Category Archives: animals

Marketing 101

Among the several discreet skills the would-be smiling owner of a flourishing shop must master is Marketing.  Although there might appear to be a moral component that could hold a scrupulous person back, it ain’t necessarily so.

For example, which would you rather find on your plate?

a) a perfectly seasoned and prepared dinner of succulent beef; or

b) a plateful of the sliced flesh of a badly treated and cruelly slaughtered affectionate cow

Only a fool would try to market the product as (b).  Word to the wise, yo.

The Cull

During a restful day Sunday I stretched out on the bed in the dim light and listened to Christa Tippet in the middle of a conversation with a woman whose life’s work was listening to and studying the songs and habits of the whale, and more recently, the elephant.   A fascinating woman with a real love for life and a great capacity for study and learning.  She ended by talking about the enormity of the ocean, how being on a small boat is like clinging to a cork bobbing in the vastness of it, and how the largest creatures in the world swim in it, singing.  Human knowledge, she said, is not at any pinnacle, it is only now beginning.  There is so much to learn, for sure, before the lights wink out forever.

This blessed woman got to know several elephants, by their voices, their looks and their personal habits.  Who knew elephant individuals were so different, one from the other?  She suggested there is more individuation among elephants than among people, or at least as much.  Do you think you could put a human being on a space ship and send him to another planet to accurately represent us all?  

You could do it, I guess, but you’d be an idiot to think he or she could represent you as well as me, as well as someone on a continent we’d never visited, someone living a life we cannot imagine.  Where the perfect representative of mankind might have no fear , you and I would be crippled by it; where the perfect representative was grim, we might be cracking jokes.  Where the perfect representative could dance pretty well, she could not invent spontaneous, manic dances the way you can, or draw like I can.  It makes sense, if you think about it for a moment, that there might not be a typical elephant.

Anyway, the famous memory of elephants is also not something someone just made up one day.  She tested it by playing a recording, to a group of elephants in a zoo, of a long-dead matriarch vocalizing in her distinctive voice.  This female had been gone several years, many of the elephants who knew her had still been calves, or whatever young elephants are called.  To an elephant, they perked up their ears, became agitated and started making a racket.  They clearly recognized this voice and knew it was their departed leader, even the youngest ones seemed to know it.

Anyway, don’t take my word, or hers, as your spaceship hurtles toward the distant galaxy where you will be the ambassador for all of us.  You can go to the NPR website and scroll through for Tippet’s recent shows, find the one I’m talking about, listen to it yourself, follow the links to associated scholarship, read up on it.   I’m writing about this to make a point.

After spending a long time observing and learning about several individual elephants she went home, where she did the other part of her work, probably raising money for her research so she could return to the land of elephants.  When she got back there, and began looking for some of her old elephant friends, she learned they’d been culled.  

Culling is a word, like the neutral phrases ‘collateral damage’, or ‘friendly fire’, that, by a marketing-style legerdemain, changes killing into an abstraction that is easier to deal with.  These elephant individuals had been subjected to the natural process of culling, thinning the herd by shooting certain individuals to cull them.  There were too many elephants where there were now too many people, problems were arising and it was necessary to cull the pachyderms.  Nothing more complicated than that.

Learning that these individuals she’d looked forward to spending time with had been culled was crushing to her.  She went into a depression.  All she could do, she reported, was write a book, which turned out to be a very good thing.  When I went into a depression all I could do was write and record songs late at night, not a bad thing, but not really a very good thing, either.  Writing and publishing the book helped her make some sense of her torment, allowed her to pass from depression back into productive action.  I imagine its a book worth reading and I salute her.

I had something else to add, another track, but, as I looked away it seems to have been culled, like a big, extroverted elephant with a loud voice, a direct individual who looks you right in the eyes, and then is gone like smoke in the wind.

Mark But This Flea

Back in an early writing course at City College the professor, a young, dynamic guy with the torso of a stocky man and the lower body of a powerful goat, read John Donne’s famous poem The Flea.  His eyes glittered during his excellent reading of the flirtatious poem, as he no doubt took a survey of the new young women in his class.  He explained to his impressed students that he was originally an actor, had become a novelist and then a college professor.  He was an inspirational teacher and a great reader, and he brought the wooing words to memorable life as he began:

“Mark but this flea, and mark in this, how little that which thou deniest me is”

The line rings in my head today as I ponder how little the smallest things we deny each other actually are.  Invisible to the naked eye, these tiny, crucial things.

The Oshpah Pit

I don’t know the exact meaning of “aspah” (phonetically OSH-pah), but I can tell you about the Ashpah Pit.    It was in the woods, at the end of a long muddy road that would shine with small puddles after the rain.  It was lush there, and smelled of earth and trees, until you got close to the pit that guys with a bulldozer and a dump truck had dug.   This pit was huge, the size of an amphitheater, and filled with the summer time garbage of a small community of a few hundred people.

It was at the end of a long dirt road cut through the trees.  For days after it rained it was impossible to walk as far as the ashpah pit without getting your feet wet.  Your clothes would be damp too, the air was always moist and clammy under those dense trees.  It was paradise for the mosquitoes who bred, thirsted and lived their short lives there.  Born at dusk by the millions, and feeding, courting, mating and dying throughout the night, they were looking for whatever action they could get as time ran out.  

These mosquitoes were so voracious, and so desperate, that they would land on you as you slapped at them, sometimes five or more at a time, the others hovering, singing their horrible songs of desire.  And they were tenacious, these strapping young mosquitoes.   You could slap at one, narrowly miss, and the insect would do a little somersault, literally turn a tiny circle in the air, land back directly on the arm, or neck, or your face.  Meanwhile, another would be sucking lustily at the back of your neck, near your earlobe.  You could try to keep them away by smoking, and back then many of us did smoke, but it was best to complete the business at the ashpah pit quickly.   Dump the garbage and get back down the road.

There’s the famous story of how I met my old friend Meefs, a story for another time and another place, the story about his deadpan slyness and those two long walks to the ashpah pit and back.  But what I want to point out is that the mosquitoes at the ashpah pit are the strongest examplars I know of that fierce, wildly energetic desire to live, and somehow dominate, in a world of death where the odds are a billion to one against you living out the night.

Doesn’t mean I’d invite any of them to my house.

Perfect Example of Deleterious Cognition

Deleterious Cognition:  a thought process, activated by a tidbit of true information often better not known or considered, that has harmful effects, causes fear and in extreme cases (and many cases are extreme), paralysis.  There are countless examples, here’s one my stomach and I observed up close the night before last.

I am partial to calamari.  I suppose I’m still at a primitive stage in my mostly vegetarian lifestyle, because, while I can’t justify eating squid and other sea creatures, I eat them sometimes.  They are not mammals, nor even birds, who express fear and other emotions, but the animals of the sea we call seafood surely prefer not to be captured, cooked and eaten.  The late, great David Foster Wallace covers this completely in his superb “Consider the Lobster”, written for Gourmet Magazine.  If you haven’t read it, you really should.

Anyway, Sekhnet heard a disturbing piece on NPR she almost instantly regretted telling me about.   It seems the rings of squid that are grilled, sauteed or deep-fried and served as calamari are virtually identical, in size, shape, texture and even, most sickeningly, flavor, to slices of washed, seasoned pig’s asshole.  Not the hole itself, but the last section of colon.  Yes, I know.  They did a blind taste test, apparently nobody was able to tell the difference, though many swore off calamari after taking the test.

The high intelligence of pigs, and the brutal death camp lives millions live, was one of my main motivations when I decided to stop eating animals raised for slaughter.   Sekhnet, a lover of all animals and a long-time  vegetarian with pescatarian tendencies, was at a farm a vet set up as a sanctuary for abused and neglected animals, and those who had somehow escaped from slaughter.  There is a photo of her shooting with her big news camera as a pig, more than twice her size, leans against her affectionately.  Hard to think of eating something so friendly.

Anyway, properly prepared, sliced pig’s colon is, apparently indistinguishable from calamari.  I ordered the seafood fettucini, which was good, but there was now the troubling question of the source of the calamari that was in it.  Every expert had been fooled, how was I to be sure it was not pig’s colon hiding in the rich sauce among the shrimps and clams?

Sekhnet saw my face and began exploring my pasta.  She pulled out a section of purple squid legs and held it up on her fork reassuringly.  It was unlikely that if they’d used part of the squid the rest would be pig’s ass, but, such is the nature of deleterious cognition that actual likelihood plays a small role and reassurance is easily brushed off.

“Clever of them,” I said to Sekhnet, eating around the circles of “calamari”.  “If I was putting pig’s ass in somebody’s seafood fettucini I’d do the same thing.”  All of this was perfectly true, still, I bravely ate a few hoops of “calamari” after eating the few sections of tentacle.  

Until I ate one particularly thick one that had a horrible taste.  They apparently had not washed this one well enough, it tasted exactly like a pig’s ass.

One side of me felt compelled to reach for the paper napkin on my lap and discreetly expel the clearly shit tasting fake calamari from my mouth.  The more civilized side prevailed.  I was at a birthday dinner, after all, and in spite of having told, moments before, grossly inappropriate real-life tales of bravura farting that made the 93 year-old birthday girl quickly change the subject, I winced and swallowed the section of pig’s colon.  It has been at least four years since I ate any part of an animal as smart and sentient as a pig.

It is much more possible that this was simply a bad piece of calamari, maybe older than the rest, maybe starting to go bad, as they say.  Become a rotten thing, shooting up the town, spray painting graffiti on the walls, pissing on the toilet seat, being a punk.  On the way to putrefaction and in a hurry to get there.  This thought, rather than comfort me, that I probably hadn’t eaten some poor pig’s asshole after all, only made me queasier.  The only question remaining was why I’d swallowed it when my taste buds knew quite clearly it was no good.

The question turned my stomach slightly and the ache there was not allayed by any thought process I could muster.  After a few hours the hard-working digestive juices had done their work, dissolving and neutralizing whatever it was I’d eaten.  What remained afterward was only the question of my susceptibility to deleterious cognition.

“I shouldn’t have mentioned that story to you, you have too much of an imagination,” said Sekhnet hours later when we’d dropped off the birthday girl and I’d told her the rest of the story.  She was not wrong in her impulse, though I don’t like to think of myself as the squeamish type who must be protected from inconvenient or otherwise disgusting truths.  I won’t be listening to the story, which Sekhnet told me to google, but it’s here for the heartier souls among you.

 

The Little Red Hen

 

My mother read me the story of the Little Red Hen, probably more than once, for I remember it well.  I can recall the illustrations, if I’m not mistaken we owned a copy of the book, a golden book, with that gold spine.  

 

The Little Red Hen had a great idea:  let’s make a delicious cake.  The animals were very excited about the cake.  The Little Red Hen went around the farm yard asking “who will help me prepare the soil?”. The dog had other things to do, so did the pigs, the ducks, all the friends around the farm that were so keen on getting in on the cake project, turns out they were just a little busy.  

 

After the soil was prepared, the  seeds that would grow into the wheat they’d use to make the batter for the cake needed to be planted.  “Who will help me plant the seeds?” asked the Hen, who had never read the story and hadn’t yet any insight into how things were going.   She was met with the series of cheerful mealy mouthed evasions that all children are so familiar with.  

 

Then the seeds had to be watered, the garden weeded, the wheat harvested, milled, the batter made, the cake baked, etc.  Everyone was very into the cake project, and fully backed the Hen’s plan, it’s just they were all a little busy whenever she asked for help.

By the end of the book the Little Red Hen, who’d done all the work, every step, and never complained, turned into a complete bitter bitch.  “Now, who will help me eat the cake?” she asked sweetly.  I recall my mother’s tone, as the Hen, slightly mocking, but still very sweet, sounding at first like a genuine invitation.
They all were very excited to finally have a chance to eat the cake, which indeed looked delicious in the illustration.  Then the Hen reminded them what a bunch of selfish, Johnny Come Lately pricks they all were and ate the entire cake herself.  
 
Soon, untold in the children’s version but predictable, farmer Johnny cut the Hen’s head off and the farmer’s wife whistled as she southern fried the plump chicken.

 

“I told the bitch she shouldn’t have eaten that whole cake,” said the dog to one of the ducks.

 

I think of this story, a story where there is a delicious looking cake at the end. The characters have motivation to help, but don’t.  How would it be if we changed the story a little?  The Hen asks a few friends to do her a favor, she has a theory she wants to test, an educational theory that sounds a little whacky, but the friends want to be supportive so agree to be on the Hen’s Board of Directors, though none are sure what that entails, including the Hen.

 

Turns out Directors are responsible for overseeing the growth, functioning and well-being of the organization.  They are asked to give of their time, talent and treasure.  None of these directors gives a rat’s ass about the Hen’s theory, really, but they sign on blindly out of friendship to the intelligent but eccentric bird.  The bird then engages in any number of difficult tasks, struggling a few steps up a steep and slippery learning curve, doing the jobs of every person on the board, becoming more and more exhausted and bitter.  She begins writing propaganda about how well things are going, sends it out to the board members who pretty much ignore it, while at the same time tacitly supporting it.

One day the Hen has a bit of good luck, a 24″ iMac is donated to her program by the IT department of a nameless corporation.  She fires it up and the picture is glorious, the student animations will look so good on it.  She pulls one up, it looks marvelous, like watching a movie.  First bit of good luck, sign of things to come.  Encouraging.

 
The next day the Hen excitedly brings a friend to see the iMac in action.  Turns the machine on, but the screen remains blank.  There is no picture, no glowing apple logo like the branded skull on the Jolly Roger.  Dead.  “Why would the IT department donate something that wasn’t intermittent?  One of them would have taken it home when the company upgraded the computers,” her friend points out.

 

Of course they would have.  That’s how the world is. Now, about that cake.