Road Apples by Tim Sanders
April 11, 2011

Wildlife at home and elsewhere

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I have recently received a massive amount of email asking: “Why don’t you write another one of your fascinating and informative wildlife columns, Gene?” So, in response to that massive amount of e-mail, all of it sent by Dexter Middlebush of Chattanooga, Tennessee, who apparently mistook me for somebody named Gene, here is some fascinating wildlife information.


LOCAL WILDLIFE INFORMATION


There are now water buffalo roaming through Cherokee County. Oh, okay, so maybe they’re not roaming through Cherokee County right now, and maybe when they were roaming they weren’t roaming all over the county, but there were definitely water buffalo a few miles south of Centre, not far from Highway 411 last week. Roaming.

I know this because our great-nephew Matt Teal and his wife Jennifer mentioned the water buffalo in a Facebook post. Those water buffalo were not just your average, feral water buffalo that often show up after a heavy rain; they were the domesticated kind. Sort of. They belonged to one of Matt’s neighbors, and had escaped their enclosure and were trampling and leaving enormous water buffalo pies all over Matt and Jennifer’s yard and the nearby woods, and causing a great deal of consternation among their dachshunds, which they raise and sell.
 Dachshunds are not fond of water buffalo. We have a dachshund, Maggie, whom coincidentally we purchased from Matt and Jennifer eight years ago. I know for a fact that just one water buffalo in our backyard would send her into wild paroxysms of barking, and cause her to poop several times at whichever location she might be when she first noticed that horned leviathan. Multiply that by five or six water buffalo and a dozen dachshunds, and you can just imagine the din around the normally peaceful Teal home last week.

When Marilyn first read Matt’s Facebook post about the water buffalo, she wondered if perhaps he was just joking, or maybe mistaking a herd of more common hoofed mammals, like dairy cattle or Weight Watchers, for water buffalo. But no, these were the real deal. The Asian kind, with the imposing snouts and broad shoulders and huge horns. Jennifer said that the Fire Department finally helped corral the beasts, and all is as it should be again in the area.

I don’t know all the details of the capture, or the exact number of water buffalo involved, but I do know that Marilyn and I will be eyeing the woods behind our house suspiciously from now on. If fire ants and armadillos can migrate to our backyard from Mexico, I’m sure water buffalo from just a few miles south of town will have no trouble finding the place.


REGIONAL WILDLIFE INFORMATION


When all else seems bleak, wildlife-wise, you can always depend on the PETA organization to lighten the gloom with their unintentional humor.

I found an interesting March 31, 2011 report on the NBC News website. It caught my attention because of the acronym PETA in the title, and also because of a large photo bearing the caption:


“Lettuce Ladies Ashley Bymen and Jessica Levin of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) wear bikinis in below freezing weather as they hand out free tofu sandwiches to pedestrians while promoting vegan eating and animal rights at Farragut Square in Washington, DC, on January 4, 2010.”


The girls in the photo are wearing bikinis made of lettuce, and ear muffs which are not made of lettuce. The idea of the costumes is not to imply that PETA people are simply dim bulbs who like to stand in sub-freezing weather wearing lettuce bikinis. That’s obvious. But mainly it is to remind us that many of their animal friends are very intelligent, comparatively speaking.

But I digress. Actually, that photo had nothing to do with the main article, which explained that Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell had announced the previous week that, due to state financial shortfalls, “the Commonwealth wants to contract out business at dozens of rest stops to defray the cost of operating them.”

This, not surprisingly, inspired PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman to fire off a written request to the Virginia Department of Transportation that her group be allowed to sponsor the Troutville Rest Area, providing they’d be allowed to change the name of the rest stop to the Fishing Hurts Rest Area.

In her request, Ms. Reiman pointed out several important facts, which I would have read if I didn’t already have a pretty clear understanding of PETA’s anti-fishing rationale. They believe that fish, which they prefer to call “Sea Kittens.” are highly intelligent (they travel in schools), are deeply emotional creatures with rich fantasy lives, and often suffer debilitating embarrassment because they have no eyelids. They believe that one day, when we humans have evolved into the enlightened, tofu gobbling creatures we should be, each and every trout in the Rappahannock River will have the right to vote, and have access to a bicycle to get him to his polling place. Or something like that. At any rate, she said her group would be interested in sponsoring that particular rest area if a) they could sell “vegan faux-fish sticks and other fish-free snacks,” b) they could be given a reduced, non-profit sponsorship rate, and c) they could be allowed the aforementioned name change from Troutville to The Fishing Hurts Rest Area. (The name Troutville, by the way, was given to the town in the 1890s, when brothers Jim, John, and George Trout settled there. The three brothers had no scales and a total of six eyelids.)

That same article also states that PETA is asking San Francisco Mayor Edwin M. Lee to change the name of the city’s Tenderloin District so that people would “stop thinking of tasty meat (even though the name actually is a reference to bribes).” Ms. Reiman suggested “that city officials rename the neighborhood the Tempeh District, an homage to a soy-based meat substitute.”


If the Cherokee County water buffalo infestation should spread, maybe we could contact PETA. They could rename the species something more innocuous and cuddly, like Horned Water Kittens, and that would make everything all better.