A Walk Through the Leaves

A Walk Through the Leaves

We took Kasey and Chewey to Shawnee Mission Park today and they loved it. They met some new friends, including four Aussies. One of them was a double merle which most often results in birth defects, you will see her in the video. She got rescued by two kind ladies but is partially blind and deaf. For people who don’t know this: please do not interbreed two Australian Shepherds who are both merles either blue or red, it usually results in defects from the merle genes.

Update: Youtube disabled the audio track for reasons of copyright even though I am linking ELP’s Amazon page. Ah well, I guess they have to do that.

Cooling Fin

Cooling Fin

kasey-tongueEvolutionary adaptations are sometimes bizarre, like the one that dogs and wolves evolved to shed excess heat. Their tongues are big liquid drenched cooling fins coated with capillaries  and vessels near the surface – if you click on the thumbnail to enlarge the photo you can see that. This is an adaptation that evolved over time, just as the thick fur that coats them to protect from cold did.

When Kasey runs in the winter she doesn’t pant, but when the temperature is above fifty degrees or so and she becomes active she pants a lot.

Tug of War

Tug of War

Tug-of-WarKasey and Django fighting over a toy. Once Kasey gets it free the result is usually about five minutes of full tilt running around the backyard. Django tries to cut the circle most times because he has a hard time keeping up, but then Kasey just reverses field in a blink and suddenly the circle is rotating the other direction.

Kasey and The Chick

Kasey and The Chick

kasey-and-the-chick

Kasey used to have a bear that she would drag up and down stairs each day and night, but the bear wore out, so now she has a giant stuffed easter chick, you can see the feet in this photo. Sometimes she snuggles with it, sometimes she shakes it like her worst enemy, but she always fetches it down if it’s left upstairs in the mornings.