pet connection

I was in spaniel and sighthound heaven the entire show. It was a thrill to see the rare Pont-Audemer and Bleu Picardie spaniels; the elegant French spaniel; the many Phalenes (the drop-eared variety of the Papillon); the Magyar Azar, a Hungarian sighthound; the Chart Polski; a sleek of Salukis; a tribe of Afghans; a crack of Whippets. To have written and read about some of the rare breeds or to have only seen them in pictures and finally get to see them in the flesh was a great pleasure.

On Saturday morning I saw many of the rare French hunting breeds: the Porcelaine, the Braque d’Auvergne, the Saintangeois. That afternoon I visited the Musee de la Chasse et de la Nature, where I saw artworks depicting their ancestors. If I had been organizing the show, I would have arranged opportunities for show-goers to visit the museum and to have living dogs there posed by the art.

Unfortunately for la gloire France, the show was poorly organized. Catalogs didn’t list ring times. A screaming match in French at the secretary’s desk appeared to have something to do with the exhibitor having no idea when to show up at the ring and thus missing her class.

There was a new catalog every day, understandable for such a large show, but none of the four catalogs I have list any of the Herding breed entries, despite the fact that every time you turned around you tripped over an Australian Shepherd, Border Collie or Pyrenean Shepherd, not to mention representatives from pretty much every other herding breed.

All materials were available only in French, no other languages, strange considering the number of exhibitors and visitors from Britain and Australia as well as the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands where English is a common second language. I don’t know if it’s typical at a World Dog Show that materials are provided only in the language of the host country, but the press corps, which included several Brits, was assured by the Austrian delegation—next year’s hosts—that materials in English would be available.

And merde! It was everywhere. I am impressed that I managed to navigate four days of the show without stepping in any piles or puddles. That was a big complaint of everyone we spoke to, as was the overall lack of organization.

But all of that was outweighed by getting to see a pack of hounds released from their kennel and running around outside under the perfect voice control of the huntsman, as well as watching the different working styles of the various herding breeds in the demo ring. I was amused by the informality: dogs would follow along behind their owners, off leash, sort of doing their own thing along the way, but always keeping an eye on where their person was in the crowd. The ringside seats were inside the ring. And dogs sat right alongside their people during the equivalent of the Group classes each day. And I got to meet Nina Ottosson, who had a booth there. I interviewed her for my book Careers With Dogs, so it was fun to get to meet her in person.

Today we’re in the Loire Valley and hope to make it to Chateau Montpoupon. No, it’s not a monument to mustard, but it has what looks like a very nice hunt museum.

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Late Sunday afternoon just before dinner I went to the backyard to check my vegetable plants. I knew a few veggies were ready to be picked and I thought I might include them in my dinner. However, as Bashir trotted ahead of me I saw him stop abruptly and then turn to look at me. That’s a sign something is out of the ordinary and sure enough, right in the middle of the path a box turtle was digging a hole to lay her eggs.

Female box turtles choose spots where the dirt is the right dampness, where it’s warm enough to incubate her eggs correctly, and where the dirt is diggable. I’m sure there are other reasons why they choose certain spots, but why this female chose the middle of the path I don’t know, and she isn’t talking.

Anyway, I called the dogs back to me, asked them to stay, and went to take a look. One of the rescues I took in earlier this year was in the process of digging her hole. This is an older female who has seen some hard times. I’m kind of surprised she’s laying eggs this year as she was in pretty bad shape when I took her in. But when she got her veterinary check soon after I took her in the vet said she was just old and underweight; otherwise she was healthy.

Female box turtles dig with their back legs, scooping with one foot, bringing the dirt up and out to one side. Then they dig with the other back foot. As the hole gets deeper, they slide backwards into the hole, keeping the front end out by holding on with the front legs. When half of the body is in the hole, they stop going deeper and begin digging to the front of the hole, making a little cave.

As they lay the eggs, they use their back legs to sort of catch the eggs — break the eggs’ fall — and then position the eggs in the little cave. When the eggs are laid — they lay from two to six — the process is reversed and the hole is filled in.  Once it’s filled in, she will then scrape leaf litter, dirt, bark, and grass over the hole is it’s no longer visible.

Most of the box turtles I’ve had or rescued tend to begin the process in the late afternoon and continue into the evening. It can take up to four hours, from beginning to dig the hole until she walks away. This turtle began about 4:30pm and she walked away from her hole about 9:00pm.

Once they walk away their job is over. There is no guarding of the nest and no maternal care. The eggs and hatchlings survive on their own.

Unlike sea turtles, box turtles are not in a trance while laying their eggs. They can be disturbed and if disturbed, will just walk away. This is especially true if disturbed while digging the hole. Once they begin laying it’s a little harder to disturb them; they tend to try and continue the process. But they will leave the nest if bothered too much. So I took the dogs inside while I tried to document this old girl’s process.

To show you what they look like, once she was done and walked away I dug up three of the eggs — it looked like there were six in the nest — and placed them next to a teaspoon so you could judge their size. Then I put them back in the nest and covered it back up. In 60 days I’ll place an inverted bucket over that spot and check it daily. Box turtles eggs, depending on the ground temperature, hatch in 70 to 85 days. The babies will then break through the shell, which is leathery when laid but more brittle when the baby is ready to hatch. The hatchling will then claw its way to the surface.

When they break out of the shell, many of the babies will still have some egg yolk attached at the belly. This gives them nourishment for several days so they’re in no hurry to gain their freedom. Once they reach the surface of the ground, they are on their own.

Top: The hole is about half dug.

Middle: Eggs in the nest.

Bottom: Size comparison with a teaspoon.

All photos by Liz Palika.

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People and dogs milled around waiting for the doors to open. Look! A Leonberger. Rottweilers with tails. Is that a Chart Polski? Too late to ask; my attention has been caught by something else.

What were those cute little red and white dogs? “Go get a picture of them,” I told Jerry. I stared at them. Not Cavaliers. Not Brittanys. Then I remembered where I was.

“Are those Kooikerhondjes?”

A smiling nod of the head.

I’m in Paris at the centennial World Dog Show in which more than 36,000 dogs are entered. If you know me at all, you know that I usually think dog shows are boring unless they are benched, have a Meet the Breeds section or have dog sports and other displays. The World Dog Show wins on two out of three counts. (It’s not benched.) I’ve wanted to come to it for years, ever since I learned there was such a thing. World travel! Unusual dog breeds! What more could anyone ask?

We pick up our media credentials and start wandering the hall. It’s not that full yet, but we see Cesky Terriers, which were recently granted AKC recognition; a Neapolitan Mastiff who seems literally bigger than life; an Afghan wearing a sequined snood (some things are the same the world round), and at one of the breed booths a Braque Hongroi. That’s a new one. No, wait, it’s a Vizsla.

Tomorrow (well, thanks to the joys of jet lag, which has me up after midnight writing this, today) we’ll be watching my DWAA colleague Sandy Mesmer show her Silky Terrier, and checking out a few interesting breeds, including the Mudi, a Hungarian herding breed that looks a lot like the Pyr Shep; the Pyr Sheps themselves; and various Sporting (chiens leveurs de gibier, rapporteurs et chiens d’eau) and Sighthound (levriers) breeds. If nothing else, my ability to understand written French is getting a workout; none of the materials I have are in English.

Demonstration de cavage, anyone?

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I love medical words. Seriously, where other than the world of medicine do you get use words like siphonapterosis, cholecystoduodenostomy, or pheochromocytoma? They just roll off the tongue, and I get the same sensation saying them I as I do when I eat fine European chocolate. Sort of a lusty, tongue-coating warmth.

As fun as they are to say, the lust for them has to exist for the recipient as much as it does for the speaker. If I am talking to a fellow doctor, a long medicalese w0rd can convey paragraphs worth of information in a just a few (admittedly unwieldy) syllables.  Even though they are long and seemingly complex words, if every one involved digs their meaning, they become a sort of shorthand and we can get down to the healing portion of the work at hand. Everyone is on the same level, and information transfer from one brain to the next is smooth.

If the person listening is a non-doctor, though, as better than 99% of the world is, these wonderful words that pack so much meaning into just a few letters strung together work the opposite magic. The listener ends up confused, ill-informed and tunes out the speaker.  The transfer of information from one brain to the next comes to a screeching halt. Not only is the information not transferred, future attempts at communication falter because the listener no longer trusts the speaker and stops caring what they have to say because they know they won’t understand it.

We have seven brand new, fresh-out-of-the-package doctors at Purdue right now. They constitute our new class of interns. They have just spent four years filling their Broca’s area with these lusty European chocolate words, and they are itchin’ to use them. They have rightly earned the privilege of acting like a doctor, and, along with the stethoscope and lab coat, the lingo is part of the costume that we wear as we play doctor.

This, on occasion, causes problems.

We live and die by clients. They bring the animals in for us to treat, they pay the bills that keep the lights on, and they need to be an active and informed part of the medical decision making. But, they are usually neurotypicals and their mother tongue is usually Normalese. If they are flummoxed by a barrage of medicalese and don’t know what is going on, the process gets that much harder. The interns all go through the same arc of learning. They confuse the first couple dozen owners with their ginormous medical lexicon, suffer through the same quizzical stares and then, gradually, learn to speak civilian.

I did the same thing. I went through the same process. I don’t hit the mark all the time (due to my love of big words, sometimes I let some slip through) but I think I have developed a pretty good ability to talk to pet owners on their level and tone down the jargon. I think it helps people see that I am human, too, (for the most part) and I can explain things without resorting to buzzwords.

What has been your experience? Have you had conversations with your MD or veterinarian that left you wondering what is going on? Have you nodded through these, thinking ‘what the hell is he talking about?’ Or, have you stopped them and said ‘what does that mean?’  Do they communicate clearly so you can understand what is going on, and what the options are, or do they leave you with a head full of questions and ears ringing?

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Piercing cats to give them a “goth” appearance qualifies as cruelty. That’s the essence of a ruling from a Pennsylvania Superior Court panel who affirmed the conviction of a groomer in Sweet Valley, Penn. Details from the New York Times.

The groomer, Holly Crawford of Sweet Valley, Pa., offered the kittens for $100; Judge Kate Ford Elliott wrote in a 19-page opinion that “metal protruded from the kittens’ small bodies, pierced through their ears and necks, and at least one of these kittens also had an elastic band tied around its tail, an attempt at docking, which is a procedure to stem the blood flow so that the tail eventually falls off.”

An investigator for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals posed as a customer and met with Ms. Crawford in 2008 and reported her to the authorities. The kittens were seized, and a jury found Ms. Crawford guilty of animal cruelty; in April of last year she was sentenced to six months of home detention and electronic monitoring, followed by probation.

Ms. Crawford, who was described in the opinion as having “several facial piercings” and being “enthusiastic about piercing,” had admitted to piercing the kittens herself without anesthetic, though she did treat them with antiseptic after the procedure.

That’s the important part of the story, but my favorite section (and yours, I’m betting) comes at the very end…

Judge Elliott wrote, “Appellant’s claims center on her premise that a person of normal intelligence would not know whether piercing a kitten’s ears or banding its tail is maiming, mutilating, torturing or disfiguring an animal.”

The judge added, “We disagree.”

Paralyzed tornado dog is walking again: Debbie and Daniel Leatherman live in Joplin, Missouri. They thought they had lost their 10 year-old cocker spaniel, Sugar, after the catastrophic tornado tore their house apart last month. Luckily, Sugar wasn’t lost. He was discovered by a stranger and brought to Joplin Humane Society, and his injuries took him to the University of Missouri Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital. Unfortunately, the diagnosis was grim: a traumatic rupture of Sugar’s spinal cord. He was paralyzed. The operative word of the last sentence is ‘was. ‘ Thanks to the veterinary staff in Columbia, Sugar is now walking again. Thanks, Phyllis.

Historic cancer breakthrough? A couple weeks back, Dr. Tony Johnson wrote a sobering post about the canine version of a heart attack, called hemoabdomens. As Dr. Tony explained, the root cause is often a ruptured mass on the spleen due to an aggressive malignancy called a hemangiosarcoma. A hemangiosarcoma is often considered a nearly universal death sentence…or is it? Research out of Oregon State University signals hope for a previously hopeless cancer.

No more goldfish in Baghdad by the Bay: San Francisco is pushing to enact some of the toughest regulations outlawing the sale of animals of any municipality in the nation. But they’re not stopping at outlawing trade in puppies and kittens. As SFGate reports, the city’s Animal Control and Welfare Commission wants guppies and goldfish to receive the same protections. Thanks to Susan Fox for the link.

Everybody’s got something to hide except me and my monkey: If you have a therapy animal, is he protected from seizure by authorities? Yes? Always? What if he’s a monkey? In certain places, not so much. And the authorities’ show of force can be a little over the top, too. Hat tip to Mary Cvetan.

The secret life of feral cats: Do you ever wonder what the lives of cats are like when they’re on their own? Where do they go? How far do they roam? Is there a difference between ferals and cats who have owners? Jeff Horn wondered, too. Jeff was a grad student at the University of Illinois. He put radio-tracking collars on forty-two cats, some owned and some unowned, and let them do what they do. The results are summarized in Science Daily:

One of the feral cats in the study, a mixed breed male, had a home range of 547 hectares (1,351 acres), the largest range of those tracked (red outline). A pet cat in the study, by contrast, stayed very close to home.
“That particular male cat was not getting food from humans, to my knowledge, but somehow it survived out there amidst coyotes and foxes,” Horn said. “It crossed every street in the area where it was trapped. (It navigated) stoplights, parking lots. We found it denning under a softball field during a game.”
The owned cats had significantly smaller territories and tended to stay close to home. The mean home range for pet cats in the study was less than two hectares (4.9 acres).
“Still, some of the cat owners were very surprised to learn that their cats were going that far,” Horn said. “That’s a lot of backyards.”
The pet cats managed this despite being asleep or in low activity 97 percent of the time. On average, they spent only 3 percent of their time engaged in highly active pursuits, such as running or stalking prey, the researchers reported. The un-owned cats were highly active 14 percent of the time.

Thanks, Ingrid.

Simon’s Cat: That’s right, it’s time once again for our favorite feline line drawing! Today, we’re in the kitchen.

I always like to hear from readers, especially if you have tips, and links for interesting stories.  Give me a shout in the comments, or better yet, send me an e-mail.

Photo credit: Piercing, a11news.com. Sugar, munews.

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