For animal lovers

[queenb]

I know this is a bit late, but I've been having computer trouble. About Unk's picture of the kitties in the window... I love it!
I leave the shades up for Rocky when I'm at work, and there's very little light on in the house, but it makes me feel so good to see that kitty silhouette in the window when I get home!
I'm still looking for just the right second kitty, too, because Rocky is so very happy to see me when I get home, I really think he would like for there to be a buddy there when I'm at work. Plus, I've really enjoyed having a pet again. I have loved having Rocky around from day one, and his personality is funnier all the time as he opens up. I cannot imagine why anyone got rid of him. If I get a second, I want a floppy lap cat that is maybe a tad cuddlier. L has never had cats, but likes Rocky a whole bunch, so that way we could have a cat apiece on Monday.

The only funny part of this incident was Henry's reaction. He (who constantly tries to snatch food but isn't brave enough to jump onto the table) was lurking behind my chair. I got a glance of Henry's face as he saw Simon scarfing down the roast beef.... Priceless.... His eyes were buldging out and I could tell that he was thinking "that could have been me"....

Doxie, maybe that was the only funny part about it to you. I found the whole thing rather entertaining!

[MRD]

Unk: kitties and bugs, great fun. Wait until they see a dragonfly! That's the big time!
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I saw 3 Jack Russell puppies in the pet store yesterday - $1800 each! OMG. I had no idea. But boy-oh-boy they were heartbreakers!

WOW!!!!

They go for around $450-$500 here. I have NEVER seen one for that much!

Rosie was a trade. My husband did some work for the guy that had her mom and dad and we traded some of the work for the puppy. Bogie is her son, so he was (relatively) free.

Doxie, I am because I can totally see that happening here. Things will be fine, mine will be well behaved and next thing you know, Rosies on the sofa eating food that someone's left on the side table while Bogie watches and feels guilty even though he's done nothing wrong.

Life with JRT's is never boring.

Thanks for the laugh first thing in the morning.

[misskitty]

doxie: That is hilarious!! It will be one of those treasured memories, I'm sure. Well, it probably already is!

MRD: That was great you got your jrt's on a trade. Puppies here in pet stores are ridiculously priced. We dont' have as many breeders I suppose. Many people go to the States for specific dog and cat breeds too!

queenb: That's nice you're thinking of another kitty!!

[misskitty]

sorry to double post but this is an article on a different note. I found it facinating! But my kitties don't wag their tails
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If You Want to Know if Spot Loves You So, It’s in His Tail!
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The Center for Neuroscience/University of Trieste
A Matter of Degree

Attachment 20164
Seeing its owner, the dog wagged harder to its right. Shown an unfamiliar dog, the bias was to the left.

Every dog lover knows how a pooch expresses its feelings.

The muscles on either side of the tail apparently reflect emotions like fear and love registering in the brain. Ears close to the head, tense posture, and tail straight out from the body means “don’t mess with me.” Ears perked up, wriggly body and vigorously wagging tail means “I am sooo happy to see you!”

But there is another, newly discovered, feature of dog body language that may surprise attentive pet owners and experts in canine behavior. When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left.

A study describing the phenomenon, “Asymmetric tail-wagging responses by dogs to different emotive stimuli,” appeared in the March 20 issue of Current Biology. The authors are Giorgio Vallortigara, a neuroscientist at the University of Trieste in Italy, and two veterinarians, Angelo Quaranta and Marcello Siniscalchi, at the University of Bari, also in Italy.

“This is an intriguing observation,” said Richard J. Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. It fits with a large body of research showing emotional asymmetry in the brain, he said.

Research has shown that in most animals, including birds, fish and frogs, the left brain specializes in behaviors involving what the scientists call approach and energy enrichment. In humans, that means the left brain is associated with positive feelings, like love, a sense of attachment, a feeling of safety and calm. It is also associated with physiological markers, like a slow heart rate.

At a fundamental level, the right brain specializes in behaviors involving withdrawal and energy expenditure. In humans, these behaviors, like fleeing, are associated with feelings like fear and depression. Physiological signals include a rapid heart rate and the shutdown of the digestive system.

Because the left brain controls the right side of the body and the right brain controls the left side of the body, such asymmetries are usually manifest in opposite sides of the body. Thus many birds seek food with their right eye (left brain/nourishment) and watch for predators with their left eye (right brain/danger).

In humans, the muscles on the right side of the face tend to reflect happiness (left brain) whereas muscles on the left side of the face reflect unhappiness (right brain).

Dog tails are interesting, Dr. Davidson said, because they are in the midline of the dog’s body, neither left nor right. So do they show emotional asymmetry, or not?

To find out, Dr. Vallortigara and his colleagues recruited 30 family pets of mixed breed that were enrolled in an agility training program. The dogs were placed in a cage equipped with cameras that precisely tracked the angles of their tail wags. Then they were shown four stimuli through a slat in the front of the cage: their owner; an unfamiliar human; a cat; and an unfamiliar, dominant dog.

In each instance the test dog saw a person or animal for one minute, rested for 90 seconds and saw another view. Testing lasted 25 days with 10 sessions per day.

When the dogs saw their owners, their tails all wagged vigorously with a bias to the right side of their bodies, Dr. Vallortigara said. Their tails wagged moderately, again more to the right, when faced with an unfamiliar human. Looking at the cat, a four-year-old male whose owners volunteered him for the experiment, the dogs’ tails again wagged more to the right but in a lower amplitude.

When the dogs looked at an aggressive, unfamiliar dog — a large Belgian shepherd Malinois — their tails all wagged with a bias to the left side of their bodies.

Thus when dogs were attracted to something, including a benign, approachable cat, their tails wagged right, and when they were fearful, their tails went left, Dr. Vallortigara said. It suggests that the muscles in the right side of the tail reflect positive emotions while the muscles in the left side express negative ones.

While some researchers have argued that only humans show brain asymmetry — based on the evolution of language in the left brain — strong left and right biases are showing up in the brains of many so-called simpler creatures, said Lesley Rogers, a neuroscientist who studies brain asymmetry at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia.

Honeybees learn better when using their right antenna, she said. Male chameleons show more aggression, reflected as changes in body color, when they look at another chameleon with their left eye. A toad is more likely to jump away when a predator is introduced to its left visual field (right brain/fear). The same toad prefers to flick its tongue to the right side when lashing out at a cricket (left brain/ nourishment).

The Tail's Tale Chicks prefer to use their left eye to search for food and right eye to watch for predators overhead, Dr. Rogers said. But when chicks are raised in the dark, they do not develop normal brain asymmetry. In trying to eat and watch for hawks overhead, such nonlateralized chicks become confused and vulnerable to attack.

Sheep, which are good at recognizing individual faces, use the right sides of their brains for knowing a Dolly from a Molly.

Chimpanzee brains are asymmetrical in the same ways as human brains, said William D. Hopkins, a researcher at the Yerkes National Primate Center and psychologist at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. When chimps are excited, they tend to scratch themselves on the left side of their bodies, reflecting strong negative emotions, he said. And left-handed chimps are more fearful of novel stimuli than right-handers. Their dominant right brains may make them more cautious.

Brain asymmetry for approach and withdrawal seems to be an ancient trait, Dr. Rogers said. Thus it must confer some sort of survival advantage on organisms.

Animals that can do two important things at the same time, like eat and watch for predators, would be better off, she said. And animals with two brain hemispheres could avoid duplication of function, making maximal use of neural tissue.

The asymmetry may also arise from how major nerves in the body connect up to the brain, said Arthur D. Craig, a neuroanatomist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix. Nerves that carry information from the skin, heart, liver, lungs and other internal organs are inherently asymmetrical, he said. Thus information from the body that prompts an animal to slow down, eat, relax and restore itself is biased toward the left brain. Information from the body that tells an animal to run, fight, breathe faster and look out for danger is biased toward the right brain.

In this way, Dr. Craig said, animals are naturally designed to cope with changing environments.


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/24/sc...70&oref=slogin

[just1paul]

misskitty - Tootles and Gracie don't wag their tails? WOW! Joeys never stops even when he sleeps his is going.

[prhoshay]

My Miss Chloe likes to beat me in the face with hers while she's blocking the keyboard or computer screen. Non-stop. I think this may be one of her ways of getting me to play "Tug My Tail".

[misskitty]

misskitty - Tootles and Gracie don't wag their tails? WOW! Joeys never stops even when he sleeps his is going.

They don't walk and wag them like a dog. But they do flip flop them around a lot.

[doxie]

Doxie, maybe that was the only funny part about it to you. I found the whole thing rather entertaining!

I thought that peacefully eating my sandwich and working on my puzzle would have been more entertaining! Oh - I finished the puzzle today and three pieces are missing. Guessing that those will turn up in the yard in the next few days. Rocky sounds adorable. Best wishes to you if you decide to get him a friend!

Doxie, I can totally see that happening here. Things will be fine, mine will be well behaved and next thing you know, Rosies on the sofa eating food that someone's left on the side table while Bogie watches and feels guilty even though he's done nothing wrong.

Life with JRT's is never boring.

Thanks for the laugh first thing in the morning.

Gotta love those little terrierists! Simon (to my knowledge) has only jumped on that table three times. The first time, he ate the toppings off an entire large pizza (left the crust) and the second time he was sadly disappointed to find NO food on the table (another puzzle, but no food) - that time he just sat down on the table.

doxie: That is hilarious!! It will be one of those treasured memories, I'm sure. Well, it probably already is!

Simon is a really funny little dog, but, after almost 14 years of dealing with him, I think that I'd treasure the memory of him curled up and sleeping more often. I really enjoyed the article that you posted about tail-wagging. Although, I try not to get too close to that end of either Simon or Henry, I do know that Henry's tail wags mostly to the right and Simon doesn't really have a tail.

[MRD]

Waldo wags his whole body and is always happy. I will have to watch to see if I can figure out the left and right thing. The other two wag theirs a lot too.

I was amazed to find out people are willing to travel for certain pets. Last year I met a couple in the Atlanta airport that had flown to Florida for the day and were on their way back, as they had picked up a lab puppy in Florida from a specific breeder.
I love my dogs, but I am not spending that kind of money on one.

We were fortunate that Rosie came from a guy that was not a professional breeder. He had 2 JRT's and bred them only 2 times. We got Rosie from the 2nd litter. At the time, he was selling them for $400. We sold Rosie's puppies for about $350.

Doxie, I am about the missing puzzle pieces.

[katgib13]

I have a 6 year old Min Pin who climbs up on furniture (you can't sit anything down for a second) to steal food and tosses some down to my old Dachshund. It's the funniest thing. She isn't as young and agile as he is, so he gets to be the culprit most of the time. Although, she is the one who will climb on the table. He knows better...lol We have to be very careful about pushing the chairs in or she will hop right up there. She won't share like Zeus does, though. She's stingy.

She is starting to develop cataracts and now, I think she is starting to go deaf. I'm really hoping that in her old age, she is just ignoring us...because it will kill me to have to put her down. We rescued her 3 years ago from a family getting evicted. By rescue, I mean she was infested with fleas, had a hernia and a huge mole on her back that needed removed. They really didn't take very good care of her. KatyBug is a really great little dog. She is spunky and she mother hens poor Zeus to death. He loves it, until....he notices someone watching him get loves. Then he growls at her.

I'm a sucker for animals.