I receive a fair number of video links, but living in the a dead zone with a dial-up connection prevents me from opening most of them. Either I can’t open a clip at all, or my connection crashes half-way through the download process. Because what others may consider a short clip can take me several hours to download, this is all very discouraging. But evidently the universe wanted me to see this one, because it survived its early morning download ordeal intact. The Poop Detective’s CSI spin made me laugh for 2 reasons. One is because I’ve felt the
Read more →First and foremost, thanks to everyone who asked about how I and the animals were doing. We’re doing very well having suffered no more than a small tree down, the worst of which I’ve already cleaned up, and a power outage of about 12 hours. What lingers is the awareness of what a huge difference a relatively small shift in the storm’s track made. Not that far to the west, the flooding and destruction in Vermont is heart-breaking. Ironically last week I was kidding one of my clients who lives in a hard-hit area about all the flocks of
Read more →Because I consider this site first and foremost an educational one, there’s a lot of text on it. And because of this, I’ve wanted to add a search engine to it for quite a while. Clients and others who visit the site also have assured me that this would be a welcomed addition. After some research, Google’s search engine fulfilled my needs the best. The only drawback is that it comes with ads, something I’ve tried to avoid for multiple reasons since I started the site. Aside from noting that their presence in no way signals my endorsement of
Read more →I’m writing this from Colorado, the home of some of the country’s most breath-taking mountain vistas. But while I’ll never forget the time we spent enjoying those views, I’ve fallen head over hills in love with a relatively flat open space about a 5-minute walk from my son’s home. Looks pretty nondescript doesn’t it? It’s not, though. It’s filled with wildflowers and birds, some familiar but many others unknown to me. But more than that, it has a prairie dog town beside one section of the path that rings the area. What can I say? I’m sucker for
Read more →There’s no podcast this week, but I wanted to share an animal-related mystery that I investigated at my son, Dan’s, townhouse when I went there with Frica and Ollie to celebrate Christmas. It’s not that this mystery is anything spectacular. It probably isn’t or wouldn’t be even if we managed to solve it. In the meantime, it’s a good example of the kinds of things animals do to which we would probably assign all kinds of higher brain function were a human to do them. But when a dog or cat does them, well, then it’s a mystery The
Read more →I got an email from my friend Pam telling me she had about 15,000 worms doing their magic at her house. I knew Pam was a multi-talented person—singer, drummer, great raconteur, and co-owner with her husband of the Sea Solar Store in Dover, New Hampshire. But I had no idea that worms were eating her garbage too. Pam also sent me a picture of the Can-O-Worms, a round version of my worm hotel, and told me it was one of several systems now available. I had no idea. Up until I got the hotel years ago, all the systems
Read more →One nice thing about not being a commercial success is that I can change my mind about things as I gain more knowledge and experience. I can say “Whoa, was I wrong about that! This makes ever so much more sense!” without losing sponsors or watching the value of my empire plummet. Nor do I have to worry about offending my groupies because a) I don’t have any and b) those independent thinkers who do follow my work know I often put a different spin on bond and behavior topics. For better or worse—depending on your view—that spin may
Read more →This is an electronic but nonetheless heartfelt thanks to everyone who sent support and sympathy in many different forms following BeeBee’s death. During that difficult time, I had two advantages that sustained me. One was the rock-solid belief that I made the right decision, and the other was having such wonderful and caring friends.
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I didn’t manage the tear-control I’d hoped for when I participated in BeeBee’s euthanasia yesterday, but I survived.
Read more →I was thinking about my dad when I was digging BeeBee’s grave. He was a great nature lover, but he was the last person you’d want around if you found a chipmunk mangled by a cat or a bird with a broken wing. He’d get so overwhelmed by emotion that the animal would pass from critical condition to beyond hope before the objective part of his brain started to work again. Because the two of us were so much alike in many ways, I had to practice long and hard as a veterinary student not to let my emotions
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