Dog Days II & BEE a POOP Detective!

It was a zoo at The Museum last week! We had a lot of animal visitors come and teach us a little something about themselves. Of course their owners helped them with their presentations, and we had a great time learning about everything from dog training to poop! Don’t miss our last week of Drop-in Days next week as we wrap things up with Miss Candy’s Petting Zoo and our favorite pal Ruff from FETCH!

Thursday we had our second Dog Days of Summer Drop-in Day. This time around we featured dogs that could do awesome tricks. In the morning Dick Norton, a dog behavioral therapist and dog trainer from Bark Busters, and his dog Douglas taught us how to safely approach a dog. There are a few steps that you need to take if you want to pet a strange dog. First, you need to ask its owner if it’s okay to pet his dog. Second, you need to make your hand into a fist and then let the dog sniff it. Once the dog seems comfortable with you, you can pet the dog under its chin- NOT on top of his head.

After Dick & Douglas’ presentation, we had a spectacular dog show. Australian Shepherds, and a little dog named Spanky, performed all kinds of great tricks for us. Many of the dogs could weave through their owners legs, spin, dance, and bow. Tika, a 7 month old Australian Shepherd, showed us how she says her prayers each night with help from her trainer. Spanky and Wish did a great round of fly ball- check out their skills by watching our video on Facebook! Wish is also an amazing frisbee player and made some great snags! After their performances, they did meet and greets with all of our guests. It was nice to get up close and personal with the celebrities! At the end of the day, we even got to help them groom one of the dogs who needed a good brushing. We had some dog-gone fun with all of our furry guests, and we look forward to seeing them again next summer!

I’d never thought that I would say that, but I am now a poop detective. Crazy, right? Well if you came to the Museum last Friday, then you are now a poop detective too! Before we got the scoop on poop, Channel 7 meteorologist, Chris Lambert, taught us how he calculates the weather. He also answered some great questions from the audience, like “How do they come up with the names for hurricanes?” Answer: The name depends on the part of the world that the hurricane is occurring, but weather people have a list of names that they use over time.

After Chris’ presentation, you could have headed over to the Bristol County Beekeeper’s table to check out the bee hive they had set up. They also had some honey combs so you could see what the bees make. They even had the gear that they have to wear when tending to the bees for us to look at! It was great to have these beekeepers buzzzing around The Wild Place throughout the day!

Finally we were taught all about animal poop through a great presentation from Animal World Experience. There are all different types of poop- it depends on what type of animal it’s coming from. Poop comes in all shapes and sizes, and even how it comes out is different in some animals too! The weirdest way one animal poops was a scorpion! The poop comes out of its tail, and it likes to smear it all of the walls of its cage. GROSS! The best part was that we all got to get really close to the animals that we were learning about. We were big fans of these super poopers!

It was another fun filled week at The Museum! If you love animals, then don’t miss your last chance to see real, lives ones next Thursday during our Miss Candy’s Petting Zoo Drop-in Day!

-Ashley Balerna

Public Relations Intern