All the Creatures

Apparently a web store called ThinkGeek ran an April’s Fool joke ad poking fun at spam. Calling the product, canned Unicorn meat, “the NEW white meat.” Well it got the attention of the pork marketing people and they wrote a 12 page cease and desist letter. Didn’t they know that Unicorns don’t exist? I know that pigs are intelligent but it seems that the people marketing them are not. They didn’t like the idea of the slogan that ThinkGeek used. It sounded too much like, “pork, the other white meat.” You can read more about it at Chow.com at this link.

My guess is that the pork people don’t get out much otherwise they would have written a 12 letter to the rattle snake industry in Texas, who mention, poke fun and say that, rattle snake is “the other white meat.” I am assuming it (rattle snake) tastes just like chicken.

All the Creatures

Is it too early to talk about kids halloween costumes? I am not talking about costumes for human children but our friends, the goats. It is summer now and county fairs are in full swing along with 4-H shows and just plain fun get togethers. We always hear about doggy dress-up and if you go to some of the larger horse shows you can witness costume classes where the horse and rider dress up in non-traditional horse outfits. I thought I would just gather a few photos of goats that have been dressed up. I hope you enjoy them -

Cute photos aren’t they? As a side note, my neighbor has a few goats and one of the females gave birth to triplets a few weeks back. They are Boar goats, the all white with a brown head colored ones. Boars are meat goats. They grow pretty big and I have not asked him if he plans on eating them or not. Most of the time he just sells them. I use to have 2 Nubian/Boar cross female goats almost 10 years ago. I got them as 5 month olds. We had them for about 5 years and then sold them to a breeder who loved that cross.

Goats are fun and do make great pets. They also make good companions for horses.

All the Creatures

Did you know that almost all of the mammals that we think of as being native to North America are in reality not? Horses, rhinos, elephants and tigers are in fact native to North America and deer, bison, elk and moose are not. You see about a million years ago, horses, rhinos, mammoths, tigers and giant sloths roamed North America. At the same time deer, moose and elk roamed in Asia.

Roughly 30,000 to 20,000 years ago the area that now has open ocean between Alaska and the USSR was dry land. That allowed not only animals to migrate but humans as well. It is not known why horses, rhinos and the other mammals that were once native to North America disappeared. They were on the North American continent until only 8,000 years ago. There have been fossil finds in Canada and Alaska that put the modern horse in North America just 7,000 years ago. By the same token, why did bison disappear from Asia or did those that stayed behind evolve into yaks?

If you are curious you might want to go to your local book store and learn some more about the subject of ancient mammals. There is one called the Beasts of Eden that is quite good.

Since paleontology is an ever changing science, I do not recommend you buy book on sale that is more than a few years old. A case in point - I have several horse books at home and if they were published before 1978 they blatantly state that the horse developed in Asia, which is not true. Horse fossils were discovered in 1928 in Idaho (that were from horses that lived over 1 million years ago) but the general public was not aware of it until the late 1950’s. Some authors of those books simply took older books and re-wrote the misinformation, without bothering to do their own research on the matter. In the later books the information about the history of the horse had been corrected.

All the Creatures