Wolfish Musings

I’ve been neglecting the arthropods in my life. The slobbering and mewling furry creatures tend to occupy my field of vision more readily and so the little fellows don’t always get the attention they deserve. Fortunately I saw something incredible that made me think. Thinking, in my case at least, leads to writing. So here’s a bit about wolf spiders.

I was watering my flowers in the front of the house two nights ago and I must have showered a wolf spider because she scurried from the flower bed and across the pavement. I only got a quick look at her before she disappeared in a crack in the sidewalk, but it was enough to send me sprinting up the stairs for my camera. Alas, I couldn’t find her again when I returned, but I knew I wasn’t crazy. She had a large white ball attached to the underside of her abdomen. Wow, I thought, was that an egg sac?

Turns out it was. I would never have guessed spiders to be attentive mothers, but some, like wolf spiders and nursery spiders carry their egg sacs around until they hatch. Wolf spiders attach the egg sac to their spinnerets. They do this because, as their name suggests, they’re active hunters. Spiders in the Lycosidae family don’t spin webs, they seek out prey so while they’re hunting, they need a safe place for their egg sac. When the eggs hatch, the mother will carry the young on her abdomen until after their first molt.

Wolf spiderlings disperse aerially so the spiders have a large habitat range. And they don’t have toxic venom, which is what everyone always wants to know. So if you see one, wish her luck on her next hunt and let her be. I’ve been searching for the one I saw two days ago so I could see her hatchlings, but with no luck. Wolf spiders don’t set up a permanent residence, they’re itinerant killers I suppose.

Soul-Sucking Cuddle Bunny

One of the very puzzling creatures that roams my abode is my upstairs cat, Nelly. I call her my upstairs cat because she isn’t brave enough to come downstairs. We’ve lived in our house for two years now and the only time she ventures down to the first floor is if I’m late with her dinner. Dinner, mind you, is served promptly at four and Nelly has health issues so she gets to eat prescription food in her own room. Her own room is the master bathroom and she loves it. It’s her twice daily dose of sanctuary.

Nelly is a rescue who is supposedly part manx part persian. She looks nothing like a persian as she has short hair, but she does have a little tuft on her rear end like a bunny rabbit, instead of a tail. Whatever her genetic makeup, she’s adorable in a creepy kind of way. Like she’s just too cute to be real. And sometimes, for hours, she’ll just sit and stare at you… I love her to death, but it’s very disconcerting. I read once about an African tribe who believes in people called soul-suckers. These soul-suckers sometimes transform into animals (I assume that makes sneaking up on your victims easier), but they always have something slightly amiss about them, like a missing leg, or a missing tail. So yes, I do sometimes call Nelly my Little Soul Sucker.

Nelly has two issues really. One is that she hates cats. I’m not sure if this means she also has self-esteem issues, and I don’t really have the scratch to hire a pet psychologist so I may never know. But whenever Nelly sees another cat, she throws a little tantrum and hisses and growls. She’s lived with two of my other cats for almost seven years and still growls every time she sees them. So the upstairs downstairs separation works pretty well most of the time. I also call her my Cuddle Bunny, because as much as she hates cats, she loves people. Which, incidentally, makes sense if she is a soul-sucker stuck in a cat’s body… something to think about.

The only time Nelly’s feline loathing is an issue is when my monster Teka walks into the room. Teka was hand raised so she’s a little on the nutty side (a long blog for another day).When Nelly growls at her, instead of turning tail and walking away like the other cats, she attacks. Poor Nelly’s pretty face is always marred by Teka’s scratches. I’m convinced if I could get Nelly to stop growling, Teka wouldn’t attack her, but alas, cats aren’t dogs and a simple, ‘Nelly, quit it,’ doesn’t suffice. In fact, this is a good segue into Nelly’s other problem.

She’s a vengeance pee-er (I don’t even know if that’s a word, pisser maybe? Seems vulgar). If I don’t save her from Teka’s attacks, she’ll pee on the floor right in front of me. If I don’t move the dog out of the doorway so she can run from one room to another, she’ll pee on the floor by the door. If anything loud or scary happens, she jumps in the litter box and pees over the edge onto the floor.

According to Dr. Stuart, it’s because she has a fluted bladder, which, from what I understand means it’s shaped funny and is frequently uncomfortable. So stress makes her feel like she has to pee. The good Doc assures me it isn’t really personal. The key, is not to let her get stressed and to encourage her to drink lots of fluids. Again, asking nicely is just never going to work with a cat. So she gets chicken broth with her meals and we have a Drink Well fountain upstairs just for her. Her prescription food is meant to make her thirsty as well.

Cats with fluted bladders can have ‘attacks’ where their bladders get inflamed, they start to pee constantly (and on everything), this can lead to crystals and peeing blood. It’s all very terrible (and expensive I might add) to treat these attacks. The best remedy is a fluid IV. Which I do know how to administer myself, but it’s a very nerve-wracking process involving really big needles and I prefer to leave it to the professionals. Stress and diet are the main reasons cats with fluted bladders will have an attack. So when Nelly’s around, everyone is ordered to be very mellow. It’s nice actually, she’s a visual reminder to just chill out and breath. And she super soft and loves to be scratched. Better than Xanax any day if you ask me.

Hard Headed

My pit bull has zero retriever DNA. I know because when I throw a ball, he chases it, grabs it, shakes it around, and then runs around the yard with it to everywhere but where I’m standing. So we play a lot of keep-away. I throw the ball, he charges after it, grabs it, runs to a few feet from me, drops the ball, and looks at me. Taunting me. And I fall for it, every time. Don’t get me wrong, if I say in an authoritative manner, “Lucius, drop it.” He will. He’ll stand over it calmly while I pick it up and then sit while I throw it too, but that’s no fun right? Where’s the challenge? There’s nothing like the rush of adrenalin when my tender hand beats those quick jaws to the slobbery ball. A victory dance for me and then whoosh! Off he goes.

A quick note about a pit’s jaws, they don’t lock. I know this because Lucius has hay fever and gets daily doses of Benedryl. To give a dog Benedryl you have to take gel caps, imbed them in a glob of butter, pry open those well muscled jaws, and shove the mess down their throats. Trust me, neither of us finds this amusing, but it’s Benedryl or really itch hives and oatmeal baths. Oh, don’t laugh, the poor fellow has enough problems.

Likely, the myth about locking jaws has to do with their tenacity. Pit bulls were originally bred in England for bull baiting. Basically they were thrown in pits with bulls. I never hypnotically regressed Lucius to a past life to find out the truth, but I imagine it was a hang on or get trampled strategy that helped them develop their strong bite. Eventually bull baiting was deemed inhumane so dog fighting replaced it (I know, the limit to human hypocrisy must not exist). But the pit’s tenacity remains to this day. If you can’t get them to let go of their chew toy, they probably just don’t want to.

Back to the yard though, for the denouement of this blog. So we’re playing our version of fetch and it’s a heated battle, can I get to the ball before he grabs it. I toss one straight up in the air he waits, waits, and leaps at least six feet vertically to snatch it before it falls. But he misses and it lands, bounces, rolls. I take off. So does Lucius. I get there and bend down, hand outstretched. But I’m too slow and he already has the ball. As I’m going down to grab it, he’s coming up (to gloat most likely). And smack! A big, solid pit bull skull hits me right in the nose. I plop down in the grass, stunned and waiting for the blood to start flowing.

According to my doctor, the forward and downward momentum is what caused the concussion. Today, the headache has finally abated enough to blog. We may just be playing traditional fetch from now on… maybe.

Orally Fixated Kitten

Orally Fixated Kitten

Ok so she isn’t a kitten anymore. Willow will be three in August, but she’s my youngest cat so it’s hard to think of her any other way. We rescued Willow, and she’s been a conundrum right from the start. From her crossed eyes, to her odd markings, and her, well… psychological issues, she’s always been my wicked little mystery.

It started with the trick she played on me when we first met. I was walking up some concrete steps to the building where I worked. I used to work in construction so we started early and it was still dark. There was this tiny, cream colored kitten huddled at the top of the steps. I went to pick her up and she limped away, just out of reach. We played this game, me taking a few steps toward her, and her limping away, for about five minutes until some co-workers showed up and helped me trap her. I drove her home and set her up with a bed and food (which she devoured) in the bathroom. Willow and my husband bonded at the vet’s office later, when I told the vet she’d been limping and the vet told me there was nothing wrong with her leg. My husband grinned.

“Little punk. She played you.” He couldn’t stop laughing and they’ve been best buddies ever since.

Of course she had worms, every cat I’ve rescued has had worms, but even after the worms were gone, a ravenous appetite remained. The infamous Dr. Stuart joked that she’d gone ahead and given Willow the tummy tuck/spay package because she was already rolly polly at six months and that was just simply embarrassing for a young kitten.

I started calling her Yum Yum Willow because she purrs when she eats and that is the ONLY time she purrs…. Sounds like she’s saying ‘yum yum yum yum’.

Which brings me to the crux of the problem, biting. Freud said that early weaning can lead to an obsessive desire to fulfill oral gratification. I wasn’t present for most of Willow’s kitten hood, but I’d guess from the enjoyment she gets out of gnawing on human flesh that something went awfully wrong there.

When I greet my cats I typically offer them a hand, they’ll sniff and then rub and get all happy. Willow will sniff, then lick, then nibble, then gnaw until she breaks the skin if you don’t get away fast enough. She loves fingers and toes and the fleshy under parts of your arms. But if breakfast is late, the perky tip of my nose is her favorite treat. And it isn’t just me (although it mostly is, what did Freud say about adoptive mothers?) she bites the dog too. Anyone who says Pit Bulls snap and lose their cool has never met the longsuffering Lucius. He’s been bitten and nibbled and gnawed on almost constantly for the better part of his two years on Earth and still loves to cuddle with the vicious Yum Yum. They’d make a great team should anyone ever decided to break into our house (which is probably only a matter of time).

So I tend to regard Willow as an attraction on a safari. She’s fascinating to watch (lolling about, nibbling the dog’s legs, trying to clean her ass), but you really don’t want to get too close.

P.S. So no one thinks I’m abusive, Willow is on a low fat food and diet… we’re all wearing chain mail around the house now.

A Cynic’s Cure

I was sitting at my computer earlier today, agonizing over this freelance writing thing I’ve decided to try and make a living at and nowhere near deciding which animal would be the subject of today’s blog, when a large white flash crossed the window in front of me. It happened so fast that my brain, locating itself firmly in my second story room in a house sitting in the middle of an urban suburb, could not place the white blur. I peeked over the corner of my screen, my eyes a little fuzzy, and there, perched in one of my neighbor’s fruit trees was a great egret (Ardea alba, if you’re curious).

They aren’t an uncommon site in Northern California, but they are an uncommon site in my neighborhood (an actual hood, in the grittiest sense of the word), at least fifteen miles from any water. It was out of place in every sense of the phrase. Great egrets normally nest and hunt near fresh or saltwater in colonies, feeding mainly on fish. My neighbor’s tree, not suited for a bird three and a half feet tall with a wingspan of almost five feet, was bending and shaking as the lanky fowl searched for a foothold. I yelled down the stairs for my husband. And as we attempted pictures with camera phones (which of course didn’t come out), we discussed the possibilities for such an odd presence in our hood. None came to mind, but we did hope in our world-weary way that none of the neighbors shot it. I don’t know if egrets make good food, but they might make good sport for someone bored, armed, and disillusioned.

After a few minutes it flew off and we both hoped out loud that it made it somewhere safe. Although the sighting lasted only a few minutes, seeing an incredibly beautiful bird in my far from beautiful neighborhood yanked at my mind all day. A soft and elegant white foil to my prickling cynicism? It would seem so. And of course I couldn’t help but wonder if there could be any cure to a cynical world view if such a graceful bird couldn’t banish it for even a few minutes. (Odd Cat howls from solitary as I write this, poor old man gets sprung tomorrow. I wonder if cats get cynical. Actually I’m certain cats can be cynical). I don’t take for granted the unexplained and unexpected sighting, but there was a time when it might have seemed fortuitous. Today, I just worried about the bird and hoped the humans it encountered at worst ignored it and at best were respectful.

I did do a little research on Ardea alba. It turns out they are one of we humans’ success stories. Hunted to near extinction for their plumage (put that feather in your cap), they are now listed as secure and thriving with habitats all over the world. And although a sardonic, ‘just in time to wiped out by global warming’, type comment did race through my mind, a flicker of hope for the world, for the human race, and for egrets in hoods everywhere exiled it and I smiled to sit down and blog about the beautiful bird that crossed my path today.

(image by Davefoc)

Recovering Arachnophobic

I’ve been a huge arachnophobe ever since I was little. And I remember exactly what happened to cause it. I was probably around six and my parents, my younger brother, and I lived in an old apartment in Utah. My brother and I had been goofing around with my dad, wrestling, getting tickled no doubt, and laughing. I had to pee and managed to break away from the giggling fray to run (literally) to the bathroom. I opened the door and pop! A huge spider springs down from the ceiling on a silken thread, touching my nose. I can still see it in dreams, huge mandibles, eight spindly legs pulsating (trying to grab me, really) in the air as it bounced on its SURPRISE! thread. I screamed and peed my pants and then cried for awhile. All of which were all appropriate reactions for a six year old girl.

For the next twenty-four years the first thing I did upon entering any building or room was look at the door jamb, and then the ceiling. I developed my own spider sense. I could tell if there was a spider without even looking. The site of a spider would cause instant paralysis. I couldn’t move, or it would see me and jump on me or run after me really fast, who knows, but something terrible would happen if I moved. It’s hard to describe the irrational fear that gripped me over something so small, and most of the time harmless. But it felt like hot pokers in my chest and fire through my limbs. No matter what my brain was screaming, my body wouldn’t move.

Oddly enough it took an infestation of a highly toxic spider to nudge me toward arachnophobia recovery. Last summer our house was swarming with western black widows. Latrodectus hesperus, I learned. I didn’t want to waste money on an exterminator so I learned everything I could about this rather intimidating looking lady. I learned to recognize males and juveniles, learned about feeding and hunting habits, and I learned about breeding and how to keep a population under control naturally. I also learned that widows are not aggressive and that no one in the US has died from a widow bite since the ‘80’s. It turns out spiders are fascinating creatures. Still, we did have to curb the infestation. We probably killed three or four dozen black widows last summer.

This summer we’ve seen a few, but nothing near last year’s numbers. This year I’ve realized too what amazing predators black widows are. Last year, in the garden and around the house, there was nothing but black widows. This year the diversity in not only insects, but other spiders as well is incredible. Learning more about spiders opened up a whole new creeping crawling world I’d never really taken an interest in. I have four enormous amazing red New Zealand flax plants in my front yard. Two of them have daring jumping spiders living in them that are probably bigger than a quarter. One of them is shown eating a black widow above. And on one of my tomato plants out back I have a celer crab spider. Neither type of spider is a web maker, they rely on their eyesight and quickness to catch prey.

So I’ve gotten over my fear of spiders enough to sit for a minute and observe them if I see them. No panicking and squishing for the outdoor arachnids. And I use the more humane ‘relocation’ method to rid myself of spiders in the house as opposed to the vacuum method I used to use. I do not see letting one crawl its eight legs across my fingers anytime soon, but the paralysis has lifted and I can now identify most of the spiders in my back yard. They truly are fascinating creatures and it’s worth conquering fear to get a closer look at them.

Odd Cat's Bum Foot

About four weeks ago my old tom cat started limping. My first thought was arthritis, but within a day his left rear foot started to swell and he could barely walk.

Odd Cat has a kitty arch nemesis that lives across the street and they are always causing each other injuries: bitten tails, neck bites, scruff bites, the works. I hoped it was a bite (weird, I know, but less expensive to fix) and that he hadn’t been run over by a car or something equally mechanically wicked.

So we hauled the old man in to Dr. Stuart (who we LOVE, seriously) and she immediately diagnosed it as gangrene. I looked down at Odd Cat’s foot which was swollen, but still looked quite… alive, and then back up at the good doctor.
“Gangrene?” If you’ve ever seen a picture of the infliction known as gangrene you’ll know it’s a puss-filled, black and green, mess of dead tissue. Really quite revolting and nothing at all what my cat’s foot looked like. Dr. Stuart smiled.
“No, I just like saying that.” I mentioned above that my husband and I love Dr. Stuart, and this one reason. Her sense of humor is just the dark and disturbing kind of thing we enjoy. The other reason is, of course, she’s an amazingly talented veterinarian.

What he ended up having was an abscess. How did he get the offending abscess? Probably a bite, from one arch nemesis aptly named Tiger, that healed over but left an infected puss pocket under the skin. Fortunately, or so we thought, the old man had licked the wound enough to pop the abscess. Sweet! Antibiotics and bed rest.

Ah…. Nothin’s ever that easy at Monk’s Zoo. Five days ago, the poor old kitten’s foot started to swell again. Back to the Doc. More puss, more infection. And almost gangrene, kind of. In addition to a stubborn abscess, he had what is called cellulitis, where the skin cells get infected. In acute cases the skin cells can *gasp* die. Eh, ok, it’s not gangrene, but now that we know he’s on the road to recovery and going to be just fine, we did have a little laugh about it, the Mad Doctor and I.

Beware, The Look!


Owning a pit bull is not as frightening as it might seem. The important thing to remember is that bad owners make bad dogs. If you approach any dog in a fair and firm manner and train with consistency, you’ll probably get a good dog. Lucius is a sweetheart. He loves the cats, learns quickly and always listens. He went in to the vet a couple of weeks ago for a check-up and the vet said he was getting a little on the tubby side. Poor fellow needs to lose eleven pounds. Pits are loyal and smart and very much want to please their owners, they’ll do anything for you, love to play, love to cuddle, love to just be with you. And they’re stubborn. Which is how Lucius got a little fat…

It was almost a year ago, with the help of the cats, Lucius got into some eucalyptus I had up on a table. He got sick, was lethargic, and stopped eating. I took him to the vet and he was prescribed a bland diet of rice, cottage cheese, and boiled chicken.
“Just for about a week,” the vet said, “and then you can start to mix his dry food in and eventually cut out the chicken, rice, and cottage cheese.” Easy. Right? Sure except what dog would want to eat dry food after all that yummy home cooked stuff. Not Lucius. With nothing but dry food in the bowl, he refused to eat. I consulted the vet and the books. They all said the same thing. Leave the food down for fifteen minutes, if he doesn’t eat, take it away. By the second day, he’ll get the picture and start to eat again.

The morning of the fourth day. Lucius lays on the floor in front of his bowl filled with dry food. He looks up at me with those pitiful eyes. I know he’s hungry. How long can this go on? I have to get to work. I don’t have time to cook rice and there’s no cottage cheese. I search the fridge. Yogurt! Yogurt is good for dogs. Perfect. I grab his bowl, empty the Yoplait container into it and stir it up. I make him sit until I put the bowl down. He’s drooling, but he stays.
“Ok, get it.” He nearly smashes his head into the wall behind the bowl running at the food. And that’s how it started. Steamed veggies, rice, chicken, whatever we were eating if it was safe, after awhile I got tired of cooking for the dog and started to buy wet food. But even the wet food had to be served with variety. Different brands, different flavors, or he wouldn’t eat it.

So for the last two weeks I’ve been weaning him off wet food. Yesterday was the first day without any wet food or people food in his bowl…. he didn’t eat it. But the vet assures me that pushing him to that fourth day is ok. Don’t be fooled by those sad, sad eyes, stand your ground, and remember you train the dog, don’t let the dog train you.