Category: pet

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DS106 Week 2: Second Meme “Selfie With Your Pet”

Since I have been going back and forth from New York to Connecticut, I had to improvise for this assignment since I couldn’t find a selfie with him. Meet Max! He is an 11-year-old miniature schnauzer but is still a puppy at heart. We brought max home with he was just a few months old. I had my mom send me pictures with him, so here’s 10 year old me with my fluffy bundle of joy. When he was younger, we used to take him everywhere. My mom would carry him in her purse when we would go shopping or out to eat. This was when he barely barked, now he barks at everything and everyone! Max has been my only pet, I grew up with him. He is friendly with some dogs, but most of the time he just wants to play. He thinks he’s bigger than he is. Weighing only 13 lbs, he barks and wags his tail at big dogs. His cousins are bull mastiffs, a very large type of breed that loves to drool. Whenever we come back home from our cousin’s house we always have to give him a bath because he is covered in it! Max is our fur bundle of joy. He is a part of our family and we hope he still has a few years left with us! 

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Selfie with My Pet!

Getting Casper to take a picture never goes well…

This is my male albino rat, Casper (the friendly ghost)! He is almost a year old – he will be on June 22nd, 2020 – and is one my first actual pets I have owned myself. Casper came into my life December 6, 2019. I adopted him from the rat lab conducted on campus involved with the animal behavior course Animal, Learning and Behavior. In this class, eight different groups were divided up with one rat per group, Casper being the rat in my group. We conditioned the rat’s in operant conditioning chambers – similar to what B.S. Skinner conducted in his studies – and trained our rats to press levers and retrieve a reinforcer for pressing the lever. This was done on multiple different levels, with Casper needing to press the lever once, twice, even five times, etc. to retrieve a reinforcer. Once this behavior was established, Casper was taught how to spin and receive a reinforcer for doing so. Once the class was completed, students had the opportunity to adopt rats to have as pets so they would not end up being euthanized. I felt an established bond with Casper while I was training him in class, and knew this was the rat for me to adopt. Casper definitely has grown and blossomed since I’ve had him, teaching me more about the bond between animals and humans too. Rats are able to bond with their humans through trusting them and eventually becoming accustomed to the way their human’s are and the way their human’s life is. Since I’ve adopted Casper, I’ve gained his trust and have been able to provide him a healthy and happy life, even teaching him some new tricks, too. Casper is definitely an animal I will always love, even after he’s gone, for the bond and connection I made with him.

Here’s a picture of Casp enjoying a banana chip!

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