Animal Insting

Hi!  I'm Chloe the Cat!  You will not believe the fantastic thing that happened here in our foster home.  Our foster mom took all the dogs away Friday morning and got rid of them.  So now it's just us cats here.  Friday night, even our foster mom wasn't here, and we had the WHOLE HOUSE totally to ourselves.

And then yesterday afternoon, our foster mom came home again, but she didn't bring any dogs with her, so then we had her AND the house all to ourselves.  Obviously, this is the way things should be.  I can't believe it took our foster mom so long to figure this out.  She is pretty slow about some things.  Like, for instance, she does not understand that we need lots more food than she has been giving us.  She keeps talking about our "losing weight," but we don't care about that.  We just want to eat.  We LOVE to eat.  Eating is extremely important to us.  If we don't get to eat enough, we might die.

When our foster mom went away Friday, she gave us a bunch of food, so we were happy because we thought she had realized at long last that that is what we need and want.  So we ate all the food right away.  But then she didn't come home Friday night to feed us, so we got kind of hungry.   And then we were still hungry Saturday morning and most of the day Saturday until she finally got home and fed us again.

But now everything is lovely, and I hope it stays this way forever.  Our foster mom says she cannot adopt us, so somebody else will have to give us a Forever Home.  But maybe she will change her mind about that.

You know, this blogging stuff is kind of fun.  Now that we don't have any dogs here, maybe I can take over this blog and make it nicer and more cat-friendly.  Just keep your paws crossed, and we'll see what happens.

Just when we thought we had all that awful cactus show stuff over with, Mom told us she is going to Iowa to be a judge for the Iowa club's show.  This was horrible news for us dogs to hear, because it means Mom is going to abandon us for TWO WHOLE DAYS at Pooches' Paradise.  She is going to take us there later this morning, and then she and three other people are going to Iowa.

The place in Iowa where they are going is called Des Moines, and it's the capital of the entire state of Iowa, so there is a State Capitol Building that has a shiny gold dome on it.  But Mom is not going to the capitol building.  She is going to the cactus show, which will be at the Merle Hay Shopping Mall.  Of course, there will be cacti there to buy, so Mom will probably buy some, even though she doesn't need any more plants because she just bought some last weekend.  But Mom is silly like that, so I am sure she will bring home some plants.


Oh, and guess what.  Mom looked through the whole list of stores at the Merle Hay Mall, and there is not a single Petco or PetsMart there, so she can't even buy us dogs any treats while she is there.  Which I think is a very sad state of affairs.

The capitol with the fancy gold dome

Anyway, you may be wondering, like I was, how the city of Des Moines got its strange name and what the name means.  So I did a little research on this subject, and I found out that before there was a city, there was first a Fort Des Moines.  And it was built at the place where the Raccoon River runs into the Des Moines River.  The man who was in charge of building the fort, Captain James Allen (who maybe was a very distant relative of Mom's, since her last name is also Allen) wanted to name it Fort Raccoon.  I think this would have been a fine name for a fort, or even for a whole city.  But the U.S. War Department told Captain Allen to use the name Fort Des Moines instead.

In French, des moines means "the monks" or "of the monks."  And that is what the early French explorers called the river.  But there weren't really any monks around at the time, which makes you wonder what those French guys were thinking.  Well, this historian named Virgil Vogel wondered the same thing, so he did a bunch of research, and he found out there used to be a group of Illinois Indians who were called "Moingona," and this name means "people by the portage."  Which was a good name for them because they lived near the Des Moines Rapids.  So Mr. Vogel thought maybe the French explorers and mapmakers started calling the river Des Moines because it was easier for them to spell and pronounce than "Moingona."

The Raccoon River, but without any raccoons

Anyway, Mom is going all the way up north to Iowa, and I was afraid it might be cold and snowy up there, but Mom says it is a lot like Missouri, which means it's hot right now, and it only snows in the winter.  Not too long ago, they had some flooding in Iowa, but not as much flooding as they have in Pakistan right now, where the whole country is pretty much underwater.

Well, I have to get ready to go to Pooches' Paradise now.  I wish I didn't have to go there.  I wish I could just stay home and have Mom stay home, too.  But Mom says she is not going away again for a long, long time, like at least until next year.  So that makes me feel a little better.

Black-footed ferrets are ENDANGERED, but that's better than being EXTINCT, which is what people used to think the black-footed ferret was since nobody had seen one for a long, long time.  But then in 1981, a bunch of ferrets got discovered on a ranch near a town in Wyoming called Meeteetse, which is a really funny name for a town.


There were about 130 black-footed ferrets there, and scientists started watching them to make sure they were doing okay.  But then the ferrets started not doing okay because they got plague and also canine distemper, so a whole bunch of them died.  After this, there were only 18 left, so the 18 ferrets were captured and taken to several zoos and asked if they could please make some baby ferrets.  And so lots of baby ferrets, which are called kits, were born.  Then after 10 years or so, there were enough ferrets to start putting them back out in the wild, where they used to live.  But first they had to take a class called Being Wild 101.


So by 2007, the number of wild black-footed ferrets was over 750, and there were also still 250 in captivity.  And in 2008, the label for the black-footed ferret got changed from EXTINCT IN THE WILD to ENDANGERED.


Black-footed ferrets are members of the weasel family, the same as otters, badgers, and wolverines.  They are related to those ferrets like you can buy at the pet store, but the pet store ferrets are a tame variety that originally came from Europe.  The black-footed ferret is the only kind of ferret that is native to North America.

A ferret can weigh up to 2 and a half pounds.  They are 18 to 24 inches long, including their tails.  Their favorite food is prairie dogs.  In fact, 90% of what they eat is prairie dogs, which sounds like a gourmet sort of diet to me.  In a year's time, a black-footed ferret can eat about 100 prairie dogs, plus some mice and birds and insects and other stuff.  But the main thing they need to have around is prairie dogs.  And the way they hunt them is they sneak down into the prairie dogs' tunnels at night and try to get a sleeping prairie dog.  And during the day, they even live in prairie dog tunnels.


So the reason that the black-footed ferret almost went extinct was that people kept killing off all the prairie dogs, for the reasons I mentioned yesterday, and then the black-footed ferrets didn't have anything left to eat.  But now, like I say, they are making a sort of comeback.  And wherever a ferret is taken back into nature to be wild again, there has be be a great big Prairie Dog Town because it takes 125 acres of prairie dogs to feed one adult ferret.


I don't know if black-footed ferrets are good to eat or not, but they have anal scent glands, like their cousins in the weasel family, so I'm not sure I would want to try to find out.  I think that, for now, I will just stick to prairie dogs.