Dog & Cat Talk

Akua Christmas Day '08

Many Say They Understand Their Pets

WASHINGTON (Dec. 17) - Stephen King of rural Texas says he has his dog's vocabulary figured out. Molly Thibodeau says her cats comprehend her so well that they get it when she simply points.

Sixty-seven percent of pet owners say they understand their animals' woofs, meows or other sounds, including 18 percent like King and Thibodeau who say they comprehend completely, according to an Associated Press-Petside.com poll released Wednesday. In a finding many parents of teenagers would no doubt envy, 62 percent of pet owners say that when they speak, their critter gets the message.

"I speak to her on limited subjects and she does the same with me," said King, 63, a retired chemist from Kempner, Texas, who says he understands his dog, Dagny's, repertoire of barks signaling anger, eagerness, contentment and other feelings. "Common sense works 98 percent of the time."

The high level of communication is but one way the poll highlights the bond between many owners and their pets. According to the survey, conducted by GfK, only one in seven owners say they have been forced to trim spending for their pets during the past year's recession. More than four in 10 — about as many as last year — are buying holiday gifts for their animals.

More women than men say they and their pets understand each other's verbal stabs at communication. Older and lower-income people are also likelier to cite high levels of comprehension between them and their animals.

Thibodeau, 20, of Fort Riley, Kan., said her two cats understand her so completely that if she wants to shoo them off furniture, "I point at them and they get right down."

On the flip side, men are twice as likely as women to say they and their pets are clueless about what each is saying to the other — a group that overall comprises fewer than one in 10 pet owners.

"It's kind of like, 'What are you doing?'" Edwin Oto, 47, of Moraga, Calif., says of his futile efforts to figure out what his dog, Shilo, wants when she keeps barking after he lets her into the house.
Three in 10 dog owners think their pet is baffled when they speak to it, compared with nearly half of cat owners who say the same about their animal.

When it comes to communicating in the other direction, cat owners do better. Twenty-five percent of them say they completely understand their cats' meows, compared with 16 percent of dog owners who claim to be totally fluent in barks.

But Jane Starring, 48, of Barrington, R.I., says she and her family are confounded by their 8-year-old cat, Flannel, who often chases people about the house meowing.

"We're not sure we're making much progress understanding him," said Starring. "I don't know what his point is."

William Miller, a professor of veterinary medicine and medical director of Cornell University's Companion Animal Hospital, says it's not unusual for many owners and pets to understand some of each other's speech. He said animals and people learn to communicate verbally by over time associating certain sounds with actions, such as a particular bark when a dog wishes to go outside or the soothing tone many people use when petting their cat.

"It's not like you'll sit down and have a U.N. conversation with them" spoken in different languages, Miller said.

With many households having more than one pet, 74 percent of all pet owners have a dog and 46 percent have a cat, according to the poll. Men and women were about equally likely to own either kind of animal.

Twelve percent of pet owners have fish, 7 percent have birds, and 2 percent or fewer have horses, rabbits, rodents, turtles, lizards or other pets.

Just 15 percent of all owners said they have scaled back spending for their pets in the past year, suggesting the recession is prompting many to save money other ways before squeezing their pet budget.

"They look to me for food and shelter just like my children do," said Charlotte Phillips, 40, of Abingdon, Va., a mother of two whose family is cutting its overall spending but not for its two dogs and five cats. "They can't fend for themselves."

Of the group that is cutting back, 27 percent say they have seriously considered giving up their pet. Seventy-one percent say they've thought about buying it fewer toys or clothes, while 60 percent cite switching to less costly pet food.

About half spending less for pets say they've thought about postponing routine veterinary visits and getting less grooming. About one in five have considered delaying care for an animal's serious health problems or cutting day care or walking services.

Even so, 43 percent of owners said they would buy holiday gifts for their pets, compared with 46 percent who said they had done so last year. Dogs would seem to have more to look forward to this season: 48 percent of dog owners but just 28 percent of cat owners say they will buy their pets gifts.

The AP-Petside.com poll was conducted by GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media from Dec. 3-8 and involved landline and cell phone interviews with 1,129 randomly chosen pet owners. The margin of sampling error in the poll is plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.

If YOU are really intune with your pet/animal family member, and, spend time with it as YOU would any other family member, it is quite easy to know and learn what each of YOU are saying to the other. I dont know everything our Siberian says, but, I know quite a bit. As does he. I don't know about YOU, but, if my dog trys to tell me something and I dont understand, "he will look at me as if to say, what are YOU, stupid"?

"Animals Always Will Rule",

Bobby Sharpe Bobby Sharpe's "Techertainment": Enigma Video/Song "Fata Morgana" Trk 5 Bobby Sharpe's " Opyn Mindz": Merry/Happy____Fill In The Blank

Polar, Smarter Than The Average, Bears

Polar Bears Find New Food Source

(Dec. 15 ) - Polar bears could survive extinction despite many starving to death in coming years, according to scientists and other observers who have discovered that some of the bears have found a new food source — goose and duck eggs.

The eggs could be coming in part from a rebounding goose population in the Hudson Bay area, feeding polar bears whose icy habitat in the Arctic is melting, one new study finds.

In recent years, much of the sea ice that polar bears use as a hunting platform for seal meals has melted, forcing some bears — particularly young males — farther north or onto land, where they are not as adept at hunting. When stuck on land for months, a polar bear typically is forced to survive on its own fat reserves.

The bears were listed earlier this year as a threatened species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act as populations have declined.

Meanwhile, snow geese are thriving near the western Hudson Bay, and researchers say there are in fact too many of them. Their eggs can be a good food source, researchers report in the online version of the journal Polar Biology. The geese nest on tundra that some bears have retreated to.

"Over 40 years, six subadult male bears were seen among snow goose nests, and four of them were sighted after the year 2000," says Robert Rockwell, an ornithologist at the American Museum of Natural History and a biology professor at City University of New York's City College. "I've seen a subadult male eat eider duck eggs whole or press its nose against the shell, break it, and eat the contents."

Ice is melting, on average, 0.72 days earlier each year in the region studied. Snow geese are hatching eggs about 0.16 days sooner each year, according to Rockwell and his graduate student Linda Gormezano.

Current trends indicate that the arrival of polar bears will overlap the mean hatching period in 3.6 years, and egg consumption could become a routine, reliable option, the researcher concluded in a statement released today.

A polar bear, the largest land carnivore, would need to consume the eggs of 43 nests to replace the energy gained from the average day of hunting seals, but Rockwell and his colleagues figure that while many polar bears may starve in coming years, the resourceful animals just might survive extinction.

Polar bears survived a warm period about 125,000 years ago, when sea level was 12 to 18 feet (4 to 6 meters) higher than it is now and trees lived above the Arctic Circle, the scientists point out. "They've been through warming before," Rockwell said.

The polar bears' potential movement to a diet of more eggs brought to mind a quote by Ilkoo Angutikjuak, an Inuit who lives in the Canadian province of Nunavut, in the February 2008 issue of Natural History magazine, Rockwell said.

Angutikjuak said: "The animals will adapt, I've heard that because they depend on sea ice, polar bears will go extinct, but I don't believe it. They are very adaptable. As the sea ice changes, polar bears might get skinnier and some might die, but I don't think they will go extinct."

The research was funded by the Hudson Bay Project and the American Museum of Natural History.

As the high lighted paragraph above points out, "polar bears have been through this before, 125,000 years ago, AND, they are still here!" Just like I have been trying to tell everyone for the last little bit of time, "there is NO MAN MADE GLOBAL WARMING going on! It is simply the planet going through it's periodic shift cycles. In other words, "been there done that and will do it again". The animals have that concept down. When will humanity figure it out? Right, "probably never".

Animalz Rule,

Bobby Sharpe Bobby Sharpe's "Techertainment": Enigma Video: "Je T'aime Till My Dying Day" "Dragon, Book Of Shang": "Dragon, Book Of Shang" / Vermithrax Video

Dogs - Fair & Smart

Study Shows Dogs Have Sense of Fairness

WASHINGTON (Dec. 8) – No fair! What parent hasn't heard that from a child who thinks another youngster got more of something. Well, it turns out dogs can react the same way. Ask them to do a trick and they'll give it a try. For a reward, sausage say, they'll happily keep at it. But if one dog gets no reward, and then sees another get sausage for doing the same trick, just try to get the first one to do it again.

Indeed, he may even turn away and refuse to look at you.

Dogs, like people and monkeys, seem to have a sense of fairness.

"Animals react to inequity," said Friederike Range of the University of Vienna, Austria, who lead a team of researchers testing animals at the school's Clever Dog Lab. "To avoid stress, we should try to avoid treating them differently."

Similar responses have been seen in monkeys.

Range said she wasn't surprised at the dogs reaction, since wolves are known to cooperate with one another and appear to be sensitive to each other. Modern dogs are descended from wolves.

Next, she said, will be experiments to test how dogs and wolves work together. "Among other questions, we will investigate how differences in emotions influence cooperative abilities," she said via e-mail.

In the reward experiments reported in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Range and colleagues experimented with dogs that understood the command "paw," to place their paw in the hand of a researcher. It's the same game as teaching a dog to "shake hands."

Those that refused at the start — and one border collie that insisted on trying to herd other dogs — were removed. That left 29 dogs to be tested in varying pairs.

The dogs sat side-by-side with an experimenter in front of them. In front of the experimenter was a divided food bowl with pieces of sausage on one side and brown bread on the other.

The dogs were asked to shake hands and each could see what reward the other received.

When one dog got a reward and the other didn't, the unrewarded animal stopped playing.

When both got a reward all was well.

One thing that did surprise the researchers was that — unlike primates — the dogs didn't seem to care whether the reward was sausage or bread.

Possibly, they suggested, the presence of a reward was so important it obscured any preference.

Other possibilities, they said, are that daily training with their owners overrides a preference, or that the social condition of working next to a partner increased their motivation regardless of which reward they got.

And the dogs never rejected the food, something that primates had done when they thought the reward was unfair.

The dogs, the researchers said, "were not willing to pay a cost by rejecting unfair offers."

Clive Wynne, an associate professor in the psychology department of the University of Florida, isn't so sure the experiment measures the animals reaction to fairness.

"What it means is individuals are responding negatively to being treated less well," he said in a telephone interview.

But the researchers didn't do a control test that had been done in monkey studies, Wynne said, in which a preferred reward was visible but not given to anyone.

In that case the monkeys went on strike because they could see the better reward but got something lesser.

In dogs, he noted, the quality of reward didn't seem to matter, so the test only worked when they got no reward at all, he said.

However, Wynne added, there is "no doubt in my mind that dogs are very, very sensitive to what people are doing and are very smart."

Amen to the "very smart"! And yes, dogs are very sensitive to what people are doing. Our Siberian is very sensitive and, very smart. I know that sometimes he probably thinks his humans are some of the most ignorant beings around. YOU can tell by the way he looks at YOU or responds.

Dogs Are The Best,

Bobby Sharpe Bobby Sharpe's "Techertainment": Enigma "Distorted Love" Video "Dragon, Book Of Shang": "Dragon, Book Of Shang" / Vermithrax Video

Who Needs Drugs? Where The Females?

Yeah, I did it!

For a lot of animals, being in capitivity is a bigger buzzkill to the libido than a "Golden Girls" marathon. Not so for Demo the orangutan, who has been busy knocking up all three of his female companions at a U.K. zoo.

The 10-year-old primate has three babies on the way after mating with roommates Gambira, Mali and Chinta. Since the number of Bornean orangutans is down to just 50,000 worldwide, Demo is merely doing his part for his dwindling species, which is threatened by hunting, the pet trade and the destruction of its rainforest habitat.

Staff at Paignton Zoo in Devon say they are "amazed" by the three pregnancies and are anxiously awaiting the births. The second largest ape after the gorilla, Bornean orangutans like their alone time, with males and females usually come together only to mate. Hopefully that fact will keep Demo from getting too overloaded with his three new baby mamas.

Unfortunately, not every animal is so attractive ....

Hey, when you're hot you're hot! When YOU are, YOU don't need any scripts! lol

"Animals Rule, Humans Drool",

Bobby Sharpe Bobby Sharpe's " Opyn Mindz": Rodan or What? It's Big! "Dragon, Book Of Shang": "Dragon, Book Of Shang" / Vermithrax Video