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Pets
A pet or companion animal is an animal kept primarily for a person’s company or protection, as opposed to working animals, sport animals, livestock, and laboratory animals, which are kept primarily for performance, agricultural value, or research. The most popular pets are noted for their attractive appearances and their loyal or playful personalities.
Pets provide their owners (or guardians[1]) physical and emotional benefits. Walking a dog can supply both the human and pet with exercise, fresh air, and social interaction. Pets can give companionship to elderly adults who do not have adequate social interaction with other people, as well as other people that are living alone. There is a medically approved class of therapy animals, mostly dogs or cats, that are brought to visit confined humans. Pet therapy utilizes trained animals and handlers to achieve specific physical, social, cognitive, and emotional goals with patients.
The most popular pets are likely dogs and cats, but people also keep house rabbits, ferrets; rodents such as gerbils, hamsters, chinchillas, fancy rats, and guinea pigs; avian pets, such as canaries, parakeets, corvids and parrots; reptile pets, such as turtles, lizards and snakes; aquatic pets, such as goldfish, tropical fish and frogs; and arthropod pets, such as tarantulas and hermit crabs.
Some scholars and animal rights organizations have raised concern over pet-keeping with regards to the autonomy and objectification of nonhuman animals.
Midland
Midland is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan in the Tri-Cities region of Central Michigan. It is the county seat of Midland County.[7] The city’s population was 41,863 as of the 2010 census. It is the principal city of the Midland Micropolitan Statistical Area, part of the larger Saginaw-Midland-Bay City Combined Statistical Area. In 2010, Midland was named the no. 4 Best Small City to raise a family in by Forbes magazine.[8]
By the late 1820s, Midland was established as a fur trading post of the American Fur Company supervised by the post at Saginaw. Here agents purchased furs from Ojibwe trappers. The Campau family of Detroit operated an independent trading post at this location in the late 1820s.[9]
The Dow Chemical Company was founded in Midland in 1897, and its world headquarters are still located there. Through the influence of a Dow Chemical plant opening in Handa, Aichi, Japan, Midland and Handa have become sister cities.[10] The Dow Corning Corporation and Chemical Bank are also headquartered in Midland.
In 1969 the city unilaterally defined a Midland Urban Growth Area (MUGA), which at the time was a territory two-miles around the city limits of Midland in an attempt to control urban sprawl. [11] The central policy was that as the only capable supplier of drinking water, the city would provide water services to commnities outside the MUGA such as the nearby village of Sanford, but would not provide to water services to the area within the MUGA without annexation to the city of Midland thus controlling most of the growth in the county. Since 1991 however, the policy has since been revised with a series of Urban Cooperation Act Agreements with surrounding townships which has allowed case-by-case redrawings of the MUGA line to allow Midland to sell water to the surrounding townships without annexation.[11]