Travis the chimpanzee, late of Stamford, Connecticut, is all over the news this week due to the shocking attack on his owner Sandra Herold’s friend Charla Nash, who is currently fighting for her life.  MSNBC has an excellent in-depth report on the incident.

Pete Wedderburn of the Telegraph UK asks “What part of wild do the owners not understand?”

I honestly don’t know why people who keep wild animals as pets think that it’s safe, or what rationalizations they give themselves to justify that such arrangements are  appropriate.

Travis, by all accounts, was raised as a human child by Sandra Herold, whose own story is very sad.  Sandra lost her husband in 2004 and her daughter also died in an auto crash, so she was alone — except for Travis.

Sandra ate meals with Travis, watched television with him, and even shared aperitifs with him in stemmed glasses.  Before Travis attacked her friend, he had been out of sorts — apparently he even had a human disease:  Lyme Disease. Continue reading →

One of my current favorite books is Bigfoot, I Not Dead by Graham Roumieu. Of course Bigfoot not dead. Bigfoot stomp paparazzi face every day. Then Bigfoot visit with crack-smoking pigeons.

I have to say that before today, I hadn’t heard of Agogwe or “the Agogwe,” a modest-sized East African hominid who’s been sighted every-so-often by hunters, and who is obviously well-known among native African peoples. Continue reading →

I think that people’s attitudes toward animals are changing, and this is a good thing. While I do not ascribe to the extreme (some might say “bizarre”) views of Peter Singer – which include, basically, indicating that chickens should vote and advocating via advanced logical structures that those of us in developed nations should crack off 25% of our respective GDPs to support those in developing nations – Singer introducted a concept in the 1960’s called “speciesism” to indicate that humans ought not approach their interactions with other living species from a biased, species-oriented viewpoint.

Here we have some PETA advocates, dressing as “cavemen” to protest the brutal treatment of rabbits raised for fur in Australia. This picture immediately reminded me of the cruel bias against the GEICO cavemen. According to a recent LA Times blog, “everybody hates PETA.”

Probably because their point of view is divergent from most others, and because they do gross and disgusting things (this caveman picture indicates the better sort of PETA attention-getting behavior). Continue reading →

The great Tartal was once the most precious of creatures in the Wide World.  How sad it is these days that they are no longer among us.  For the Wide World is a colder, lonelier place without these great creatures that willingly carried men and women to and fro across the great waters.  A lonelier place, indeed.

Imagine that you are standing on the long, glittering marble Promenade on the shore of the shining White City.  And then, a vast body of silver and yellow-green passes into the mouth of the bay, slashing through the blue-green waters.  Imagine that this is a body of glittering living shell, strung with shining strands of bottle green and coal-red light like colored pearls.  It is a great Tartal.

Imagine that the enormous creature changes its course, slows, and its great head rises as it sights the White City.  Now the vast creature gingerly sounds the channel, seeking the way it will approach the shore.
Too large by far to take any berth in the city’s harbor, the Tartal pauses.  Then, with its mighty lungs, it exhales twin plumes of water like two whales put together, and searches again.  It senses its channel and guides itself through the waters. It does not want to beach itself upon a spit, or entangle itself in any hidden danger – great nets, perhaps, or underwater magick.  Such things would pose little obstacle to this great creature, yet there is something about the creature that is cautious, and perhaps, tired.

It inches across the bay, closer and closer still, so slowly now that it seems that it has come to a stop – but not quite – and at last, brings itself to rest alongside the beautiful Promenade that wends its way along the sandy shore. 

This is indeed what they saw in the White City on the day that Lumiere came.