Teleidoscope

Mon, Feb 05, 2007

Techlands: At the Gathering III

Posted at 10:35 pm MST to Creative Work

The next Techlands scene has been uploaded to the website at At the Gathering III.

Please post any comments or questions about the story as comments on this blog post.

I have also added a picture to the Techlands homepage, more or less in honor of Rakkas, although he is not exactly a horse.

This is an alabaster Zuni Horse fetish with turquoise eyes. The artist is Hubert Pincion, who is unusual in using only hand tools in carving his fetishes.

This photo is a little out of focus: the original statue is only about 3 inches tall, and it's hard to photograph something that small with my camera. I plan to experiment with different camera settings and eventually replace this with a better picture.

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Sabertoothed Kitties

Posted at 7:43 pm MST to Technology

There is a show about sabertooths on the Science channel this evening. One of the odd things about saberteeth is that they have happened a number of times independently in feline evolution (so they are obviously useful), and scientists are having so much trouble figuring out what they were for and how they were used.

I think it would be neat if someone bred little mini-sabertoothed-kitties. They are breeding cats with wild-cat fur patterns these days (some of the breeds have wild species genes, some are pure Felis domesticus carefully selected) and saberteeth should be possible too.

I had a cat who had the beginnings of saberteeth: she was dark gray and the white fang-tips sticking down when her mouth was closed were clearly visible. She was an outdoor cat that came in for a few years. She went out one summer evening and never came back. I suspect a coyote got her.

During the first few years I owned this house, there was a farm next door, and some of the farm cats colonized my yard. I used to put out food and water for them and watch out the windows, like observing a little pride of lions. I could tell when there was a hawk around because the cats would duck and hide. And once when the mama cat had a litter she was teaching to hunt, she hauled a small snake the length of my long driveway for them to practice hunting with.

I don't think the sabertoothed kitty was one of the farm cats them because she had been neutered, and she understood English like a housecat (the farm-cat clan didn't: one of the things I learned from them that surprised me). She might have been an abandoned pet, I suppose, but that would be very cruel... my little neighborhood is very isolated (by the standards of something the size of a cat) and there are a LOT of predators around. Outdoor cats don't last very long without shelter and, probably, dogs.

If someone found a few un-neutered alley-cats with little sabers like my kitty had, it should be possible to breed little sabertooths. It might be really interesting to see what, and how, they hunt. A wild bunny might be the equivalent scale prey for a sabertoothed kitty that a bison was for a smilodon.

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