we move. Our cats and ferrets take it all in stride, and indeed, the ferrets love a new house. For ferrets, new environments are like crack and sex and high speed internet all rolled into one.
Not so the reptiles and amphibians. As much as I love my exotics, they do poorly with changes in environment. We had seven dendrobatids (poison dart frogs) when we came to Santa Rosa, and now we’re down to our last azureus. The latest casualties were my two auratus.
It’s the small ecosystem problem. Our primary frog tank is, what? Forty gallons? Sixty? Can’t remember. It’s big. Lots of microenvironments, gradations of temperature and humidity. Lots of hiding places for our easily stressed critters. They can find whatever environment suits their mood for the moment. Our azureus did well in the big tank: the current survivor is at least five years old, and might be much older. (Always hard to tell who’s who in the poison dart frog biz.)
But when we came to Santa Rosa, we had to make a few difficult decisions. First, the frog tank had to stay in the garage because we were concerned about the potential for flooding from the reservoir tank. We’re living in a rental with wood floors, so spills could be disastrous. Second, since the frog tank is in the garage, it is subject to much wider temperature swings. (The reservoir tank is supposed to help keep the overall temp at an even keel, but it has its limits.) We decided it would be better to keep the frogs inside where the temperature is less variable, but the only way to do that was to put the frogs into a much smaller tank.
So, as I said, it’s a microenvironment problem. Small tank means uniform temp and humidity and fewer hiding places. Honestly, I’m amazed we kept them alive this long.
I’m taking a vow: no more exotics until we live in a home we own, one we don’t anticipate moving out of for a good long time. And wouldn’t that be nice — the expectation of not needing to move in the near future.
D.
Cool critter of the week
We saw one of these at the California Academy of Sciences on Sunday:
I’ll quote someone else:
The males grab onto the females in piggyback fashion, hanging on in front of her hind legs. The frog pair rolls over while floating in the water, and the female lays three to five eggs while she is in the upside down position. The eggs catch on the male’s belly, then drop onto the female’s back as the pair completes the roll. Instead of the eggs sticking to vegetation or floating off into the water as they do with most frogs, the eggs stay on the mother’s back, where they become caught. Her skin swells up around the sides of each egg. In all, she may have about 50 eggs on her back, which remain there for the next three or four months. At that time, the eggs hatch right into froglets, which pop right out of her back.
We saw a female with eggs on her back in various stages of development. Yeah, it doesn’t make much sense that they would be at different stages, unless her back traps the eggs before fertilization and they’re fertilized at different times? I dunno. One of the mysteries of life.
Oh, wait! Only 3 to 5 eggs per mating, up to fifty on her back . . . whoa, she’s been busy!
D.
Some folks can’t take criticism
In the new California Academy of Sciences Tropical Rain Forest Exhibit, Karen overheard a mom telling her kid that chameleons change color to blend with their surroundings.
We were all milling around the Chamaeleo pardalis display. Don’t know who this guy is trying to blend with, but his shirt must be fabulous.
Karen said, “No, they don’t,” and the woman looked as if she wanted to slap Karen silly. (I’m betting the wheelchair saved my wife’s skinny ass.) “I’m sorry?” she said.
I think Karen understood right away that she had somehow stepped in it. Apparently this is a woman you don’t correct. But Karen pressed on.
“It’s a common misconception. They’re not trying to blend, they’re communicating with one another — for mating purposes, or to say, ‘Get away.'”
IIRC the woman countered with, “Okay, whatever,” in her best fuck-you tone of voice, which led to Karen asserting dominance by saying, “No, no, I used to breed them!”
I got Karen out of there before they came to blows.
D.
The ferret lady
You’ve heard of cat ladies, right? They take in stray after stray until their homes explode in a giant hairball. Today, I received an email from a reader, Luke, who has an interesting story to tell about a ferret lady.
So if you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to cram over a hundred ferrets under one roof, follow me below the fold.
Predators
Here’s a quizlet for you: guess Will Smith’s total lifetime box office — the gross for all of his movies put together. See if you can nail the right order of magnitude.
Ferrets are cute, don’t you think?
And degus are cute, too:
We’ve had degus and ferrets for years now. The degus are getting old, and gradually our team of four became a team of three, which became a team of two. One of the remaining two had been losing weight and hair recently, a clear sign of the end. Two nights ago, the end came.
The ferrets were out and about when I noticed my dead degu. The ferrets had never shown much interest in the degus; their cage sits atop the degu cage, so it’s not like they haven’t smelled or seen them before. So I really didn’t think about it when I set the dead degu aside while cleaning up the ferret cage.
Bueller (that dork above) grabbed the degu by the neck and ran off with her. It took quite an effort to prise the corpse away from my ferret, but I eventually managed it. After that, Bueller ran around like the cock of the walk.
End of story, right? I’m afraid not. Last night soon after Jake let the ferrets out for their evening run, I heard squealing. I assumed the ferrets were playing rough so I went downstairs to have a look. Bueller had broken into the degu cage and had killed the last degu. I had to hold his head under the water faucet before he would release her. (Yes, yes, I shouldn’t waterboard my pets. But at the time, I had a faint hope she might be alive.)
After that, Bueller broke into the degu cage again, apparently seeing it as some sort of rodent vending machine. And he did the same thing again today. He worked his way in and waited. And waited. Eventually he got bored, but it took him the better part of half an hour.
In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised. According to Wikipedia, there are places where ferrets are still used to hunt rabbits. The amazing thing is that our ferrets never tried this before.
Did Bueller do her a favor? She was old for a degu, but in good shape. Still, degus are gregarious creatures, and lone degus (I’m told) don’t do well. Maybe I’m just trying to find some sort of silver lining to what was essentially a very violent act.
This from the guy who used to keep boa constrictors. But those were feeder rats, not pets. And Babe isn’t bacon, he’s a sheep-pig.
Maybe I’ll just eat tofu. It’s hard to have sympathy for soy beans.
Quizlet answer: $2,520,925,686
That’s a lot of box office.
D.
Unclear on the concept
I wish we could get our cats to do this . . .
. . . except for the part where she plugs the toilet paper, flushes, and then you have cat poop and water all over the bathroom floor.
D.