How To Keep Children Safe From Infection and Parasites From Pets

 Pets are great companions both outside and inside the house. Adults adore them; children love them all the more. But that cuddly and adorable puppy or cat can also give more than affection—it can pass along bacterial and parasitic infection.


Children are especially susceptible because they’re more likely to kiss and hug pets, and less likely to be meticulous about hygiene.  Good thing about this is, most pet-transmitted diseases can be easily treated with antibiotic or any anti-fungal medication; some even go away on their own.  In any case, it’s best to contact the doctor at the first sign of symptoms.  Here are some of the parasites and infections that commonly come from animals and some facts you need to know:

Lymphocytic choriomeningitis – a viral infectious disease spread naturally by house mice, hamsters, and guinea pigs.  An infected person may show symptoms such as seizures, breathing problems, and eye discharge.  The disease can be acquired by touching an affected animal’s urine, droppings or blood.

Intestinal worms – a parasite infection that can be transmitted from dogs and cats.  Tapeworms can cause diarrhea and weight loss; roundworms are visible in stools.  Intestinal worms are transmitted through contact with soil or sand that is contaminated with feces with worm larvae.

Salmonella – Reptiles, such as iguanas and turtles may carry salmonella bacteria.  A person infected with salmonella may experience diarrhea and vomiting.  Salmonella is transmitted through handling infected animals.


Parrot fever – is a disease that infects both animals and humans.  This bacterial infection can come from birds, like parrots and parakeets.  Symptoms of a parrot fever-infected person include coughing, chest pain, fever, chills, and vomiting.  This can be transmitted through contact with bird feces or by inhaling the dust in bird cages.

To prevent or avoid these pet-borne illnesses, here are some simple steps.

• Have new pets tested before bringing them home.
• Have animals vaccinated and routinely dewormed.
• Keep litter boxes and cages clean.
• If your pet displays excessive scratching, hair loss, digestive upset or other signs of illness, take it to the vet.
• Don’t use the kitchen sink to clean your pets or their toys, cages, or tanks.
• Don’t let children play in sandboxes that aren’t covered when not in use (animals may have urinated or defecated in them)
• Teach children not to touch animal droppings or let pets lick their face or hands.
• Always wash hands with soap and water after handling pets.

Green and Eco-Friendly Baby Shower Ideas

Even baby showers can be environment friendly, too. As a party planner or the expectant parents, here are some baby shower party ideas to help celebrate the occasion with a green theme.

1.   Set a sustainable venue.

In line with your intention, choose the perfect setting.  If weather permits, an outdoor potluck picnic is a relaxed way to enjoy the party.  Remember also to bring containers where guests can carry home leftovers, reducing food waste.  Another fun way to eliminate the use of disposable plastic ware in a party is to host an afternoon tea, where you could ask the guests to bring their favorite tea cup and saucer.

2.  The seasoned menu

Make the most out of the available seasonal organic products by including these in your menu.  Banish excess by managing the menu well.  Consider the amount of expected guests.  Focus on a single high quality entreé and include some locally baked bread and sandwiches or side dishes made up of vegetables and fruits in season. 

3.  Gifts of green

To go with the theme, give the guests a list of suggested gifts with the invitation.  Here are some suggestions:

• A frozen meal for the expectant parents to rely upon during the first weeks of sleepless nights
• rarely used or worn-once clothes or shoes for the baby
• barely used toys
• cloth diapers or reusable diapers (make sure you include the details of the store where they can buy these)

4.  Sustainable wrapping

Encourage the guests to bring out their creativity in wrapping the gifts with sustainable gift wrappers.  Instead of traditional gift wrapping paper, they may use receiving blankets, a beautiful scarf, old paper maps, etc.  Bows and ribbons can be substituted with pine cones or wooden teething rings.

5.  Pass it on

Make the event personalized both for the receiver and the giver by asking the guests to bring along something they can pass on to the new parents, such as a book they have read to their baby, a framed picture of the mom when she was a baby, and many other ideas that have a  personal touch to it.

6.  Invitations

Online invitations are very popular now, but if you should choose to give out printed invites, use recycled paper which can also be personally decorated with environmentally friendly materials.

7.  Gather and immortalize wishes

Pass around a journal-type book where guests can write simple yet poignant messages for the mom.  This can later serve as her coffee table book of wisdom.  Well- wishes, poems,  or messages like, “What I wish most for you is…” or “Looking back, I wish I would have known…” Along with recycling, reusing, and reducing, going green is also a spiritually uplifting practice.

8.  A beautiful remembrance

Mark the occasion with a lovely, one-of-a-kind gift for the baby.  Ask the family and friends to leave a painted handprint of their palm on an oversized plant pot to be kept in the nursery.  Gather pieces of fabric and invite the guests to cut out a heart shape, write their name on it and, with a fabric glue, adhere it to a pillowcase, that the baby can use to rest on.  Don’t worry if the project looks a bit crude or imperfect, the intention already is.

 

9.  Lifelong tokens

As party favors for the guests to take home, give out packets of seeds for spring.  Better than any token will be the memories that family and friends take with them long after the party is over.  

10.  Thanking them

To make your appreciation remembered, print out pictures of the party.  Cut and glue a photo to a discarded tough cardboard and “laminate” with wide transparent tape, then attach a craft magnet to the back.  Insert this in an envelope and write “Thank you for making this day “picture-perfect.”  This personal remembrance helps preserve memories as well as the environment.

The Burrowing Owl and Its Unusual Habitat

Owls are creatures of mystery and beauty.  But the burrowing owl (Athene cunicularia) is considered a comical character, having an everlasting quizzical appearance on its face. It bears bright yellow eyes, striking white eyebrows, and long featherless legs.

Some owls nest in trees, but the burrowing owl does its nesting underground. A lot of owls spend most of their time in the forests, but the burrowing owl is home on the flatlands. And while some owls live a lonesome existence, this one loves company and, as long as a dependable food supply is ready, lives in pocket-size colonies with others of its kind.

image via Wikipedia

The burrowing owl is slightly larger than a robin and weighs in at about six ounces. It is among the smallest raptors. But it makes up for its petite size with lots of attitude. While the typical owl is rather secretive, you can go up a burrowing owl without it fleeing away. Upright atop a mound close the entry to its burrow, the owl will pivot its head to look out as you begin to get closer — its eyes can not move like ours do - and, as it gets agitated, it will start to bob up and down. That's a signal you have gotten a little too close.

When the burrowing owl senses threat, aside from its distinguishing bobbing motion, it will ruffle up its feathers to look larger. Both the male and female burrowing owls could try to chase off trespassers. As a final resort, the owl, rather than flying away, will go down into its hole for safety.

Capable of digging a nest with the use of its bill and talons, the burrowing owl virtually always captures another animal's deserted hole and executes a home make over. It will utilize the former homes of prairie dogs, ground squirrels, badgers, and, in Florida, the burrows dug by tortoises and armadillos are also a favorite. The completed burrows can measure up to 8 feet long, with the real nest area as deep as 3 feet underground. Every nest burrow will have at the least one turn, and there's constantly a mound of dirt at the entryway to function as a lookout post.

The burrowing owl is much easier to spot than other owls, not only since it lives out in the open, but because it's more active on daylight hours. Trees are rarely part of its home ground, so it loves to sit on fence posts or other elevated area while looking on for flying insects or small scuttling rodents. This owl utilizes an assortment of hunting techniques: chasing and running grasshoppers and beetles over the ground, swooping downward from a perch as it spots moving target, or even getting large insects in flight. Different from other owls, the burrowing owl also would eat fruit and seeds.

image via Wikipedia

As many digging creatures (ground squirrels, prairie dogs, etc.) are regarded pests and efforts have been made to eradicate them, fewer nesting places stay on for burrowing owls to use. And because the owls require comparatively flat land as a living area (about an acre per owl), they're frequently forced to contend with others needing the same environment — housing developers and farmers.

Luckily, they're moderately patient of the presence of persons. Burrowing owls have turned out to be more difficult to find, but it is worth the effort. Among the ways we locate them is by gradually driving little-used roads through and through agricultural areas where irrigation canals surround the pavement. The owls occasionally nest in holes in the canal walls and utilize the top of the wall as a lookout.

Up until 1975, burrowing owls were quite commonly seen in many states on the western side of Mississippi Valley, California, and in Canada.  In the last decades, beginning in the 1980s, a steady decline in the number of burrowing owls has been observed.  This is mainly due to the continuous loss of their habitat brought about by urban and agricultural developments especially in flat land areas. 

With the loss of habitat, these owls have been trying to adapt to whatever available areas they could find.  Nowadays, one may be lucky enough to find a burrowing owl.  Some have seen them nesting in irrigation canal walls, and abandoned pipes

References:

Birds of the World by Jason A. Mobley

Bizarre Birds by Jonathan P. Latimer and Karen Stray Nolting

Owls of the United States and Canada By Wayne Lynch

Urban Wilderness: When Humans and Wild Animals Become Neighbors

The wild creatures that occupy the urban wilderness are not like the wild creatures that live in the natural wilderness away from people. They won't eat the same food drink from the same streams, climb the same trees, build their nests from the same materials, den in the same hollows or interact with man in the same manner as normal wild animals do. While they may look alike, keep in mind that they're not the same, at least not in their manner of thinking or habits.

Not all species can adapt in the city’s urban wilderness, and those that do are perhaps altered forever. Is this what we have to anticipate in the near future as the last few left over open spaces are reduced down to stamp-size plots? If we wish to keep a healthy, workable wild population of all the creatures found in the natural, unexploited environment, there have to be enough wild spaces to accommodate the broad range of biological diversity. To have the best of all worlds, there must be large protected areas where man and wildlife don't ever commingle.

image source

It's nice to see wildlife living in the city. Some enjoy feeding the birds from backyard feeders, and it's fun to spy a turkey vulture gliding over the house and a skunk tottering down the street when leaving for work in the morning. But is it truly a good thing that these wild creatures live here, in such close proximity to people? It is otherwise not natural for a few of these animals to have these types of interactions.

The wild animals that currently live in our artificial suburban and urban wilderness give us an unequaled opportunity to study and observe them, which should be done. And not just in a conversational, casual, random way. It must be required that biologists and ecologists and other scientists to check out these unique backyard relationships that are happening around where we live so we can determine what becomes of all these different wild species when we come in their natural habitats and remold them for our own use.

As we take part in the arduous process of attempting to figure all this out, we also have to take a long, mindful look at how we humans supervise ourselves. Otherwise, we could well become one with the very creatures we are straining to save. And if that materializes, what new wilderness would we humans discover ourselves forced to live in, and who (or what) would attempt to save us?

How to Keep Raccoons Out of Your Yard

 Urban raccoons get it good having their very own lawns full of scrumptious earthworms and tasty beetles, hot tubs, swimming pools, and free showers (sprinklers) to wash in before they go to bed before the sun rises.

When raccoons are not digging into your pile of garbage to check if last night's dinner fits their taste or sniffling for the tree frogs in your geraniums, they could be sleeping in hollow trees, attics, unused basements, or inside the cool storm drains in the summer when it is not raining. If they get bored, they sneak in via the cat door and rummage through your kitchen cabinets to see what sort of dry breakfast foods you've got. Suburban raccoons grow a lot larger than their wilder country cousins since they eat the very same fattening foods that we humans consume.

 

Here are a few tips on how to deal with raccoons

•           Do not feed the raccoons. You'll be helping to make them tamer than they already are. You'll also be teaching them to depend on humans for food rather than learning to scrounge and hunt naturally.

•           Address their lawn rolling humanely. Throughout the fall, winter, and spring months, raccoons would prowl your front and backyards searching for earthworms, lawn beetle larvae, and other tasty critters that inhabit your lawn. They forage along the grass using their hand-like paws, bundling up huge strips of your lawn by doing this. The impact can be rather shocking when you open your back door and look into the remains of your lawn the next morning. There are several ways to deal humanely with raccoon lawn rollers. Among the best solutions is the Scarecrow brand motion-activated sprinkler, which you can but at many hardware and garden supply stores. When raccoons, deer, skunks, and your neighbor's cat are observed by the sprinkler's optic sensor, it shoots a harmless but surprising blast of water at them, typically scaring them off. Then it resets and waits for the next intruder.

A swift and dirty way to protect your lawn of raiding raccoons is to get a roll of chicken wire from the hardware store and just roll it over the area of the lawn where the raccoons are digging.  Stake it down with wooden pegs. Once the raccoons can not get to your lawn, they will go bother your neighbors. You can leave it on lawn permanently. When the grass grows up through the wire mesh, just mow it.

 •          Clean up rooftop bathrooms. Shake roofs are usually the raccoon outhouses of choice. For some reason, raccoons choose to do their flushing on rooftops. This can actually be a serious problem. The first thing is to dispose of the feces (use gloves, wear mask and use plastic bags to contain their feces) and hose down to clean up the area. Raccoons can carry a kind of roundworm that can be passed along to humans. Then spray a dog repellant and leave them around the problem area. 

Study Tips to Avoid Mental Block

A mental block is defined as the failure to continue a train of thought. It is often described as a temporary inability to recall a name or other information. Here are practical tips on avoiding mental block.

1. Have a preview of your lesson by reading ahead what your teacher may discuss in the near future.

2. As you read you may mark or underline important points.

3. Pause for a while and review in your mind, using your own words, what you have understood.

4. After reading and understanding the whole chapter/ subject matter, take down notes.

5. In your note taking, use some symbols (“retrieval cues) which would help you retrieve of recall what you have studied.

6. Review your notes night after night and discuss them with others. You may read other references.

7. You may scan your notes the night before the exam, but make sure you get enough sleep of at least 7-8 hours.

8. After waking up early in the morning, meditate or have a devotion to pray, looking at the bright side of life. Sing joyfully while taking a shower. Eat a good breakfast with less carbohydrates and more protein.

9. Be confident believing that you have done your best and now you are ready for the exam. Never cram. Give your mind enough rest.

10. During the test, answer the easy items first and then go back to the difficult ones later. This time you can use your “retrieval cues.”

Teaching Children to Enjoy Dental Visits

Many people don’t enjoy dental visits, yet there is an increasing number of children who anticipate their appointments as excitedly as if they were going to the park. These children began their visits at an early age before serious problems occurred. They view their dentist as a friend.


By the age of three, all twenty of the deciduous, or primary, teeth have emerged.  This is the time the first appointment should be scheduled.  The initial visit, while establishing a positive attitude toward dentistry that will last a lifetime, is also essential for the child’s general health.

Healthy teeth contribute favourably to the child’s attitude about himself and the dentist.  The primary teeth should be cared for as diligently as permanent teeth. They serve the same functions and aid in the good health of the permanent teeth.  They affect speech and appearance and enable chewing of foods necessary for good nutrition.  Another reason for taking care of primary teeth is that children who are victims of dental neglect often avoid foods that are difficult or painful to chew.  This results in improper nourishment.  In addition, primary teeth maintain spaces for the permanent teeth and aid in the proper growth of the child’s jaw.

In making your child’s first dental appointment, choose a time early in the morning after the child has had sufficient rest.  Avoid scheduling the initial visit around an emotional experience such as the birth of a new brother or sister.  The dental appointment can further confuse a child already upset by this kind of change in his life.
Most of children’s fear of dental visits originate at home or are based on what parents tell them.  Never threaten a child with dentistry or use it as a means of punishment.  Neither should you bribe the child to cooperate, because he equates bribery with unpleasantness.  Refrain from discussion or display of anxiety in the child’s presence, particularly at the dental office.
A child’s positive outlook about dentistry, early visits, and regular checkups are as important as correct home care.  Parental enthusiasm is the key to ensuring your child’s happiness with the dentist, which will in turn please the dentist with a well-mannered, eager new patient.