Help keep me alive and working! My only income comes from my writing and having adventures; so help keep me going even at 74 and with Parkinson’s.
“Stuff is eaten by dogs, broken by family and friends, sanded down by the wind, frozen by the mountains, lost by the prairie, burnt off by the sun, washed away by the rain. So you are left with dogs, family, friends, sun, rain, wind, prairie and mountains. What more do you want?”
–Federico Calboli
I’ll go on record to note that I hate monkeys.
This may put me in a minority of people, but I can’t stand them.
When my kids were small, we went through the Scotsbluff Zoo. At that time, they had a Capuchin Monkey set up right next to a set-up for some sort of small Asian wild cat. One of the cats was sitting as close to the monkey enclosure as he could, giving them the chattering routine. I know exactly what that cat meant.
ANYTHING but monkeys. Lauren hunts drunk ones with Crowned eagles, and there is a reason. See Kipling’s bandar-log
As I grow old, l like some other old zookeepers have developed animal prejudices. I don’t like lions, but l like tigers; generally dislike Chimps and other such rabble, damn Calibans who think smearing shit on your shirt for the three hunrdredth time is still funny, but I like and respect gorillas. I feel that masrsuplia are barely sentient, much stupider than moniror lIzards, and that Koalas are litttle more aware than the gum tees that they eat or your average plant, but Crocodilians are real personalities—they are ‘birds’, you know.
The echidnas, especiially the big ones, are another matter.They are very weird, and have big brains. Read Tim Flannery on them, esp Throwim Away Leg. Could they be Permian survivors? I think that lumping them with the utterly aquatic platypus was a means of mere convenience.
Do you know my brother Michael? It seems unlikely, but he thinks so. He lives in Georgia but he once lived in Easton.