Eagles, Bears & Vaping Squirrels — Animal Party Gets Wild
On this wildly entertaining episode of Animal Party, Deb Wolfe dives into everything from dramatic eagle rescues and vaping squirrels to mysterious dog ear “aliens” and bear break-ins! Discover why a cocker spaniel’s chronic ear problem turned out to be something shockingly unexpected, how to safely care for hairy dog ears, and why pet parents should never ignore “different than usual” symptoms. Deb also explores clever animal intelligence, microchip miracle stories, astronaut reunion joy, and a fun celebrity animal trivia challenge. It’s a funny, fascinating, and heartwarming ride through the wild world of animals.
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Transcript:
Hello, you're listening to Animal Party on Pet Life Radio. And did you all see that big reunion of Christina Koch, the astronaut, when she came home to LBD, her little black, her little brown dog, and he, the dog gave her such an amazing greeting. Did you all see that? It's so worth looking at.
Oh, it's so sweet. And they sort of montaged into it a couple of clips of Christina playing with the dog on the beach before she left and just makes you warm and fuzzy to see the big return. So yes, I wanted to talk about that.
And I also wanted to talk about a couple of eagles that were in the news and I'm going to give you a riddle and I'm going to talk about ears today, dog ears in particular. Yes. Yes, something nasty went on in a Cocker Spaniel's ear and I posted pictures of the thing the vet found in there.
Ooh, looks like a alien, honestly. The thing the vet fished out of there after drugging the dog to get at it, after the dog had been to a different vet several times and the owner had been given ear infection medicines. Well, there was no ear infection, probably because of all the medicines this poor owner was paying for and using on this dog, you know, constant maintenance, but the dog was still uncomfortable and scratching and itching despite all this.
And it was, even though it's a Cocker Spaniel, Mac, that's had this problem many times as they often do, and I'll go into that, the owner noticed that it just wasn't the usual. So because they'd moved, they ended up at a different vet and voila, it wasn't the usual. Sometimes even your vet gets jaded by what the usual the dog comes in with.
It wasn't the usual at all. It was absolutely alien. So we'll talk about that later.
If you want to see the thing, yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck. Oh my gosh, I posted it. I think it was around April 13th on Deb Wolf Pet Expert on Facebook and you can see this thing in a beaker at the vet clinic after they took it out of Mac.
All right. Well, we'll talk about that later. Yeah, we will, but let's get to the Eagles, the Eagles.
Okay. So if you're hitting the link next to the show page, you're going to see this footage that was on the news in Vancouver Canada, and it actually made the news all across the country because it was so interesting. But what it is, it's two bald eagles, you know, the big black and white ones, the ones that are on the flag or not on the flag, but always standing around and statues of them near flags, the big American symbol, the big bald eagle.
Okay, that guy, you know, very proud predator bird, right? It has wicked talons. It can scoop up mice, rats, fish, whatever it wants and eat them. Okay, that's the bird we're talking about.
Giant bird. Very, very, very noble, often appreciated and even worshipped in Native American cultures, First Nations, Canadian cultures, you know, the Aboriginal people here. The eagle is very much a symbol of a lot of things.
So here are these two eagles. They were flying and they somehow got caught up together locked, talons locked on a wire, like, you know, the city wires that run through the streets from the telephone poles, the hydro wires. So these two eagles were hanging from midair, one on either side of the wire, locked together, screeching in a suburb near Vancouver.
And of course, you know, authorities were called and they came as quickly as they could and it was really fascinating to watch. So if you hit the link, you'll see it. It's really fascinating how they got them unlocked, but they one person grabbed one eagle, one person grabbed another eagle, which believe me, I would not, I don't know, those things have beaks.
Oh my gosh. Anyway, these two brave people, well-trained and well-suited for this, grabbed the eagles and separated their talons and then so they weren't actually locked anymore. And then someone else made a loud clapping noise above them and they broke apart.
And if not, I mean, they clearly would have died there. They could not release themselves and eventually there would have been a big problem. So it's a good news story and it only took a few seconds to release them, although they were caught there for a while.
Why would two eagles be trapped like that? Well, were they caught having sex as two boys, two male eagles? Okay, well that raises a whole lot of other questions, but no, what they were caught in was a battle. They were fighting and they probably weren't that serious about it because it's probably a mock battle because it didn't take much to get them to release and they didn't go back to fighting. They immediately flew off in separate directions.
So, oh my goodness, they may have even been brothers just playing around, but it was not a good move on their part. You got to watch out for those wires, eagles. Okay, we're going to go to break and come back.
But before I do that, I'm going to give you the first part of our riddle today. We're trying to guess an actor, an actor, okay? Now this person, I'm getting the first hint today, is that he has played a rodent type animal on some media event. See, I can't give it away too closely, right? I got to be a little bit vague, but that's the first.
Some kind of media production, movie, play, whatever, book, story, whatever. He played an animal that was a rodent. That's your first hint.
We're going to come back. We're going to have two more hints and hopefully you can figure it out before Animal Party is through today. Okay, it's me, Deb Wolf, and we're going to come back from break and talk more about ears.
Yep, dog ears. Stay tuned on Animal Party, Pet Life Radio. Hello, we're back on Animal Party, Pet Life Radio with me, Deb Wolf.
Well, if you've got a book and you've mistreated it, left it in the bottom of a backpack and all the pages are all rumpled and stuck together, it's a bit dog-eared. Well, why do we say that? Well, you know, the dog's ears, especially the long-eared dogs, they drag through everything and they get really messy and sometimes they have long, long hair to protect them. Sometimes, like with hunting dogs, there's a lot of hair inside the ears and it's designed to insulate and clean, but also protect them from those loud noises, like guns.
So there's a reason for all this. But if you have a pet dog, like a standard poodle, golden doodle, cocker spaniel, any of these dogs that has these hairy, hairy ears and deep ears, this is a combination here going on. Well, you know it already because you smell it and you have to take your dog in and you have to have them cleaned and sometimes you have to pluck the hair and sometimes you're Yorkie or your, well not your Yorkie, but let me think which dogs end up with this.
Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes your cocker spaniel has to have his ears put in a ponytail so the air can get at them and there's all kinds of interesting problems that arise with the maintenance and care of the ears of dogs. Okay, so this poor guy Mac.
Mac moved to a new area and there's lots of grass there and he's low to the ground because he's a cocker spaniel and his ears are even lower because the way he drags his head as he sniffs the ground just like he's meant to do, right? But somehow or other something got in there and we still don't know. I mean, you can look at the image on Deb Wolf Pet Expert Facebook from April 13th. You can look and tell me.
There's three images there. What do you think it is? Because the vet couldn't say and the vet had an emergency and couldn't spend time looking at it. So we don't know.
The owner was told that it was probably some kind of weed or seed that grew inside the ear. That's possible, but it could also be an insect because it really looks creepy like a bug, like an alien actually. Anyway, poor Mac scratching and scratching and no matter what they did, he kept scratching and scratching and luckily she was on to it.
The owner Bonnie knew what to do and said, no, this isn't right even for an ear infection, even for Mac. So took him in and sure enough, yuck, they had to, you know, put him out and pull it out and clean it up and he's going to be fine, of course. And what a good natured dog to put up with that for so long.
But for a long time, she's been telling people don't touch his ears. They're sensitive, you know, and if that's a problem and it's chronic, but it's worse than usual or it's different than usual. This is a really good signal.
Don't just say, oh, yeah, he always has stinky breath or he always has itchy ears or he always has weepy eyes. If it's getting worse, there's a new problem. There's something else.
So, okay, that's what happened there. And if they hadn't caught it, the thing would have grown more if it was a weed or a bug, whatever, it would have expanded and expanded and maybe burst the eardrum, maybe made poor Mac deaf. So it's really, really good.
They caught it. So what else about ears? Well, here's a question I got. Does everyone have their dog's ear hair pulled? My boy always shakes his head a lot after having it pulled at the groomer.
There's a sad face emoji. I feel bad. Should I keep doing it? Okay.
Now this is a golden doodle owner. So some golden doodles have really hairy ears. Some don't.
Standard poodles have very, very thick downy hair inside their ears. So do miniature poodles, toy poodles, all poodles. It's meant to protect them from the gunshots, which most poodles never experience.
I mean, on Duck Dynasty, there's a red poodle who does. So he needs his ear hair. And so for that dog, you want to keep the ear hair, but you want to keep it clean.
So regular flushing, regular wiping. I would mix up a solution of apple cider vinegar, two parts to one part hydrogen peroxide and squirt that in there after a good swim, run, hunt, whatever. So it dries it out after I've cleaned them.
There's a lot of things you can do to maintain with hair. But for most of us who don't need that hair at all, the easiest thing you can do is use a q-tip. And what you do is you put it in the ear and then you just turn in a direction, just a couple turns and then pull it out and do it again and do it again and do it again and do it again.
Now you might, if your dog's dirty, use your cleaning solution first because when you pull the hair, it's going to open up, you know, pores and you don't want it to get rashy or infected or sore. You want to minimize that, right? So clean it out first and then you're doing this and you'll get the worst, longest, thickest hairs on that with that method and you won't have to use metal tweezers. You won't have to maybe cut the skin by accident and you just turn so the hair twists around the q-tip and then pull it out.
Now don't do like 10 turns and have this giant clump that you're pulling out at once. Just do a little test or quarter turn the first time. If no hair is caught, do a half turn.
If no hair is caught, do two turns. Now you're going to see a few clumps coming out and it'll irritate the dog a little bit, but it will also feel so much better once it's done. Two days later, he's like, oh, thank you.
So much less itchy, so much less to get caught. So that's what I would recommend for this golden doodle. And if you're sending him for grooming, you get to say what you want.
So traditionally, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, every poodle got tweezer plucked bald inside the ear. I don't like, like, I don't know, like a metrosexual man going to the beach, you know, absolute bald. And then the inside of their ears would be raw and red and so sore and some of them didn't do well with that.
So your groomer, especially if they've been in it a while, may still do that. Or your groomer may not do it at all, if they're a modern groomer. So you have to kind of tell them what you want.
You could say, just get the worst of the hair, just get the thickest stuff, just do a mild earplug. Or you could say, let me know if it needs it. There's a variety of ways to address this.
Now, if you've got a stinky, gross situation and it's always hot and it always smells and your dog's always scratching, okay, you need to get rid of that hair and you need to start fresh and clean it out. So your groomer can help you with that. Now another trick, and I've said this before, I find cornstarch very, very helpful with grooming.
So if the ears are really oily and waxy, then you can use ear cleaner first and swab it all out and let it dry and do the plucking at another time with the Q-tip twist technique. Or you could even do it at the same time. You can flush the ear and then use the Q-tips to swab out the stuff or even a wet wipe, you know, maybe use the baby kind so it's not full of chemicals.
And then you can use the cornstarch to make the thick, oily hair in there matte a little bit and stick on your Q-tip. Or you could just use the cornstarch. You could try that first without wetting the ear.
Just try the cornstarch first, sprinkle a little bit in and then try and see if it tangles on the Q-tip. It's a little bit of an experiment because I don't know what your dog's ears look like from here. But mostly you want maintenance.
You want it not to ever smell bad. And yeah, that's the big thing. Now, sometimes when people hear me say this, they go, oh my God, I never want to stick anything in my dog's ear.
I know I'm not supposed to do it with my kids or myself. I don't want to pierce the eardrum. Okay, very valid.
Very valid. Except dog's ears aren't shaped the same as people. So people's ears go right back to the eardrum.
You got to be really, really, really careful and you shouldn't be using Q-tips in there, so they say. But dogs, it's like an L shape. So even if you go all the way, you're never going to hit the eardrum.
It curves down into an L. So if as long as you're going straight and you're not using anything that has a curve or flexibility, you're not going to hurt the eardrum. So don't worry about that part. Now, if your dog doesn't like it or isn't used to it, start really slow.
Just do the outside of the ear. Just take your fingers and rub the edges of their ear and give them kisses and love and maybe some peanut butter or cookie, you know, do that a few times. Then the next day, go a little farther and the next day, go a little farther until your dog doesn't care that you're playing with his ears and cleaning them and petting them and touching them.
It's a very affectionate sign between dogs. It's something mating pairs do and it's something mama dogs will do with their offspring and offspring will do back to their mama dogs. Sibling dogs, litter mates will do it too.
Ear cleaning is a big deal to them. So if you're cleaning their ears, that's a gesture that goes understood as your deepest, deepest caring. Okay, we're going to go to a break and be back.
An animal party on Pet Life Radio and I'll give you the next clue. Hello, you're back on Animal Party on Pet Life Radio and our actor of the day question. He was a rodent of some kind.
Yes, in a production and he, so I said he was a he. Okay, that's a big clue. He acted next to a talking dog.
Can you figure out who we're talking about? Probably not. Maybe, maybe if you really know animals and maybe if you have little kids, so there's another hint. All right.
I want to give a warning out. Anybody local who's seen the news has seen that last week we had our first bear break in. Yes, we did.
Now, you'd think that people in my neck of the woods would understand that bears break into cars. Yes, especially in spring and fall. We're in spring now.
Flowers are blooming, trees are blooming. It's raining too much. It was sunny, so nice and so beautiful and everyone thought it was spring and then boom, rain.
Well, that's spring. So we got our April showers happening, but the bears have woken up. It's warm and they're looking for food.
And so we had our first bear break in and I get a wicked sick pleasure watching them. I can't help it. So there's this truck parked behind some guy's house in a suburban neighborhood.
There's a lot of trucks and cars all along the street and there's, you know, it's just a regular neighborhood. It's not the country like where I live. It's in town very much, a place called Coquitlam.
And yeah, so this bear susses out the car, smells there's garbage in the back of the truck cab, which is a locked closed cab. So he takes his big bear paw and he's not even that big of a bear. He's sort of an average bear, but an average bear is bigger than us.
So bam, he hits the window, seems to break right away. Of course it does. And he helps himself to everything in the cab.
Now, I don't think that car will be salvageable. Maybe. Maybe.
Sometimes bears get into the cars and the trucks and they can't get out again and then they destroy the whole thing. So please, boop boop, lock those doors, lock those doors because they can't get in when it's locked. But for anyone who ever doubted animal intelligence, if you see a bear open a car, they try the doors, they try the windows, they try everything.
Don't leave food in your car. Even a chocolate bar wrapper will draw them. Don't leave anything in there.
And I know that's really hard when you have little kids and there's Cheerios all over the place. But maybe you want to let the pet dog in there to clean that up before you close up the car for the night because the bears are out everybody. Okay, I'm going to give you one more clue.
This actor, who has been a rodent and acted next to a talking dog, also supports a very good charity that helps animals who need homes, animal rescue, called Best Friends. So those are all our clues. I'm not going to give you any more clues.
See if you can figure it out while I talk a little bit about what's been going on here. So there was a cat because you guys have asked me to talk more about cats. I'm making a point every single show to get some cat content.
Meow, meow. Here we go. So there was a cat who during Hurricane Helene escaped and that was in North Carolina.
And 443 days later, the cat was found roaming along the Tennessee state line. So why was this cat found? How did they find the cat? You may think your cat is extremely unique. You may think that until you lose your cat and you try to find your cat and you go to a website with all the posted pictures of all the cats and you think, oh my God, my cat looks like all these cats.
What am I going to do? And saying, okay, it has a tattoo. Well, what if the hair is grown over? What if it lost that ear? What if people aren't able to read it anymore? What if it's just a mess? What if they don't check? Okay, so microchip. That's why they found that cat.
Microchip. Now, I don't tend to microchip my pets. I'm mixed about it.
But if there ever was a reason to, this cat's a reason to. It tells you, you will find your cat if you lose it and it's alive and it's found. So there's another one.
A six-year-old German Shepherd called Chili was found in southwest of Edmonton after being missing. And this one, wow. I mean, it was gone three months, lost half its body weight.
The poor thing. German Shepherd called Chili. But the weird thing for me is it was found only two kilometers away from where they lost it.
It just goes to show you, stay there. Keep calling, stay there. All right, that's important.
And I guess I should solve the riddle. I guess, I guess I should. Well, maybe I'll tell you about it one more time.
So he played a rodent, actually a squirrel, and he was next to, was the actor next to an animated talking dog and he supports best friends. Who is he? Well, he's a Canadian. Gotta like that.
Will Arnett. He owns a Labrador Retriever called Bella and all that is true. So his charity work is Best Friends Animal Society, a no-kill organization.
His film roles, he starred in the movie Show Dogs as FBI agent Frank Rizzo working alongside canine partners and his commercials. He's appeared in gecko ads, interacting with the gecko, you know, and looking for a lost dog, with the gecko lizard thing and looking for a lost dog. And let's see.
What else is he done? He's also, I lost track of that. He's also, well, he played a squirrel. He played a squirrel, which brings me to something in the news.
Before we go today, I want to touch on this. Squirrels are very smart. Rats are very smart too, but squirrels are very smart.
And when I go out hiking sometimes, I'll be in the middle of nowhere and I'll find something really odd, like some kid's toy plane or somebody's soccer ball with tooth marks in it. So a dog left it, right? Or a kite, like just weird things that end up in the middle of the woods. And oftentimes I'll collect it if it's plastic or something I think shouldn't be there or I'll put it at the edge, you know, where the kid might find it the next time if I think, if I think it's something they'd want back.
But I also find, and this distresses me so much, I find cans and I find beer and pop and potato chip bags. Sometimes I actually bring an extra bag with me to collect all this crap and sometimes I find little vape cartridges. Now, this is really bad for a bunch of reasons.
There's an igniter in there. So that's not good for forest fires, etc. But sometimes, and this is the weirdest thing, there's stuff left in them and there's been squirrels.
I'm not kidding you on this. There's been squirrels footage on those, you know, cams they put in the woods and stuff. There's squirrels who are vaping now.
I'm not kidding you. I am not kidding you. I know it sounds crazy, but they figured it out.
So don't throw your crap in there. No drugs, no garbage. Keep track of your toys.
Whatever you pack in, pack out. Please, please do that. All right, everybody.
Thanks for listening on Animal Party Pet Life Radio. I'm dying to see footage of the vaping squirrels, but so far nobody sent me any. If you've got some, send it to me on Animal Party.
You just send it to Deb at Pet Life Radio and I'll get it. Okay, everybody. Thanks for listening and a big shout out to Will Arnett for participating in the show today.
All right, be good to your animals from Animal Party Pet Life Radio. Ciao meow.