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This bowl talks to your pet — in your own voice!
Have you found that your pet simply will not eat when you are away from home? Many animals that are used to having their caretakers near them regularly can suffer from separation anxiety. With this little gizmo your cat or dog will be able to hear your voice as it eats, making it feel more comfortable with its surroundings. The ChatterBowl will play a recording of your voice when the sensor detects an animal eating from it based on the amount of light changing.
Not much to look at, but the ChatterBowl can be used as either a water bowl or for feeding your pet. It can be easily cleaned by simply removing the talk-box and washing the bowl. You can also wash the talk-box itself using cold water with nothing abrasive or harsh being used. Make your pet happy today!
Very interesting feature on the “Beyond Tomorrow” show on Discovery Channel. Lots more information, but the basics are these…
A woman had a what appeared to be a normal mole on her leg. Her dog kept sniffing and then licking it with some urgency. She finally went to the doctor and it was found she had bladder cancer, for which she was treated.
In studies since then, dogs were trained to sniff out the urine samples donated by bladder cancer patients from among healthy urine samples. Their success rate was 42% — threefold compared to a simple guess rate of 14%.
After one dog repeatedly selected a sample that was thought to be healthy, it was found that its donor in fact had kidney cancer. The patient received surgery in time and survived.
Found this in a May 2001 Reader’s Digest (Asia edition). Cat owners can relate…
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The long-running musical CATS brought audiences a romanticised view of these well-loved pets. Despite the elaborate costumes, popular songs and lively dancing, the play didn’t quite capture the essence of our feline companions. Here is what CATS should have done:
1 Audience members should have entered the theatre only to find their seats had been clawed and covered with fur.
2 Sometimes the actors would have performed, but sometimes not — depending on their mood.
3 When certain audience members opened their playbills, cast members should have attempted to lie down on them.
4 For no apparent reason, the actors should have randomly run to the lobby and then back to the stage at top speed. They then should have continued as if nothing had happened.
5 A special audience member might have found a headless bird in his or her seat after intermission.
6 The show would have had to stop several times to allow cast members to bathe and groom themselves.
7 Most of the final act should have consisted of the cast just staring at the audience.
– Jerry Simpson, Jr., and Louis Buzek
Here’s some information from today’s Daily Yomiuri newspaper.
JAPAN DOG FESTIVAL 2007: “Living together” is the theme for the Japan Dog Festival 2007, which runs [from today] until Monday at the Pacifico Yokohama conference hall complex in Yokohama. More than 250 dogs, including police dogs and guide dogs, will parade near the venue at 10am Saturday to mark the start of the festival. Organized by the Japan Kennel Club among others, the festival features a dog show with 718 dogs, all champions from other shows. Other featured events include agility trials, an obstacle race for dogs, and a dog show for puppies. Doors open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, and from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Monday. Admission is Y1,800 for adults and Y600 for primary and middle school children.
For more information, see the Japan Dog Festival website.
Did you enjoy the videos we posted of two chatty cats? The first two really do look like they’re conversing with each other. And most of the several other related videos are really great as well.
For me as one interested in languages, the neat thing was comparing the sounds that different cats made under the same situations. For example, most cats, when seeing a bird or similar object of prey, utter a kind of stuttering “meh-eh-eh-eh” sound. I think of it as meaning “prey” or, by extension, “food”.
And I’ve noticed that when cats are hungry and asking to be fed, they tend to consistently make a certain kind of sound.
I first noticed this with Mikan. When she was plainly asking for food, she’d ask (with a rising intonation), “Yow-WOW?” When she became old and had lost her upper canines [can felines have canine teeth?!], it sounded more like “Yah-RAHR?”
I am convinced that this “food” question is what a cat is actually saying when — to us — he/she seems to be saying “hello” (which they pronounce — if not as “yah-RAHR or yah-WOW” — as “ha-RO” or “ha-RAO”, like Japanese schoolchildren) — especially because, face it, a cat is MUCH more interested in enlisting the aid of a canopener-capable human than in the niceties of greetings.
While Mikan used “Yow-WOW?” and “Yah-RAHR?” to ask for dinner, Momo has always used “MEH-eh?” But both of the cats seemed to understand both “words”. You should have seen their faces the first time I repeated their words. Their spines stiffened, eyes rounded, and faces took on an expression of “Omigosh, our owner can actually speak comprehensibly! Humans may not be as dumb as we thought!”
Try it yourself: say these words, slowly and distinctly, to your cat and see if you don’t get the same astonished reaction!
In the first video Toby tipped us to, the two cats were talking about something called “ao-KEH”. The first speaker (the cat on the right) seems to be inquiring about the possibility of ao-KEH (whatever that is), and the other cat responds, using the same “word”; and they discuss the subject a bit. Somehow I don’t think ao-KEH is food (perhaps because desire for food seems always accompanied by urgency), but without further clues one can’t make much of a guess.
Momo watched this video several times, and many of the others. She seemed keenly interested in what the cats were saying in neko-go, as if she were following the thread of the conversation and comments.
She also gets absorbed in animal-related shows on TV. Tonight we watched “Garfield 2: A Tale of Two Kitties” together. (Great flick, by the way; good clean fun, interesting story line, fantastic animal handling and animation and computer graphics, plus very enjoyable voice overs by Bill Murray, Bob Hoskins, Tim Curry, others…)
Momo was quite intrigued by the wide variety of animals and birds (throwing in some MEH-ehs when the ducks and geese were on-screen). But I was very interested to note that when Garfield — a portly orange-tiger cat — was on-screen, Momo was riveted. Mikan was a Garfield-looking cat, and she and Momo lived together for almost 11 years.
When I’ve occasionally said to her, “Mikan?”, surprisingly Momo has gotten far more alert and questioning than when I use a cat-language food word. I think Momo is still wondering, sometimes, why Mikan isn’t here, where she has gone… We’ll have to wait until Rainbow Bridge to see her again.
(The suffix “-go” means “language” in Japanese, so the title of this post means “Cat language for beginners”.)
Hi, all. I’ve just noticed this listing in today’s TV log. Sorry this is such short notice, but maybe some of you will be able to see or tape this terrific BBC animal program at noon today on the Animal Planet channel. (It has also popped up on other channels.)
“Animal Games” is a (simulated) Olympic Games for the animal kingdom. They have animals from five different groups — the Mammals, the “Herpetiles”, the Birds, the Fish, the Insects) competing in five or six different events (long jump, high jump, weight-lifting, etc.) on an even basis.
The “even basis” is arrived at by using a fixed measure for human height and the highest level (for example, 10 meters) ever attained by a human in that event. Then they scale up or scale down the challenge to the individual animal. For example, a human’s greatest weight-lift achievement was something like 544 lbs, so the challenger for the stag beetle was 544,000 lbs!
The graphics are outstanding; everything looks so real! And the sports results — reported by two excited announcers in typical sports style, with background info as well — are really astounding.
By all means, try to catch and/or tape this show! It’s really sensational!
(If you miss the show, you might be able to order it from the BBC website, but I am not sure about whether they will ship to Japan, or whether you would be able to watch it on your Japanese DVD.)
Yesterday, we posted an article about how a dog had kept a lost, elderly woman warm throughout the night. The link to the article on the Japan Today site included a number of readers’ comments which were, on the whole, dismaying, as many of them seemed to be more interested in trying to make cynical jokes (thus revealing their age, or rather, lack of it).
That’s really ironic, if you look at the etymology of “cynic.” (I’m an incurable etymologist!) Webster’s says: “a person who believes that only selfishness motivates human actions and who disbelieves in or minimizes selfless acts or disinterested points of view.”
The American Heritage dictionary adds: “A person whose outlook is scornfully and often habitually negative.” (In my observation this is a style that often starts in the teenage years (especially with boys) as an attempt at building individuality. Unfortunately some people never grow out of it.)
The word “cynic” derives from the name of a fourth-century B.C.E. sect of Greek philosophers, the Cynics. They believed, according to Webster’s, “that virtue is the only good, that the essence of virtue is self-control, and that surrender to any external influence is beneath human dignity.” This sounds fairly reasonable (though the third principle sounds like it could verge on raw egotism; more about that later).
So how did “cynical” get its present meaning of “faultfinder”? That’s even more ironic, if a little obscure. The dictionary says that the Greek word kunikos, from which cynic comes, was originally an adjective meaning “doglike,” from kun, “dog.”
What’s the connection with dogs?? Apparently a well-known member was so disdainful of deferring to others’ views on personal behavior that he won a reputation of “acting like a dog” — and the nickname of “Dog” — by doing such things as barking in public, urinating on a table leg, and so on! (At least with real dogs that’s natural and has no ulterior meaning…)
The connotation of “faultfinder”, then, apparently came from the behavior of Cynics, who — naturally believing their _own_ actions virtuous — never hesitated to point out what they considered the faults of others.
So it’s ironic that these self-styled _cynics_ disdain this article about a virtuous _dog_ saving an old woman.
Another aspect of the dog’s role in this style of expression is found in the word “sarcasm”. It also derives from the Greek. (There used to be a saying, “The Greeks had a word for it,” and it seems they really did create a remarkable vocabulary that has persisted for millennia. How different the world would be now, if they’d had TV, iPods, and video games…)
“Sarcasm” is defined as “a cutting, often ironic remark intended to wound or make its victim the butt of contempt or ridicule.” (Note that many Japanese speakers — and others — use “cynical” when they really mean “ironic”. “Cynical” focuses on considering all [others'] actions to be selfishly motivated; “ironic” refers to incongruity between expected and actual; and “sarcastic” focuses on the desire to hurt others.)
In a dictionary I consulted many years ago, the root of “sarcasm” is the Greek “sarkazein”, which means “to tear the skin off in strips, like a dog.” So here we could say that by using sarcasm, the negative commenters on this article are themselves acting like dogs (the dark side of dogdom, that is).
One last note… Contributor “beelzebub” comments “that’s how Three Dog Night got their name.” I think he’s right (and possibly Australian; the two are not mutually exclusive [just kidding!]).
A couple of decades ago I went on a spree of reading books about “indigenous Australians” (formerly: “Aborigines”). Originally nomadic, these people kept dogs for hunting and as companions. Cold winter nights were described in terms of how many dogs you needed to have sleeping with you in order to keep warm; the highest number was three. (Evidently that night in Ibaraki was just a “one-dog night” — but cold enough, nonetheless.)
Researching this on the Internet, I found confirmation at the Wikipedia page devoted to the Los Angeles-based rock group Three Dog Night (maybe claiming to be “the coolest?). Their heyday was 1968-1975 but they are still touring, even this year. And from there, another link mentioned that Eskimos — or rather, Inuit peoples — also use this same index. All of which supports the idea of letting pets sleep on your bed.
And now it’s time to end this dogged pursuit of cynics and canines, and go feed Momo. Though only one cat, as “my futon ferret” she wriggles under the covers, doing her best to insulate against the winter chill.
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