Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The gop couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

Ah, the different things are different argument.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

American History and Black History can not be separated.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

Books are my comfort food!

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Donald Jessica Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

The US Supreme Court is on the ballot in november.

‘Museums aren’t America’s attic for its racist shit.’

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Republicans in disarray!

This country desperately needs a functioning Fourth Estate.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

You are here: Home / Pet Blogging / Dog Blogging / … And Now for Something Completely Different…

… And Now for Something Completely Different…

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More details at the link. Via some guy on the internet.

For the skeptics, from the NYTimes:

… Researchers have known for some time that [African] wild dogs are exceptionally social and civic-minded. Among most group-living carnivores, big adults feed first, gulping down the choicest organs and leaving junior diners to scrounge through gristly leftovers. Among wild dogs, said Patrick R. Thomas, the curator of mammals at the Bronx Zoo, “it’s the exact opposite.”

“The adults let the puppies feed first,” he said. “It’s very peaceful to watch.”

For puppies too young to leave the den, or for injured pack members unable to hunt, hale-bodied adults go further, provisioning the needy by regurgitating a portion of a recent meal…

…[R]esearchers continue to be impressed by the depths of the dogs’ self-sacrificing behavior. In one recent study, Dr. Creel and his colleagues determined that the bigger a pack grew, the more efficiently it hunted and the greater the number of offspring it raised. However, the researchers were startled to see that not everyone benefited from the swelling ranks.

“Big packs with lots of offspring turn out to have poor adult survival,” Dr. Creel said. The cost of regurgitating food for a surging number of pups, it seemed, exceeded the advantages of bringing down more prey. As a result, nonbreeding adults in big packs would gradually become malnourished and end up dying at a somewhat younger age than their peers in smaller clans…

Reader Interactions

94Comments

  2. 2.

    ? Martin

    For puppies too young to leave the den, or for injured pack members unable to hunt, hale-bodied adults go further, provisioning the needy by regurgitating a portion of a recent meal…

    My coworker broke a bone in her foot recently and now I feel like a bad social member. Tomorrow I’ll puke up part of my turkey sandwich for her.

  6. 6.

    Kifaru1

    I grew up in Africa and had the luck to see wild dogs in Tanzania. They are amazing animals. If anyone is interested in a story, Hugo Van Lawick wrote a book about an African wild dog named Solo.

  8. 8.

    lamh36

    I read about this little girl, but loved seeing it as Rachel’s “best new thing ever” segment. This week isn’t even half over and we need some news to make you smile

    All Eyes on Mo’Ne as Local Little League Team Heads to World Series

    …The win was fueled by 13-year-old pitcher Mo’Ne Davis who threw a three-hit, complete game shutout. Davis, who’s been featured on numerous websites as well as the Today Show, will become only the 17th girl to play in the Little League World Series in 68 years…

  9. 9.

    max

    @lamh36: This week isn’t even half over and we need some news to make you smile

    OK. I’m game.

    The Fields Medal, awarded every four years to between two and four scholars under the age of 40, is math’s highest prize. It was first given out in 1936—and news has broken that, this year, Stanford profesor Maryam Mirzakhani has become the first woman to win the prize. Per this profile in Quanta Magazine, Mirzakhani was raised and received her undergraduate degree in Iran before attending graduate school at Harvard, where she finished her doctoral thesis in 2004. She’s won the Fields for her work with the “dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces” which—and I apologize to mathematicians out there for whatever I do to butcher this description—roughly means that she considers abstract questions related to non-Euclidean entities such as, for example, the surface of a pretzel.

    max
    [‘That’s the stuff *I* always wanted to study.’]

  10. 10.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Ayn Rand does not approve of these silly dogs allowing the young and the weak first choice at mealtime.

  12. 12.

    srv

    You know, African Hunting Dogs are also the only other mammal that kills for pleasure?

    Think about that.

  13. 13.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    any of you who go a’spelunking on Fox News familiar with a bad performance artist named Todd Starnes? He claims to work there

    toddstarnesVerified account
    ‏@ toddstarnes
    Obama sends “deep condolences” to family of MO teen killed after allegedly attacking police officer. No condolences for the cop.

  15. 15.

    MattR

    Wish I could find the link about how dogs self police their play behavior and will ostracize a dog that doesn’t properly follow the rules.

    @lamh36: There is also Chelsea Baker, a 17 year old junior from Florida who throws a knuckleball and has turned down professional offers to play for the Japanese women’s league so she can finish high school. She got a chance to throw some batting practice against the Tampa Bay Rays earlier this year.

  23. 23.

    lamh36

    @MattR: I love that.

    Kudos to both girls. I made the error of reading the comments and the majority of the them are great, there always some dude who’s mad cause the girls ‘took the place” of some boy.

    Blah…

  26. 26.

    Lurking Canadian

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: holy fuck. “Condolences for the cop”?!? ‘Cause he was so traumatized by the way the kid’s back jerked as he pumped round after round into it? These fucking people just can’t help themselves.

  29. 29.

    Cervantes

    @max: Glad you mentioned Mirzakhani. She does good work in the study of hyperbolic planes — a field that a fellow Persian, Omar Khayyam, helped invent a thousand years ago.

  30. 30.

    Mike J

    @Cervantes:

    Glad you mentioned Mirzakhani. She does good work in the study of hyperbolic planes

    Isn’t topology what DougJ does? Maybe Baud wasn’t kidding.

  32. 32.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    @Mike J: How do we know he didn’t? Doug J is a mathdude* of many nyms.

    *Mathdude being non specific as to gender of course.

    @Baud: Late as usual, I am.

  35. 35.

    MattR

    @lamh36:

    there always some dude who’s mad cause the girls ‘took the place” of some boy.

    They sound like the type of regressive dudes who would also be against any sort of quota system created by affirmative action (while being unable to see the contradiction between that and enforcing a 100% male quota on the baseball team)

  36. 36.

    the Conster

    @max:

    You are aware that the Fields Medal was the source of contention between Robin Williams’ and Stellan Skaarsgard’s character in Good Will Hunting, right? Synchronicity.

  37. 37.

    lamh36

    UGH!!!!!!!!! Good night BJ.

    David Kaib ‏@DavidKaib 6m
    Don’t get to see the autopsy. Don’t get the name of the cop. No fly zone. Media out. Still haven’t interviewed the witnesses.

  38. 38.

    Mandalay

    @lamh36:

    This week isn’t even half over and we need some news to make you smile

    This isn’t exactly news to make you smile, but it is good news, and pretty surprising (to me at least):

    Auto theft isn’t much of a problem anymore in New York City. In 1990, the city had 147,000 reported auto thefts, one for every 50 residents; last year, there were just 7,400, or one per 1,100. That’s a 96 percent drop in the rate of car theft…

    The most important factor is a technological advance: engine immobilizer systems, adopted by manufacturers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. These make it essentially impossible to start a car without the ignition key, which contains a microchip uniquely programmed by the dealer to match the car.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/upshot/heres-why-stealing-cars-went-out-of-fashion.html?_r=0

    As older cars get junked it looks like car theft may just fade away.

  41. 41.

    ? Martin

    @Mandalay: But I thought that was the front line on the war on white people. I mean, we’re not being gunned down in the streets or having our voting rights impinged upon. But we do seem to be having our feelings hurt quite a lot these days. It must be our kryptonite.

  43. 43.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)

    There are a lot of carnivores, perhaps most of them, that will sometimes hunt just for the fun of it. Most of them enjoy hunting which, when you think about it, isn’t surprising. I’ve seen footage of orcas tossing a seal to each other with their tails like a game of catch. When they finally get bored they let it go without much concern as to its continuing health.

  44. 44.

    lamh36

    Ok, I found something to make me laugh before I go to bed.

    I hope it works, it’s a Facebook video. I have never been this happy when doing a workout.

    It’s an 80s video. Gawd, I totally forgot how into aerobics the US got back then.

    Enjoy.

    Crystal Light Aerobics Championships,

    I swear at the 0:25 mark, them dude were twerking…lol.

    God the 80s…lol

  45. 45.

    browser

    @? Martin: True. But I’ve been on the receiving end of cat lover fury before. I have it on good authority that this joint is rotten with ’em. Playing it safe.

  46. 46.

    Violet

    Finally feeling better after two days of dealing with what I’m guessing was food poisoning. Horrible. And then Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall are gone. And the horror show happening in Ferguson. Terrible couple of days. Ugh.

    On topic, African Wild Dogs are so ugly they’re almost cute. I didn’t know that about their behavior.

  47. 47.

    Little Boots

    you know what. this is the time for omnes and steeplejack, the only good people on this site.

  51. 51.

    Suffern ACE

    @lamh36:

    Gawd, I totally forgot how into aerobics the US got back then.

    I think we were into WATCHING aerobics. The 80s is when we really started getting fat as a nation.

  54. 54.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Mandalay: No, it’s a pretty insightful comment, especially for the racist scum who are insisting that Brown somehow deserved to die for failure to bow and scrape to a cop.

  56. 56.

    fleeting expletive

    i still think “I have a pen and I have a phone” is a pretty powerful statement.\

  58. 58.

    Suffern ACE

    Yeah. I’m not going to sleep tonight. The workers are coming tomorrow to remove my bathroom and put in a new one and I still don’t know if I made the right decision to go shower only.

  59. 59.

    James E Powell

    Open thread? I got a question for anyone who can help. This blog, the only non-sports blog I read more than once every day, has got something in it that causes it to freeze up in Chrome and run really slow, like it is now, in explorer. Any ideas?

  60. 60.

    lamh36

    @Suffern ACE: I guess so, but damn. I really needed the laugh that the video brought me tonight. I mean, the biker shorts, the lycra onesies, the hair and the hideous dancing…lol. Even the song is soooo 80s!

  68. 68.

    MattR

    @James E Powell: I’ve been getting an issue with a hanging plug in or script (can’t remember which at the moment) using Firefox. Eventually it asks if I want to continue to wait or kill it (and once I stop/kill it, all is good again). Pretty sure it is related to one of the ads.

    Re: your other comment – Without looking was it Jeff Healey? and was one of the videos him playing with SRV?
    (EDIT: And now that I see it wasn’t, here’s a link to Jeff’s first TV appearance with Stevie Ray Vaughn.

  69. 69.

    Mandalay

    @? Martin: There are many smart posters here, but you are one of the smartest of them all. I do not understand why you are choosing to go down this path. Generic comments criticizing “white people” are just as wrong as generic criticisms of black people or gays or Jews or women, and I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t dream of going down those paths.

    A few such as Lenny Bruce and Chris Rock can walk that precarious tightrope, but you…not so much.

  70. 70.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    Saw that on FB. Media Matters captured it, along with a couple of other tweets from Starnes:

    First Obama speaks out for the Harvard professor — then Trayvon — and now Michael Brown. I’m sensing a pattern.

    Why didn’t Obama release a statement offering support to the business owners whose stores were looted?

    Jerkass.

  73. 73.

    lamh36

    ‏@CNNTonight 1h
    Second witness comes forward; reports there was no struggle between Michael #Brown and officer, who shot him – Adolphus Pruitt NAACP

  83. 83.

    gian

    @? Martin:

    crap police hyper-paranoia probably targets people of color more, but the training is the training. I tried to post this below (and it’s there now) but Douglas Zerby was white.

    Douglas Zerby never knew what hit him.

    Without a word, without even announcing their presence, Long Beach police officers hiding in a nearby apartment repeatedly shot Zerby, 35, because they feared that the object in his hand was a gun.

    It turned out to be a pistol grip-style garden hose nozzle.

    Zerby died at the scene, a courtyard on East Ocean Avenue, on Dec. 12, 2010, but the recriminations continue. This year a civil jury awarded Zerby’s family $6.5 million in damages. The city is appealing the award, after arguing that the officers genuinely feared for their safety.

    http://www.ocregister.com/articles/police-538385-city-long.html

    the OC register BTW is a right wing rag

  89. 89.

    lamh36

    St. Louis Co police confirm female shot in head in 1300 bl Highmont, near QT. Appears to be drive-by shooting. #ferguson

  94. 94.

    Chris

    @Kifaru1:

    Thanks, that’s going on the “must read at some point” list.

    This takes me back. Way back to my childhood. Before I was an IR nerd, or a politics nerd, or a history nerd, I did once used to be an animal nerd, especially where canines were concerned. African wild dogs (African Hunting Dogs? Cape Hunting Dogs?) were a favorite thing to read about, especially since they seemed to be the unsung predator in Africa – everyone seemed to prefer talking about lions and hyenas.

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