Puppy!

I've put off blogging on this for a couple of weeks because I knew it would be a total cheat not to put up a picture, and I couldn't find the cable to connect my camera to my computer. Well, I found it yesterday. Actually, I found two of them in the first place I looked a couple of weeks ago. You know how that goes.

Say hi to Laszlo, the newest citizen of our little island of misfit toys. I posted a while back about how we had to have Amanda, our Australian shepherd, put to sleep a while back. The missus responded by running to a shelter, and then running right back, weeping. It was a sad thing. She decided that she wasn't ready for a new dog yet.

But our old dog, Roxie the Jack Russel/Rat terrier, has been getting more and more neurotic. Her neediness finally snapped the missus's resistance, and so the search was on.

The missus had been speaking of borzois and French bulldogs and other such atrocities of animal husbandry, while I plaintively kept bleating, "Just find a dog we like, get a nice stray mutt who needs a home..."

Thankfully, my preferred option came up first. Karen got wind of a rescue dog from a friend who works with them, and arranged a meeting. The dog was a spaniel, a stray with a cherry-eye.

So we drove out to Concorde to let Roxie meet him. The thing to keep in mind is that the term 'bitch' did not appear out of thin air for no good reason. Roxie is, unfortunately, a little bitch. New dog tried to make friends with her and got a faceful of teeth. But after a while they settled down, and it was clear that this was gonna be as good as it got so far as Roxie went.

I had my doubts. First off, the guy was such a little sad sack. Totally miserable, wouldn't meet my gaze, wouldn't approach me -- in fact, he shied off when I called to him. I'm an animal person, to the point where it gets a little weird at times. Ask the missus about my King cobra pal, for instance. So to have a potential pet just cringe at my presence did not please. My inclination was to take him in because he clearly needed a home and some affection, but if he didn't like me, what was the point?

Well, about twenty minutes later, the woman responsible for Laszlo and I were deep in conversation, when out of the blue she says, "Boy, he really likes you."

I looked down, and saw that he was sitting next to me, a-a-a-l-l-l-most touching me, body curved so as to approach me as closely as possible without getting my notice, just staring up at me with this expression like I was... Well, you know. Dog stuff. Eyes met, he collapsed at my feet with his paws in the air, the belly was scratched and the deal was sealed.

Well, his sad-sack demeanor has proven a sham. He's still oddly shy around me -- won't approach me from the front, won't come when I call him directly -- but he won't stay away from me if he has any say in the matter. He's actually got a boisterous, slightly sly and humorous personality. A positive attitude, which is something we need in this household.

Roxie, of course, is having a difficult period of adjustment.

Taking to one's bed is Victorian behavior, but Roxie has an unfortunately Victorian mindset. "Miss Roxie regrets she's unable to lunch today."

It's getting better, inch by inch, and it's just a matter of time before they're friends. Laszlo is showing remarkable social smarts in this matter, and he's determined to be a pal. Roxie is being absolutely miserable, though.

We were taking care of a Prince Charles spaniel named Coco recently, and when Coco and Laszlo were in full frenzied frolic mode, Roxie crouched under the comforter and whined loudly in sheer envy the entire time. Oh, that there should be such joy in the world apart from herself! I keep telling her that the problem is with her attitude, but with that attitude it wouldn't make any difference even if she could understand me.

Although I must confess that my feelings toward the little brute have warmed considerably lately. During my recent bouts of miserable sickness, she made a conscious and somewhat show-offy (I should never have shown her His Master's Voice) point of staying steadfastly by my side. I'd make a brief return from the netherworlds and look up and she'd be looking all noble and disgustingly pleased with herself.

Hey, you know what? If an animal volunteers to guard my body while my soul does its business in the spirit world, I will not be ungrateful. If I had to pick a fetch, I would have chosen something cooler than a neurotic Jack Russel, but coolness is not my lot in this vale of beers. If my familiar barks at the neighbors and urinates submissively, well. That's how it goes.

I just wish she'd stop growling at Laszlo, though. Just have to give her time.

True Amphibian Crime Part Two: The Transbay Newt Shuffle

Now that I'm looking at this, I want it on a T-shirt.

Okay, this happened about eighteen years ago. I'm pretty sure crimes were committed, but I'm not au fait as to the laws in question. My late brother Duncan was the provocateur; a then-friend of my brother's and now a close friend of mine, whose nom du caper will be The Hon. Richard Talleywhacker, acted as wheelman. As for my own role...

This was before the missus and I embarked on our herptile fixation -- and the events that follow, I now realize, were the thin end of that wedge. On impulse, I'd picked up a fishtank at a yard sale and set it up with an undergravel filter.

Now instead of stocking it with fish, I had gotten a jar full of pondwater and sediment and poured it into the tank and let it stew for a year or so. There were all kinds of tiny animals in there, water beetles and daphnia and so on and so forth. There was a healthy crop of algea. While there weren't any big spectacular animals, it was still fascinating to put your face close to the glass and watch all the different little creatures going about their business.

So one fine day Duncan tells me I'm going hiking with him and The Hon. Richard Talleywhacker. Mr. Talleywhacker drives us out to Tilden park and we set out hiking around the hills. And that's where I came face to face with temptation.

Tilden has a population of California newts. They are adorable little guys, chunky dark red pups with orange bellies. They lay their eggs underwater in clusters of jelly attached to plant stems.Well, we ran across some seasonal ponds that were drying out, and where the water had receded we found hundreds of egg clusters drying in the sun.

I knew it wasn't kosher to swipe animals from a park like this, but when I bemoaned the fact that all those eggs were going to die, Duncan nagged at me until I gave in. I had some plastic bags in my knapsack; we gathered fifteen or twenty egg clusters and took them home, where I put them in my aquarium.

At first I wasn't sure they were going to hatch -- but they didn't rot. And then one day I went upstairs and the tank was swarming with infinitisimal larval newts. They lived happily off the fauna in the tank for quite a while.

But then quite literally overnight, a select few of the newts grew to two or three times the size of the others -- and there were a lot fewer of the others. Now I have nothing against cannibalism in principal but enforcing it via confinement and starvation seemed a bit unsavory to me. The theme music from Born Free blowing through the open space between my ears, I called Duncan and told him it was time to let the newts go.

"There's no point in letting them go in Tilden," Duncan said. "There's already newts there. Let's take 'em to Golden Gate Park."

Now let me make one thing clear. The geeks who unleashed the salamanders mentioned in The Origin Of Cyclops, the idiots who decided to import all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare to the US, the jackoffs responsible for bringing Australian black swans to New Zealand -- that is some heinous shit. Disrupting an environment with alien species is fundamentally noxious.

But San Francisco -- and Golden Gate Park in particular -- isn't a natural environment. If it were, it would be dunes and bunch grass, dry as a bone. But Golden Gate Park is a moist green wonderland with year-round ponds, filled with alien plants and animals. Giving a California native an extra habitat didn't seem like a sin.

It still doesn't.

So The Hon. Richard Talleywhacker and his car were called upon to transport Duncan, myself, and an uncountable number of larval newts to San Francisco. We did the dirty deed in broad daylight. No one dared challange us, assuming anyone noticed we were doing anything. Two ponds were stocked.

I've always wondered what happened after that... but every so often I do a search on California Nets Golden Gate Park. And once, a few years back, I found a one-paragraph story on a news site saying that the California Newts had returned to Golden Gate Park. No more information than that. Since I'm pretty sure that there weren't any newts living in San Francisco before...

I wonder. I wonder...

True Amphibian Crime Part One: The Origin Of Cyclops

I've mentioned this before, but the missus's mother is Ruth Leaf, a master printmaker. She once spent a weekend teaching me to make linoleum cuts and I wound up producing a few that I liked before being derailed by other creative concerns. I'm planning on doing a series of them at some point in the not-to-distant future, probably on botanical subjects.

So this Tuesday I ran across something on the internet that's given me pause. It's funny how you can be just cruising along and all of a sudden you find yourself wondering how deeply involved you are in ecoterrorism. I'll provide the link at the right place in the story -- this information has made me decide to publicly confess one of my darkest criminal acts. Let us all hope no one decides it's worth prosecuting me over.

Here's the deal. I am a recovering herptile freak. When I was a child, my mother ran our house as a small-scale private menagerie, and that's how I caught the bug. For years I was obsessively devoted to collecting small animals and creating terrariums and aquariums. Amphibians and reptiles were far and away my favorites and at one point I'd managed to cover an entire wall in my room with shelves of ten-gallon tanks. Alas, when I was twelve I went on an extended trip to Oregon with my brother, leaving my finny, scaly, and slimy pals in my mother's care.

Let's just say that when I got home I didn't have a hobby anymore...

But when the missus and I got together, the disease resurfaced, malaria-style. On a whim we looked at a local store specializing in herptiles and were hooked. It started innocently enough with a pair of baby iguanas (I'll have to tell you about Isadora some time. Let's just say that when a reptile loves you, it ain't like mammal love, it's more like a sense that you're part of their territory and they own you.) but over the next few years our collection expanded to include fire-belly toads, bearded dragons, a snake, leopard geckos, axolotls, etc, etc.

So we were in and out of that place buying mice and crickets on a regular basis. One time when I was in there I noticed a truly spectacular animal for sale at a very, very low price. It was a salamander that had beautiful black-and-mustard mottling and it was more than a foot long. He was missing an eye, which was probably the reason he was on sale.

I saw him, I fell in love, I knew I didn't need another pet. So after a few weeks I broke down and bought him. But when I asked what species he was, I couldn't get an answer. The guy who sold it to me gave me an, "I'd tell you but then I'd have to kill you," type of response.

So I hit the books and the best guess I could come up with was that he was a mole salamander suffering from gigantism.

He was swell. Amphibians aren't typically what you'd call full of personality. But Cyclops was. I put him in my studio next to my drawing table and the axolotl tank. When I'd work he'd come out from under his slab of shale and prop himself up on the side of the tank closest to me and stare at me, probably hoping for a pinky mouse.

And when one of the axolotls floated at the end of the tank closest to Cyclops, Cyclops would go into a frenzy. He would writhe and make clumsy frolicking jumps and try and climb out of the tank while periodically making this strange little proto-croak. I always assumed there was some kind of sexual motivation there...

Anyway, that was about fifteen years back. On Tuesday I ran across this.

That big salamander? The one that's running amok and fucking things up for the native species? It's a dead ringer for Cyclops. A perfect match.

So now I'm wondering. Was Cyclops a hybrid? Were those hybrids introduced into the wild deliberately or accidentally? Or is the hybridization occurring spontaneously in the wild? This is all extremely circumstantial evidence, of course, but I'm wondering whether or not a fairly serious action against the local ecology has been committed, beyond the introduction of the barred tiger salamander -- and whether or not I have any responsibility in this situation. I will almost certainly just let this float by, but it's troubling.

But there are, as always, some less savory influences on my actions here. First is the deeply ingrained ethos of my ugly little youth, which taught me that snitches get stitches and dead finks don't walk too good.

And I, myself, committed a similar act when I was younger. Details tomorrow.

Arguing About Extinction

Look out! Look out! It's a man eating dinosaur!

Haw! Haw! Haw! I crack me up. So what's this all about? I'll let you know on March First...

So I got into a bit of a kerfuffle with one of my writing buddies this week. Allison made this post over on her blog, The Volcano. You should go read it – but to put her position into the least-nuanced terms, she ran across some information regarding a so-called animal sanctuary that claimed to have ecological concerns at heart while operating as a tourist trap. She thought it would be more ethical to let the animals go extinct than to engage in that kind of abuse in the name of saving the species.

And I went kind of nuts. As I wrote to her in an email –

Again, I know my response here is way, way disproportional -- you just had the misfortune to tap into a subject that's one of my obsessions, and you hit a high-pressure node of opinion.

When it comes to this issue I feel very strongly that we as a species need to prioritize other animals much more highly than we do. I’ve got an elaborate framework of logic built up around this but in the end it’s an emotional response. My allegiance is to life in general before my species.

(When it comes to individuals my feelings are different, of course. I’ll tend to value those I know over those I don’t – which means that I’ll take a lizard I love over a human I don’t know, or a human I know over a dog I don’t. This isn’t rational; it’s just the way my priorities operate.)

But in the end, there is something about allowing a species to go extinct that seems like, well, a sin.

I can rationalize this by saying that someday humans may achieve a less-destructive relationship with the environment and it might be possible to allow the species to return to the wild if we had viable breeding populations in captivity. And it’s entirely possible that individual species could have their populations supplemented by captive-bred stock if dedicated preserves are allocated to them. And so on – I have some links below where related ideas are discussed with more clarity than I can bring to the subject.

Still, my reaction is, as I said, an emotional one. Extinct is as gone as it gets. You can’t replace a species that you’ve killed. The biome, Gaia, the ecosphere – whatever you want to call it, it’s my primary emotional allegiance and an extinction impoverishes it. And us. And me.

Here’s a snippet from my email exchange with Allison.

Please note that I am in no way denying that some horrible shit happens in this realm, and that a lot of bastards blanket themselves in save-the-Earth fuzzy bunnies and green fields as a cover for their rotten behavior. That doesn't mean that we should deny the value of the best work in the field. In a world where I read this in the news...

Extinction Fear For Black Rhino

... I cannot feel a sense of acceptance. When I see this I cannot calmly accept your position that --


In nature, species live and species die off. Working to prevent extinction is yet another example of how man inserts himself into the wild.

That statement really sounds as if (and I doubt that I'm reading you correctly here -- but this is how it sounds) you're putting the efforts of these folks --

Saving Rhinos

on the same level as the poachers and boner-pill freaks who are bringing about rhino extinction. As if it's possible for us to exist without affecting the environment. As if there is something fundamentally wrong with making an effort to deal with specific ecological issues. I just don't buy it.

At a different point in our exchange I suggested that if human-caused extinction was natural, then how could human-assisted survival be unnatural?

Allison also said that she’d might view my arguments differently if I could provide her with some examples of stewardship, of the ends I favor being pursued in an honorable fashion.

Here’s how I responded.

The place to start looking for models of stewardship would be in the examples that I mentioned already. First, the California Condor (and you might want to look around at the rest of this site).

The Peregrine Fund on California Condor Restoration

Gerald Durrell is the one man who's influenced my thoughts on this subject more than anyone else. Here's a brief look at his legacy.

A New Vision At The Durrell Wildlife Trust

And here's his ethos regarding zoos.

The Durrell Policy For Zoos

If you want an example of that ethos in action you might want to look through this and see which animals his zoo is helping to survive.

He's also written a large number of books that detail his efforts. They aren't heavy tomes -- they're intentionally light and amusing. He wrote them to fund his efforts, and they still work to that end. If you're interested I'd be happy to pass some on.

There are wildlife rescue groups everywhere. Here's an accessible local organization that you could take a closer look at before you dismiss the possibility of stewardship. It's just one of many.

International Bird Rescue Research Center

And later…

... on a much baser level, this kind of activity can be one of the most beautiful things a human being can do. One aspect of humanity that is dear to me (and you know there are damned few of those, he snarled) is our ability to engender bonds of affection across species.

What I'm saying here is that the animals involved might not agree with your position. Yeah, those temple tigers are being fucked over but you should ask the lion in this video about his opinion of animal rescue.

Christian the Lion

Yeah, that is brute-force sentimental propaganda for my position... but here's some more information on the park where the lion in question was rehabilitated.

Kora National Park

A similar interventionist organization is here.

The Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Center

Again, I have to ask if you are genuinely opposed to these efforts?

There were a few more issues and nuances to our discussion, but those were the main points. Right now we’ve retired to our corners to think things over. I’ll admit that my example of the California Condor isn’t the strongest – this is an animal that seems to need a Pleistocene ecology in order to thrive in the wild. It will likely need captive breeding programs permanently if it’s going to survive.

But something in me just doesn’t want to live in a world without them.