ANIMALS AND THEIR YOUNG

I wanted to tell you about the experience we had with our cat and dog in growin their young. I fellt that the best way of doin doing so is by copy the stories out of my book ‘From the Promised Land to the Lucky Country’, which is available on www.amazon.com No. 1419633074.

Our cat 'Pooss"

One day, the kids find a very hungry looking black and white stray cat, amongst the trees at the back yard. She has a badly healed and ugly looking injury along one of her back legs. Taking pity on her, they adopt her and name her ‘Pooss.’

Pooss becomes pregnant, and her first-born is an albino with practically no hair. She nurses it for a couple of days, till she delivers two more. Then, she disappears with the albino and returns without it.

Pooss turns out to be the best mother I have ever seen. She instructs her kittens in the ways of a cat, teaching them to hunt, walk in a line, and take their turn while she encourages them to jump down from high places. She is not shy of reprimanding them when they dare step out of line, and spanks them or puts them in the corner when they deserve it - only to lick them afterwards. And you know, she never read a book about how to bring up her young.

Our dog Tara

… Tara has started digging under the clinic building and is taking all the sand out of there. We are worried the building will fall over if she continues this way, and the children are working hard returning it. Yet Tara does not stop. She is determined, leaving us no option but to succumb and hope for the best.

The building does not collapse, and Tara has her den. Once she enters, she refuses to come out, and in there she has her pups. However, she needs to be fed and we need to know what’s going on. So the children are taking turns crawling under the building. A day passes, and nothing happens. The following day, we have our two pups and think that’s it, but Tara is not coming out. We increase her feeding to about five times daily, with meat, milk and cheese in big amounts, and she finishes it all up. A day later, she has another couple of pups, and every time the children go under the house, they find some more. At the end of four days, Sharon crawls out very excited,

‘I have counted ten or eleven. But I’m not sure. Its difficult to see.’

Gill goes under the house, counts, and thinks there are eleven, but is not so sure either. Now, all we can do is wait and see.

At long last, Tara comes out and urinates for about half an hour and returns to her den. She has no more pups, but we have a tribe.

Tara stays under the house for some more days feeding her brood until she thinks they can venture out. Now, we can see their progress. We notice she does not care who feeds and who doesn’t. She has eight active tits for eleven mouths and it is not enough. Therefore, we make sure to rotate the pups and see the little ones are not disadvantaged. Each time one of the bigger ones falls asleep, we pull a little one from underneath the heap of pups, and put it on top to suck at a vacant tit. That way we lose none.

Eleven pups to look after are a lot, and Tara has not a minute’s peace, so she institutes an imaginary line of demarcation the puppies are not allowed to cross. Each time one of them dares to try, she opens her mouth over its head, shakes it and roars. The little one then cringes and disappears as fast as his little legs will carry him.

Even though still very young, you can already see their individual characters...

If you have a animal story, why not share it with me.

Renate

Artist, poet and the author of

'From the Promised Land to the Lucky Country'

To look inside my book Click here

To see more of my book click on this link

http://www.promisedland-renate.com 

ANIMAL STORIES

It’s a long time since I posted animals stories, or mentioned them in any shape or form. Today, I’d like to air some of what I think and feel, which I have not voiced before.

From day to day we find out more about the animals that share our world, and I often wondered, why we humans think we are the top of creation; shying away from recognising animals’ abilities we do not understand.

More surprising is the fact that we equate and judge other species by our own criteria and our own abilities, which do not include that which we do not see, feel, hear, or acknowledge.
Even more surprising is the belief some of us have, that it is our god given right to do, or use, other species in any way we please;
We human, enslave them, hurt them, and experiment on them for a so called “our own good” - How disgusting!

Many animals I came across do amazing adjustments to live and survive in our midst:
We never learn to adjust to the language our dogs speak - they adjust to us.
We put animals in circuses to entertain us - teaching them tricks that are out of their natural range of movements, and they do – even when it hurts them.
AND we take away their freedom, by putting them in zoos; for us to watch every single movement they do,
We deny them the right to live the way nature intended, AND we put them in laboratory cages to cut them, maim them, induce illness in them, genetically change them; under the rotten excuse of ‘Scientific Research”, just because they cannot object, or if and when they do - we shoot them!

I have said my piece here and I hope many of you are enrage just as I am.

Having said that, I’d like to show you some of the amazing things animals do and how they interact with us, and at times, form friendships across the species divide, by their own want and volition. So here I go:

Our son and family had a cockatiel in a cage, to which, as you already know I strongly object. However, they were going for holiday and gave us the bird to look after while they were gone.
It came in a large cage that same evening; with clothe to cover the cage for the night, a packet full of food; and a string of instructions to follow.
Come morning I take the clothe off the cage as instructed, said hello and good morning to the bird, refresh the water, put some food in the dish , and go back to my morning chores.
The phone rings. The tone is not the usual one our phones have, but it is constant.
I lift the receiver - there is no one at the other end.
I shrug my shoulder, put the receiver down, and return to my chores.
The phone rings again and it is the same story.
After a couple of more calls, I decide to follow its root, and end at the bird’s cage.
Getting there, the ring stops, and the Cockatiel is talking to me.
I say hi and return to my tasks.
The phone rings again.
I come to the cage and the bird is talking to me again.

I try this couple of more times, and realise the bird want to converse with me;
it has learned people come when the phone rings!
I decide to try and communicate.

Gerry and I have a whistle we used to use, before the days of the mobile phone. It was a fairly long and some what complicated segment of a song. I wanted to see how the bird will react.
I told her all about it and then whistled it. She listened intensely, with her head bend to one side and to the other. As I stopped, she said some thing to me that I understood her asking me to repeat it. As I finished, she started to repeat it.
Each time she asked for a repeat, I obliged, and she continued to learn.
She got the first and last parts correctly, but had difficulties getting the middle, which was somewhat more complicated.

We continued to communicate that way for the 10 days she was with us, and it was beautiful. I am sure that if we would have been together permanently, we would have had a large vocabulary between us.

My daughter in law, Lynne, had a Goldfish that we suspect of not being a goldfish at all. It continued to grow and grow and was still alive seven years later.
As it continued growing, it got a bigger aquarium, even though he was on his own. He did not like company and used to eat those that were brought in to keep him company.

To make sure he will not be bored, Lynne put him on the kitchen bench, so that he can be a part of the activities around.
He had a silvery golden colour and two large protruding eyes that followed every move around him.
Every evening, at 5pm on the dot, he will nock on the glass and remind Lynne that it is time for him to get his meal!

I have received the following from EllieBlue on Stumble upon. She was replying to my post about Crows:

Renate,
I too have a high regard for crows. We had one as a pet. She was knocked out of her nest during a storm. She was very affectionate but naughty. She would sneak visitors’ biros etc from their pockets and my mother's pegs from the clothesline. She loved it when we set up a dish for her to bath in.

~Hugs~
Sandra

To finish off, here is a link to a clip of an elephant painting

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LHoyB81LnE

Enjoy.
Renate
Artist, poet and the author of
From the Promised Land to the Lucky Country
To see more of my book click on this link
http://www.promisedland-renate.com
To look inside my book Click here

Animal stories

We have arrived home, after travelling from one end of the world to the other, to find our electronic world in disarray. Most our instruments, including my computer, said their last good bye, and we are still in the process of getting it all sorted out. It has taken us three days to get our phone reconnected and it will take another week to get our broadband going, if we are lucky. So today’s posting comes to you through my son’s computer. Thank you Gill, for letting me use your facility. *** Tara, our three quarter, short hair Alsatian dog has gone off her rockers, barking her head off; disturbing our sleep. ‘Shut up Tara’ we shout, but Tara doesn’t listen. Her bark fierce and persistent and we are persistent in requiring her to stop; but nothing helps. Come morning, we enter our clinic building which is adjacent to our home via a joint carport, and lo and behold – we had a burglar on the premises! However, nothing was stolen. On the contrary, we gained some goods! You would not believe it; the thief came through the window, left his tools - and ran out through the front door… Tara, made him think again… We call the police and two of them come, dressed like T.V. detectives: long coats, hats and sunglasses. They write a report, take the burglar’s tools with them and say, More than checking for fingerprints, there is little we can do. We’ll return the tools to you once we finish with them; if not claimed. We never see the tools again, neither the police, and are wondering: were the tools ever claimed? … *** We have three elongated tomatoes growing on our one and only lonely tomato plant, and we are looking forward to using them in our salad once fully ripen. However, an uninvited visitor thinks differently, and is having them right now. As I look out the kitchen window I see one of these tomatoes on the lawn, with a third eaten away. The cut is neat and clean. “Gerry,” I say, “who can this one be? And why leave so much behind?” We wait a day, and the second third is eaten with a neat and clean cut. On the third, it‘s all gone. As no waste occurred, we are happy to leave the two other tomatoes on the vine and see what comes next. The following days bring the same pattern, and within six days the other two tomatoes are gone. In the meantime, our visitor feels secure enough to come to our glass door and look inside and, it is a lizard: A lovely young one of about 60cm long of which less than half is body and the rest - tail. It has a diamond shaped head and ordinary lizard colours. After a couple of more visits and no more tomatoes in sight, our lizard left us for redder pastures… *** Our W.A Women – pilots’ club has a visitor who lives on a farm in West South Africa, and I am hosting her for the day. As we talk, she tells me the following story: “Next to my farm,” she says, “a road crew is putting down a military type role-out wire road. Day after day, the crew rolls out the road, and every morning - the road is gone without a trace. After few days and getting sick of it, they decide to ambush the area.” “And what do you think has happened? Can you guess”? She asks me with a knowing smile on her face. I shrug my shoulders and shake my head, “I have no idea,” I reply “Well, Hiding behind the trees they see a group of elephants watching them work. When the day’s work is done, and they are gone, the elephants come out of their hiding, roll up the road and carry it away. Come morning, the elephants return, watching from their hiding place looking to see the people’s reaction… …and, who says animals have no sense of humour?… *** Did you ever see a pink dolphin? This dolphin is an albino. Isn’t it beautiful? If you want to read more about it, here is the link – http://www.snopes.com/photos/animals/pinkdolphin.asp *** If you have some similar animal stories, do share them with me. Once I have another bunch of them, I will post them. Renate Artist, poet and the Author of ‘From the Promised Land to the lucky Country”

Crows

We live in a tourist area named “The City of the Gold Coast”, which is about 1000km north of Sydney along the Pacific shore, in the state of QLD.Like most Australians, we have a private home with a garden around it.

Prior to development the area was a ‘fill’ area, for unwanted building materials and other wastes, which made it an ideal home for crows.

Although urbanized for years already, the crows are still here and we still wake up each morning to the sad sound of their good morning greetings.

Our crows are black as black can be, and fairly large; more like ravens I suppose. In contrast to European crows, they don’t jump, but walk, and they love eating fruit.

We have some passionfruit vines on the side fence, in an area that is separated from the back lawn by a corrugated metal fence. From time to time, empty passionfruit shells appear on that lawn with only a single piercing on them.

For months we wondered how come they are there, and who is the culprit. We thought, may be it’s the large fruit bats we have who eat the lycee off our tree; so we hung some old CDs on the vines to twinkle in the night with the street lights to keep them away; but with no results. The empty shells continued to turn up on the back lawn!

One day we caught them. The crows, I mean. Here they were, sneaking very very quietly, picking the fruit off the vine, and taking it to the back lawn, poking them with their beaks, and sucking the juicy fruit out!

What are we to do? We had no idea, so we succumbed. We decided that nature is getting its way, and all we have to do is to be quicker than the crows in getting the fruit onto our dining table.

In Israel, we are staying in an area, which is also a tourist area. Here, along the Mediterranean Sea, they have the most beautiful promenade you can imagine.

And here, the local crows make sure to spoil the promenade with their most unhygienic eating habits.

Every morning, when we are out for our morning walk, we see them emptying the cover-less rubbish bins from all their previous night leftovers, feasting to their heart content and leaving an unbelievable mess around.

These crows are very different in looks and in behaviour. They are not just black. Their wing, tail and head are black but their body is faun to light brown. Some of them have also a black bib in the front.

They also do not just walk or just hop.They do both; walking and hoping. They walk when they have time to enjoy their surrounds, hop when they are in a hurry, and before a flight lift off.You can see them walk, then, start hoping, then, comes the lift off.

Crows have, for some reason, got an eerie attitude developed towards them throughout the ages. I think it is because of their sad crying type of voice. However, when you bother to look at them and observe them, they are a very beautiful bird with a deep and rich colour and a lovely shape.

Renate

Artist, poet & the Author of

From the Promised Land to the Lucky Country

http://www.promisedland-renate.com/