Animal Insting

Mr. William Jefferson Clinton got elected the 42nd president of the United States in 1992, and when he took office, he did not have a dog.  All he had was a cat, and this just seems wrong to me!  Of course, I do have to admit that Socks was a pretty cute cat, and that's mainly because he was black-and-white, and a tuxedo cat, just like my brother Charlie.







Socks was adopted by the Clinton family when they lived in Little Rock, where Mr. Clinton was the governor of the state of Arkansas.  And what happened was that Chelsea, who was the daughter of Bill and Hilary Clinton, was leaving her piano teacher's house one day in 1991, and Socks just jumped into her arms.  So I guess Chelsea talked her mom and dad into letting her keep the cat.  No one knew exactly when he was born, but the best guess was that it was in March of 1989.




Then in 1992, Mr. Clinton got elected President, and the Clintons moved to the White House.  Of course, Socks went along, and he assumed the important position of First Cat.  Sometimes he shared his food and water with a stray tabby named Slippers, but mostly Socks was the one who got all the publicity.  He often went on visits to schools and hospitals, so I think he must have been a very sociable and friendly cat.







There was a cartoon version of Socks who was the host of the children's White House website, so lots of kids knew about Socks and wrote letters to him.  Representative Dan Burton, who didn't like President Clinton very much, said one time that it was a waste of White House staff, postage, and stationery to answer mail addressed to Socks.  But luckily, most people didn't feel that way.




So anyway, Socks was the only First Pet during President Clinton's first term in office.  But after the second term started, the Clintons decided to get a dog.  So they adopted Buddy, who was a chocolate lab.  Buddy was born in September 1997 in Caroline County, Maryland, and he moved into the White House when he was three months old.  President Clinton named him after his great-uncle, Henry Oren "Buddy" Grisham, who had died the previous June.











Buddy was a frisky, happy puppy, and right away Socks hated him, and never stopped hating him.  So the two First Pets had to be kept in different parts of the White House living quarters.








President Clinton used to go out running with Buddy, and he also played fetch with him and got his picture taken with him pretty often.  So everybody knew about Buddy, including lots of children who wrote letters to him.  After a while, Mrs. Clinton wrote a book that was called Dear Socks, Dear Buddy:  Kids' Letters to the First Pets.  This book came out in 1998, and it had more than 50 letters in it and more than 80 photos of Socks and Buddy.



When President Clinton's second term ended, the family moved to a house in Chappaqua, New York, but this house was too small for them to be able to keep Buddy and Socks separated.  So Socks stayed with Mr. Clinton's secretary, Betty Currie.





Buddy moved to New York with the Clintons, but in 2002 a very tragic thing happened, which was that Buddy got hit by a car and killed.  The Clintons weren't home at the time, but some Secret Service officers were taking care of the house and of Buddy.  A contractor came over to do some work, and when he left, Buddy was playfully chasing after him, and that's when he got hit by the car.

Three years later, in 2005, Mr. Clinton got another chocolate lab that he named Seamus.


Socks, meanwhile, went on having a nice life with Betty Currie until he got cancer of the jaw.  On February 20, 2009, he had to be put to sleep.  He was almost 20 years old by then, and he had had many adventures, including living in the White House.  Not many cats can say that, or dogs either!

At our house, we all love to sleep.  The dogs love to sleep, and the cats love to sleep, and even Mom loves to sleep.  So because we love to do it so much, we get a lot of practice, and we are very good at it!  Mom likes to take pictures of us sleeping because she thinks it's cute or something.  Of course, she doesn't take any pictures of herself sleeping, since that would be kind of hard to do.

It's also hard to get pictures of the cats sleeping because cats sleep with one eye open, or at least that is what I have been told.  So whenever Mom tries to get a picture of the cats sleeping, they wake up before she can even get her camera turned on.  But anyway, sometimes Charlie and Chloe sleep together in the green plastic tub.  They didn't do that last summer because I think it was too hot, but they do it a lot in the winter.

At night, the cats like to sleep with Mom.  First it was just Chloe who mostly slept with Mom, but then Charlie started doing it, too, after he figured out that he could walk into the bedroom without being eaten by Nicky.  So now Charlie sleeps with Mom almost every night, and Chloe also sleeps with her most nights, so Mom says that it is kind of crowded in her bed.
Sometimes when Mom is getting ready for bed, Chloe or Charlie will decide that the closet would be a good place to sleep because there are some old blankets and quilts in there.  Also, when it is time for Mom to do the laundry, there are dirty clothes all over the floor, and they smell like Mom, so that makes them nice to sleep on.  But Mom doesn't like for us to sleep in the closet because she is afraid somebody might decide to chew on her clothes.
Of course, I am very cute when I sleep.  Usually I like to sleep all curled up, because it's warmer that way.  Except in the summer, and then I sleep more spread out.
Sometimes I sleep with my head and front legs hanging off the sofa.  Mom thinks this is really funny, for some reason.
Mom says I snore when I sleep, but I find this hard to believe because it seems so unladylike.  Mom says I don't snore very loud, but that I definitely do snore.
Mel barks sometimes in his sleep, which is pretty silly-sounding because he barks without opening his mouth.  Also I guess he dreams about running, since his legs start twitching.
Barry sleeps in some strange positions, too, like with his head hanging over the arm of a chair.  I was too lazy to dig out the photo Mom took of him sleeping like that, but here's one of him sleeping on the bed with his foot in his face.  Barry doesn't bark in his sleep like Mel does, so maybe he doesn't dream the same kinds of dreams.
I like to snuggle with my brothers, if they will let me do that.  Mel gets very nervous when another dog tries to get in bed with him, and he will get up and go in another room.  So I can't snuggle with him.  But sometimes Barry will let me sleep next to him.
Nicky is getting better and better about letting me snuggle with him.  And sometimes he even leaves enough space for me to curl up in without falling off the edge of the bed!
When Nicky sleeps, he almost never curls up, even when it's cold weather.  He likes to sprawl out and take up a whole bunch of space.  Also he breathes really loudly through his mouth when he is sleeping.  It's not exactly like snoring.  It's more like when a horse blows out its breath through loose lips, if you know what I mean.  Anyway, that's the way Nicky breathes when he sleeps.  And sometimes he moves his legs a whole bunch, which we think means he is dreaming about being a race dog.  Either that or he is dreaming about chasing squirrels!

Here are 12 last memorable "last words". These people left us one last smile before they left.

To tell you the honest truth, I had never even heard of axolotls until one of my most faithful fans asked me to write a blog entry about them.  So I looked them up, and I found out that they are these funny-looking Mexican salamanders that only live in one lake in the middle of Mexico.  And since that lake is mostly all dried up except for a few polluted canals, the axolotl is CRITICALLY ENDANGERED in the wild.

But what I also learned is that axolotls are easy to breed in captivity, and they are used a lot in research.  Also they are kept as pets in the U.S., Great Britain, Australia, Japan, and some other countries.  Sometimes they are called wooper loopers, which I think is a cute name, and it's easier to say than axolotl.

There are several things about axolotls that make them different from most salamanders.  First of all, they don't go through all the parts of a normal life cycle that an amphibian is supposed to.  A frog is an example of an amphibian, and frogs start their lives in the water as tadpoles.  And then later they grow legs and lose their tails, and they crawl out on the land and become frogs.  Also they breathe through gills when they live in the water, and they use lungs after they get to be frogs.  And going through all these changes is called metamorphosis.

Salamanders usually have this same sort of life cycle like frogs do, but axolotls are different.  And the way they are different is that they never leave the water when they grow up.  They just stay there and keep breathing through gills.  We don't know why they don't leave the water.  Maybe they just like it better than living on land.  Or maybe they were safer living in the water, so they just never evolved to live on the land.  Scientists think that axolotls don't have the right thyroid hormones to make them go through metamorphosis and live on land.  But anyway, when an animal stays in a juvenile period of its life like this, it's called neoteny.


So that's one thing that is unusual about axolotls.  And another thing is that they can heal themselves in amazing ways.  Like for instance, if an axolotl loses its leg or its tail, it can grow a brand new one that's just as good as the one that was lost.  Also if you do something like transplant an eye from one axolotl into another one, it will grow there and be a nice, usable eye.  Researchers are really interested in all this stuff because it helps them understand how embryos develop and how transplants can be done and that kind of thing.


Axolotls are about 9 inches long when they are full grown.  Their gills are on stalk-like things on the outside of their bodies, and they look kind of like lacy collars.  Also axolotls have fins all the way down their backs.  They have wide heads and skinny little legs and toes.  The way they eat is they lunge at their food and suck it in.  Then they swallow the food whole because they just have little nubby tooth things that never grow into anything they can really bite with.

What axolotls like to eat in the wild is stuff like worms, insects, and small fish.  In captivity, they eat earthworms, bloodworms, waxworms, blackworms, whiteworms, brindal worms, daphnia, mealworms, and brine shrimp.

There are four main colors for axolotls.  The two colors that you would normally see are wildtype, which is some shade of brown with spots, and melanoid, which is a fancy word for black.  Besides that, there are two mutant colors, and they are leucistic (pale pink with black eyes) and albino (golden, tan, or pale pink with pink eyes).



The name axolotl comes from the Aztec language, and it means something like "water dog."  Of course, these little salamanders don't look anything like dogs, at least in my opinion.  But there used to be this Aztec god named Xolotl, and he would change himself into a water animal to avoid being sacrificed.  So that is supposedly where the name axolotl comes from.  I'm not sure why the Aztecs would be trying to sacrifice one of their own gods, but this part wasn't explained in what I learned about axolotls.


Anyway, back in the old days, when the Aztecs lived in Mexico, in the middle of a bunch of lakes such as Xochimilco and Chalco and Texcoco, there were tons of axolotls living in the water of the lakes.  This was exactly the kind of environment that axolotls liked to live in because it was fresh water at a high altitude.  And the Aztecs ate axolotls as part of their diet.




But then Mexico City got built where the Aztecs used to live, and all the lakes got drained and filled in to make land to put the city on.  So all that's left is a few canals of Xochimilco, which is a big tourist place where you can go and take a ride on a boat that is all decorated with flowers.  Mom was there and rode on the boats back in 1972, when she was much, much younger.  She told me that the water looked very dirty even back then, so now it must be lots worse, and it is pretty surprising if any axolotls can stay alive there.





Also besides the pollution, there is the problem of African tilapia and Asian carp being put in the water there, and they are eating the baby axolotls and the axolotls' food.  One scientist who has studied the situation made an estimate that there are only about 100 axolotls in every square kilometer of wetlands now, even though estimates were 10 times higher in 2004, and 6 times higher than that in the 1980s.  So this is why they say that the axolotl is so critically endangered.





But like I told you before, lots of people have these little salamanders as pets because they are pretty easy to keep if you have an aquarium and the right kind of water at the right temperature and some worms to feed them.  You can go online and read all about how to take care of your axolotl, and there are discussion groups, plus you can even buy axolotl plush toys and t-shirts.  Personally, I think a dog or a cat would make a better pet because they are cuddlier and smarter, but I guess some people have different ideas about pets!

In Japan there is this place called Tashirojima (田代島) which means "Cat Island" in English.  The reason it is called this is because (1) it is an island, and (2) there are a whole bunch of cats there.  In fact, there are only about 100 people living on Cat Island, but there are lots more cats than that.  I could not find anyplace that said exactly how many cats live on the island, so maybe nobody has ever counted them.  But somebody has counted the people and also asked how old they are, because it turns out that all of the people on Cat Island are pretty old, like over 60.  Well, except for one person who is 37 or so.

Tashirojima is located near Ishinomaki City, in Miyagi Prefecture.  Here are a couple of maps, in case your Japanese geography isn't so good.  The island is about 8 square miles in size, and you can get there by going on a ferry boat.  And in case you are worried about what happened to all the cats and people on the island during the earthquake, you can relax, because they are okay.  The only problem is that they need food and other supplies, just like lots of other people do who were near the earthquake.  At first, some people tried to get to Cat Island by boat to bring supplies, but there was too much debris and stuff in the water, so the boat couldn't get through.  Then the last news I saw was that an Army helicopter was going there to take food for the people, and maybe also cat food.






Anyway, now I will tell you how this island got to be an island full of cats.  A long time ago, people who lived on the island used to raise silkworms so they could make silk.  But mice would eat the silkworms, and the islanders kept cats to eat the mice.  
Also there were fishermen who came to the island, and they sometimes stayed overnight at the inns there.  The cats would come and beg for scraps, so the fishermen fed them, because everyone believed that feeding cats would bring good luck.  So the fishermen got very fond of the cats, and they thought that if they watched what the cats were doing, it would tell them what kind of weather was going to happen, and when the most fish would be around.  One time a cat got killed by accident while the fishermen were getting ready to go fishing, and they felt very bad about this.  So they buried the cat and built a shrine on the spot.




Anyway, now that all the people of Cat Island are getting older, they are trying to attract tourists to the island and also some younger people to live there.  A lot of people like to go there just to see all the cats and to get their pictures taken with them.  And they like to see the shrine and the houses that are shaped like cats.  




In the shops, you can buy a maneki neko, which is a cat with one paw raised, and this will bring you good luck.  Another thing you can buy is a good luck kitty bib to take home and put on your own cat.




So after everything gets all cleaned up and rebuilt from the earthquake, maybe you will want to go to Japan for a vacation.  And if you do, you can visit Cat Island.  I'd like to go myself, but for some reason, they do not allow dogs there!