I have a finely tuned ability to talk myself out of anything remotely interesting. It’s very easy to stay with what is comfortable. Making a change, well, that is hard. And I’ve found personally speaking, trying the whole “make little changes every day” with no goal in mind doesn’t ever really cut it. I need to make a big dramatic decision, commit to it, and then figure out what small series of changes need to take place in order to make it happen.
Case in point: I like hiking. I’d like to do it more, especially since we live in such a great area for it. The dogs would love it too. But do I do it? No, because that takes planning and I never get around to it.
And yet I decided, when I’m in Tanzania again in June for a World Vets trip, to tag along with our team leader Dr. Teri as she- and now I- tackle Mt. Meru, Tanzania’s second-highest mountain after Kilimanjaro. (more…)
As I alluded to in a post last week, I’m planning on travelling back to Tanzania in June for a project with World Vets. As you all know, or I think you mostly know, that was pretty much the most amazing experience of my life. And this is going to be different- it’s a working trip, not an anniversary trip I planned for two decades straight. I get that, and in a lot of ways it’s a relief- the pressure is off. I saw the chimps. I saw the Big Five. This time I get to just relax, do some good work alongside good people, and let Africa sink into my pores.
A friend once said to me, Africa is a place you either love or hate. You either get home and shrug with a confused “what was that?” look on your face, or you start planning your next trip. Well, making it back to a country in less than twelve months is a new record for me, so you tell me where you think I fall on that spectrum. I’ve had Africa on the mind since my feet touched ground back in October. (more…)
Joe Tosini knows how to command a room. When he shakes your hand with an iron grip and leans in to stare you in the face, you know right away that whatever it is he’s about to say, he feels it from his temples to his toes.
“I used to be a preacher,” he said to me, and I believe it. He has that ability to grab a group of people. I first watched him do it at an ACES session at the Helen Woodward Animal Center, when he was there to tell a group of animal rescue advocates from around the country about his company, Ark Sciences, and how he wanted to change the world.
His subject now is not religion but unwanted pets, but he brings the same fist-clenching conviction to the topic that one would expect from any passionate believer. “We’re going to change the world,” he says, while talking of the pain he felt travelling all over the world and seeing the suffering resulting from animal overpopulation. The room felt it too.
With no background in animal science to speak of, Joe founded Ark Sciences and assembled a team of veterinarians, scientists and animal experts to move forward with his goal. They acquired the patent for a form of chemical castration, which had languished as Neutersol, and re-vamped the protocol under a new name, Esterilsol. (more…)
I often wonder what wild animals who spend a lot of time around humans must think of us. Those in zoos, for example, or those in big national parks. I thought about this a lot when I was in Africa- specifically in the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania, which is filled to the brim with Land Cruisers full of camera toting primates every day.
To most of those people, seeing these animals is just this incredible, awe-inspiring once in a lifetime experience. But to them, well, it’s just another boatload of humanoids. It’s certainly a different experience in some of the wilder parts of the continent, but in the tourist-heavy areas, the animals showed a complete and utter ambivalence to human presence. Ho hum.
It struck me particularly strongly when we stopped for lunch in the Ngorongoro Crater at the watering hole. Humans swarmed the grassy area like a hooting herd of baboons, herded into the safe areas under the watchful eye of bemused rangers who were keeping an eye out for the errant fool who wanted to take a dip in the water.
Because no, you dopey human, those are NOT rocks and we do not under any circumstances recommend you try swimming over to them.
They will bite your leg off.
While most tourists attempt the traditional “Safari Bob” look, complete with neat khakis and hats from REI, some go the other direction and attempt to emulate some of the more colorful African birds. Camouflage of a different sort, I suppose. Good for attracting some of those massive African wasps.
Though only the most hardcore go Out Of Africa enough to bring their very own pipe and tobacco all the way to Africa, down into the crater, and then pull it out and smoke it.
These guys read the planning book, and apparently all went shopping together too. Drab colors, long pants, shiny binoculars. I will state now for the record that not a single Tanzanian resident dresses this way, but this is the Official Tourist Uniform described in all the safari books so this is what we all show up with, for the most part. I’ve come to the conclusion that this is the easiest way to differentiate the tourists from the ex-pats.
A trio of tourists.
A trio of birds.
In nature, like attracts like. This trio of Tourist Sapiens looked to a trio of birds, gravitating towards one another with the inexorable pull of mutual interest. The birds know by now what they are expected to do. Or maybe they just wanted to investigate the people as much as the people wanted to investigate them.
Note the symmetry of posture as they engage in that most homo sapien of activities, staring. The guy on the right has a little hip action flair going on too, just to be fancy. That is Advanced Tourist Posture. Bam.
“All those humans look alike, Hal. I can’t tell them apart even after all these years.” “I know, Bob.”
I tried for an entire week to get my ranger to tell me some of the strange stories you know he has to tell about the tourists he has met over 20 years of guiding, but alas for me, he wouldn’t spill the dirt. You KNOW he has some.
“And then that one in the buff kept pulling out her iphone and saying-”
“Oh! Hello Jessica! Ah ha ha, just talking about rhino preservation and all. Ready to go?”
He was SUCH an amazing guide though that I had to forgive him his utter professionalism. If only the animals could talk.
Everyone knows you should start the New Year off with a kiss. I love kisses. I live for kisses.
Unfortunately for me, when I’m at work most dogs are not really that happy to give smooches. Sure they do at first, but one go with the thermometer and the honeymoon’s over.
This is one of the reasons I was thrilled to throw on my civvies and hit the Meet the Breeds booths at the AKC/Eukanuba show as a regular Joe. I thought, maybe I could ask owners about their dog’s proclivity for herding versus retrieving. Or ask about how long it takes to groom them for a show. Or maybe I’d just do what I felt like, and love on the pups and see who was the best smoocher- which is exactly what I ended up doing.
It was inspired by the Boston County Kissing Booth.
The French bulldog people threw down the gauntlet with their own booth advertising French kisses. (That’s Macho, by the way. You’ll see him in amorous action in the video.) GAME ON.
I started with them, but I basically hit on all sorts of dogs while I was there, from a teeny Brussels to a burly Cane Corso in search of affection and licks. At the end of the day, no matter the dog, they were all capable of some pretty incredible acts of affection even when it’s some strange person standing in their face and demanding smooches. And you will never guess who won.
I loooove dogs. If you couldn’t tell.
(Thanks to Diane and everyone who gamely held the camera when I shoved it in their hands and said, ‘point it at my head. I’m going in.’ I get to do the coolest stuff sometimes . )
Do you have a favorite place you dream of? A memory that, when you close your eyes at the end of of a long week, you dig up from the recesses of your white matter and relive in a brief but joyous fantasy of wishing yourself back into the past? I do.
I know I have a bunch of things I was going to write about this week. This is what happens when I don’t write things down. I’m sure there is something I should be writing or that I thought to myself I would write this week, but when I actually sit down to do it I draw a blank and all I can do is think about chocolate, or Africa, or other such things.
I’m sure some of this has to do with the chaos of the holidays now being behind me, and the looming horror of all the work I need to do on the house looming ahead. Plus the fact that our cash strapped school district dealt with their budget issues by adding on an extra week of vacation- surprise!- and the fact that despite several goes with the saddle soap my favorite shoes still smell like a dog pooped on them, which of course he did. All of these things combined kind of make me look wistfully at my old photos and think to myself, surely someone in Tanzania could use the services of a veterinarian for six months or so, right? Just for a wee bit?
And I still haven’t told you my favorite story from Africa, about Graeme the Disenchanted Disillusioned Disgruntled Imprisoned Scottish Balloon Pilot, but that is a whole-day sort of post so I guess I will add that to my New Year’s Resolutions.
In the meantime, just enjoy some pictures my husband finally got around to editing this week. They are from Tarangire National Park, our last stop on safari. (more…)
It’s Africa Thursday! I made that up. But there it is, so here we are. And boy, are you in for a treat today, because today, we are talking about leopards. And colons.
In Africa, the penultimate experience is to see the Big 5. Most people don’t, but if you are exceptionally lucky and hit everything just right, you might. I had gone into this trip with no expectations of accomplishing this goal: my own Big 5 was a little different: chimps, lions, giraffes, elephants, and warthogs.
We got very lucky on our travels in the Ngorongoro Crater the one day we were there, and no I didn’t blog about it yet but oh! It was lovely! And in the crater, armed with binoculars and a guide who was in constant communication with the other guides to find the best game, we managed to see four of the five:
by Dr. V | Sunday | November 20, 2011 | Comments are off for this post
It’s a week of being thankful, and in that vein I’m reaching back into something I used to do regularly and make a Sunday post highlighting something great from around the web. Today, two large scale projects meant to bring more shelter pets into their forever homes:
Home for the Holidays
Iams’ Home for the Holidays program has just surpassed the 6 million mark for number of pets who have been adopted since the program’s inception in 1999. Way to go! They’re still working on their goal of 5 million bowls of food donated, as well.
2011 Results to date:
Since October 1st, we have helped find new loving homes for:
Dog/Puppy 214,741
Cat/Kitten 190,484
Other Adoptions 8,678
Total adoptions so far: 413,903
Total meals donated so far: 1,525,920
The Shelter Pet Project
Speaking of adoption, the Shelter Pet Project has just released a new set of Public Service Announcements in a joint project with the Ad Council, HSUS and Maddie’s Fund.
The PSA message is “A person is the best thing to happen to a shelter pet.” Truer words were never spoken!
The single word that motivated me to fly across the world. Our closest living relative, the crown jewel of Tanzania’s Mahale National Park, and the animal I have most wanted to meet since I was a kid.
I met a chimpanzee once before, in a dark research laboratory cage while I was thinking about specializing in laboratory animal medicine. He peered at me through the bars with such heartbreaking knowledge, sadness, and resignation, that within 5 seconds I knew that I could never, ever do that for a living. They are so beautiful, so intelligent, and so very like us. This was where I needed to meet them.
Seven days a week, ten months a year, the trackers rise at 7 am, and they run. (more…)
I know you all want to hear about the chimpanzees. I want to tell you about the chimpanzees. I am just overwrought with shuffling through 8,000 raw digital images, that are sitting on the bloated home computer and stressing it like a girdle about to pop. Between that and trying to coordinate the images with the videos I took but whose audio is highly suspect, attempting to put the two together into something cohesive is a huge time suck.
In addition, I’m going to Minneapolis for a day to give a talk on social media in veterinary medicine, which is going to be fantastic but also involves no small amount of planning and is yet another thing that takes me away from chimp movie-making. I actually worked chimp pictures into the presentation, which impressed me, if no one else. It will be a good talk. We have a lot to learn from them, but I always knew that.
In the meantime, let us turn to the afternoon after we were given the “How to Not Get Eaten” talk at Greystoke for a special real life edition of On Safari: In search of the vetpanzee. (more…)
“I am prepared to go anywhere, provided it be forward.” -David Livingstone
In 1871, H.M. Stanley uttered the famous words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” in the town of Ujiji on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, two years after Stanley was hired by the New York Herald to track down the missing explorer. Livingstone had spent much of the past 30 years exploring the African continent, slogging through swamps, fighting off malaria and dysentery, and enduring a neverending onslaught of trials and tribulations that left him marked during much of his life as a failed expeditionary leader.
Despite all this, Livingstone doggedly refused to leave the continent to which he was always drawn, continuing to explore until his death from disease in 1873. Those who knew him were inspired by his determination, and his deference to local cultures and support for abolition gave him a different sort of legacy that paved the way for countless explorers and missionaries who would later bring schools and healthcare into central Africa.
My journey to that same shore was much less fraught with peril, ferried by plane and boat with ample supplies, a backpack full of medications, and about 20 pounds of electronics. Nevertheless, outside that bubble of safety provided by stable governance, tourist dollars and modern marvels, the land on which I found myself was much unchanged from that remote stretch of sand so famously written about by Stanley more than a century ago.
When last we left the story, I was collapsed in the rear of a KLM plane that I had cried my way onto, in a post-adrenaline adrenal collapse. I oscillated between complete exhaustion and nervous energy, standing up, sitting down, wandering the aisles in search of my husband, who I never did find, taking advantage of the free wine.
I will say this: you know how on domestic airlines they bolt you into your seat at takeoff and glare you into submission if you so much as dare to stand up? International carriers don’t seem to have this policy. The second we hit 10,000 feet, the party started. Seat belt sign was off, electronics were out, and people started trotting up and down the aisles. They were sitting there, chatting, mingling, helping themselves to beverages in the back. We hit turbulence, banked a little, carts were zooming around- that seat belt sign did not come back on until we were landing. Needless to say, by the time we hit Kilimanjaro airport, I had gotten over my bleak mood and was ready to enjoy the trip of a lifetime.
By the time we landed at the airport to cheers and hoots- none of which were mine, if you can believe it- it was dark out. My first view of Africa looked exactly like Bakersfield at 9 pm, truth be told. I had my first mammal sighting- a dog, but to be fair that isn’t exactly a uniquely exotic African mammal so I will also accept a second answer for the giveaway which I will get to in a bit. We drove through Arusha to our hotel and collapsed.
The next morning, I resolved to put my behind in the past (not going to be the last Lion King reference, sorry) because despite all indications to the contrary, we had made it to Africa, and today we were going to chimp camp. Well ahead of schedule, we were deposited at the teeny Arusha airport to await the arrival of our bush plane to Mahale.
This is my “I can’t believe we’re actually here” grin. I had it on my face through October 6th when we went home. (more…)
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