Dog Vulture question.

[Pete Wells]

When a Cursed Earth dog vulture has a shite, is it white  and liquid like bird shit? Brown and sausage like, like dog shit? Or is it white dog shit like we used to get in the 70s?

Just wondering.

[COMMANDO FORCES]

For a friend!

[mightybren]

I remember white dog shit in the 80s. I don't remember seeing any dog vultures though

[Link Prime]

Doing some research for the next art comp entry, Pete?

[Lobo Baggins]

Carrion scavengers have exceptionally corrosive stomach acid in order to neutralise bacteria that would kill pretty much anything else - so white and runny liquid, basically.

[I, Cosh]

Not 100% sure but here's a strange coincidence.

Most mornings on my ride into work, I pass a pair of cormorants sitting on a riverside piling. Today, just as I was passing, one of them thrust it's posterior into the air and let fly with a jet of steaming shit. I was so impressed, I stopped to send a Whatsapp message about it to my mate.

[sheridan]

There must have been a comedy episode where we found out at some point in the past, surely?  Is there anything like that in Jonathan Livingston Dog-Vulture?

[sheridan]

Not 100% sure but here's a strange coincidence.

Most mornings on my ride into work, I pass a pair of cormorants sitting on a riverside piling. Today, just as I was passing, one of them thrust it's posterior into the air and let fly with a jet of steaming shit. I was so impressed, I stopped to send a Whatsapp message about it to my mate.

Funnily enough, for only the second time in my life (despite having lived near the sea in the past), I got hit by a seagull the Saturday before last.

[ZenArcade]

 !!!  Liquid and squirmy....everyone knows that. Z

[Eamonn Clarke]

They do it in little plastic bags and then fly up to hang them on the bare branches of the scorched cursed earth trees.
Bit like Essex really

[Dash Decent]

I believe that bird excrement is the way it is to enable them to fly - having 'unmixed' liquid urine would make them too heavy sometimes.  If so then presumably the same applies to other flying animals including dog vultures.

Bat guano is similar to bird poo.  Bats are mammals so regardless of whether the dog vulture is more bird than mammal or more mammal than bird, I think we can conclude the answer is the same either way.

Next question: do dog vultures lay eggs or give birth to live young?

[Mardroid]

I suspect they lay eggs. I don't have a scientific basis for this, but it feels right that this is what fictional flying  creatures  would do. I think that since we are mammals ourselves, the concept of  laying eggs is rather alien and therefore fascinating to us, so our writers would likely depict such creatures biased towards their bird physiology, rather than the mammal. But I wouldn't be surprised if they lay a whole litter of eggs, rather than just one or two.   

Here's something I have wondered since I first came across dog vultures:

Are they evolved from vultures, with the aid of cursed earth radiation obviously, or are they evolved from dogs or other wild canines such as coyote?

Or, God forbid, are they literally a hybrid of both? I.e. did the radiation mutate a vulture and a canine so their germ cells became compatible, so that when the forbidden love between Mr. Woofy and Ms Squawk was consummated, a clutch of eggs appeared a few months later.

[Tombo]

There's a comedy Dredd strip from I think the Megazine.  A scrawler is sentenced to community service with a block cleaning firm and that shows a dog-vulture turd as looking like a dog's turd

[Lobo Baggins]

Are they evolved from vultures, with the aid of cursed earth radiation obviously, or are they evolved from dogs or other wild canines such as coyote?

I've always assumed that there was some sort of additional biological mutagenic component to the Atomic Wars which accounts for the human/animal and animal/other animal hybrids that inhabit the Cursed Earth and the Undercity.

[TordelBack]

Agree with Lobo - I think the Wiseheads sequence in Origins makes this explicit, and possibly references to the Great Germ War in The Cursed Earth (Prog 61?).