Archive for July, 2009

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 [...]

Being BeeBee First some informal shots of the main characters in this week’s podcast: BeeBee under my desk wearing her Gentle Leader, Frica resting up following a run-in with Bee, And Bamboo, staying out of BeeBee’s way. I’d like to report that I’ve come up with the perfect way to resolve this issue, but the [...]

Feline Pedagogy There are two definitions of pedagogy in my old American Heritage Dictionary. The first is the one most people are familiar with, the art or profession of teaching. That certainly would apply to Bamboo the kitten, as he pointed out to me as he perused the dictionary himself. But the second definition, “preparatory [...]

Last night I woke up to what sounded like a howl-off between a coyote sitting in my front yard and one in the distance. Either that or the one in the yard was howling for the sheer joy of listening to his/her echo from across the valley below the house.This morning when I looked into [...]

Those Crazy Humans! The most recent hand-washing study mentioned at the end of this podcast was published in the Journal of Clinical Outcomes Management. In this study, the effect of hand-washing as a way to prevent the spread of methicillin-resistant Stapholococcus aureus (MRSA) in a hospital was studied. Over a 3-year period, hospital-transmitted cases of [...]

The nice folks at Veterinary Technicians Schools On-line recently published an article, Top 100 Websites for Pet Ownership Advice, that included my podcasts on the list. Because my approach to all things animal tends to be so different from that offered by other sources, such recognition always brightens my day.   

Natural Dilemmas In case you wondered how I resolved my dilemma… These are the evening primrose and the long-stemmed white flowers whose name I always forget the mallow and astilbe, the last of the sweet William and flourishing Korean willow, the last lupine, some newly blooming daylilies, an unidentified insect, and the lawn.

Financial Hardship and the Human-Companion Animal Bond As you may have noticed, the number of articles and reports about animals being given up or put down because their owners lack the financial wherewithal to provide for them has increased as the general economic picture has become bleaker. In virtually all of those I’ve read or [...]

Human and Natural Time There’s a Bamboo tale that goes with this podcast. Just as I was editing the last bit of it, he stepped on some combination of keys on the keyboard that put blue bands at the top and bottom of the sound track and itty-bitty arrows in it, plus caused it to [...]