Exotic Pets

            Imagine a bald eagle flying around your home, with its 7-foot wingspan and freedom blazing from every feather. Now imagine that same freedom bird ripping your face off because he’s just a little hungry and he has been having a bad day. As a kid, I always wanted a panther, with sleek jet-black fur, and bright golden eyes. I’d ride him all over the place, go to the mall and watch everyone quiver in his or her boots over my majestic creature on his leash. As cool as it would be to have a panther or a bald eagle as a pet, they’re still wild and they will kill you if they need to, plus they’re extremely expensive. The most exotic animal that is semi-possible to obtain is probably a chimp or monkey. Even then, so much time and money would be consumed trying to keep said pet.

           

            So why do these rare pets take up so many resources? First reason is just the rarity and the difficultly of catching some wild animals. Some prices for exotic animals, such as a macaw, can cost almost ten thousand dollars.  A chimpanzee can cost more that sixty thousand dollars. That’s right, these animals cost more than a brand new car. These prices will become even higher as their habitats are being destroyed and their friends being caged to be sent to other owners. The government and other associations won’t let just anyone have these extremely dangerous pets, for good reasons. Hours upon hours of training are needed to learn about these exotic animals to finally get the approval to obtain a pet you desire.

           

            You can’t just put some rare exotic animal in a kennel and fed it hamster food. Depending on the pet you have, some people have to build special enclosures for their pets costing thousands of dollars. Animals eat a lot as well, we know that, your dog can scarf down a steak in about 10 seconds. Food is expensive and feeding your exotic animal its “rare” diet could cost you as much, if not a lot more, than feeding a kid.

            Owning an exotic pet is a lot of work. Thousands of dollars are spent on food, shelter, and transportation. As much as I love the idea of owning a panther, I probably need to wait until I win the lottery.

The War Mongers

            Australia is known for their extremely manly men. You have Steve Irwin as an example, a guy who fought freaking crocodiles and wasn't afraid of anything. Along with dangerous men in Australia, you have the animals. Jokes are always made that everything in Australia has specifically evolved to kill humans, but its semi-true, you have to be careful where you walk in the giant war zone of a country. Extremely venomous jellyfishes and octopi roam the waters while drop-bears; poisonous snakes and spiders creep around the mainland. Most manly men in Australia keep their distance from these demons because if they don’t, they will kill you like they did Steve Irwin who died to a stingray piercing him in the heart. There is another time the manly men of the Aussie nation fought back and lost embarrassingly.

            They went to war against emus. That’s right emus. Not the deadly animals that roam the streets of Sydney, they went to war against a large bird. An emu is similar to an ostrich, just a bit shorter.  Although emus can be aggressive sometimes, they are not as extremely dangerous as every other animal in that God-Forsaken place. So why would the good people of Australia go to war against these birds you ask, well over 20,000 emus chomped down all the crops of Australian farmers. In the 1930s, after another bad year of crops, the government decided to intervene by literally going to war against the birds. Machine guns and other advanced technological weapons from this era were being used, that’s right machine guns.

            Now a technologically advanced military is hunting down 20,000 birds that keep eating farmers’ crops. You think to yourself, oh this will be an easy slaughtering of FLIGHTLESS birds right? Wrong. The first attempt at killing emus failed terribly, after days of searching, the solders finally found about 1,000 birds. They round ‘em up and fire, but the guns jam and all the emus scatter. Along with this failed mission, many other missions follow leading to about 50 emus being killed over the course of a week. Emus 1, Solders 0. The military left with their heads low and the emus continued their rampage over the land.

            About another week later, after more complaints from farmers, the military comes back with their big heavy guns. Yet again the solders find little success. Killing about 50 in the first few days.  By the time the military was finished with the dim-witted war, the emu’s side suffered about 900 casualties. The military leaves feeling a little bit better about itself. 

            The media always seems to like making fun of the government, so the name Emu wars, where machine guns lost to a bunch of birds, was born.  Over the years, emus continue to ravage Australian farms, but now the government just ignores it, so they don’t have to fight the emus again.

Rescue me

            Everyone loves dogs; they’re nice, loving, and loyal. They deserve the name “man’s best friend”.  They are always there to make you happy with their amazing faces that seem to smile. They’re so cute that I just want to cry whenever their sad little faces show up on TV with the Sarah Mclachlan music in the background. Most dogs are extremely talented as well.  They can follow a scent, point, fetch, roll over, get the paper and about anything in your wildest dreams. During this last week, the minds of Americans reflected on the anniversary of a devastating event, 9/11.  Recognizing and remembering the brave souls, firefighters, and victims of this terrible tragedy is something everyone should do. One particular group of people I would like to recognize is the K9 search team that went to work after the 9/11 attacks and the work this search teams do everyday. 

            In order to distinguish how amazing and hard working these dogs are, we have to know about their training, practice, and abilities.  Dogs have an astonishing sense of smell!  In order to find people lost in rumble, snow, etc, they smell the air around them to find the scent of someone they are looking for. These search team dogs are mostly bloodhounds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodhound), they are known as SAR (search and rescue) dogs. An unusual place to get more information on these dogs is from Mythbusters. They took the challenge of trying to confuse a SAR dog.  They failed terribly. It’s quite informative and the Mythbusters crew always makes their show entertaining.  Taking a shower, back tracking, taking odd routes, and using black pepper where all strategies that failed trying to trick a bloodhound. What makes these SAR dogs so good at what they do is the fact that humans shed a bunch of dead skin. This dead skin carries a trail, which dogs can smell, giving them directions to the person being followed. Along with trailing people, the smell of humans in general can be used to locate people buried from disasters like 9/11.

            When the towers collapsed, the SAR dogs where sent out to search for survivors. Of course, as we know now, after the towers fell no survivors would be found. I wrote this blog post because of this fact, “Due to no survivors being found, search dogs became extremely stressed from not finding anyone, because to this, workers hid in the rumble and let the dogs find them to get their spirits up” L.