PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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@how2skinatiger
Piebald Golden Jackal (Canis aureus) killed in Serbia.
It's possible this animal may be a hybrid with a domestic dog. Hybrids between the two species are well-documented, however a similar-looking piebald jackal culled in Israel was DNA tested and found to contain no trace of domestic dog ancestry, suggesting this colour pattern may also occur naturally in the species.
Photo from Six By Six Hunting
“An Unforgiving kingdom”
by Shafeeq Mulla (Zambia)
“A leopard known as Olimba carries the carcass of a female vervet monkey with its baby still hanging on for dear life.”
The Nature Conservancy 2022 Photo Contest
really neat guy, never seen these little ears like thison such a bold big guy, makes him seem so bashful
(source)
A boy covered in young opossums By: Charles Philip Fox From: The Illustrated Library of the Natural Sciences 1958
A reminder for the summer that double or long haired coats do not keep dogs cooler
This post has been debunked many times.
“Studies of thermal imaging show that long-haired and double-coat dogs had lower surface temperatures. That’s because the heat inside the coat cant get out onto the surface and therefore won’t affect the surface temperature.
Rectal temperature was not significant in evaluating differences in surface temperature. Showing that a thermal image wont tell you if a clipped dog is hotter than a unclipped dog. It only shows the difference in the surface temperature.”
Basically, if the surface temperature of your dog is only 24’C, which is nice and cool, but the dog’s rectal temperature is 41’C (normal rectal temp for a dog is somewhere between 37.5-39.0’C), the dog is still going to be experiencing heatstroke and needs to be cool down urgently (and tbh, likely needs a vet visit at that point).
I wrote a long blog post 4 years ago about clipping dogs short for the summer -especially so-called double coated breeds.
I think this is a great resource, personally. It’s full of actual scientific studies and resources too.
Obviously some common sense is needed when shaving dogs. Examples:
People who show need to consider whether shaving or clipping is going affect showing the dog whilst the growth cycles of the hair complete again. Though, if the risk of heatstroke is severe enough, a missed show may not be the end of the world, but that’s just my opinion!
As with any shorter coats, you need to be a bit more careful about sunburn. Yes you can get pet-specific spf!
Young and elderly dogs do not have the most efficient thermoregulation so if you’re likely to have environmental temperature fluctuations, you might need to make sure they won’t get too chilly with a super short shave. Especially if you’re going to be bringing them inside to an aircon’d house etc. These might be the cases where clipping or shaving some belly fur may be more appropriate, rather than full body clips.
…. And as a side note, ice cubes are fine to give to your dog to down as long as you don’t have a dog that will eat it whole and potentially choke!
It pains me as a vet nurse to see Bernese mountain dogs, olde English sheepdogs, Malamutes (and so many others!) panting horrendously and trying to find any patch of cool tiled floor everyyyyy summer because they aren’t equipt to deal with the temperature.
Other than bulldogs, I think German shepherds, collies, and the mountain dog breeds, are the most common breeds I’ve seen with heat stroke in the summer time.
Thank you! This myth always baffled me because we have a lot of long-haired farm dogs whose owners shave them down for the summer (partly for the heat, but also to get rid of mats and prevent hot spots and fly strike), and we never see them in for heat stroke.
I think a lot of this stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of how insulation works.
The most common thing I hear is that insulation “keeps hot things hot but also keeps cold things cold”. (A veterinarian from Penn State wrote a layperson article against shaving that says, if not exactly this, basically.) Which, like, that’s true, but your dog isn’t a cold thing. Your dog is a hot thing, that constantly generates more heat. Which all gets trapped in there with them. So shaving a dog doesn’t make them too hot, it allows them to shed heat more efficiently.
The other thing I hear a lot of people say is that the hair on certain dog breeds (double-coated dogs, mostly) “won’t grow back”. This is false. The undercoat and guard hairs probably will grow back at different rates, and your dog will look goofy for a bit. But unless your dog has a medical condition that impacts hair growth, it should all eventually grow back.
Jungle cat (Felis chaus)
Photo © Suru Nair
Long-tailed weasel (Neogale frenata) Sebastopol, California, USA
Photo © ricardo00
whats ur favorite bird?
anon you have just opened pandora’s box
My favorite particular bird is the Pfeilstorch! This is a piece of taxidermy from the early 1800s currently on display at the University of Rostock in Germany.
In the early 1800s, natural historians and biologists did not know where birds went for the winter. They just disappeared. Some people thought they hibernated like bears, or turned into fish (!!) or flew to the moon (!!)
Cut to 1822 when a this bird was found in Germany. It was still alive, walking around with this spear in its neck. The spear was made from wood that only grows in central Africa. The German biologists determined that the bird had been speared in central Africa and then flew north to Germany. This was how they figured out that birds migrate with the changing seasons.
My dentist never gives me feetie warmers.
You’re probably not likely to claw the dentist’s face off.
You don’t know that
An American mink (Neogale vison) in New Albin, Iowa, USA
by Larry Reis
Just a little grown up baby animal
Hey you want to see the worst dog in the entire world.
Sharpei French bulldog. Allegedly at the vet for aspiration pneumonia (how'd that happen I wonder)
I like that they have cardboard shoved in his ears. You know, to post the ears. So the dog uh. So it will uh. So it will look better
GOD i love italian breeds so much, this dog really really really looks like fem!goofy, see this little nodule on top?
(source)
THIS is Angie, the best dog i’ve posted so far
she has me burning with inspiration, i never would have dreamed up a natural fur pattern like this
(source)
unfortunate to call it this early but this dobe wins Best of Tail for me
Aw!
Gives a new insight into why the people who wanted a scary-looking dog insisted on docking. People always say it was for hygiene, but now we know.
(I have a rescued Rottweiler, and sometimes I get a little sad thinking about how I will never know what her natural tail would have looked like. I tell myself she probably doesn’t remember any different, and she does good wags with just her nubbin, but still! Maybe it would be this good! There is no way to know.)
Docking wasn't anything to do with being scary looking until the original reasonings for docking became irrelevant.
Dogs were taxed by various governments in accordance to their specific jobs. Hunting dogs and working dogs by and large were docked. Docked dogs were taxed differently (less-so)- if at all- than dogs with natural long tails. Docked dogs were associated with the lower class, the poor, and so it was easy to see if a peasant was poaching on the king's land by seeing if the dog doing the hunting had a long or short tail. Or if this was a rich man's novelty pet vs a soldier's war dog. Or if this was the kennel master's prized animals vs the common dog you'd see guarding the flocks and pulling the carts.
When the dog tax was no more, various breeds continued docking because it had become routine. Certain breeds continued to be docked to prevent injury- farming equipment and medical care was not like it is now, and it was much more dangerous for the dogs to be working in these capacities back then. A dog whose tail gets stepped on by a cow is a dog that will either continue to be in pain from the broken tail for the rest of its life, likely ruined as a working dog, and thus no longer useful for the farmer... or will need to undergo amputation likely still awake and without pain control or good understanding of germ theory and sterile equipment. Easier to do it and less likely to lose the dog when you can just band the tail as a puppy and it dies and falls off by itself.
As far as the doberman breed goes, they were docked not to look scary but to protect them from injury being grabbed by an assailant, since these are intended to be protection dogs biting humans for attacking their owners. It's also why they were cropped. It just so happens that 1: very few people if any actually use these dogs in that capacity anymore and 2: the modern length of crop and dock is absolutely useless for injury prevention because they are both very grabable. Not to mention most of the people still using dobes in this manner keep their dogs natural nowadays, for various reasons but mostly because gun ownership is more common than it was when dobermans were created and thus most people needing protection use guns and a barking dog to get their point across rather than needing to rely on their dog attacking someone at close range where the dog may be grappled, stabbed, or injured in some way. It's also why they have such a short coat and close-lying tight skin.
"Looks scary" is entirely a modern and show dog invention, the first known mention of it being for the aesthetic was in 1890, and docking has been common practice since before the Roman Empire. The intimidation aspect was a pleasant side effect, but not the point of the procedures. Nowadays, there is not much reason to crop and dock most breeds outside of aesthetic. But when these procedures were invented, they did have actual use. People weren't just randomly chopping off pieces of their dogs for kicks.
Even as late as the 1970s, people thought docking would help prevent parvo and distemper, before we knew and understood these diseases and could control them easily with vaccination. We also thought mixing dogs with wolves would prevent parvo with fairly disasterous results. The Romans thought cutting pieces off the dogs' tongues would help prevent rabies. We might have been wrong about these things, but they were done out of a desire to help keep our dogs safe to the best understanding we had at the time. Our current understanding of how disease spreads is very, very recent.
We know better now, and we should do better. But I think one shouldn't discount history. It's a bit more complicated than all that.
