Humane Society

This week, I went to the humane society with Vicki Bieschke. We spent an hour and a half at the center playing with the many animals. There were so many animals to play with including dogs, cats, rabbits, and even ferrits. We first played with the kittens because young animals need a lot of attention. I played with these fun and highly energized kittens by spinning a cat rope around and letting them chase it. I made sure all of the kittens were running around. Then, we went to the bunnies, and I held the white bunny for a little bit. After a while, it got a little scared, so I put it back in its cage. Next, we took out a few of the older cats and let them run around and play with one another. Lastly, we desided to walk the two black lab puppies. They were so cute and had a lot of energy from being locked in their cages for so long. It was hard to get a collar on both of the labs because they both ganged up on me in their cage. When we finally got them outside, the collar didn't fit one of the labs, and he almost escaped. Volunteering at the humane society was so fun, and I learned a lot about animals.

When Pigments Attack!

This project has proven to be great and grand, inside and out. So far I have collected over 200 pictures, but maybe about 50 of them are good, and not all of them are of the project material. Its the sloppy mid season, (spring) so all the horses are all muddy and gross looking so I have to go out with a brush and try to clean them up, that sometimes fails within itself as well. So thats a challenge that I have run into. We are having quite a bit of fun though, I go volunteer with my friend Lauren, so because I have to have her keep the critters attention while I take pictures we tend to spend 2/3 of our time running around in the pastures saying hello to everyone and then taking pictures. Then only about an hour and a half feeding and scooping poop. Which is pretty joyous.

Over the time that I have started this project, (even though I have been volunteering for a few months prior) the facility has found new homes for about 8 horses, and since then they have gotten about 6 new horses, including one that is getting over lymes disease, which can happen to horses too.. Alot of the horses that come in have been abused or poorly trained, though a few that come in have no background stories, and were just given up because the owner didn't want to go through the lifetime commitment of owning a horse. Which means in the sense of this project that its more opportunities to get colors! Since most of the horse population is this foundation color called Bay, about 70% of the horses at the farm are this color. So since I needed some of the rarer colors, Liz so kindly offered to take me up to where she worked so we could roam with those critters and get some of the colors that my rescue didn't have, such as roan, and silver dapple, I was quite happy.

As for the webpage portion, I have it all designed, and few things are filled in. Since I stole the html off the page I coded for my online portfolio, some of the coding disagreed with how I wanted to write a lot. So after fighting with it for a few days, I decided to cheat and write the things I needed within the image, so it would be a text and image combo thing. So if you guys want to check it out its at http://fadedoak.com/uwsp (click projects to get to well, the project..) there are two thumbnails in the right corner, the first one doesn't work because I have had it with trying to figure it out before this is due. But I wanted to give you all a taste of what its planned on looking like.

I realized that this project is going to take possibly far over the required time to spend on it, but its something that will also be useful to a whole lot of people and such.

Oh yes, the pictures included, because everyone likes pictures The first one is of the new horse that came in, who is an excellent example of how no one is clean..

And then the second one is of my lovely assistant and another filthy horse.

Then out of pure entertainment, "Mustang Sally" who was really happy and jumping all about, and a how horses can be completely airborne...

Humane Society Day One

Yesterday I went to the humane society with Lynnea Chelmo for my fist volunteer opportunity. We stayed for about an hour in a half. When we got there Lynnea and I did not know where to start. When we looked around there were so many animals that just looked like they needed some love. So what we did was we spent a little time with all the different types of animals they had. First we started with the kittens. We played with them and made sure to get them all moving. Lynnea played the with the wild one of the bunch as I held the lazy super cute one. The next thing we did was move onto the bunny. The bunny was a little skirmish so after a while we put him away because he seemed to want to go back into his cage. The cat cages are right by the bunny room so we hit that up next and let some cats out to play with they were all very social and nice. The last and most exciting adventure we went on was walking the two puppies they were so cute and innocent looking. But they were naughty Lynnea was practically wrestling with them in the cage trying to get there collars on which we never quite got and one of the dogs almost escaped. I learned a lot and enjoyed myself. I learned how to take care of these animals and just exactly how much attention these animals really need. I am looking forward to Thursday, which is the next time we will be going to the Humane Society.

Humane Association

For my service learning project I am going to work at the Humane Society. I am volunteering for the humane society because I believe that animals that don’t have home deserve the same attention as the animals that have a nice family to live with. Animals are like humans and deserve some where to live, eat, and someone to take care of them. I am going to go there with Vicki and Lynnea to work with the animals. When I am working with the animals I might have to feed them, walk them, or even pick up there waste. Some animals can even go to nursing homes to visit people who don’t have an animal to interact with. These animals can help keep people happy by playing with them and entertaining them. When I am working with the animals I hope to see how they can interact with me and other people. I hope to help the animals by interacting with them and also keeping them healthy. I want to know if different animals treat people the same way or if they only favor certain people. Also, a big part in this volunteering is to interact with the other employees. People are mammals too and have different ways to treat animals. It will be interesting to see the different techniques many people use.

Portage County Humane Society

I have not yet heard back from the Humane Society but I still plan on volunteering there. There are numerous opportunities that are available. But there are two types that i would like to partake in: Kennel/ quality time volunteers where I would take a dog for a walk or groom it or spend time with a cat/kitten; there is also a pet therapy opportunity where pets are taken to visit senior citizens or shut-in patients. What I am hoping to learn from this experience is behaviors of different animals and how they interact with people in their environment. I am also hoping that I can help to provide a better quality of life for these animals that need a home.

Humane Society

For the service learning project I will be going to the humane society to do some volunteer work. I am planning on helping out the animals there by feeding them or taking them for a walk or something. I have never volunteered for anything like this before so I am not sure what it is going to be like. The reason I am doing this is because for the service learning project that we have to do for this class this seemed like one of the things might be not that bad to do. I like animals so I am hoping it will be alright. I plan to go to the humane society for 2 hours every weekend while we are doing this assignment. I hope that my doing this assignment I will be able to learn some more things about animals and how I can help out by just giving a little of my time.

Humane Society

For my service learning project I will be volunteering at the Humane Society in Portage County with Vicki and Steph Wolf. We will be involved in socializing with cats and dogs and just giving these animals attention and care. We will be socializing with cats through personal contact and grooming. When working with the dogs, we will play with them, walk them, and wash them. I chose to help out here because it seems like it will be a lot of fun, and I love working with animals. I will get to play with animals while also helping the community. Through this service project, I hope to learn many new things about different animals and how they interact with one another. This experience will help me understand how animals' behaviors change depending on the people and the environment it is in. I hope to help the community and the animals at the Humane Society by volunteering. I can definitely see myself continuing to work at the Humane Society in the future.

Equine Pigments

My service-learning project is going to be studying equine pigments at the local horse rescue. St. Francis horse rescue is a non-profit organization that I have been volunteering for since late November. It intrigues me mainly because it has been something that interests me that there could be so many color variations that emerge from just a few base colors. The service portion is the volunteering part, along with free advertisement for the facility, and use of the pictures for promotional purposes. The learning portion is creating a comprehensive guide to what causes the different coat colors, which will be developed into a website. Along with extending my knowledge about the organization and critters in general. The process would be to tour the facility and identify 8-10 coat colors and then determine what causes these colors. For example, Agouti produces a Bay coat, when it is the dominant gene, then the black coloring extends to the different points of the horse (legs, mane, tail, ear rims). If the Agouti is recessive, then black is uniformly distributive around the horse, creating an all black horse. Then to photographs the highlight points (body and key points). Then create a comprehensive webpage that combines the information. Already I have run into a few snags in my project, since it is a facility that has adoptable animals I have to work fast to claim the critters for my project before they find their forever homes, another hardship is that since its also a retirement facility for the horses that are too sick to be adopted out, there is the possibility that they may pass away before I get a picture. Which is the case for one of my black pigment examples. Fortunately, I have already gotten the pictures of the horses that now have new homes.

Edit: I guess I should add what I plan on getting out of this on a personal point rather then all the other scientific stuff. I find that volunteering, even though it is just scooping poop, feeding, giving some good TLC to critters that have had a rough past, and soon a hopeful future. Coming from a home with alot of critters, and my volunteer job back there I needed someplace to work off some debot and get my critter fill. So doing this project will proceed to keep me at a stable point of mind along with teaching me new skills about horses and how society reacts to creatures such as these (in good and bad ways)

.

A few references since, I’m sure few of you have no idea what I am going on about…
Horse pigments is a gateway into what the text version of the final webpage will include, among other things, it explains what genes cause what horse coat colors.

St. Francis Horse Rescue, located in Rosholt WI, is where I will be sampling horse coats and determine what color pigments are showing.