Fuzz When Nature Breaks The Law Quotes

Snowplows kill twice as many Canadians as grizzly bears do.

The black bear is a ridiculously lovable species. There's a reason kids have teddy bears, not teddy goats or teddy eels.

We are irrational in our species-​specific devotions. I know a man who won’t eat octopus because of its intelligence. Yet he eats pork and buys glue traps for rats, though rats and pigs are highly intelligent, likely more intelligent—​I’m guessing, for I have not seen the SAT scores—​than octopuses. Why, for that matter, is intelligence the scale by which we decide whom to spare? Or size? Have the simple and the small less right to live?

So she looks in her rearview mirror,” one is saying, “and there’s a bear in the back seat, eating popcorn.” When wildlife officers gather at a conference, the shop talk is outstanding. Last night I stepped onto the elevator as a man was saying, “Ever tase an elk?

Californians are like, 'Lions are everywhere now!'" What's on the rise are home security cameras. Doorbell cameras are the mammograms of wildlife biology.

If the present rate of decline continues, the yellow-eyed penguin will likely be gone from the planet in ten or twenty years. It is difficult to be here watching them and not feel somewhat slammed by this information. What a thing to lose! Go look them up. The candy red beak, the pink go-go boots, the yellow mask angling back from the eyes. They’re the Flash, they’re 1970s Bowie! I don’t mean to imply that adorable, showy species are of more value or somehow deserving of more concern. It’s just … damn.

Doorbell cameras are the mammograms of wildlife biology.

For most of the past century, your odds of being killed by a cougar were about the same as your odds of being killed by a filing cabinet. Snowplows kill twice as many Canadians as grizzly bears do.

But the United States is surely not the only country working on gene drive in mammals. If we’re on it, China is too. And China has not demonstrated a comforting abundance of oversight in the realm of genetic engineering.

I would take delight in the optical non sequitur of a bear standing in front of a Louis Vuitton boutique. This poor goober with the burrata on its snout, innocent and utterly unaware of its likely fate, makes me want to cry.

Albert Ken-rich Fisher’s 1900 “Summary of the Contents of 255 Stomachs of the Screech Owl” made me feel tired and sad, though also vaguely festive, owing to the author’s “Twelve Days of Christmas”–style presentation: “91 stomachs contained mice … 100 stomachs contained insects … 9 stomachs contained crawfish … 2 stomachs contained scorpions …” Droppings provided a kinder, less taxing alternative.

Because people like me want to have their hamburgers. Only once or twice a year, I want to say. But I know that’s a lame defense. It’s not the quantity that matters, it’s the statement you make or don’t make. When you tell people you don’t eat beef — or would never use a glue trap — you make the alternative a little less comfortable for them. You keep it from being a thing they give no thought to.

Is there something uniquely dangerous about beans? I posed this question to plant scientist Ann Filmer, recently retired from the University of California, Davis. In her reply, she included a link for a website she had put together on poisonous garden plants. I was taken aback to note that nine of the 112 plants in Category 1 (Major Toxicity: “may cause serious illness or death”) were currently, or had recently been, growing in our yard: oleander, lantana, night-blooming jasmine, lobelia, rhododendron, azalea, toyon, pittosporum, and hellebore. Another, the houseplant croton, was growing in an orange ceramic pot in my office. In other words, it’s not beans. It’s plants, period. If you can’t flee or maul or fire a gun, evolution may help you out with other, quieter ways to avoid being eaten. Over the millennia, natural selection favors eaters who turn up their proboscis at you, and eventually they all steer clear.

someone who knows a little more than diddly. I’m scheduled to meet with the Center’s wildlife genetics staff, upstairs in the Long Speak Room, which is an amusingly apt name for a government conference room (except that it isn’t—a realization that will dawn when I take note of the plaque by the door, which reads: Longs Peak Room).

safety orange/red hunting jacket makes the hunter stand out to other hunters, to deer it may be more camo than store-bought camo.

Of all the animals we have ever kept, these Albatross are the ones to which I have become most attached. I really love them and respect their independence and jaunty ways. This marks the end of a period of acquaintance with real aristocrats of life.

Aritra points out his window as we pass a turnoff. “Two kilometers up that road a man was killed by an elephant. A few days ago. Three people were working on the roadway. They ran when they saw the elephant, and one man was separated, and the elephant followed him.” This is hard for me to imagine. I grew up with Babar and National Geographic. Elephants were gentle and slow-moving. They wore spats and bright green suits. They were never something to fear. This has created a minor disconnect between myself and my hosts.

They are the same tribal laborers that the British brought in from central India. They use them because they are considered hardworking and obedient.

New Zealand says it like it is. On the brink of a cliff above the surf at Pancake Rocks is a sign warning tourists not to climb over the fence. It closes with “Don’t be an idiot.

While Cutler was tinkering with his castor oil, his roommate began feeling ill. Fearing it might be ricin poisoning, the roommate went to the emergency room. It was just flu, but at the mention of ricin, medical personnel called in a potential terrorist situation and a Phoenix SWAT team descended upon the apartment. Cutler served three years for, essentially, possession of a laxative with criminal intent.

The words appear that way on a Utah food-handler testing and certification site. The threat they refer to is not jequirity beans or castor beans. (The castor bean isn’t actually a legume. It’s a spurge.) The threats are kidney beans, red or white, broad beans, and lima beans. Fail to boil these common edibles for at least ten minutes, and you may find yourself in significant gastrointestinal distress. As did a thousand-plus viewers of a Japanese TV show that recommended grinding white kidney beans in a coffee mill, toasting for three minutes, and sprinkling on rice. According to the journal article “The ‘White Kidney Bean Incident’ in Japan,” a hundred people were hospitalized.

In five or six years,” he begins, but he doesn’t go where I’m expecting, “no one will be using lasers. It’s dangerous.” Even the handheld kind sold for classroom lectures can damage a retina. When laser light is absorbed by pigments in the eye, it deposits energy and heats up the tissue. Because the light arrives in a tight beam—and is further focused by the eye’s lens—the energy density is high. In terms of the damage caused, think of the difference between someone in stilettos stepping on your foot and someone wearing loafers.

Let us here lay to rest the myth that birds’ innards will burst if they scavenge the rice thrown at weddings. Over the years, this enduring bit of misinformation migrated as far as Ann Landers’s column and the Connecticut state legislature. In 1985, Representative Mae Schmidle proposed “An Act Prohibiting the Use of Uncooked Rice at Nuptial Affairs.” The Audubon Society called hooey, pointing out that migrating birds feed on fields of rice. Some churches ban the practice anyway, not because it’s perilous for birds but because it’s perilous for guests, who could slip on the hard, round grains and fall and then fly off to a personal injury lawyer.

Research on jaywalking pedestrians tells a similar story. Most of our decision-making is based on how far off a car is. We’re not so good at factoring in the speed. Experimental evidence suggests that full looming sensitivity doesn’t develop until adulthood. A young child on the side of the road and a car traveling faster than 20 mph combine to encourage, quoting a team of European psychologists, “injudicious road crossing.” Hence the need for injudiciously punctuated slow children signs. It’s not just that kids aren’t looking when they cross; they’re also not seeing.

Qureshi adds that the other problem with government-controlled culling—referring here to the shooting of wild boar and nilgais—is that while it is permissible to kill them, the law forbids eating the meat. “And here”—he means India—“you don’t kill a species for the sake of killing. Only a psychopath does that.

Exasperated, the navy turned to science for help. On October 2, 1957, Hubert Frings, a Pennsylvania State University professor of zoology, got a call from Washington. Would he be willing to come to Midway Atoll for the December/January nesting season? In other words, would Frings make the supreme sacrifice of spending his between-semester break on a tropical island in lieu of hanging around Altoona, Pennsylvania? You bet. Accompanying him would be his wife, Mable, a librarian and bioacoustician with a special interest in cricket and grasshopper “chirp sequences.

So I’m curious, how far does the Pope think we should go in the direction of respecting and correcting the natural world and it’s wild inhabitants. Before I arrived the PIL media manager sent me a copy of Francis’s rather beautiful and cyclical ‘On Care For Our Common Home’. “Each creature has its own purpose” he writes “none is superfluous." He describes how Saint Francis would burst into song when he gazed at the sun, the moon or the smallest of animals. I read these passages to Father Carlo. He listens, nodding. “Saint Francis began a new relationship between nature and humanity. If you read his poems you find the expressions ‘Sister Water’, ‘Brother Sun’, ‘Sister Moon’.” “Would Saint Francis include brother rat?” I ask “Sister Boll Weevil, Uncle Blackbird who devours 2% of the North Dakota sunflower crop?”. Father Carlo says "Yes, Yes he would. He includes even death” he says.“Did saint Francis say anything specifically about rodents?”I hear myself say. “No, he didn’t. but the point is, brotherhood is not a simple relationship. with your brothers and sisters, normally you fight. You cannot think that there is an idillic way of being in a relationship with someone. Every relationship among humans and the earth is not only connotated with positive aspects. At the same time you also have negative aspects. The point is how do you deal with those aspects?” He’s good, this guy. “Yes” I say, “and how should we deal? It’s well and good to say these things, but how do we act in a way that serves both human and animal fairly? Let’s take the example of Canada Geese on gold courses. What is their crime? Befouling the turf, littering. For this should we be allowed to call someone in to round them up and gas them? Do they deserve to die because a few well-heeled humans want to hit a ball into hole and they need an obsessively tidy playing surface the size of the holy sea? Think of all the Sister Water that gets wasted watering the greens. Maybe it’s time to eliminate gold, not geese.” Father Carlos collects his thoughts. Among them, surely, ‘who let her in?’.

So I’m curious, how far does the Pope think we should go in the direction of respecting and correcting the natural world and it’s wild inhabitants. Before I arrived the PIL media manager sent me a copy of Francis’s rather beautiful and cyclical ‘On Care For Our Common Home’. “Each creature has its own purpose” he writes “none is superfluous." He describes how Saint Francis would burst into song when he gazed at the sun, the moon or the smallest of animals. I read these passages to Father Carlo. He listens, nodding. “Saint Francis began a new relationship between nature and humanity. If you read his poems you find the expressions ‘Sister Water’, ‘Brother Sun’, ‘Sister Moon’.” “Would Saint Francis include brother rat?” I ask “Sister Boll Weevil, Uncle Blackbird who devours 2% of the North Dakota sunflower crop?”. Father Carlo says "Yes, Yes he would. He includes even death” he says.“Did saint Francis say anything specifically about rodents?”I hear myself say. “No, he didn’t. but the point is, brotherhood is not a simple relationship. with your brothers and sisters, normally you fight. You cannot think that there is an idillic way of being in a relationship with someone. Every relationship among humans and the earth is not only connotated with positive aspects. At the same time you also have negative aspects. The point is how do you deal with those aspects?” He’s good, this guy. “Yes” I say, “and how should we deal? It’s well and good to say these things, but how do we act in a way that serves both human and animal fairly? Let’s take the example of Canada Geese on gold courses. What is their crime? Befouling the turf, littering. For this should we be allowed to call someone in to round them up and gas them? Do they deserve to die because a few well-heeled humans want to hit a ball into hole and they need an obsessively tidy playing surface the size of the holy sea? Think of all the Sister Water that gets wasted watering the greens. Maybe it’s time to eliminate golf, not geese.” Father Carlos collects his thoughts. Among them, surely, ‘who let her in?’.

So she looks in her rearview mirror,” one is saying, “and there’s a bear in the back seat, eating popcorn.

The victims of arboreal manslaughter may be, unlike the perpetrators, quite young.

The black bear is a ridiculously lovable species.There’s a reasonkids have Teddy Bears, not Teddy Goats or Teddy Eels.

I am skeptical, only because I have read the 1978 paper by researchers at Pennsylvania State University who tried to warn away white-tailed deer by erecting roadside plywood cutouts of deer rear ends with tails a-flagging. On some, the raised tail was painted white; on others, an actual deer tail had been nailed in place. Sadly, because who wouldn’t want to see our nation’s highways lined with plywood deer asses with decomposing tails, none of it worked.

If other fallers read this, he will no doubt get grief about his lovely hands, but I believe a man named Dazy will handle it.

When bear biologists from the state of Washington surveyed forty-eight U.S. wildlife agencies, 75 percent said they sometimes translocate problem bears, but only 15 percent believed it was an effective way to resolve the problem. It’s more often done in high-profile cases, when media attention has put the animal and the agency in the spotlight. Generally speaking, translocation is a better tool for managing the public than it is for managing bears.

We practiced the diamond-shaped sweep earlier. Four people move along back to back to back to back, weapons ready. It’s a human octopus with guns. Each person scans the quadrant in front of her (named for hours on a clock face: 12, 3, 6, and 9) and calls “Clear” if she sees no danger. Whereupon the person to her right calls “Clear.” Et cetera, around and around. Not only can the surroundings be monitored in all directions, but it’s safe in that no one can inadvertently point a weapon at anyone else. Should someone spot a threat, she calls it out, whereupon the people on either side move into position beside her. Now three rifles are aimed and ready, while one person watches the rear. When we practiced this earlier, Joel played the dangerous animal. I had hoped for some pantomime, maybe even a costume, but he’d just step in front of us and say, “I’m a bear.

I’ve heard people with homeland defense say, ‘Oh, we keep a good control on whatever genes are synthesized commercially, blah blah blah.’ ” Pincus takes no comfort there. He related another story. “For therapeutic reasons, we wanted to synthesize a gene that encoded the toxic part of ricin, that would be expressed—i.e., produced—in human cells. This should have set off a lot of red flags if anyone was looking for that kind of thing. But, man, we ordered it, and we had the gene two weeks later. So if you think the Select Agent list protects us from sophisticated terrorists …” I’ll finish the sentence for him. It’s a load of horse spleen.

A technique favored by Mussolini’s squadristi thugs. Political foes were force-fed large quantities of castor oil—up to a quart, according to The Straight Dope. Who does that? Moreover, why? To kill by dehydration? To humiliate? I could find no satisfying answer, not even from the International Castor Oil Association, which, despite large quantities of emails, had no comment.

I can’t judge. We all have emotional connections to certain branches of the tree of life, and for some that branch is trees. We are irrational in our species-specific devotions. I know a man who won’t eat octopus because of its intelligence. Yet he eats pork and buys glue traps for rats, though rats and pigs are highly intelligent, likely more intelligent—I’m guessing, for I have not seen the SAT scores—than octopuses. Why, for that matter, is intelligence the scale by which we decide whom to spare? Or size? Have the simple and the small less right to live?

Possum merino is a heavenly soft wool blend. When I first arrived in New Zealand, I bought a pair of wonderful green possum merino gloves. I imagined peaceful possum flocks being sheared like sheep. Then Warburton explained that possum pile is too short to shear and is typically sliped instead. Sliping involves some kind of postmortem chemical depilatory. I still wear the gloves, though with diminished happiness.

Like most birds, gulls mate by aligning their cloacal openings. The ornithological term for this is “the cloacal kiss.” Which makes bird sex sound sweet and demure, until you remember that they also excrete through their cloaca.