Archive for the 'Animals' Category

If you like this sort of thing, Hilton Head has a nest of Bald Eagles under camera watch.

Source.

Here is the source.

Questions: (1) Why did her husband let her go solo backpacking? (2) Why didn’t she carry a large bore handgun? (3) Why did she decide that hiking ten miles in the dark was safer than staying?

I’ve discussed the nature of the need to understand animals before, as well as my experiences with them.

Check.  All of the above.  I have fallen off, been thrown off, bitten, run over, kicked, and just about anything that can happen on or around a horse.  I have ridden horses all day long, and I do mean all … day … long, and gotten on to do it again the next day.  And the next day.  And the next day.  I have fed them, herded them, doctored them, and assisted them to mate.  If you’ve never witnessed horses mating first hand (and I’m not talking about watching the Discovery Channel), it can be a violent affair.  I’ve ridden with saddles and then also (in my much younger years) bareback over mountain tops along narrow trails while running the herd).  The hardest ride was bareback and (on a dare) without a bridle, only the halter.

From the age of fourteen and beyond into my early twenties, I worked weekends and summers at a Christian camp above Marietta, South Carolina named Awanita Valley (and Awanita Ranch in Traveler’s Rest).  We trained and trail rode horses, fed them and cared for them, hiked the trails and cleared them of snakes and yellow jacket nests (have you ever been on a horse when it came up on a yellow jacket nest?).

When we weren’t doing that, we were cutting wood, hauling supplies, digging ditches, and baling hay.  My boys did the same thing, and Daniel later (before the Marine Corps) worked for Joey Macrae in Anderson, South Carolina, an extraordinary professional horseman, breaking and training horses.  I have ridden in the rain, blazing sun, and snow.  I have seen my son Joshua and his horse buried up to his thighs in snow, and watched him ride the horse up from sinking in the drift and stay on him while keeping the horse and him safe.

I was preaching at that point to LEOs, and explaining that you need to understand the affects of voice volume, timbre, pitch, etc., the calmness of your voice and demeaner, nature of eye contact and body movements, etc., on the behavior of the animal.  The animal must trust you and agree to a relationship.  If that doesn’t happen, in most cases, the animal will kill you.  So you learn from someone who knows how to do it, or you learn from the school of hard knocks.

Here is a related instance of failing to understand animals (or simply not caring).

Medina Spirit, the horse that finished first in this year’s Kentucky Derby but failed a drug test after the race, died after suffering a heart attack Monday at a Southern California racetrack, trainer Bob Baffert said. The trainer said Medina Spirit died following a workout at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia, California.

Baffert attorney Craig Robertson initially confirmed the death to CBS News. The California Horse Racing Board said in a statement a necropsy would be performed at a lab run by the University of California, Davis, and a cause of death can’t be determined until the examination and toxicology tests have been completed.

The 3-year-old colt died immediately after collapsing near the finish line on Santa Anita’s main track Monday morning, the board said.

“My entire barn is devastated by this news,” Baffert said in a statement. “Medina Spirit was a great champion, a member of our family who was loved by all, and we are deeply mourning his loss.”

Medina Spirit is the 10th horse to die while training at the track this year, according to the California Horse Racing Board. Nine other horses died while racing at the track in 2021, according to the board. In 2019, racing at the track was temporarily suspended twice amid a spike in horse fatalities.

Before you go there, I know what you’re going to say.  The animal perished because it was fed PEDs.

No … that’s not right.  No it didn’t.

I’ve tried to point this out before in previous posts.  The notion you are constantly exposed to in American western movies about horses running at a full gallop for miles and miles and miles is just false.  Horses cannot do that.  Their hearts will explode if you try to force a horse to do that.  American westerns perpetrate a lie.

Horse racing is immoral.  Greyhound racing is immoral.  They should both be illegal because they inflict suffering for man’s pleasure.  There isn’t an iota of difference between horse racing and dog fighting, which is also immoral.  You are forcing the animal to do something that runs contrary to its nature and is dangerous to its health.

Man was designed to run a long ways over long distances, and man’s body has internal triggers, clocks, and gages to tell him when to stop, when to hydrate, when to replenish, when this is “fast enough for me,” and so forth.  Animals do what they are told to do when they trust us.

The horse shouldn’t have trusted the trainer or rider.  The horse cannot tell otherwise.  The trainer and rider should be ashamed.  They killed the horse.

The good man cares for the life of his beast.  Because God says so (Psalm 50:10, Proverbs 12:10, Genesis 1:25, Proverbs 27:23, Matthew 10:29).

Readers know I’m a sucker for dogs.  I miss my Heidi-girl so much that I still grieve her loss.

WiscoDave sent this along today.

Despite trying surgery and chemotherapy, Hutchison died on August 11, at age 25, after an eight-year battle with cancer, Mirror reported. Things took a devastating turn in June, when Hutchison learned that his cancer had spread to most of his brain and to his bones and pelvis.

Nero would likely have passed away due to a broken heart anyway.

Also today, this is a report about how a woman and a dog copes with the dog going completely blind soon after adoption.

Because.  Love.

Good grief.  She’s apparently never been around animals before.

And no, I don’t know what sound she was making, or why she was making it.

I’ve usually got a firearm nearby, but how close is close enough?

A California woman currently battling cancer has described the terror she felt after being attacked by a bear she found roaming around her kitchen early one morning.

According to Fox 11, Laurel-Rose Von Hoffman-Curzi, 66, from Orinda, suffered a deep laceration to her face which required stitches as well as other puncture wounds, cuts and bruises after being mauled by a bear at her holiday home in North Lake Tahoe last weekend.

Von Hoffmann-Curzi said she had traveled to the property to isolate while she continues to fight stage 4 lymphoma. She was alerted to the presence of someone inside the property after being woken up by loud noises coming from the kitchen at approximately 6 a.m. on Saturday morning.

Upon investigating the noise, she came face to face with a large bear which was skulking around the kitchen refrigerator. What happened next is something of a blur.

“He must have come straight at me,” Von Hoffmann-Curzi told the news outlet. “I have only a vision of the paw. It was dark and then I’m getting torn up.”

She recalled that she was “bleeding and scared and screaming” during the ordeal but still found a way to fight back against the bear, throwing a quilt at the animal and screaming at it.

Though this initially failed to deter the animal, the bear eventually left her house after it saw her husband and son.

Von Hoffman-Curzi was treated in hospital for her injuries and believes she is lucky to be alive following the attack. “I should be dead the way the bear swiped at my face,” she said.

[ … ]

“Anything that has a strong odor to it is really the number one thing that attracts bears to people’s properties,” he told Fox 11.

That explanation certainly tallies with another recent bear-based home invasion, which was reported in California earlier this week. John Holden shared shocking video footage of a small bear eating food off his kitchen counter.

Holden came home to discover his house in disarray with the bear caught polishing off the remains of a bucket of KFC he had left on the work surface. He was in no doubt as to the cause of the break-in, surmising that the smell of the fried chicken was evidently too tempting for the bear to resist.

According to Bearwise, bears are attracted to “anything that smells” and |it doesn’t even need to smell good.”

“Garbage, compost piles, dirty diapers, pizza boxes, empty beverage cans…to a hungry black bear, it all smells like something good to eat,” they warn.

I don’t think I would ever respond to noises in my home without a firearm, but based on the second report, entering and leaving the premises also creates a justification to carry.

Chicken hawks are tough on both hens and roosters.  Sometimes a rooster can fight one off, sometimes not.

The goat made the difference.  I don’t think this goat liked the invasion of his space very much.

The hawk is fortunate to have gotten out with his life.

Remember boys and girls, Coyotes are predators.

Two toddlers were taken to the hospital after being attacked by a coyote in separate incidents in the Massachusetts town of Arlington, officials said Monday.

In the first incident, around 5:40 p.m. Sunday, the animal approached a 2-year-old girl, bit her on the back and dragged her across the yard, according to police. About 10 minutes later, police received a report of a coyote scratching another 2-year-old girl at a different yard, authorities said.

Both children sustained non-life-threatening injuries and were taken to a hospital for evaluation. Officials believe the same coyote was involved in both attacks, but they were still searching for the animal Monday.

The two incidents come just three weeks after another child had a violent encounter with a coyote in the same town. The 5-year-old victim in that attack was playing in a sandbox when a coyote approached him and bit him in the leg, police said.

They won’t just take your pets, they’ll take your children if you’re not aware of the threat.  And they’ve learned to hunt in packs, and are no longer afraid of humans.