When I was in school, there was a resident who could best be described as a holy terror. She ate senior students for breakfast, washing it down with the salty tears of our despair when she would mercilessly rip us to shreds in rounds. And hoo boy, did she love me. And by love, I mean, love to rip me up one side and down the other. I was an easy target; I didn’t know much at the time. Her very favorite snack.
“The patient in room two is a….” I studied the chart…”Belgian Mali-noy?”
“Malin-WAH,” she would correct, rolling her eyes. That sort of thing. You had to see her in action to get just how well she did ‘condescending eyeroll’. And then I would make it through the room, and proudly pronounce the next day that there was another Malinois there on the service, only to have her whip out a droll, “No, um, that would be a … Tervuren” plus eyeroll at the senior clinician. While the difference between a Malinois and a Tervuren are now clearer to me, they really weren’t at the time, and well, they are hard to tell apart to the untrained eye.
We don’t learn breed identification in school. We learn it on the fly. We learn that the whatever-it-is in the room has an ear infection, and how to deal with it. It’s much easier in a clinic, where the owner has already filled out paperwork and told at least two other people what breed you are looking at before you go in and mess it up.
It’s still not easy. While this may be easy to ID: (more…)
So I’m super excited to watch the AKC/Eukanuba National Championship on the 4th! Four days of dogapalooza collapsed into two hours- it’s a tall order. I have some fun posts/giveaways planned for next week to lead up to the air date, but in the meantime I wanted to give you a little glimpse into the behind the scenes cogs of a show this size.
What can I say? I live for behind-the-scenes stuff. Dogs galore, camera crews, obedience trials, police dogs, Super Dogs, conformation, agility, and exhibitor booths all in one big conference hall running simultaneously? How does that happen without anyone getting bitten or run over? And when you send in an admitted agent of chaos such as myself to document the process, does that help or hinder the outcome?
Fortunately there was an ace crew of veterans there to oversee both the show and the bloggers, who, if experience is any indication, are always a bit of a wild card.
Crashing the Mrs. America pageant happened offsite, OK? (I voted for Mrs. Colorado, myself.) What are you going to do. We’re a handful. (more…)
First, a note: I fully support the efforts to bring awareness about the dangers of SOPA. And if you happen to have no idea what I’m talking about, or why Wikipedia and reddit don’t work, well, the info is all out there. SOPA/PIPA stinks, and as a small potates blogger, the implications horrify me.
That being said, I decided not to black out the site for two reasons:
I doubt this site going dark is going to be the tipping point for anyone to say, “well, I thought SOPA was a good idea, but the thought of life without pawcurious is just too much, so I’m changing my mind.” I’ll leave the hand wrangling to all the high school kids freaking out over a day without Wikipedia.
Most importantly, I couldn’t figure out how to make the blackout plugin work. Seriously. So here we are. Happy Wednesday.
Monday, I got to go on our local Fox station to talk about ways to keep healthy with your pet. It was a perfect opportunity: I have Brody, who is action central, and Koa, who is a couch potato. There’s something for everyone and dogs of all fitness levels out there.
I brought both of them, unsure of which dog I was going to end up using in the segment. Both Brody and Koa had gotten a turn on the GoPet treadmill that we would be using in the piece (which is entirely deserving of its own post, by the way); I was leaning towards Brody, since he had just gotten his feathers crimped and was looking especially fluffy that morning. Plus he runs faster on the treadmill than Koa does. (more…)
Chicken jerky is one of those things I had never even thought of trying to make until recently. I know my dogs love it, and until the FDA put out multiple warnings about how imported jerky was making pets ill it was something I included in their treat regimen.
About a year ago I got a dehydrator, in one of my occasional crunchy fits of health (it never lasts.) I used it a handful of times and then let it sit on the counter. A few weeks ago, I thought I would try and figure out how to make my own chicken jerky with some chicken that had been languishing in the freezer, and guess what: it is, like, the easiest thing in the world to do. (more…)
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 . )
When Susi from DogKnobIt and I asked if we could dogsit the Eukanuba VP of Canine Communications, Pawl Griffin, for a bit at the AKC/Eukanuba National Championship, I’m not sure what they were thinking when they agreed. I’m glad they did, though. Because we had a ton of fun.
He’s a petit Basset Griffon Vendeen, but we decided to see what would happen when we asked breeders of other types of dogs for grooming advice. (For the record, that brilliant idea was Susi’s. I thought we should take him to a tattoo parlor.) So we visited a sheepdog, an Afghan, a Yorkie, a hairless terrier, and a few others. Here’s the result:
I realized after I posted the video that his name is spelled “Griffin”, but it took so dang long to upload the thing I didn’t have the heart to redo it and set myself back another hour and a half. So please forgive me the typo.
Upon seeing the video, my husband couldn’t restrain himself from commenting on how much he wished we had a boom mike. A boom mike. Well, this is what happens when you’re doing the iReporter guerilla stuff with a Flipcam. Think of it as the authentic dog show cacophanous experience.
So even if you think it’s terrible, or crummy, or even just bleh, lie to me and say you loved it. I’m fragile. Stick around for the outtakes at the end- I think they’re my favorite part.
Normally when I do these blogathons, I park myself on the couch with a pile of chocolate and a liter of coffee and just go for it. But this year, this year I decided to be ambitious. I will do my blogathon on location, I thought. Let’s make it NUTS.
The week before, I drove out to the Lions, Tigers and Bears sanctuary to verify they had working wifi. It was slow, but not too slow. Good enough for the blogathon, I figured. My friend Star and I hatched plans. We’ll camp out in the bear sanctuary! We’ll bring night vision goggles and do live updates from the lion cages like we’re Anderson Cooper!
Um, yeah.
That was before we had the Storm of the Year. And while those of you who deal with inclement weather on a regular basis may laugh, we got a month’s worth of rain in one day here in San Diego, one day of horrific weather that none of us know how to deal with, sandwiched in between two more typical sunny beautiful days. And it was into this storm that I drove, with totally inappropriate clothing and a non-waterproof camera. DA DA DUMMMMM…
I was standing in the tiger enclosure while we were shooting the catnip videos in a sweatshirt, umbrella on the ground due to lack of space and hands, getting pounded by freezing rain while trying to protect the camera from the rain. My fingers went numb. The spectators were popsicles. The cats ran and hid. By the time 4 o’clock hit and we were ready to shoot the crossbow videos, it was dark out and the hills were flooded.
The rain continued to pelt us. The satellite on which the wifi relied was shrouded in rainclouds. And at 6 pm, the internet went out and refused to come back. I tried to post a few times from the phone, but who can do a blogathon from an iphone? I tried to tether the wifi to my phone, but I don’t even know what that even means, so that was out. Going outside in that weather was useless, and even if I did, with no wifi I couldn’t upload any pictures. My blogpocalypse was getting blogpocalypsed for real. So meta.
So at 7:30, I hiked back out to my car in the absolute pitch black with nothing but a lantern for the treacherous drive back to my house. It took me a while to find it. I have a black car and it was parked somewhere in a big meadow. I was swinging the lantern back and forth, trying to find my car in the rain in a muddy field, and all I could think was, this really is the apocalypse. I’m going to die.
I drove back home through the mountain pass, hoping against hope to avoid hail. I made it to my exit 45 minutes later, and saw this:
Road closed. Another 15 minute detour, on the phone with my husband giving him instructions to get such-and-such guest post published so I wouldn’t miss the hourly benchmarks. By this point I was convinced my blogpocalypse was just me being prophetic. Driving, flooding, lost connections, drama, police…talk about setting the mood.
I finally made it back home and busted through as much as I could overnight to get posts up with our functional home wifi, so that at 6 I could get BACK in the car and drive BACK to the sanctuary just in case the weather improved. I had no idea if the wifi would be working again or not, so I had to have backup posts ready to go in case.
I got back to the sanctuary and it was beautiful out. Of course it was. This was my attempt at ”zombie shadow looming over an abandoned something-or-other.” It was the most ominous I could get by that point, being exhausted and all. It would have been much funnier with the crossbow.
But at least the cats came out! I got to spend the morning doing all the stuff I was planning on doing the night before, like getting to feed the lions. Who, by the way, are very loud when they rumble.
And Conga the leopard, who spent the night before sulking over the rain, was out and ready to visit.
yum yum yum she said, right before dripping chicken juice into my eyeball.
What you don’t hear is me screaming, “I’m infected now!” Salmonella, right in the eye.
So rest assured, I worked for every dollar you all so generously donated. And it was totally worth it. Because those cats eat a TON of chicken, and Bobbi just got back from Wyoming with someone’s pet bobcat, and Natasha the tiger had surgery for uterine cancer last week.
My husband’s only comment was this: We spend two weeks in Africa and you come closer to death here at home trying to do something with your blog. SO TRUE.
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…)
Today I’m showing Part 2 of the Ask Dr V series. I believe, though I haven’t checked it against the itinerary, that I should be on my way to the Ngorongoro Crater as we speak. Unless a chimp shoved me off the mountain earlier in the week, in which case these pre-published videos will be on a whole new level of macabre.
Which, by the way, my shade would find utterly hysterical.
Before I left, I spent a few minutes answering some of the great questions you submitted for the Ask Dr. V segments. I was on my way to a PTA meeting and had a few minutes to kill, so I figured why not. This was way more interesting, by the way.
Do you have a clear understanding with your petsitters or boarding facilities when you leave on a trip? Would you want them to make that call for you?
With our surf lesson postponed until today, I didn’t want to waste this week doing no preparation at all with Brody. So we practiced getting acclimated to the board at home and in the pool.
I’m not a surfer myself, so I got on the board to get a feel for the balance involved. It’s quite a lot of work. With practice, I’m sure we’ll both improve, but in the meantime, I got him to sit on it for a few minutes and that alone is pretty cool.
. )
