What would laterally compressed canines be? I'm assuming this phrase means canines that are squooshed together in some way -- that is, there's a smaller gap between the two canines in a cat than in a dog -- but I don't know.
Cats are preeminently adapted to be predators. They have laterally compressed canines, rooted in mechanoreceptors, that hold food and permit them to dislocate the vertebrae of prey in one bite.
Clinical Behavioral Medicine for Small Animals
Karen Overall
St. Louis: Mosby, 1997
page 55
I'm not managing to visualize this at all.
Overall's book is fantastic, btw. Expensive and fantastic.
The other marvelous book I've found is Dennis C. Turner & Patrick Bateson's The Domestic Cat: The biology of its behaviour. The subtitle is a bit misleading, because the book has far more to say about behaviour than biology, making it far more interesting than you would imagine from the title. You can look at the book on Google (previous link); here's the Cambridge Press page.
Last and also least if you're trying to write a book about animal welfare, We Are the Cat is pure pleasure. Brilliant writing.
Well, I just scrutinized the bites of a dog and a cat of the same age (the dog is bigger). I could not discern any "lateral compression" differences that were apparent to the naked eye. The positioning of the overlapping canines relative to each other, and to other teeth (incisors) was identical in both. There was a slightly larger gap between the canines on the cat as compared to the dog (whose canines fitted together closely, as when you weave your fingers together). The biggest difference was that the cat had longer, narrower and more pointed canine teeth for the size of the mouth compared to the dog.
ReplyDeleteThe cat can certainly grip with those teeth and carry something weighing as much (or more) than itself. My petite little Burmese morphed a few evenings ago into a mighty huntress from the forest primeval. She found a huge, little-used (housework is NOT me) feather duster on a large, heavy bamboo pole, and managed to wrest it from a closet shelf, onto the floor, pick it up and carry it into the bedroom (it is three times her size and twice as heavy) and up onto the bed where she attacked it with savage frenzy and maniacal growls.
I don't think my dog could do the same with an object that was bigger and heavier in the same proportion. Dogs don't seem much given to carrying or even dragging heavy objects.
But "lateral compression"? Maybe it means the sides of the canines, when they lock together, provide more holding/gripping power?
There was a slightly larger gap between the canines on the cat as compared to the dog
ReplyDeleteThat sounds as if it's the dog who has lateral compression.
I LOVE the closet story.
I have a similar story about our Lab, Abby. I looked out the window one day and found her engaged in an important project that involved extracting something from the little fenced-off area that goes from our yard to the neighbor's water tank, I think it is. She was working mightily; her entire body was alert.
Finally she got it.
She came prancing out from the enclosure carrying an enormous, 6-foot long piece of gutter.
She was extremely proud, and intent upon Stage 2 of this project, which was to sit down and gnaw the thing to bits and pieces.
My neighbor had to throw her some treats so I could get it away from her. She's so hyper that every time I tried to get close enough to grab the gutter, she'd turn her head and I'd have to jump out of the way to avoid getting raked by the jagged, rusted-out ends.
Afterwards my neighbor said, "Were you afraid of Abby?"
Yes.
Afraid of Abby.
Not of Abby's intentions.
Afraid of Abby's crazed, hyper, yellow-Lab-in-a-china-shop effects on her environment.
One of those kids was such a math whiz that the bar models clearly had nothing to do with him or his interest in math...
ReplyDeleteI couldn't quite tell with the other boy. They were friends, and he was also good at math, but I couldn't tell if the bar models were as irrelevant to him as they were to the other boy or if he wanted to be doing calculations like his friend.
I stopped asking them to do bar models (I checked with the second boy's mom first, because she'd been especially interested in the Singapore approach).
ReplyDeleteThat's where we are. A keeps commenting what a waste of space there is under each word problem. Of course, that's because there's the expectation that you'll use bar models to solve them. She doesn't need the bar models herself anymore, but doesn't mind it when the publisher takes the time to do them for her. She's into conserving energy and that includes drawing bar models.
ReplyDelete