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enismirdalAll too often I come across Classified ads that read something like this:
These adverts make me boil with rage. If you cannot afford to pay money for a hamster and cage, unless you're eligible for PDSA vet treatment, you cannot afford to acquire yourself a new hamster. (Unless you have some magical relative willing to foot the vet's bills.) If your hamster gets sick, you HAVE to take it to the vet. A vet's bill for one consult for a sick hamster may break down something like this:
£25 - inital consultation fee
£10 - treatment
£5 - VAT
Total = £40
That's assuming you have a straightforward problem, no repeat visits, only one medication required. You need a specialist? £60 straight off. You need to take the pet back for another check? Add another £20. Yeah, a hamster is a cheap pet - if it never develops a problem with wood shavings, never needs a special diet and never, ever gets sick. Of course, you could always just have your hamster put to sleep as soon as it looks a little peaky. But even that costs £15 or so. In other words, the price of a basic cage, or a large second hand one.
I'm often tempted to e-mail people to point these things out. Thankfully we managed to get the message through to flatmate's sister.
In peripherally related stuff...
Bob is old these days. At least 2, possibly more. She's starting to show it - her coat is thinner and she sleeps more. Nonetheless, if I'm ever awake at about 4:30am, I'll hear her feet (tap-tap-tap) on the wheel, and she's basically a vacuum cleaner when it comes to food. However, she's gone completely bald underneath, which seemed a bit excessive even for an old hamster, and is drinking a bit more. She was getting frustrated with her drinking bottle so I've given her a bowl as well (it's on the top level where there's no food/bedding and it's a heavy ceramic one, so shouldn't be an accident risk) and she seems pleased with that. I also decided to have the wonderful specialist amazing vet check her over and suggest why she's all bald underneath.
So we trundled over to Harold Wood on New Year's Eve and Bob met Vet and Vet met Bob. She was on her best behaviour and let him inspect her very thoroughly.
The weird thing is, even though she's bald and her skin's quite dry and flaky and scurfy, she's not scratting at all, that I've seen. She seems totally oblivious. She's not losing weight, so odds are it's (thankfully) not kidney or liver failure. So it's looking like one of two things: mites (in spite of the lack of itchiness), or hypothyroidism. Mites being easy to treat and hypothyroidism being rather harder, we're going to try mites first and see how that goes, then hypothyroidism if that doesn't help. 9 drops of Xeno and a chunky vet's bill later, I took away 2 more vials of the stuff for the 2 and 4 week reapplications and Bob seems none the worse for wear. A bit early to tell whether it's made any difference, but fingers crossed!
In entirely unrelated news...
When I got into the lab this morning, I was told by a colleague that one of the other researchers was looking for me. Apparently she's decided to do some experiments with fish and colour learning and wanted some advice on colour and brightness. Fish vision is not my forté, but I've got a vague familiarity with some of the researchers in the area, so forewarned, I hit PubMed and skimmed some abstracts on the subject.
Learned that fish colour learning was best done on a black background, as when you put colour stimuli on a white background, fish often use brightness to choose the stimuli rather than colour. So when the researcher sent her two undergrad project students down to see me later, I suggested this. "Oh," they said, helplessly. "I don't think we could do that in our setup. Can you just get us two brightness-matched stimuli?" I explained that "brightness" is all very well and good, but brightness to a bee and brightness to a fish might be quite different, so even if we had brightness-matched stimuli for bees (not usually an issue, since bees do colour learning faster than human children), they might not be relevant to fish. However, I could check some coloured papers in the spectrophotometer and see which ones matched in absolute irradiance. Great, they said. Could I do it by 1:30pm?
This was at 12:15pm. Miracle worker I am not: I was booked from 1pm till 2pm already, leaving me 45 minutes in which to have lunch and do some work. Skipping lunch, setting up a slightly finicky bit of equipment, then testing a whole pile of stimuli inside 45 minutes seemed a bit of a tall order. Fortunately for all involved, it occurred to them that the coloured paper we had in the lab wasn't in big enough sheets for them anyway. So I sent them down to the art shop to buy some coloured paper for me to test, so that when I'd checked it they could buy themselves LOTS in the appropriate colour.
Around 4pm or so they returned with a big stack, so I set up the spec and told them to come back tomorrow morning for the results. Perhaps not as quick as they'd like, but as quick as I could manage, all things considered. I've found about 4 or 5 possible colour pairs for them to try, some more aesthetically appealing than others. Also printed them off a paper reference that they will probably find useful. Hopefully that'll be enough for them...
I like fish, in general. Their colour vision is pretty cool and they're nice smart, clean things. I could see myself training fish to colour learning tasks one day in the future. I'll be intrigued to see the results that come out of these experiments. Hopefully the fish will like their stimuli!
Currently submerged in writing up. Have a fairly large pile of Words at this point, but those Words currently lack style and p-values, diagrams and references, and there are lots of highlighted sections where I've gone, "Argh, this bit is hard! I'll fix it later and make it be not nonsense!" Am rewarding focused work by allowing myself to watch episodes of It's Me or the Dog on 4oD. I am SO crushing on Victoria Stilwell.
hi i am a nice person who really likes animals and i want to offer a home for a hamster. the trouble is that it has to be free because i dont have a lot of money. needs to come with free cage. i live in dagenham.
These adverts make me boil with rage. If you cannot afford to pay money for a hamster and cage, unless you're eligible for PDSA vet treatment, you cannot afford to acquire yourself a new hamster. (Unless you have some magical relative willing to foot the vet's bills.) If your hamster gets sick, you HAVE to take it to the vet. A vet's bill for one consult for a sick hamster may break down something like this:
£25 - inital consultation fee
£10 - treatment
£5 - VAT
Total = £40
That's assuming you have a straightforward problem, no repeat visits, only one medication required. You need a specialist? £60 straight off. You need to take the pet back for another check? Add another £20. Yeah, a hamster is a cheap pet - if it never develops a problem with wood shavings, never needs a special diet and never, ever gets sick. Of course, you could always just have your hamster put to sleep as soon as it looks a little peaky. But even that costs £15 or so. In other words, the price of a basic cage, or a large second hand one.
I'm often tempted to e-mail people to point these things out. Thankfully we managed to get the message through to flatmate's sister.
In peripherally related stuff...
Bob is old these days. At least 2, possibly more. She's starting to show it - her coat is thinner and she sleeps more. Nonetheless, if I'm ever awake at about 4:30am, I'll hear her feet (tap-tap-tap) on the wheel, and she's basically a vacuum cleaner when it comes to food. However, she's gone completely bald underneath, which seemed a bit excessive even for an old hamster, and is drinking a bit more. She was getting frustrated with her drinking bottle so I've given her a bowl as well (it's on the top level where there's no food/bedding and it's a heavy ceramic one, so shouldn't be an accident risk) and she seems pleased with that. I also decided to have the wonderful specialist amazing vet check her over and suggest why she's all bald underneath.
So we trundled over to Harold Wood on New Year's Eve and Bob met Vet and Vet met Bob. She was on her best behaviour and let him inspect her very thoroughly.
The weird thing is, even though she's bald and her skin's quite dry and flaky and scurfy, she's not scratting at all, that I've seen. She seems totally oblivious. She's not losing weight, so odds are it's (thankfully) not kidney or liver failure. So it's looking like one of two things: mites (in spite of the lack of itchiness), or hypothyroidism. Mites being easy to treat and hypothyroidism being rather harder, we're going to try mites first and see how that goes, then hypothyroidism if that doesn't help. 9 drops of Xeno and a chunky vet's bill later, I took away 2 more vials of the stuff for the 2 and 4 week reapplications and Bob seems none the worse for wear. A bit early to tell whether it's made any difference, but fingers crossed!
In entirely unrelated news...
When I got into the lab this morning, I was told by a colleague that one of the other researchers was looking for me. Apparently she's decided to do some experiments with fish and colour learning and wanted some advice on colour and brightness. Fish vision is not my forté, but I've got a vague familiarity with some of the researchers in the area, so forewarned, I hit PubMed and skimmed some abstracts on the subject.
Learned that fish colour learning was best done on a black background, as when you put colour stimuli on a white background, fish often use brightness to choose the stimuli rather than colour. So when the researcher sent her two undergrad project students down to see me later, I suggested this. "Oh," they said, helplessly. "I don't think we could do that in our setup. Can you just get us two brightness-matched stimuli?" I explained that "brightness" is all very well and good, but brightness to a bee and brightness to a fish might be quite different, so even if we had brightness-matched stimuli for bees (not usually an issue, since bees do colour learning faster than human children), they might not be relevant to fish. However, I could check some coloured papers in the spectrophotometer and see which ones matched in absolute irradiance. Great, they said. Could I do it by 1:30pm?
This was at 12:15pm. Miracle worker I am not: I was booked from 1pm till 2pm already, leaving me 45 minutes in which to have lunch and do some work. Skipping lunch, setting up a slightly finicky bit of equipment, then testing a whole pile of stimuli inside 45 minutes seemed a bit of a tall order. Fortunately for all involved, it occurred to them that the coloured paper we had in the lab wasn't in big enough sheets for them anyway. So I sent them down to the art shop to buy some coloured paper for me to test, so that when I'd checked it they could buy themselves LOTS in the appropriate colour.
Around 4pm or so they returned with a big stack, so I set up the spec and told them to come back tomorrow morning for the results. Perhaps not as quick as they'd like, but as quick as I could manage, all things considered. I've found about 4 or 5 possible colour pairs for them to try, some more aesthetically appealing than others. Also printed them off a paper reference that they will probably find useful. Hopefully that'll be enough for them...
I like fish, in general. Their colour vision is pretty cool and they're nice smart, clean things. I could see myself training fish to colour learning tasks one day in the future. I'll be intrigued to see the results that come out of these experiments. Hopefully the fish will like their stimuli!
Currently submerged in writing up. Have a fairly large pile of Words at this point, but those Words currently lack style and p-values, diagrams and references, and there are lots of highlighted sections where I've gone, "Argh, this bit is hard! I'll fix it later and make it be not nonsense!" Am rewarding focused work by allowing myself to watch episodes of It's Me or the Dog on 4oD. I am SO crushing on Victoria Stilwell.
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Date: 4 Jan 2010 23:12 (UTC)My cat had a litter of kittens when she was younger, and even though she's just a "common moggie" my Mum insisted on charging a substantial amount for each kitten, because of this same problem. She didn't want to send one of the babies to a home where there wasn't enough money to look after it.
no subject
Date: 5 Jan 2010 19:49 (UTC)no subject
Date: 5 Jan 2010 21:33 (UTC)BOOM!