The joys of jellyfish. August 7, 2011
Posted by ourfriendben in critters, wit and wisdom.Tags: jellyfish, jellyfish exhibits, North Carolina Aquarium, Portuguese Man'o War jellyfish, Shedd Aquarium, Sherlock Holmes
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“When was the last time you thought about jellyfish?” So begins an article, “Balletic Flowers of the Sea,” by Joel Henning in The Wall Street Journal (check it out at www.wsj.com). Our friend Ben would have to respond, within the hour. And not because of the article, either.
I’ve been interested in jellyfish since I first heard about them as an infant, and have been mildly obsessed by them since I was on our annual family summer vacation in Pensacola, Florida, at age six, and enountered a Portuguese Man o’ War on the beach. I’d been told that the sting of one of these jellyfish could result in an agonizing death. Gee! I just had to find out for myself. (Perhaps this early incident explains why our friend Ben has still not managed to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, despite years of ardent hinting and hoping.) Sticking my bare foot tentatively into the jellyfish, the youthful Ben waited to feel the sting. And waited. Nothing. Mind you, this might have been because the unfortunate jellyfish was already dead, or simply because it was beached topside up so I didn’t actually encounter any tentacles during my unsuccessful probe.
You might think this failure to endure an agonizing death would have turned our friend Ben off jellyfish, but not so. I have remained fascinated by them throughout life, examining them with obsessive interest whenever I’m fortunate enough to be on a beach where one has washed up, grateful to have the opportunity to observe it, but sad that its life most probably will end stranded just feet from its ocean habitat.
My interest in all things jellyfish multiplied exponentially after an ultraviolet encounter with some at the North Carolina Aquarium in Beaufort, NC. Watching the various species drift by, ghostlike, tattered shrouds trailing, illuminated like stars, in the night of the surrounding water, made an indelible impression. Their exotic beauty struck our friend Ben dumb, which, as Silence Dogood rightly points out, is perhaps the first and last time that will ever happen.
Returning to The Wall Street Journal article, which focuses on an exhibit of jellyfish at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, continuing through May, 2012. Our friend Ben has visited the Shedd Aquarium and it is fantastic; even without jellyfish, well worth a trip. But check out some jellyfish trivia from the article and you may want to visist the Shedd (or the North Carolina Aquarium, for that matter) for the jellyfish alone:
* Jellyfish can range in size from a contact lens to a bus.
* Jellyfish, described by the article as “living lava lamps,” are among Earth’s oldest creatures, having floated in our oceans for hundreds of millions of years, preceding fish, insects, and dinosaurs.
* Some jellyfish can double their weight in a day. (Thank heavens humans can’t duplicate that feat, the battle of the bulge is bad enough as it is!)
* The world’s largest jellyfish, the lion’s mane, with a bell (as its top is called) 8 feet wide and tentacles 100 feet long, even features in a Sherlock Holmes adventure.
I suggest that you refrain from sticking your foot into a jellyfish, should you enounter one. (You may not be as lucky as our friend Ben.) But you should definitely check them out at a beach or an aquarium near you!
Giving chickens a bad name. August 6, 2011
Posted by ourfriendben in chickens, homesteading, wit and wisdom.Tags: backyard chickens, chicken mishaps, chickens, keeping chickens, outlaw chickens, urban chickens
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Yesterday morning, our friend Ben and Silence Dogood had been delighted to see a “Crazy for Chickens!” decal on the window of a passing car, including an outline of a happy hen. We wished we could find one for our own car, the Red Rogue, where it could join our “No Farms, No Food” and “Buy Fresh, Buy Local” stickers. Go backyard chickens!!!
We have a small flock of heritage-breed hens, who provide us with fantastic organic eggs, entertainment, high-quality fertilizer for our garden beds (their high-nitrogen poop naturally composted with the straw of their chicken yard and the shredded paper in their nest boxes), feathers for our fly-tying friends, and a ready source of appreciative and ever-hungry diners for all our past-peak produce, bread, etc., plus any leftovers we’ve had enough of, pulled weeds that are too scary to compost, spent garden plants, and so on.
Chickens are nature’s garbage disposal. And unlike actual garbage disposals, they give you delicious eggs and free fertilizer, not to mention good company. Ours not only look different—we try to choose each of our six or seven from different heritage breeds—but have their own personalities and know their own names. They also know us and our black German shepherd, Shiloh, and relate to all of us with varying degrees of affection and complacency.
Our chickens take up little space and require little in the way of care: a snug enclosure (coop) with nest boxes where they can get out of the elements and lay eggs, a chicken yard where they can wander around outside, enjoy the sunlight and fresh air, take a dust bath, revel in the feel of rain running through their feathers, forage for anything they might find, and enjoy a steady supply of fresh water and a diversity of foods, including fresh greens, an assortment of fruits and veggies, scratch grains, egglayer pellets, bread and other baked goods, pasta, rice, and milk or cheese that’s past its prime.
We love our chickens. They’re colorful, personable, low-maintenance, and they reward us with the best eggs we or anyone we’ve given some to have ever eaten, with huge yolks like glaceed apricots and a rich, delicious flavor. So we’ve been thrilled to observe and read about the rise of the backyard chicken movement across America. In cities from Seattle, WA to Madison, WI to Pittsburgh, PA to New York, enthusiasts are raising a few (ordinances generally limit the number to between two and five) chickens and reaping the rewards. It’s one step closer to sustainability, a link to our ancestors, who couldn’t have imagined not raising chickens along with their veggies, herbs, flowers and fruits. Back to the future! Great eggs, no salmonella, no guilt over patronizing the hideous factory farms that remind us of the human “flesh farms” in “The Matrix.”
Seeing the pro-chicken decal buoyed our spirits, but our delight was short-lived. Arriving home, Silence went online to see if any e-mails required a response and saw a “This Just In” e-mail from our local paper, the Allentown, PA Morning Call. One of the headlines was ”Lower Saucon rooster repeat offender, attacks elderly woman.”
On the morning of August 5th, the rooster ran out of its yard and attacked a senior citizen as she took her morning constitutional. According to police, who cited the rooster’s owner with “violating the township ordinance of failing to keep his rooster on his property,” this was the third time the rooster had charged and injured a passerby, the other two instances occurring in May and June. In response, the rooster’s owner informed the officers that he was “aware of the attack.”
This is the kind of thing that gives chickens a bad name. Even roosters that are confined to a chicken yard are loud, disturbing the neighborhood with their early-morning cries. They are protective of their flock by nature, charging perceived intruders with beak and spurs, as the super-sharp claws on the backs of their legs are called. Their instinctive ferociousness, designed to defend their harems from predators whatever their size, is why the so-called “sport” of cockfighting came about, and their legendary fearlessness is why countries like France chose a rooster as their national emblem. Many’s the farm child who’s grown up with scarred legs from rooster attacks.
It’s insane to keep a rooster in an urban or suburban situation anyway, much less a free-roaming watchrooster. You don’t even need to keep a rooster to get eggs: Hens lay them anyway. The eggs of roosterless hens are sterile, just like the ones you buy in the store; they’re for eating, not hatching. The only possible excuse for keeping a rooster is if you want to produce your own chicks, not really an issue for city dwellers.
The owner of the attack rooster has clearly rusted out a few bolts in what passes for his brain. To allow one’s animals to attack elderly passersby, or children walking by, or anybody passing by, is criminal. Had the rooster escaped its enclosure and rushed someone once, it would still be inexcusable, though accidental. (Imagine the lawsuit if a dog had done that!) But clearly this rooster is, ahem, free-range.
The damage one owner and one bird like this can do to law-abiding, quiet, peaceful urban and suburban chicken owners is incalculable. Each time the rooster attacks, it makes the news. Not only has an unoffending neighbor been savagely attacked, but the owner’s comment is not, “Ohmigod, I’m SO sorry! I should never have tried keeping a rooster in a neighborhood setting! I’ll send it to a local farm at once, and of course I’ll pay all emergency-room fees.” Instead, what he says is ”I was aware of the attack.” What a great guy! Just the kind of neighbor everyone dreams about.
What happens next is only too predictable. Next thing you know, a group of outraged citizens will demand that the township revoke any ordinances allowing chickens within city limits, or demand that an anti-chicken ordinance be instated if no laws regarding chicken-keeping are on the books. Because of one idiot, an entire city could be deprived of the delights of chicken-raising, the ability to learn useful husbandry skills, to enjoy the freshest possible eggs, and to savor the feeling of a little more self-sufficiency and control over their own food supply.
We think this is a shame, even a tragedy. Rather than banning chickens from the community, we’d like to see that stupid, uncaring bastard punished instead, and to make sure that his punishment fits his crime. We think it would be fitting to close him up, in only his underwear, in a very, very small space with his beloved rooster for a very, very long time…
Raccoon roundup. August 4, 2011
Posted by ourfriendben in Uncategorized, wit and wisdom, homesteading, gardening, critters.Tags: backyard critters, blog humor, raccoon facts, raccoons
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The other morning, our friend Ben saw something moving in the island bed surrounding the huge maple tree that marks the dividing line between our back lawn and our back garden, where our Cultivated Wild Meadow, Pullet Palace, greenhouse, raised beds, compost bins, rainbarrels, fruit trees, grape arbors, and etc. make their home. But even the tree is quite a way back from the sliding deck doors in the kitchen, where our friend Ben happened to be standing at the time, and, to quote James Herriot, “I am not at my best in the morning,” which is to say that there could have been an extraterrestrial moving around back there for all I knew. Clearly, I needed reinforcements.
I decided to start with the one closest to hand, our black German shepherd, Pioneer Hawk’s Haven Shiloh von Shiloh Special. “Psssst, Shiloh, come here! Do you see anything out there?”
No one could accuse Shiloh of lacking intelligence or not understanding commands, but “Come” is one that she hears only selectively, if at all. Unless, of course, one is asking her to come for some reason she considers worthy, such as to give her a treat or take her outside or share one’s own meager food supplies. But eventually, she deigned to head in our friend Ben’s direction. “Look out there! What is that?!”
The huge, upright ears swivelled back in my direction, and the head cocked in the characteristic “Oh dear, you need help” attitude. If she could have lifted a paw to her head and circled it in the classic “You’re insane!” gesture, she would have. Heaving a massive sigh at the absence of any form of refreshment, she left the kitchen ostentatiously and collapsed noisily, clearly exhausted by the lack of food, in the living room.
Oh well, no one ever said shepherds had been endowed with hunting instincts. Clearly, it was time to bring in the big guns. Heading to the bedroom, our friend Ben considerately roused the peacefully sleeping Silence Dogood with a well-modulated hiss. “Silence!”
“Mmpf?”
“Hey, Silence, wake up!”
“Urk?!! Ben, what on earth is going on now? You know I can’t sleep at night now that it’s so hideously hot and humid. Can’t you let me get an uninterrupted hour’s sleep in the morning, for mercy’s sake? What’s the matter with you?!!”
Hey, it wasn’t my fault that things had come up for the past three days that required waking her up before 6 o’clock. But that didn’t mean my life wasn’t in danger, and not from whatever was prowling around outside. A diversion was essential before I was snuffed out. “There’s something moving out there,” I proclaimed dramatically.
“What thing? Out where?”
“I saw it from the back deck door.”
“Maybe it was the neighbor heading out to get the paper,” Silence muttered, unimpressed, preparing to roll over and try for another hour’s sleep.
“It was under our maple tree, and it looked like a fox.”
“FOX!!!” Silence was out of the bed and lurching for the back deck door before Shiloh and I could even turn around. Like me, she was scared by the concept of foxes because of our beloved backyard chickens. We did everything possible when constructing our Pullet Palace to protect our chickens from alien invasion. We used stout kenneling panels to make the sides and roof of the chicken-yard enclosure surrounding the coop, so the chickens would have room to roam without fear of aerial attack from hawks or agile climbers like raccoons who could easily scale an open-topped fence. Not even a bear could get in from above. And we laid an 18-inch-wide strip of chickenwire flat on the ground beneath the kenneling panels, 9 inches to a side, to try to discourage anything from burrowing under. But foxes are renowned for their ability to dig—thus the term “foxhole”—and 18 inches of wire probably wouldn’t be enough to stop them. We’d only seen one fox in the whole time we’ve lived here, romping through the field behind our property several years ago. But frankly, one would be enough to turn our poor chickens into sushi.
“Ben, that’s a cat!” Silence declared contemptuously, looking out. Now I was in for it. “No… wait… it’s not moving like a cat. It’s red like a fox, but it has a ringed tail like a raccoon, or a longhaired red cat. There’s no such thing as a ring-tailed fox. But no, I swear it’s not a cat. Get our birding binoculars, would you?”
Dear Silence, such a propensity for pointing out the practical and obvious, even at that ungodly hour. The binoculars! Of course. Our friend Ben retrieved them and handed them over.
“Ben, it’s a little raccoon. No, wait—it’s two little raccoons! They can’t be more than a few months old, they’re just a third the size of our cat Linus. I’ll bet they’re digging for grubs around the tree, trying to find nutrients and moisture given this drought we’ve been having. Here, take a look!”
As usual, Silence was right. The reddish color we thought we’d seen must have been a trick of the early-morning light. The twin raccoon kits were adorable as they attempted to forage furtively in the “bush,” completely ignored by nearby birds who would never have treated their parents with such contempt. Silence and I asked ourselves, but where was their mom, anyway? Male raccoons tend to head off after mating, leaving the females to raise the young alone. But mama raccoons are usually diligent about their responsibility, taking the kits through their first season of life and showing them how to survive. These two were on their own.
Our friend Ben actually forgot about the little raccoons until a few days ago, when Silence was watering the houseplants in our home office. “BEN! Remember the baby raccoons? I just saw one of them break from the front-yard island bed and head around the side of the house!” Silence and I rushed for the deck door, convinced that we’d see them come up on our deck, as many an adult raccoon had before them, to our dismay. But there was no further sign of the little ones. Silence speculated that perhaps they’d headed into the waterless but still-damp creekbed of our stream, Hawk Run, to check out holes in the bank for crayfish or other edibles.
Then the next morning, I took Shiloh out for her 5:45 bathroom break. As I headed for the ring of trees Silence and I have dubbed “The Circle of Doom,” I saw one of the baby raccoons waddling furiously for one of the walnut trees surrounding the circle. Slowly but deliberately, it began to climb the tree. Following its progress, I saw the second raccoon already on a high branch of the tree, awaiting its twin. I told them calmly that we meant them no harm, and Shiloh, fierce watchdog that she is, ignored them completely. They didn’t seem particularly alarmed, either, regarding me with interest as I attempted to communicate, rather than showing the least sign of panic.
I haven’t seen them in the last few days, but after three sightings, I assume they’re out there. Are they a threat to our tomato, pepper, squash, tomatillo, and fruit crops? Probably. Inept as the yearlings are, they’re still bound to be hungry. Raccoons, like humans, are omnivores, and like us, they’ve proven adaptible to even urban environments; I’ve seen them on the wire fire stairs of inner-city homes, and our friend Edith had a horrendous (or at least horrendously expensive) encounter with a raccoon family that had taken up residence in her urban-suburban attic.
They have large brains and dextrous hands. (That would be the raccoons, though one could say the same about Edith.) It’s no challenge at all for an adult raccoon to reach into our half-barrel water garden, take out a snail, and extract it from its shell, as the empty shells we find on the deck when raccoons are spotted in the vicinity amply testify. Frogs, baby birds, birds’ eggs, fish, crayfish, shellfish, insects, earthworms and the like don’t stand a chance.
Neither does cat food, dog food, or any other food if a raccoon can squeeze through your cat door or otherwise worm its way into your house. (Yet another excellent reason not to install cat—or, yikes, dog—doors, since rats, ‘possums, and God-knows-what can take advantage of them as well as pets.) And don’t think they can’t open your kitchen cabinets or the fridge door; we know of one raccoon who consistently broke into a friend-of-a-friend’s home, opened the fridge door, and extracted the diet cheesecake, carefully opening the package, consuming the contents, and depositing the wrapper on the floor before departing.
Clearly this was a combination of the world’s most selective raccoon and the world’s most habit-bound human, or it couldn’t have happened more than once. And our friend Ben of course has to wonder if the raccoon was watching its weight, or hoping to become the next spokesraccoon for Weight Watchers, or if the rest of the food was so appalling that it made fat-free cheesecake look decadent by comparison. Or if those rumors are true about diet foods containing addictive chemicals that keep people (and raccoons) coming back for more no matter how awful the taste, look, and texture. But I digress.
Returning to the subject, I decided to find out more about raccoons. I had read Sterling North’s Rascal as a child, about a boy and his pet raccoon. I had seen Fess Parker in his coonskin caps as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett on TV (neither man actually wore one, FYI). As an adult, I had of course heard about rabid raccoons, how you should keep well away from the normally nocturnal creatures if you saw one lurching around in broad daylight like a wino who’d just polished off a couple of bottles of Mad Dog 20/20. (But some perfectly healthy raccoons, like our twins, will occasionally appear in daylight, so use their behavior rather than the time of day or night as a rule of thumb.) And Silence and I had seen the enormous size adult raccoons could reach with our own eyes, since they’d sometimes arrive at our deck at night to eat our outdoor cats’ food and fish in our water garden. Definitely not something you’d want to tangle with in the house, even if it wasn’t rabid!
Raccoons’ intelligence, dexterity, intrepid nature, problem-solving skills, adaptability, and omnivorous habits are certainly worthy of respect. But they can also lead to tragedy. Silence Dogood once told me of the heartbreak suffered by one of her coworkers who left her baby securely in the car seat, car door open, while rushing into her rural house with the groceries. She returned moments later to find her infant under attack from a large, hungry raccoon. The child survived the attack, but required extensive plastic surgery, and the guilt and shock almost killed her mother.
The lesson, which we humans seem so slow to learn, is that wild animals, and especially baby animals, may look cute, and they may act cute when we observe them going about their lives, playing and goofing off, but ultimately, they will be true to their nature. It behooves those of us who live or go among them to keep that in mind, especially when the creatures concerned remind us of something we already know and love: a kitten or puppy, a stuffed teddy bear, the Lion King, Tarzan’s chimp companion Cheeta. It’s one thing to try to find the common links between all life, and quite another to discard the essential differences between us to our own cost.
But again, our friend Ben is straying from the point, which is that I found some pretty amazing facts about raccoons in their Wikipedia entry. Like me, you may be interested to know that:
* Raccoons are now thought to be related to those much-larger furry omnivores, the bears. Both share many common behaviors.
* The smallest known adult raccoon weighed just 4 pounds, the largest, over 62 pounds. (The average is about 8 to 20 pounds, though 30 pounds is not uncommon.) They put on enormous amounts of weight to prepare for the lean times of winter, actually doubling their size, and try to consume as many calorie-dense foods like nuts as they can find.
* Raccoons can live 20 years in captivity, but seldom survive even 3 years in the wild.
* The raccoon’s ancestors evolved in Europe 25 million years ago, crossing the Bering Strait (like human beings) to come to the Americas.
* Despite many languages naming raccoons for their tendency to wash their food before consuming it, animal behaviorists claim that this behavior has only been observed in captivity, never in the wild. They say it’s a displacement activity the captive animals use to reproduce hunting along streams and rivers for fish and other aquatic prey. This would make perfect sense, except for one thing: Then why do so many ancient names for the raccoon refer to its food-washing? Surely names like the Powhatan and Proto-Algonquian for raccoon, from which our own word raccoon is derived, were taken from observations in the wild, not from pet raccoons or zoo specimens! Hmmm.
* Humans and birds of prey are called “sighted” species because by far our strongest sense is our sense of sight. Dogs’ strongest senses, by contrast, are their sense of smell and hearing. But raccoons’ dominant sense is their sense of touch, typically expressed through their super-sensitive front paws. Their brains are specialized to focus on touch more than any other animals’ that have ever been studied, and they can recognize objects by touch alone. However, that’s not to say their other senses are lacking. Their eyes are well adapted to seeing in the dark, their sense of smell is excellent, and their hearing is astounding—they can actually hear earthworms moving under the ground.
* Raccoons are no dummies, either. They can quickly learn to open different kinds of locks, still open the locks when their arrangement was dramatically changed (such as turning them upside down), and remember what they’ve learned three years after a short initial training session. And they can tell the difference between boxes containing two, three, and four grapes, as well as “instantly” being able to distinguish between different symbols, according to research. (No wonder that refrigerator and cheesecake carton proved no challenge.)
You can read the Wikipedia article to find many more fascinating raccoon facts. Meanwhile, we wonder if our apparently orphaned twins are still hanging around. If so, Silence and I have decided to name them Crispin and Pippin. But turst me, we’ll enjoy observing them without attempting to make friends!
Which do you love, the mountains or the sea? August 3, 2011
Posted by ourfriendben in wit and wisdom.Tags: beautiful places, favorite places, personality tests
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Our friend Ben and Silence Dogood have seen far too many so-called “personality tests” that ask some version of this question:
Choose your favorite place/scenery/vacation site:
a) the mountains
b) the sea
c) a lake
d) a river
e) a forest
f) the desert
And so on. These tests claim that they can tell something about your personality from which type of scenery you choose. Do you think that’s true? And if so, what do the places or scenery you love say about you?
Our friend Ben loves the ocean and sandy shores. I find salt water and salt air revitalizing and love shells and other sea life. All life came from the sea, and I strongly feel the connection to this, my ancestral home. Just smelling salt air thrills me.
I also love the mountains. I love perching on the side of our most famous local mountain, Hawk Mountain, and looking at the land spreading out like a living map below, watching birds of prey and butterflies drift by at eye level. If I could build my dream home, it would be in the side of a mountain, faced with glass, with a fabulous viewing platform from which I could survey my visual domain. But I must say, I also love the lush valleys with their view of the mountains. I would not be sorry to live in a river valley looking up at the mountains framing my view.
And I love our East Coast forests, with their hemlocks and beeches, their azaleas and mountain laurels, their great boulders and many-hued lichens and mosses and ferns and mushrooms, and all the other diversity of plants and wildlife that make their home there. Forest rivers and ponds have a magic all their own; forest trails remind me of The Hobbit, calling ever onward. When I see a cabin home built in a forested setting, see sunlight streaming through the trees to light the forest floor with magic, I long to live there, too.
Then there’s the desert: the Painted Desert in Arizona, with its gorgeously colored rocks, the Four Corners section of New Mexico with its astonishing formations, the extraordinarily beautiful rock formations of Utah. I’m a lifelong rock collector; I’ve grown cacti since sixth grade; a lifelong dream is to visit Dinosaur National Monument; I have stood with awe before some of the archaeological ruins of the region’s cliff cities; I love the horned toads and other creatures that call the desert home, and have huge respect for the Native cultures that have found a way to live there and their extraordinary art forms. No, I could never bear to live in such a bare and arid place; my soul longs for the green of deciduous woodlands, the open view of valley fields. But wow, for vicarious delight through books and pictures and collectibles, it can’t be beat.
Where wouldn’t I want to go? A lava field. A fjord. The Dead Sea or the Bonneville Salt Flats or Death Valley. The Arctic or Antarctica. The Rocky Mountains or Mount Everest. A rainforest. (Sorry about the rainforest part. But I hate heat, humidity and dampness, and was scared out of my wits as a very young child by a book that showed graphic depictions of the ferocious army ants massing along the rainforest floor and devouring anything in their wake. I guess I never recovered.)
Mind you, we have friends who love the Rockies. Friends who lead tours to the rainforest or save up their money to go on birding trips there. Friends whose favorite scenery is the flat, endless Midwestern prairie. Friends who absolutely despise the ocean. Friends whose great dream in life is to move to the Southwest desert.
What does this say about them, and us? Our friend Ben has no clue. Certainly, the fact that we as a species are able to embrace, enjoy, and adapt to such a wide range of conditions—pretty much every climatic option offered on this, our home planet—speaks to our own versatility and offers one answer as to why we were able to survive and thrive. As for why some of us prefer certain forms of scenery and landscape conditions over others, could it be some sort of cellular memory of our various pasts? Or just the conditioning we were exposed to through our childhood vacations and where we were brought up?
What do you think? And which places are your favorites?
Low-mileage vegetables. August 2, 2011
Posted by ourfriendben in gardening, homesteading, Uncategorized, wit and wisdom.Tags: diverse diet, eating well, local produce, locavores, Paleolithic diet
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It was 5:45 a.m., and not being the brightest bulb on the string at that hour—in fact, barely being able to compete with our 15-watt nightlight bulb—our friend Ben stared at the teaser at the top of the front page of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal with bemusement. (And yes, of course I’d love to sleep later, but our black German shepherd Shiloh has definite views about that.) “The Appeal of A [sic] Low-Mileage Vegetable,” it read, and showed a carrot with a superimposed odometer. The story itself was in the “Marketplace” section.
Hmmm, was the story about trying to market unpopular vegetables? If so, why didn’t it show a turnip or rutabaga? Those poor carrots get no respect. But hey, a WSJ story about vegetables! And it’s made the front page! Lurching into the bathroom to clean the litterbox, it belatedly dawned on our friend Ben that the story must be about locavores, folks who make an effort to support local agriculture by buying locally-produced produce, meat, eggs, milk and cheese, wine, beer and the like. “Low-Mileage.” Oh.
However, the locavore movement isn’t new, and therefore isn’t news. Or at least, front-page news in The Wall Street Journal. Unless it’s finally affecting commerce in a serious way. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I considerately shook a peacefully sleeping Silence Dogood’s shoulder to alert her to this potentially important development.
“Hey, Silence!”
“Mmpf.”
“Silence!”
“Mmpf.”
[Continuing to shake shoulder, encouraging Shiloh to bounce on bed and lick Silence's outstretched arm.] “Wait ’til you hear about this!”
“Shiloh, stop! Ben, this had better be good.”
“It’s a story in The Wall Street Journal about eating locally. Isn’t that great? More national attention for the local-foods movement. It’s about… uh…” My voice died away as I turned to the actual article and began to read.
“About?”
“It’s, uh… it’s about Wal*Mart.”
“WHAT?!!! You woke me up at 6 in the morning to talk about Wal*Mart?!!! GRRRRRRRR…”
Hastily fleeing the bedroom, our friend Ben retreated to our home office and finished reading the article, “‘Local’ Grows on Wal-Mart” (check it out at www.wsj.com). As one might expect, the story focused on the growing national appeal of local produce and the giant grocery retailers’ (not just Wal*Mart’s) attempts to cash in on it, even if for them, “local” meant the entire West Coast or even the entire U.S.
This reminded me of how lucky we are here in the precise middle of nowhere, PA. We’re in farm country, surrounded by cows and fields and vineyards and even breweries. We can drive ten minutes in any direction and buy organic produce and free-range meats and eggs. We can buy homemade yogurt, cream, butter, milk, and an endless assortment of cheeses from local Jersey, Guernsey, and Swiss cows. We can buy award-winning wines from five local wineries and artisanal beer from ten local microbreweries. We can buy heirloom peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants from nearby Mennonite farms, and every conceivable fruit, veggie, and green in season, or buy them canned, jellied, frozen, dried, pickled, and otherwise preserved out of season, from dozens of farm stands and farmers’ markets. We can join a variety of local organic CSAs—subscription-grower programs—and receive the freshest assortment of veggies, fruits, herbs, and other delights every single week. And our local groceries proudly showcase the local farmers who provide them with their produce, giving their names, their farms’ names, and their locations.
True, not everything’s locally available. We grow our own hardy kiwis, hardy pecans, vanilla, cinnamon, black pepper, cardamom, ginger, citrus, figs, coffee, tea, bananas, and herbs. (Which, we hasten to add, is not the same thing as saying that we’ve managed to harvest and cure them all yet.) But there are plenty of things we love, including cashews, coconut, pistachios, almonds, dates, and, above all, salt, that we don’t grow. And we’ve yet to see local kiwis, bananas, pineapples, and etc. make it into our stores. Or discover a salt deposit in our backyard, more’s the pity.
But, setting cynicism aside, our friend Ben applauds the trend of the giant chains to at least support producers in the U.S. and Canada, even if Louisiana doesn’t strike you as “local” if you live in Maine. I do, however, think a “Produced in the U.S.” or “Produced in Canada” sticker is adequate, without the hype about being local if it isn’t justified. I’d love to see “Produced in PA” (or name your state) stickers as well. And I’d love to see “local” reserved for things that are actually produced locally, within the communities where they’re marketed.
The article yielded a few nuggets of information our friend Ben was not aware of: That Wal*Mart is “the largest grocer in the U.S., with more than $120 billion a year in food sales,” for example (Kroger is #2). And that, while giant retail chains are trying to tie their wagons to the local-food star, agricultural experts are saying no way, nohow. “They say that modern expectations for year-round supplies of blueberries and lemons will keep local food from becoming much more than a fad for most mass merchants,” according to the article. “I really don’t think Wal-Mart is going to tell customers, ‘This is not in season, you have to eat cabbage and turnips for the next three months’,” as one expert memorably put it.
But our friend Ben was quick to see the flaw in this argument. Throughout human history, every culture has learned ways to preserve produce so they can benefit from its nutrients and flavor out of season and add diversity to their meals. Whether this meant drying beef or venison or buffalo or fish for jerky or pounding them into pemmican; turning apples into juice, cider, hard cider, apple sauce, cider vinegar, apple jelly, dried apple slices, apple butter, or apple brandy; or drying blueberries or making blueberry preserves or blueberry syrup or blueberry vinegar or canned or frozen blueberries, we have devised ways to preserve our local harvests year-round, whatever they may be. Our health and enjoyment depended on it.
Look at lemons, one of the foods mentioned in the article: In Morocco, they preserve (we’d say brine or pickle) whole lemons. In England, they make lemon curd and lemon marmalade. In the U.S., it’s easy to find bottled lemon juice everywhere. True, nothing might equal a fresh-squeezed lemon. But all of us can still enjoy some form of lemon until they come in season once again.
So why are we so obsessed with the just-picked blueberry or corn on the cob, however distant its origins, or the hideously unripe but “fresh” strawberry, tomato or watermelon in December? Our friend Ben thinks it comes down to our obsession with immortality, our fear of death. Or of baldness or extra pounds or wrinkles.
Say what?! Every day, I receive e-mail bulletins about the health benefits of, say, fresh blueberries or walnuts or salmon. I read about them in the paper and in magazines and even grocery circulars. I’m sure they’re on the radio and TV all the time, too. Make sure you eat your fish for those vital omega-3s! Eat tomatoes for cancer-fighting lycopene! Spinach/broccoli/acorn squash/fresh garlic cloves combat disease! Eat two helpings of [fill-in-the-blank] every day/week to prevent [blank]! Blueberries/cranberries/kiwifruits/lychees/gogi berries/acai berries/God-knows-what will save us all from obesity, aging and death!
Mercy. There’s been a lot of hype lately about the so-called Paleolithic diet, and all of it has missed the point. Humans evolved to be, and survived because, we were omnivores. Early man ate whatever he could get his hands on, be it ants and grubs or fish, shellfish and birds’ eggs or fruit and honey or herbs and roots or nuts and berries and any kind of meat, from mice and lizards to bison and deer. Early man was always hungry, always on the lookout for anything he could eat. It was not the food per se but the huge diversity, the sparseness, and the enormous amount of exercise required to obtain so much as a mouthful that provided the health benefits of the Paleolithic diet. And even so, a 30-year-old was considered ancient.
Today’s “Paleolithic” diet essentially pits carnivores against vegetarians, with no tolerance for the median (omnivorous) path. The pro-Paleoliths claim that the health benefits of their diet are a short travel time through the gut, like a carnivorous diet, so food doesn’t have time to ferment during the digestion process. If Anthony Bourdain did a Paleolithic travel-food series, he’d call it “No Fermentation” (rather than his hit series’ title, “No Reservations”).
Once dairy, legumes and grains entered the human diet, fermentation became a major factor: in yogurt and cheese, in beer and bread and tofu and tempeh and sauerkraut and cider and vinegar and wine and kimchee and pickles and so many other foods. And not to put too fine a point on it, the cultures that embraced these foods lived long and prospered and rose to great cultural heights.
It was the rise of refined foods (white sugar, white flour, etc.), the adulteration of food with chemicals, the overconsumption of food, the drastic reduction in the variety of foods we ate, the toxic pollution of our environment beginning with the Industrial Revolution, and the increasing indolence (aka lack of constant exercise) that our automated lifestyles have encouraged that have brought us down, not the consumption of beans, grains and dairy. To say otherwise is naive, extreme, and dangerous, the hallmarks of pretty much all “diets.”
Yes, of course we can benefit from the good things about the way our Paleolithic ancestors lived: Eating much less than we do now, eating as wide a variety of fresh, organic and unprocessed or lightly processed foods as possible, staying on the move (on our own power) as much as possible, trying to live more in tune with the cycles of life, the days and the seasons: sleep when it’s dark, wake with the light, plan your meals around what’s in season while it’s in season.
Which brings our friend Ben back to low-mileage vegetables. Silence and I have our own priorities when it comes to vegetables and fruits. First, we try to grow as many of our own—organically, of course—as we can. Second, we try to find organic produce locally to supplement what we grow. Third, if we can’t find organic produce, we make a point of buying from area growers to support our community. And fourth, we try to eat at least 30 different vegetables a day.
Say what, you may be asking yourself after that fourth point. Thirty different vegetables?!! Impossible! But of course it’s not impossible or we wouldn’t be doing it. It’s easy. Let’s start with salad. Say you mix three different lettuces into your salad and add some arugula, frisee, escarole, radicchio, and spinach. That’s eight. Now, you add chopped scallions (green onions), shredded carrots, bell pepper, cherry tomatoes, olives, celery, sliced cukes, sliced yellow summer squash, and broccoli and cauliflower florets. That’s 18. Toss in some drained and rinsed canned garbanzos (chickpeas), kidney beans, or black beans, and some roasted corn cut off the cob: 20. Wait, we forgot radishes or Japanese salad turnips and diced red onion and purple cabbage and some undressed bagged coleslaw! And so it goes.
Moving on to the main meal, you might typically make at least two vegetable dishes to go with your meal, perhaps green and yellow wax beans or broccoli and carrots, and perhaps boiled, mashed or baked potatoes as well. Or you could make a luscious mixed grill of roasted vegetables as we love to do, with sliced sweet and new red or Yukon Gold potatoes, wedges of sweet onion, asparagus, corn or crookneck squash, and mushrooms.
That could bring your total close to 30 vegetables for one meal, and we’re not even counting the sandwich at lunch with lettuce and tomato or a luscious Caprese salad with Romaine, tomatoes, fresh basil, and capers. Or your breakfast omelette with scallions or diced sweet onion and bell or hot peppers, or your huevos rancheros with refried beans, onion, scallions, bell peppers, jalapenos, and tomato.
And obviously, we’re ignoring the mainstays of our meals, the spaghetti and pasta sauces and curries and stir-fries and pizzas and refried beans and soups and chilies and all the other complex, delicious, incredibly veggie-rich dishes that Silence makes so well. These up the veggie-diversity ante amazingly. Let’s just take Silence’s spaghetti sauce for example, with garlic, onions, tomatoes, zucchini, bell peppers, mushrooms, and hot peppers: 7 veggies in a single dish. Or our yummy pizzas, topped with olives, artichokes, onions, mushrooms, bell peppers, and arugula, plus tomatoes and garlic in the sauce for an 8-veggie total. If Silence is making an Indian feast, the total can easily be 15 just in the one meal, or more.
Our friend Ben urges you to see how much diversity you can add to your own meals. It will improve your health and longevity. And, if you can add “low-mileage” vegetables and fruits, you’ll help out your community as well. Go for it!!!
Reigning cats or dogs? August 1, 2011
Posted by ourfriendben in critters, pets, wit and wisdom.Tags: best pets, cats, dogs, parrots, pets, smartest pets
1 comment so far
Our friend Ben and Silence Dogood love dogs. And we love cats. We also love birds, fish (and other aquarium denizens like shrimp, clams and snails), reptiles and amphibians, chickens, and bunnies. So far, we haven’t succumbed to the allure of insects, spiders, or ferrets. But our friend Rob is a ferret fanatic, and we’re following the career of our friend Susan’s tarantula Quentin with interest.
We both grew up with pets—our friend Ben’s first pet parakeet was purchased before I was even born—and we can’t imagine a life without the rich rewards of sharing our lives with them. Which brings us to wonder about the seemingly age-old debate about the relative merits of cats and dogs, most recently rehashed yet again in yesterday’s Parade magazine article, “Cats vs. Dogs.” Which is smarter? Which lives longer? Which is faster? Which is more popular?
Sheesh. Call us cynics, but we sometimes wonder if this so-called controversy is just made up by journalists desperate for stories. Especially when articles like the one in Parade note that only 62% of Americans have pets, but more than 90% of Americans consider their pet a member of the family. (Maybe the missing 28-plus percent have pretend pets.)
But we digress. We wonder about all this because we can say for a fact that every pet is rewarding in its own way, whether it’s a beautiful neon tetra, a cat that’s happiest purring on your lap, a dog whose tail can’t stop wagging when she sees you, a guinea pig who squeals happily when it hears you opening a lettuce wrapper, or a parrot whose funny comments make you laugh after a long, bad workday. Why must we be asked to choose one or another when we can have them all?!
Anyway, returning to the questions raised by the article, let’s dish up a few answers:
What pet is smartest? Setting aside folks who keep great apes as pets (what are they thinking?!), the smartest pet is unquestionably a parrot. The two brightest parrot species, the yellow-naped Amazon (our own renowned Plutarch the Pirate Parrot is a yellow-nape) and African grey (the world’s most famous parrot, Dr. Irene Pepperberg’s Alex, was an African grey), are now acknowledged by animal behaviorists to have the intelligence of a five-year-old child. In our opinion, many humans don’t have the intelligence of a five-year-old child, so this is saying something. (Groucho Marx: “Why, a two-year-old child could understand this! Get me a two-year-old child, I can’t make heads or tails of it.”)
According to the Parade article, the brightest dogs have the intelligence of two-year-old children; even an average dog can learn 165 human words. Presumably the five smartest breeds, which include our own beloved German shepherds and golden retrievers, know plenty more; don’t think for a minute they don’t know what you mean when you spell w-a-l-k, t-r-e-a-t, or c-a-r. (Or, of course, v-e-t.) Cats, by contrast, only recognize around 35 words, according to the article. But at least it acknowledges that the brightest cat breed is our own favorite, the Maine coon. To put this in perspective, Koko, the famous San Francisco Zoo gorilla, understands 2,000 human words; the average person, 60,000 words; our friend Ben, 600,000 words (just kidding about the last part).
Which lives longest? If it’s a dog-cat contest, the answer would definitely be cats. We’ve had a friend whose cat lived to be 30, and one of our Maine coons, Jessie, lived to 19. Small dogs can also live fairly long lives, making it into their late teens regularly or early 20s if they’re lucky, though the larger the breed, the shorter the life; great Danes, for example, tend to live only 8 years, and the max for our own preferred breeds, German shepherds and golden retrievers, is around 13, exceptionally 14 (sob). Given the much-longer lives of larger species like ourselves, elephants, whales, and horses, this makes no sense to us, but sadly, it’s a fact. However, the award in this category as in the intelligence category goes to parrots: A parrot like our Plutarch can live more than 100 years. (Plu is currently a comparatively youthful 27.)
Which is the best hunter? Solo, it’s a cat. Dogs hunt in packs like wolves, and are superb pack-hunters, but pet dogs don’t have a lot of opportunity to practice this skill. However, if you could see our cats Linus and Layla catch a mouse, assisted by our black German shepherd Shiloh, you might have to conclude that cats really can hunt in packs very effectively, and are willing to allow their dog “siblings” to join them, and all these authoritative answers are nonsense. Our old cat Jessie preferred to hunt in tandem with Silence Dogood as her hunting partner; Jessie would catch a mouse but not harm it, yowl to announce the catch, and then wait patiently by the front door, mouse in mouth, for Silence to don a fireplace glove, grab the mouse, and hurl it—outraged but unharmed—out the door.
Which is most useful? That depends. When humans evolved from hunter-gatherers to farmers and agriculture made civilization possible, supporting great civilizations from Mesopotamia to Ancient Egypt, cats were by far more useful. Cats ate the rats and mice that would otherwise have eaten the stores of grain that supported the cities. That’s why cats were worshiped as deities by the Egyptians.
In mediaeval Europe, cats ate the rats that brought fleas and plague, and should have received an even more heroic welcome. Unfortunately, they became associated with Satan-worship and witches and were systematically exterminated, resulting in the plagues and famines that swept Europe repeatedly during that period. Depriving lonely old women of their pets and martyring both for merely existing merits Divine retribution in our opinion!
Today, of course, dogs are more useful, whether they’re therapy dogs in assisted-living facilities or hosipitals, drug- or bomb-sniffers, trackers, hunting dogs, companions for the blind or wheelchair-bound, police dogs, library dogs, sentries, or a thousand other occupations. Our friend Ben feels confident leaving Silence Dogood in our German shepherd Shiloh’s protection, knowing that Shiloh normally loves everyone, but wouldn’t hesitate to defend Silence with her life if she detected a threat. (And I know Silence would do the same if she felt Shiloh were threatened, as I would defend them both with my own life.)
But that’s not to say cats are useless nowadays. Ours patrol the house for mice and insect invaders, and make sure these vile enemies are dealt with swiftly and decisively. They’re also quick to alert us to perceived dangers, whether it’s an oncoming storm or a stranger at the door. And there’s nothing like a cat on the lap to warm you on a cold day!
Which is most affectionate? Dogs have a reputation for slavish devotion and cats for aloofness. But our observation is that this is a bunch of hooey. All our dogs have loved us, and so have all our cats. They’ve all crowded around us for love and attention, praise and petting. We’ve never had an aloof cat, but then, we’ve never expected to have one.
We’ve engaged with all our pets and expected them to engage with us, and they never disappoint. And this has been as true of the most wary feral cat who found its way to our deck as it is of the cats and dogs we raised from infancy; it certainly takes them longer to trust, but what a great feeling the first time one of them makes the decision, rushes over, and shoves its head under your hand with a loud purr! Even our fish rush over when they see us. (Not that we think they’re being affectionate, we just think they enjoy looking out of their aquariums as much as we enjoy looking in.)
We think animals respond as we expect them to respond. If you treat a dog as a “dumb animal,” chained outside to its house without human contact, or assume cats have no interest in interacting with people so you ignore them, you’ll get what you expect. But the poor cats and dogs, who would love to lead a full life as part of the family, certainly won’t get what they deserve. And if that’s the way you treat animals, how exactly do you relate to people, people such as, say, your kids and spouse?!! Oh, yes, we’re sure that ultimately you’ll get what you deserve. In fact, you’re already getting it every minute, aren’t you? Otherwise, how could you act like that towards anything or anyone?!!!
But again, we’re straying from the point. Which is that, for us, it’s not a question of cats or dogs. It’s the joy of cats and dogs, and parakeets and parrots and every other creature that can increase our joy and expand our world. Every pet we’ve ever had the privilege of knowing has enriched our lives and taught us so much about the nature and value of life and relationship. Every pet has shown us the meaning of, the value of, love and trust. Absolute love, and utter, absolute, ultimate trust.
No wonder people risk their lives to save their pets. They know, without question, that their pets would do the same, and more, for them if they could, and never think twice. Not because they’re stupid and incapable of thought, but because of their boundless love and trust. May we find the strength to love them and merit their love, and in the end, may God find us worthy of them.
