I'll bite.
An interesting animal I had: For a while, I had a pet crayfish, named Crawdaddy Warbucks. Mom bought him from a pet store for my birthday, along with a batch of black mollies, a beta, and several other very nice, expensive tropical fish. I had no idea that a hungry crawdad could outswim and outmaneuver an entire tank full of fish. He was very lonely at the end of a week.
He got 5¢ goldfish companions, after that. They could outswim him.
An interesting animal I ate: Over the years, I've had the opportunity to feast upon ostrich, llama, elk, buffalo (well, technically, bison) and beefalo, as well as many of the redneck requisites: alligator, opossum, squirrel, rabbit, turtle, deer, rattlesnake, bear, and -- I'm sorry to say -- I even ate a beaver, and I still can't bring myself to think that it's all it's cracked up to be, guys.
An interesting animal at the Museum: Does the
John G. Shedd Aquarium count as a museum?
Years ago, my family returned to Chicago for a weekend visit, and hit the coolest of the museums -- the Field Museum of Natural History and the Shedd Aquarium. It was one of those trips made indelible in memory, not the least by making eye contact with a dolphin kept all alone in a tank, with nobody for companionship and nothing for amusement but an Astroturf-carpeted cylinder as a back-scratcher.
I looked at the beast, and -- I will swear to this until my dying day -- it looked right back at me with a look of desperate loneliness in its eye. As a young teen I knew there was nothing I could do to make its situation better, but it was still all I could do to keep from pounding on the door to the back, staff area of the place and demanding that they get into the tank and play with the dolphin.
My visit to the aquarium was, thankfully, not much longer, and I came home feeling heartsick about the whole thing. After telling my mother what I thought I saw, she told me she had felt the same way about the lonely dolphin.
It was less than a month later that the newspaper informed us that the animal had died in captivity, and within a year, the Shedd and other aquariums were re-examining the way they kept intelligent, gregarious creatures. While I'm still not crazy about seeing the beasts in captivity, I'm happy to say the lot of cetaceans in Chicago is much improved.
An interesting thing I did with or to an animal: As a young, aspiring Michelangelo, I created portraits in watercolor and oil paints, and in ceramic, of our Labrador Retriever, Satan. I don't know what happened to the watercolor, but the other two works remain in the family collections. And, they're really not bad art, even by adult standards.
An interesting animal in its natural habitat:
computer mouse
bee on a blanket
There has been a lot of talk over the past summer, about the dying away of honeybees. Granted, they aren't indigenous to this continent, they've made themselves at home all over the place, and I haven't seen any shortage in my neighborhood. They're still buzzin' about in Pop's flower garden.
Now, it's your turn to go all animal!
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