his is Pepper on the left and Toby on the right. Pepper is the teacher, Susan's dog. Pepper is a wonderful labrador/heeler mix. She is the most obedient dog I have ever met. She always holds still so she's a pretty good practice dog. Because of this, she gets lots of shots and blood drawn on the days we do that. Poor, Pepper, but amazingly she's ok with it. Toby is another story, he belongs to Kaitlyn, another student in the class. He loves to run around as fast as he can, but he slips a lot on the floor, so he doesn't get very far or very fast.
This lovely bird is Chloe. She is a cockatoo and is our class pet. She lives at the school, except for weekends where she goes home with Susan. She was adopted by Susan when her family couldn't keep her, she has been through 7 different families. She gets pretty loud sometimes, but you get used to it. She would bite a lot when we first got her, but she's been trained really well here at our school. Me and her are buds.
This is Ladybug, another of Susan's dogs. She is only 10 weeks old and is a very intelligent little border collie. Did you know that border collies are the smartest dogs in the world? Well, now you do. Bug is definitely a puppy, which you can tell as she books it around the classroom. She also tries to "herd" the cats, other dogs, or us students to entertain herself. She's gonna be a working dog on Susan's farm.
This macaw is awesome. I don't know his real name because everyone calls him Big Bird. I just know that that isn't his real name. He belongs to Susan. I felt pretty cool having him on my arm, it's kind of scary having something that big so close to you. He likes to laugh at people, but he doesn't talk much, which is too bad.
Farmer Susan had a farm and on that farm she had some emus and those emus had some fun and made baby emus and Susan brought them to class. These are the baby emus! They were really cute, but made a ton of noise. I guess that's just a baby thing though... ;) This picture was about a month ago and Susan says now they are the size of turkeys and still have their stripes.
This is me and my guinea pig, Chuck! My brothers have so kindly named him Chuck Norris. Lame. I adopted him from the Cache Humane Society, which is awesome. He was really people shy and quiet when I first got him a little over a month ago, but I've got him to come out if his little piggy shell. I love my piggy! He gets to come to class with me once a week and he loves all the attention he gets.
This is Natty, the cat that hates the world. She loves to be petted, but if any other animal comes close while she's being stroked, she attacks them. Sometimes this is another person. She's weird. Well, here she is in a cat back hanging from a grooming stand. Wow. It was pretty hilarious! The new kids were learning how to restrain a cat, including getting them into cat bags. Justin, a student that recently finished the program, put Natty in a bag real quick and hung her up. Sadly, no one felt sorry for the cat. She was there for at least 20 minutes.
So today in class I got injured. We were popping the anal glands of a miniature pincher in class, he was a really fat dog named Trucker. His claws had just been trimmed, but were still very long because his owners don't take good care of his nails. (the more often you trim a dog's nails, the shorter you can cut them without drawing blood.) But he really didn't like his anal sacs getting popped, they were really bad, and I was the unlucky one restraining him. My arm was scratched up really bad. Susan told me to go use the first aid kit in her office to take care of myself. I couldn't find any just normal big band-aids, so I improvised. I got made fun of a lot after that. And all this happened in the first half hour of class.I love my school.
