Monthly Archives: April 2011

o que não mata engorda

As the Portuguese say, what doesn’t kill you makes you fatter. It’s kind of like stronger, but much more Portuguese and by that I mean much more about drinking and eating custard pastries.

I’ve been thinking recently about unlikely love and when it ends. Human/human. Human/nonhuman. And then I saw the story of Maria the toulouse goose and her man, a retired Echo Park resident named Dominic Ehrler.

A year ago Maria started following Dominic around the park. She’s defended him from dogs and even tries to fly home with him when he gets on his scooter.

“When she first started following me around like a dog I got goose bumps,” Dominic told the LA Times. “David Foster, one of the parks people here, finally introduced me to her. He said, ‘You know you’re being stalked! Her name is Maria.’”

Flickr photo via LaCaMod

CBS News made a cheesy and yet wonderful video: http://www.wimp.com/gooseman.

And in February a group of fans apparently sang to her. “Maria” of course.

As for how the friendship has changed Dominic, “I quit eating poultry,” he said. “I used to think birds were dumb.”

Footnote: It turns out that Maria is actually a male. And so Dominic is now calling him Mario.

what’s in Jayzee’s stomach

What used to be in there was a balloon. And some driftwood. Here’s a close up.

Jayzee is an elephant seal pup currently in residence at the Marine Mammal Center in California. He came in for malnutrition, weighing only 34 pounds. When he gains enough weight and learns how to fish, the Center staff will heave him into a metal crate, lug it down to the beach, and let him go.

Balloons that go up, come down somewhere else. If you’re an English girl named Laura Buxton, your balloon might wind up with someone with your very same name and very same age. But if it doesn’t, it can land in the ocean. Where the balloons may confuse sea turtles, sea lions or seals who think that they’re jellyfish or something else delicious. Release something else instead.

Everyone followed the rules

Thank you Joanna Ebenstein (of the Morbid Anatomy Library) and the Coney Island Museum for letting me talk about animal madness

…in honor of Topsy, electrocuted at Coney Island in 1903.

Music for Animals

Most people who make music for animals today think they prefer classical.

I don’t buy it.

Which is why I’m on my way to Boston, together with Grass Widow, to find out what gorillas like.

Hopefully it’s them.

And on Fader.

who are you and what are you doing here

One thing about having a blog that no one warns you about is that, even with the numskull I-know-only-enough-internet-to-use-a-prefab-blog-platform you can still see how people find you that visit your site. Don’t worry, I can’t see WHO you are. I can only see if you found this place using keyword searches. But here’s the thing…Ever since I posted about what I like to call anthropomorpha-porn and the site www.catswholooklikehitler.com the daily searches that are bringing people here (from places like google.com) are “rabbits who look like Hitler” “animals who look like Hitler” “cats who look like Hitler” “llama hitler” and more. It’s a like an Ark for the Third Reich. Whoever you are, I am both perplexed and fascinated by you. It also reminds me a bit of college.

My sophomore and junior years I lived in a house of women who loved to throw parties with ice luges and barbque. We had luaus in February in upstate NY and holiday parties that lasted for days. I remember most of it. Often though, late at night, a random man in a cow suit would show up. He wasn’t invited. He was much older. Sometimes he came with a young man with a mohawk. I think he drank our empties that weren’t totally empty. And bummed cigarettes. I am not yet sure, unnamed Hitler-animal masses, if you are like the man in the cow suit. But I intend to find out.

Coney and the Congress for Curious Peoples

Dear New Yorkers, if you’re in town this week get yourself to the Congress for Curious Peoples on Coney Island. There is a bearded lady who juggles machetes. A killer clown named Koko. Tons of lectures about fireworks, science as spectacle and a show by the world’s smallest fire-eating lady.

If you stay through the afternoon on Sunday you’ll find me talking about Tip the elephant. And probably John Daniel the gorilla too.

Time Out NY lists their top five things to see at the Congress.

Yesterday. On Craiglist Missed Connections.

I am so tempted to write this man. Even though I have no dog.

Disapproving Rabbits and Cats that Look like Hitler

Alfie, a disapproving rabbit.

Sometimes you build what you think is going to be the best missile defense system EVER and instead you end up with rabbits who look at you with disdain. Or bulldogs wearing sunglasses. Or squirrels with casts. Or cats with tiny Fuhrer staches.

It amazes me how much of the internets are dedicated to odd animal phenomena. It’s almost as if America’s Funniest Home Videos is actually the wizard behind the curtain of Internet 1.0. Throughout the early nineties I watched that show with my brother. And there were always animals doing things like running through the legs of toddlers, knocking them on their diapered butts, and then sliding down waterslides to land in plastic pools. Only to shake off the water on mom’s new rug. No one was hurt. We laughed. It all seems so innocent now.

Now, that is, that we have Disapproving Rabbits, Cats that look like Hitler, Pets who want to kill themselves, or Upside down dogs, available, like anthropomorpha-porn, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Her name is Snowball.

I spend a lot of time thinking about why animal shows that feature orangutans dressed up like small, orange, human boxers are still funny and interesting in some parts of the world (Hello, Safari World) and extremely disturbing in others (hopefully the latter group is growing faster than the former). But the internet is still a place for animal shows. Not all of them are exploitative and usually they deal with domestic animals (not smoking chimps or boxing kangaroos or elephants playing soccer– though all of those still exist in real life in various places). Online there’s mostly Photoshop and ironic captions. The most popular feature nonhumans doing human things in weird ways (wearing casts or sunglasses). Or animals being sarcastic (Fuck You, Penguin) or Cute Ones Falling Asleep. They get book deals. Probably good ones.

Llama with sunglasses (animalswithsunglasses.com)

I don’t know why this is. Except that as we allow ever fewer real polar bears and tigers to exist, we make more and more baby onesies with their likenesses printed on them. Animal shows may be somewhat similar in that as they have disappeared from Central Park and downtown Chicago, they nonetheless show up online. I think that we simply don’t want to get rid of our animal avatars. On our water bottles, baby clothes, earrings, or profile pages. It is probably because we miss animals themselves. Being human can be extremely lonely. So we dress up others to keep us company or to make us laugh and because we, I believe, still want to connect. Also, because living with an ironic wolf T-shirt is easier than living with a real wolf in your backyard. Even if they’re wearing sunglasses.

ps. Check out this hamster (with giant testes) falling asleep.

the silence of dogs in cars

“I was once left in a car at a young age.”

Photographer Martin Usborne.

more.

Seal Baby Snot

Phyllis, an elephant seal pup, gets weighed at the Marine Mammal Center in Marin, CA. Once she gains enough weight she will be released back into the ocean.

“Elephant seal pups are very snotty animals.”

The stranding team at the Marine Mammal Center in Marin spends a lot of time with concerned members of the public on the phone explaining this. “They just normally have a lot of mucus. They’re suppoooosed to sound like that.”

Recently one caller to the center hotline, (415) 289-SEAL, insisted that the seal he was looking at was not acting normally. “I know seals and this one isn’t right. I’m poking him with a stick and he’s not really doing anything.” The center had to send someone out to not only make this man stopping poking the seal but to convince him in person, that the elephant seal was okay.

Sometimes, though, you need to put a seal in a wheelbarrow. It is usually for their own good. You will be trying to weigh them (ie. weighing the wheelbarrow first and then weighing the seal in the wheelbarrow and then subtracting the weight of the wheelbarrow, which is roughly half a kilo in case you’re curious) to find out if they’re doing better than they were the week before. The whole time they will look at you with their big pool-ball eyes (which ooze mucus out the sides because they’re somewhat dehydrated) and it will be with a mixture of curiosity and resignation. The ratio depends on the seal pup. Before and after they are weighed…and also before and after they eat, or when they are angry or annoyed, and perhaps even when they’re excited…they will make a lot of noise.

Volunteers at the Center do mostly hard work (pen cleaning, fish milkshake making and dish washing). But occasionally you get to do something else. Like this.

An elephant seal pup, especially a young one, sounds like a chicken with a head cold. Only sea lions sound like cartoon seals with the AHR-AHR-AHR bark. Elephant seal pups squawk and when they’re not squawking they quietly regard you as if they don’t care. But I think they do. A long-time volunteer at the Center told me that they are much faster than they seem. They certainly are a lot more than they seem. And by this I mean they are like aliens visiting us from a planet we can’t ever hope to visit without a space ship. Except that the planet they’re visiting from is ours. When Phyllis grows up she will spend roughly 6 minutes of every day at the surface of the ocean (long enough only to breathe). The rest of the time she will be thousands of feet below, often as deep as 5,000 feet. She will come back onto land only to mate and give birth and molt. The rest of the time she will be far, far out in the open ocean, up to eight thousand kilometers from shore.

Phyllis is at the hospital in Marin because she is too skinny. And she hasn’t taught herself how to fish yet. I hope she will be okay. She does come from a long line of survivors.

Once, hundreds of thousands of Northern elephant seals lived in the Pacific Ocean. But in the 1800s they were slaughtered for the oil that could be made from their blubber. By 1892, there were only 50-100 seals left. They lived on Guadalupe Island off of Baja, California. But after their legal protection in the 1920s they’ve slowly rebounded. Here a mother gives birth.

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