Feature Articles
AUGUST 14, 2013
Homeward bound: Moving with your pet
Moving to a new area can be a stressful ordeal for all involved, especially your pets. The chaos of packing, moving furniture and the strangeness of a new area can leave your cat or dog spinning. However, with a little advance planning, patience, and affection you can help your pet quickly adjust to their new neighborhood.
MULLET OVER BY JAMES K. WHITE | AUGUST 14, 2013
Pointy dental things
The opossums (pronounced “uh-possums” or in Texas, simply “possums”) are often considered to be unattractive animals. They resemble large rats, have toothy “grins,” generate repulsive odors and can hiss loudly. Traits we might list in the plus column: Opossums usually do not carry diseases and they devour pests such as roaches, mice, scorpions and spiders in large quantities. Contrary to popular myth – opossums do not have the most teeth (usually 50) of any land animal – that would be certain species of snails which typically have more than 25,000. Most of any mammal: Spinner dolphins with 252. Most of any land mammal would be the giant armadillos which can possess 100 pointy dental things.
DR. DAVE HEPBURN | AUGUST 14, 2013
Which is worse: childbirth or kidney stones
Strolling across the moonlit hospital compound, I was puzzling over how a woman had lost all five of her babies to a mysterious death, each time within days of their birth. Any day now she was about to have number six and so her northern village elders had sent her to my 40-bed hospital in the middle of the jungle island that is Tanna.
Was there some genetic defect? Perhaps a bleeding disorder or was this, as some of the nurses had speculated, the unthinkable. Did I have a mass murderess in my over-crowded hospital?
