Animal Insting

Mom thinks we might be getting a little pudgy, especially me, so she made us all go on a diet.  And Mom is trying to be on a diet, too.  None of us likes being on a diet because it's lots more fun to eat as much of everything as we want to.  Mom thinks that we are gaining weight because we don't get much exercise these days, due to the bad weather.  And also we changed to a new food which is called EVO Herring and Salmon, and maybe Mom is giving us more of it than we should get.  So now she has cut our rations back, and also we get fewer treats.  We are not horribly fat or anything like that, so it's not like Mom is starving us, but still it's no fun to have to eat less.

Friday night on Dogtown, which is one of my very favorite TV shows, as you know, they had a chihuahua/pug mix named Tuli who was really fat.  Tuli weighed 11 pounds, and the vet thought she should only weigh about 8 pounds.  So she had to go on a diet and get different food and eat carrots for treats and go for walks every day.  And after doing all that for quite a while, she lost weight, so the vet said it was okay for her to be adopted, and this nice lady adopted her and talked about how she had to be careful to keep Tuli from getting fat again because Tuli liked to do stuff like eat the cats' food.

The vet on Dogtown talked about how it's not healthy for dogs to be fat.  If they are just sort of fat, it's called being "overweight," but if they are really fat, it's called being "obese."  So I did a little research on the topic of fat dogs, and now I'm going to tell you what I learned.




Most of the websites I looked at said that about 25% of dogs in the U.S. are too fat, but one site said it might be more like 40% or 50%.  This is a really high number, and it just goes to show that dogs really enjoy eating, which of course is natural, because who doesn't?



Here are the main reasons why dogs get fat:
1.  They are fed too much
2.  They don't get enough exercise
3.  They have genes that tend to make them get fat easily
4.  They have some condition like hypothyroidism



There are some breeds of dogs that are more likely to be overweight than other breeds.  These breeds include labs, dachshunds, shelties, cockers, bassets, beagles, cairn terriers, and collies.  Also dogs that have been neutered or spayed need fewer calories than dogs that are intact.



Here's how you can tell if your dog is overweight or not:  In a dog who is just the right weight, you can feel the ribs easily through a thin layer of fat.  Also you can see that the dog has a waist and tuck-up.  The tuck-up is the tummy part of the dog from the ribs on back to the rear end of the dog.  Of course, some breeds are shaped lots different from other breeds, but those are the general rules about how to tell if dogs are fat.




Being fat can cause a whole ton of health problems for a dog.  Here's a list of the ones I found while doing my research:
 1.  You might get diabetes
 2.  Your bones and joints hurt more
 3.  You can have heart disease and high blood pressure
 4.  It's harder to breathe
 5.  You get tired quicker
 6.  You can't stand the heat
 7.  Your liver doesn't work as well
 8.  It's riskier to have surgery
 9.  It's harder to have puppies
10.  You can't digest your food as well
11.  You can get infections easier
12.  Your skin gets dry and flaky
13.  You're more likely to get cancer
14.  You probably won't live as long

When I read about all these scary things that can happen to fat dogs, I felt better about being on a diet.  Well, sort of.  Anyway, I know I don't want to have all those bad things happen to me, so I guess it's worth it to eat a little less, especially if Mom doesn't give me a choice in the matter!

A while back I published a list of the cheesiest Japanese movie monsters, which is one of my most viewed posts. In the spirit of Hollywood here is a sequel to that list.

There was the most amazing story in the paper yesterday morning about A DOG IN POLAND WHO WAS RESCUED FROM THE BALTIC SEA!  Mom and I were very excited to read this story, and then we looked for more information online, and we found some.  We also found some photos of the dog, and these photos belong to the Associated Press, so I don't know if it's okay to use them or not.  But probably not.  Anyway, if I get sent to jail, I hope there will be a computer there that I can use to keep writing my blog!

So here's the story of what happened.  Somehow this dog got out on an ice floe, which is what you call a chunk of ice that is smaller than an iceberg but bigger than an ice cube, and started floating down the Vistula River in Poland.  No one knows where the dog came from or when it started its float trip, but some people in a town called Grudziadz saw the dog on Saturday.

Grudziadz is about 60 miles from the sea.  Some firefighters there tried to rescue the dog, but they couldn't do it.  This was probably because there was so much ice in the river, and also the river is pretty wide, which you can see by looking at this photo that was taken of the Vistula from Grudziadz.  Except that this photo was taken in summer, when there wasn't any ice.

So the dog kept on floating downstream, and the weather was really, really cold, like sometimes it was 20 degrees below zero!  And the only reason the dog didn't freeze to death was because he had thick fur.  If he had been a polar bear, he could have just got off the ice floe and gone swimming in the river.  Polar bears are good swimmers, and they have very thick fur, and they like hanging out on ice floes.  But dogs don't generally like ice floes, so this dog probably realized that he had made a terrible mistake by getting on the ice in the first place, and I'll bet he was really scared.

Finally, the dog floated all the way to the Baltic Sea, and he floated like 15 miles out into the sea, and some scientists who were on a Polish ship saw him on Monday and they rescued him.  Except it wasn't easy for them to rescue the dog because he kept falling off the ice floe, and the scientists were afraid he would drown, but then he would come back up again.  So then one of the men got in a pontoon boat thing and he managed to get hold of the dog and drag him into the boat and save his life.

The boat crew dried off the dog and warmed him up and fed him, and he was very friendly and grateful to them.  They named him "Baltic," because they found him in the Baltic Sea and also the name of their ship is the Baltic.  The company that owns the ship sent him a nice squeaky toy and a dog dish and some dog food.  Then a veterinarian checked Baltic all over and she said that he was in very good condition, even though he had been floating around on the ice for several days.

The President of Poland, Mr. Lech Kaczynski, sent a letter to the crew of the ship.  And even though he has one of those funny Polish names that are hard to say and spell, we know that he is a good person because he is a dog owner.  So in the letter, he said that the men on the ship were very good people because they saved the dog, and that "Such gestures make our world a better one."

There are some people who have said that Baltic is their dog, but when they came to meet him, Baltic didn't act like he knew them.  If the real owner of Baltic doesn't come to get him, the ship's crew is going to adopt him, so we know that he will have a good home.  And that makes this story have a very happy ending!

This is the story of a real live famous dog who lived a long time ago in South Africa.  He was so brave and loyal that his owner wrote a book about him, and also there was a movie made about him.  So in that way, Jock was kind of like Greyfriars Bobby.

But anyway, here's the story of Jock.  He was born in a part of South Africa that is now called Kruger National Park.  Here's a map so that you can see where it is, just in case your South African geography is not too good.  Kruger National Park is way over on the right-hand side of the country, next door to Mozambique.  Except it wasn't a national park back when Jock was a puppy.

I wish I could tell you that Jock was a basenji, but if I told you that, it would be a lie.  What Jock was was a Staffordshire bull-terrier, which is what some people would call a pit bull.  He was the runt of his litter, and his breeders were going to drown him in a bucket of water because they didn't think a runt puppy would ever amount to anything.  But this man named Sir Percy Fitzpatrick saved Jock and adopted him as his very own dog.  Jock was very grateful for this, and he grew up to be faithful and obedient to his dad.  He was also a good fighter, a good hunter, and a good companion.

At that time, which was in the 1880s, some people in South Africa were very busy looking for gold because they knew it would make them rich if they found it. These miners were so busy that they did not have time to go get food and stuff, so Sir Percy and Jock took supplies to them in wagons that were pulled by oxen.  This was very hard work, and Sir Percy and Jock had many adventures while they were doing it.  Like for example, one time Jock got into a fight with a baboon, and Jock won the fight.

Another time Jock got kicked in the head by a kudu cow, and after that, he couldn't hear anything anymore.  I wasn't sure what a kudu cow looked like, so I found a picture of one and here it is.  The bulls have horn things, but the cows don't.

Jock and Sir Percy did this work for five years, and then all their oxen got infected by tsetse flies and died.  So Sir Percy had to find different work.  And after that, he got married and moved to Johannesburg.  He did not take Jock with him, maybe because he thought that Jock would not be happy living in the city.  Instead, he gave Jock to a trader who lived in Mozambique.

One night, a stray dog was raiding the trader's chickens, so Jock went out and killed the dog.  But it was dark out, and the trader thought Jock was the stray dog, and he shot him by mistake.  And this is how Jock died, which is a very sad part of Jock's story.

Sir Percy used to tell his children bedtime stories about all his adventures with Jock, and his friend, Rudyard Kipling, told Sir Percy that he should write them down in a book.  Mr. Kipling was a famous writer, so Sir Percy took his advice and wrote a book about Jock.  Then later on, a movie got made about Jock, too.

Mom thought it would be fun to read this book, so she went to Amazon.com and ordered a copy for us.  They had a very special collector's copy of the book there that cost $299.99, but Mom just bought us a used copy for $3.99.

If you go to Kruger National Park in South Africa now, you can stay at the Jock Safari Lodge, which was named for Jock of the Bushveld.  Here's a picture of this lodge, and if you want to see lots more pictures plus maybe plan a safari of your own to go there, you can look at this website:  http://www.sunsafaris.com/jocksafarilodge.html

I told Mom that we should all go on a trip to the Jock Safari Lodge, but she said we couldn't go there because it was expensive.  This is what she always says when I want to go on a trip someplace.  Oh well, I don't think there are very many basenjis in South Africa anyway, so it probably wouldn't be very interesting to go there.

But before I forget, I want to thank my basenji girlfriend, Zest, Superstar in Training, for suggesting that I write about Jock because otherwise I might never have heard of this famous and interesting African dog!