For a little bit of variety, since Zor is sometimes a picky eater (she's been snarfing up everything lately anyway), James bought a bag of
Purina Beneful along with a couple bags of our usual lamb and rice chow (Costco).
Well it's been so long since I've seen such colorful dog food, I've been telling the dogs when it's time to chow, "Hey, you want some Fruit Loops?" and I get this happy grin and wag wag wag. And darn if Zor doesn't just practically inhale this stuff like a Navy Squid on lunch break.
Slightly enhanced photo of doggie froot loops in a cereal bowl on a brilliant blue background selected to help exaggerate it further. haha!
Speaking of colorful things, with Easter coming up soon I'm reminded of those colorful chicks. This picture floats around the internet...
How do the chickies get so colorful? Is it harmful?
(without getting into the sad fate of Easter bunnies and chicks that turn into temporary seasonal pets)
As a chicken fancier, I had run into a nice link some time ago where some chicken breeders were using food dyes to differentiate chicks from certain breedings so that when the babies hatched out of the incubator, they could be differentiated at a glance and put into the correct gene pools for future breeding. The birds, would be perfectly fine. It's just the chick down that is colorized and they lose all this fancy coloring with their first molting.
Anyway, another link explaining the why and how is
here.
In some research projects in wild bird conservation, this method is also used. One example of such a study using this method on wild birds is
here.
(see highlight on p. 14)Egg width and length was measured, and eggs were numbered using a permanent marker pen. Egg volume was calculated using Hoyts formula, (volume = 0.51x length x width) (Hoyt 1979). The sex of the chicks was determined molecularly (Griffiths et al. 1998). To determine which chick came from which egg, when hatching water-soluble food dye was carefully squirted through the hole that appeared in the egg. Three different colours of dye therefore allowed the subsequent identification of which chick came from which egg.
Well, enough of this break. Back to less colorful stuff that needs doing. Spreadsheets and taxes...
© 2006 
