Animal Insting

Today is the last day of June, so it's my last chance this year to write about June bugs.  Mom said there might still be some June bugs around in July, but sometimes she's wrong about stuff like that, so I think I'd better go ahead and write about June bugs today.

Anyway, when we go out on the patio at night, there are June bugs there because they like to come to where the floodlights are.  Gabe and I think it's fun to catch the June bugs and eat them, but Gabe likes to do this more than I do.  In my opinion, June bugs are not nearly as yummy as cicadas, so I am saving most of my bug-catching energy for cicada season.

The scientific name for June bugs is Phyllophaga, which is Greek for "leaf eaters."  If you don't like the Greek name, you can also call June bugs "June beetles" or "May beetles."  In some places, the June bugs are shiny green, but the ones we have around here are a boring brown color.

When the June bugs get tired of eating leaves, which happens in July or August, they mate and then the girl June bugs start laying eggs in the ground.  Each one of them lays about 60 to 75 eggs, and it takes them a couple of weeks to lay them all.

Then after a while, the eggs hatch, and make little white worm things called grubs.  The grubs keep growing, and when they get bigger, they have to shed their old skin and make a new one.  Meanwhile, they are busy eating the roots of the grass in your yard and maybe in your flower bed, too.  Mom thinks grub worms are yucky, and she thinks June bugs are yucky, too.  But the grub worms are the yuckiest of all because they do lots of damage by eating all those roots.

Anyway, the grubs turn into pupae before winter comes, which means they wrap up in a cocoon kind of thing to keep warm and sleep through the cold weather.  Then in the spring, they come out and become June bugs, and the whole thing starts all over again.

Mom wishes that Gabe and I would eat up more of the June bugs, but like I said before, I much prefer cicadas.  I told Mom that she should get a chicken if she wants something that will eat all the bugs and grubs.  In fact, I think that having some chickens around would be an excellent idea, but Mom does not agree, for some reason, so I guess we will just have bugs and grubs and no chickens.

Today I will tell you about another dog breed that started out in Africa, and that breed is called the Boerboel.  Mostly, you can find Boerboels in South Africa because they were bred by the Boers, which is what the early Dutch settlers were called.  The Boers were farmers, and they needed dogs to guard their livestock and their families, so they bred dogs that were exactly right for this purpose.

Nobody knows exactly which dog breeds were mixed together to make the Boerboel, but there was probably some mastiff and bulldog and other European dogs, plus dogs that the native people had.  The first dog that might have started the whole breed was a dog that Jan van Riebeeck brought to the Cape when he came in 1652 and founded the first settlement.

Anyway, Boerboels are really big dogs, like mastiffs, and they weigh between 150 and 200 pounds.  They are very brave and loyal, and there are stories about Boerboels killing leopards.  But besides being fierce and strong, they have to also be very gentle with children and other family members.  And they have to be smart so that they can tell which animal or person is a threat and which one isn't.  Boerboels can also be used to herd livestock and to track game, so they are kind of a dog of all trades.

Nowadays, more Boerboels are just family pets instead of being working dogs on farms.  Since they are such big dogs, they need enough space to run around and get some exercise every day.  You should only get a Boerboel that has been bred to have a good temperament and that has been well socialized as a puppy.  Otherwise, you could end up with a really big, scary dog that bites people.

Lots of people in South Africa like to breed Boerboels, and they send the puppies to other countries where people would like to own a Boerboel.  But they don't send them to Denmark.  And the reason for this is that the Boerboel got banned in Denmark this year because some people think it is a dog that is bred for fighting.

In some places, Boerboels can be entered in dog shows, but I could only find one kennel club that lets you do that so far, and that is the Kennel Union of Southern Africa.  Which is why if you want to have a Boerboel as a show dog, you should probably move to Pretoria or someplace like that!

Well, as you know, I have a very exciting life, and now I'm going to tell you all the latest exciting things that have happened.  First of all, Mom has been leaving the door open to the cat room sometimes so that we dogs can look at the cats through the child gate.  Here's a picture of me looking at Chloe.  She is very bold, and she rolls over and shows me her fat tummy and acts like she is not afraid of me at all.  And sometimes she hisses at me.

If you are a dog and you live in Iran, you should leave the country immediately!  At least that's my advice.  And the reason you should do this is because a big, important religious man named Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi said that people in Iran shouldn't have dogs as pets.  I think it's very mean and unfair of him to say this, and if I ever meet up with him, I will tell him so and maybe even bite him on the leg!

Of course, if I did this, the Ayatollah would send me to doggy jail, which is what he started doing with pet dogs back in 2007, when he first told people that they shouldn't have dogs.  But people kept getting dogs anyway because dogs are people's best friends, and many Iranians were smart enough to know this.  So now this Grand Ayatollah guy made a fatwah, which is a religious ruling, about how people can't have dogs.  And the reason he gives for this is that dogs are unclean.  Which should be an easy problem to fix if you just give all the dogs a bath, but Mom says that "unclean" means something different when you are talking about religion.


And another thing the religious guy said was that having dogs as pets was what people do in the West, and that Iran shouldn't be like the West.  America is in the West, and so are Canada and Europe and South America and Australia and New Zealand.  People who live in all these places know about the wonderfulness of dogs, so they have them in their houses and stuff.  The Ayatollah says that "There are lots of people in the West who love their dogs more than their wives and children."  Which may be true, but I say what's wrong with that?


Anyway, here's something interesting about the doggy fatwah:  it doesn't apply to people who are nomads and wander around with their sheep and goats looking for places for them to eat grass, because these people need dogs to help with herding and guarding their flocks.  In the Iranian language, these dogs are called sage ashaayeri, which means "nomads' dogs."  They come in a bunch of different colors, and some have short hair, and others have medium hair.


The nomads who live in the west part of Iran have most of these dogs.  They are about the size of a border collie, and mostly their job is to guard the animals and also to guard the people's tents.  So these dogs are very fierce with strangers, and they can fight wild animals like wolves, bears, and wild boars.

Anyway, if I ever go to Iran, which I am most definitely not planning to do, I will find some nice nomad family to live with because I don't want to get arrested and thrown into doggy jail!

Tasmanian Tigers are sometimes called Tasmanian Wolves, which is confusing, because how can an animal be both a tiger and a wolf?  And what's even more confusing is that the Tasmanian Tiger isn't really a tiger or a wolf either one.  And if you want my opinion, it was all this confusion that helped make this poor animal extinct!

Everyone says that President Harry S. Truman is the person who said this excellent quote, so I thought he must have been a really good person who liked dogs a lot and had a whole big pack of them in the White House.  But I was shocked to learn that he didn't have any dogs at all!  I can't really explain why this is true, because Mr. Truman was from Missouri, and that should mean that he was the kind of man who would love dogs, but I guess he didn't.  Mom says that you can be a good person and still not like dogs, but I think she might be lying about this.

Anyway, I will go ahead and tell you some stuff about Mr. Truman, just because I went to all the trouble to do some in-depth research on him.  And what I learned was that he was born on a farm and mostly grew up there, but he didn't really want to be a farmer, so when World War I started, he joined the Army and was an artillery officer.  At the end of the war, he married a woman named Bess Wallace.  He had been in love with her for a long time, but she said she didn't want to marry a farmer.  But now that Mr. Truman wasn't a farmer anymore, she married him.  Later on, they had a daughter, and her name was Margaret.

Mr. Truman did a whole bunch of different stuff before he got to be president.  He and Mrs. Truman lived in a big white house in Independence, Missouri, and now it's like a museum, and you can go on a tour inside it, which Mom has done.  But back in the early days, Mr. Truman wasn't famous and neither was his house.  For a while, he and a friend had a store that sold hats and other things for men to wear.  Then later he was a county commissioner, but I'm not sure what that is.  And after that, he got elected to the U.S. Senate.

Mr. Truman was in the Senate for several years, and then he ended up being the vice-president.  The president was named Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he had been the president for many years, and he was getting kind of old and sick.  Then one day he just suddenly died, and Mr. Truman became the president.

So the Truman family moved into the White House in Washington, but they did not have a First Dog, which was a very sad state of affairs.  Then at Christmastime in 1947, a woman from Missouri sent Mr. Truman a cocker spaniel puppy as a gift.  And the puppy's name was Feller.  But Mr. Truman did not want a dog, so he gave the puppy away to the White House doctor.  This made a lot of people angry, and they said that President Truman was "anti-canine," which it seems to me like he was, too, but Mr. Truman did not really care what people thought about this important issue.

Then later on, the Postmaster General wanted to give Margaret an Irish setter puppy, and Mr. Truman let her have it.  Margaret named this puppy Mike because it was a good Irish name.  But Mike was kind of wild and crazy, like puppies are, and even after he grew up some, he was still that way, so he was always getting into trouble.  And the White House guards kept feeding Mike candy, and that made him sick with rickets.  So after he got well again, the Trumans gave him to a family that lived on a farm in Virginia.

After Mr. Truman stopped being the president, he and Mrs. Truman went back to Independence to live in the white house there, and they lived there until they died.  Mr. Truman used to like to go out for a walk every day, but he didn't have a dog to go walking with him, and this is very sad, if you want my opinion.

Some people have done a bunch of research on the quote about how if you want a friend in Washington, you should get a dog.  But they can't find anything to prove that Mr. Truman really said that, so probably he didn't.  It seemed like the kind of thing he might say, though.   But here's a real quote that he did say, and I like it a lot:  "Never kick a fresh turd on a hot day."

Today is what's called Midsummer or the Summer Solstice or the First Day of Summer.  I don't know how it can be both the middle of summer and the first of summer at the same time.  Frankly, I think it's very confusing, and I am not going to try to explain it.  I am just telling you what I learned while doing my research.

Maybe you remember when I told you all about the Winter Solstice.  Well, the Summer Solstice is the opposite of that because now the top part of the earth is leaning toward the sun, and this means that it's hot outside and also that there is more daylight, so you can mow your grass at 8 p.m. and still mostly see what you are doing.

In some countries, the Summer Solstice is a really big deal, like especially in Scandinavia and other places in Europe.  In some of these countries, Midsummer is actually a Big Official Holiday where everybody gets to stay home from work and celebrate.  And the main ways that people celebrate are by building bonfires and by dancing around maypoles and by drinking.

In Sweden, for example, people decorate their houses with flowers and leaves and stuff, and they also decorate a maypole.  Of course, it's kind of weird to call it a "may" pole in June, so another name for it is "midsummer pole."    Here's a painting that was made by a Swedish artist named Anders Zorn in 1897, and it shows people dancing to celebrate Midsummer.

And here are some modern Swedish people dancing around a midsummer pole.

Another place where Midsummer is a big deal is in England, like especially in Cornwall, which is that little pointy part that sticks out at the bottom left.  People like to make bonfires there on top of hills or where there are some old castle ruins.

Also there's this place called Stonehenge, where people put a whole bunch of humongous rocks in a circle thousands and thousands of years ago, and now nobody remembers why the rocks were put there.  But it may have something to do with figuring out when it's the solstice, so people go there and have lots of parties and stuff.

The real solstice is on June 21, but a lot of Midsummer celebrations are on June 23 and 24.  The reason for this is because the solstice was a very ancient pagan festival, and it had to do with scaring away all the evil spirits and also with making all the crops grow.  But when Christianity came to Europe, the solstice got made into more of a celebration of St. John the Baptist, who was supposedly born on June 24.  So the pagan stuff and the religious stuff got kind of mixed up together, and that's why not everybody has parties on the exact same day.

Anyway, for dogs and other animals with fur, what the summer solstice means is that it's time to get busy shedding your old winter coat and growing in your new one.  And this is because before you know it, cold weather will be here again, and you will want a nice, thick coat to keep you warm!

Guess what!  We have a brand-new air-conditioner in our back yard, and here's how we got it.  Yesterday morning we had to get up sort of early, and then Mom fed us Breakfast of Dogs.  And after that, she took Barry and Mel to doggy daycare.  And the reason she did that was because she knew the air-conditioner man was coming, and she didn't want Barry and Mel to bite him.

So then the man came, and his name was Harold.  He spent a long, long time working on the air-conditioner, like all day.  First he had to take out the old air-conditioner, which was ugly and green.  Also, it was 27 years old, which in dog years is 187.  And because it was so old, we were afraid it would stop working at any minute.   Here's a picture of the old air-conditioner sitting sideways on a cart.

Then another man came in a big truck and brought the new air-conditioner, which is all pretty and shiny and not ugly like the old one.  But before the new one could get hooked up, Harold had to do a bunch of stuff in the basement, like put in a new coil, which is a big, sort of triangular thing with lots of copper tubes that wind around in it.  And to put in the coil, he had to cut a bunch of metal to go around it.  And then he also made some tube things go out through the wall to the shiny, new air-conditioner outside, and also some electric wires.  It was all very complicated, so I mostly took a nap while it was going on.

After a while, it started getting hot in the house, like especially upstairs.  And Mom put a fan in the cats' room, but they were scared and mostly hid under the covers all day.  Mom even opened up the door and let me and Gabe and Charlie sniff at each other through the child gate, but then Charlie went and hid, and I didn't get to sniff him anymore.

What Mom did all day was first she wrote some emails, and then she drilled holes in some pots, and then she repotted some of her plants.  Then it got to be 5:30, so Mom had to go pick up Mel and Barry from doggy daycare and bring them home.  And she put them in our bedroom where we sleep, and I went in there with them, and Mom turned on the ceiling fan for us, and we were hungry because we hadn't had any supper.

Then we had to wait a really long time for Harold, the air-conditioner man, to go away, like until almost 9:30.  But after that, we had nice, cool air in our house, and we got to eat Supper of Dogs, so we didn't starve to death after all, which is what I thought might happen to us.

So that's the story of how we got our new air-conditioner.  And Mom said I should also put in a picture of our dumb garden gnome because Mom thinks he looks really cute in the garden.

Personally, I like the garden dog head better, so I will show you a picture of it, too.  It would be better if it were a basenji head, but at least it's not a gnome!