Dogs, cats, or rodents?
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Rodents are the closest to humans in terms of behavior so I’ll go with one of the other two.
nice. my take is that there is nothing good that can be said about rodents. but that doesn’t mean i disagree.
Hey, my friend with her new pet hamster would beg to disagree!
Tough call between dogs and cats, no room for rodents. I’ve always loved dogs, owned several at different times in my life and never forgotten any of them. We’ve also had cats, and they are as lovable, and loving, in my opinion, as dogs are. But they are different.
Dogs require more attention and exercise and they need interaction. That’s fine with me, but I travel for work and can’t maintain that level of care. Cats are currently the mainstay at our house, three of them, and each is different and wonderful in his or her own way.
I do love having pets, but no rodents, thanks!
All.
Including reptiles, insects, and of course the most fascinating of all…birds. With birds you can sit in your yard, or at the beach, or in the forest, or in the desert, or in my case, my den, and gaze in wonder at the most amazing creatures to ever walk (then fly) the earth…..the dinosaurs.
Everything. The only way to truly grasp how sweet life is, is to study it in all its forms.
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Just so.
Your comment about “life in all its forms” brings to mind something interesting that happened at our house this past year. We live in the country, and every year, in the spring, we have a seemingly infinite number of all types of critters. One annual rite we have is watching the zipper spiders spin their webs and, for several weeks, catch, and devour all sorts of flying bugs. It is both a fascinating and a gruesome thing to watch. Last year one built a large web adjacent to, and attached to, a window box of flowers we had hanging on our porch rail. We would both stop every day to take an inventory of what it had caught, as it laid in wait back in the flowers or out at the edge the web. It always seemed that the large zipper spiders were at the top of the food chain in their world. They were large, and deadly to anything flying by. Last fall I came home from work one day and noticed that the spider’s web was looking kind of ragged. They are meticulous about immediately repairing any break caused by flailing prey which gets caught in the web, so I was suspicious that something had happened to it. As I looked around in the flowers, suddenly I noticed a 6 inch long praying mantis, holding the half devoured body of our zipper spider. Our little buddy was no more. But we had noticed that in recent weeks, the spider had spun three egg sacs, which were hidden in the flowers of the window box. Later in the fall, after the frost, I took the eggs sacs out and stored them in a jar in a cool place, and this spring I set the sacs back into this year’s window boxes, and waited. A few weeks later I came home to hundreds of microscopically small baby zipper spiders which had emerged from the first egg sac. Over the next 10 days the other two sacs hatched, and they also had a similar number of little spiders. Over the next few days, they all started to disperse, and within a week all traces of them were gone from the window boxes. But I look forward, later this summer, to possibly seeing one of these little guys show up one day and start spinning a web on my porch, just like its momma did last year. And once again, the world will have come full circle on my little patch of green earth.
. . . observation, recording, and description worthy of any scientist/naturalist. Well done!
What a great story, Mike.
I grew up around fruit groves, usually avocado. When I moved to my current place many years ago, I missed the huge orb weaver spiders that live in the avocado groves, called (natch) grove spiders. Their webs are massive, strands of 15-20 feet between trees are common. We did a project, and lo and behold, they had grove spiders in their trees. Every week I would catch one and bring it home and release it. These are big spiders, but they only live a season, with the female laying eggs to over winter, and then she dies.
Every year since I released those spiders, they come back in the spring, grow through the summer, then disappear. Walking through my years in the fall, you have avoid their webs hitting your face.
It’s been 20 years now, and my wife and I still get excited watching them through the window.
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Speaking of flying dinosaurs:
Baby Green Heron
Thanks!
What more does a person need?
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Cats.
Ardvarks
Rodents no doubt among those three, but don’t forget scrub jays – definitely the smartest and funniest animal pals I’ve found.
. . . while fishing (them and me!). AKA, water ouzels, but ’round here, they’re dippers.
I don’t eat any of them.
OK, I’ll bite – and piss off cat lovers.
If you have cats, you will not have lizards, because cats kill them for fun. Lizards eat roaches and silverfish, among other things — so guess what you get a lot of when you have cats . . .
Yes, cats climb in your lap and purr, then go outside and kill songbirds for fun. Cats are the republicans of domesticated animals . . . .
This is so true. Someone in England did a survey on cat predation of birds awhile back and the numbers were shocking and astronomical. I have three rescues, only one is a hunter and so only allowed out after dark for a few hours when birds are safely in their nests.
So true — just google “cat predation on birds” — the scholarly research is chilling (unless you hate the sound of a songbird in the early morning).
While feral cats are considered the biggest threat — how did they become feral?
The same way pigs and horses were introduced, then became feral. It does not change the damage they do to the environment.
You are dead to me.
Hey – reformed cat lover here. I have very, very fond memories of Boogs, and Schat (Schat slept on my wife’s belly – the only time – the night my wife became pregnant with out first born), and Lovie, and Princess — just never understood the damage they caused.
I like cats, but you are correct. Very funny, too.
Lagomorphs! They’re so cute!
I never liked cats as a kid. In college, I had friends with a cat. I sometimes wonder if that cat’s purpose in the universe was to change my mind about cats.
In a house full of cat lovers, that animal would find me and sit in my lap, purring. When I crashed after a study session, or a drinking session, I would awaken to find it nestled next to me on the couch.
I’m a dog person, but cats have earned my respect and love.
PS, before you discard the idea of rodents, pet rats can be remarkably well-trained and friendly. You can look up videos online. Kids build obstacle courses for them and have lots of fun. I would rather my teenage students spend time training a rat than waste away staring at their phones and video games.
Cats, and mine have always been indoor only, so the birds are safe from them. My Schooner did catch and eventually kill a wild mouse that got into my basement, but tha’s a one-off of predation among my tribe.
Dogs are also cool, though, in their different way, and while I’ve never been a canine owner I do speak fluent dog and enjoy them.
A horse can be a delightful pet, too, even after its usefulness for riding is over. Expensive, though.
There’s a huge mulberry tree across the driveway from my condo, and this year it’s carrying a bumper crop of berries. All day masses of birds twitter through the branches gorging themselves — lots of robins, some cedar waxwings, catbirds, and assorted little brown birds.
All our cats are indoor only.
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Unless you live out in the country it’s crazy to let cats wander; too many ways they can die horribly. Even in the country there are roads with fast drivers, not to mention predators like foxes, coyotes, and dogs allowed to run free by careless owners. Barn cats usually learn quickly to stay fairly near their base, doing their rodent control job.
And then there are all those lawn pesticides/herbicides…
They just don’t live as long as an indoor cat. Life is tough out there. Most `barn cats’ are not pets. They are working animals, that have a job. Any farmer will tell you (I married a dairymans daughter, and cats have a job on every dairy) that if they don’t do their job, or they go after the farm animals, they are replaced with a cat that will. `Replaced’ is a euphemism.
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Dogs, of course.
Don’t be like Trump. Visit a pound and fall in love.