The recent hullabaloo with tainted pet food has awakened lots of people to the fact that the "high-quality" and "nutritious" pet food is actually made with the same filler base as Purina Wonder Kibble. The literal same: it came from the same factory, and got the same poison into it. It's that base that was tainted, and made it into the various different brands of food.

We've been told that you can't just feed your pet food from the table; it's bad for them. If that's true, what did they feed dogs in the Bronze Age? They didn't have Purina Wonder Kibble then, and yet they had strong healthy pets.

The truth is, your pet doesn't need store-bought food. They don't need corn meal, ash, or any of the other various fillers. They certainly don't need rat poison.

The other benefit to the tainted pet food scandal is that my Mom's dachshund, Lincoln, ate part of a can of it. She hustled him to a vet quick, and tests showed that he didn't have any kidney or liver damage. (He does, however, have prostate cancer, which they caught early thanks to the tests.)

Mom did the research and came up with recipes to make Lincoln's food herself, which has done him worlds of good. She recommends this book to anyone who wants to make their own pet food.

If you don't have that kind of time, though, you can buy nutritional pet food. Actual nutritional food, though, not what they have at Wal-mart.

First, we checked out Amaranth Foods, a health food store that had only two real contenders. Instead of just arbitrarily picking one for her, we gave Sheba two bowls and let her pick which one she preferred. She's not a fussy eater, but how do I know what cat food tastes better?

( Taste test results beneath the cut )

The new baby birdie didn't make it. :(

Two weeks ago, the canaries laid a second clutch: five eggs, this time. Five! we thought but, having had only one chick from the previous four eggs, we learned not to count our canaries.

They were due to start hatching on Thursday, but a few days before that, we found one of the eggs broken on the bottom of the cage. Disappointing! But five eggs didn't really fit in the nest anyway--it probably got shoved out accidentally, we thought. It had been fertile, anyway.

Then an egg disappeared. Just disappeared. Did they eat it? We don't know.

Then we discovered a partially broken one in the nest. It was still enclosed with a membrane, but part of the shell was gone. Eventually it ended up on the cage floor too. We didn't really want to examine it too closely in case it contained a dead baby bird as well.

Today we found yet another eggshell on the bottom of the cage. Then we were horrified to see a baby bird under the floor grate in the corncob and poop. We figured it was done for, but it wiggled when Lisa blew on it. So we pulled out the grate, rescued the little birdie, and fed him with the syringe.

I think we should name it Newton, after the discoverer of gravity. I guess the featherheads rolled the egg out of of the nest and it fell and broke on the grate, releasing the baby. Hell of a way to be born.

There's one last egg, but now Peep isn't interested in sitting on it. She sat on Peanut probably far longer than she needed to, but we're wondering now if he really needed to be sat upon. Probably she was just getting ready for the second batch.

Unfortunately, since Peep's not interested in the nest, the remaining egg and the baby are pretty much up to us. As I'm the one who can circulate blood to generate heat, I've been holding the baby in my left hand while typing this. The egg and the nest are sitting on top of my MacBook power brick which, since it pumps out some serious BTUs anyway, might as well be put to good use as a nanny.

Lisa will be taking the baby and the nest to work tomorrow, where she can feed it and her co-workers can coo over it.

He looks a lot better with feathers. For some reason, as soon as he grew feathers he got shy, and hunkers down in the nest when we talk to him. When he still looked like a frozen Safeway turkey he'd drink water from our fingers: I guess his vision wasn't good enough yet to tell us apart from his parents.

Click for pictures!

What I want to know is, where did that neck come from? The adult canaries don't have necks like that: they turn their whole bodies to peer up at you. Like Batman. Assuming Peanut is actually a canary, is his neck going to fuse with the rest of his torso?

On Thursday, probably exactly two weeks after it was laid, one of the eggs hatched. None of the other three did: we've looked at them in the light and they were never fertile.



At first he (we're calling him a he. We can't tell. We can't even tell on the adult canaries, except that one of them lays eggs and the other one sings) looked like a tiny pink scrap of pinkness, with Doc Brown white fringe over parts of him.

Lord, baby birds are hideous.

I wanted to name him Junior Birdman, after the Joker's line in Batman, which is a reference to a song apparently. Lisa's counterproposal was Peanut, after the junior Birdman from Harvey Birdman. He looks like a peanut.

We'd thought Feep would be a good father, since he likes to feed Peep as if she were a hatchling. He also forcibly impregnates her. I think there's a Lolita thing going on there.

However, neither of them seemed particularly interested in feeding the baby. We were disappointed but not that surprised because the featherheads are kind of idiots. So Lisa took the baby formula that she'd offered the parents, ground it into goop, and we squirted into the baby's mouth using one of the syringes I'd been given to rinse out where I used to have wisdom teeth.

We couldn't feed him while we were at work, of course, but he hung on until the weekend, when I could feed him while Lisa was at Otafest, and she could feed him while I was gaming.



Fortunately on Sunday Peep perched on the side of the nest and watched Lisa feed the baby, and after that she had the idea. Now Feep feeds Peep, and Peep feeds the baby. A lot.

He was bigger on Sunday already.



He's bigger today, probably due to his nearly-constant feedings. A lot bigger. When he's laying down he still just looks like a pink lump, but when he raises his head for food he's more than twice as big as he was when he hatched.

I couldn't get a picture of that, but I did get a picture of the three of them. Know why Peep looks a little surprised in this picture? Because she's sitting on a goddamn condor.

Today our canaries laid a second egg! Well, only one of them did.




We're not keeping the babies, since it's only a two-canary cage. Mom will take one and Kyle will take one and after that we'll either give them away or sell them. Lisa would prefer to give them away to friends so she knows that they'll be taken care of. I suspect she'll have trouble giving them away at all.

After this litter, I think we'll use Mom's canary-birth-control plan: switch the eggs with fake ones when the birds aren't looking. Lisa plans to sculpt some out of FIMO, but Cadbury Mini Eggs would probably work just as well. They look just the same.

Play the Pygmy Pigeon Progeny Pool!

For quite a while now really, Sheba has been pulling tufts of fur out her back and leaving them on the carpet. Her skin looks fine, and she mostly does it when we're not home, so I pretty much assumed it was anxiety, since she's not the sanest of cats to begin with.

But she turned ten years old this year, so it was about time we hied us over to the vet, as she was long overdue for a checkup. This involved Dire Warnings To The Cat for the week prior, which of course she ignored, being as she is foremost a cat, and also does not understand English.

Unlike most cats, Sheba is very well-trained. She is very careful not to misbehave: she won't jump onto food preparation surfaces--and in fact recently we dropped some salmon on the floor and she wouldn't even come into the kitchen when we were there, because she knows she's not allowed to be underfoot during food-time. She bolts out of the basement if I go down there while she's using her litter.

This isn't because she's especially eager to please. It's because she fears reprisal.

I have sat on her for as much as half an hour at a time. Also I randomly chase her around. Try it--it keeps them humble.

Which means, in order to stuff her into her carry-bag, I can't LOOK like I'm about to stuff her into her carry-bag. I don't know, fly casual! Naturally our first attempt didn't work, which aroused her suspicions, and we ended up just putting the bag on its end and dumping her into it.

She yowled in the car, briefly, as cats are wont to do in variable gravity areas. But she calmed down, probably soothed by our speaking conversationally. Then she was fine. And she was fine in the cat clinic's waiting room. But as soon as we went into the little examining room, kitty Jekyll turned into kitty Hyde. She growled and snarled and refused to be dumped out of her kitty bag and in general raised a ruckus.

The vet released Sheba on the floor, in the corner, and tossed a towel over her, muffling her slightly.

"She's, um, feisty. I think we're going to have to sedate her," the vet said.

"Yeah, the most you can usually do is listen to her heart and check her teeth," I said.

So we left her at the clinic and they gave her a roofie-colada. Apparently not enough to defeist her: when we picked her up, she was pretty happy to see us, and I unzipped the top of her bag to pet her. "She wouldn't let us do that," the orderly said wistfully. She and the vet both had quilt-patterns of scratch marks on their hands, most of which were too old to have been Sheba-inflicted.

Her x-ray showed a possible slipped disk in her spine, which she might be chewing on. But no mites or lesions. She recommended that we dribble omega-3 fatty acid onto her food, which we've been doing, and buy her Prescription brand wet food. "Won't soft food rot her teeth?" I asked. Well, maybe, she admitted.

The clinic is pretty good with the intertron nowadays. The doctor sent me a followup e-mail:

How did Sheba do after her visit on Saturday? Any problems? How are things going with the fatty acids?

Her bloodwork looks good (normal thyroid, kidney, liver, white and red blood cell count etc etc). Her skin scraping was negative for mites. On xrays, the radiologist felt that at most there was only a subtle narrowing of the vetebral disc space in the lower neck. So...nothing concrete to go on. I would monitor her behavior closely and write down when the hair pulling seems to occur, and where the tufts are coming from. It might be worth a trial with an medication called elavil which can help with chronic pain as well as act as an antihistamine to reduce itchiness.

Translation: "Your cat's probably nuts."

That's possibly why mint chapstick makes her scrunch up her face.

I just e-mailed this to littermaid.com. I tried to use their website contact form, but conveniently that comes back with a server error.

I am extremely displeased with this product. After three months of use, my LitterMaid Pro stopped retracting its rake--10 minutes after my cat used it, the Pro would rake the waste into the waste receptacle and then stop there, with the rake holding the receptacle open. This actually caused more odor than a normal, non-automatic litter box would have.

I had to keep an ear out for the LitterMaid's sound so that I could manually flip its switch. Generally several flips (or banging on the top of the unit) would be required to make the Pro retract the rake. Again, this meant that the LitterMaid required more effort for a worse result than a normal box of litter would have. Today I gave up on the LitterMaid and replaced it with my cat's normal box. I would chalk it up to one of life's bad experiences, if not for the complete waste of quite a lot of money--the LitterMaid Pro cost $200 CDN at PetCetera.

I would appreciate being contacted as soon as possible to rectify this.

Looking the LitterMaid up on Amazon.com shows that lots of people think it's ass--something I should have looked up before buying it. Live and learn, I guess.