One of my neighbors had a REALLY FAT golden retriever she adopted, that needed to be put on a diet, but even super-low-cal food wasn’t working, becuase Ella was still hungry and would open the cabinet to eat the whole bag. Vet suggested that she needed a filler Food so she could feel full without the extra calories, and suggested canned green beans, which are mostly fiber and lean protein.
Ella fucking LOVES green beans. She does a dance for them if you mention them. Her ‘sibling’ the police academy washout shepherd, thinks she’s insane.
Even if your pet doesn’t like green beans*, offering them a canned green bean is inevitably HILARIOUS becuase they’ll either be thrilled or otherwise make strange faces. Results so far:
Ella (golden retriever): Overjoyed. gets up on her hind legs to dance without prompting.
Sampson (Black shepherd): Offended, yells until you give him REAL treats.
Cody (Gentleman shepherd): is concerned, becuase this is Obviously Not Food. Gently takes it to be polite, leaves it out in the yard.
Minx (Domestic Shorthair cat): Smelly Toy Is Hilarious, batted under the couch.
Tiger (Really Fat Domestic Shorthair cat): Total disgust, hissing and sulking in the Prosciutto box. Came out and ate it later anyway.
Wanda (corn snake) we didn’t expect her to be interested but she spent like three minutes licking it.
Sadie AKA Marquis De Sade (Hyacinth Macaw) ignored bean in favor of dumping can on the floor, sticking head in can and screaming. Did not attempt to bite, which is Very Nice for her.
Arwen (Australian Kelpie): ate bean, waited until humans were out of the room to consume rest of the can, got costco-sized can stuck on face and pooped green for three days. Regets nothing.
Empanada/Anderson Cooper/#3 (Plymouth Hens): Excited screaming, kickboxing tournament over possession of beans/can. #3 was ultimately victorious, becuase She is Fattest.
Big Angus (scottish highland cow, I know, ironic): very polite and delicate acceptance of beans for appx 1700 lbs of beef, will now run full-tilt across pasture to meet me, which scared the crap out of me tbh.
Will post further updates as I am allowed to try.
*Please always cionsult a vet before making any dietary changes or offering your pet new foods, but green beans are pretty safe for most pets you can keep in America
YOU HAVE SO MANY ANIMALS
Oops! just to clarify- only Charlie, Cody and Arwen belong to my family, and the rest are pets for friends and neighbors. (I only offered green bean with their parent’s permission). I do have some Updates:
Potato (domestic shorthair cat): Disgruntles hissing, bit the crap out of his owner’s hand, dumped the can out and took the can into his kitty hole. refuses to let her remove the can.
Oingo Boingo (betta fish): Got real poofy, bit the shit out of it, discovered the beans, loved them, tore the snot out of the case for more. (Pls note: frozen beans were used for this as the sodium in canned ones can be dangerous)
Dorito (Sun Conure): Delighted shrieking, happy dance, grabbed entire bag out of owner’s hand, tore it open and threw beans everywhere. climed inside bag, ate a whole bunch before he could be retrieved and returned to his enclosure.
Maureen (Domestic Longhair Cat): Small, awed “mew” before awkwardly gnawing on it. Didn’t actually eat it, but apparently she loved chewing on them, becuase whenever someone opens the freezer, she runs over and sits up on her hind legs to bed for them.
My Chiweenie back in WA is utterly obsessed and got rather round in a way that wasn’t healthy for her back so the vet suggested green beans. She thinks they are almost as good as cheese, which was the gods gift to dogs as far as both she and I are concerned. When the can or bag is retrieved she will sit up on her short little back legs and make a garbled howl like the world’s smollest hound and then end it in a sharp, pleading bark. It is fantastically adorable.
1. That’s Adorable. 2. As many people have pointed out, canned green beans can be high in sodium, so be sure to rinse the beans off or use frozen/fresh ones, and always check with your vet before making any dietary changes. 3. UPDATES:
Ravenna and Esme (former racing greyhounds): Ravenna snarled at the bag, ripped it open and barked at the beans for five minutes until Esme started to nibble at them, then they ate a 2-lb bag of frozen beans in about twelve minuts and farted for three days.
Rozencrantz and Guildenstern (Garden Snails, kept by my Nintey-five-year-old neighbor becuase he loves them) I’ve never seen snails go bananas over something but they devoured a fresh bean each in under an hour. they now get them every Sunday.
Dennis (Tennesee Walking Horse): wonderfully gentle and lippy taking the beans from me the first time. Nearly swallowed my hand in eagerness the next time they were offered. He’s a special boy.
Hagrid (Domestic hog): *Open Maw and Demonic Shrieking as I toss them in from the other side of the fence. He’s very enthusiastic about catching them and didn’t miss one, even though I’m terrible at throwing things to the point of failing PE in high school.
yes that does indeed say happycow. so. there have been A TON of studies on cows and grooming. the general summary: cows really like to be clean; they’re MUCH happier that way. if you don’t provide them a brush or something like that, they’ll use walls or fences to scratch against, possibly hurting themselves in the process.
but more to the point grooming is a way they calm themselves down, too. similar studies have found that it’s the first thing they do after being freed when they’ve been restrained.
which leads to brushes like the one above, or ones like this (one of my favourite cow photos ever):
cows: anxious and fussy but much happier when able to do self-care. SOUNDS FAMILIAR TO ME
THE POOR BABY GOT BRUSHED AWAY BY IT AT THE BEGINNING I LOVE COWS
my name is Cow when fur not cleen or when I am stressed to be seen to calm myself in nearby place I find a brush
One of my favourite lecturers at vet school was an old cattle vet. Retired from practice long ago, his demeanour was best described as “jolly but practical” and he had seen many years of students pass before him.
Many years. It used to be he would be teaching bovine obstetrics to a room full of strapping Aussie blokes, each more than capable of lugging a 40kg jersey calf around on their shoulders. Nowadays most of our class were women, and a fair chunk of those were petite international students, barely bigger than the aforementioned 40kg jersey calf themselves.
He knew very well that most of these smaller women were likely to end up in small animal practice, but that wasn’t going to stop him from trying to convert them to the joys of cattle medicine.
I remember him very clearly in the bovine obstetrics lectures,pulling a calf is a seriously physical task. Cattle are BIG and they are all muscle. When a cow decides she is going to push a 40kg calf at you the simple fact is that you cannot push against her. That uterus of hers is stronger than your forearms, and she’s prepared to push all day. Fortunately, there are drugs for that.
Our lecturer would merrily tell us some very colourful stories about pulling calves and the sorts of farmers he had encountered, including their unfortunate tendency to try to pull a calf first, using a tractor if need be.
Attaching a calf to a tractor and then driving away from the cow does not, in fact, make it any easier for her to give birth. If it’s stuck, it’s stuck, and no tractor is substitute for a lot of lube and some intra-uterine calf leg Tetris.
So what do you do, he specifically asked the international girls huddled down the front, when you show up at a farm, and the farmer, built like a brick house, and his son, also built like a brick house, have already tried and failed to pull this calf?
You walk up there, and you show them how it’s done.
You have a veterinary a science education and ten litres of lube. You can get the calf out. Use your brain, then give them the ropes to pull and use their muscles. Take control. Tell them what to do. Climb onto a box if you have to. If you’re particularly little, you can get both hands up there. You CAN pull that calf.
Up until that point, I don’t think those students actually expected to be able to really do it. But he expected them to.
And if all else fails, he continued, do a Caesarian. They won’t be judgemental if you didn’t pull a calf if they’re already tried anyway.
And you know, I personally know at least one of those petite little students ended up in cattle practice.
You can do it.
Reblogging old content for the Disenfranchised Duckling.
This is important for us, the
petite vet students who normally look tiny next to a Angus bull and a
Percheron.
Honestly, a big bull will send any human flying, no mater how big they are. 400-800kg of opinionated beef will always be stronger than a human, no matter how ‘beefy’ the human is.
If you are shot, you are less likely to injure your back when working on the feet of cattle and horses.
If you are petite, you may get both hands into the birth canal of a large animal, and you may be able to treat dystocia in alpaca or sheep without resorting to caesareans.
If you have thin arms, you wont feel nearly as bad about preg testing cattle.
Large animals are always going to be bigger than you, but they will also be bigger than your largest classmates
so id like to tell you something, like, in the context of cryptid sightings
specifically, id like to tell you some things about cattle
they dont look like they move fast, but, in fact, they do. they move very fast, and theyre capable of doing so quietly
if a cow is black and has white spots, or if it is white and has black spots, both the white and black bits come together in the approximate shape of a cow
but in the dark, you cant see the black parts, and the white parts do NOT, form the approximate shape of a cow
what im saying is that i have at certain times been walking in the fields on a night with low visibility and i have, at certain times, seen an indistinct white shape zoom past me, and i am at least 95% sure it was a cow. and that if you see a white shape zoom past you in a field at night, it is also probably at least 95% of a cow
Steel Phoenix Studios 