Meaningless Ranting
I know that I really shouldn't use this journal to vent about my job so much. It may not always seem like it, but I do love what I do, and I know I wouldn't be happy doing anything else. And the good days and clients and pets really do outweigh the bad ones by a significant margin, but somehow it's always the frustrating cases that stick in my head so I need to work them out in words at the end of the day. That said....
If I ever get my hands on the genius who thought it would be a good idea to breed teacup griffins, they're going to have a heck of a lot of explaining to do. It may be made slightly more difficult by the fact that I'll be busily applying their face to a medium-fine cheese grater, but I'm sure such a wise and foresightful soul would be up to the challenge.
Griffins are tough enough to deal with - you've got two such radically different forms trying to share the same metabolism that even under the best of circumstances practicing medicine on them is somewhere between divination, guesswork, and playing Scrabble while blindfolded. At least the full-sized critters evolved semi-independently, though, and they've had a few thousand years to work the kinks out of the shared-body situation. They've adapted to their environment, and for the most part they're fairly stable, health-wise. As soon as something goes wrong it's an utter catastrophe, but aside from trauma they don't have too many medical problems.
Of course, people can't be satisfied with critters the way nature made them. They have to make it cuter, and smaller, and cuddlier, and generally far more screwed up than God or whoever's in charge could possibly imagine. Mini poodles, mini goats, mini horses - of course, it was only a matter of time until someone wanted a mini griffin. So the captive breeding programs started selecting for smaller and smaller beasts, and after a while they wound up with the Miniature Griffin. They were about the size of a standard goat, they were prone to digestive ailments and reproductive failure, they were... not small enough.
So some damn fool got it into his head to introduce housecats into the breeding pool. And after a few spectacular failures and a bit of applied thaumagenetics, the teacup griffin was born. Six pounds fully grown (they long ago replaced the eagle stock with falcons), significantly less likely to maim their owners, and, aside from an indescribably ugly bald baby stage, more adorable than any living thing has a right to be. It sounds perfect, right?
Have you ever seen a bird with feline leukemia? It's not pretty. Thanks to their more delicate lung structure, they pick up the disease about a hundred times faster than any normal cat. And while the big cat breeds developed a resistance to the virus before living memory, housecats are still prey to it. One sick grif can knock out an entire colony in a month, and there's nothing to do but stamp your feet hopelessly. They haven't had the time that standard griffins have to build up any sort of resistance to bird diseases, either, and between that and generally suppressed immune systems from the techniques needed to add the new species in, I've seen more cases than I ever would have imagined sick near to death from feather mites, of all things.
I could even handle these problems, if they were the worst. They're frustrating and ridiculous and entirely preventable, but they're at least real problems. But they can't hold a candle to the newest issues I've started seeing.
Lions and eagles may be wildly different species, but at least they more or less fill similar niches. They're both predators, but they neither compete nor do they even interact much at all. Cats and falcons, though, come into much closer contact. It's not unreasonable for a falcon to grab a kitten for lunch, and while a cat is unlikely to snack on a hawk, to their critter brains all birds are acceptable prey.
When you combine that fact with the tendency of all inbred things towards neurosis, it gets ugly. I've started calling it Predatory Dissociative Disorder, for lack of a better name and because I've never seen anything written about it anywhere. It seems to start with standard neurotic behavior - a cat's normal tail chasing gone a little too far. But once the poor thing actually catches its tail, and takes a good nip, all of the standard predator reflexes go out of control, and within an hour or two they can literally tear themselves apart. I've tried everything I can think of to control this once it starts - Elizabethan collars and booties to keep them from hurting themselves, immune-suppressants to try to keep them from recognizing their separate halves as other animals, sedatives and antipsychotics to control any underlying neurosis, but no matter what I do, as soon as we stop physically restraining them they go right back to waging all-out war between their front half and their back.
This is incredibly, amazingly, earth-shatteringly horrid and ridiculous, and it's all because some pointy-eared freak managed to infiltrate a genetics lab and steal the equipment and information to breed his spoiled-rotten, immortally bored, Queen-of-Air-and-Ennui wife a new trophy pet.
Stupid elves and their stupid experiments. Stupid tiny inbred monsters that eat themselves.
Stupid me, thinking that getting a student loan from the Seelie court was a decent way to help fund my education.
Grumfle.
(Has Becky lost her mind? No - or, well, maybe, but not in specific relation to this. If you're interested in the background story here, check out this entry.
If I ever get my hands on the genius who thought it would be a good idea to breed teacup griffins, they're going to have a heck of a lot of explaining to do. It may be made slightly more difficult by the fact that I'll be busily applying their face to a medium-fine cheese grater, but I'm sure such a wise and foresightful soul would be up to the challenge.
Griffins are tough enough to deal with - you've got two such radically different forms trying to share the same metabolism that even under the best of circumstances practicing medicine on them is somewhere between divination, guesswork, and playing Scrabble while blindfolded. At least the full-sized critters evolved semi-independently, though, and they've had a few thousand years to work the kinks out of the shared-body situation. They've adapted to their environment, and for the most part they're fairly stable, health-wise. As soon as something goes wrong it's an utter catastrophe, but aside from trauma they don't have too many medical problems.
Of course, people can't be satisfied with critters the way nature made them. They have to make it cuter, and smaller, and cuddlier, and generally far more screwed up than God or whoever's in charge could possibly imagine. Mini poodles, mini goats, mini horses - of course, it was only a matter of time until someone wanted a mini griffin. So the captive breeding programs started selecting for smaller and smaller beasts, and after a while they wound up with the Miniature Griffin. They were about the size of a standard goat, they were prone to digestive ailments and reproductive failure, they were... not small enough.
So some damn fool got it into his head to introduce housecats into the breeding pool. And after a few spectacular failures and a bit of applied thaumagenetics, the teacup griffin was born. Six pounds fully grown (they long ago replaced the eagle stock with falcons), significantly less likely to maim their owners, and, aside from an indescribably ugly bald baby stage, more adorable than any living thing has a right to be. It sounds perfect, right?
Have you ever seen a bird with feline leukemia? It's not pretty. Thanks to their more delicate lung structure, they pick up the disease about a hundred times faster than any normal cat. And while the big cat breeds developed a resistance to the virus before living memory, housecats are still prey to it. One sick grif can knock out an entire colony in a month, and there's nothing to do but stamp your feet hopelessly. They haven't had the time that standard griffins have to build up any sort of resistance to bird diseases, either, and between that and generally suppressed immune systems from the techniques needed to add the new species in, I've seen more cases than I ever would have imagined sick near to death from feather mites, of all things.
I could even handle these problems, if they were the worst. They're frustrating and ridiculous and entirely preventable, but they're at least real problems. But they can't hold a candle to the newest issues I've started seeing.
Lions and eagles may be wildly different species, but at least they more or less fill similar niches. They're both predators, but they neither compete nor do they even interact much at all. Cats and falcons, though, come into much closer contact. It's not unreasonable for a falcon to grab a kitten for lunch, and while a cat is unlikely to snack on a hawk, to their critter brains all birds are acceptable prey.
When you combine that fact with the tendency of all inbred things towards neurosis, it gets ugly. I've started calling it Predatory Dissociative Disorder, for lack of a better name and because I've never seen anything written about it anywhere. It seems to start with standard neurotic behavior - a cat's normal tail chasing gone a little too far. But once the poor thing actually catches its tail, and takes a good nip, all of the standard predator reflexes go out of control, and within an hour or two they can literally tear themselves apart. I've tried everything I can think of to control this once it starts - Elizabethan collars and booties to keep them from hurting themselves, immune-suppressants to try to keep them from recognizing their separate halves as other animals, sedatives and antipsychotics to control any underlying neurosis, but no matter what I do, as soon as we stop physically restraining them they go right back to waging all-out war between their front half and their back.
This is incredibly, amazingly, earth-shatteringly horrid and ridiculous, and it's all because some pointy-eared freak managed to infiltrate a genetics lab and steal the equipment and information to breed his spoiled-rotten, immortally bored, Queen-of-Air-and-Ennui wife a new trophy pet.
Stupid elves and their stupid experiments. Stupid tiny inbred monsters that eat themselves.
Stupid me, thinking that getting a student loan from the Seelie court was a decent way to help fund my education.
Grumfle.
(Has Becky lost her mind? No - or, well, maybe, but not in specific relation to this. If you're interested in the background story here, check out this entry.