Animal Friends
The rules of gardening and housekeeping are clear on rodents and lilies. Lilies are good, rats are bad. Childhood reading had ill-prepared me to whack off rats’ heads. I was raised on Mickey Mouse, Tom and Jerry.
When I was a freshman in college, our family pet, a Shetland sheepdog named Shep, was killed by a car as he roamed the neighborhood in search of a bitch in season. A student in …
“But we still don’t know simple things. Like how many there are. How fast they grow. How long they live. We don’t know where the juveniles go. We don’t know even if [young gray whales] migrate.”
Vern Robinson’s Little Pistol Pete, a 16 month – old, 1250-pound, largely black Maine-Anjou/Angus steer, stands on the clean concrete slab under the burning blue sky of an August day that is just beginning to …
Sharon has found vermiculture to be fun and profitable, but her friends and relatives thought it was a nutty idea. “They thought I was absolutely crazy.” They’ve changed their minds now that she’s making money,
Some primal termite knocked on wood And tasted it, and found it good, And that is why your Cousin May Fell through the parlour floor today — Ogden Nash If my ears were sensitive enough, …
After three weeks I have Baja office up and running, return to San Diego to interview several people for a story. Only motel I can find that takes pets is Motel 6 in El Cajon.
By June the Beecheys and their dark-eyed young promised to become an Egyptian plague, and my husband, who carries spiders out of the house instead of flushing them, suggested poison.
RIGHT OFF, no sooner than five minutes after we stepped onto Pioneer Park’s green lawn, we met up with an elderly black-and-tan fellow gone white at the muzzle and sporting a red-and-white stripped Dr. Seuss …
Outside my American window, the weasel was winding himself through the bird of paradise and dashing into plastic conduits. We put the conduits there for our own use, but the animals use them as subway tunnels.
I dropped a roly-poly in the bucket as though I were an animal trainer at Sea World, and then I made a twiggy ramp that would encourage the captive to show me his delicate, blue-tinged undersides.
“They can be clumsy mothers. We’ve got videotapes of the mothers knocking the eggs out of the nest and sending them tumbling down the cliff.” Videos also show the mothers jumping up and down on their eggs.
It looked like the fossil of a dinosaur, there on the CAT scan film. The veterinarian, Dr. Marjorie McMillan, pointed her index finger, the nail clipped, unpolished, toward the skull. “There and there,” she said. …
I recall setting up house with one Peggy O’Dwyer, a freckled, blonde Irish woman, full of spunk, brass, and devilment. This was a rare woman, the one in a thousand who was road-buddy material. I …
I find a cinnamon-colored strand of fur, black-banded, poking through the sleeve of my sweater. Another cat hair; I had hoped I’d gotten them all out of my life. They turn up now and then, …