The Department of Well-Being and Safety is putting a positive spin on this year’s long, cold Winter.

The way the DWBS sees it, the longer the weather stays cold, the less likely it is that Park Animals will contract Small Ball Fever.

“It’s all a matter of numbers,” said Cornelius Kakapo, the DWBS Director of Public Relations, in an interview with The Mammalian Daily this morning.

“The later the arrival of Spring, the smaller the number of small balls that will enter The Park. Hence, the lower the number of cases of Small Ball Fever that we will have to treat,” he said.

Every year, the DWBS monitors the influx of small balls. This year, Kakapo says, the number has decreased significantly and the Department believes this is due to the late onset of warm weather.

The balls, which are known outside The Park as “golf” balls, harbour the deadly Small Ball Fever virus inside their dimpled surface. The SBF virus is spread when it leaks through cracks in the ball’s surface and makes contact with mucosa in the mouth or nose. Symptoms of the infection include extremely high fever, chills, aching muscles, and, eventually, pulmonary dysfunction. All Animals are at risk of developing Small Ball Fever but some groups of Animals, including Squirrels, Donkeys, the elderly, and the infirm, are at particular risk.

Despite repeated attempts and the use of a variety of methods, he DWBS has been unable to contain the number of balls that enter The Park each year.

“Small balls are the bane of our existence. We can contain them inside The Park, but there is nothing we can do to restrict their number outside our borders,” Kakapo says.

The Park will open a number of pop-up clinics for the benefit of hibernators and estivators, the Department of Well-Being and Safety announced today.

At a press conference held this morning, DWBS Director of Public Relations Cornelius Kakapo confirmed that at least five clinics for estivators will open, beginning on May 15. Although the locations have not yet been established, Kakapo said they will be “strategically placed throughout The Park” in order to allow all Animals to avail themselves of the services the clinics will provide.

“Studies have shown that pre-hibernation and pre-estivation check-ups are of tremendous benefit. We want to encourage all our hibernators and estivators to take advantage of these new state-of-the-art facilities,” Kakapo said.

The clinics will be staffed by professionals from The Park Hospital for the Afflicted and Infirm, as well as by private practitioners.

With the Winter Solstice celebrations just a few days away, experts in the field of mental health have turned their attention to one of the season’s biggest scourges: Non-Hibernators’ Guilt.

“After Extinction Anxiety, Non-Hibernators’ Guilt is the most common psychological condition we see in the Winter season,” says Dr. Gudrun L. Gibbon, a Park psychotherapist who will also serve as a staff member at The Park’s first Extinction Anxiety Clinic when it opens in January.

The condition, also known as NHG, can affect Animals who remain awake and active during the Winter season, but who have close friends and associates who are hibernators. NHG-affected Animals experience a deep sense of guilt and anxiety, concurrently with happiness, when they attend Park celebrations and important events in the Winter.

The Winter Solstice celebrations, in particular, are difficult for Park Animals. It is around that time that symptoms of NHG begin to occur, says Gibbon.

“These are the first celebrations of the Winter season, the first celebrations that are attended only by non-hibernators. In a way, they set the tone for the rest of the season. The amount of stress this puts on our non-hibernators has, I believe, been underestimated in the past,” she says.

While statistics show the number of Animals treated for NHG rising, experts in the field say the condition is not always easy to diagnose.

“Many of the symptoms of NHG are similar to those of other psychological conditions,” says Dr. Chloris Cougar, a researcher at the University of West Terrier’s School of Medicine.

In fact, some of NHG’s symptoms look remarkably similar to those associated with Feline Unipolar Depressive Disorder (FUDD), one of Dr. Cougar’s areas of expertise. It’s important, however, that we not confuse NHG with other conditions, Dr. Cougar stresses.

“There is some preliminary evidence that suggests a connection between NHG and Sad Cow Disease (SCD), but this is very, very early research and we have to be very careful about making assumptions based on it. SCD is a more complex condition and is much more difficult to treat,” she says.

She likens NHG, on the other hand, to “a stronger variation of normal.”

“It’s natural for Animals to miss those close to them who are in hibernation, especially during times of celebration. But some Animals experience this temporary loss more profoundly than others. Those are the Animals we are concerned about,” she says.

While acknowledging that much further research is needed, the two experts offered this advice, in the meantime, for non-hibernating Park Animals:

“Try to enjoy the Winter holiday season by understanding the dictates of nature. Your hibernating compatriots are not missing out on the fun; instead, they are doing what is necessary for their survival. Soon enough, they’ll be among us again, celebrating other joyful occasions.”

Animals achieve lower scores on intelligence tests after they have spent a significant length of time in the company of Humans, say the results of a study conducted by the Cognitive and Experimental Psychology division at the University of West Terrier’s Department of Psychology.

The research study, which involved 5,000 Animals from inside and outside The Park, was conducted over a period of three years by UWT psychology professor and lead researcher, Dr. Luule Aednik. The full results will appear in the September issue of the prestigious Journal of Experimental and Reactive Psychology (JERP).

Supported in full by University research funds, the study concludes that prolonged amounts of time spent in close contact with Humans causes a “numbing effect” on the brains of the members of many species.

“There is a deficit after a certain length of time,” said Aednik in an interview with The Mammalian Daily.

“The most shocking result in the testing was the loss of recognition of some of the characteristics of one’s own species. We saw some types of species-specific behaviour almost disappear, often after only a few months. Animals lost basic skills; some had even forgotten how to secure their own food,” she said.

Though the impetus for the study was purely academic, Aednik believes the results have more widespread implications.

“I think they explain some of the problems that some Animals have had in adapting to life in The Park,” she said.

With their friends neatly tucked in and enjoying a peaceful estivation, The Park’s hibernating communities have joined together to fight calendar harmonization, which they believe is at least partly responsible for the rise in deaths from premature awakening in their community.

“We wanted to wait until after the official estivation date to launch our fight,” said Oliver S.P. Franklin, head of the Confederation of Ground Squirrels (CGS) whose group initiated the action. “We didn’t want to alarm our friends or disturb their tranquility.”

Together, the hibernating groups plan to challenge the law known as “The Calendar Harmonization Act” in the hope of having it repealed.

“We’re confident that if we succeed in demonstrating the harm it [The Act] has done to our communities, the Archons will consider reinstating our original calendar,” Franklin says.

See also:
Archons to move forward on calendar harmonization
Thousands rally against calendar harmonization

To that end, the hibernators have enlisted the help of a group of researchers and statisticians, including Dr. Jagger Zebu, Professor of Mammalian Medicine at the University of West Terrier and one of the authors of a recent report that documents the rise in the incidence of deaths due to premature awakening among The Park’s hibernating citizens.

Premature awakening from hibernation is defined by The Park’s Department of Well-Being and Safety (DWBS) as a situation in which an Animal awakens from hibernation 3-4 weeks before the official date. The situation results in death 99% of the time, as Animals are often unable to find adequate sustenance so early in the season.

According to the report, deaths from premature awakening have risen 30% in the last two years.

“Coincidentally, that is the same length of time the new calendar has been in operation,” says Cormac Nuttallii, a member of the Idiosyncratic Hibernators of The Park (IHOP) and a vocal critic of calendar harmonization. His group has joined forces with the other hibernating communities to “see that justice is served,” he says.

A little more than two weeks before the official date of estivation, The Department of Well-Being and Safety (DWBS) has released a report on the health of The Park’s hibernating communities.

Entitled, “Premature Awakening: The Dawn of an Epidemic?” the report relates the results of a two-year study of the incidence of premature awakening among The Park’s hibernating citizens. The study was conducted by the DWBS in collaboration with the University of West Terrier’s School of Medicine and the Park General Hospital for the Afflicted and Infirm.

According to the report, deaths from premature awakening have risen 30% in the last two years. This past Winter alone, several hundred Ground Squirrels were found dead outside their burrows weeks before the official end of hibernation.

“We assume they were looking for food and became disoriented,” says Oliver S.P. Franklin, head of the Confederation of Ground Squirrels. “It was a real blow to the community.”

While the report documents the rise in incidence, it offers no definitive answers as to the cause.

“This is just the beginning,” says Dr. Jagger Zebu, Professor of Mammalian Medicine at the University of West Terrier and one of the authors of the report.

“The matter requires much further study before we can be confident of an explanation,” he says.

Sighs matter!

Such is the opinion of researchers at the University of West Terrier’s School of Medicine, after they analyzed data from three extensive surveys of Animal morbidity and mortality.

The team of investigators, whose medical specialties include cardiology, trichology, neurology, and gastroenterology, examined the health outcomes of twenty-eight species of Animals in The Park. The results of the retrospective study will appear in their entirety this Autumn in the prestigious journal, Sanitas.

“This study is the first of its kind to examine sighs as a marker for disease,” said Dr. Adelaide Antelope, who heads the group of researchers.

A total number of four hundred and twenty-five Animals participated in the survey, which were conducted at UWT over a fifteen-year period. Although previous generations of physicians believed sighs to be of diagnostic and prognostic significance, that theory had fallen out of fashion by the year 8 AZ.

“Even though we continued to note sighs in the history-taking,” Dr. Antelope said, “the significance was more as an attendant behaviour rather than as a sign of more serious disease.”

According to Dr. Yazmina Yak, a senior member of the research team, sighs became an issue in the study when one particular investigator noted the frequency with which the term, “idiopathic exhalation” was used in the description of the mental state of patients who were found to suffer from serious illness.

Also among the group’s findings Dr. Antelope says, is a correlation between sighing and dying (see Figure 1 below).

“When we took a closer look at the outcomes of the sighers, we were astonished by what appeared to be an almost direct relationship,” he said.

Indeed, the study showed that Animals who presented with sighs and at least two other disease symptoms stood a seventy-two per cent greater chance of having an illness that could trigger death.

That statistic alone, says the research group, is enough to make any Animal sigh.