Hangin’ with the Animals

posted by Animal Lover2 on Nov 30

by: S. Roberts

Dogs are mans best friend, and as any dog owner will tell you, they really do become part of the family. This is probably why we can’t leave the family dog out of the festivities at Christmas time. There are many of products on the market for dogs from doggie treat Christmas stockings, to Christmas theme food dishes, to Santa costumes to dress your dog up! Santa wrote a particular request asking people not to buy rubber Santa chew toys, because on Christmas eve when Santa is delivering presents, many dogs are looking a little too pleased to see him.

Why not take the time to make your best friend and extra special gift this Christmas, a Christmas sleigh bell dog collar.

All you need is…
A dog collar, bells, felt and glue.

The dog collar needs to be a fabric or woven type collar that can be stitched into. Choose a nice festive colour like red.

You can buy bells from craft shops or your local haberdashery. The larger the bell the more ‘Sleigh bell’ the ring of the bell will sound, and your pooch will sound like a reindeer prancing along. Small bells have a high pitch ring, ideal for small or lady like dogs, the delicate tinkle makes them sound like small Tinkerbell the fairy.

Adjust the collar to fit your dog comfortably.

Sew bells at regular intervals around one edge (the bottom edge). About 4 CMS is a good gap between bells.

If you are using small bells sew them on in clusters of two or three larger bells can be sewn on singularly.

The bells need sewing on firmly so that they don’t come off. Your dog may try to eat them.

Cut out holly leaf shapes and berries from some felt and glue them into place between the bells. You could substitute the holly leaves for fabric Christmas tree bows for lady dogs.

A cute Christmas collar gift for your dog, which will make your pooch jingle festively on every walkies!

Do not leave the dog wearing the collar unattended.

About The Author

S. Roberts is one of Santa’s Helpers and writes for http://www.santaspostbag.co.uk a Christmas educational & activity website. For more festive ideas & gifts to make visit http://www.santaspostbag.co.uk/homemade-christmas-gift-ideas.html.

SantasPostbag is in association with http://www.bigboystoyz.com Together keeping Christmas Magical.

posted by Animal Lover2 on Nov 29

by: Jennifer Allbright

What color is a horse? The words for a horse’s coat color have very specific meanings.

A bay horse has a body coat that is a shade of brown with black legs, mane, and tail. Within the bay group, there are blood bays which is a more dark reddish shade of brown and bright bays which can look a golden brown. There are also black bays, which might appear to most people as a black horse. Truly black horses are a more rare color.

Most horses that you might think look black are black bays, which is a very dark brown. You will see lighter colored hair between the hind legs and tummy area and around the muzzle. This makes them black bays instead of black horses. People also call this seal brown.

A chestnut horse has a coat that is a shade of red, while the legs, mane, and tail may be lighter or darker than the body, or the same color, but never black. A chestnut horse can be any shade of red, reddish-brown, or orangey-red. A very dark brownish red with no black on the legs, mane, or tail is known as liver chestnut. It is a more rare color. Sorrel is another word for a light chestnut color.

Grey horses have black skin with white or gray hair. A grey horse might look white, but if its skin is dark, it is a grey. Grey horses are born a dark color, such as black or brown, and their coat grows lighter as they grow older. There are light grey, dapple grey, flea-bitten grey, and steel grey variations in coloring. A white horse must have pink skin, which is more rare than grey horses.

Dun horses have a sandy yellow to reddish brown coat. Their legs are usually darker than their body and they sometimes have faint zebra stripes on their legs. Dun horses always have a dark stripe down the middle of their back along their back bone, known as a dorsal stripe.

Sometimes the dorsal stripe continues down the horse’s tail and through the mane. Many dun colored horses also have face masking, which makes the horse’s nose and sometimes the rest of the face a darker color than the horse’s body.

A buckskin horse has a sandy yellow or tan color with black legs, mane, and tails. Buckskins are similar looking to duns, except that buckskins do not have a dorsal stripe or other primitive markings that are seen in duns.

Palomino horses have gold-colored coat with a white or light cream colored mane and tail. A palomino coat can range from a light off-white shade to a deep shade of gold.

Roan horses have white hairs mixed with a body color to produce blue roan, which is roan mixed with black, red roan, which is roan and bay, and strawberry or rose roan, which roan and chestnut.

There are other white body markings and spots that can affect the horse color to be a Paint or an Appaloosa, which also have breed registries just for them. (We’ll save those topics for another article.)

So next time you see a brown or black horse, look carefully - What color is the horse?

About The Author

Jennifer Allbright writes for http://www.NewtoHorses.com which provides information to new-comers on caring for, riding, and showing horses. The site offers a wide range of information from safety around horses and resources for horse items to specifics about dressage training and showing.

posted by Animal Lover2 on Nov 27

By: Josh Harkness

Got a pet? Win a Million! That’s right, your dog, cat, iguana or other pet could win you a cool mill. But how?

First, you need to sign up. Signing up is free. All you need for this is a valid email address (because we will send you a confirmation link to click in order to confirm you are a real person, not a spambot).

The signup page is at http://www.petmillions.com/signup.asp, and is really simple.

image 1

Type in a valid email address that belongs to you, a password you would like. Select the right answer from the drop down list (in this case a star), tick the box to agree to our terms and conditions, and then click the button to create your account.

What will happen next is that the system will send a confirmation email to the email address you just specified, containing a confirm link that you can click to actually create your free account. Make sure your email account is set up to receive mails from http://www.petmillions.com or we won’t be able to reply! If you don’t know how to do this, here are some whitelist guidelines.

Once you have confirmed your account, you can login. Go to the login page and enter the email address you used to create your account, and the password you specified.

image 2

If you ever forget your password, just use the password recovery feature. This will email your password to your current email address.

When you login, you will be taken to the my account home, which looks like this:-

image 3

From this page you can control everything about your account, including modifying your account details (name, contact email address etc), creating new entry forms for your pets, modifying existing entry forms you have already created, and contacting us, as well as sharing http://www.petmillions.com with your friends.

The first thing you will probably want to do is create your first entry form, so click the ‘new entry’ button. This will take you to the following page:-

image 4

You need to type your pet’s name, a description (tip - make this as interesting or fun as you can - you will get more votes that way!) and select what kind of pet you are entering (in this case, Mr Poochie is a dog). The description must be under 255 characters or less - so keep it short and snappy! When ready, press the ’save’ button to go to step 2.

image 5

This is where you decide what picture hosting you want for this entry. You can have 1 free entry (without pictures). Why do you have to pay for picture hosting? The bottom line is that hosting pictures costs money (the storage on our server, and bandwidth from people looking at your pet soon add up). If you didn’t pay for this, who would? Our charities? By buying hosting for the images of your pet you are actually making a contribution to our charities, rather than costing them money, and you can start from as little as $1.50 (about �0.80p or �1.18) so it’s not a huge expense for a chance to win a million!

Click the button for the picture hosting you want. Choose either 1 picture hosting, or 3, or 5. Obviously, 5 picture hosting is the most economical (and makes the biggest charitable contribution!). It also gives visitors voting for you more images to look at. Our independent payment processor, Paypal, takes most credit cards, and the process takes about 30 seconds. You don’t even need to create a Paypal account if you don’t want to.

When you return to http://www.petmillions.com, depending on how much picture hosting you have bought, you will see something like this:-

image 6

To upload your image, it’s important to keep a couple of things in mind.

First, the image must be in ‘jpg’, ‘jpeg’, ‘gif’ or ‘png’ format. Second, the image must be no bigger than 100Kb. There are some tips on how to resize images to get them down to 100Kb or less here

To actually load the image, click the ‘Choose File’ button. This opens a window allowing you to select the image file you want from your own computer. When you have selected the picture you want, click the ‘Upload’ Button. This will actually load your image up onto the server, and make it visible to surfers so they can vote for your pet.

When you have uploaded all the images you want, click the ‘done’ button. The last thing is now to start getting votes for your pet. You, your family, friends, and work colleagues can vote every day, and there are some more tips about getting votes on the petmillions.com site http://www.petmillions.com/votinghelp.asp.

Remember, all you need to do is to get into the top 20 entries in any month, and you go thru to the Grand Final! That guarantees you a cash prize, and you could even win the Grand Prize of up to a cool Million!

Good luck!

About the AuthorJosh has written this article for http://www.petmillions.com, the web’s premier online pet contest. Support charities, and win a million! It doesn’t get much better than that!