My cats have me trained to such a perfect routine, it’s hilarious.
Wait for alarm to go off in the morning and then insist on cuddles. If alarm does not go off and human is attempting to sleep-in, wake her up at the same time anyways.
Insist on being picked up and cuddled while human is preparing breakfast.
Yell at her when she leaves for work. If she doesn’t leave for work occupy the cat bed on the desk and the top of desk chair to observe her and get cuddles all day.
Insist on dinner at PRECISELY six o’clock. Precisely. Scream until delivery.
Start screaming for reading cuddles at precisely nine o’clock. Lead human to bedroom. Grey cat shall tuck self under left arm and on top of left boob while reading occurs. Black cat shall snuggle by feet.
Grey cat shall sleep next to left side of human. Black cat shall sleep on human’s pillow.
Repeat.
Every day. Every. Day. They’ve got a better sense of time than I do.
I think cats only have One Day, and it’s This Day. Dogs might have three our four days, like This Day, This Day That Is Different Every Few Days, A Hypothetical Tomorrow and THE APOCALYPSE.
everyone knows dragons aren’t real. any scientist will tell you that tales of giant flying beasts wreaking havoc from the sky is a total made up myth for little babies and also it’s not true.
but today, I’m going to let you in on a little secret:
scientists can be liars sometimes.
welcome to an all-new episode of Weird Biology and today, you are going to learn about a fucking dragon.
FIRE AND BLOOD! FIRE AND BLOOD! FIRE AND BLOOD!
even though it looks like a creature straight out of medieval myth, the Bearded Vulture is (allegedly) a bird! also called the Lämmergeier or Ossifrage (both metal as shit but difficult to pronounce), the Bearded Vulture can be found in mountain ranges across Europe and Asia.
but before we get much further, I need to give you a proper sense of scale. Bearded Vultures
have wingspans of up to nine feet, weigh up to 17 pounds and can be almost four feet tall.
this fucking thing is at eye-level to a third grader.
like 8-year-olds don’t have enough problems already. jesus.
and not only are they fucking huge, they’re they’re also smart. like, crows are smart, right? imagine a four foot tall crow with knives for feet, the face of a velociraptor and a sheer delight in anarchy. that’s the Bearded Vulture.
Bearded Vultures have complex social structures and advanced personal relations, but their intelligence shines best in the way they hunt.
yes, hunt. most vultures on the planet will only deign to eat things that have already died on their own, but the Bearded Vulture will sometimes… cut out the middleman. so to speak.
and then they eat him.
unlike other birds of prey, Bearded Vultures don’t rely on their claws to get a meal. instead, they have adopted a much more efficient and game-breaking method.
imagine you’re hiking alone through the mountains when suddenly HOLY SHIT a feathery dragon swoops out of nowhere and knocks you right the fuck off a cliff to your tragic and untimely death. it sounds like something from a Game of Thrones episode, but this regularly happens to tortoises, goats, and and in one really strange instance a monitor lizard.
nobody ever said nature was nice.
after the prey has met its doom via physics engine abuse, the Bearded Vulture swoops down for a meal and is promptly sued by George R. R. Martin for copyright violation.
(ha ha! this was a joke! a funny joke! PLEASE DO NOT SUE ME, MR. MARTIN!)
seriously though, one of the most interesting and alarming aspects of the Bearded Vulture (out of many, so many) is their diet. once they have either found or “helped make” a carcass, they get down to business: they eat the bones, and only the bones.
that’s probably the most metal fact I’ve ever listed about a bird and I have listed a LOT of bird facts.
it’s right there in the name, “Ossifrage”, which means “bone-breaker”. (and that’s the SECOND most metal fact I’ve ever listed about a bird, by the way.)
Bearded Vultures are the only bird whose diet is almost exclusively bones. like, we’re talking 85%-90% here. it’s a very high number.
they swallow smaller bones whole, and crack the larger ones open by abusing physics again and flinging them off cliffs. it’s worth all that effort for the sweet sweet bone marrow hidden inside.
probably means they never have to worry about calcium deficiencies, either.
but most importantly, it means that Bearded Vultures have little to no direct competition! this cool bone-eating trick means that they’re the only predators in the area even interested in the stupid things. every other scavenger only wants the soft parts, meager fools that they are.
the only thing that a Bearded Vulture really needs to worry about is other Bearded Vultures. (and humans, but more on that later.) to ward other vultures off, they rub red dirt into their feathers and perform elaborate threat displays. the deeper and more visceral the red, the higher-status the vulture.
you can experience this effect yourself! simply dunk yourself in stage blood and then board your nearest public transportation device. the best seat is instantly yours! provided that nobody else is bloodier than you.
but all of this ridiculous dragon bullshit comes with a price.
in the middle ages, humans in europe were convinced that Bearded Vultures would: a) eat their sheep, and b) carry off and eat small children. (they were right about the sheep thing, to be fair.)
but because of these beliefs, frightened parents hunted down and slaughtered Bearded Vultures wherever they found them. and it turns out even an avian dragon is no match for projectile weapons.
the Bearded Vulture population in the Alps was completely wiped out by the 18th century.
nothing motivates multiple generations of a human population like “THIS THING WILL EAT MY CHILDREN”.
but there is good news! Bearded Vultures are much more appreciated these days, and they have been successfully reintroduced to the Alps. they’re still going strong in the Himalayas, and also Ethiopia.
let’s hope these real-world dragons stick around and terrorize future generations of humans with their blood red feathers and horrific table manners.
FIRE AND BLOOD! FIRE AND BLOOD! FIRE AND BLOOD!
–
thanks for reading! you can find the rest of the Weird Biology series here.
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This is Arwen, she’s a Husky/Kelpie mix and a little Asshole:
“I wonder if she can jump?” my dad asks the first five minutes we have her. She perks up at the word, and clears a six-foot fence form sitting on the ground. “Oh.” Says dad. “Shit.”
Later that night she got up on the counter and ate three pounds of corned beef in roughtly 68 seconds but this was considered part of the learning curve of having a new dog.
I wake up at 4 AM to the sound of the toilet being flushed repeatedly in the hall bathroom, and assume plumbing is now posessed by angry and wasteful ghosts. I get up to disconnet it and find her in the Bathroom, standing to flush the bowl, then shoving her head in to drink the running water. I’m not totally awake, so I stand there like an idiot trying to understand this, and my sister gets up to see what the noise is, sees the same thing and also stands there. Fiance notices my absence and does the same. Mom eventually wakes up and finds us standing around like very confused zombies and almost joins the parade of baffled zombies before shreiking “THE WATER BILL!” We got her a circulating water bowl after that.
My parent’s don’t have AC, but they haveone of those “fridge on top, pull-out-freezer below” fridges. Last summer, we were remarking that we might need to shave her so she didn’t get heatstroke, to which she looked up and made a disgusted noise at us. …Then got up, used the dishrag to pull open the freezer and climbed on top of the frozen vegetables, stretching out and sighing contentedly. “Arwen,” Mom began, but was interrupted by a loud ‘WHAAAaaaaarrr?” from Arwen. “Ok you can stay there for now but we’re getting you a kiddie pool so you have to get out when we get back. Don’t eat anything.” She ate a bag of frozen green beans and farted for three days straight.
Took her walking along the lake with the long lead so she could sniff things to her hearts content. She went about shoving her head in the undergrowth, usually coming up with her head covered in leaves and pollen.
Except for the bush where she came back out with a 7-foot Bull Snake wrapping itself around her ehad and neck, trying it’s best to strangle her before she can eat it. She immediately ran back to me, the parts of her face not occupied with the snake arranged in a gleeful expression of “Look! I found Snacks!”
I screamed, not immediately regognizing that it wasn’t a rattler, and fell, splitting my knee on a rock. The screaming made her let go of the snake, but I still had to grab her and wrestle the snake off her because it lacked the sense to just scuttle away. I finaly got it lose from her (Despite her best effort to continue trying to eat it and turned around to fling it off the trail-
-And directly into the face of one of my 90-year-old neighbors who’d come out to see what the screaming and profanity was, making her collapse.
I’m pretty sure being told “I accidentally threw a snake at my neighbor.” was the highlight of that EMT’s day. Dottie was unharmed but she still doesn’t speak to me.
One day, we left her in a Harness and overhead tether in the (at the time) unfanced back yard so she could enjoy some relatively free-range outdoors time. I walked by the window not a minute later to find her completely GONE, and race out to the yard to find her. It took me a good heart-pounding five minutes to realize the overhead tether was goign UP into the ancient silver maple and realized that 1. Arwen can apparently do something really weird with her shoulders where they pop out sideways, allowing her to bear-hug the tree and 2. climb a good 40 feet into the three to fight 3. A porcupine, which i didn’t even know LIVED out here.
Fortunately, Porcupines weigh considerably less than Awen and she couldn’t get a good enough foothold to get all the way up to it, but I still had to climb up there and lower her down, barking dog profanities at the porcupine the whole way.
My parents recently acquired a mechanized recliner which has been instumental inmom’s hip surgery recovery. Execpt that Awen Also likes lounging on the furniture, and is more than capable of hitting a large, elder-friendly button with her paw. So now when she gets back from a walk or the dog park she makes a beeline for the living room, get in the recliner and pushes the button until it’s flat and stretches out in it.
My parents didn’t have a problem with this because she gets out of the chair when they ask her (Mom even tells her “Go get my chair ready” in winter because she does a good job pre-warming it), until last winter when Arwen taught my dog Charlie, another devoted couch animal how to do this.
One afternoon there was a tremendous outburst fo barkign and snarling from the living room and we rished in to find both dogs in the recliner, Charlie on the fully-reclined back and Arwen on the elevated seat and foot rest, bellowing at eachother for control of the recliner, thier movments having pitched it back to it’s two hind feet, the device swaying to and fro like a leather covered boat upon the high seas, a furry mutiny on board. Neither dog was willing to yeild the plush throne, nor to listen to the humans yelling at them to knock it the hell off, until Arwen tackled the usurper, kocking him off and managing to cantaleiver the recliner clean over, flipping it into the hall, both dogs and all humand miraculously unharmed.
She still doesn’t let him sit in it.
I love her so much.
(If you got a laugh out of this, please consider donating to my Tip Jar or Paypal to get Arwen (and Charlie!) nice treats)
Evening reblog with an additional Shenanigan I just remembered:
One of the regulars at the dog park was an unfixed basset hound with an obnoxiously indifferent owner. “Brad” shows up pretty much to smoke weed and let “Bojangles” harass the other dogs, in spite of regular complaints about Bo starting fights and trying to mount every dog, leg, and toddler in sight.
One evening, Bo was particularly interested in Arwen, aggressively following her, nipping her heels and trying to mount her, even after her usual wolverine-like Snap’n’Snarl, which has tended to discourage unwanted suitors before. Brad was Too Damn High to notice, as usual, but mom knew that if Arwen actually bit Bo, Arwen would be the one in trouble and was trying to call her when Bo made yet another attempt and Arwen finally had it.
Instead of rightfully tearing his face off, Arwen instead did what Mom described as “A Judo-style front-flip” that pulled Bo clean off the ground and threw him on his back, Arwen landing on her feet like a cat. Bo’s stubby little legs didn’t allow him to right himself before Arwen jumped on him, front paws slamming into his saggy basset balls, squatted over his face, and peed on him.
“ARWEN NO!!” howled my mother as nearly everyone else present laughed, but having made her point, Arwen daintily got off Bo, and trotted to the gate, ready to go home. Bo yelped but got up and skulked away, only moderately bruised, cowering under the bench by Brad, who finally noticed something might be amiss.
Mom remembers hearing “Dude, why is my dog all wet?” right as they were leaving. Apparently nobody told him what happened, becuase Brad still brings Bo to the park, but Bo has much better manners now.
I read this whole thing to my mom and upon reading the end part she was like “OH MY GOD! Our dog Lady once flipped another dog and I didn’t know it was a thing dogs could do!!”
So there’s that.
Update: Arwen was at the vet’s office for a check-up and daycare, and decided partway through the afternoon that the other two kelpies were annoying her, but she didn’t want to go inside to be kenneled for a nap, so she instead…
…ninja’d her way onto the vet’s roof despite there being three people in the yard watching the dogs and no clear way up there. She had a pleasant hour of watching the vet staff try to figure out how she did that and how they were going to get her down before mom came to pick her up.
“Arwen, get your furry butt down here!”
At which point Arwen obidently got down by jumping into a nearby tree that’s technically inside a neighboring house’s yard, shimmied down that like a bear, then walked out of their side yard and back around the block to come sit at Mom’s feet, putting her paws up like she expected a treat.
That tree is not accessible from the daycare yard. We still have no idea how she got up there.
Shine on you beautiful bitch.
This just gets better and better every time i see it
I…
I have fostered doggos for a good majority of my life and my brain simply cannot process half of the bullshit in this post…
1. She’s a mix of two extremely smart breeds 2. She’s a mix of two extremely energetic breeds 3. The inmates trained her to do lots of “Extracirriculars” like veritcal leaps, how to climb chain-link fence, agility courses, physical-comedy type tricks becuase they finished teaching her the regular Service Dog Cirriculum and wanted to keep working with her. 4. Due to said Extrcirriculars, she doesn’t have any fear of heights, strangers, animals, or the nonsense of other dogs.
She does do the Professional Service Animal thing when we put her vest on, but then she’s working and has things to do like teaching social skills to people or being a living stress ball to someone having a bad time, so all that brains, energy and training can be put towards a productive end, but if she hasn’t got an active job, Shenanigans Ensue.
I love everything about this omg
Update:
She ate a four inch hole in the carpet because someone dropped a pork chop there. She’s completely fine, it all passed without so much as an upset stomach on her part.
-also ate the garden hose because we weren’t spraying her with it.
-conned one of the guys that installed the AC out of his sandwich by pretending to bark at something on the other side of the house, and doubling back when he came to investigate.
-is back on the therapy circuit helping kids in a summer school program get better at reading by having them read books to her. Her favorite student right now is a boy from Venezuela who is still learning English who gives her a big hug every morning. She doesn’t normally like hugs but she puts a paw on his back to hug him back.
Okay, it’s official. I’ve found my favourite historical anecdote of all time.
So in ancient Rome they had this tradition where they had to consult the gods and check they had divine approval before they went into battle. They did this by bringing forth a flock of sacred chickens and throwing grain at them. Their behaviour would then determine whether or not the gods were on your side. If the hens didn’t eat or wouldn’t leave their cage, it was a Bad Omen and you had to postpone battle and ask again the next day. If the chickens ate happily it was a Good Omen and you could go and chop up some Gauls or Carthaginians or whoever you happened to be fighting.
Now, there are lots of little stories about these chickens, but I just found one I hadn’t seen before. In 137 BC, the consul C. Hostilius Mancinus tried to take auspices before battle, but:
the chickens once released from their cage fled into a nearby wood and even though they were sought with the greatest diligence, they could not be recovered.
Can you fucking believe that. Can you actually believe that happened. The Romans have a reputation for being so stern and sensible and stoic and that happened. Like… everyone’s ready for battle, so you turn to your assistant and say “BRING FORTH THE CHICKENS” and you throw down the grain and open up their cage and the chickens just. run. they fucking run. those tiny velociraptor bastards abscond screaming into the woods like there’s no tomorrow. Blinking in disbelief, you send soldiers into the woods to recover them but those feathered bandits are gone. Vanished. The gods have deserted you. You’re beating bushes and following the sounds of triumphant clucks. The soldiers are frantic. The chickens are gone.
He lost the battle. It was a Bad Omen.
That sounds like the ultimate Bad Omen like at that point you go home and start drawing up an armistice bc the gods told you to go fuck yourself with chickens
That’s… pretty much what happened. The chicken omen, along with a few other Bad Omens, resulted in:
infelici pugna, turpi foedere, deditione funesta
“a lost battle, a shameful peace treaty, and a calamitous handover.”
so yeah, he lost the battle and had to go home and sign an embarrassing peace treaty that the Romans complained about years later, and when they talk about him they curse him for his praecipitem audaciam – “reckless audacity” – and vesana perseverantia “insane obstinacy” because NONE OF THIS WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU’D LISTENED TO THE CHICKENS AND POSTPONED BATTLE LIKE THEY TOLD YOU.
Don’t forget naval commander Claudius Pulcher, whose sacred chickens refused to eat anything before the battle of Drepana. He tossed the chickens overboard, saying if they won’t eat, then let them drink, and went into battle where he promptly lost almost all of his ships and crew. I forget if he died or returned to Rome in disgrace, but it was a freaking disaster and the sacred chickens called it.
I’m not sure which phrase in this post is my favorite, “bring forth the chickens” or “this would have never happened if you listened to the chickens.”
What about Pulcher’s line: “Bibant, quoniam esse nolunt!” – They can drink if they won’t eat! – after which the sacred chooks went swimming.
I bet the spreading news of what he’d done ruined the morale of his entire fleet and went a long way towards why he lost the battle. Men who think their commander has offended the gods aren’t going to fight well on his behalf, in case the gods spread their offended wrath around. (If I remember my “Myths of Ancient Greece and Rome” correctly, the Olympian lot tended to do that a lot.)
AFAIK when Pulcher* returned to Rome in disgrace the Senate immediately tried him for impiety (a Senatorial message to the gods that they didn’t approve of him either) then banished him to exile where he died soon after.
Moral: don’t be horrid to the holy hens.
(*For the second time in this post, spell-checker wanted me to spell his name as “Pucker”. Appropriate, I suppose. Go figure.)
“You don’t have to do everything. If something drains you or leaves you feeling hopeless, find some other way to contribute. Every time a progressive-minded person can’t sleep because of the trauma they’re surrounded by, that person becomes a little less effective the next day. And the far right becomes a little stronger.”
