Get up to get down: Pet products fetch a pretty penny

Although it topped the New Zealand record charts at Christmas, listeners gave "A Very Silent Night" "mixed reviews" when it was played on the radio. Some would "just lie down and did nothing," Bob Kerridge told Reuters, while one "physically attacked the radio when it was played and went quite berserk and totally destroyed it."

Kerridge is the chief executive of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and the song is off of a CD recorded at frequencies only audible to dogs and sold in New Zealand to raise money for the organization. It contains an instrumental as well as a vocal version of "Silent Night", and sold for $3.93 a copy, raising around $17,300 from sales.

"Never having heard it myself," Kerridge admitted, "I don't know what they'll hear and of course I don't know how dogs hear music."

Well, 70 percent of dogs in kennels and 85 percent in households have experienced reduced stress after listening to what researchers call "doggie classical", a stripped-down interpretation of classical tunes to be released on compact disc March 1 along with a book entitled Through a Dog's Ear.

Dogs apparently did not enjoy the likes of Britney Spears or Metallica as much as Bach, Schubert, and Chopin.

And songs and CD's for dogs isn't the least of what has become a booming industry, according to figures reported February 26 by the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association. The figures show pet owners spending an estimated $41 billion last year on their furry (or scaly) companions, almost double the expenditure in 1996, and expected to grow this year. About 63 percent of households are estimated to have pets, usually dogs, cats, or fish.

In the words of APPMA President Bob Vetere, "Pet owners and the companies providing pet products and services show no sign of letting up."

What's next? Food for dogs? Houses for dogs??



Special thanks to Meredith K.

Dog yawning photo: Inside Bay Area

"Squirrel a la Huckabee?" (Slate V)

Slate V's Samantha Henig must have picked up on my previous post, and in this video asks how to safely cook a squirrel, and if it can be done in a popcorn popper, like Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee claims to have done in college.

New species this week: Devil frog from hell

To celebrate the craziness of the animal kingdom, and because I have nothing better to do, I'll be picking a newly discovered species to highlight here each week on Friday.

The clear winner this week is Beelzebufo, "perhaps the largest frog ever to exist," according to the National Science Foundation. It lived 65 to 70 million years ago on what is now Madagascar and was "about the size of a beach ball." And with "an extremely wide mouth and powerful jaws," you would not have wanted to try and chase him around the pond.


Apart from the fact that the discovery may put the landmasses of Madagascar, India, and South America together as one in that time period, and apart from the titillating observation that Beelzebufo was likely "capable of killing lizards and other small vertebrates, perhaps even hatchling dinosaurs," most interesting are the monikers reporters have come up with for the big toad: "giant fossil frog from hell"; "Frogzilla"; "armored frog from hell"; and the tamer just plain "frog from hell". Well, the scientists that discovered the big bastard started it--their Latin name for it, Beelzebufo, means "devil frog".

The runners up this week include two new species of the fat, funny-shaped wobbegong (funny-named I might add) shark near Australia, and whatever's on three ships recently "returned from the Southern Ocean, their decks overflowing with a vast array of ocean life including a number of previously unknown species collected from the cold waters near the East Antarctic land mass." (Video here.)

Pic: SUNY-Stony Brook

Economy, war, health care...squirrel attack!

Tim Russert, host of NBC's "Meet the Press", asked Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee on Sunday, "Was it true...that he had fried squirrel in a popcorn popper in college?"

"Mr. Huckabee confirmed his prior squirrel consumption but appeared to back away from defending the flavor," says the Wall Street Journal. "'It's not the best thing in the world,' and doesn't really taste like chicken, he concluded."

Though the former governor of Arkansas' response lacked the bite most voters would like, still no other candidate has come out and taken a position on squirrels (of the rodent family Sciuridae) in America.

That very Sunday, before Huckabee made his bland statement on the issue, a squirrel entered a substation in Gentilly, Louisiana, tripping a circuit breaker and leaving 6,000 energy customers without power for nearly four hours.

Hardly a week before that a squirrel got into a transformer in Weston, Connecticut, causing an electrical fire and brief power outage.

In fact, squirrels frequently chew wires and meddle with transformers, causing power outages, fires, and even explosions. "New York officials report that squirrels cause power outages daily," according to one source. At least twice, the gray rodents have shut down the NASDAQ stock exchange.

"On average about twenty-five percent of all power outages nationwide...are inspired by suicidal squirrels," claims the web site "Daily Kos".

And voters needn't limit their concern to tree squirrels--burrowing ground squirrels can undermine the integrity of buildings and infrastructure. "A post-Katrina study," warns a California-based water supply and flood protection organization, "cited 'rodent burrows' as a pervasive problem with earthen levees in New Orleans."

OTHER PLACES TO WATCH OUT FOR SQUIRRELS

A baby grand piano.

My friend's pants in third grade.

Soup.

The cemetery.

England, where the destructive American gray squirrel, brought to the island in the 19th century, has turned out to be a viciously invasive species, routing the native red squirrel from its habitat and spreading a deadly pox among the survivors.

What will the Dipterans say?

The universality of alcohol's effects appears to have been confirmed by a recent report from Penn State which showed that inebriated fruit flies not only lose motor control and eventually consciousness, but also their sexual inhibitions. In fact, the drunken males can become so sexually uninhibited as to switch teams and hit on their fellow males--"a novel type of behavioral disinhibition," insist the researchers.

Led by Kyung-An Han, the current study observed the sexual behavior of sober fruit flies first. When an amorous Drosophila melanogaster meets an eligible female, he gives her a tap, sings her a song, and proceeds to lick her genitals. With just the guys, this courting ritual is almost never observed, and when it's attempted it is usually strongly rebuked by the male courtee.

But things are different in the Flypub--the environment experimenters use to get their fruit flies drunk. It is essentially an ethanol-soaked cotton ball in the middle of the flies' container. The flies don't imbibe, they inhale the fumes. Han's team gave their flies a daily dose--Happy Hour at the Flypub--"to more closely mimic the drinking habits of alcoholics and chronic alcohol abusers."

Another way to get fruit flies and other airborne insects drunk is the inebriometer: a tall glass tube with several platforms attached to a pump for the introduction of alcohol vapor. The bugs start out on the top platform, where they'll remain in the absence of alcohol, but after a few "drinks" they'll start to tumble from one platform down to the next. Their crapulence is measured by the time it takes a pile of them to form at the bottom.

If you are worried about the effect this debaucherous research is having on Drosophila melanogasters' moral fiber, you should be aware that scientists have not stopped at ethanol and its unsavory effects: they've tested caffeine on the innocent flies and even crack cocaine!

Video: Fruit flies gone wild