Fun with Animals

One pig to another: Many of us take prayerful pauses grateful so many of us the Easter holiday survived. As for next year, we pray we will have already died from old age, sickness or, rarer still, natural causes. The chameleon does an uncanny thing: it can change its coloration to blend with its surrounding, a life-saving innovation designed for protection and a predator’s detection. Humans with a criminal proclivity envy the chameleon’s survival ability and say it’s a shame they weren’t created similarly instead of caught, tried found guilty and incarcerated. Said a leopard: “I’m a dead giveaway; I must do something quickly and today! I am too easily spotted when about so it’s best I have my spots rubbed out.” Spotless, the leopard grew disturbed; to call himself a leopard seemed absurd. And in keeping with his original Latin wasn’t he a pardus (panther) and a leo (lion)? So which part, then, of his animal nature was he, the spotless lion or the spotted panther? Or was it just a play on words and language and to a leopard of what advantage? The skunk – and this is curious – may truly be said to be ubiquitous. It can be miles away and yet as close and palpable to one’s very nose – an unerring truth as any in gospel, ye of doubt and little smell. The ground hog is a winter sleeper; he wishes his burrow were much deeper. But once a year he’s forced to wake and show himself for silly humans’ sake. If he sees his shadow, so humans say, it means that spring is on its way. If he doesn’t, then it’s back he goes, and he doesn’t care how deep it snows! And it’s not so much the yearly ritual he finds annoying, rather the habitual stubbornness of humans to do away with an observance as asinine as Groundhogs day. (A parody on Ogden Nash’s poem The Swan) The swan can poop while sitting down on water or on its feet on solid ground. For this Ogden Nash awarded it a crown. Yet humans on occasion have been known to rush to duplicate the feat and for expedience and not a prize, rather a desperate need to find a seat in a restroom stall no one occupies.