Salamander
Fire Walking

I've been busy this past week trying to put together a presentation I'll be making Monday morning. I've had to reconstruct this in my head since the source material is no longer available to me. Part of the presentation is on the principles of HACCP, and the rest on animal welfare. The presentation will be given in a course on food safety for veterinarians. The HACCP part of the presentation fits in nicely to the course objectives. The animal welfare part is a bit off base, but I still feel it is important to present this to these kids, since they won't be getting the information from anywhere else. I've found a handful of scientific papers indicating loose ties between good handling practices and reduced bacteriological shedding, and I'll dump those into the beginning of the presentation as a sort of justification before skimming the surface of the subject. I thought this would take me an afternoon to pull together, but it's taken me close to twenty hours so far. If I ever seriously think of going into teaching, somebody remind me that so far preparation to presenation ratio is running at about 10 hours to 1 hour. There aren't enough hours in the week to teach full time.

My foster cats are feeling far more comfortable around me. I was worried when they first arrived that they'd never calm down enough to make good pets, but I think now in the right home they should do fine. I'm more concerned about Nick than Puma, since he is still very head shy and does not let me reach for him. He's fairly jealous of his brother getting attention though, and I've been able to use that to my advantage. If I spend enough time brushing Puma, Nick finally gets to the point where he can't stand it and will let me brush him as well. The two cats continue to spend time walking together side by side, pushing against each other to navigate the room. I've tried to get some pictures so I can ask some of my vet friends what this behavior indicates, but it just doesn't translate well as a snapshot.

That's Puma in front, with Nick behind him. They are in full body contact, circling around me. It's the weirdest thing to watch, as if they were strapped together around the middle.

This is all the break I get - I need to return to preparing my presentation.