Archive for July, 2008

The Foxy Rosetta Stone of Animal Behavior and Physiology This podcast is about a study I consider a virtual Rosetta Stone relative to understanding the relationship between physiology, behavior, and domestication: the Russian Farm Fox Study. While recording it, I managed to stay out of range of the playing dogs most of the time and [...]

By the time I went downstairs after I’d written and posted my last message, Whit had eaten all the food in his dish. But then the next morning when I went down to the basement to clean his litterbox, I discovered that he’d vomited what looked like all he’d eaten. Because the food he’d vomited [...]

This has been a week of ups and downs. Until noon today, I could have reported that Whit was doing well, showing sufficient enthusiasm for life that I felt encouraged. But then today he showed no interest in his lunch. It’s a miserable hot and humid day here and, had he skipped a meal when [...]

Fleeing Slippers and Invading Chipmunks This week my podcasting career suffered a double assault that left bloody, but unbowed. With apologies to William Ernest Henley’s Invictus (which I had to memorize in the 11th grade), It matters not how strewn with animals the path, How filled with incomprehensible terminology the emails, I eventually will be [...]

Yesterday I picked up an assortment of canned cat foods for Whit when I went grocery shopping. He’s always eaten dried food and was such an excellent rodent-hunter that I tended to think of what I offered him more as supplemental feeding. Even so, I always provided him with what I considered the best, although [...]

This post inaugurates a new blog category, the Whittington Journal. Ironically, in March of this year, I wrote In Praise of Whittington, a commentary that described my feline companion of almost 14 years. At the time, I did this because he was doing very well for his age and I didn’t want to wait until [...]

The Bee’s Knees – NOT! Did you ever support some animal-related practice that you and almost everyone else thought was fantastic, the bee’s knees as we used to say in the old days, only to question the wisdom of it later? As we have more access to more information faster, such doubts seem to crop [...]

The Sound of Two Paws Clapping In many ways, for me the best time of day is when I take the dogs out first thing in the morning. Particularly at this time of year, I love that everything is so fresh and clean. And quiet. It’s the quiet that’s particularly engaged my thoughts lately. These [...]