ANIMAL PEOPLE is the
leading independent newspaper providing original investigative coverage
of animal protection worldwide. Founded in 1992, ANIMAL PEOPLE has
no alignment or affiliation with any other entity.
Astonishing Animals Extraordinary
Creatures & the Fantastic World they Inhabit
by
Tim Flannery & Peter Schouten
Atlantic Monthly Press (841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003), 2004.
Hard cover, 203 pages. $29.95
This
absorbing book celebrates the diversity of evolution. Flannery takes the
reader through a gallery of 97 of the strangest-looking creatures on the
planet. Many appear to owe less to nature than to a Hollywood special
effects studio.
Each turn of a page brings yet another fresh delight, sometimes enough
to make one gasp.
The behaviour of some animals matches their extreme appearance. Sea devils
absorb their own skeletons in order to procure the calcium needed for
their eggs. The male net-devil eats his way into the female and then lives
off her blood, a permanent parasite. (Some women may be tempted to make
morbid comparisons). The stoplight loosejaw has evolved a separate set
of formidable jaws––outside its body. The King of Saxony bird
of paradise boasts eyebrows three times the length of its body, bedecked
with streamers, in order to beguile the female.
The illustrations by Peter Schouten are magnificent. But unlike many coffee
table books which propagate “feel-good conservation,” the Astonishing
Animals text by Tim Flannery does not try to hide the extinction that
looms large for many of his cast. Behind the lovely pictures lies a deeper,
subtle message.
Look at the power and extent of the evolutionary drive to survive and
propagate, and there is much food for thought. There is inspiration for
people to stop accepting progressive extinction as something which is
depressingly inevitable. How can we stand by and allow such masterpieces
of either the Creator’s work or of evolution (take your pick) to
be carelessly erased off the planet?
On a lighter note, Flannery tells us that one of the alien-like creatures
depicted is a figment of his own imagination, and he invites the reader
to identify the fake. ––Chris Mercer & Bev Pervan
Keiko
Speaks: Keiko’s True Story Based
On His Communication with Bonnie Norton
by
Bonnie Norton & Keiko
Animal Messenger (P.O. Box 275, Elgin, OR 97827), 2004. 195 pages, paperback.
$15.00.
Bonnie
Norton told ANIMAL PEOPLE that she had never heard of the late science
fiction and fantasy author Andre Norton, but she could pass for an Andre
Norton character.
“In 1996 an Animal Communicator came to my riding stable and talked
with several of my horses,” Bonnie Norton opens. Fascinated, Norton
studied Animal Communication herself.
“When I realized I could help many more animals and people,”
she writes, “I sold my barn and horses so I could become a full-time
Animal Communicator.”
How the horses felt, Norton does not say.
Most of Keiko Speaks consists of transcripts of telepathic conversations
that Norton and others claim to have had with Keiko between August 1997,
when Norton first visited him at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, and September
2003, when after his release, three months before his death in a Norwegian
fjord, he is said to have pleaded through Norton for the last time to
be allowed to live with human companions.
Norton summarized her case in a July/August 2003 ANIMAL PEOPLE guest column,
“Listen to what Keiko wants!” Whether or not one believes in
telepathy, Keiko made his wishes known. They were not honored by those
who had raised and invested more than $20 million in the effort to free
him. ––Merritt Clifton
What
The Dogs Have Taught Me &
other amazing things I’ve learned
by
Merrill Markoe
Villard Books (299 Park Ave., New York, NY 10171), 2004. 245 pages, paperback.
$13.95
This
is not a book about dogs. Nor do the dogs who feature in some of the essays
teach Markoe much worth writing about.
These essays are mainly about women: their anxieties, hopes and fears,
needs and hates. “What living in Los Angeles has taught me”
might have been a more descriptive title.
Some of the essays do revolve around dogs, including “Showering with
your dog,” “A conversation with my dogs,” and “Zen
and the art of multiple dog walking.” But most of the book is devoted
to the life and times of a modern American woman. It is written by an
insider who is witty, worldly, erudite, obsessive and risqué––often
to the point of being plain crude.
All this self-exposure and psychoanalysis makes for fascinating reading,
coated as it is with comedy and neat literary flourishes. As an ageing
third world male of reclusive habits, I could not fall further away from
the target market for the book. But Markoe’s brand of self-deprecating
humour and scathing insights have a universal appeal, and I often found
myself laughing out loud.
Buried in animal welfare issues to the point of chronic mild depression,
as many activists are, I found the book a tonic. ––Chris
Mercer
The
50th Anniversary Edition of the Merck Veterinary Manual looks strikingly
like a Bible. It incorporates the work of more than 350 contributing authors.
“Last updated in 1998,” explains the promotional material, “the
Merck Veterinary Manual is the oldest and most widely consulted
reference of its kind. The Eighth Edition sold more than 100,000 copies
worldwide, and was translated into six languages.”
That may be the most efficient use of the wealth of knowledge in the Merck
Veterinary Manual, which is probably the closest approach in existence
to a single-source reference on everything known about animal health.
Most Merck Veterinary Manual users are hectically busy. They do
not have the hundreds of hours that would be needed to read the Merck
Veterinary Manual cover to cover, a page or two or whole chapter a
day, as if it was a Bible and they were the religious faithful of slower
times.
Yet there might be great value in reading and pondering each page. The
Biblical approach might almost suffice for the textbook side of a general
veterinary education.
As important, the Merck Veterinary Manual is structured to invite
a broad perspective. Each chapter is written by a different team of specialists,
but as a whole the volume works against narrow specialization, toward
awareness and appreciation of animals of every kind. Most vets and certainly
most non-veterinary humane workers will never need to refer to huge sections
of the book, yet many of these passages may contain material worth having
in the back of one’s mind, just in case.
For instance, “Most dilphid marsupials can be fed dry or canned dog
or cat food...Wombats and the larger macropod marsupials can be fed a
combination of large herbivore pellets and rabbit pellets.”
The next time I get a late-night call from a bewildered cop who just found
a hungry wallaby at a truck plaza, I’ll be able to give a quicker
answer about what to feed the critter besides potato chips. Meanwhile,
here is a hint as to why rabbits so rapidly spread across Australia, after
native marsupials were hunted to scarcity: rabbits were not only able
to eat the same vegetation, but were preferentially adapted to a similar
diet, having evolved to fill a similar ecological niche, with even a similar
mode of locomotion.
As a technical reference, much of the Merck Veterinary Manual is turgidly
Latinate, not at all light reading. It does not include colorful stories
like those that keep Bible readers turning the pages. Yet reading random
sections can be fun. There are dryly comic passages, such as the mention
that gonads usually come in pairs, and frequent glimpses of animal personality.
For example, page 1535 mentions that, “The chief cause of death in
captive marine mammals is believed to be pneumonia. It is not common in
polar bears.”
Why not? Though the Merck Veterinary Manual itself does not even
try to explain, the answer is in the animals’ differing responses
to stimulation and stress. Some species, among them polar bears and tigers,
thrive on activity levels that send most species looking for a place to
hide. While other marine mammals suffer in captivity from sensory overload,
polar bears more often suffer from boredom.
Chapter headings include the Circulatory System, Digestive System, Eye
and Ear, Endocrine System, Generalized Conditions, Immune System, Integumentary
System (skin and fur), Metabolic Disorders, Muskuloskeletal System, Nervous
System, Reproductive System, Respiratory System, Urinary System, Behavior,
Clinical Pathology & Procedures, Emer-gency Medicine & Critical
Care, Exotic & Laboratory Animals (a pairing that perhaps unconsciously
recognizes common conditions of exploitation), Management & Nutrition,
Pharmacology, Poultry, Toxicology, and Zoonoses.
At just $45 for the volume, amounting to $20 per pound, the Merck Veterinary
Manual looks to me like a bargain, whether viewed as prevention or
cure. ––Merritt Clifton
Brushed
by Feathers: A
Year of Birdwatching in the West
by
Frances Wood
Fulcrum Publishing (16200 Table Mountain Parkway, Suite 300, Golden, CO
80403), 2004.
247 pages, paperback. $16.95
Frances
Wood lives on the far side of South Whidbey Island, about 10 miles from
here, as the crow flies––along with most other birds common
to the Pacific Northwest. Most resident species have some presence here,
in habitat that varies from old-growth cedar to open fields, orchards,
rocky beaches, and light-density human development. Most Pacific Flyway
migratory species stop over to feed.
Counting 20 species in 10 minutes is often no more difficult than stepping
outside, amid hummingbirds, chickadees, nuthatches, finches, wrens, sparrows,
American robins, and towhees, among the most frequent visitors; listening
for woodpeckers, with the pileated, hairy, and downy varieties all nesting
nearby; checking the sky for great blue herons, bald eagles, redtail hawks,
osprey, northern gos-hawks, and American kestrels while walking to the
car; watching for startled owls gliding across the road between here and
the ferry landing; and observing the variety of gulls, ducks, cormorants,
and pigeons at the landing while waiting to board.
Scarcer species, requiring books to identify, appear about once a week.
We moved to Whidbey Island, in the middle of Puget Sound, about two years
before Wood arrived and began making my bird identifications easier through
her monthly birding column for the South Whidbey Record.
While I often did not know what I was looking at, and still don’t,
I was already aware that I was seeing more different kinds of birds just
by looking out the ANIMAL PEOPLE office window several times a day than
I had ever seen anywhere else except the now lamentably depleted Keoladeo
sanctuary at Bharatpur, India.
Keoladeo, when we visited in 1997, before the devastating drought of the
past few years, reputedly had more birds than any location of similar
size in the world.
We have relatively few birds who are as spectacularly bright as the parrots
or as unique as the hoatzen we saw on a 1999 trek into the Peruvian Amazon,
but we do have more species and more individuals. Indeed, one of the truly
odd moments in our time here came when two sisters visiting from India
lamented the paucity they perceived of birds. The brush in front of them
was seething with birds at that very moment––but they were camouflaged,
small and brown, not nearly as obvious as the few ringnecked parakeets
who might have occupied a similar niche back home.
Oddly enough, I have never met Wood, but have often exchanged bird sightings
with her by e-mail, probably starting with the grey jay who flew down
from Mount Ranier one clear summer day to spend the afternoon visiting
his Steller’s jay cousins at our feeder.
About two hours from sundown he finally headed home. He was probably the
only species I ever saw here whom Wood hadn’t.
Wood writes about our myriad local birds for two audiences: fellow birders,
who form instant mental pictures of each species she names, and general
readers, whom she tries to infect with her own enthusiasm for birding,
though they may not be able to name 20 species.
Wood typically pursues the difficult balance by describing the human interest
angles involved in each memorable sighting. She also tends to provide
enough descriptive detail about the birds she mentions to enable non-experts
to follow her stories without constantly consulting a field guide.
While many birding columns read as if cribbed almost entirely from field
guides, Wood’s best, edited into chapters of her book, contain little
that could be found in a field guide. Her book audience probably consists
chiefly of serious birders. Her newspaper audience are mostly people who
will never be experts, but take an interest in what they see, and it is
writing for this audience that keeps her work accessible. ––Merritt
Clifton
