Florida Farm & Feed

Interesting Articles

A loose pet sitting calmly in the back seat can get hurt during an accident.

Don't wait until an accident occurs before thinking about the safety of your pet. There is a great deal of potential danger when driving with an unrestrained pet in the car. Read the article for more information.

6/27/00 Article in the Tallahassee Democrat Online, copied and used with permission

June day + parked car = hot dog
By JANIE NELSON
Tallahassee Democrat

It's been written again and again: You can't leave children or dogs (or any other living things) closed up in hot cars in the summer. They could have heat stroke. They could die. Some people never learn. A mother reports that she and her daughter recently were shopping at New Leaf Market when they noticed a small dog locked inside a car. The windows were cracked, but the heat was building up inside. They reported it to the folks at New Leaf, who announced the car ID and tag number over the store's sound system. "When the couple answered the page of the car ID in question, the woman seemed seriously interested in learning information calmly offered about heat, pets, dehydration, heat stroke, etc.," the mother wrote. The pet owner also asked for advice on traveling with pets. Our intrepid mother suggested that one of the diners stay in the car with the dog, windows rolled down, while the other shopped. That didn't sit too well with the male companion. "When he returned after checking on the pet, he announced that the small pooch was fine just as things were," our animal lover writes. That wasn't the answer the mom and daughter wanted to hear. They used the New Leaf phone to call the animal shelter for information. "When the shopping couple noticed this continued advocacy for the pet," our heroine continued, "the couple got in the car and drove away." Odds are the car was too hot for them, and they turned on the air conditioning.

cnn.com

Posted at 6:51 p.m. PDT Wednesday, July 19, 2000

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) -- Polly wanna Web-surf? That's what a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a handful of students are trying to figure out. They're spending their days training a gray parrot named Arthur to use a computer to surf the Internet -- hoping to keep boredom at bay for their feathered friend. ``Parrots are very social creatures,'' said Irene Pepperberg, a visiting professor of animal behavior. ``In the wild, they live in flocks. ... People buy these animals as pets, they interact with them a lot in the morning and they interact with them a lot in the evening, but then they leave them alone eight or nine hours a day.'' Those pet parrots become bored, she said, and start to chew their feathers, scream, or exhibit other behavioral problems. If they had something to do, she reasoned, the birds would be happier and less aggressive. Benjamin Resner, a research assistant at MIT, came up with the idea of teaching lonely parrots to use a computer to check out the Internet. It's no joke. Susan Farlow, who runs Jacot Unlimited, a bird-behavior consultant company in Lincoln, Mass., thinks the idea could work. More importantly, she said, if the idea flies, it will prevent many birds from hurting themselves in their fits of boredom and anxiety. ``There's a huge number of pet parrots out there, and many of them have significant dysfunctional behavior,'' Farlow said. Arthur -- in the brainy yet punchy style that typifies MIT -- has been given the nickname ``Wart,'' after Merlin the magician's nickname for King Arthur in the book ``The Once and Future King.'' So far, he doesn't seem interested in much more than pecking at his virtual counterparts when parrot pictures pop up on the screen. But Resner envisions a day when Arthur can play games, enter chat rooms filled with other parrots, or talk to his owner through the computer. ``When people hear about this, a lot of people think it's almost a sitcom-like interaction where the bird goes and checks the stock quotes,'' Resner said. ``It's not like that.'' Resner and some of the students at MIT built a joystick-like controller for Arthur that can be moved side to side and up and down. He works the joystick by inserting his beak into a hole at the top of it and pulling it in a certain direction. The next step will be building what Pepperberg and Resner are calling ``InterPet Explorer,'' a prototype that would only include Web sites that would intrigue Arthur and his fellow parrots. Pepperberg expects that the computer would probably be limited to such sites as those that feature music and videos that would enable Arthur to look at different wildlife scenarios. Resner, who developed children's software before he arrived at MIT, will begin working full-time on the project in August. Resner hopes that if he can create a device that Arthur can easily use, he will be able to use that knowledge to create new ways for severely handicapped children to surf the Net. Though some universities might have doubts about the worthiness of this project, both Pepperberg and Resner say they've received nothing but encouragement from the school. ``The comments that we're hearing aren't, like, `This is too crazy, tone it down a little bit and make it more mainstream','' Resner said. ``They say, `Go faster, hire more people, work longer hours.'''