Where’s the beef (here, it’s all right here)
Kat Eschner's weekly newsletter about animal-human relationships Vol. 3 Iss. 8
This issue of CREATURE FEATURE is brought to you by Perry, who I am staying with and caring for during a two-week stint in New York. He is a grompy olde man catte with epic toe floofs who likes to wake me up at 4 am by kneading my head and yowling for breakfast. I’m given to understand that cattes are just like this sometimes.
BY THE WAY, I am in NYC until Sept. 27 and if you are there too, I would love to meet you. kat.eschner@gmail.com
Image: A white long-haired cat with grey ears and blue eyes stares balefully towards the camera. Meet Perry, everybody. Credit: Kat Eschner
Firefighters had to deal with exploding cans of bull semen while trying to *put out* this blaze
A conflagration at a genetics lab in south-eastern Australia destroyed bull semen and all kinds of testing and artificial insemination equipment, in a setback for local farmers. Things came (sorry not sorry) to a head when the fire got hot enough to turn the cryogenic cylinders of cum into projectiles, reports Kellie Lazzarro for the ABC.
"The liquid inside the cylinders was rapidly expanding and essentially the lids of the cryogenic cylinders were just popping off the top and projectiles were being thrown from the building," a fire services authority told her.
Extra credit: I don’t actually know much about bovine AI (artificial insemination, not intelligence, I can’t imagine why we’d try for SmartCows). If you’re like me, head over to—surprise, surprise—Vice for an inside look.
Seriously what’s up with these bloodless cattle mutilations
It’s starting to look like eastern Oregon has its own Jack the Ripper. Whoever this person or persons are, they are specifically interested in cattle and possess some… unusual abilities. The local sherriff’s office is keeping a list of the most commonly called in theories about what’s actually going on, reports Anna King for OPB: the Vietcong, aliens, witches, lightning, sharks with laserbeams and vegans are all on the list.
Cowboys recently found several animals with body parts precisely removed — and it’s happened just like this before in the West.
It happened to Anderson back in the 1980s, when one of the rancher’s mother cows was mysteriously killed overnight. From his homeplace, Anderson pointed to the exact spot where he found her on top of a mountain. He’s never gotten over it.
Anderson said he had just been near the spot the night before. The next morning, his cow was laid over and dead, her udder removed with something razor-sharp.
“And not one drop of blood anywhere,” Anderson said.
Breaking: raw steak is grotty and should not be placed on your eye
Opthamologists agree: putting steak tartare on your black eye is not going to do anything good for it, writes Kate Bernot for The Takeout. I didn’t actually know anybody still did this, and frankly I have my doubts that anybody has *ever* done this, but whatever. You do you.
Did you lose a fight with a doorknob? Use your words next time, jeez. For the moment, “..if a black eye is swollen so badly that it’s impossible to see out of it, it’s time to seek medical attention—not run for the refrigerator’s meat drawer,” she writes. “If the injured eye can still be opened wide enough to see normally, then the black eye can probably be treated with just a cold compress. In a pinch, a bag of frozen vegetables—sealed—will also work.”
Bonus round: A seventeenth-century Goop author recommends the “put a dead cow on it” method for curing gout. Truly, a panacea.
GIF: Two cows in a painting bobbing awkwardly up and down (Credit: Art UK)
The three-toed sloth is not well informed about the outside world. On a scale of 2 to 10, where 2 represents unusual dullness and 10 extreme acuity, Beebe (1926) gave the sloth’s senses of taste, touch, sight and hearing a rating of 2, and its sense of smell a rating of 3. If you come upon a sleeping three-toed sloth in the wild, two or three nudges should suffice to awaken it; it will then look sleepily in every direction but yours. Why it should look about is uncertain since the sloth sees everything in a Magoo-like blur. As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound. Beebe reported that firing guns next to sleeping or feeding sloths elicited little reaction. And the sloth’s slightly better sense of smell should not be overestimated. They are said to be able to sniff and avoid decayed branches, but Bullock (1968) reported that sloths fall to the ground clinging to decayed branches “often”.
How does it survive, you might ask.
Precisely by being so slow. Sleepiness and slothfulness keep it out of harm’s way, away from the notice of jaguars, ocelots, harpy eagles and anacondas. A sloth’s hairs shelter an algae that is brown during the dry season and green during the wet season, so the animal blends in with the surrounding moss and foliage and looks like a nest of white ants or of squirrels, or like nothing at all but part of a tree.
—Excerpt from Life of Pi, Yann Martel
Extra credit
More things I read this week. Heads up: the EPA animal testing story is a week old, but it’s a good primer on an ongoing issue.
EPA is phasing out some forms of animal testing (NPR, Nell Greenfieldboyce)
Following the lives of 47 rescued fighting dogs 😭 (The Washington Post,Emily Giambalvo)
Best of luck to this polka-dotted zebra foal (Gray News, Ed Payne)
Wilderness areas literally HALVE the risk of extinction for some species, new study suggests (Science, Richard A. Lovett)
Yak on the lam (Nelson County Times, Erin Conway)
Please read me
My work from this week and last.
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CREATURE FEATURE is edited by Tracey Lindeman.
All images in CREATURE FEATURE are used under Creative Commons licensing. Efforts have been made to ensure that photographs of living animals or natural scenes have been taken ethically, in responsible pet ownership conditions, at AZA-accredited zoos and aquariums or under safe, non-damaging conditions in the wild. If you see an issue with any image we share, please notify me.