"Porcupines used to be confined to the forests but with deforestation, they’ve moved out into saffron farms looking for food."

"Saffron corms are highly nutritious and porcupines love them. Since they destroy the crop at night, farmers can’t do a thing."

Said Mir Hasan Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology, quoted in "How porcupine ‘terror’ is devastating Kashmir’s saffron harvest/Authorities have set up a ‘situation room’ in the quest to stop the rodents raiding crops of ‘red gold’ , devastating farmers’ livelihoods" (London Times).

"A zoo in Denmark is asking the public for donations of unwanted small pets or horses to feed its captive predators."

CBS News reports

The zoo in northern Denmark said that chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs were an important part of the diet of its predators, which need "whole prey," reminiscent of what they would hunt in the wild.

"If you have a healthy animal that has to leave here for various reasons, feel free to donate it to us. The animals are gently euthanized by trained staff and are afterwards used as fodder. That way, nothing goes to waste — and we ensure natural behavior, nutrition and well-being for our predators," Aalborg Zoo said. 

The zoo said it accepts donated rabbits, guinea pigs and chickens on weekdays between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m., but no more than four at a time.

They're eating the dogs! They're eating the cats! No, they are not. It doesn't say dogs and cats. It says "chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs." 

Here's the notice. Is that the zoo's predator or somebody's unwanted cat?

 

That's easy to translate and to see that's a lynx: "Chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs form an important part of the diet of our predators – especially the European lynx, which needs whole prey that resembles what it would naturally hunt in the wild." 

"A large number of animals were also removed from the home, including four Great Danes, three other dogs, a lizard, snakes, several birds, two hamsters and 29 chinchillas..."

"... according to Chief Harkins. Ms. Spencer’s social media is filled with love notes to Mr. Mosely, interspersed with images of her in sundresses posing with Great Danes at dog competitions."

From "Couple Imprisoned Girl for 7 Years and Kept Her in Dog Cage, Police Say/Investigators, who did not identify the teenager, now 18, said they believed she had been sexually abused by her stepfather" (NYT).

I know cruelty toward non-human animals correlates with cruelty toward human beings, but I wonder if an effusive, over-the-top love for non-human animals correlates with cruelty toward human beings. Are there not people who see dogs (or cats) as purer and better than humans and more deserving of loving care? Of course, one's dog will give unconditional love and never utter a word of criticism. Compare a teenager to a dog and — if you are incredibly stupid or deranged — you may descend into a Great-Dane-and-chinchilla-infested hell of the sort devised by Ms. Spencer and Mr. Mosely.

"Most men live lives of quiet desperation," said Joe Rogan.

On the new episode of Duncan Trussell's podcast — audio and transcript here.

The guys were not talking about Henry David Thoreau. They were talking about men struggling to live with women. Here's the context (which begins at 00:57:11):

ROGAN: I had a buddy of mine who was an actor and he got this part, I think it was in a movie. It was good, you know, good little, small part. He was real excited and his girlfriend started crying and she said, when is something gonna happen for me?... That was her response....

TRUSSELL: Jesus, dude. That's so dark.

ROGAN: I think about that guy sometimes. 'cause I was, I was on a, a show with him, one day, just bit part on a show. And I was like, this guy's gonna be a movie star.... But I remember him telling me, he's like, she started crying, man.... She was crying saying, when is it gonna happen to me? So [he says] I don't know what to do. And I was like Captain Fucking Jettison — I'm Captain Fucking Pull the Parachutes — that's me.... So I was like, dude, you gotta bail out.... You gotta bail now. This one, you can't fix that girl....

TRUSSELL: That's so fucked up.

ROGAN: But she's pretty hot.... 

TRUSSELL: Dude, I wouldn't have bailed.

ROGAN: She had the heavies... she had natural heavies.

TRUSSELL: Natural heavies. It's worth it!

"Flow."

I watched this on Max over the weekend and recommend it for the beauty of the visuals — I love the light and the water — and the wordlessness of the storytelling. 

There are various animals — cat, dog, secretary bird, lemur — but I was interested to see the capybara, because I'd just been reading this New Yorker article by Gary Shteyngart, "How the Capybara Won My Heart—and Almost Everyone Else’s/It’s not hard to understand why capys have a cultlike following on Instagram and TikTok. I fell for the giant rodent decades ago."

Looking back at that now, I see that Shteyngart discusses the movie "Flow":

Show Redditors finding a happy place to escape from Trump.

 

Link. Who would have thought, back when GWB was the hated devil, that he would one day provide solace to those who were agonizing over a far more hateful devil?

I like this picture someone put up. Do you see who it is? At first, I thought: LBJ??!? But he's too short:

"In recent weeks, so many people have called Bill Crain’s Hudson Valley farm rescue to surrender their ducks and chickens — many purchased at the height of the pandemic lockdown..."

"... that he finally marched into a local farm store and demanded to speak to a manager. His plea: Stop selling chicks and ducklings.... 'It’s a crisis that people are abandoning these animals,' he said. One of the slim silver linings of the pandemic’s earliest days was the addition of animals to many families. Some people, decamping from virus-besieged cities for the countryside, stoked a craze for backyard fowl.... Socially distant and lonely, or with kids to entertain, many cleared pet store shelves of gerbils and lizards, chinchillas and snakes....Why families are holding onto cats and dogs but relinquishing smaller animals like guinea pigs may have to do with human attachment, several experts said. On Staten Island, Jade said she was able to bear parting with her guinea pig because Honey was less interactive than her dog and cats. 'They look adorable, but I think people have this misguided conception they are going to be able to provide this companionship and fill a void that the are looking for,' said Allie Taylor, the president of Voters for Animal Rights.... On Wednesday, a box containing 22 guinea pigs of all ages was found abandoned in the lobby of a Staten Island apartment building...."

From "The Great Guinea Pig Giveaway Has Begun/From geckos to chinchillas, small pets were a pandemic balm. Now shelters across the country say they are being surrendered" (NYT).

The solution is, clearly, to eat these animals. You don't need a rescue sanctuary. You need meat processors. Ducks and chickens are obviously edible. Eat them, and the problem is gone.

But what about the guinea pigs? What about them?! Look it up. They're especially good. They've even — like pigs/pork and cattle/beef — got their own name when they are converted into meat: cuy (or cavy).

Here's a Modern Farmer article, "Is America Ready for Farm-to-Table Guinea Pig? The ubiquitous kids' starter pet / lab animal could soon be raised at a farm near you":

"I saw a bald eagle in the wild a few years ago, and to be honest, it looked, even as it flew over the snakey river and the murmuring pines and the hemlocks—Canadian trees, according to Longfellow, whose 'Evangeline,' is a poem of exile I adore—like a bigot."

Sentence of the Day. 

Sentence of the Day is a declaration I make now and then — certainly not every day — when I encounter a complicated and weird sentence. 

That's in "Of Mice and ICE" (at the Poetry Foundation). The author is Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, an English professor at the University of Toronto, who teaches poetry and postcolonial theory and literature. She was writing in 2018, when the ICE problems were Trump's. 

I got there as a result of googling "beastie," a word I used in the previous post, about a fox, and have used now and again and again on this blog. 

A "beastie" is "A little animal; an endearing form of beast n. Also applied jocularly to insects. (Originally Scottish)" (OED). The oldest usage is in the Robert Burns poem that is referenced in that Poetry Foundation piece with the complicatedly weird sentence. 

Here's the Burns poem with "beastie" in the first line — "Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie."

Here's Longfellow's "Evangeline" — which begins "This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks...."

What other sentences have caused me to declare "Sentence of the Day"? There was this, in 2005:

"Plump couches, radical books, free WiFi, $5 microbrews, killer sound system, a menu that runs from catfish and collard greens to peanut butter, banana and honey sandwiches: a cool, comfortable, slightly bourgy haven for a hot, bothered, slightly bourgy peace movement."

This, in 2017: 

"It is a mildly disconcerting experience, seeing conscious evolutions and experiments in style; baroque, ornate, urgent, dyspeptic; the repetitions and modalities at various points and the stylized categorizations and oppositions – prudes and perverts, monsters and insanity, measures and tests, inquiries and examinations, bodies and boys, punishment, pleasure, asceticism, suicide; the going back over old themes in new ways; how the old becomes new but how the new can never entirely disown the old; the desire for both fidelity in the evocation of moods and worlds, but not necessarily strict historical accuracy, whatever that might in the end be taken to mean; and the desire to write all this up somehow as a history of the present." 

And here's another 2017 example: 

"You know like any face I made when I was young was adorable and now if I’m worried there’s this pathetic gleam of how do I look and yet we love an old dog or an old leather couch so why not an old female arm or an ass all its own, speaking powerfully shabbily in time."

"Denver first in U.S. to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms."

The Denver Post reports.

"Psilocybin possession would remain illegal but would become police’s 'lowest law-enforcement priority.'"

So... it's not like marijuana. You won't be able to go to Denver and buy these mushrooms at the mushroom store. It's just that if you have them, they want you to know they'll leave you alone. It's not mushroom tourism time. Yet.

Supporters extolled emerging research showing potential health benefits with psychedelic mushrooms.... Last fall, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted psilocybin “breakthrough therapy” designation for its potential to help with treatment-resistant depression, a status that speeds up the development and review process for a medicine containing the substance.

It might work! Come on, Denver, give us a chance. I know you've got marmots too. I have seen the tourists toying with them in Rocky Mountain National Park. I'm thinking of Denver restaurants with marmot-kidney-and-psilocybin sushi. At least let us try!

"The town of Tsagaannuur... was recently sealed off following the deaths of a local couple who contracted the plague from eating the raw meat and organs of an infected marmot..."

"... Some Mongolians believe eating the rodent’s uncooked innards to be 'very good for health,'... The husband and wife reportedly ate the kidney, gall bladder and stomach of the creature.... The 38-year-old man, who worked as a border agent, and his wife, 37, died of multiple organ failure caused by septicemic plague....  Deaths caused by the plague — a disease carried by small rodents that was responsible for wiping out a third of Europe’s population nearly 700 years ago and killing millions in China, Hong Kong and nearby port cities in the 1800s — are much more rare in modern times because of antibiotics, according to the CDC. But reports of people getting infected have continued to pop up around the world, including in the United States, William L. Gosnell, a program director with the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s department of tropical medicine, medical microbiology and pharmacology, told The Post. 'The bacteria maintains itself out in the wild in these animal populations,' said Gosnell, who is affiliated with the university’s John A. Burns School of Medicine. The plague is most commonly transmitted to humans by fleas that become infected from biting rodents carrying the yersinia pestis bacteria, which causes the disease..... Gosnell said he has never heard of a person getting the plague from eating raw rodent meat, but added that 'it wouldn’t be surprising. Any time you eat something raw, there’s always a chance for picking up all sorts of different pathogens,' he said. 'There are so many other zoonotic infections they could have picked up, unfortunately due to the locale, it just happened to be plague.... If you cook it, the bacteria is dead, you don’t got a problem,' he said. 'Some things you don’t eat raw.'"

WaPo reports.

Sometimes the precise thing you think you need to do for a particular desired goal is an easily avoided thing that is precisely what takes you as far as possible from that goal. In this case, the thing was eating raw marmot organs and the goal was good health. It's completely easy to cook the organs before eating them and cooking them would have destroyed the plague bacteria that killed them, but they seem to have thought that the rawness of the organs was the key to good health, the extreme opposite of death.

I hope it's not disrespectful to the couple who died — I'm sorry they died — to offer their story as a pattern of human decisionmaking. You're hopeful about an exciting idea — like eating raw marmot organs is good for your health — and you do it because you want what the idea says you'll get, so you do it, changing your good-enough condition into something much worse. It's the difference between do something and first do no harm. You might never consider eating raw marmot organs, but I bet that, many times, you've eaten the metaphorical raw marmot organs or voted for somebody who promised he'd make us all eat metaphorical raw marmot organs.

"But would we have grown this close if we hadn’t experienced the medical emergency that pushed us into marriage? I doubt it."

"Lupus woke me up and forced me to take a leap of faith with Chris. And it taught me this: Being married to someone you love is a lot better than being married to your own cynicism."

The last few lines of a NYT "Modern Love" essay by a woman who considered herself "way too progressive for such a conventional arrangement" but suddenly married her boyfriend when she had an acute health crisis and wanted to get on his insurance. She needed to go straight to the hospital, but they detoured to city hall first and got married.

You might remember that back in July 2008, when I was single and had been single for many years, I did a Bloggingheads in which I talked about having health insurance through work that would cover a spouse, making my pay package less valuable than it would be if I were married. I added, "I've often thought I should just charitably marry someone... I'd just marry them to be nice..."

For the connection between that diavlog and my marriage to Meade (which began in August 2009), read "Flashback '08: The Audacity Althousity of Hope." Excerpt (quoting Meade):

Gee, I'm single now, happily single, and thought I'd just remain that way.

But considering all the benefits, I guess I'd really be a fool not to take a close look if Althouse were to, just out of niceness, propose to pity-marry me.

What could I offer in return? Let's see - I could prune those redbuds, take out the garbage, trap squirrels. 

That's a lot of trapped rodents ago.

"Standoff in Boulder, Colo.: Prairie dogs hold Buddhist college at bay."

Headline in the L.A. Times.

"If you replaced the 'dog' in prairie dog with 'rat,' would they elicit the same emotion?...I wonder," asked Bill Rigler, spokesman for Naropa University, in what the L.A. Times suggests is sort of kind of a Zen koan.

For years, Naropa has battled some 150 persistent prairie dogs over 2.5 acres of prime real estate on its Nalanda campus.... The struggle is especially poignant in this famously liberal college town, where Buddhists and prairie dogs occupy exalted positions within the local ecosystem....

"We bought this land in 2004 to expand on and the first prairie dogs showed up two years later," Rigler said.

The Buddhists got there first, and — on Buddhist principles — did nothing. The doing of nothing was a nice ecosystem for the "dogs" (which I originally typo'd "gods"):

The industrious rodents swiftly built a prairie dog town of some 200 burrows extending from the campus parking lot to busy Arapahoe Avenue to almost the front door. Plans to expand classroom space stalled, and in 2011, Naropa began searching for ways to relocate the animals.

Four years and $100,000 later, little has changed. Trapping and moving the rodents is easy enough; finding someone who wants them is not. 

I think a lot of people who set "have a heart" traps would be surprised to know that it's illegal to move the animals elsewhere and just set them free, without permission. (And I hope you won't hate me — have a heart! — for burdening you with the knowledge of which you were once free. Who can free you from the trap that is knowledge? Even with the door left open — you're free to seek to believe what is not true — you find it hard to scamper out and run wild in the landscape/parking lot that's just inches away.)

The Buddhists seemed to have decided to kill the "dogs" — I typo'd "gods" again! — inciting protest. On Facebook: "Mommy, I heard that Naropa University is going to have all of us killed" and:



As Rigler put it, quoted in the above-linked L.A. Times article:

"All of sudden it was, 'The Buddhists want to kill the prairie dogs,' but we had no intention of killing them," said Rigler, who isn't a Buddhist. "The very act of applying for a [lethal control] permit triggers an open comment period, which gives everyone the opportunity to say, 'I have a site for relocation,' or put forward other ideas."

This sounds like the doctrine of double effect. Your desire or intention is not to kill the animals... but they may end up dead as you pursue what you do want and intend. The college wants to relocate the prairie dogs and the threat of killing them is a way to get somebody to step up and accept them onto their property. Another way to think of it is like this:



It's a threat. Let us use your land or we'll kill these "dogs."

A coyote trotted down our street at 5:06 AM.

Never seen that before around here. Have seen foxes. I hope they, the coyotes, like the foxes, eat chipmunks.

Backyard carnage.

Meade saw a hawk swoop by with a furry creature in its claws. We were afraid it was Blondie (our favorite squirrel). Meade leaned out the upstairs window for quite a while capturing the carnage. I edited it down to 28 seconds. Something happens at 20 that made me laugh. And, relax, it's not Blondie. It's one of our many chipmunks, none of which have names.



I asked Meade to name the chipmunk and he said "Mick McChipmunk." He named the hawk "Dick Cheney."

"The moment that hamster was handed off to a screaming girl in a harsh, frenzied environment was likely the moment it gazed at the short path to its doom."

Predicted doom met.

"I have to admit that while my politics generally tend to the liberal option, on this one issue of chipmunks, I can see the NRA point of view."

"Part of me wants these suckers to die."

Says Mayor Citizen Dave. Also: "I love tomatoes enough to rethink my concerns about global climate change."

Self-interest. It's baked in. 

"The prairie vole is a notable animal model for its monogamous sexual fidelity, since the male is usually faithful to the female, and shares in the raising of pups."

"Another species from the same genus, the meadow vole, has promiscuously mating males, and scientists have changed adult male meadow voles' behavior to resemble that of prairie voles in experiments in which a single gene was introduced into the brain via a virus."

Okay, mad scientists and sensible-policy imaginationists, spin out your proposals and fantasies. Give me some long views of the landscape.

A man who saved a mouse from a cat is now "at death's door" with the plague.

In Oregon.

What sort of place should you want to live in as you get old? A place with "non-Western ideas about healing"?

From a discussion with an architect (Wid Chapman) and a gerontologist (Jeffrey P. Rosenfeld):

Along with grab bars (which are frequently mentioned in your book, though none is visible in the pictures), what makes a house suitable for aging?...

Mr. Rosenfeld: When you mentioned grab bars, it reminded me that most of the homes in the book speak to a Western medical aesthetic, but a few support non-Western ideas about healing. There’s one in particular, Bioscleave, in East Hampton, N.Y., that builds on the idea of reversible destiny: that the home can challenge and stimulate inhabitants to keep them youthful. Everything about that home is colorful. It’s angular. It’s full of intentional surprises and quirks.

I’m glad you mentioned Bioscleave. I wanted to ask about the sloping, textured floors the architects designed to make walking more of an “adventure.” Isn’t that the kind of adventure that can lead to a broken hip?

Mr. Rosenfeld: The house is occupied by a person who lives there part time. A mature person. I haven’t dared ask her age, but I can say that neither of her hips is broken.

Colorful, angular... stimulate and challenge... this made me think of crib toys. They're thinking of old people like babies. I found that repulsive. We've thought a lot about moving to a simpler house, which would also be the house where we'd grow old — hopefully, extremely old. (I see that in the discussion, the gerontologist says he's "beginning to think about how [he and his wife are] going to deal with our inevitable aging." But getting old is not inevitable. It's preferable!)

What Meade and I have talked about wanting is a completely uncluttered, cleanly modern place. I don't look to the walls and floors for stimulation. I want a place that doesn't distract and bother me while I'm doing what I want to do, like read or talk to somebody.

Bioscleave sounds utterly insulting, like old people are babies. Then I looked it up. My lord! It's like old people are hamsters!



Ridiculous! Hilarious! And who cleans that place? Especially of all the blood.

I'm looking at that word "Bioscleave." "Bios" is the Greek word for life in the sense of one's life, course or way of living, lifetime. "Cleave" is a word that famously has 2 meanings. It's an auto-antonym. It can refer to clinging — let's say, to life — or to separation — which, in the case of life, would refer to death.

Take a look at that Bioscleave again. If they try to take you there... get out. I don't want your Hamster Habitat of Death. And I'm not charmed by your burbling about "non-Western" ideas. I don't want your Bioscleave just like I don't want your acupuncture. I want an ultra-Western ultra-modern house to go with my ultra-Western modern medicine.

Grizzly bear kills a man in Yellowstone Park.

The description comes out:

Marylyn Matayoshi told park officials that she and her husband were hiking back to their car along the Wapiti Lake Trail about 11 a.m. when they saw the bear and two cubs about 100 yards away. [Yellowstone Supt. Dan] Wenk said the couple had just emerged from a dense area of lodgepole pines into a broad meadow where the bears were.

The couple backed away, and then turned in the direction they had come. When they looked back, the grizzly was charging them, Wenk said. Matayoshi yelled to his wife to run, and she took shelter behind a fallen tree at the side of the trail, according to officials.

Wenk said the sow reached Brian Matayoshi first, fatally biting and clawing him. The bear then approached Marylyn Matayoshi, and picked her up. Wenk said it is likely that because she was playing dead, the bear moved on.

It was the first killing by a bear in Yellowstone since 1986, and the bear was protecting her cubs.

As long as we're talking about Yellowstone, here are some lush photographs of Yellowstone. I especially like the ones of Grand Prismatic Spring. Generally, I prefer landscape photographs to photographs of animals. People get strangely excited about seeing animals in Yellowstone. I mean, a chipmunk begging for food? A coyote running through grass? You probably have these things in your home town. As for the bigger creatures... I'd leave them alone.