Dead Horses and fun with the Internet

I won't kid you; the Snowpocalypse has transitioned to the Icepocalypse but the effect is the same. We're pretty much trapped inside with little hope of release until some time Monday. So I've been reading, and puttering about the house, and goofing around on the Internet.

And from there I was reminded about why I enjoy living in the Internet Era. It began with this post over at Lawyers, Guns & Money, captioned "Man sitting on dead horse, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, 1880":

From there one of the comments in the thread lead me to this post, where the investigators use various clues from the photograph to pinpoint two dates that the photograph could have been taken: "Since the tree looks like it is in full foliage, the picture must have been taken on either August 10, 1873, or August 10, 1879."

To pursue all this through pre-digital means would have taken days at the very least, pulling through almanacs and historic mapping and things like building records and old photographs.

And that's assuming that I would have come across this fascinatingly bizarre photo in the first place - it's easy to forget that the pre-Industrial ages were brutally hard on domesticated working animals like horses and mules. When you see beater vehicles on the road today (and I don't know where you live but Oregon, which lacks a state regulation requiring vehicle inspections, has tons of them) think of what would happen if these people drove a horse like they drive their cars and trucks. Only instead of going without oil changes and replacement brakes these poor animals would go hungry and cold and get driven far beyond their strength.

The death rate for urban horses must have been horrific.

And then think about the number of abandoned vehicles you roll past parked in side streets or down dead-end alleys. Translate that into the corpse of a 1,500-pound drayhorse; something that's too big to move with anything smaller than a large mechanical hoist, the Victorian or early 20th Century equivalent of a tow truck.

We tend to think of our times as The Most Awful Ever, and I agree that the Automotive Age has brought with it some fairly awful side-effects. But the advent of the automobile also brought with it the solution to some fairly awful problems, and the carnage of these animals was one of them.

Still doesn't explain why some joker was photographed sitting on a dead horse in the middle of a Sheboygan street in August 1873 (or 1879).

But some mysteries will and probably always should remain mysteries.

MiniGoats!

We had a busy day yesterday.

First we started off around the corner. There's one of those "little lending library" kiosks on Princeton, one street over, and I went to drop off a bunch of books there. I also found a book that looked perfect for Little Miss, so I traded 10-for-1 and off we went to the Transfer Station. The Boy came along to "help" but was soon immersed in the Tooth Fairy book and between the dump, buying new work boots for me, a stop at Powell's Books to snap up Bob Massie's Castles of Steel, and the trip to the Nickel Arcade the Boy finished the whole thing:

Thing is, on the way to the arcade we passed the big empty lot at 11th and Belmont and saw that the MiniGoats were open for business.

These little guys are the living lawnmowers for this lot and recently the goatherd has been opening the lot as a sort of petting zoo for the little munchers.

They're amazingly socialized for farm animals and they seem to love the attention. This little guy desperately needed a skritch between the horns.

The unquestioned stars of the goat show were the two little baby goats. I won't kid you; I wish to hell I'd have known about the whole "adorable baby goats = total chick magnet" thing when I was young and single.

Did you know that even tiny baby goats have little horn nubbins? They do.

I was shocked that the Boy - who normally loves all things furry and non-human - didn't come out to pet the goats. Go figure. But they were ridiculously adorable and I was saddened to read while I was researching this post the apparently the woman who runs the whole Goat Rental thing is a complete skeevebag. Still, that didn't make the minigoats any less adorable. Bye, adorable little MiniGoats!

Where the Wild Things Aren't

Speaking of wilderness, and since the small predators that live among us are on my mind (Little Cat has been doing nastily worse over the past week) I note in passing the summary of this "research" that appeared in the N.Y. Times:

"...the domestic cat as one of the single greatest human-linked threats to wildlife in the nation. More birds and mammals die at the mouths of cats, the report said, than from automobile strikes, pesticides and poisons, collisions with skyscrapers and windmills and other so-called anthropogenic causes."

(Cautionary note: the full article is likely behind the NYT paywall...)

While the Fire Direction Center has housed two of these fearsome predators for over ten years and as such has seen tangible proof of the moggies' ability to take various furred and feathered prey, I'm still not sure that I buy this story of the domestic cat as Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.

For one thing, it goes a long way towards absolving us hairless monkeys for all the other things we do that are tremendously effective in destroying wild animals. As Erik Loomis notes; humans in general are the single worst thing for wildlife on the living Earth. "Worse than land mines, worse than nuclear meltdown."

Perhaps the single greatest "story" of the last 200 years of life on Earth has been the emergence of humans as something beyond the global apex predator. Cats, dogs, tigers, sharks...all have to do their killing retail. We can literally reshape the earth. We level mountains, fill in canyons, we seem to be changing the global climate.

I'm not trying to argue against the conclusion that people need to neuter their pets, need to stop dumping them into fields and streets, should really keep them inside, or not keep them at all if "inside" is just too damn small for an animal to live comfortably (or if they are simply left outside in a yard bored out of their doggie skulls.

What I am saying is that the Great American Public - 95% of Joe and Molly Lunchpail (rising to 99.8% if they have any sort of Tea Party membership card somewhere on their person or a Romney sticker on their car) - is dumber than a goddamn stump about scientific facts in general, and this sort of "reporting" does them no favors.

Remember this when your Uncle Alex, the teabagging appliance salesman, tells you for the zillionteenth time how Global Warming isn't the problem, feral cats are the problem.

Oz by night

Since the whackos are out shooting up the mall we decided to play it safe and spend one of our rare rainless December evenings at Zoolights.

Unsurprisingly the kiddos love this Portland Yuletide macguffin. And I have to admit that these nocturnal admissions are the better of the times I've spent with them there.

The thing is, I still can't get around zoos as animal prisons.

All the lockdown behaviors; the pacing, the self-soothing stuff like rocking and repetitive motion, the compulsive grooming...they're all there. I hate seeing these creatures slowing going mad in their miniscule "habitats".

At least tonight the only critters in evidence were the elephants, who were pacing their way-too-small prison yard as always, and the sea otter who was doing rather the same thing only underwater. The sea lions, who usually swim compulsive laps in their tiny tank, were asleep.

This stuff bugs me and I'm never sure how much to talk about it with the kiddos. I think that they would understand, and yet, they genuinely love animals and love the zoo animals in particular. I think that it would hurt their hearts if they recognized their animal friends as desperate convicts locked in stir 24/7. And yet...there they are.

The Zoolights enable us to visit with as little exposure to the convicts as possible, and the light display really is beautiful and creative. The kiddos were sweet, oohed and aahed over the pretty lights, thoroughly enjoyed an illicit late-evening french fry gorge, and even managed to be decent about the loud crowd of Blazer fans on the MAX train-ride back to the parking space.

Now everyone is tucked soundly in bed dreaming of tomorrow, the last day of school for two whole weeks.

But I'm still awake, seeing in my mind's eye the elephants relentlessly pacing in the dark; back and forth, back and forth, their heavy feet falling again and again, soundlessly taking the measure of despair in the cold damp night.

Cat-faced Eagle

Jim Fallows posted this, with the comment

"...owls are cats that happen to have wings. And thanks to various Chinese friends for the reminder that the Chinese word for owl, maotouying, is written 猫头鹰. Which character-by-character is "cat head eagle," or more vividly "cat-faced eagle." Long before slo-mo they got the point.

And that it's a good thing they are not much bigger than their real size."

Ummm. Yep. That'd make the whole "you humans REALLY need to get up earlier and put the fucking cat food in the fucking bowl" issue a lot more fraught.

Anyway, it's a cool video.

Kaninhop!

When I was a fractious youth I worked in a show jumping stable. I've never lost my appreciation and enjoyment of those equine athletes; they earn their oats, that's for sure.

But I'm not sure I'm ready for the bunny-wabbit version of this. "Kaninhop" involves getting the fluffy little rascals to complete a miniature jumping course complete with oxers and knock-down rails.

I'm not sure if this is adorable, or just freaking weird.

But I do know that these rabbit fanciers will need to train little mouse riders before I'm willing to drop $80.00 for a seat at the Devon Rabbit Show Open Jumper Finals.Call me a curmudgeon, if you will. But then, I'll bet the USET has never had to worry about this;

"Miss Fehlen points out important practical reasons for keeping competing rabbits leashed: 'We use them in tournaments for safety,' she said. 'Just think of what would happen if a male were to break free. We want to avoid uncontrolled reproduction. It has happened before.'"

And let's just NOT go there, okay..?

Empire of the Ants

The louring rain and decreasing warmth have send our neighboring sugar ants looking for a cozy place indoors, and their anabasis debouched on the kitchen counter tonight.

"Daddy! Daddy!" shrieked little Miss down the basement stairs "Mommy says bring the ant spray quickly quickly because the ants are in the cabinets!"I fished the can of vilely toxic ant death out of its receptacle and arrived in the kitchen to find a dancing daughter and a disgusted wife staring at the now-empty shelves where the little scuttling bastards tried to hide from their chemical doom. I stood between my womenfolk, respectively antic and revolted, surveying the prospective gas chamber for our latest boxcar of formicidae like a dyspeptic Mengele eyeing the latest trainload of particularly degraded untermenschen.

"How the hell did they get in there?" I protested, producing a volley of frantic questions from the little girl and a sour look from the big one. "How the hell should I know?" she sighed, "Just use the damn spray, please."

So we moved all the fruit and veggies and flour and eggs and butter (Mojo was in the process of making some carrot cake-like object when she discovered the marauders inside the cabinet) off the countertop, I deployed the chemical munition (advertised as a persistent agent that would keep the little bastards out for "up to 4 weeks!") and used a towel to recover the bodies of the footsoldiers unable to evade the chemstrike, and carefully replaced the food in sealed containers back in the contaminated zone.

[It may say something about me that as I did this I had a brief flash of memory of something I did in back in the 1980's; my platoon was detailed to the Airborne Test Board for something called PAPRICCA - pronounced like the spice - which was an acronym for "Parachuting Procedures in a Chemically Contaminated Area".

This beauty started with the idea that the U.S. Army desperately needed to get somewhere that some other inconsiderate sonofabitch had brined with something nasty, like nerve gas, and that the best way to do this was to drop some parachute troops into it. The actual "parachuting procedures" included a series of exercises where the process of military static-line parachuting was performed while in what we called our "MOPP" suits (a silly acronym that stood for "Mission-Oriented Protective Posture" and was used interchangably with the term "CPOGs", "Chemical Protective OverGarments") and culminated with actual parachute jumps while wearing a protective mask - what a civilian would call a "gas mask".

Needless to say this training was disliked to the extreme, since as training it ranged from the exhausting and uncomfortable to the downright dangerous, and my memories of it are not fond ones. The then-new KEVLAR helmets didn't fit over the pro-mask and had to be taped on with hundred-mile-an-hour tape. The 130-knot slipstream of a C-130 had no respect for this jacklegged arrangement, which meant that almost everyone lost their helmets within seconds of exiting the jump doors. And, worse, the opening shock of the T-10 parachute usually jerked the pro-mask down the face of the jumper, who was suddenly blinded by a black plastic shroud just as it was crucially important for him to know whether his canopy had opened correctly and was not at the moment streaming above him, a useless nylon exclamation point identifying him as The Most Totally Fucked Trooper in his platoon. So about half or more of the test platoon troops ripped off their masks, making their notional deaths from the notional nerve agent certain and immediate upon landing. It was, in short, a total goatscrew.

Unsurprisingly, this tactic was never actually incorporated into the 82nd Airborne SOP. But that was PAPRICCA, and gassing the ants reminded me of it.]

Mojo went back to her cooking, but Little Miss was fascinated by the ants. She followed me downstairs to try and find some ant baits."What does these do?" she asked. "Why we need to get the queen ant?"

So I explained to her about ants, and queens, and eggs, and then we had to go to the computer and watch a YouTube video, and then she wanted to know why the queens couldn't walk far, and how they got into our house, and how the eggs got in the queen, and how the eggs got out of the queen.

And then she wanted to know about how eggs got in mommies, and how eggs turned into babies, and how babies grew inside mommies, and how babies got out of mommies. So I showed her pictures of her Mommy when she had the Peeper inside her tummyand we tried to watch a video of babies coming out of mommies except YouTube thought that you had to be over 18 to see that, and I couldn't be bothered to set up a damn YouTube account, and the hell with it but trust Daddy, sweetie, the baby comes out of the mommy's puff-puff. You did, Peeper did, Mommy did, I did, too.

(I should add that both of my kiddos know the proper words for the male and female wedding tackle. And sometimes we use the word "penis" rather than "wiener" or "junk", depending on the formality of the occasion.

But for some reason the word "vagina" just seems too cold and clinical to this family. The Boy first coined the term "puff-puff" for Mommy's girl parts, and for some reason we all like the expression. It just sounds soft, cuddly, and friendly. Girly. So. Puff-puff.)

But cuddly or no, Missy was horrified.

"No! No, no, no!" she pronounced, "I don't want babies coming out my puff-puff!"

"Not now, silly," I assured her, "It's only when you're older, when you're grown up, and only when you want it to."

"I will never want to." stated Little Miss, "No, I will 'dopt two babies, from China, because that doesn't hurt."

I told her that, indeed, sounded like a cunning plan. Then I picked her up and carried her upstairs.

Her mom and brother were watching something warlike on The Military Channel, so we settled into one of the wing chairs.

"How come the ants don't know about the poison?" she said, bouncing on my knees in a way I recognized prestaged a bit of girlish cleverness. "How come they don't talk about it?" I explained that they couldn't talk, that their mouths didn't work that way, that they communicated by smell. That if she were an ant, she would have to fart to say "I love you."

"Eeeew! Stinky! Nobody could love a fart!" she declared. Then she smiled a wide, triumphant smile and announced the conclusion of the evening's discussion.

"We're a LOT smarter than ants, Daddy."

And with that she wriggled off my lap and scampered away.

Mousetrapped

I freely admit that one point of THIS post was just to have 31 posts for the 31days of January......but it IS a funny video.

Face my Cat, Face Death

I'm not sayin' that my cats would do this......but if the bear was small enough and Fat Nitty was hungry enough...the part I love is where the bear goes for the trash bag and Fluffnums rockets off the porch. You can almost hear it yowling "The FUCK? That's MY used human food, Yogi!"

Bambi vs. Nala

I think you know how much I hate zoos.

To me they're like animal prisons, and, sure enough, the prisoners/animals have similar pathological behaviors like rocking, swaying, and sodomizing young punks in the showers.

Here's the equivalent of getting punked out in SuperMax, this time at the National Zoo in Washington, where a suicidal or just plain panicked whitetail doe lept into the (as you can see from the film) senselessly small lion enclosure.What this makes me think is how absolutely mad it is that we keep these great predators in tiny holes for our own entertainment. THIS is what they do; it is neither entertaining nor majestic but rather a bloody, frightful thing that serves to remind us that for the unpaved portion of the world much of life is bloody and frightful. No standard-issue American would want to or pay to see this, even though it is central to what lions are all about, and what predators and predation are all about. It's been too long since we were anything but the apex predator. When we were prey, this was all too often how our lives ended.

The truth is that life is often about (as Mrs. Lovett said) "who gets eaten and who gets to eat." This sad little video reminding us of that truth points out the degree to which zoos are nothing but a lie and a mockery of the animals imprisoned within. They really need to vanish the way of the minstrel show, Lydia Pinkham's Tonic, and the dog-faced boy in the midway.

Perhaps we could keep the cockroaches and a frog or three.

(h/t to Nancy Nall for the cool video)

Update 11/9 p.m.: Meghan mentioned this '89 Nick Park video, which is too clever and too funny - and uncomfortable in a revealing sort of way - not to include. So here is "Creature Comforts":

Extinction: Beat It Through Self-Hypnosis

Saw something the other day about pandas.

Seems that a Brit wildlife type made the suggestion that pandas are a sort of evolutionary cul-de-sac and that we should let 'em go.

Mind you - the critters were doing fairly OK until - imagine - humans came along and turned their bamboo forests into farms and timber tracts...

Now personally I'm fairly immune to the fabled panda "charm";...they always seem faintly silly to me.

But going in and fucking up their home and then blaming them for not doing their evolutionary best?

Seems pretty hypocritical to me.

This particular panda does seem like the poster panda for the shallow end of the panda gene pool.

Where the Sidewalk Ends

Here's an interesting little oddity; a post from a Detroit blogger about the desolate "zoo" on Belle Isle, a vacant monument to the greed and corruption of former Mayor Kilpatrick's Boss Tweed Period.

I admit to being seduced by the title: "Where the Wild Things Aren't".

But also because I have a long-standing hate-hate relationship with zoos.

I was never a particularly zoo-ey child. My only real - and fondest - memory of the old Brookfield Zoo in Chicago (the first I was old enough to visit and recall anything of the occasion as well as where I spent my life from fifth grade through high school, i.e. prime zoo-going yers) was watching a baboon take a break from masturbating (hobby, pastime and preoccupation of the savagely bored male primate) to scoop up a fresh handful of used Monkey Chow and nail a capering high school mouthbreather right in the neck as a tribute to the hairless ape's baboon imitation. At seven the pure ThreeStoogian elegance, the primal sophistication of the poop-flinging baboon entranced me, and baboons in general have remained a special favorite of mine as a result.By the time I was old enough to really see the animals as more than live-action kids' story figures I was also savvy enough to interpret the many sad pathologies of zoo animal behavior; the pacing, weaving, obsessive grooming, and self-mutilating as strong indications that the supposedly heartwarmingly child-friendly zoo was just a goddam prison for many of the animals there.

(Curious sidebar: several years ago I read two short books by someone called Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, one on the social behavior of dogs, the other on similar activities among cats. These were more aimed at pet owners than zoo animal fanciers, but Thomas' interest in cats was heavily slanted towards lions and tigers. One thing she had researched, and noted in her book, was the behaviors of zoo cats versus circus cats. She observed that, for all the horror and obloquy directed at circus cat-trainers and cat handlers, the circus cats generally appeared much less stressed, displayed MUCH less disturbed behavior such as pacing and swaying than the zoo cats. Her conclusion? That despite the tiny cages and lack of "natural habitat" the circus cats had a more interesting life. They interacted with each other and with the circus people. They had jobs; they were working stiffs, they had a point to their lives. The zoo cats were convicts; idle, closely confined, unoccupied prisoners and typically bored out of their skulls.)

Now I have a little boy who loves the zoo. Not for the animals, really, the train and the sandbox and the treats are the real magilla - but the animals are an inseparable part of the full meal deal. He has no idea that I think the zoo is an animal prison, and I don't want to be the one to tell him.

So I grimace at the tiger, numbly pacing its cage, as we race by on the way to ride Old Smokey the train. Sorry, pal, maybe the governor'll spring yez soon. Maybe youse need to see Da Warden.

Maybe you should try flinging a big ol' tiger poop at the dummy in the plaid shorts making roaring sounds at you from over by the popcorn trolley.

It seemed to work for the baboon.