Amuirin is ruining my productivity.

No, really. I’m supposed to be taking a break from this blogging business. And yet, there it was, my name (well, not my real one) on a post at Amuirin’s blog, telling me to get to work. So, because I certainly don’t want to incur the wrath of Amuirin, here goes:

An interesting animal I had:

Well, I’ve never had an animal that was especially peculiar simply due to its species or breed. Mostly I come from a large animal family, but in my younger days I went through a phase in which I loved small animals. So for a while there we had gerbils, hamsters, parakeets, and even a rat. We were clearly not intended to own small animals, however, because we had exceptionally bad luck with them. Our cat, the ferocious Mr. Cat, ate all the parakeets, no matter how hard we tried to keep them from him. A lone hamster gave birth to a litter of young’uns, all of whom it promptly ate. Shortly thereafter its eyes bulged out of its head, and it walked in circles for a few hours until it died. A pair of gerbils who had lived together peacefully for several months had a fight to the death with no survivors.

Our most interesting and peculiar large animal was a borzoi named Sasha. He was completely neurotic. And, when I was 10 or 11, he broke my collarbone.

An interesting animal I ate:

A wracked my brain for a few seconds trying to come up with an answer to this question. I’ve been a vegetarian almost my whole life, so I haven’t eaten that many animals at all. But then I remembered that on a trip to the Amazon rainforest in 2003 as part of a study abroad program in Ecuador, I did eat some interesting animals: lemon-flavored ants. If you want to learn more, you can click here. And yes, they did taste like lemons.
An interesting thing I did with or to an animal:

This is a tough one. I guess I don’t do many interesting things with/to animals. OK, this is probably the best story I’ve got, although really it’s a mean thing and not that interesting: when I was a kid living in rural New Mexico, my sisters and I routinely explored all the surrounding land (no matter that it was private property). For about a month one winter, two black dogs befriended us and followed us everywhere. There were a number of small ponds in the area that we liked to skate on in our shoes when they were frozen in the winter, but because none of us wanted to fall through the ice, we would throw sticks out onto the surface so that the dogs would go out first and test the ice for us. Don’t worry, they never fell through.
An interesting animal in its natural habitat:

Here we have a tie for first place in my book: bison and prairie dogs. Because really, how can you separate one from the other? They are both incredibly cool animals, and are considered to be keystone species in prairie ecosystems. I could talk for hours (not quite, but probably at least half an hour) about bison and prairie dogs, because I’m a budding ecologist and those are the organisms I would most like to study, and someday I will. But, I doubt anyone wants me to ramble on about bison and prairie dogs for hours, so I will try and restrain myself. Lucky you. And don’t get me started on people who massacre prairie dogs because they allegedly (and falsely) harm cattle.
An interesting animal at the Museum:

I liked Amuirin’s response to this one so much, it’ll be hard to come up with a follow-up. I am always partial to dinosaur displays. I went to the Natural History museum in DC recently. We made the mistake of going there on Memorial Day Weekend, so we didn’t stay long because the throngs of visitors were intolerable. I was pretty impressed with the enormity of the mastadon skeletons. And, after seeing the movie The Squid and the Whale, I’d love to see this exhibit someday:

Do I have to tag people? How many? Okay: Holley, Vroni, and Waxing Strange, you’re up.

~ by teaspoon on October 5, 2007.