Animal Insting

Today is Labor Day, so I am going to tell you about a fairly new job that dogs are doing these days, and this job is sniffing out BEDBUGS.  It used to be that most of the bedbugs had been killed off, like after World War II, but now they are coming back again.  And the reason for this is because we can't use DDT to kill them anymore because DDT is Very Bad for birds and other living things besides just bugs.  And also people are traveling a lot more, so bedbugs hide in their luggage and get a free ride from one country to another.

Which means that now bedbugs are showing up in all sorts of places where people don't want them, like bedrooms, dorm rooms, hotels, and hospitals.  The bedbugs think human blood is yummier than any other kind of blood, so that's why they like to live where people live.  Bedbugs are really little, but not so little that you can't see them.  They are kind of flat when they haven't eaten any blood lately, but after they bite somebody and fill up with blood, they are lots fatter.

Bedbugs can go several months without eating at all, so you might have them in your house and not even know it.  When they come out to eat, they will bite somebody while they are sleeping and then feed for 5 or 10 minutes.  After that, they go crawl off someplace to hide and digest their food.  Some people don't even hardly notice that they have been bitten, but other people have more of a reaction.  Sometimes babies or old people can get anemia if they live where lots of bedbugs bite them.  But the surprising thing is that bedbugs don't carry any diseases, so I guess this means it is better to be bit by a bedbug than by a mosquito or a flea.

Anyway, there are several ways to get rid of bedbugs without using DDT, but it is best if you know whether you even have the bugs, and if so, where they are.  If you don't know these things, you might be wasting a lot of time and money.  So that is why the bedbug detection dogs are good to have around, because they can search a big building lots faster than people can.  Also they are right 98% of the time when they tell their handler that they have found bedbugs.

Remember how I keep telling you that dogs have really excellent noses?  Well, dogs can sniff out bedbugs in any of their life phases, even if they are still eggs, or if there are just one or two bedbugs, or if they are hidden in a crack in the floor or someplace like that.  Of course, the dogs have to be trained so that they will know what scent the handler wants them to find.  And then when they find it, they have to sit down or bark or do whatever they have been taught to do so that the handler will know that the dog smelled a bedbug.

Here are some videos of dogs on the job, searching for bedbugs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3e8rhT_hAw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0W9rmBBllM&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9s0ogXoCEY&feature=related

Because of all the training and stuff, it's kind of expensive to hire a bedbug-detection dog, like maybe $325 an hour.  But the dog works fast and is honest, and people save money by using them because then they do not have to spray nasty chemicals in places where there aren't any bedbugs.

In some parts of the country, people are now hiring a dog to search a house for bedbugs before they buy the house.  In New York City, there is a really big bedbug problem because people live in apartments and condos with just a wall between them, and the bedbugs can crawl along the pipes and through very narrow spaces to get from one apartment to the next.

Anyway, that is one of the many important jobs that dogs are doing these days.  And I will just also mention that some of these same dogs are also trained to find termites or mold.  So it can be very useful to have a well-trained working dog around!

In honor of Labor Day here is the U.S. I decided to dedicate a list to the worst bosses from Movies and TV. See any similarities to your workplace? Let's hear how bad your boss is in the comments.

Well, it's time for me to tell you about some of the poor, homeless dogs at the Humane Society that would make really good pets.  They need to get forever homes as soon as possible, so if you can give them one, please hurry over to the shelter!

Okay, this first one is SPRITE, and she is totally adorable, or at least that's what Mom thinks.  Sprite is a Maltese/poodle mix, and she's only 8 months old.  When she first came to the shelter, she was scared and snarky with people.  Also she was all dirty and matted and had cherry eye in both eyes.  But now she's all shaved and pretty.  And she had surgery to fix her eyes.  She's much friendlier now, but she doesn't like everybody.  She really likes Mom, though, and she especially likes to sit in Mom's lap and get petted and fussed over.


This one is KENDALL, and she is 3 years old.  She is a Sharpei/shepherd mix.  Sometime in the past, Kendall had a broken leg, and it healed kind of funny, but it doesn't keep her from walking around just fine.  Kendall is very calm, and she likes other dogs.  In fact, she should probably be in a home where she has a doggy friend.  When she first came to the shelter, Kendall looked pretty bad, with skin problems and stuff like that, but she looks much better now.  You can still see some scars on her nose, but they're not too bad.  Also she has all those cute wrinkles, maybe even more than a basenji has!


TOFFEE is an older dog, but he would really like a nice home where he could be happy the rest of his life.  He used to have to live on a chain, which is a very bad way for a dog to live.  Toffee is about 9 years old now, and he's kind of a bossy boy, so he would be better off being the only dog in the house.  He is probably a golden retriever mixed with a chow chow.  Anyway, he's got a lot of pretty hair.


This one is QUE (which is pronounced like "cue"), and he's 4 years old.  He's a lab mix, maybe part catahoula hound.  He's black with a brindle face and legs.  Que is a very nice, mellow boy, and he gets along just fine with other dogs.


Here's SNOOKI, who is 2 years old.  She is a Staffordshire bull terrier with a short, solid body.  She also kind of snorts when she breathes.  Mom thinks Snooki is a very nice, very funny dog.  The only bad thing is that Snooki doesn't much like other dogs or cats, so she needs to be an only dog who will get lots of attention and spoiling.


NELSON is majorly cute, or at least Mom thinks so.  He's the kind of dog she says she would adopt if we didn't already have our Legal Limit of Dogs.  I think Nelson sounds like he would be a fun guy to have around.  He's only 6 months old, and he is a maybe a shepherd/lab mix.  Before he came to the shelter, he got hit by a car, and both of his front legs were broken.  One of them was set and is all straight again, but the other was broken at the elbow, so it's kind of funny looking.  Nelson limps a little on that leg, but at least he didn't have to have it cut off, which could have happened.


This last one is DIANA, who is 3 years old.  She is a very pretty, very sweet dog.  They are saying she is a yellow lab mixed with shepherd, but I think she might have some collie or border collie in her.  Of course, nobody asked me.

You can find out more about these dogs on the Humane Society website.  And if you can give one of them a home, I'm sure that dog would be your best friend forever!

Okay, now before you get your panties all in a twist and think that I'm usurping Piper's blog like I did that other time, I will just let you know that this time I got permission first.  That lazy Piper -- sometimes she doesn't even know what topic she wants to write about, so when I asked if I could write instead, she said "Okay, whatever."  But she said I couldn't write anything bad about dogs, so I told her I would try not to write anything too bad about them.  (Wink, wink!)

Anyway, Charlie and I are settling in pretty nicely here.  We come out of our room a lot more than we used to, and we enjoy exploring the house.  Of course, like all cats, we are full of curiosity, so we want to know what kind of place we're living in, and we especially want to know where our foster mom keeps the food.  We found the big bag of that boring kibble that she feeds us, but it's all closed up with clips that are hard to get off.  We can smell the dog food up on the counter, but we can't really get up there to eat any of it.  Surely there is something yummy around somewhere in a nice, accessible location, though, and we are determined to find it!

Wednesday evening I got up on the dining room table where Foster Mom (FM) was paying bills, but there wasn't any food there.  It was just a bunch of boring paper and magazines and stuff like that.  Plus FM immediately put me back on the floor, saying that cats are not allowed on the table in her house.  What kind of stupid rule is that?

Charlie and I like to spend a lot of time napping during the day, but in the evening, we come out of our room and venture downstairs to see what's going on.  Mostly what's going on is that FM is watching TV, and the dogs are snoozing.  And by the way, I will just mention that the dogs have generally been pretty nice to us.  I don't mean that they have been "friendly," but they haven't really bothered us, either -- especially after we threatened to scratch their ugly faces off if they messed with us!

So anyway, Charlie and I go downstairs in the evenings to check things out, and I was able to show FM how clever I am at opening cabinet doors in the bathroom and kitchen.  Or if I can't get them open all the way, I just bang them repeatedly, which usually gets FM's attention right away, so it's an amusing thing to do.  You will never believe this, but those four dogs are so stupid that they have never learned to open the cabinet doors.  Sheesh.  This must be why, on those TV shows about what the earth would be like without any humans in it, they always say that cats will survive and dogs will not.

The other thing I was going to tell you about was what I like to do at night, after everybody goes to bed.  Because what happens is that FM gets up two or three times to go to the bathroom, and I'm always listening, so when I hear her do this, I go in the bathroom so she can pet me while she's sitting there.  This seems like an excellent use of her time, and I guess she agrees, because she always pets me.  And then I follow her back to bed and jump on the bed with her.  The unfortunate thing is that she doesn't think she should continue petting me once we get into bed.  Instead, she wants to selfishly go back to sleep.  So no matter how many times I butt my head against her arm or how charmingly I tickle her face with my whiskers, she won't pet me anymore.  I've finally learned that it's useless to keep trying, so I just hunker down and doze a little, or else I hop off the bed and go find something more interesting to do.

Charlie jumped on the bed one night while FM was sleeping, but he made the mistake of scratching her arm with his claws, so she yelped.  I guess this scared him, because he's never tried it again.  If he wasn't such a big klutz, these things wouldn't happen.  He should take a lesson from me because I am much more graceful in the way I get on the bed, and so far I have not scratched FM.  I told Charlie that it is not smart to scratch the hand that feeds you, even if that hand doesn't feed you nearly enough, but he's a boy, so he doesn't think he needs to listen to me!

Faith is a very famous dog, so you may have already seen her on the Oprah Show or on YouTube or someplace like that.  And what makes Faith so famous is the fact that she walks on two legs, like a human, instead of on four legs, like a dog.  Which is not such an easy thing to do.

In Faith's litter, which was born in December, 2002, there were some other puppies that had deformities, too.  But none of those other puppies lived, and the only reason that Faith did is because a boy named Reuben saved her when she was 3 weeks old.  Faith's doggy mother, Princess, belonged to a friend of Reuben named Johnny.  Princess was mostly chow chow, but Faith's daddy might have been a lab.


When Reuben saw Princess and her puppies, Princess was trying to smother Faith.  And the reason she was doing this was probably because she knew that a deformed puppy couldn't survive in the cold, cruel world.  So Reuben brought Faith home to his family, and they took her to the vet, and he said maybe the best thing would be to put Faith to sleep.  But the family decided to try to save Faith.

So they took care of her, and she got stronger and healthier.  And in the beginning, she actually had three legs, but her one front leg was deformed, so it started wasting away, and it had to be cut off when Faith was 7 months old.  So after that, Faith just had two back legs.  And then she started sort of trying to stand up on her two legs, so her family put some peanut butter on a spoon and coaxed Faith into hopping.  And pretty soon Faith decided, all on her own, to "walk" by putting one foot down and then the other one.


Now Faith is almost  8 years old -- which is the same age I will be in November! -- and she walks really well.  And people who have studied her say that her joints and muscles have grown and changed so that they can support her when she walks in this way that is not like how other dogs walk.

If you have never seen Faith in action, you should look at a couple of videos.  Here are some good ones, but there are other ones, too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FjKqboY9Yo
http://animal.discovery.com/videos/weird-true-and-freaky-faith-two-legged-dog.html

Not too long ago, Faith was made an honorary sergeant in the U.S. Army because she goes to hospitals and visits veterans who have been hurt in the war.  And it inspires these veterans to see a dog who has learned to walk, even in spite of having bad stuff happen to her when she was born.


And now Faith's mom is trying to fix it so that Faith can go to the U.K. and visit wounded soldiers over there, too.  So that is why Faith is such a cool dog and the kind of nice dog I'd like to meet in person someday.  But I would not like to have to walk on my hind legs.  I much prefer walking on all fours!