Monthly Archives: March 2012
Crazy-cat-lady
There are certain things in this life I am scared will happen to me. First and foremost, I am scared to turn into my neurotic and paranoid mother, though I know it is inevitable. Second, I am scared that I am slowly but surely turning into a crazy-cat-lady.
Me in a few years… (The Simpsons’ Crazy Cat Lady)
And, boy, did I take several steps forward in the last two days!
Truthfully, I always felt that I was a bit of an old maid. I’m very much a homebody and truly love spending time curled up in my apartment, on my computer, reading fanfiction or facebook, or watching random television.
I will not, however, be counted as an old maid because I fell in love… twice. The first love of my life is someone who pushes me and aggravates me and fights with me for control. However, he loves me nonetheless and I could not imagine my world without him.
The second love of my life pushes me, aggravates me, and fights for control. Yet it is my love for him that outranks all else. I never would have expected to fall in love with a short black man with beautiful green eyes, but it happened. Now, I spend my time shouting at him to get out of the kitchen, stay away from my guinea pigs, and to stop trying to eat my food.
What’s really terrifying is that this last paragraph is completely about my cat but it also fits my fiancé to a tee… except for the “short black man with beautiful green eyes”. Don’t get me wrong, my fiancé has beautiful eyes – they’re just blue.
But back to my cat.
My Handsome Man!
My cat is a weirdo. He’s tall and lanky, loves to play fetch, and spends most of his time acting dumb. His favorite game is: Wait for Mom to do something, and then get her attention by jumping on her boobs! He drives me up the wall and irritates me nonstop day or night with the constant need to play or eat or get my attention.
I wouldn’t change any of it for the world.
For, you see, I live by myself 600 miles away from friends, family, and my fiancé. Being a zookeeper is difficult in that finding a job where you want is impossible unless you plan on volunteering at the location for a period of time (unpaid) or are exceptionally lucky. I like to think that I was lucky enough just to get a job.
Being alone means just that. I find myself becoming melancholy, often despondent and depressed without my circle of support. That’s why having my cat makes me feel so much better. He is loving and an attention whore, but that is exactly what I need because I am a clinger. He is, metaphorically, the scratchy side to my soft Velcro.
You may be asking yourself, “How does this tie in with you, writer, becoming a crazy cat lady?”
Well, one of my coworkers recently had a baby. She spends all her time now talking about her son and all the new things he does, learns, or reacts to. I find myself listening intently and then replying back with abundant stories about all the new things my cat does, learns, or reacts to. My cat is my baby. End of story.
Another instance of where I am becoming/am a crazy-cat-lady is the new idea I’ve had about my cat. If you haven’t noticed already, I like to think things up. I also have a wild imagination and once I get myself stuck on an idea I am just that – stuck. I recently decided that I am sick and tired of my cat looking morosely out my windows. I wanted him to be able to go outside.
Being like my mother, I could not fathom the thought of letting him out on his own.
“What if he gets hit by a car? What if he can’t find his way home and I never see him again?” Coming from a paranoid woman’s womb makes you completely unreasonable yourself.
Therefore I decided that I was going to buy my cat a harness and a leash and take him outside.
There you are, my friends. I have hit crazy-cat-lady bottom.
I, sadly, did go out and buy a harness and a bright leash so I’d be able to find my black cat even if, for some odd reason, he was in a dark space (don’t worry, I’m not out walking my cat at night. I’m weird but I sure am no creeper).
The bush was interesting…
My cat is learning – and in my opinion, liking – to go outside. Hopefully this will teach him that if he goes outside, Mommy needs to be there and that if he comes back in, he gets treats!
The training is my zookeeper side coming out.
Anyways, everyone should start taking their cats for walks! It’s a lot of fun with lots of moments of hilarity! Especially when the cat stops walking.
[imgfave.com/view/1267376]
Good people and animals
I made a new friend the other day and something he told me got me to thinking. When first meeting me, he found out about my cat and guinea pigs and commented, “You must be a real good person. People who like animals always are good people.”
Good people.
[Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/trevormorgan%5D
As an animal care professional, I can honestly say I have met a fair number of animal lovers. Most of them in my eyes are good people. The people I work with, I would consider, are good. But honestly, I don’t know if I believe even that.
One of the people I work with has been in this field for 30 years. He comes in every day, does the bare minimum while following his daily schedule exactly, and goes home. He won’t listen to anyone and feels he is better than all of us, no matter what we say. He brings in paintings and pictures that he has made to teach us because, apparently, we don’t know anything. He spends the day quizzing us about random facts that he believes only he knows. He acts pretentiously when anyone criticizes him or goes against what he says.
I don’t want say that he is a “bad” person because most of us believe that he has some type of mental disability. Nothing so significant that he cannot function, but we do believe that he has some social issues. However, he does at times seem to know that what he does is wrong and proceeds to ignore his actions as wrong while blaming others. I truly dislike him.
So what does that make me? I am an animal lover but I am just human. I have my shortcomings and my pride. I definitely am not a saint nor do I act like one. I have contempt for others, jealousy in situations, anger and rage, and not to mention sloth. I have high morals that are faulted. So what does that make me?
A good book that makes you think. I like those.
Hal Herzog writes in his book, Some we love, some we hate, some we eat, that the correlation between being a criminal and being abusive to animals does not really exist. After analyzing 354 cases of serial murders, researchers found that 80% of the perpetrators did not have any animal abuse histories (31). Herzog also uses personal anecdotes to establish that a wide variety of people, when children abused animals but grew up to be normal, well-adjusted adults. He basically points out that as children, each individual learns right and wrong and that animal abuse is a way to learn the difference.
I never did anything like that. I don’t know about the rest of you but I never even did the whole magnifying-glass-to-kill-ants thing. The examples he uses include the ants and how kids do horrible things like toss a puppy over a fence. It’s pretty sickening to me that that is a normal occurrence for some kids to do things like that. But if you learn that what you did was horrific, are you a good person for having strong morals after completing such a horrible act?
But truly, animal abuse is not the same thing as disliking animals. I know people who have never had good experiences with pets or like some animals and not others. These people may have never had a pet and never grew up with creatures. Or some people just don’t like animals because they do not connect to them at all. That seems perfectly normal, right?
Does that mean, then, that some of those people are “good” when they like a species and “bad” otherwise? Or for the person, who never had pets, is just “neutral” because they’ve never been tested? (It’s weird to think about people on such a miniscule scale but I like trying to figure out philosophy using examples…)
In the end, trying to determine how true a simple statement like “Good people are people who like animals” really is complicated.
I don’t know about you but I’m happy being an animal lover, give or take being a good person. 🙂
_____________________________________________________________________________
Herzog, H. (2010). Some we love, some we hate, some we eat: Why it’s so hard to think straight about animals. New York: HarperCollins.
Cute overlord
Recently, my fiancé and a close friend have been fighting. It’s been a punches-thrown, curses-slurred, ball-breaking knockdown battle royale type fight to the finish. They’ve spent weeks spewing as much word vomit as humanly possible at each other while I watched from the sidelines, anxiously expecting one side or the other to explode from built up anger. All this aggression and no answer has yet been decided.
Neither will relinquish their dominance over what is the most freaking adorable animal that exists today.
Yes. You heard me right. They’ve been starting WWIII over what cute and cuddly reigns supreme.
My close friend believes that slow lorises are the cutest animals ever. I never really knew what a slow loris was and I still haven’t had the opportunity to work with them. So far, I believe more that these little ones are creepier than cute. Especially when taking into account that these pygmy monsters are the only venomous primate. They have large buggy eyes and a button nose and I can see the cuteness if I squint my eyes closed and look to the right of the little animal. However, as far as cutest animals go, I don’t agree at all.
Cute? Meh. I can agree on some of the cuteness but still not the most adorable.
My fiancé, on the other hand, has adamantly disagreed and believes that the slow loris is far from the cutest animals. He’s under the impression that the penguin wins this battle.
I would be more likely to agree that penguins are adorable over slow loris. Penguins have their squat little bodies and beady little eyes. As I’ve stated in an earlier entry, don’t underestimate the cuteness of these adorable little animals but I, for one, can’t help but love them. Their little tuxedos and waddle make them so adorable.
My sweet boy, Bernie, getting cuddled. I love penguins. Especially this one!
Even their diseases that could possibly kill them are ridiculously cute.
Penguin feet can sometimes become infested by bacteria causing sores to develop. If the sores remain open for long periods of time, they can become infected and cause internal infections which can then kill the poor little birds. This condition is known as bumblefoot.
My fiancé’s first reaction when I told him about this disease was, “Holy shit! That’s so cute!!”
Sadly, he’s right. Although this disease can be really harmful, it sounds like a giant puffball that has taken residence on the feet of penguins and to remove them, one must cuddle and coo the bird until the little bumble dies from over-lovin’.
Even worse is how to treat bumblefoot in penguins. Basically (and I know this because I have on more than one occasion I have had to help vets put the preparations on penguins for their bumblefoot), the veterinarians will take medical tape and tape pieces of hard construction paper to the bottom of the penguin’s feet, in the shape of the foot. These are then carefully covered with waterproof bandaging and tape to keep the feet dry and the boot in place. So, in other words, the vets create little booties/ shoes for the penguins.
Therefore, to cure adorable penguins of their deadly cute-sounding bumblefoot, little shoes have to be put on penguins to keep their little cute feet safe!
It’s so freaking cute I think my head will explode just thinking about them. I turn into a mushy pile of obnoxious squealing goo at the mere mention of cute and cuddlies… but I think I’ve finally figured it out.
I know the answer to, “What is the cutest animal?”
Hands down, no doubt, the answer is the baby beaver.
A few weeks ago, the Department of Environmental Natural Resources in the state began demolishing beaver nests in the nearby rivers. At this time during the normal weather years, it is too cold for beavers to give birth. In most situations, the beavers also flee the dams (in my thinking anyways) so DENR is not also killing the individuals.
Since this year has been so warm, a pair of beavers gave birth early. Unfortunately, their dam was blown up but DENR found three baby beavers.
And, boy, are they adorable.
Even my boss, who is unaffected and unfazed by all things cute, saw them and could only describe them as “fucking adorable”.
Just. So. Fucking. Adorable.
These little bitties drink bottles and cuddle on your lap. If you walk into the room, they’ll each make a mad dash for you and crawl into your lap while making their tiny whelping noises. Even more adorable is that instead of nursing, they will happily suck on a finger and fall fast asleep in your lap.
I sent my fiancé and the friend pictures of the baby beavers and they both conceded to the cuteness.
Therefore, I can officially declare: BABY BEAVERS ARE THE CUTEST GODDAMN ANIMALS.
I mean, look how freaking lovable they are!! She's sucking on a baby bottle nipple but she makes it look so precious.
And although the guys had some favorable battles, I win the war!!! WOOT!
A Zoo Life 