animals

Scary Shark.

Leave a comment Posted on by Snoskred

Last night when we went to the usual Saturday night Chinese, there was a big group of people out on the boat ramp which can be seen from the restaurant. We weren’t really sure what was going on, until they started using this winch which holds up a big fish you’ve caught. They’d caught a Mako shark, about three metres long. It was huge!

So this is bad for many reasons, the worst of which is it reinforces my fear of sea water to go swimming in. I blame my parents for allowing me to see Jaws at an early age. And I felt sorry for the shark, because he/she probably was just out there minding its own business when it got hooked by these people. A 40 minute struggle (the other half went out to find out more about what happened) followed by two large hooks into the side of the fish because they couldn’t get it into the boat. It wasn’t humanely killed. I’m not sure how you humanely kill a shark. I guess you don’t.

But I think since swimming in the sea I have gained a new respect for fish. They’re not the stupid little creatures people make them out to be. I find it more difficult to eat them now.

The Chinese owner went out and talked them into giving him the shark fins, he gave them a couple of bags full of Chinese food in return.

animals, country life, food

Moments

1 Comment Posted on by Snoskred

I sent the other half out to water the plants while I did some stuff in the kitchen. Maybe 10 minutes later he was knocking on the door, so when I went to see what was going on he pointed out a little bird that was hiding among the pots to me which was not well – it looked injured.

So we have these fantastic volunteer groups in Australia which take in injured wildlife and take care of them, hoping to release them into the wild. While the other half got the bird and put it into a box with a blanket, I got on the phone to find out where to take it.

It’s times like this where I realise I’m not as country as I think I am. First, the directions which were given to me did not even include a street number. It was basically – past the SES, then past some bushy land, then you go over a bridge, and it’s the first white picket fence after the bridge, just before you start to go uphill.

The reason we were sent here was because it was supposedly closer than the other place she was going to give me directions to. I politely did not mention that I once held an injured emu on my lap for 30kms until we could get it to a vet and the place she was telling me to go was way less than that!

A moment for the emu story – we were driving up from Adelaide and about 30kms out of Hay we found a emu sitting in the middle of the road. We actually had a full car loaded with stuff which we were bringing up here because we were moving. The LCD tv was on the back seat covered in a blanket, but the other half and I cared little about grabbing it to wrap the emu in and we picked it up off the road because there were cars around.

She seemed to know we were trying to help her. We didn’t know how injured she was and if it had been badly I don’t know what we would have done but it just looked like a small graze and she seemed to be in shock, and there was no way we were leaving her by the side of the road to die. I was worried that she might have broken a leg. If that was the case they generally don’t try to help them, they just put them down. Emus only have two legs. We knew enough about emus to know it was a she.

So the other half looked at me and said what do we do, and I said well, let’s take it to the vet, there will be a vet in Hay I’m sure. He said, but the car is full, where will we put her? I said, on my lap I guess. He looked at me and said – You know, Emu’s can be really nasty creatures, she might start to peck you. I looked the emu in the eye and it looked back at me, and I said nah, it’ll be fine. I can’t really describe that moment, it’s just that I knew it would be ok.

So I got in the car, he put the emu on my lap, and these aren’t small birds, you guys. This thing would have easily weighed 20kgs, so it was heavy. She was all wrapped up so it couldn’t try to stand up, and she was resting her neck on my arm and looking at the other half. I had both arms around it to keep it from falling off my lap. Her head was over near the other half, and she was looking around quite calmly, and at one point she put her head on the other half’s shoulder.

We dropped her off at the vet in Hay, and called back a week later, the emu was going well and back on her feet, they knew who owned her because she was from an emu farm, and she was going back to them soon.

It was a somewhat life changing experience, and I wanted to work with wildlife after that, but so far I haven’t actually done it – I don’t really have the right situation at home because of the two cats. And the animal shelter haven’t got back to me either. I’m going to have to get onto that I think.

So I hope the little bird survives. I don’t know how it got injured but maybe a cat got it. Being a cat owner who has two cats that are indoor only for their safety as well as the wildlife and meaning no offense to anyone reading this, I find it difficult to understand people that can let their loved pets go out – there’s snakes, there’s cars, there’s heaps of dangerous things but worst of all, what of the damage their animals can do to the native wildlife?

I once lost a cat to a snake bite. He crawled all the way home, and he almost made it. For two days we looked everywhere for him, I was very upset, then a housemate discovered him in the long grass, fur matted with grass seeds as he had struggled to get back to us and to safety and that was the moment I decided that future cats would be indoor animals from then on. He was less than 20 metres from the front porch where I had sat calling him and wondering where the heck he could be.

animals, volunteer

Surprises..

2 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

Rabbitch posted about this yesterday, and now I’m laughing myself hysterical as well.. :)

As we were walking up the street to my parents for dinner tonight, we saw the little stray cat that likes to visit the windows of my house and upset the kitties and hide in the storm water drains when anyone approaches her, in the drain, with three little kittens. Four cute kitty faces looking up at us. I don’t think the kitty belongs to anyone, we think she might be feral but nobody knows for sure, and I’m torn between just letting them be, and reporting them to the RSPCA so the kittens can find good homes and hopefully the cat can too. Thoughts? One bad rain storm and they could all get drowned. :( But it is summer. But weather is unpredictable. I should leave some tuna outside on a plate for them. ;)

I really don’t like Rosie O’Donnell on the View, at all. I find her self-centred. If you watch it you’ll see, she often drags the conversation around to herself. Star Jones used to do the same thing, I can’t stand that. However, I did see Rosie on the Actor’s Studio and actually quite liked her. I don’t know whether it was because the show was supposed to be about her, for a change, or whether she was just less annoying.

I don’t watch much free to air television these days. In fact I do not even know how to make my tv show me the free to air channels, and it’s been that way since we moved in here. So I often miss out on stuff which people are seeing and raving about. Tonight Desperate Housewives began on W, one of the pay tv channels. It was the first episode, and surprisingly I really enjoyed it. I think I might buy the box set.. we’ll see how cheap it is.

We’ve been going to the beach a bit lately. There’s lots of good photos there. And when you have the below not very far from your doorstep, you really have no excuse..

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animals, celebrities, General Chit-chat, photography, photos

I figured this out..

2 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

If you only want a short amount of your post to appear in your rss feed (meaning people have to visit your blog personally to see the rest, so you can get a better idea of how many people are reading you) you can change the settings in Blogger Settings —> Site Feed —-> Allow Blog Feed —-> change this to short. (Select Short if you only wish to syndicate the first paragraph, or approximately 255 characters, whichever is shorter). So I did this today, sorry to be a pain in the rear, but if it’s bugging you let me know in the comments.

What have I been up to? I’ve been working on some scambaiting. The scammers love to hear from me. I’ve got a new copy and paste all set up and ready to go for them which involves a busty blonde lady of European origin who wants them to love her. This should make for fun emails..

I also been doing chores round the house, and I watched The Talented Mr Ripley yesterday, it was really great.. I have not been commenting on nablopomo blogs, I thought I would give myself a bit of a break before getting back into it next week. I needed the me time, seriously!

Pieces of Mind inspired me to volunteer at an animal shelter in a recent post. I wasn’t sure about it and I actually had two other options I was considering, both of which involved animals, but of a more wild variety, Wires or Nana which are both for native Aussie animals, and also the local animal park, I had run into the guy who runs it and mentioned I missed volunteering at the zoo and that I loved reptiles, and he said he had 200 reptiles off display and they love to have volunteers.

So in the end, I’ve emailed the animal shelter, and they’ve put me down for the next induction. I’m very happy with this. I was worried about how I’ll deal with the urge to take the animals home myself, and also how to cope with the not knowing, but I think I’ll be ok with it. And I need to do something, I need to get out of this house!

So that’s the news for now.. and if you are reading me by rss, can you throw a comment on here so I know? ;) I’m going to try and do that this week to all the blogs I am reading by rss.. cheers

animals, blog housekeeping, feed readers, volunteer

A tale of two kitties..

6 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

Not my kitties, for a change. I thought I would write about something zoo related, and this time a happy post. You can read the slightly sad reminder to wear sunscreen for Jacunda here.

So the Sumatran Tiger. We had two in our zoo. I’m not using their names to protect the innocent, the female one was K, and the male one was T. T is a tiger that originally came out from Germany over 20 years ago and they think he was about 6 years old then, but nobody is sure.

t1

He’s an old grump, but his genes are very important. He has very few teeth left. He licks his food to death, well he would if it were live, but it is served to him prepared. He is easily the most bedraggled cat you’ve ever seen. He looks like something the cat dragged in. Ouch, yes it was lame but I could not resist.

K was hand reared at another Australian zoo. She is absolutely stunning.

k1

When you hand-rear an animal, you bring into being a whole range of issues that the general public would not expect. K seriously thinks she is a human. The keeper can give her a good pat, and while this is great in some ways for health checks and that kind of thing, this is not normal tiger behaviour. Tigers are supposed to chase and eat humans, not purr throatily at them while the human gives them a scratch under their chin like any domestic cat.

I was present in the cat tunnel one day when the keeper did his usual health check with her, and just the sight of him approaching would set her purring – the purring sounds like thunder, a very deep rumble. K also would like to be at the front of her enclosure, talking to the humans. You could call her, she would turn up and stare at you and rub her face against the bars, almost begging you to give her a scratch. Her old enclosure had bars and while most people do not like bars, K adored them because it meant she could feel close to her adoring public.

At one point they moved her into an enclosure with a glass front. One visitor was given a huge surprise one day when she actually tried to jump out of the enclosure to be closer to the human. She shattered the inch thick glass, lucky for the human that tinting had been applied which stopped the glass from completely breaking, or human would have made a new tiger friend. K would have loved it. I suspect the human would have freaked out.

So, when you want two kitties to *ahem* mate, what do you do? You put them in enclosures next to each other and if they seem to look like they want to get it on, you introduce them in the cat tunnel (aptly nicknamed the tunnel of love) and see what happens. And this is what they did one day.

T entered the tunnel expecting to see the rear end of a female tiger ready to mate, as this is normal tiger behaviour. What he got was an open claw to the face. He retaliated by grabbing K by the throat and not letting go. Lucky thing he has virtually no teeth left, or that would have been the end of K. To separate them, the keeper had to turn the firehose on them.

The mating attempt was not successful and sadly they came to the conclusion that they will probably never be able to mate K. She doesn’t understand how she’s supposed to act. It was never taught to her, and it probably can’t be now. She may not have the correct instincts to be a mother, as well.

It is a really hard decision for a zoo to have to make when offspring are born and things go wrong – do they hand rear, or do they let nature take its course? With a valuable animal like a Sumatran Tiger, which is so endangered, there is a strong argument for hand-rearing any off spring if the mother cannot cope. There are so few of them left in the world. It’s almost like playing god.

k3

You look her in the eye and tell her she can’t be here, because I sure can’t. I’m glad it’s not my decision to make. Some species handle it much better than others, the cheetah is a great example of a species you can hand rear without doing too much damage to them and how they will live the rest of their life.

animals, zoo