Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:03 Welcome to brain junk. I'm Amy Barton and I'm trace Kerr and today we are going to be talking but everything you never knew you wanted to know about pets. So Amy, I'm going to lead off talking about some history. Excellent. Just a little bit. People have trouble figuring out just how long we've been keeping animals. Uh, in Mesopotamia. Dogs that look like modern mastiffs are showing up in lion hunts in drawings and long in ancient Egypt they have drawings of hunting dogs and lapdogs and then also people keeping lions, hyenas, monkeys and the Nial goose as pets. Wow. Yeah. And catch showed up a little later. Dogs were on the pet train a lot earlier than cats were. That's not a surprise.
Speaker 1 00:50 No, I would say cats are borderline pets anyway. They live with us and eat our food, but they're more like your, um, your couch squatting crazy uncle
Speaker 0 00:57 that's you just can't get rid of. Yeah. And then horses show up by 2000 BCE, uh, used in chariot battles throughout the Middle East. But, uh, one thing I found interesting about pet history, speaking of dogs specifically, dogs seem to have been domesticated twice from two different Wolf Lines in Europe. There's evidence from about 16,000 years ago and in Asia from about 14,000 years ago. So dogs have been with us for a long time and I think you had a story about it.
Speaker 1 01:25 Dogs do you? I do. I have a really great story about dogs. I was poking around on the Internet and saw the story of Lou divine. She's a two and a half year old, bloodhound Canadian bloodhound. Yay Boot. This is my Canadian words. Sorry. Canada. We do love you. Canada. I'm her owner. April Hamlin tells the story of how she must live on the race track of the Elfmont tracklist train half marathon in Canada, let Lou divine out to go potty. Right around the time the event was starting, Lou divine hopped or snuck out the fence and joined the half marathon. And so usually dog gets a ways from home loses interest, comes back. Most of us, your dog goes two or three blocks, comes home blue divine stayed the course of the entire half marathon. She ran 13 miles. She did and the owner says she's kind of a lazy dog. Oh No. Normally. And so I can't imagine how her little pause must have been after that, right? Yeah, but she stayed with the front runners and did take a couple of detours like to sniff a dead rabbit and go visit a herd of cows. You must've had quite the day, but stayed with the front pack and came in seventh and was awarded a finisher's medal.
Speaker 0 02:42 Yes.
Speaker 1 02:45 Favorite pet story? I try not to blast social media with all the animal stories, but that one, I love that one very much. That's adorable. New Divine, the half marathon runner.
Speaker 0 02:55 Well, if you're not really into running half marathons with dogs, but you want to hang out with pets that don't belong to you, you need to go to Japan because they have animal cafes. Oh now there is some controversy around animal cafes because some of them aren't taking great care of their animals. The ones that I was looking at are ones that have been there like the number one, a plus better business bureau style animal cafes. So Tokyo is tops for this type of dining experience. It started with cat cafes. So imagine you know a coffee shop and there's all these cats and you can pet them and enjoy them
Speaker 1 03:32 and do you eat and then go see them or do you eat in there? There
Speaker 0 03:34 some places it depends on the animals. They could be around the tables with you. Other places like the CICU CICU Cafe, that's hedgehogs what you can feed, touch and take photos with the hedgehogs that seem to keep the people food and the hedgehog separate. I feel like that's a good plan. Yeah, there are dog cafes and cat cafes, but the one that I absolutely love, you can follow them on Instagram and I've put a link in the show notes is the EKF Makutu cafe. That's owls. Oh really? So amazing. They've got purchase and there are fluffy owls and warned owls and all sorts of different ones. You can pick them up and carry them around on your arm. You can pet them.
Speaker 1 04:20 Wow. So they're definitely, they're cool with people. The ones that get to totally cool. Yes. Pure a bird person. That would be terrific. I'm not totally sure. I'm a bird person. I would like to watch other people do that. Well you could just sit and I'm a bird boy
Speaker 0 04:32 distance. You know you could sit at the far table and sip your tea and watch the owls. So cool. Oh, there's also the meat pig cafe that has mini pigs. Oh, ah. There's another one that has two goats, but they're very specific about how you're not allowed to touch the goats. You can see them but not touch. They, you just let them wander around or like to touch them. I know with that's my favorite part of the fair is the pygmy goats and the goats and the touching the petting zoo. I know. Yup. Spokane County Fair. So good. No sponsorship. The, and the last one I wanted to talk about is the Penguin cafe. At the Sumita aquarium. You can watch them swim and waddle and eat fish. There's no fish, there's no touching. Still good. They showed people like behind a metal railing and the penguins were just walking by doing their thing.
Speaker 1 05:22 That would be so great. We should, I would totally visit. I would buy the yearly zoo pass if they had an auto cafe. Oh my gosh. Absolutely. Would you like to talk about mutations in pets? I love to Tucker, they like the x pets. This is not going to be as exciting as that sounds. Well my son will adores all animals and cats so much and he's told me tortoise shell cat facts repeatedly. Oh, I'm finally sharing with you guys. He is super into tortoise shells and they're not a breed. Lots of breeds can be tortoise tion so when they say tortoise shell they, you can see them in lots of colors. You see usually like a black, brown or black and Tan, but they can be orange and like creamy colored, but they have a tortoise shell kind of pattern. They are splotchy again, like a crazy quilt.
Speaker 1 06:12 Yes. But it looks like of the vaguely sort of those square rom busy shapes that um, turtles have on their shelves anyway. Tortoise, Shell cats. How does that happen? It is mainly a girl cat thing. Mostly boy cats are not tortoise shell. They're very rare about one in 3000 tortoise shell cats are male. And the reason for that and the way we get tortoise shell cats, and it's because girl cats are x, x boy, cats are x, y. So to get that coloring, that's from the x chromosome. And so girls are more likely to have more combinations because they've got two xs, so they can have two dominants, two recessives, a dominant and a recessive. So that combination of a dominant and a recessive or that weird combination is what that tortoise shell results in. But with a male cat, you have x, y, there's only the possibility of that one x having the colors.
Speaker 1 07:07 So what we have when you see a male tortoise shell is x, x, y. And so the other thing that's very special and it's a weird, really unusual, is most male tortoise shell cats are sterile because they're x, x, y. Yeah. So those are wills <inaudible> and he's been telling me about scale list snakes and it's a very similar, the way it happens and those are super cool scale is snakes. They can be skillets from the belly down or they can be the backup. One article said that they usually have some skills on their belly, but it's the basically the same process that results in a scale a snake, but they, the pictures of them, it looks like you've tattooed somebody's arm with the snake pattern, but they don't have any skills. They just have that snake pattern and it looks like creepy old lady skin kind of. They're quite amazing. And survival rates in the wild are a little hard to determine, but it seems like they survive. Okay. Yeah. Cause they'd be like giant gummy worms, snacks. I mean there's no protection at all. No. So there's probably a little bit more danger from predators. Um, but you see ball pythons go for snakes, corn snakes, Garter snakes. They were not discovered until 1942 actually. So there are relatively new, uh, discovery maybe because it's difficult to survive with that creepy, creepy old baby skin.
Speaker 0 08:25 Huh? I got some of that myself. Likewise. I'm like, okay, I recognize that notion. Yeah, that's disgusting. Let's keep on with the science theme. I want to share with you. There's been a lot of study into dogs and reactions to human speech and gestures. You know, dogs will look where you point and things like that. But cats not so much. So the study was done in Japan on two groups, Katz's pets, like in the home and cats in cat cafes. Oh, okay. So they went into homes with cats and they used four words that are similar to the cats name. So if the cat's name is Jack, you'd start with smack and fact and you know, and say those four words. And then the fifth word would be Jack, the cat's name. And they were videotaping this and they had people looking for reactions. So ears moving or head moving or miaowing or something like that.
Speaker 0 09:19 Nine out of 11 cats seem to recognize their name but pretended to ignore you. Like you got an <inaudible>, you could just have an ear twitch. Um, they might not have much of a reaction. And then, yeah, and what I liked about the cats in the cafes, so there might be 15 or 20 cats in a cat cafe and they would respond to anything because you know, you've got lots of people coming in and even though they have pictures with their names, you might be calling Joe Bob or you know, something like that. And so the cats are like, eh, it's a name. And they use their pretty food voice. Yeah. All right, fine. Yeah, they have the cat version of reactive attachment disorder. Then like they'll go to everybody pretty much.
Speaker 0 10:01 The study did show that a, they do seem to recognize their names and they can differentiate being having their name called from an owner versus a stranger. They're more likely to react if the owner calls their name and then they were kind of wondering. So I said nine out of 11 cats responded. They think that possibly the cats that don't respond, it's because their names are sometimes called when they get in trouble. Oh yeah. You know how you find a mess and you're like, ah, cat's name and cat knows that that's not good. And so they just are like, I don't want to deal with that. They're going to wait and see what happens. And then they'll come find out if that was your pretty food voice or your yes or I pulled all the toilet paper off the toilet roll voice. I don't have any cats to do that, although I did have one once.
Speaker 0 10:49 That bit it. Oh chill. It look like, you know, just had these perforations through it. I was like really has to know the texture dry. Why? Most of the time I do not have reason to yell at our cats. But Shelby did bring in a mostly dead bird that had time to revive. There was some yelling that day two didn't stick around on the scene to find out what went down. She thought she'd killed it and brought it to, yeah, my daughter's bed. I was like, yeah, yeah, it was a gift. Yup. Let's talk about animal gifts that costs a lot of money or that are kind of wild and fancy because we have researched this nail Polish I found. Okay. Did you know that pets can, cats in particular can have whisker stress. There are whisker stress free bowls, and this totally makes sense.
Speaker 0 11:33 Once I thought about it, like if you just dump your cats food into a deep bowl, their whiskers bumped the bowl and they're sensitive and so really what they've done is put the food on a plate and they call it a whisker stress free cat bowl. Oh, some good marketing. That is good marketing and I have my cat food on plates. I didn't realize I was eliminating whisker stress. That's right. I feel like that's an infomercial. You'd see it like two 30 in the morning. I know this looks like a plate folks, but it is not. No. As High Tech. Oh yeah. Is on a little platform which makes it special. So whisker stress free bowls. See you on practical. I was looking at things like stainless steel water fountains that look like something you'd was trying to find out a museum or the Diamond Dog Tierra.
Speaker 0 12:14 Yeah. Or the Bacon flavored bubble machine, which was so adorable because they had a Corgi who looked like he was higher than a kite. He probably was bubbles and he was like making bubbles. Yeah, it was super cute. Awesome. I did find a bamboo pet hammock. I loved my friend Jody has a dog bed, a camping dog bed for her dog, but that just seems kind of Nice cause they don't have to lay in the dirt on the rocks and you know, especially since every time I've camped with a 70 to 80 pound chocolate lab, depending on what time of year it is, she usually lays on my sleeping bag. Yes. That's a lot of dog to be sleeping on your sleeping bag of smelly, potentially wet dog. I've seen dog car seats, which are basically soft seats with little harnesses, which the seatbelt is not a bad idea.
Speaker 0 13:02 And then, okay, can we talk for a moment about pet strollers? Please? Let's, okay. Don't ask me if you've got an elderly dog or an injured dog. I'm totally down with that, but I don't know. You've got this super swanky. I mean, some of these strollers are nicer than the strollers I bought for my children for sure. And there's this little pants. He probably has the dog Tiara riding in the stroller in that little dog he north face. I don't know. I don't know. See a man with, um, a Caliano leash and a Kali in a front pack. And I thought old dog gets to go out too. Oh, that's true with that. But, um, Sweden's in her, in a jacket and the stroller. I don't understand. Well, but you know, it's so, it makes me feel like you and I need to get involved in the pet industry because in 2017, a survey by the American pet products association, Americans spent almost $70 billion on pet stuff.
Speaker 0 14:01 70 billion. We clearly lack vision. We can do so much with that. I mean not that animals don't enjoy all the things we do for them, but wow. But if you're looking for a companion to go on walks with you, um, an animal with five inch legs might not be the animal to choose. That might be your house pet. Yeah. Well that's the one that's in the $850 leather purse to carry your small friend with you, which I find the leather purse to be a little ironic that I'm just going to let that go. No judgment, no judgment. Okay. Do you want to hear, my favorite thing that I found in pet trends, bring it on. Spaying and neutering your pets is a humane thing to do if you don't want your pet to reproduce and have unfortunate consequences. But the pet industry has decided that maybe your boy dog feels a little uncomfortable with his lack of masculinity.
Speaker 0 14:49 Oh No. Oh yes. Neuticles plastic surgery for your dog so that they can feel like they have a robust manhood still. I'm not sure if we can play this one folks, but it made me so happy. I think we can because there I've seen something worse than that. Oh really? It involves glitter and your male dog. That's all I'm gonna say. Do what you need to do on Google. I'm just telling you, you'll be surprised. Um, and I've seen this plastic insert thing and I'm, I'm troubled by it for many reasons. I mean really, cause this is not about the dog. No, it is about you compensating for something. All right? Yup. We love our pets. I think we just need to leave it at that. Yeah. I'm like, that's a good show. Ander you want to hear more? We were on Facebook and Instagram as brain junk podcast and you can find us on Twitter as at my brain junk. Amy and I will catch you next time when we share more of everything you never knew you wanted to know. And I guarantee you will not be bored. Maybe a little over informed, but not bored.
Speaker 2 15:55 <inaudible>.
