Animal Insting

Okay, now I'm going to tell you more about dog bites, just like I promised you, but I found a ton of information on the internet about this topic, and I can't fit it all into one blog entry, so you will have to be happy with however much I decide to write.  Ha!

First of all, if you want to avoid getting bitten by a dog, there are some situations that, if you see them, you should stay away from them, and here's what they are:

1.  If a dog is alone in its own yard, and its humans are not there.  In 2008, 78% of the people killed were by dogs in their own yards.

2.  The breeds of dogs that have killed the most people are pit bulls, rottweilers, akitas, and chows.  Which is not to say that other kinds of dogs won't bite you.  But in 2008, 65% of fatalities were from pit bull attacks.


3.  If there are a whole pack of dogs, stay away, because a gang of dogs get a thing called "pack mentality," where if one dog decides it would be fun to bite someone, the other dogs all decide to do it, too.

4.  Dogs that are chained or tied up are three times more likely to bite.


5.  Male dogs are lots more likely to attack than female dogs are, and dogs that aren't neutered can be the most vicious of all.

6.  A dog that just came to live in a new home is more likely to bite for the first two months he is there.  Or if a new person comes to live in a home where a dog is already living, it's more likely that the dog will bite the person during the first 60 days or so.

Some cities have tried to solve problem #2 by making laws against owning a certain type of dog.  This is called breed-specific legislation (BSL).  Pit bulls are the breed that is probably banned most often, but sometimes other breeds are, too.  A lot of people have spent a lot of time arguing about BSL, because it doesn't really seem to work very well, plus it's unfair to the dogs because a lot of times it's their owners who are the ones who make them turn into mean dogs who will attack and kill people.  Anyway, it's all very complicated, and I don't want to use up a lot of blog space right now talking about it.  But I will just mention that at least 25 different breeds have been involved in 238 people getting killed by dogs.


Many times, the people who get bitten are children.  There are several reasons for this, like for instance that children might not know how to behave nicely around dogs, so the dogs get scared and bite.  Also, if kids start running, a dog might think they are some kind of prey to chase, and so they will go after them.  And it's sad but true that children are short, so their faces are much closer to a dog's teeth, and this is why 65% of bites are on a child's head or neck.


Here are some scary numbers about kids and dogs:  50% of dog attacks involve children under age 12, 70% of dog-bite fatalities are children under 10, boys are more likely to get bitten than girls, and babies that nobody is watching are 370 times more likely to be killed by a dog than an adult is.  All of which means that if you are the parent of a young child, you should always supervise the child with dogs, and also you should teach the child how to act around dogs.

Okay, so here are some things humans do that make dogs sometimes bite them:

1.  Taking away the dog's food or a chewy or something the dog doesn't want to give up.
2.  Coming into the dog's territory or threatening the dog's pack members, including human pack members.
3.  Trying to handle a dog who is sick or injured.
4.  Approaching a dog who is feeling scared and insecure.


5.  Using rude and threatening body language, like staring directly at the dog or reaching over the dog's head to pet him or hugging the dog.
6.  Acting like prey.  For instance, if the person runs away or jerks their hand away or somehow makes the dog think about chasing and attacking him.
7.  Doing something that the dog thinks is an attack, like stepping on him or pulling his tail or waking him when he's asleep.

So don't do any of these things, okay?  Especially with dogs that you don't know very well.  Personally, I hate it when people come up and try to love on me like I'm their BFF, even though we've never met before.  And sometimes people who do stuff like this will say, "Dogs like me!" Which is a stupid thing to say, if you ask me.

Oh, and if a dog growls at you, he is just being nice enough to let you know that he is not happy with the  current situation, and if you keep doing whatever you are doing, he may have to snap at you in order to make his point more clear.  So you should just be glad that he gave you a warning rather than biting you with no warning at all, which is what some dogs have learned to do because people scolded them for growling.

Well, that's pretty much it, except that I will just say that dogs bite because biting is the only way we have of defending ourselves.  If we had hand guns, we wouldn't need to bite.  Any dog will bite if pushed far enough, but with some dogs it takes a lot of pushing, and with others, not much at all.  So if you think that your dog would never, ever bite, you should maybe think again!

Well, yesterday I was so busy telling you about my Big, Scary Adventure that I didn't have time to tell you about Mom's adventure, which happened on Monday.  And Mom's adventure was that she got BIT BY A DOG when she was at the Humane Society.  And the way it happened was that Mom had been playing with dogs for a while, and then she got ready to go eat lunch, and she went in the Quarantine Room, where she is not really supposed to go, but she just stepped inside the door so she could tell Aunt Joyce, who takes care of the dogs on Mondays, that she was going to lunch.

A dog who is thinking about biting someone!

And Aunt Joyce was cleaning out runs in the Quarantine Room, and she had one dog out of his run because she was cleaning the run.  And this dog's name was Mars, and he was  a feral dog.  So when Mom came in the room, which is a pretty small room, Mars was in a corner, kind of behind a big trash can, and he backed up even farther and barked at Mom, but she is used to having dogs bark at her.  So she just said something soothing and cheerful like, "Oh, are you afraid of me?" and then she didn't pay any more attention to Mars because she was just going to talk to Aunt Joyce, but all of a sudden, Mars ran out from behind the trash can and bit Mom really hard on the knee and then ran back behind the trash can again.

Mom says it feels worse than it looks!

Mom said it really, really hurt when Mars bit her, and she backed out of the room in a hurry, and Aunt Joyce pushed the trash can over in front of Mars to make sure he didn't run out again.  So Mom had this kind of puncture wound on the left side of her knee and a bruise on the back of her knee, from the two places where Mars' canine teeth hit her.  And the wound was bleeding and it hurt a lot whenever Mom bent her knee.  Then Aunt Joyce and Aunt Jessie, who takes care of the kitties, helped Mom clean the wound and bandage it and everything like that.

Then pretty soon everybody at the shelter started finding out about how Mom got bit, and Mom kept saying it was all her fault because she shouldn't have gone into the Quarantine Room.  Then Aunt Karen, who is in charge of all the adoptions and stuff, told Mom that Mars was supposed to go to another group where someone was good at working with feral dogs.  But after Mars bit Mom, he now has to be kept at the Humane Society for another 10 days.  Mom thinks Aunt Karen was mad at her, even though Aunt Karen said she wasn't, but Mom is on the Board of Directors, so Aunt Karen can't say what she really thinks.  Ha!

Anyway, when Mom came home from the shelter, she walked kind of funny, and all of us dogs sniffed at her leg a lot.  Then in the evening, her knee hurt more, and she really, really walked funny, especially when she was going up or down the stairs, and that made all of us kind of nervous because we were afraid she would fall down and land on one of us and crush us.  So mostly, Mom sat around all evening with ice packs on her knee and watched TV.  Then we all went to bed.

Oh, and remember when I hurt my toenail last May and then it got all icky, and Aunt Cheryl gave Mom some cephalexin for me to take?  Well, Mom still had some of that left, so she started taking it after she got her dog bite.  And then on Tuesday, Mom went to see the doctor, and the doctor gave her a prescription for more cephalexin and also gave her a tetanus shot because Mom was supposed to have got one last year, but she forgot to get it.  And yesterday Mom said her knee felt better, and she even mowed the front yard.  And she doesn't limp anymore except maybe a little when she is going up or down stairs.  So we think Mom is going to be all normal again soon, which is good because we don't like it when Mom is not being her regular self.

Gabe's toothwork!

This was not the first time Mom got bitten by a dog.  Mostly, it was Gabe who bit her, and he's done it twice.  The last time he bit her was right after he got attacked by the greyhounds, so he was hurting and all crazy and snarly like he gets after he's in a fight, and Mom tried to unhook his leash, and he bit her on the hand.  But that was her own fault because she knows how he gets, so she should have been more careful.

Well, I was going to tell you a whole bunch of facts and other fascinating information about dog bites, but I have already spent way too much time just writing about Mom's dog bite.  So tomorrow I will try to tell you all the other stuff, like for instance that 4.7 million dog bites happen every year in the U.S.  And now, after Mom's horrible adventure, that number is 4.7 million and one!

OMG!  You will never believe what happened to me yesterday!  In fact, if I had known it was going to happen, I would never have got out of bed.  But the day started out just like any other day -- well, except that Gabe peed in Mom's bed again -- so I was fooled into thinking that it was going to be just a regular day.

As you know, I don't like water much, so I am not too terribly interested in things that live in the water, except for maybe fish, because our dog food is made of fish.  And the kind of fish it's mostly made of is herring and salmon.  But I'm not going to talk about fish today.  Instead, I am going to talk about Steller's Sea Cow, which was a great, big fat mammal that used to swim around in the ocean, but now it's EXTINCT.  Which is actually very sad because according to my in-depth research on the internet, the Sea Cow was very tasty, and just one of them could feed 33 men on a ship for one month at sea.

Of course, you are probably wondering who Steller is and why he named the Sea Cow after himself.  Well, it turns out that his whole name was Georg Wilhelm Steller, and he was a naturalist from Germany.  And in 1741, he was out sailing around on a ship with a guy named Vitus Bering, who had the Bering Sea named after him.    And while they were sailing around in the Bering Sea, which is kind of north of the Pacific, way over by Russia, they found these Sea Cows, and since Mr. Steller wrote down a description of them and also made a drawing, they got to be called Steller's Sea Cows.


The Sea Cows are part of a group called Sirenia, which also includes dugongs and manatees, both of which of still in existence.  If you ever read the Odyssey, by Homer, or saw the movie, you will know that there were these "sirens" that were singing on an island, and they were trying to lure Odysseus and his crew onto the rocks.  Well, if the sirens looked like Steller's Sea Cows -- which in my opinion are pretty ugly -- I can't see what the attraction was for Odysseus.


Anyway, Mr. Steller thought there were a whole bunch of Sea Cows, but later on, scientists figured out that there were probably only about 1,500 left at the time that Mr. Steller discovered them, so they were already in danger of being extinct.  And once the Europeans found out about them, they started hunting them and managed to kill them all off in only 27 years.

The Sea Cows were very easy to hunt because they just kind of bobbed around, eating kelp, and they were mostly happy, easy-going animals who didn't realize that humans were their enemies.  So the humans killed them and used their skins for boats and ate their meat and burned their fat in oil lamps.

Scientists who have studied the evolution of the Sea Cow say that it originally used to live in the warm waters near Peru.  And at that time, it had flippers and finger bones.  But as it evolved and moved north, it started just eating kelp, so its teeth turned into a couple of plate things that were good at crushing kelp.  Also its flippers turned into just these stubby armlike things, and it stopped diving down in the water because the kelp was all mostly at the top of the water, so there wasn't any reason to dive.


So anyway, that's pretty much the whole story of the Steller's Sea Cow, which became extinct in 1768.  But this might not be the end of the story, because there have been people saying they saw Sea Cows ever since Sea Cows supposedly went extinct.  Like for instance, on Bering Island in 1830, a naturalist from Poland said he saw Sea Cows, and in 1910, a Sea Cow might have washed up on the coast of Siberia.  Also some Russian sailors on a whaling boat said they saw several Sea Cows in 1962.  So this is kind of like what happened with Elvis Presley, where people are always saying they see him someplace, even though he is dead.

I had an idea that maybe we should ask Sarah Palin to keep an eye out for Steller's Sea Cows, because she can probably just see them from her porch, and if she was busy watching for them, it might keep her busy and out of politics.  Hahahaha!  Just kidding!

The president that maybe had the most dogs and other pets of any president was Theodore Roosevelt.  And besides all those animals, he also had six kids and a wife, and they all loved animals, too.  Mr. Roosevelt started out being the vice-president, but then in 1901 when President McKinley got shot and died, Mr. Roosevelt became the president.

But before he got to be president, Mr. Roosevelt did a whole bunch of other stuff.  He grew up in New York City, but he was sick a lot as a child because he had asthma.  He liked to read books about nature and animals, and he started doing stuff like boxing to make himself stronger.  Then he went to Harvard, and after that he was in the state legislature.  He wrote a book about the Navy, lived in the Badlands for a few years, fought in the Spanish-American War, and then was governor of New York.

So as you can see, Mr. Roosevelt was a very busy man.  And when he became the president, he was only 42 years old, and that meant he was the youngest man to ever be the president.  Oh, and another thing he did was he got married, but his first wife died right after their daughter, Alice, was born.  Then later Mr. Roosevelt married again, and he and his second wife, Edith, had 5 children.  Their names were Theodore Jr., Kermit, Ethel, Archie, and Quentin.  Sagamore Hill, which was the name of their family home, was in a town called Oyster Bay, on Long Island.

Kermit with Blackjack

Anyway, that's enough about the people.  Now I will tell you about the animals that the Roosevelt family had.  I don't know if all of these lived in Washington at the White House, but at least some of them did.  The dogs were:  Pete, a bull terrier; Blackjack, a Manchester terrier; Rollo, a St. Bernard; Gem, a mixed breed; Skip, a rat terrier; Peter, a terrier; Manchu, a Pekingese; Sailor Boy, a Chesapeake Bay Retriever; and Susan, a mixed breed.

Quentin with Eli Yale

The cats were named Tom Quartz and Slippers.  Also there were 4 Guinea pigs named Dr. Johnson, Fighting Bob Evans, Bishop Doane, and Father O'Grady.  There was a rat named Jonathan, a pig named Maude, a macaw named Eli Yale, a small bear named Jonathan Edwards, a garter snake named Emily Spinach, a pony named Algonquin, another pony named Fidelity, a badger named Josiah, a hen named Baron Spreckle, and a one-legged rooster.

So as you can see, the Roosevelt family liked to give their animals interesting names!  President Roosevelt's favorite dog was Skip, the rat terrier.  He found Skip while he was hunting bears in the Grand Canyon and brought him home.  Skip was very affectionate and liked to sit on the president's lap. Sometimes President Roosevelt took Skip hunting, and if Skip couldn't keep up with the hunters, he got to ride on the president's horse with him.  The children liked to play with Skip, and Archie especially liked to run races with him in the halls of the White House.

Sagamore Hill

The top dog at the White House was Rollo, the St. Bernard.  He was very friendly and got special treatment from the president.  But Pete the bull terrier was a naughty dog.  He nipped a naval officer on the leg, snapped at some cabinet members, and tore the pants of the French Ambassador.  So Pete had to go live at Sagamore Hill after that.

Alice with a dog

Manchu, who was a little black Pekingese, was given to Alice by the Empress Dowager Ci-Xi of China.  Alice said that one time she saw Manchu dancing on her hind legs in the moonlight on the White House lawn.

President Roosevelt was reelected in 1904, but he didn't want to run again in 1908.  After he stopped being president, he went on a safari in Africa, where he killed some elephants and rhinos and other animals, which I think was not very nice of him.  In 1912, he decided he would run for president again after all, and he started the Bull Moose Party.  But he lost the election to Woodrow Wilson.  Then he went on a trip to South America, where he got malaria, and after that his health was always kind of bad, so he died in 1919 when he was only 60.

Anyway, even though he was always going hunting and shooting animals, President Roosevelt did a lot of good stuff, like for example making the first National Parks.  Also he helped end the war between the Russians and Japanese, so he won a Nobel Peace Prize.  He was the first American to ever win this prize.

And of course, I have to mention the Teddy Bear, which was named after President Roosevelt.  This happened because when Mr. Roosevelt was out hunting for bears one day, he refused to shoot a mama bear that was with her cub.  So a toy maker asked if he could name his stuffed bears "Teddy," and Mr. Roosevelt said that would be okay.  And that's how the world ended up with Teddy Bears!