When we were kids, we had no pets if you don’t count goldfish, and I don’t. My sister, Alice (the Republican), always a troublemaker, was the reason. Alice had asthma and furry little animals made her stop breathing, turn blue and require a trip to the hospital. Once, she didn’t come home for several days and I asked my Mother if she was dead. “Of course not, why are you asking me that?” she replied, a little irritated. “Well,” I said, “if she was, I was wondering if I could have her sled.”
Earlier, until age 4, we lived in Medford, Mass., near Boston, where we had a crabby landlady named Genevieve Carr…or Ma Carr, as we called her. Ma’s one redeeming feature was that she had a beautiful young Irish Setter (named Rusty, of course). Now, some people may tell you that Irish Setters are not brilliant dogs, but that doesn’t include Rusty, who was my best pal and very bright. I played with Rusty every day and refused to move when my Mother told me we were relocating to my Grandmother’s place in Lawrence. To placate me, my Mother told me we could come back and visit Rusty often but that was a big fat lie, an unfortunate prevarication which caused me to mistrust authority figures for the rest of my life.
I finally had a pet when I inherited Baron, the 100-pound Doberman belonging to my second wife, Harolyn Locklair. Baron was sleek, very tall and scary to anyone who didn’t know him and some who did, and he caused me to discover one of the valuable aspects of pet-owning. My house was next to the Subterranean Circus, where I worked until 10 p.m. many nights while my stepson Danny did homework and watched television by himself next door. It was Gainesville’s Age of Young Bums, and one of them decided to duck into my place and watch a little TV. There he was in my favorite reclining chair when I got home, a grubby, overbearded raggedy man intently watching Hill Street Blues.
I yelled something at him, told him to get out of the house. He looked up at me timidly and said, “I would, except for him,” his eyes moving over to Baron, who was lying on top of a sleeping Danny by the TV, staring daggers at the offender, just waiting for him to move. I picked the transgressor up by the collar and escorted him to the door, Baron’s expression being “let me know if you need a little help.” The bum thanked me for not calling the cops and he tipped his fedora to Baron for not devouring him, promising to never return. “VERY good boy!” I told Baron. “What’s going on?” asked a barely conscious Danny, who could sleep through the eruption of Krakatoa.
Since being married to veterinarian Siobhan Ellison, I have never been without pets, although all of them like her better. Right now, we have a dog, two cats, two horses and nine goats. Loosey the cat watches the ABC News with me every night from the right arm of my easy chair, expecting benefits. When you have a cat of your own, it makes you an automatic member of some vague secret society of cat owners who feel free to discuss their feline experiences with you no matter how odd. Like why they think it’s perfectly normal to own fifty or sixty of the critters, most of them with names like Clytemnestra or Oretha of Monrovia, who had previous lives in Eastern Europe or maybe Atlantis. Still, when it comes to pet owners, cat fanciers are not necessarily the wackiest.
Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport
Wallabies are small to medium-sized marsupials similar to kangaroos. In Victoria, Australia, you can own one, as did wallaby-lover Jed Hansen. “Matilda was a great pet,” he recalled, “grew up with dogs, and was similar in behavior. Our dogs loved to play fetch with balls and she learned the game and used to race the dogs to the ball. She would use her paws to fetch and return the ball. She also liked to play tug of war with the dogs. She hissed at strangers and guarded the fence boundary against intruders. One night, some lug climbed the fence with a mind to break into the house and the dogs didn’t hear a thing but Matilda did, and she attacked. Imagine crawling around a strange house at night and all of a sudden there’s a pissed-off wallaby standing in front of you. Middle of the night, we heard loud screaming and jumped up and ran outside. By the time we got there, all we could see was one very irate wallaby covered in blood, not hers, with more of it on the fence and ground. Better than any guard dog, I’d say. At least the bloke had a story to tell his friends.” Watch me wallaby feed, mate, watch me wallaby feed.
Then there’s Sparky, the electric eel. Mark Murray, a bit of a mad scientist thought for some reason that having an electric eel for a pet would be loads of fun, and it was…for Sparky. The eel was quite a character, delighting in playing Hide the Shock with Mark. Sparky would lurk behind the rocks in his ornate tank and often give Mark a little jolt when he reached for him just for the hell of it. Murray just laughed it off until one day while trying to feed his pet, Sparky went into his special Shock Dance and Mark ended up with a face full of eel food and a slight twitch in his right arm. Which is the main reason so many eel owners trade their pets in for guppies.
If you’ve been thinking of giving your wife a camel for her birthday as Noel Weaver did, you might want to consider a trip to the accessories counter instead. The young camel was a present for Pam Weaver’s 60th birthday and at first seemed the perfect gift for an animal lover such as she. Then, the animal started acting funny. The camel would straddle or lie on the family goat, nearly smothering the poor critter. But it appeared that goats weren’t the sole target of the camel’s aggression. Police Constable Craig Gregory, investigating Pam’s sudden death studied her trampled body and opined, “Who knows? It might even have been a sexual thing.” Camel expert Chris Hill unequivocally concluded the animal had carnal intentions. Rival investigator Paddy McHugh thought “The creature was in season and treated Weaver as a competing male.” It’s unclear if any of this happened but it’s certainly what the 300 attendees at her funeral believed. Not so Noel, the responsible party, who addressed the memorial service with a generous heart. “You have to forgive the camel,” he said, “he loved her very much.”
Okay, Scarface---We’ll Bring The Koala
Are fuzzy little eucalyptus-eating koalas in fact critical members of the Australian Mob? Without a doubt. As luck would have it, the fingerprints of koalas are virtually identical to those of humans, even under a microscope. The creatures are famously picky eaters who seek out eucalyptus leaves of a specific age, and their fingerprints must have originated as an adaptation to this task. The loopy, whirling ridges on koala fingers cannot be distinguished from humans even after a detailed microscopic analysis. In her research, Chantel Tattoli, a freelance journalist researching fingerprinting, came across reports of koala prints fooling Australian crime scene investigators.
It was widely known that the notorious Australian crime boss George Freeman never went anywhere without his koalas, enabling him to pollute crime scenes and bumfuzzle investigators. George's gangsters always wore gloves, but their koalas didn’t, and even if they were somehow captured, what would the authorities do with them? There is no justice system for koalas, no koala jails.
Sometimes, however, justice takes its own course. In 1951, a breakaway band of koalas, dissatisfied with their share of the cut from Freeman’s crimes, broke from the gang and went off on their own. Freeman eventually tracked them down and wiped out the lot of them in the infamous St. Mary of the Cross Day Massacre at Cock Wash Creek. George never admitted to the crime but often referred to it as “The day the eucalyptus trees smiled.
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Pomp & Circumstance
Pet owners’ affection for their charges often knows no bounds. “Best kitty in the world!” they swear. “A true genius!” others aver. All well and good, but some people take it a smidge too far. Like these guys:
Colby Nolan, a house cat, was awarded an MBA in 2004 by Trinity Southern University, a Dallas-based diploma mill, sparking a fraud lawsuit by the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office. Colby lived with a deputy AG looking to expose Trinity, and undercover agents were able to get the six-year-old kitty a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration for $299, which is not a bad deal. Of course they had to lie a bit, claiming Colby had previously taken classes at a community college, worked at a fast-food restaurant, babysat and maintained a newspaper route. The agents submitted a faux transcript claiming Colby had a GPA of 3.5.
In December of 2004, the Texas attorney general’s office got a temporary restraining order against the Trinity owners and ordered the school’s assets frozen. In March of 2005, Craig and Alton Poe were assessed fines of over $100,000 and ordered not to market any more fraudulent or substandard parchment or represent their university as being accredited. “Wait a minute,” meowed Colby Nolan, “does this mean my degree isn’t any good?”
Zoe the Cat was a feline owned by psychologist Steve Eichel around 2001. Eichel obtained a psychotherapy certification for Zoe from the American Psychotherapy Association and several similar credentials from other organizations, the purpose for which was not clear. Alas, after Zoe had a shingle made and went to Steve for guidance on advertising, her owner advised her that startup costs would be too great. Said Zoe forlornly, “With a few breaks, I coulda been a contenda.”
In 2009, George, a cat owned by Chris Jackson, a BBC show presenter, was registered as a hypnotherapist after his owner created a fake certificate from a non-existing institution and used it to register with three professional organizations. Felines seeking hypnotherapy flocked to his door and established George as one of England’s leading mesmerists before learning he’d been shut down by authorities. “I’m bumfuzzled,” said one fan. “George had just revealed to me my past life as a shepherd in Galway. What am I gonna do now?”
Oh, To Be An Axolotl….
As any 84-year-old blog writer will tell you, we octogenarians are desperate for role models. Mentors who can keep us healthy, wealthy and wise, or at least help us repair our disintegrating physical shells. Enter the mighty axolotl. The storied "Mexican walking fish," which is actually a salamander, possesses a power like no other---the ability to regenerate its body parts. Unlike most creatures, the axolotl can jump into a phone booth, regenerate not only its limbs but also its spinal cord, heart tissue, even parts of its brain and then emerge ready for action. How does he do this, Mister Science, and why can’t I?
The axolotl's ability stems from its cells’ exceptional capacity to divide and differentiate, which yours can’t do, though scientists are trying to figure out why. Researchers have finally sequenced the axolotl’s giant genome which, at 32 billion base pairs, is ten times larger than yours. Now they can compare genomes across individual animals to discover what part of the genomic code is most conserved, which could someday hold the key to the axolotl’s regenerative powers. Not today, though, Mister 84-year-old blog writer. Keep looking.
That’s all, folks….
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