Archive for the 'Animals' Category

My goodness I did love my Heidi and mourn her loss to this day, my red and rust Doberman, all 92 pounds of her sitting in my lap like a lap dog.

This Dobie is just sweet and cute as she can be, and is crying over seeing her first love.  It’s worth the few seconds it takes to watch this.  I want her.  But I’m not mean enough to take here away from her love.

Video.

This dog doesn’t much like lemons.

Video.

This Raccoon likes to drop her kiddies off at baby day care.

Video.

Here are pictures of a rare sighting of a wolverine in Yellowstone.

Source.

A stuck goat.  Maybe he should have kept the goat.

Video.

Report and video here.  I don’t think she was chasing the big cat at all.  I think she was running around out of her head screaming.

The dog is fine.

If it had been my Heidi-girl, a 90 pound Doberman, the cat may not have gotten out unscathed even if she had caught my girl.  I’ve seen Heidi run other aggressive dogs down, catch up with them, slide underneath them (like she was sliding into second base), and then come up with a bite grip on the dog’s neck with the aggressive dog about to go down and out for the count.

Fortunately, I was able to save the other dog and we didn’t have to make a police report.

I’m sure she would have tried to do the same thing to the big cat.  She may not have been completely successful against a cat of 130 pounds and she may have died, but she would have made the cat regret tangling with her and it wouldn’t have been a good day for either one of them.

The big cat probably wouldn’t have seen her as food anyway.  From what I understand, they are predators of opportunity.  Small dogs are on the menu.

If I lived in that area, I wouldn’t let my dog out without being there with a pistol.

Source.  It took 36 beers to being him down.  Slower than a .44 magnum.

Views.

As much as I’ve enjoyed Sandy Banks’ columns through the years, I must take issue with her characterization of wild coyotes’ presence in her suburban neighborhood.

In truth, any “reign of terror” being perpetrated there stems from humans’ ubiquitous war on wildlife.

Banks concedes that human housing has invaded the coyotes’ natural habitat. Yet she villainizes them for adapting to our trespass.

Any “unrepentant hoodlums” are the residents who have dispossessed the coyotes; any “scourge” she perceives was wholly foreseeable, not “unpredictable.”

Rather than demonize coyotes for being coyotes, Banks should keep in mind that they aren’t able to earn a living by writing newspaper columns.

Sandra Perez, Santa Maria

Her view is irrational and inconsistent.  Let me prove it to you.

Her view is likely the one of an evolutionist.  Upon her view, men are animals and the Coyote is just another animal.  We must all learn to live together in one gigantic utopia and men are the dastardly ones waging war on other animals.

But you see, upon the evolutionist view, there is no such thing as evil, and thus if men are just animals, men are behaving like animals when they kill other animals, as a lion would in the Serengeti desert.  She has no business complaining.  She’s watching nature in action.

This is what Professor Alvin Plantinga would do.  He would explain how the naturalist view is self referentially incoherent and self defeating.

The proper view if that God created man in His image and gave him dominion over the animal kingdom.  Dangerous animals who kill men are to be put to death, and animals who destroy your property are thieves – and your property includes your beasts as well.

Even dogs are smarter than her.  They figured this out a long time ago, and they and men are friends.

Dogs are awesome.

Bartsh found a small cut on Milo’s paw, and rushed to get supplies from the vet. Mabel didn’t seem too worried about her baby brother’s injury — until she noticed it was getting him extra attention from Mom.

“When I called Milo over to change the bandage and Mabel saw all of the supplies, she immediately came over and plopped herself down right in front of me, lying on her side, ready to be fixed up,” Bartsh said. “I finally got her to move over, and once I got Milo all fixed up and he went on his way, she came right back over and laid down for her turn.”

Could just be that she was so concerned about her buddy that she felt sympathetic pain.

Naw.  Love me, love me, show me attention please.

My dad once called dogs stupid, and I replied, “We give them a place to live, free medical care, food and attention, and all we ask for in return is love.  Who are you calling stupid?”

I’ve seen horses do something similar before.  When catching and trying to saddle horses for a trail ride, we tried to figure out why one horse was limping so badly, figuring that it had gone on so long that he must be lame and need rest from a hoof bruise.  We let him go, and he galloped off to the other side of the field, not to be caught by us that day again.

Pretty much any time in the bush.

A bull moose spent nearly an hour stomping and attacking a rookie racer and her team of sled dogs amid a training run for the Iditarod in the frigid wilderness of Alaska.

Bridgette Watkins said the massive animal paid her little mind when she first spotted it on her 52-mile trek along Salcha River trail system, near Fairbanks. She told Outdoor Life she paused for the moose several more times, trying to keep plenty of space between them, and then suddenly it was charging at her.

A bull moose spent nearly an hour stomping and attacking a rookie racer and her team of sled dogs during a training run for the Iditarod in the frigid wilderness of Alaska.

The rookie racer aimed her .380 firearm at the animal, which had recently shed its antler, and then fired off half of its six rounds before it jammed. But the moose didn’t stop, so she dashed for cover beneath her sled, cleared the jam and then checked on her team. The moose was milling about her dogs, so she quickly cut free six of them, who were attached to snowmobile being driven by her friend and dog handler, Jen Nelson.

The moose again charged in their direction, prompting Watkins to fire another few rounds.

“We’re standing there and I said, ‘I’m out of bullets, I’m out of bullets, I have no more bullets’ … and I’m like, ‘this is it,’” she recalled. “I can count the whiskers on his nose. He’s two feet from me.”

Instead of attacking the women, the moose turned his attention to the remaining four dogs.

“Any time a dog would move or bark, the moose would go into attack mode. Over and over and over,” Watkins told the magazine.

“And we would yell and hit things and scream and try to distract him. And when he would stop, we would talk to the dogs. Because they’re standing there looking at me, terrified, and I’d try to keep them calm.”

She also said this.

“Everybody wants to tell me what kind of gun I should have or shouldn’t have, or how I should have or shouldn’t have shot,” Watkins says of the social media backlash. “I’m prepared now, and I was prepared then. I’m a lifelong Alaskan—I have every gun I need to kill even an elephant. It’s not that I don’t have the weapon, I’m just not going to a gunfight” when I’m running trails in February.

I’ll be the next somebody to tell you what to do.  When I went to the Weminuche Wilderness I was warned about Moose.  Bears … eh … not so much a problem up there, but “a Moose will stomp you to death and there are plenty of them.”

I carried a big bore handgun.  You should too.  Get yourself a .44 Magnum so this doesn’t happen again.

Daily Dot.

The man who was mocked on Twitter in 2019 for raising concerns about feral hogs is now being defended as a modern-day prophet due to a “feral swine bomb” that is ravaging the San Francisco Bay Area.

The New York Times detailed in an article on Tuesday how feral pigs have been threatening drinking water and damaging property outside the Golden Gate City, leading many local residents to seek out their destruction.

“They are tearing up lawns, ripping through golf course fairways, threatening the drinking water and disturbing the harvests at Napa vineyards,” the Times wrote. “Many Californians want them dead.”

The issue has become so significant that legislation was introduced in California last month that would make it easier for feral swine to be hunted. While hunters are currently required to purchase a $25 “tag” in order to hunt a single pig, the bill would allow hunters to target an unlimited number of swine instead.

“In California, 56 of the state’s 58 counties have wild pigs. The swine are inflicting a mounting economic toll in Lafayette, a suburb in the East Bay, where the pig invasion seems most acute,” the Times added. “Before the pandemic the city shelled out $110,000 when pigs, rooting for grubs, churned soccer and baseball fields like a rototiller.”

The financial costs—as well as concerns over water supply contamination due to the many diseases feral swine can spread—have led residents to begin recognizing the havoc states such as Texas have long dealt with.

Feral pigs in the San Francisco Bay Area are tearing up lawns, threatening the drinking water and disturbing vineyard harvests. They're part of what one federal official called a "feral swine bomb" — and many people want them dead. https://t.co/smZ4xQ8hi1

— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 1, 2022

As we have discussed before …

The environmental destruction caused by this invasive species (or combined with an escaped farm population) is extreme.  There is no more destructive wild animal in America than feral pigs.

It isn’t just the deer hunters wanting to keep pressure off of the herd.  You know why the government of West Virginia doesn’t want to decimate the feral pig population?

Because they make money off of it.

This will be fine until some little child gets gored by tusks, or crops get decimated instead of the wild pig population.  Then they’ll write stories about the out-of-control pig population in local newspapers and lament how there’s nothing that can be done to control it.

Then hunting guide companies will spring up out of nowhere to guide out-of-state hunters who want to kill feral pigs.  Just like in Texas, where they have chosen not to eradicate the population.

Yea, in Texas too, where land owners charge money for hunting feral pigs, and so they have a vested interest in having the nasty critters around.

In Georgia, entire crop fields have been rooted up and farmers put out of business.  But wait, this is the Bay area.  The water supply is nasty, golf courses and soccer fields have been rooted up, and children may one day be gored to death.

So solve the problem then.  Lethal removal works, you just have to stop trying to stop the lethal removal.  What folks have found is that the AR-15 is perfect for the job.

Oh wait.  California restricts magazine capacity and forces owners to have that bastardized grip.  Too bad.  You’ll have to suck down your nasty water, Bay people.  Or change the gun control laws.

Y’all know how I love dogs.  I also especially love that this blind dog can find joy like this.

Source.

A Mountain Lion made off with a 75-pound dog in Arizona a few days ago, but the dog managed to get loose from the big cat and survive unscathed.

In South Africa, a wildlife photographer noticed a Cheeta walking up to him, and apparently this big cat wanted to hug.

Maybe this is TCJ reader Fred, who loves big cats.  No, he is much too young to be Fred.