Sunday stamps: 'C' is for 'Cavia' and 'Capibara'

In common Dutch, the guinea pig is named 'cavia'. Which is also part of the scientific name, Cavia porcellus.
A nowadays old-fashioned Dutch word for cavia is 'Guinees biggetje', which means 'Guinea piglet'. However, the animal is no family of pigs, nor origins from Guinea, but from the Andes mountains.

In English, the term 'guinea pig' is also used as a metaphor for a subject of scientific experiments. In contrary in Dutch, an other animal is the unlucky one in common language, namely the 'proefkonijn' ('experiment rabbit').

A large cousin of the cavia is the capibara, whose name also starts with the letter 'C'. In English it is spelled with a 'y', in Dutch we use an 'i' instead.
I would love to have a capybara stamp in hands, but alas I haven't. Fortunately I found on the internet several nice pictures, among them these two from lands they are living in, these largest rodents in the world:




Curious to know what other stamp lovers have in mind when thinking of the letter 'c'? Check the delightful Sunday stamps site and the links mentioned there!

Sunday stamps: Pets

This Sunday Stamps' theme is 'Pets'.

I would have loved to show two stamps about cavias (guinea pigs), because we had two cavias at home. Alas I must say 'had', because one of our dear house members, cavia Cato, sadly has passed away last Friday. Thus widowing her companion Senior.

As far as I know I've seen only two cavia stamps. Due to some suboptimal functioning desktop/scanner I cannot scan them for this Sunday's post. But fortunately there also are links to them:
- One cavia stamp is part of a recently issued USPS stamp sheet. Fortunately FinnBadger has showed this beautiful stamp on his website, click here to find it.
- The other is a personalized stamp, I made via PostNL 'personal stamps' website of our very first, also late, cavia Snuitje. You can find the stamp sheet on bottom of a previous post about pets in 2014 (click here).

Meanwhile I had the following 'chaincards' already scanned. The theme of this chaincard project also was 'pets', and the cards traveled via Netherlands, Taiwan, Azerbeidjzan, Singapore, Russia. It gives a nice insight in which animals are considered pets worldwide: especially the Singaporese and Taiwanese stamps surprised me, as most Dutch have cats, dogs, rodents and goldfish or guppys as pets. About the horse stamps was some discussion, whether they are pets or not, but because we liked the images too, they also were approved to use for the ones who wanted them.



The card shown above is from the Russian member, and returned home after I had added my stamps.



This card was mine, arriving home after having been traveling through all mentioned countries.

And the following card - from the Singaporese member - took a lot of extra travel time. The rubberstamp print tells us all about the adventurous reason why:



See more great pet stamps at this Sunday's Sunday Stamps site and follow the links mentioned there.