The Animal I Am

            I think we all want to be a certain animal. An animal who can snarl and not be told to be nice, behave, be anything but what it is. It’s why shapeshifters will always be popular. The ability to let the wild, feral side out is a dream for everyone. But of course, I want to be something noble, regal, something that flies, or runs, something with eagle eyes, owls’ hearing, strength of a bear, speed of a jaguar, loyalty and wisdom of a wolf. I’d rather not be a mouse or a rat, thank you very much.

            If I’m honest though, I think the animal I want to be, the animals I like, are not the animal I really am. I’m a dog person. Love their humor, their ability to scent, their loyalty, their unconditional love.

I have cats, but they and I just tolerate each other. They all but have “do not disturb” signs tattooed to their sides. They demand food when hungry or attention when they need a scratch. But otherwise, it’s a swat or bite for me and the dogs when we get a little too close. It’s their job, they believe, to keep the riff raff in our places. They are as cantankerous and irritable as I am.

            I’m afraid, I’m really a cat. I’m afraid, I love dogs because they are the exact opposite of me. The yin to my yang. The gentle to my irritation. The happy to my annoyed. I would be in an existential crisis by this discovery, except I’m too much of a cat to let the thought disturb me. There are some benefits to being a curmudgeon after all.

Dog - Free to a Good Home

            If there is any universal truth – other than Jane Austen’s – it’s that you shouldn’t answer a “dog, free to a good home” ad unless you are planning on coming home with the dog. I blame it all on Bruce, actually. He was the one, who after saying we didn’t need another dog, showed me the ad.

Finn, our first Golden Retriever had just died at the age of fourteen and a half years and with three other dogs Bruce opined that we didn’t need a fourth. I, reluctantly, agreed. You can’t have too many dogs in my book. But then, Bruce showed me the ad – Golden Retriever, Free to a Good Home. He blames me, of course, but if he didn’t want the dog, he shouldn’t have shown me the ad.

            We arrived at the small farm on an out of the way road and were greeted by a pack of barking ankle high balls of fluff. The real dog, Dexter, was tied underneath a huge oak. He raced to the end of the chain, and when the tether pulled him up short his forward momentum drove him up onto his hind legs. A restrained ball of energy – and not very restrained at that. The dog had been racing around on his chain so long there ground beneath the tree had been cleared of all grass. But more than that, he’d spent so much time standing upright trying to propel himself further than the chain allowed that the muscles of his hind legs bulged. If he’d been human, he’d be a weight lifter, lifting with his legs.

            Dexter was two. It turned out the people who owned him were his fourth owners. They’d gotten him when they bought a baler. Apparently, the previous owners (Dexter’s third) had told them they could only buy the baler if they took the dog, too. They, obviously, had really wanted the baler.

They let him loose, in order to prove he was friendly and not vicious crazy. His tail wagged constantly, thumping against my leg.  His tongue lolled out happily, wanting to lick everything within reach. It moved almost as much as the dog’s legs did. But Dexter couldn’t sit still long enough to actually be petted.

            We walked through their pasture, as the dogs ran. Dexter came back every couple seconds to make sure he hadn’t been abandoned. And then he was off again, unable to stay still for more than a second. The woman explained how they tried to let him in the house, but he ran around so much she was afraid he’d break her china. Which only confirmed my theory that if you have dogs you should never own anything that you value more than the dogs.

            Bruce and I just looked at each other. We had three dogs at home, a Great Pyr, a Newfie, and a Border Collie. In her day, the Border had expended energy chasing Frisbees for hours. But her energy was always directed and contained. Dexter’s was neither. The Pyr and Newfie, of course, thought that getting up to eat dinner was enough energy expenditure. That and a walk would do them.

            Still, Dexter after ten minutes of running, ran back to us with his tongue flopping out and sat down. He leaned against my leg. Then he stood, circled, sat.  Stood. Ran. Returned. Sat. Leaned, torn between getting constant attention and not being able to sit still.

            “What do you think?” the man said, eager for an answer.

            Bruce and I looked at each other again, knowing that no matter how crazy the dog was he needed a real home, not just fifth owners. And really, my look said, you can’t leave him with these people. We went home with the dog, who managed to sit still in the backseat. It helped that Bruce sat with him, holding the dog on his lap the whole ride home.

            Dexter loved our dogs and they loved him. And at night he’d sit still in the house, if you pet him continually. Long runs each day, a lot of attention, and Dexter finally calmed down when he was about twelve. But of all our dogs, he was the one that always came when you called, always stuck close on walks. Because he never quite believed he wasn’t going to be given away again. So, he made sure he didn’t get left behind.

A Jealous Writer

            Writing, for me at least, involves a lot of jealousy. I wish I could be one of those people who enjoys some else’s brilliance without thinking, “I wish I’d written that.” But alas, that’s not going to happen. If I’m not thinking, “I wish I’d written that,” then I’m thinking, “I wish I thought of that idea,” or “I wish I could write that well.” I think this with almost everything I read, because the truth is, if I’m not loving it by the end of the first page, I’m probably not reading it.

            My current “I wish” meter is being directed toward E.K. Johnston, author of The Story of Owen: Dragon Slayer of Trondheim and Michelle Knudsen, author of Evil Librarian.

            Johnston had the brilliant idea to take a modern day Canada and introduce one fantastical element – dragons. She then rewrote history for a world that has evolved to deal with dragons, hence Owen, a teen dragon slayer. But, Johnston’s gift doesn’t end with world building. In Owen, his bard Siobhan, and his family, she’s created people that I care about. So much so, that I’d almost want to live in their world and have them as friends even if that meant having to take driver’s education over again to learn defensive dragon driving maneuvers.

            The Story of Owen is such an incredible idea, I’ve been trying to figure out how to come up with something equally as brilliant. It apparently just takes inserting some mythical creature into the modern world. Except Johnston has done dragons. Vampires, werewolves ,and demons have all been done. So what’s left, I wonder?

            Knudsen’s novel does something I thought would turn me off. The villain after all is the librarian. And I rather like my librarians to be heroes. But in Evil Librarian the protagonist is so normal, so goofily funny, so ready to take on demons without any powers other than being the one person who can see the librarian is a demon that I couldn’t help falling in love with her. Here’s a normal teen girl madly in love with a boy who doesn’t know she is alive, able to withstand a demon’s attraction, and with an encyclopedic knowledge of musical theater. None of those are the things of superheroes and yet, Cynthia is a superhero.

            So, I’m thinking I need a normal teen with vast knowledge of some topic, an evil creature, and voila! But musical theater and demons go so well together. And of course, writing as well and funny as Knudsen does would be the onerous part.

            Still, hope springs eternal and there must be a good side to jealousy, right?  

Riding in Cars with Goats

 

                The Lego Club, at the library where I work, met yesterday. A group of girls made a vehicle, a person, a dog, and a sheep. “It’s a truck, so the sheep can ride in it, too,” one of the girls said, as she loaded in the person, sheep, and dog.

                “I’ve ridden in a car with a sheep,” I said.

                “A sheep skeleton,” another girl said, referring to the fact that once a year I borrow bones from my husband to do a program at the library on skeletons. The bones include a full sheep skeleton that because I am not good at returning things immediately, usually rides around in my car for a few days.

                One year, the UPS man told me I’d left my dog in the car too long.

                “I’ve ridden with live sheep and goats, too,” I said, but I’m not sure they actually believed me.

                My sharing-a-car-with-a-ruminant adventures first started when I was nine.  My family was moving, so my dad drove the U-Haul with my sister and our dog in the cab. My mother followed in our station wagon, with my grandfather riding shotgun and my grandmother, my other sister, and me in the back seat. Our goat, Heidi, rode in the way back.

Heidi and I had a precarious relationship. She’d pinned me against the garage wall one too many times and generally I tried to stay away from her. It’s been my experience that goats don’t like people that can look them in the eye and so are often a little wary of children.  By the time we moved, Heidi had stopped trying to wailing on me every chance she got, but I can’t say I adored her. Anyway, on the six hour trip to our new home she didn’t try to beat me, although she did spend a lot of time reaching over the seat and chewing on my braids.

I’ve moved from Illinois to Virginia with a goat riding on my lap, driven Bruce around with assorted sheep sitting on his lap, and gone home to visit my mother for Christmas taking a goat along for the visit. Generally, they make fairly good car riders, although when they decide to stand up it can do a number on your legs. Don’t try it while wearing shorts.

 

Poor Yoda

So, the library where I work has a 3-D printer, which occasionally has a mind of its own. The other day someone was printing off a copy of Yoda, but the extruder got plugged and before Yoda's skull was attached, Yoda lost his head. Or part of it.

Yoda looked like he'd died and someone performed an autopsy on him. They'd cut the top of his skull off and went to remove his brains, but lo and behold .....

what was left of Yoda's brains was a honeycomb, or a sponge. It appears Yoda died of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy - better known as Mad Cow Disease.

There's a story here somewhere - I'm just sure of it!

 

 

Yoda was copied from Thingiverse. Attribution is:

Yoda in .STL format by falken76

Published on February 22, 2013

www.thingiverse.com/thing:52971

Animal Terminology

Animal husbandry has a language all its own. There are terms for males, females, young, having babies, raising them, and equipment. I once referred to a hay mow (rhymes with cow) in a story and a fellow author wanted to know what on earth I was talking about. I just sort of assumed everyone knew what a hay mow was - but farming and animal terminology are becoming a specialty.

 

So, for all you non-farm types, a mow  is the storage for hay usually found on the second floor of a barn. Dairy barns, at least the ones for small dairies, are set up with the cows on the bottom or basement floor, and hay storage above in a mow. Stantions are like a head gate - their the way cows used to be locked in place in a barn, so they faced their manger, where they ate, and their butts pointed to the gutter, where they pooped. That's a mini-course on dairying - at least on the small farm scale.

Lambing Season

                Well, it may not be warm but, technically spring, also known as lambing season, is here. The other day someone asked me why lambs are always born all within a few weeks of each other.  I blinked a couple times while I processed that fact that things sheep people take for granted are complete unknowns to non-sheep people. There’s a whole bunch of information that goes into answering that simple question, ranging from sheep reproduction to farming economics. I gave her an inadequate two sentence answer, kicking myself for all the things I left out. So, here’s the long answer; everything you never wanted to know about sheep sex.

                Unlike cows, pigs and chickens, sheep (for the most part, there are exceptions for you purists out there) are seasonal breeders. That means there are only certain times of year that they “come into heat,” are in “estrus,” or cycle. If you’ve never heard these terms, they are just farming euphemisms for meaning there are only certain seasons when an animal can be bred and get pregnant. Sheep usually start cycling around September and stop around December. So, basically they can only be bred and get pregnant in the fall. (That’s in the northern hemisphere, folks.)

                From an evolutionary standpoint this makes perfect sense. Gestation, or the length of pregnancy, in a sheep is about 145 days or 5 months. If sheep were bred in the spring, they’d lamb in the fall and the lambs would need a lot of nutrition to grow just when grass and feed was at an all time low (fall into winter). If they were bred in the summer, they’d lamb in the winter and most likely would freeze to death if they lived in a cold climate. Even with a barn, keeping a new born lamb alive in subzero weather is hard. I can testify to this personally, having warmed up a lot of frozen lambs in warm water in the kitchen sink or kept orphans in the kitchen by the wood stove.

                So, ewes start coming into heat, or cycling, or being able to be bred in early fall. But they can’t be bred every day. They cycle like anyone else. And this is where it gets difficult to explain to non-animal people. Animal people are all about biology and sex. Regular people, the ones that don’t raise horses, cows, sheep, pigs, or goats, often don’t know how their own bodies work, no less how a sheep’s does. But let’s give it go. Every female of any mammalian species releases an egg or ovum every so many days and can be bred at that time. For sheep, that’s every 16 days. If you have a flock of sheep that means in the fall all of them in any 16 day period all your sheep should come into heat once.

                So here’s how a farmer does it. She decides when in the late winter to late spring she wants to lamb. Some will lamb early to have lambs ready to be sold for slaughter by Easter. Others want their lambs to go out on grass in May and grow out on grass, so they’ll aim to lamb in April. So the farmer decides what month she wants to lamb. Then she figures out when five month ahead is. She puts the ram (or rams) in with the ewes five months ahead. Usually the ram stays with the ewes for only a month or 32 days. That’s two heat cycles and we assume everyone that can be bred will be bred within two heat cycles. That also means everyone will lamb within a one month period.

                Lambing season is hard. If you’ve got 30 ewes, odds are one will lamb every day. If you’ve got 300 ewes, odds are 10 will lamb a day. Most ewes need no help lambing, but still you want to be there to make sure the lambs get cleaned off and dried so they don’t get cold. You want to be sure they find the teats and suckle. You want to be sure if the ewe has two or three lambs she accepts them all and doesn’t put all her attention on the last, forgetting about the first. You want to be sure no one steals her lambs. You want to be sure they get separated from the others so they have some “mommy and me time” to bond.  

(It’s a lot like humans, actually. When I was in nursing school, the maternal nursing instructor said “what we worry about with newborns is that they are kept warm, that they eat, and that they bond to their mom.” That’s no different from sheep or cows, but the instructor and apparently human mothers don’t like having that pointed out to them. )

Anyway, back to sheep. Lambing in one month means for that month you have a lot of sleepless nights. For some odd reason sheep like to lamb at night, usually on the very coldest night if at all possible. Not being there means some lambs may die. So, most farmers are up every few hours checking on their sheep during lambing season. But once it’s over, it’s over. You get a barn or pasture full of bouncing happy lambs and you can sleep till next year, when you do it all over again.