Rescue the Drowning, and Tie Your Shoe-Strings

Here's the mark of a true, geeky academic: When you discover not one, but TWO, really amazing journals, which are surprisingly accessible. And you find yourself positively delirious with excitement over words, plain old *boring* words on the page. Such that you simply cannot stop reading them. Have spent the better part of my "work" time so far reading full text articles from Society and Animals . My favorites so far?:

• "Anthropomorphism and Anthropomorphic Selection—Beyond the 'Cute Response'"
• "Toward a Non-Speciesist Psychoethic"
• "Crossover Animal Fantasy Series: Crossing Cultural and Species as Well as Age Boundaries"

Yup. Total geek.

Passing the Torch

Yep. That Lamb can take over for the Lion now. The sooner the better.

Earlier this morning, staring absentmindely out the second floor window while getting dressed to take out the doggles. I saw one. Then another. Kiting together. Then later, in the still-bare branches of the tall tall oak tree, rebuilding together the nest for another year. Yes, the hawks have returned for another season.

And I have nenewed hope that days of warmer weather will follow their lead.

Wish I Was a Nomad

One of my fondest childhood memories is the ritual of sitting down weekly (Sunday nights?) to watch Marlin Perkins narrate animal stories on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. I was really not much into either Nature or Animals as a kid - not at all, in fact - but this show was one of my favorites.

The show is still around. Last night I watched the most remarkable story of a lioness in Kenya with an 'unnatural' penchant for adopting orphaned oryx calves . The film just left me speechless. But, as is the case with pretty much all such stories, this one does not have a happy ending. For most of the calves, and for the lioness herself (who disappeared and hasn't been sighted in several years). And certainly not in my own heart. But still. Wow.

As with so many things in my world, i have a love/hate relationship with these sorts of nature shows, probably with Nature herself. I love learning, watching, observing, but there is always the inevitable sadness.

Thinking of Moving...

...into the Langley Hall library (aka the Biology library). Seriously. Conveniently located right across the street from where I work, it's like a wee little library full of the coolest books. If I had a home library like that, I'd never have to leave my house. I just can't stop pulling books off the shelves in there. I went during lunch today for just two particular books, which turned into four, which then turned into seven, and then I saw one more I'd missed on the "new book" shelf right by the checkout. And there were several more I just couldn't carry.

I really should have had some sense about me fifteen years ago and studied wildlife biology, instead of English. How very different my life might be. Ah, hindsight.

This Distance Pulls at the Breath

So an old high school friend of J.'s sent him an email the other day with an interesting story . A painted bunting seems to have taken up residence in his friend's mother's yard in southern New Jersey. What makes the story interesting is that this type of bird lives exclusively in the southern U.S., the very far south. This is the northernmost sighting, ever, of this particular bird. His presence has caused quite a stir, a ruckus almost, among bird watchers and preservation groups, particularly the Audubon Society, and now friend's mother's yard is under constant watch by many people. No one is sure quite why he's gotten himself out of his "natural" habitat. Me, while I am in awe of the bunting's obvious beauty , I am also a bit sad for him. Most certainly he will never find a mate way up there and will likely live a lonely existence, indeed.

Though I've Dreamed Them, In Sleep's Spaces

Friday necessitated my going to Ohio for the day. I offered, on the way home, to help transport two wolfdogs from a temporary home in OH, to their new foster home in PA. The story of the journey itself, while mildly interesting (How it Took M. 7 Hours to Drive a Mere 150 Miles), is unimportant at the moment. Suffice to say that if I ever consider such a journey in the future, it will definitely be on very different terms, MY terms.

I knew/know very little about wolfdogs. Intuitively, I've always had this sense that such breeding between species may not necessarily be the best idea. Now that I've done a bit of retrospective research, I am very conflicted about having participated in this rescue endeavor, conflicted for a few reasons:

• At the OH home, the wolfdogs lived in an outdoor kennel (talk about filthy dogs! my car is still stinky!). At the PA foster home, they are going to a person who has little if any experience with this type of animal, who has 2 small-ish children and a puppy; the dogs will most likely live in a basement room and the new caretaker will not have the time or the resources to handle/socialize them as they will need in order to be adopted. Have I unknowingly helped to trade one *bad* home for another? Has this actually been the best thing for these two dogs? I am not sure I would have done this if I'd known what I do now.

• Is there any real reason, any real benefit, to breeding wolfdogs in the first place? By "benefit" I mean, does this practice make things better for the individual or collective animals themselves? They are, essentially, neither wolf nor dog, stuck somewhere in the middle, uncomfortably and unwillingly straddling those two worlds. It seems that any reason one could offer up for doing this would just reinforce my developing belief that this is done only for selfish, purely human reasons. The kind of home environment all the resources indicate wolfdogs need, does not seem like it would give any of them the quality of life they deserve. Then again, this same issue could be raised for any number of *exotic pets*. This seems to get back to the issue L. and i were discussing a while back, about when and to what extent can/should humans intervene/meddle with Nature?

• What does it mean that I am bothered by say, keeping a bengal tiger as a "pet," but conversely, I am not bothered by say, keeping an "exotic" reptile (provided it's captive bred) as a "pet"? Hypocritical? Am I assigning some hierarchy of importance/meaning to particular animals' existences based on some overtly subjective, personal criteria?

I am seriously grappling with the ethics of this whole thing.

It did occur to me on Friday that spending the little time I did with those animals, is perhaps the closest I will ever come to being truly near the wild wolf.

The Book Excerpt

After almost four years, The Animal Book is finally in print!
Here's what the editors have to say about my essay...

“…Those of us who have shared our lives with animals may recall a time when we ‘lost our eyes’ and thus attained a fuller vision. Perhaps one day it will dawn on us that our dog finds us difficult to communicate with—that the problem was ours—instead of vice versa; we might have realized suddenly what our horse has been telling us all along about the field we tried to force him through. Melanie Dylan Fox has loaned her eyes in this way to the black bears of Sequoia National Park. In ‘Ursus Americanus: The Idea of a Bear,’ Fox examines her responsibility to the bears she has come to know in their trespassed habitat. Like Steeves and other contributors to this volume, she also ponders the etymological and semantic quandaries that accrue to us when we attempt to speak about such knowledge. We must violate ‘traditional grammatical rules’: each bear for example, is a ‘he,’ a ‘she,’ a ‘who’ with an individual temperament, not an ‘it’ or a ‘that’ with merely a species identity.

In the tradition of Herman Melville in Moby-Dick, and more recently, of Loren Eiseley and Barry Lopez, Fox looks at animals through the dual lenses of science and myth. Like Eiseley in the title essay of The Star Thrower, or Lopez in Of Wolves and Men, Fox seems hopeful that some verbal concatenation of empirical detail and mystical insight might inspire the reader’s own exploration and discovery. Her cross-species, social relationship with bears has changed her forever, and the experience she describes is available to all who expand their conceptions of what is possible.”

Hmm. My essay contains empirical detail and mystical insight. Cool.