TBT^2: Remarkable Animals

After years of misspent youth, during which time I considered animals little more than fleshy, occasionally cute, robots, yours portly has learned the error of  his ways and become an animal lover.

Don’t get wrong—I love to eat animals as much as I enjoy keeping them as pets, and I possess a realistic view of animals:  they exist to serve us, not the other way around.  I love Murphy, and I’ll make sure she is fed, watered, and (when appropriate) medicated.  But the day that the vet says, “we can keep her alive another two weeks with this $4000 experimental canine chemotherapy,” it’ll be time to give the old girl a heartfelt goodbye.  By comparison, I’d sell my left kidney to the gay mafia if it’d add one day to the life of one of my family members or Dr. Fiancée.

All that said, I now very much see animals as a gift from God.  Every child in Sunday School knows that the first job of the first man was to name the animals; God Spared the animals along with humanity when He Commanded Noah to build an ark.  Clearly, our relationship with animals is meant to be a fruitful and productive one.

Further, anyone who has ever owned a dog (or even a cat) knows that these creatures have personalities.  Sure, I imagine jellyfish don’t lead rich inner lives, but it’s wild and amusing to me how dogs can possess such a range of personalities.  Murphy is aloof and anxious, but very much the queen of her domain.  Dr. Fiancée’s three-legged mutt is sweet and loving, but has her sassy moments like Murph.  My parents’ two rat terriers are cousins and/or half-brothers of some kind (I think they share a grandparent), but despite their genetic similarity, their personalities are nearly opposite (much like human siblings at times).

Do I think dogs have souls?  Perhaps not in the way that humans do.  But there is a life and intelligence behind the eyes of a dog.  Even the most forlorn, neglected mutt possesses something of a shimmer behind his sad eyes.  The fact that the eyes can even express emotions suggests there is something deeper there.

Of course, the evolutionist wags will snarkily remark, “we just bred them to reflect qualities we like.”  Perhaps.  Nevertheless, I’m struck by how human dogs can be, while also being something quite different—in some ways, something even better.

All points worthy of speculation, idle or otherwise.  What do you think, dear readers?

With that, here is 12 September 2024’s “TBT: Remarkable Animals“:

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TBT: Remarkable Animals

The older I get, the more I appreciate animals.  My parents have just taken in two precious kittens—a brother and a sister—and watching their cantering and playing is adorable.  It’s also a good reminder of the playfulness of youth, in both humans and animals, and how enjoying that playfulness keeps us young, even if we’re not as spry as we used to be.

God Created some amazing stuff.  The sheer biodiversity of our world is awe-inspiring, and demonstrates that our God Is Awesome.  We serve an amazing Lord.

With that, here is 15 September 2023’s “Remarkable Animals“:

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SubscribeStarSaturday: Hiking the Florence Nature Preserve

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

On Saturday, 3 August 2024 my friend Ashley and I went hiking in the Florence Nature Preserve, accessible via the Upper Hickory Nut Gorge Trailhead, just outside of Gerton, North Carolina and down the road from Chimney Rock.

Ashley had proposed the trip a couple of months earlier, with the inviting question “do you like hiking?”  I couldn’t respond to that query quickly enough, and within minutes we had planned the broad outline of our excursion to the trailhead.

We left right around 6 AM that morning in Ashley’s sweet 2021 Ford Bronco, which she was eager to road test on winding mountain roads, and after a couple of missed GPS turns due to the distraction of conversation, we made it to the trailhead around 10:15 AM.  By 10:30 AM we were lathered up in sunscreen and on the trail.

By noon we were drinking in this beautiful view at Tom & Glenna Rock over some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches:

Panoramic View of Lookout - FNP

The entire trail is roughly five miles up and back, but there are various side trails and alternative routes available that can reduce the trek depending on experience level and time constraints.  We opted for a modified version of the “blue” trail rather than the whole loop, which would have taken us pretty much the entire day to complete.

Here’s a map of our route (I’ve used the map from the Conserving Carolina website and added our route in pink):

Florence-Nature-Preserve-Map - Route with Ashley in Pink

According to some rough math based on the interactive map for the trail, Ashley and I hiked around 3.82 miles in total.  Naturally, roughly half of that was uphill, so coming back down the trail was a bit quicker.  We also paced ourselves heading up, as Ashley was documenting our hike via video for her mother.  That deliberate pace was smart, because we did not wear ourselves out on the hike.

The trail is rated as “challenging” and/or “strenuous,” and after my “Summer of George” I was a tad concerned about my ability to huff and puff up a mountain, but yours portly performed admirably.

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Remarkable Animals

My local newspaper, the Darlington News & Press, ran an excellent column entitled “Until one has loved an animal” by Dr. Bill Holland, a Christian pastor and theologian.  His column runs regularly in the paper, and he always offers up some interesting insights into faith and biblical Truth.

Until one has loved an animal

The piece is about the remarkable humanness that animals can sometimes possess.  It’s easy for us to anthropomorphize animals’ behaviors, but anyone who has owned a dog knows that they share something with us that other animals lack.

Specifically, it’s about the remarkable spelling horse Beautiful Jim Key.

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The Nature of Nature

As a people genetically and spiritually descended from the English, we Americans love nature.  The United States is a land known for its natural splendor and beauty, and our entire history is one of constantly encountering, subduing, conquering, and/or making our peace with nature.  Frederick Jackson Turner in his famous “Frontier Thesis” argued that our young nation’s constant struggle against nature—the frontier—reinvigorated our democratic and republican spirit and institutions, as we constantly adapted concepts like liberty and constitutionalism to new, often hostile environments.

Yet we retain something of the (perhaps naïve) English notion of nature as fundamentally benign, a bounteous garden for our enjoyment and leisure, not to mention our sustenance.  We imagine rolling hills of lush greenery, absent of any nasty critters or conditions that might interrupt our bucolic stroll through the countryside.  Our conception of nature is thoroughly Romantic at times, feeling more like Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony than Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (although, to be fair, both feature massive thunderstorms!).

Of course, we Americans also know something our Anglo-Scottish-Irish friends don’t:  nature is a b*tch.

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Hard to Swallow

A big H/T to Neo at Nebraska Energy Observer for the inspiration for today’s post:  in his latest edition of Sunday Funnies (“Sunday Funnies:  Juneteenth & Other Things“), Neo includes a tabloid-style headline that reads, “I Was Nearly Krilled!: Lobster diver says he was swallowed by humpback whale.”  The pun “krilled’ is circled in orange.

I looked it up, and it’s a real story:  Michael Packard, a fifty-six-year old lobster diver from Massachusetts, was briefly trapped in the mouth of a massive humpback whale.  According to Packard, he was in the mouth of the great beast for about thirty seconds, before the creature surfaced, shook its head back and forth, and spit Packard into the air.

Here is the relevant excerpt of Packard’s account, as quoted at NPR.org:

Packard told WBZ-TV that he was about 45 feet down in the water when he suddenly felt “this huge bump and everything went dark.” He initially feared he had been attacked by a shark.

“Then I felt around, and I realized there was no teeth and I had felt, really, no great pain,” he said. “And then I realized, ‘Oh my God, I’m in a whale’s mouth. I’m in a whale’s mouth, and he’s trying to swallow me.’ “

Packard was still wearing his scuba gear and breathing apparatus inside the whale’s mouth, which he said was completely dark. Fearing he wouldn’t make it out alive, he thought about his wife and sons.

After about half a minute, the whale rose to the water’s surface and began shaking its head from side to side.

“I just got thrown in the air and landed in the water,” Packard recalled. “And I was free, and I just floated there … I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe I got out of that.”

The story sounds incredible—and, according to whale experts, the odds of it happening are extremely rare—but it is within the realm of possibility.  Humpback whales lack teeth, and instead filter feed through baleen, long, hair-like “teeth” that filter out sea water and trap small prey, like shrimp and krill, inside.  Humpback whales often feed using lunge feeding, during which the whales “open their mouths, accelerate and ‘take in 10 SUVs worth of water and fish and then everything else,'” according to Iain Kerr, quoted in the same NPR piece.

Apparently, Packard just happened to be swimming in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the great whale accidentally sucked him up with tiny sea critters.

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TBT: Climate Hysteria Robs Us of Joy

In casting about for a good TBT this week, I stumbled upon this post—which really should have ended up in one of my “Forgotten Posts” editions of Lazy Sunday—about the foolishness of climate hysteria, and the arrogance of thinking we can really have a concrete impact on the environment at the macro-level.

Don’t get me wrong:  I enjoy God’s Creation, and I think stewardship of His Creation is incredibly important.  We shouldn’t go around adopting baby sea turtles.  But driving to work everyday isn’t going to affect the environment or the climate in any discernible way.

In fact, it’s funny—climate change doesn’t even seem like a serious issue anymore (who even remembers Greta Thunberg now?).  As soon as the elites went hard for The Virus hysteria, they immediately had us using disposable plastic crap and Styrofoam containers again.  Even the whole message of The Age of The Virus was “Consume”—stay home, eat takeout, watch trash TV.

That puts the lie to the climate change nonsense.  I’ll repeat my admonition from one year ago today:  “Eat, drink, and be merry—and have lots of babies.”

Here is 22 October 2019’s “Climate Hysteria Robs Us of Joy“:

Growing up, I received my fair share of public school climate indoctrination.  My generation cut its teeth on Captain Planet, the eco-propaganda cartoon that, among other things, scolded Americans for using too many resources and having too many babies.  Fast forward to today, and those arguments are mainstream.

In fact, I remember my dad telling me that Captain Planet was Ted Turner‘s ham-fisted attempt at indoctrinating kids—one of the first times I vividly remember learning that the elites were lying to us.  The finger-wagging, puritanical nagging of environmentalists further pushed me away from eco-hysteria.

Still, we were always taught that the oceans were dying, that fresh water was scarce, etc.  Well, thanks to Quora, some easy math shows us that God’s Creation is abundant enough.

Quora user posed the question (to paraphrase):  if everyone drank a glass of water from the ocean (let’s assume it’s been desalinated), how would it affect the sea level?

One poster’s answer goes through the math:  if everyone—including babies! (around 7.7 billion people)—took a twelve-ounce glass of water from the ocean simultaneously, “the water level would drop by 0.0000000075 meters, or about 7.5 nanometers. That’s about 1/1000 the size of a red blood cell.”  Another contributor, Vilmos Shepard, writes that this scenario “would lower the ocean by less than a wavelength of light.”

As the contributor writes in his response, “within a day or two, we’d all sweat, breathe and urinate that water back out, and it would eventually end up back in the oceans. The water cycle is a hard thing to beat.”  Indeed.

The more I learn about Creation, the more I appreciate that there’s not much we can do to affect or alter the macro-level environment.  We can make tweaks and marginal improvements—such as improving desalination of sea water, transporting water more efficiently, picking up trash, etc.—but it’s foolish to think we alone can break or fix the environment.  Creation is incredibly abundant and robust.

Barring massive nuclear warfare, our everyday actions are not going to destroy the planet.  I’m not saying we should casually throw our old tires into the river—we should be good stewards of Creation—but it’s wasted effort to agonize over our carbon footprint.  If the enviro-cultists and eco-hipsters really cared, they’d live in the country, instead of cramming themselves into energy-guzzling urban hellscapes.

Eat, drink, and be merry—and have lots of babies.  Don’t curtail your enjoyment of the bounty of God’s Creation just because Ted Turner and Greta Thunberg are insane and deluded.  Yes,  yes—dispose of your old electronics and used motor oil properly (we’re trying have a society here), but we shouldn’t lose sleep over eating a steak.

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Orangutan Keeps Swinging

Apes, monkeys, gorillas, chimps:  they’re fascinating creatures.  Part of their allure is their similarity to humans.  Indeed, I think part of what we like about higher-order animals is when they do anthropomorphic things.  Everyone loved Koko because she had a pet kitten and talked with a Speak-&-Spell.  Even more alien creatures with human abilities draw our attention.  I love octopuses because they’re beautiful, odd creatures, but also because they can open jars and possess memory.

There’s also the connection to primal energy:  a silver-back gorilla is as fat and hairy as I am, but it could rip my head off.  King Kong holds such a powerful presence in our cinematic minds because it’s the story of Beauty and the Beast—the love of the soft and feminine subduing an unbridled, masculine force.

So this story from The Epoch Times about a recovered orangutan really caught my attention.  A female orangutan was shot and separated from her baby in Indonesia.  A team from International Animal Rescue managed to save the poor creature, who was starving on the jungle floor, and release her a few weeks later into a primate sanctuary.

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Albino Giraffes Poached

As if dancing plagues and Chinese viruses weren’t enough, albino giraffes are getting poached.

From the BBC:

Two extremely rare white giraffes have been killed by poachers in north-eastern Kenya, conservationists say.

Rangers had found the carcasses of the female and her calf in a village in north-eastern Kenya’s Garissa County.

A third white giraffe is still alive. It is thought to be the only remaining one in the world, the conservationists added.

Their white appearance is due to a rare condition called leucism, which causes skin cells to have no pigmentation.

Apparently, no one knows why these giraffes were killed; the poachers’ “motive is still unclear,” per the BBC.

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The Joy of Autumn

It was a hot and muggy Halloween here in South Carolina (with tornado warnings mid-trick-or-treating!), but my complaints about the season’s distinct lack of autumnality must have worked:  we’ve had a crisp, cold week.  Indeed, in true South Carolina fashion, we’ve largely skipped autumn and have headed directly to winter (of course, don’t be surprised if it’s 80 degrees on Thanksgiving Day).

I’m getting excited for Thanksgiving.  It’s been busy at work lately, and the natives are restless.  Teachers know when students need a break—there’s a weirdness to the atmosphere, and you can almost feel the kids clawing at the walls.  As a Leftie British colleague of mine once quipped, “You Americans think it’s a good idea to have eighteen weeks of school without a break.”  Usually I’m not one for foreign interlopers critiquing our awesome country, but even a progressive Briton is right now and then.

Mainly, though, I’m excited for some downtime with the family, with lots of filling food and cold, crisp days.  Sweater weather, as the vapid co-eds call it, has arrived, and I welcome it happily.  Like the vapid co-eds, I like all the pumpkin spice stuff, too.

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