Did you ask her about this? Please say no.
Embrace the catblogging, ogged. I think you need to add "I CAN HAS FAMBLY?" to the pic.
Did you ask her about this? Please say no.
Sweet. Let's say that I came to the correct conclusion first.
cats are a good heart medicine
may be you should keep him, you have arrythmia and other conditions
Could you pack that cat up and ship him to Chicago?
Was this photo taken at night, or is that his natural color?
Ogged artificially darkened the photo because he's racist.
don't ship him to Kotsko. Kotsko eats kitties.
Ship him here.
Any cheap restaurants in the neighborhood?
How about a second cat to keep this one company?
Dude, you've supplanted her cat? Uncool.
Once she's separated from her cat, she'll become more submissive. Smart move. When you finally lock her in the basement, she'll hardly whimper.
Y'know, it's pretty uncool to solicit e-mails and then not reply, Ogged.
Damn man, I was away from my desk for a minute. Do I want the cat going to such a needy person? I'm not sure.
So incredibly adorable. Seriously, if she wants to keep the cat but feels guilty about leaving it alone, 2nd cat is the answer. As Rah says, two cats are a complete home entertainment system.
15: Ari, don't you have a husky? They tend not to be super terrific cat buddies, but of course YMMV.
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McManlyPants - thanks for the Scott Westerfield Uglies etc recommendations ages ago - I passed it on to my eldest, and she's just finished Uglies, thought it was great, and is now desperate to read Pretties.
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18 - why d'you think he wants the cat?
20 - WesterFELD. Looked at it and then forgot to correct it.
I take it she still hasn't found the blog if you're posting pictures of her pussy.
Low hanging fruit sooooo sweet.
That cat looks young. Being transplanted now would be okay.
18: The husky is not working out. I say this as someone who has taken in rescues before, who knows the responsbilities of taking in dogs, etc. But this dog -- though I quite like her -- has serious problems that are way beyond our ability to solve: even after a 5-mile run, she has so much anxiety that she chews up the house; she can't sit in my office at work, even when I'm there, without howling [insert joke about how nobody should have to be with me in confined spaces]; she really doesn't like our baby. We had a renowned trainer come by yesterday to perform an "evaluation." Her conclusion? "That's a really difficult dog. I'm stumped." I kid you not; that's what she said.
I'm rather tearful about all of this. But I, too, am stumped.
What's the cat's name? Cats have names, right? (I need one for the entry form at the local octagon.)
24: Ah, yes. Huskies can be like that. Sometimes, they're just not fully domesticated. We had one that really wanted to live outside. He was a great, sweet dog, but if he got out he stayed out for a week. He wouldn't go anywhere, just stick nearby and refuse to come in. And if they're a bit cuckoo they can get snappy.
17 is true. Cats thrive when they have somebody to fight.
25 - tone of voice really doesn't translate sometimes, does it! Stupid internet.
Ari - sounds awful, sorry to hear it. A friend of mine just had to put her two dogs up for rehoming yesterday and is so upset about it. Horrible decision to have to make.
I'm rather tearful about all of this. But I, too, am stumped.
It sounds like you've done as much as could humanly be expected (and much more than I would do, for example, for an actual human). You probably know that, but I just thought that I'd remind you.
27: Yeah, I've had them before. And I love them, quirks and all. But a dog that simply can't relax, no matter how much time I devote to tiring her out, is a hard thing. And the dislike of the baby won't stand. At least that's what my wife says.
All of that said, I think if she consumes one live cat per day, that might settle her right down. What say you?
The four people / families I've known who got big or medium dogs (6 dogs total) for the city all regretted it to some degree. Only one of the dogs had no problems at all. One or two of the four dog-owning units were willing to devote their entire lives to their dogs, but even so they had problems and regrets.
31: I'd start her off with three and then ween her back to one.
30: Thanks. Getting an independent opinion, from the dog-whispering trainer, on her crazitude really helped. I'm not quite guilt-free. But I do feel like we've made a good-faith effort. Still, my older son is going to be heartbroken. On the bright side, kids really do need things to hate their parents about.
33: why did the city need that many dogs?
My large city dog had no problems, he's perfect for an apartment- he mostly sleeps all day or squeaks a ball when he's inside, but runs all over as soon as he's out, and the ratio of inside/outside time doesn't make a difference to him.
36: It's a big city. With big needs. Duh.
big or medium dogs (6 dogs total) for the city
I'd actually heard that Danes are good apartment dogs because they don't really like much exercise.
Ari, have you tried medication? I had some success with a combination of drugs and running.
37, 41: Yeah, our big old dog lived in Chicago for nearly all of his 16 years. Little dogs are very often much more hyper than big oafish ones. The thing with most dogs is that they really don't want to be left alone each and every day. The situation seems to work out best if you can take your dog with you to the office or have a job that isn't strictly 9 to 5.
Confidential to BW: Ween! Ween! Ween! Neener neener.
42: We get her stoned every night, natch, while we sit on the front porch listening to Fillmore West.
Honestly, I'm not sure if it's right to drug a dog -- except to deal with health issues -- when the answer for her might just be that she needs to live somewhere with more space. Or that she'll thrive in a family that doesn't have kids. But if you want to part with some portion of your stash, I'm game.
37, 41: Newfoundlands tend to be pretty great apartment dogs, provided your living room is large enough that they don't fill it. They really do just lie around all the time until you take them out to walk.
P.S. fur & drool warnings
Oh, Ari, that's so awful.
If I was (or you were) in the mood for a joke, I'd suggest that you blow marijuana smoke into the dog's ear.
The thing with most dogs is that they really don't want to be left alone each and every day. The situation seems to work out best if you can take your dog with you to the office or have a job that isn't strictly 9 to 5.
This is why my mom has decided not to get a dog, at least for a while. She has a cat, which is much easier to deal with.
Ari, I'm actually serious about this-- it's worth talking to your vet. There are some mood stabilizers that are effective as part of handling separation anxiety. (I think actual prozac is widely used, and there are some others.) These aren't sedatives and don't affect behavior very much but they head off some of the anxiety (a health issue!) some dogs experience when people depart.
20: Yay! I think the series doesn't hold up as well as the first book but the most recent one, Extras, is almost entirely great. Depending on her age and your/her tolerance for horror she might enjoy Westerfeld's Peeps, though it is about cannibals and vampires and vampire cannibals in NYC, all of whom are horny. It has a sequel, The Last Days, about an upstart young rock band surrounded by cannibals and vampires so, y'know, classy.
We are so lucky Buck works at home. Nafanua's never been left alone during the days for more than the length of a short trip. She's on the hyper side, though -- I'm pretty sure that without company all day she'd be a nutcase.
Ari, you should check with Knecht. I hear no one gives a dog a workout like him.
56: Okay, I'll give it a try. I'm curious what the vet will say. Given that this is Davis, I think I might get scolded. But anything's worth a shot. Hell, I'm considering feeding the dog live cats. So why not prozac, right?
60: Seriously, Ari, see if you can find on YouTube the segment on doggie Prozac from Michael Moore's old show TV Nation. It's played for laughs, but the drug was clearly and obviously transformative for some manic and unhappy dogs.
60: here is one vet discussing SSRI use. When I tried this we worked up to mid-sized doses of clomacalm but it did seem to help.
I just want to clarify for one and all that this dog is NEVER alone. She's either with me, howling in my office at work, or at home with my wife and kids, nibbling on the baby and destroying our heirlooms (read: Ikea throw rugs).
The down side: some people will ridicule you for "doggie therapy." Others will consistently and intentionally conflate the distinction between SSRIs with tranquilizers. This is irritating.
Labs, if he ends up medicating and keeping this dog and not taking the cat as a result, I will exact vengeance.
63: No, no! I didn't think that. I was talking about the left alone thing with respect to the idea that big dogs in the city were likely to be unhappy.
by other conditions i meant irritability, not cancer
the most irritated keeps the cat
Ari's dog sounds like the lucky one
64: Okay, the vet says, "no." She says that medication works very rarely (based on the literature) and somtimes has alarming side effects. She's particularly wary of putting a dog under the age of two on SSRIs. As, she says, "waiting out the problem is more likely to solve it than medication is."
I told you I would get scolded.
She did, however, recommend a steady diet of cats and rabbits for the dog. Ogged, do you have any spare bunnies?
Forgive me if I bow out now. This is really upsetting.
Sorry, dude. My vet felt differently. On the other hand he was also suggesting putting the dog down as well.
Both medicating and putting down. That seems like overkill*, no?
* Pure comedy gold.
My vet felt differently.
In which Labs internalizes the insipid speech of his students.
the most irritated keeps the cat
Read is on a roll.
Hell, accepting responsibility for an animal, cat or dog or bunny, is a strange thing. When I first moved here and sought a cat at the SPCA, I was denied because I was a student, therefore likely transient and irresponsible. But a grad student, I said, late 20s, mature, really!
I took in a pregnant alleycat instead, and she and her son shifted hands a couple of times between me and my then-boyfriend. Eh. That cat and her son are pretty old now, and there's been talk of putting them down (feline incontinence sucks, man), but I don't think I can do that. It goes with the territory, is what I'm thinking.
My ex and I had a parrot many years ago that began mutilating itself when she went from being a college student with roommates (so always somebody around) to married and gainfully employed (so empty house for 9-10 hours a day). We fed her Prozac out of a dropper for a year. She seemed to like it and would come running for it, but it didn't do anything for her neurosis.
K Drum blog post on a report that SSRIs don't work.
79: We considered a bird in Rory's quest to become a pet owner, but were told that birds really are very social creatures and need a ton of attention to thrive. As is the case with so many cool pets...
could she talk? what was her favourite phrase?
i recalled a very funny joke about a parrot
just can't translate funny enough
though maybe there's a legit difference. drugs always seem to work better on mice, don't they?
Do the placebos also make people kill themselves?
Why, are you testing suicide-inducing drugs?
81: My experience and observations lead me to believe that birds really aren't meant to be pets. Too difficult to fulfill the social needs of a flock animal unless you're a shut-in. This might or might not apply to small birds like budgies.
could she talk?
All she ever said was her name, Eliot, and hello, but she had a whole range of calls that had specific meanings. She was a Quaker parakeet, which are really delightfully friendly and pretty birds (though, apparently, kinda prone to neuroses). She would, however, shit on command and if you held her on your finger and made like a gun shooting at her with your other hand, she'd flop forward like she had been shot.
She would, however, shit on command
A useful attribute, no doubt, sadly uncommon in human children. Did you command it often?
83 to 79 it was
89 the joke : may be you know it already, now sonuds not that funny, well
so the guy had a parrot, a very talkative one who liked to swear, so he invited his gf and instructed the parrot to keep his mouth shut and asked him
'if she'll hold your leg to greet you tell her she is pretty, if she'll hold your another leg tell her she is smart, ok?' 'ok'
so she came and he said you can hold my parrot's leg and he'll talk
everything went smoothly, but then she said 'oh how cute, what he'd say if i hold both his legs'
to which the parrot says, -wouldn't i fall, bitch
Actually, yes. She spent most of her time on our shoulders, so about every half hour or so, we'd hold her over a trash can or her cage and say "Shit!" Then she'd be good to go for another half an hour or so.
OT:
Admiral Fallon has been canned.
Supposedly he's been dragging his feet about attacking Iran.
I've been worried about an election war since Spring 2006, so I'm the boy who cried wolf. Maybe they just decided that a Democratic Congress would be impotent, and that they should save their war until the Prex election.
In 1968 Nixon could have ended ther war, and he did de-escalate it and reduce the cost to Americans, but he made sure to keep something going until he'd been reelected.
I once had a cockatiel who started that pulling-of-the-feathers-when-bored routine. The Birdman of Santa Ana [otherwise known as our local butcher/bird breeder] suggested letting him have the TV on when we were out. This worked admirably, but for the occasional squawking of theme songs.
Damned bird learnt how to imitate head clatter on the computer drive perfectly. [This was back in the dark days of strange copy-protect programs that wrought havoc with one's Commodore 64]. Drove me mad until I figured out what was happening.
Really, Ogged, you need to put up a nicer picture of the cat. And give its particulars. And drive it down to LA.
[otherwise known as our local butcher/bird breeder]
We're just supposed to let this sit there?
We just put one of our cats on Prozac after he suddenly started marking a few weeks ago. It's supposed to take 4-6 weeks to get up to speed, but it's only been a few days and I don't think he's marked again. He seems only ever so slightly different and that may only bc bc we're looking for a difference.
And yes: you need a better picture of the cat.
88: No, but if "they" are claiming it doesn't work as an anti-depressant, I'm wondering if that would have any implications for its alleged suicide-inducing side effects.
I played with the cat pic and Photoshop - he appears to be a gold tiger cat with a doleful expression.
Somebody here was talking recently about teaching their cat to shit in the toilet, which has inspired me to try and train mine to shit on guests.
My grandmother, I'm told, knew her father's voice from the household's African Grey. Her father was a Southern lawyer who had moved to Boston, and for professional reasons had taken training to lose his Southern accent. He died when she was young, but the parrot preserved a moment of his anger, which was also when his accent poked out. What she heard:
Goddammit, *Melissa, wheah are mah BOOTS?!
I played with the cat pic and Photoshop - he appears to be a gold tiger cat with a doleful expression.
AKA adorable.
Our cockatiel used to scare the hell out of the cats - Delany, the elder, tended to leave him alone, but Virgil, the younger, would crouch beneath his cage and twitch. Bird would yell "oh, no, you don't" in my voice and and send Virgil flying. Delany would have a quick look round to make sure he hadn't been the object of the remonstration, then go back to ignoring the bird.
Damned bird learnt how to imitate head clatter on the computer drive perfectly.
A friend of mine in high school had a parrot -- I think it was a parrot, but I don't know from birds -- named "Modem," who, you guessed it, could produce the handshakes from 1200 to 2400 baud modems, all the way up to 56K.
103: I sent Ogged the tarted-up picture. You could, of course, drop him off on the way down to visit your parents...
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In response to Clinton saying she went to dangerous places as First Lady, Sinbad says this about the trip to Bosnia he took with Clinton and Sheryl Crow.
Bill Clinton- 'Hey, man, I can't go 'cause I might get shot so I'm going to send my wife...oh, and take a guitar player and a comedian with you.'"
Sinbad. Still awesome.
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101: My cat leaked his anal glands on me. Twice. One time, I was in bed. He stood on my chest and turned around, and... drop.
Gahhh!
may be you can open your blinds
or it might be my eyes that are night blind
though anyway i can't afford to adopt any animal
even if i wish,
may be you can open your blinds
Maybe he could use a decent camera.
What's the shipping to England?
OK, OK, I have a soft spot for cats. E-mail me the cat.
First, read's joke is hilarious. Second, oh my gods that cat is adorable. I want to know that he winds up in DE's care.
really? i thought there are mistakes
nice you enjoyed it, thanks
for some reason it sounds funnier in my language :)
This isn't catblogging, it's catblegging.
We already have an honorary second cat, which is all the first cat will tolerate.
Get him a buddy, Ogged.
That second picture is much better. Very pretty. I also second the suggestion to find another adult cat as a friend for this cat.
One more suggestion for a second cat and I'll disappear this whole thread.
So much for the rustic Lur belief in one's word as bond. I blame the Jesuits.
That cat ain't got nothing on mine. My cat is fucking adorable and she's a genocidal motherfucker. Every day we'd get mouse heads, chipmunk heads, random bits of feathers. Not to mention random entrails. She's a killer, and she grooms my beard.
Have you considered photoshopping your face onto her body and hanging the result on your wall?
I'll never live that down, will I? Thanks, ogged.
One more suggestion for a second cat and I'll disappear this whole thread.
"Dear Diary,
Today I asked for something on the internet and found that the internet is not helpful. Boo fucking hoo!
Toodles,
Ogged"
My killer cat brought me the first ruby-crowned kinglet I ever saw. He didn't seem to understand that adding to one's life list with dead birds is cheating.
130: Maybe it was twitching a little?
As I have explained, Ogged needs to get rid of the cat before he can move to Step Two of his plan. A new cat would not help.
Let us now (re)praise famous cats.
Brave Heebie is now toilet training the poor thing. This confuses me since the video is from 4 years ago. This cat hasn't been using a litter box for 4 years?
Has there ever been a cat person/dog person thread? I suspect some of you of being prejudiced/jealous.
My cat is fucking adorable
One of my cats went to the vet today when we realized she was randomly peeing blood here and there around the house.
135: And did they figure out her problem?
You let Labs near your cat? No wonder she's peeing blood.
I'm quite in love with my puppy right now. I've just about got over expecting him to start purring.
Someone has gone CSI and blown up this picture to determine the exact location of Ogged, right?
Since we tricked him into giving two pictures, we can triangulate.
139: I am staring at the screen with a look of dumbfounded joy. So. Cute.
Dude, don't take this the wrong way, but you are So Gay.
You're making me a little uncomfortable, dude.
I would take this cat if I were allowed to have one, and if I could be relied on not to abuse it in my many drunken rages.
143: Wow, really? That sure explains a lot of that gay sex I've had.
Thinking that puppy is cute is a lot gayer than having gay sex.
You're making me a little uncomfortabletotally turned on, dude.
drugs always seem to work better on mice, don't they?
I kept a cancerous mouse alive for over two months with daily steroids. So, yes.
Re. the poor, beautiful kitty: someone better take that damn thing and give it a very indulgent home. To make up for Ogged's *irresponsible girlfriend's* poor choices.
I suppose the pet thread is the place for me to note that my roommate today captured a black widow spider and it's FREAKING ME OUT.
It's in a jar on our dining room table, taunting a little cricket (keeps dripping evil juices on it/near it). I live with weird people.
146: a lot, but by no means all.
You all are obviously unconvinced that my cat is as cute as I say she is. Next time I get visitation, I'll show you motherfuckers cute. Battlecat will cause you all to melt. Then she will attack.
Photos, yo. We need photographic evidence of your cat's cuteness.
(e.g., my old roomate's cat or the deadly spider currently living in my dining room)
Not to mention all the other cute photos.
154: We had black widows living in the wood pile next to the fireplace. Which is to say, in our living room. They were not in jars. And I only found them because it's now spring, so the unused firewood -- aka, home to the deadly spiders -- had to go back outside. Fortunately, when we lived in Oklahoma, our attic was filled with brown recluses. So the black widows aren't that big a deal, relatively speaking.
My mom's cat. (Actually my sister's.)
Mr. Sifu, you are a bad person.
Roomate's old cat with Tostitos, eekbeat editing with cat. I promise I'll stop now.
156: "living in the wood pile"
Ha! Early in her stay in our United States, my eastern european grandmother bought a dictionary of idioms that included the phrase "nigger in the woodpile". She seemed particularly fond of this locution, as it made her feel American, and it took a while to cure her of it. A while being 40 years. I still can't countenance a woodpile without imagining a nigger in it with designs on old immigrants.
Eh, it's kind of uncomfortably hot here. We need some tradewinds back. Yesterday evening was all voggy and apocalyptic-looking. Today was better, but it's really too early in the year to be feeling like August.
Hear that, Sifu? You've got it easy.
My cat, who now lives with my parents because C (defective human being that he is) is allergic.
Sorry, my internets have been in and out. 163: Nothing I can remember, but I'm sure you deserve the opprobrium, one way or another.
You have to look at the link in 166 for a while to appreciate the full glory.
Teo, Thisbe's beautiful.
From Cocks to Cats: Unfogged Jumps the Shark.
Thinking that puppy is cute is a lot gayer than having gay sex.
New hierarchy of gayness
4. having oral sex with men
3. rollerblading
2. having anal sex with men
1. saying "squeeeee!"
I'd love to get another cat but Frank would experience status anxiety. Plus Boston is too far away.
It's bpl's cat, and he's great, but he's actually too social and affectionate for her schedule, which keeps her away from home so much that she feels guilty about leaving him alone.
Won't she feel even guiltier once she's realized she dumped her loyal and affectionate cat for her flaky and unreliable Lur boyfriend?
My large dog tries to be friends with cats, but for some reason they're scared of him.
173: Hm, I think I've seen that dog before...
Any cheap restaurants in the neighborhood?
See, I don't believe this at all. You always hear these urban legends about Mexican/Chinese/Cambodian/whatever restaurants substituting cat meat for chicken (and Fleur tells me she knows from personal experience a place where this happened), but it just doesn't make economic sense.
Chicken is cheap. Whole frozen chickens can be bought wholesale for well under a dollar a pound. The poultry-industrial-complex is so efficient that a pound of chicken can be had for a tiny markup over the cost of the feed and fuel that went into producing it.
Cats, by contrast, are going to be a relatively expensive commodity. Let's say, generously, that the restaurant is employing illegal immigrant labor at $4/hour (all-in cost) to collect cats. Even if they confine themselves to neighborhoods with a high feline density (and clean out population of the occasional animal shelter), I doubt they are going to be able to yield more than 2 cats per hour. At an average of 10 pounds live weight per cat, you're up to 20 cents a pound right there, on generous assumptions.
Then you have to factor in the ratio of live weight to dressed weight and dressed weight to table ready. Generously assuming that cat meat yield is similar to lamb, you're up to 48 cents per pound of meat, and that's before you count the cost of slaughtering and butchering, which I would estimate to be about 9 cents per pound assuming a the same labor rate, a high productivity (12 cats/hour), and no capital costs.
In short, any restaurateur who is substituting cats for chicken is an incompetent businessperson.
N.B. this analysis does not apply if you are raising the cats on an industrial scale with cheap Chinese labor or if you can command a premium price for cat dishes.
Also, I have neglected the potential value of the cat pelts, which could be signficant if you could produce large quantities of sufficient uniformity.
176: you should see my Excel model.
Is Cala around? I'm thinking about making a case interview question out of this.
Generously assuming that cat meat yield is similar to lamb
I believe it's supposed to be basically indistinguishable from rabbit.
Maybe you could exploit economies of scale by contracting with crazy cat people? You'd need a lot of crazy cat people, of course.
There was a stall selling squirrel at the Farmers market last weekend. I was curious, but not *that* curious.
You pay a premium price for cats, dogs, earthworms, maggots, etc. You can get them, but they're specialty meats. Never fear.
You need a two-sided business model; sell footage of the cat slaughter to cat-hating Web perverts as well as putting the cats in the coq au vin (ISTR we worked out that chat au vin was optimal).
Cat would be gamy, too, if that's what you like.
I see nothing at all odd about eating squirrel, raccoon, or opossum, though. I've had raccoon, and my grandfather hunted squirrel. Squirrel are awfully small and hard to shoot, though, and don't have much meat on them.
A friend of mine had an 8-ounce grub in Africa. "Tastes like shrimp". It's not as though shrimp are cleanly or attractive creatures.
I just spotted a flaw in my analysis: I grossed up the cost of cat meat for the ratio of dressed weight to table weight, but compared that to whole chicken. Correcting that error reduces the like-to-like price of cat carcasses to 40 cents. OTOH, I was very generous in my other assumptions (no transportation costs, no capital costs for slaughtering, etc.), so I would be surprised if the overall conclusion did not hold up.
Maybe you could exploit economies of scale by contracting with crazy cat people?
Good thought. This would help offset the effiency advantages of battery hens.
There was a stall selling squirrel at the Farmers market last weekend. I was curious, but not *that* curious.
Them's good eatin', asilon.
cats can curse you to great misfortune
if you hurt them in any way, so you are warned
may be i'll post a cartoon 'a great secret of cats'
one of my faves which says there is no animal stronger than cat with very funny lyrics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rchk8qNaspc&feature=related
My copy of The Joy of Cooking has a section on skinning and preparing squirrel. However, I seem to recall the book strongly advising heavy duty rubber gloves for the skinning because something in the raw skin/carcass would do something hideously bad to you, which kind of makes me think chicken would be just fine.
Is Cala around? I'm thinking about making a case interview question out of this.
Oh, holy lord, that's awesome. I'm imagining all of the people who interviewed with me. Uniformly the whitest people ever, no matter their ethnicity. And now I'm imagining them trying to hide their look of horror as the interviewer sets out the case.
186: Cats may seem distant and cold, but they are smart and can be very loyal. My cat bit a guy I was trying to break up with in college and puked on the Ugly Naked Guy the first time they met.
Knecht works for the Tyrell Corporation.
The squirrels were skinned, and whole apart from their heads and feet. 4 quid. Perhaps I'll get one next time, for the sake of the Mineshaft. I sometimes buy chicken wings from these people (£1 for 6), and they always have mutton and venison there too. I could ask them if they've thought about cats.
My copy of The Joy of Cooking has a section on skinning and preparing squirrel
Gourmet varmint recipes.
These recipes are clearly from another era, because they do not call for browing the varmints in a searing hot dutch oven before braising them.
A friend of mine had an 8-ounce grub in Africa.
An Australian told me that wichetty grubs are standard fare at rural Aussie barbies. She may have been pulling my plonker, but the circumstantial detail was pretty convincing. They are also said to taste like prawns.
i'm a dog person i guess coz i'm also a Dog born
the cartoon has 4 parts, there are two more about dog's secret and horse's secret, just love love love them
And now I'm imagining them trying to hide their look of horror as the interviewer sets out the case.
One of my colleagues used to ask candidates how many chickens you can feed from birth to slaughter with the contents of one trainload of grain. It's a pretty good case question in terms of seeing whether a candidate can estimate quantities and think "top down". The unsuccessful candidates try to figure out how much you feed a chicken every day for how many days (some even try to work out the curve of how much the daily ration increases as the chicken grows). The key to cracking the case is to start with an estimate of the ratio of grain weight to slaughter weight and work from there.
175 is entirely correct. In order to make cat meat as cheap as chicken meat, you'd have to factory farm cats the way Americans factory farm chickens, complete with forced-feeding, growth hormones, limb amputation, industrial lagoons of cat feces, and cages no bigger than the animals themselves. This will never happen as long as Americans find cats lovable, which leads me to suspect the only hope to save humanity from meat industry-related water scarcity and global warming is a hot new wave of lolcows.
you'd have to factory farm cats the way Americans factory farm chickens
The market would demand a free range product, which would lead to job advertisements for people to herd cats. Which would almost be worth it.
limb amputation, industrial lagoons of cat feces, and cages no bigger than the animals themselves
This is more or less how I envision Addington & Yoo's just fate in the afterlife.
Here are my poor departed cats back in Indonesia. They were caught and eaten by my neighbours.
Oh, Nakku, that's so sad. Your cats look so sweet. (Cute children, too.)
Appearances notwithstanding, I love cats. And not in the gastronomic sense.
Maybe I got the voice affix wrong when I asked them to feed my cats.
Our cat is cute. Also, a little bit creepy.
Chicken is cheap. Whole frozen chickens can be bought wholesale for well under a dollar a pound. The poultry-industrial-complex is so efficient that a pound of chicken can be had for a tiny markup over the cost of the feed and fuel that went into producing it.
I think the thing your missing is that this is relatively recent, and represents a fundamental restructuring of the industry. So the idea of restaurants/butchers doing a switch may be much older. Besides, I thought the natural comparison was rabbit.
The key to cracking the case is to start with an estimate of the ratio of grain weight to slaughter weight and work from there.
How are you going to get that estimate other than pulling it out of your ass? I certainly have no idea how much of what a chicken eats gets shat out, how many useful calories are extracted and what its energy expenditures are, etc.
Also, no way is the yield of meat from a cat comparable to that of a lamb. I mean, proportionally; obviously not absolutely. Cats have scrawny legs.
They were caught and eaten by my neighbours.
For real? Jesus.
205: these are consultants. You make something up that sounds plausible and hope the client buys it.
I had lamb sausage from the local farmers' market last night. Expensive, but delicious.
Chickens are notoriously inefficent, that's why they feed chicken shit to cattle (standard practice).
Maybe cats are more efficient?
205: The idea is to pull the data out of your ass, but get the equations right. Suppose X pounds of grain per pound of chicken; weight of grain shipment; five pound chicken.
Also, if you figure out how to do math quickly in your head, make sure you tell your interviewer how you got the answer before you give them the answer. This is standard practice because then if you make a mistake doing mental math you can show you had the right idea.
However, if you do your mental math too quickly you can get the interviewer asking not how you arrived at the answer, which you've walked her through, but how you did the mental math and find her trying your method on the numbers on the next question. (Seriously, though, taking 87% of 50 isn't that hard.) Which was oddly satisfying even if I didn't get the job.
So, Cala, how many pounds of grain per pound of chicken?
210: You didn't even bother considering how much gets shat out?
I would try to figure that out...and then realize that it would be easier to measure the weight of the chickens and figure out how much was wasted than to go in the opposite direction.
212: The number you actually want is dressed weight vs. lifetime (avg) consumption.
212: you just say "assume average slaughter weight of 4 pounds from a consumption of 12 pounds of grain lifetime" and go from there.
Also, it strikes me that you can't really start from pounds of grain per pound of chicken; you need to settle on a slaughter weight and estimate how much it will grain it will take to reach that weight, because there's no reason to think that if it takes X pounds of grain to make a 3lb chicken, it will take 5X/3 pounds to make a 5lb chicken, since, after all, more needs to go into maintaining the thing once it's already reached a certain point, and all of this will be tied into its energy requirements (=whether it's caged or allowed to walk about), too.
So if you get to choose the slaughter weight, I would set it at a few ounces, since I imagine chickens are born weighing a few ounces, and answer: infinitely many.
But if you know how much grain each chicken eats in its lifetime, then you don't need to know the slaughter weight at all. You just divide (grain per chicken) by (grain per truck).
216: well, yeah. That's what it sounds like you do.
Further, since the question didn't ask about the slaughter weight, but rather just said, how many can you raise from birth to slaughter, it seems you'd be open, given the question as stated, to announce that you allot each chicken 10 pounds of grain, and when they've eaten it all, you slaughter them, regardless of how much they weigh. Or something.
...to get an estimate of how many trucks it would take to feed one chicken.
Although I would divide grain per truck by grain per chicken.
If that's really what's involved, phrasing the question in terms of chickens seems to be mostly an invitation to think that the question actually involves chickens and not division, since exactly the same strategy would apply to a question asking how many foos you can baz given a trainload of quux, and the stipulation that bazzing a foo involves decreasing your quux supply.
222: Hey, this is not catblogging.
221: yup. They want to know how quick you can develop back-of-the-envelope solutions to real-world problems, not whether you have basic math skills. If you can't see through the chickens and trucks and chicken shit and so on to the simplicity of the underlying problem -- and do it quickly, and explain your reasoning convincingly -- they probably don't want you.
224: I fail to see how it's possible to know that the underlying problem is simple.
The answer is basically the same thing as "Usually one of these trucks feeds 50 chickens, so I'll say 50."
221: yup. They want to know how quick you can develop back-of-the-envelope solutions to real-world problems, not whether you have basic math skills.
No, see, real-world problems involve real-world knowledge, and it is that which has gone missing from our solutions. What is present: basic math skills.
Ben you really haven't dealt with many consultants, have you?
212: It doesn't matter what gets shat out. If it takes me 10 pounds of grain to get a 2 pound bird, whether the bird eats it or shits it doesn't matter to that calculation (though it might to other calculations.)
216: I think the idea of the problem (underdescribed, but helpful Interviewer Ruprecht would provide more details, like grain/pound of dressed meat, and probably a ratio of dressed/slaughtered) is to see if you can estimate the answer in terms of number of chickens without bothering to figure out how much each chicken eats or shits.
when i was a kid i had two chickens for about a week as pets, then they died
they would immediately fall asleep if you put your hand on them, so very small and yellow
i don't remember what they ate and how much
may be i did not feed them that's why they died
but i'm sure there were some grain inside of their box, i thought it's for insulation to sleep on
so they could eat whenever they wanted may be
226: hence `back-of-the-envelope'
I probably should have read the actual question at some point.
Dumb question. Is dressed meat just the chicken with the feathers removed?
If it takes me 10 pounds of grain to get a 2 pound bird, whether the bird eats it or shits it doesn't matter to that calculation (though it might to other calculations.)
Do you know how much grain it takes to get a 2 pound bird, or even what a reasonable estimate is? Sifu just suggest 12 pounds grain for four pounds chicken, and you 10 for two, and I certainly have no idea which is more realistic. Absent experience with chickens (which is the next best thing to practical wisdom about chickens), coming up with a reasonable estimate involves having some ideas about chicken's efficiency at extracting nutrients and whatnot. (Not that I have any more clue about that, but, you know.) Obviously if you already know that it takes x pounds grain to make y pounds of chicken, you don't care about the mechanism. But we don't know that.
So, obviously, no one cares about making a reasonable supposition as to how much grain you feed a chicken over its lifetime, and the only thing that matters is that you look at the problem in this way—that you assign some number to it. Consequently, my answer of "infinitely many" is looking better and better.
Dumb question. Is dressed meat just the chicken with the feathers removed?
It depends on the occasion, of course, but feathers totally removed is generally thought to be appropriate only for European beaches and the boudoir.
It helps to think of it as a game. It's a game with rules. One of the rules is to know to ask "Do we know how much grain it takes to get a pound of dressed meat?", and because it's a game, there will be an answer and the point was to see if you knew to ask the question.
I once marked a PPE entrance exam in which the economics professor had set a question in which the candidates had to calculate how many hives were optimal for Pooh and Eeyore's honey needs.
EVERYONE except for one person gave an integer answer [including me]. Turns out the professor was expecting a rational number specified to about 3 decimal places.
To this day, I think the economics prof was wrong.
It's a truism that feeding animals grain to produce meat is inefficient. So the pounds of meat produced from x pounds of grain would be x.y, where y is the pounds-of-meat per pound of grain (less than one). x.y / z would be the number of chickens, where z is pounds of meat per chicken.
I don't see how you could get beyond this without inputs for x, y, and z, but I'd put 20 lbs. of grain per 2-pound dressed chicken, with the actual number probably being lower rather than higher.
EVERYONE except for one person gave an integer answer [including me]. Turns out the professor was expecting a rational number specified to about 3 decimal places.
Classic. I wonder if, when faced with the question of the right number of children to have, they approached the solution in the same spirit.
I don't see how you could get beyond this without inputs for x, y, and z, but I'd put 20 lbs. of grain per 2-pound dressed chicken, with the actual number probably being lower rather than higher.
Don't forget the amount of grain required to get the person whose job it is to pluck the chicken.
re: 237
Also, the professor's* model answer used calculus.
Everyone [except one person] either solved a simple simultaneous equation or used induction. You could do it in your head, ffs.
[Due to an admin fuckup I wasn't given the answer sheet until after I'd marked the exam. So, everyone who did it that way got marked right, despite what the economics prof thought.]
* of the British professor variety, i.e. some Nobel prize winning top-guy-in-department.
So was the one person who used calculus the same person who gave a non-integer answer?
240/241: That's strange. Mapping from discrete to continous domains to do optimization is often the right way to do it --- but you're supposed to map back for the answer.
