The Progressive Puppy

Weekend Farm Report - Artificial Insemination and "Patches"

My partner Art and I hope to qualify for a state agricultural exemption, which would save us lots of money on property taxes.  Problem is, to get these farm exemptions you have to actually, y'know, farm ...

We are planning to raise and sell 'Tame Nigerian Dwarfs With Sweet Milk.'  This would mean I'll be birthing babies once or twice a year. (Pass the Huggies and Diazepam.)  Naturally, as our herd increases we'll have to fence off another acre or two.  I'll eventually build another website, similar to the one we had when we rented the beach cabin.  I intend to name our little livestock venture "The Art of Goats."  I expect it will take at least year before the business is up and running.

Introducing an uncastrated billy to the paddock is not an option - they can be fractious and unpredictable, I'm told.  Stud services are costly.  It's too late for linebreeding since Bushrod and Cricket have already been neutered.  So we've decided to attempt artificial insemination.  Here are a few things I've learned:  You can purchase goat sperm online for $25 dollars per vial from a company called - I'm not kidding - The Buck Bank.  Units of measurement for caprine semen are referred to as "straws" and they must be kept frozen in liquid nitrogen.  (Note to self:  Clearly label and store away from the milkshake straws.)  Once the goat jism is defrosted, you have about an hour to insert the baby batter into whichever doe is in heat.  (I grow faint at the prospect, but we're on a fixed income and the tax savings are enormous.) 

You may recall that Angel had a difficult time delivering Cricket.  When the ordeal was over, I promised her she would never again have to go through the agony of childbirth.  (Yes, I make promises to my goats.)  That leaves Sister who is strong and, judging by her teeth and the absence of a beard, considerably younger.  Although we will be offering Sister's future progeny as pets - with stern requirements for prospective owners - our classified ads will likely read: "milkers" and "gentle herd sires."  We might get a third Nigerian Dwarf nanny for breeding purposes. 

Our success in gentling Bushrod and Cricket has astonished the local vet.  When Dr. Lucy last came out to the farm, she cuddled the bucklings and said they're more affectionate than those she's seen which were bottle-fed. 

Apparently, we're doing something right.  We respect the animals' natural intelligence and curiosity and use their passion for raisins to break up quarrels and occasional displays of jealousy.  Sometimes at dusk, when the goats gather around me, I grab the guitar and sing "Patches" to them.  During the chorus, they bleat and bleat like their little hearts are breaking.  This sets the dogs to howling,  It is a melancholy scene.

Saturday Cat Videos

1)  Cat spins on a wheel, via YouTube user subwaysuicides  (Hat Tip: HuffPo)
2)  A crusty country fella feeds two kittens from a bottle, via MrsArtAngie

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Thursday Farm Report

1)  Morning glories climb sunflower stalks.
2)  Bushrod and Cricket are running toward me.  Art, with the dogs, at the pond.
3)  Angel and her son Cricket have a deep bond.

Her preferred brand is Sun-Maid.

Weekend Farm Report - Turtles, Labs and Cricket

We've counted fifteen turtles in the pond.  The turtles sometimes wander out into the pasture.  Little Brother or Chance will occasionally pick them up in their mouths - gently, labs have "soft mouths" - and bring them to us. When this happens we praise the dogs and tell them that the turtles are their "babies" and we have to take care of them.  (Similar to how we introduced them to the goats.)  The turtles are so accustomed to us now that they don't pull their heads in when they see us coming.  Since the dogs know what the word "pond" means, I decided to give them a bit of direction.  Now if the dogs bring us a turtle, we say, "Take the baby to the pond," and then we mosey down to the pond and when we get there we tell them to "drop it."  The dog lays the turtle on the bank and the turtle walks, almost casually, into the water.

P.S.  Cricket now has horns.

When Warm-Blooded Dinosaurs Roamed the Earth

I have always been fascinated by dinosaurs, ever since I was knee-high to a Pteranodon:  Dinosaur exhibits in museums, dinosaur illustrations, dinosaurs in the movies, dinosaurs on television.  When I was a tyke, my favorite Christmas present was a set of twelve plastic dinosaurs and an accompanying picture book packed with artists' renderings of the creatures.  In those days - and this was in the late-1950's, you understand - our knowledge of the prehistoric beasts was sketchy at best.  Dinosaurs were commonly depicted as plodding, dull-colored reptiles, with tails dragging uselessly behind them. 

Of course we now know that dinosaurs were actually streamlined and bird-like, long tails balancing their gargantuan bodies, with air pockets inside many of their bones.  Some sported furculas and feathers.

Paleontologists have for many years been discussing whether or not dinosaurs were cold-blooded, the conventional wisdom for almost half a century - but recent evidence leads scientists to suspect that these so-called "terrible lizards" (neither terrible nor lizards) were in fact as warm-blooded as the family dog.  Jason Palmer reports for the BBC:  Prior studies of dinosaur bones uncovered what are known as "lines of arrested growth."  The creatures were presumed to be cold-blooded because modern cold-blooded animals show these same lines.  But scientists reporting in Nature have studied the bones of 41 modern mammal species from around the world, finding every one had these lines as well.  A number of discoveries in recent years have challenged the 40-year-old notion that dinosaurs were cold-blooded.  But because soft tissues such as organs and skin are not preserved, much of what is known about dinosaurs must be inferred from their bones, and comparisons made with modern animals that can be studied in greater detail...  David Weishampel, a palaeontologist at the Center for Functional Anatomy and Evolution at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Maryland called the new work "a wonderful paper" and said it was a welcome addition to the debate.  "I think most (palaeontologists) regard dinosaurs as being warm-blooded but there's a lot of waffling in the data that appeared before that wasn't conclusive," he told BBC News.  "It's about time we have a connection between the modern bone histology and fossil bone histology, through a very nice ecological and metabolic comparison."

Jennifer Welsh writes on CS Monitor:  The growth lines they found on the ruminants were similar to those seen in previous studies of dinosaur bones — indicating that both ruminants and dinosaurs have periods of high growth punctuated by "unfavorable" seasons with limited resources and little growth. This means that dinosaurs were likely warm-blooded like the ruminants.  "The argument we are giving in our paper, rather in favor of endothermy in dinosaurs, is that between the growth and rest lines, there's always a big region of highly vascularized [infiltrated with blood vessels] tissue that indicates very high growth rates," study researcher Meike Köhler, of the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain, told LiveScience. "This is typical in dinosaurs and very different from reptiles, which have slow growth between the rest lines." 

This is exciting news.  Now if we can just convince fundamentalist Christians that velociraptors weren't playfully nibbling on fig leaves in the Garden of Eden, or that Noah and his sons didn't go rounding up baby T-Rexes and stuffing them inside the ark...  but perhaps that's too much to hope for.  (The cartoon below is by  TTTP.)

Lonesome George Bites the Dust, Last Chance to See

The last of the giant tortoises living on La Pinta, a small island in the Galapagos, has died.  Conservation icon Lonesome George was approximately a hundred years old, and the only remaining member of his subspecies.  From Reuters via HuffPo:  Lonesome George was found in 1972 and had become a symbol of Ecuador's Galapagos Islands, which attracted some 180,000 visitors last year.  "This morning the park ranger in charge of looking after the tortoises found Lonesome George, his body was motionless," the head of the Galapagos National Park, Edwin Naula, told Reuters. "His life cycle came to an end."  ...  The giant Galapagos tortoises, which can live up to 200 years old, were among the species that helped Charles Darwin formulate his theory of evolution in the 19th century.  The Galapagos National Park is considering embalming George's body so that it can be displayed in the park, Naula said...  Scientists had been trying to get George to mate since 1993, when they introduced two female tortoises of a different subspecies into his pen. They laid eggs twice, but they were infertile.  (Did nobody consider extracting George's semen when he was in his prime and saving it for just such an occasion?  Perhaps they'll at least harvest George's DNA for cloning.)  

Not long ago, I read a fascinating book about endangered species called Last Chance To See, written by Douglas Adams (of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame) and Mark Carwardine.  Although the book was originally published back in 1990, it's as fresh and timely in the 21st century as genetically modified blackberries.  As they hop across the globe in search of animals which will soon be lost to us, Adams and Carwardine mix sharp observations with some whimsical humor.

The chapter "Heartbeats In The Night" deals with a species of flightless parrots found in New Zealand.  Fewer than 150 are currently living in the wild.  The Kakapo (eerily reminiscent of the Dodo, hunted to extinction in the late 1800s) is flightless because it never had to deal with predators.  It's also alarmingly heavy, probably for the same reason. 

From Last Chance To See: 

"Until relatively recently - in the evolutionary scale of things - the wildlife of New Zealand consisted of almost nothing but birds...  No dogs, no cats, no ferrets or weasels, nothing that the birds needed to escape from particularly.  And flight, of course, is a means of escape.  It's a survival mechanism, and one that the birds of New Zealand found they didn't especially need. Flying is hard work and consumes a lot of energy. Not only that, there's a trade-off between flying and eating.  The more you eat, the harder it is to fly.  So increasingly, what happened was that instead of just having a light snack and then flying off, the birds would settle in for rather a larger meal and go for a waddle afterward instead.  When eventually European settlers arrived and brought cats and dogs and stoats and possums with them, a lot of New Zealand's flightless birds were suddenly waddling for their lives. 

"Of these the Kakapo is the strangest... If you look one in its large, round greeny-brown face, it has a gaze of innocent incomprehension that makes you want to hug it and tell it that everything will be all right, though you know it probably will not be.  It is an extremely fat bird (and) its wings are just about good for waggling a bit if it thinks it's about to trip over something - but flying is out of the question.  Sadly, it seems that not only has the Kakapo forgotten how to fly, but it has also forgotten that it has forgotten how to fly.  Apparently, a seriously worried Kakapo will sometimes run up a tree and jump out of it, whereupon it drops like a brick and lands in a graceless heap on the ground."

There there, poor sweet baby.  Everything will be all right.