You have awsome "furballs"! mine does the thing about sitting on books too. Also, one of my cats has kidney problems and needs special "moist food". Well, she enjoys this food....too much. She wines and sits on the keyboard from about 2:00 to 6:00 (when she gets fed the "moist food").

I guess this would be the most appropriate place to put this. I have an after-hours office job and tonight I saw one of the cruelest animal things I think I've ever seen.
There is this Advertising office and I had to go in there. They pride themselves on having very avante guard decorations & really they do. But, I was walking around, looking for a paperpunch and all of a sudden I saw movement on the wall by the lightswitch.
When I looked there, there was a totally empty halfround/flat-to-the-wall fishtank stuck up on the wall and one little purplish blue fish in it. He was following my every movement around the room. I mean, the whole tank was nothing but whiteness except for him ... he just looked so lonely. When I'd put my finger up to the glass, he'd go to where it was outside the tank. I just felt really bad for him. Such a bleak existence for a fashion statement.

So, I left a note up on the wall and said "This fish needs some vegetation, or another fish or pebbles or something. He looks too lonely." So, I don't care if they don't like that I wrote that or not - I think that poor little fish will die of loneliness or just the shock of all that bleak nothing in his environment. Nature is not that way for fish.

Ibis,

Well done putting up that note!

Although I've heard that goldfish have a memory of about 3 seconds I'm sure the life it has in a completely empty bowl could be made much better by putting in a companion for it and/or some sand and vegetation...

Thank you for your support, Olav.

If it was a beta, which I think maybe it was ... they are quite interesting fish.

We had a male beta, which of course, cannot be with another male beta because they fight all the time. But he was in a large tank with guppies and after the guppies had their babies, the babies would sometimes fall down through this bubble nest the parent guppies made & Killer, the beta, would retrieve the baby fish in his mouth and return it to the bubble nest. Very paternal!

Oh thats soo cute. Go Beta fish!! And also go fish rights! There was a study done a while ago that showed most fish actaully do have quite a long memory, they can be trained to do something (like swim down a pipe after a bell sounds) and they will still do it months after not having done it. I don't think a gold fish's memory is too long but I think it is a lot longer than 3 seconds.

If a fish had a 3 second memory then its even more reason to put interesting things in their tank, because an empty bowl won't keep them entertained for 3 seconds and whenever something interesting does happen like a human comes in then the fish will be back into the state of boredom 3 seconds after the human goes out.

Of course I am happy swimming around in circles in my bowl, I'm trying to catch my tail, once I finally manage to catch it then I'll have to find something else to do but I have yet to catch up to it.

That's complete bullsh*t by the way. Goldfish can learn tricks/the place of the food/such as pretty well. The three second memory stuff is just an urban legend that people invented to not feel so bad for the goldfish in small empty bowls at their homes.

And yes, I've watched Mythbusters.

EDIT: I should always read other people's responds before opening my own mouth....





This post has been edited by The Wolf: May 5 2006, 12:02 PM

Thanks for the corrections guys. I had fish when I was a kid (not in a bowl, but a rather large aquarium). Two goldfish and some guppies of some sort, which ate the tails off the gold fish...

I felt bad for them all and flushed them down the toilet...

I think the strangest thing I ever saw was my hampsters exercise regime. Now, this was one fat-british boat hampster - ate way too much, didn't like doing any form of movement (would expect food brought to him). Anyway, one day we hear the wheel creeking, and so figure he's finally decided it was time to exercise. We went downstairs, turned on the lights and... he was pushing the wheel around with his paw, watching with amusement as it turned around.

That was one lazy mammal.

Anyway, here's something intresting about animals, well, most animals anyway. I mean everyone knows some of the freaky stuff (like various useless organs animals have, left over from evolution), but how many of you knew that the majority of animals cannot throw up due to motion sickness?

Wierd, huh? There are only a few animals that throw up when you spin them around and around. Now, before that sounds like I'm being cruel to animals, I knew someone who did research into various drugs and such (back in the days of old school research, 60s, 70s,80s), and obviously there was (is) a lot of animal testing in that kind of thing. Now, without entering a debate on animal rights, he used to work on trying to cure motion sickness, and had to spin animals around. He told me that the only one he could do it with was some kind of Japanese Shrew (or something) because it was one of the few animals with a motion sickness response.

On another, competely unrelated note, does anyone know if dogs can look up?

Uhm... is that a trick question of some sort? Just try holding a goodie above a dog, and it'll look up...

On a similarly unrelated note: Has anyone seen pigeon chickens / kids?

Hmmmm...Olav, I'm still wondering what pigeon chickens are?

If you mean has anyone seem the babies of pigeons, I know of a couple different places where pigeons have built nests and while I have not seen the babies, I have definitely heard them peeping (crying) for their food.

==============================

Speaking of bird's nests ... we get the most majestic parent birds in the world here in Florida. (Well, I think they are.) They are the ospreys - water eagles - who make nests in the tallest trees. When people cut down the tallest trees in their area they start making nests at the tops of radio towers, telephone poles, tall building spires. They can build a really good solid nest on amazingly small spaces.

One time I was outside & looked up and I saw this osprey hauling about a 6 foot long tree branch through the air - up, up, up to its nest. I couldn't stop watching until he got it up there and started pushing & shoving it into place. Then, off he flew to find another. Our TV news shows remotely film some of the baby ospreys in their nests all Spring until they fly away and you can follow their progress in the paper too.

This post has been edited by Ibis: May 7 2006, 07:22 AM

Ah.. Well they're called pigeon/dove chickens in Norwegian, directly translated (duekylling), but I suspected it wasn't called that in English...

Anyway that was my point, that so few have seen them as babies. All of them seem to be the same size! So it seems they are in nests until they're fully grown...

I just find this a bit fascinating. I'll go away now...

Hahahaha ... you needn't go away. But I think you are right, they muist stay in the nest until nearly full grown because you never do see littler ones down on the ground.

They probably need to stay in the nest untill they are fully grown because they probably can't fly until then and for this reason they probably grow fast too. That was way too many probablies for one sentance.

New Zealand has no natural land mammals we do have water (seals) and air (bats) mammals but no land ones so birds have evolved to fill most of the gaps so our birds are definitly cooler. We had giant eagles which used to feed on the Moas (like brown emu but much larger), when the humans came they hunted the Moa to the extinction so the giant eagles used to hunt humans for a while before they starved to extinction. I would be very strange if somehow they managed to survive till now and we all had to hide under buildings to avoid be taken off and eaten. And because there was only a few preditators which ate other birds, most birds evolved without the need for flight or camoflage so I have always wanted to keep a pokeko as a pet, they are flightless, bright blue, white underneath and bright red beak and long legs; but they tend to rip up everything and I don't think it would agree with the cats.

This post has been edited by Pisces: May 7 2006, 10:37 AM

Rainer's next door neibourgh has a little Yorkshire Terrier named "Megan"

Her constant barking merited her the name "Megan the Fierce"

But she really is a bundle of fun once you know her.

Megan the Fierce ... it sounds like Rainer risks his life living next door to such a creature!

Pisces,
I share your love of the giant birds ... Moas, DoDo's, even Ostriches. But I didn't know about the giant eagles - they would be totally awesome to see! But not to be hunted by!!

Here is my pet Moabird in Guild Wars - these 2 are my favorite characters & they are the highest level that I have and hang around at Lion's Arch and beyond.

Ranger/Monk

Wow, think I'll go play some Guild Wars right now!

Actually, she is slightly bigger than Rainer's foot, and only barks alot.

Other than that, she will mostly kiss you to death!

On the topic of large birds, there's a hawk that hangs out in my backyard. My brother and I have fed it mice on numerous occasions.

i don't really like birds... i don't know why they juss seem kind of useless. plus i have had my bad experiences with birds. in hawaii this guy charged you $2.00 for a f-ing bird to stand on your shoulder for a minute. so i thought this might be fun, but do you know what the bird did. it yanked a big amount of hair of my head and gave me a bald spot the only birds i do like are penguins they are so kool the way they waddle and toboggan with their stomachs.

Dantrag, you are so lucky to have a hawk in your backyard! I would give anything to be friendly with a hawk.

1234king, sounds like maybe the guy who charged $2 might've abused his bird insome way for it to tear your hair out....but then againg we have the thread here about the bird problem concerning pulled hair. So, maybe it's just a thing with birds. You know they groom their own feathers by pulling the plumey part through their beaks rather hard ... maybe this bird was trying to groom you but got frustrated when it wouldn't come out right.

I must admit I´m a bit scared of birds.....did you notice their cold eyes? brrrrr

He besides we´ve got the Bird-flu, it came to sweden on the exact spot where i work! On the premises of my sweet NPP!