But what is it? Hints lie elsewhere in antdom. Over here:
And here:
The ant has his bliss, and you too have yours, smooching with your kitty cat this evening.
UPDATE: Elsewhere, "I ate three lumps of it. But I spat two of them out, so I really ate one and a half of them."
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23 comments:
Bad, bad kitties! Thank goodness dogs aren't carnivores. Or at least quick enough to get a kill outside of their bagged or canned food doled out by their human masters who don't have to be repulsed by the sight of nature's food chain in action. We civilized folk prefer the Safeway food chain, naturally :)
Jane:
Thank goodness dogs aren't carnivores.
Whoa! Tell that to some of the ranchers out here who have to shoot packs of wild dogs that attack and kill their livestock. Most of them are, or are the descendants of the 'cute little puppies' that someone left by the side of the road. 99% of those 'cute little puppies' got hit by cars, eaten by coyotes, starved to death, died from dehydration, died from exposure, died from freezing to death in the winter or roasting to death in the summer heat, or various other forms of death.
The other 1%-- they're the ones who were tough enough, mean enough, and let's say it-- animal enough to put away their hatred of the people who abandoned them, and survive anyway. In packs. And yeah, they're carnivorous all right.
IF YOU LOVE ANIMALS, YOU'LL SPAY/NEUTER YOUR PET!!
Eli, just a little tongue-in-cheek. Lots of city dwellers hate cats for their hunting ways, forgetting what dogs would really be about if we let them be dogs. IOW, don't kiss the mouth of your dog on principle, either, and give all pets rabies shots!
My daughter volunteers in her spare time to rep a large animal adoption and neutering org in NY. She just did a campaign for them, to promote responsible pet ownership. She grew up with all but one foundlings and shelter adoptees.
Jane:
Then kudos to your daughter.
All of our pets have come from shelters or otherwise been animals that no one wanted (including one who had been dropped off at a church with a bowl of food and nothing else).
It is true that dogs who have been mistreated often are unpredictable and occasionally dangerous. But they can also, with a little love, turn out to be the most loyal animals in the world.
The best dog we had, wandered in from the deep desert in New Mexico into the yard of a family we knew (who had a lot of strays living with them.) The dog had almost starved to death when he got to their house, and he was an Australian Shepherd. He lived with us for three years (including a move to another community) and then mysteriously got a brain tumor so that we had to shoot him. He was sweet, gentle and intensely loyal, especially to my daughter, who became inseperable from him the day we brought him home.
Several months after we got him, there was a news report about how someone found hundreds of Australian Shepherds, apparently used for some kind of research, who were still locked in cages and had been machine gunned.
I'm sure that he was one of those. I'm sure he was the lucky one. I'm sure that his brain tumor was caused by whatever they were researching.
And I'm sure that we gave him the best three years of his life.
Referring to the linked article, how does one stage an effective protest by doing the very thing that he claims to abhor? Doesn't he become what he detests? Hmmm...sounds more like a Freudian reaction formation to me. Maybe he always wanted an excuse to down a dog, royally f(l)avored or not.
Hmm, even cats know that bat wings are indigestible.
Eli,
Are you anywhere near Sandia Labs? If so, I can give a hypothesis. When I was going to UC Davis in the late 60's off to the North of my dorm were more than 1,000 beagles in kennels, for a long duration radiation experiment. If you live near Sandia, and there were a 1000 shepherds in cages and your one ended up with brain cancer, connect those dots...
Hey, I thought "bat" from only the first picture. My first thought was that it looked like a bat head.
Not that it made any *sense* so I wondered if it was a seed pod.
But no! It was a bat!
A bat? Two words: rabies shots!
(Or was that six words and excessive punctuation?)
Drill Sgt:
At the time, I was living in Los Lunas and the 1000 dead shepherds they found were in a ravine some distance west of town, and several miles from where this dog showed up.
And I really don't care (or want to know) exactly what experiment he was part of. I just know he was a good dog and we were happy to have him as part of our family, for the few years he was part of it.
Jane: I made sure not to touch that thing, but it does worry me that people will come into contact with the cat, and kids might touch the bat. It won't matter that the cat has had rabies shots, because that will only mean the cat won't get rabies, but it will still have infected blood in and around its mouth. I wonder if I should contact health authorities. The fact that a cat -- I assume it was a cat -- was able to catch a bat makes it more likely that the bat was rabid.
I am sure photojournalism-blogging has some degree of risk, not the least of which is what others think and might do when they encounter Ann in all manner of positions and contorsions in order to photograph ants and cat spit-up.
Ohhh for 1 more camera in the hands of a sinister blogger.
No. You'd have to know the circumstances. Where was this bat found? In the middle of a city? When was it caught? In the daylight? Was it active or sleeping?
They commonly get disoriented in cities and, come daybreak, will simply find a crack to roost in. Cats are pretty good scavengers of small furries.
If you're really worried. Take the carcas in for analysis. Pick the pieces up with an inverted paper sack.
Og: It was on the sidewalk in a residential neighborhood.
hdhouse: I'm careful to crouch in the most flattering positions.
Remember, people: Althouse knows bats.
Cat: Hey, Ants, have at it! Enjoy the remains of the bat I slew.
Ants: What? No eyeballs?
a vet told me once that all bats will test positive for rabies but if shots are current there should be no alarm.
Ann:
Me no like caveman name. Olig if the whole thing is too much please.
Jane:
Here is the funniest true dog story I've ever heard:
A man lived next to a family that had a little girl, and she had a pet rabbit that she kept in a hutch in her back yard.
The man next door had a dog, which had several times gotten into the neighbor's yard and dug up flowers or otherwise made a mess, so the father of the neighboring family had come over once or twice and told the man that he had to restrain his dog and in no uncertain terms made it clear that his dog was not welcome there, and if it kept coming over the neighbor might call animal control.
One day, the neighbor family was gone someplace, and the man's dog came into the house with something in his mouth. The man took it and discovered it was the neighbor's rabbit, covered with dirt but otherwise still intact. He figured that the dog must have figured out a way to open the rabbit cage and killed the rabbit and dragged it home through the mud and dirt.
Not wanting to incur the wrath of the neighbors again, he hit on a plan. He carefully washed off the rabbit and airdried its coat so that it looked liked it had just been groomed, sneaked into the neighbor's yard (where the door of the hutch was still open) and carefully laid the rabbit inside and closed the door, so that when the little girl found it she'd assume that it had died of natural causes.
A little while later the family got home, and not long after he heard the girl yelling and screaming at the top of her lungs. He figured his plan had worked.
Then a few minutes later he heard a knock at his door, and the father was standing there. He asked the man directly whether he had noticed anyone prowling around in his yard.
"uh,...no," answered the man.
"That's too bad," said the father, "I just wonder what kind of a sicko would take the time to dig up a little girl's dead rabbit that we had just buried this morning, clean it up and put it back in the cage."
Eli Blake: That would be hilarious even if it weren't true.
Yes, Eli, that’s the best laugh out loud story I’ve read in a while. Thanks for the merriment and let’s hope that poor man is also laughing at what he did.
Ann, you’re doing a good service by pointing out the danger of rabies from animal fights and “kills.” It’s not so uncommon a problem that pet owners can let their guard down on pet immunizations or think it fine for their kids to try to touch a squirrel, etc. Have to admit I was even a little worried about avian flu transmitted via my cats who occasionally get a bird, although reported incidences of this happening have been rare and none known *I believe* in the US. So the bird feeders are still up and stocked on a regular basis (to, unfortunately, feed the blasted squirrels--)
While rabis can be bad for a human, let's not get all hyper about it.
"... rabies among humans is rare in the United States ..."
Basically, maybe two per year or .0000000666%. You are thirty-five times more likely to be hit by lightning.
CDC
uvm.edu
Wrong Diagnosis
Feel free to correct my calculations.
That said, one should simply be careful.
Know what I think is sad? They found a few years ago -- postmortem, of course -- the Edgar Allen Poe, who was always thought to have died of consumption, actually died of rabies. What a sad thing, huh.
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