Ahhh... the News

This is interesting.
Oh, and this:

heehee!

Oh And...

I get this e-mail from Evergreen in a roundabout sort of way. This particular incident irritates me so much more than this one because it's truly unprovoked. And COME ON, the organic farm?!? Really guys, find a more productive way to let off some steam.

"Two Suspicious Fires Reported at Evergreen Sunday, September 14
The McLane Fire Department and The Evergreen State College Police Services responded to two fires at Evergreen early Sunday morning that caused an estimated $35,000 in damage. Arson is suspected.
One fire, in a campus residential housing area near the intersection of Overhulse Road and Driftwood Road, was reported shortly after 2 a.m. and engulfed five Dumpsters adjacent to a housing unit. The unit closest to the fires, and those nearby were unoccupied. Housing check-in for fall term begins September 20.
The second fire, reported about 4:20 a.m., destroyed a tool shed and hoop greenhouse at the college’s organic farm on Lewis Road on the west side of the campus.
Damage from the Dumpster fires is estimated at $5000. Damage from the fires at the organic farm is estimated at $30,000.
The McLane Department will be working today to determine the causes of the fires. Arson is suspected. Evergreen’s Police Services will lead the criminal investigation.
In an effort prevent further incidents, potentially identify those responsible and maintain campus safety, the college will be temporarily stepping up campus police patrols, enlisting Residential and Dining Services staff to more closely monitor the housing areas for suspicious activity, and requesting additional back-up patrols by the Thurston County Sheriff's Department."

Damn....

The Good Stuff

My parent's friends the Schommers have three collies. Busy busy dogs. When it's hot out, or just any old time, one of them has been working on this lounge-crater in the dirt/gravel/rubble spot near the picnic table. She digs a round, shallow hole to get to the cooler dirt underneath and then sprawls in it. Willow has been visiting them with my parents while they talk about building processes, jerry-rigged t.v. antenna's and school. At some point, the whole idea of cool dirt = sweet chilaxin' grounds must have clicked because tonight we watched her (pretty feebly) paw at the dirt and then gingerly lower herself onto the dirt gravel. Two hours later she was still there, sound asleep.

We all thought she looked a bit like an archaeological dig.
Chilaxin' in 90 degree shade.

A Bad Case of Humans

Via: Dailymotion.

Humans- Cool Cartoon!
Uploaded by aniboom

Olliphants in Distress

When I first heard about the new baby elephant I wasn't excited and I thought to myself "well, that's odd. It's cute, tiny, and a baby.... why am I not already in my car on my way to see it? And then I realized that I knew the zoo would milk this new baby for all the money it can. Whether this was a planned pregnancy for the publicity, or simply a planned pregnancy doesn't particularly matter, but the general sentiment behind zoos is something that I'm becoming less enchanted with the older I get and the more I'm able to recognize in the behavior of these animals. This article appeared in the Oregonian today and I'm glad that it did...

The Elephant in the Room
by Jonathan Nicholas, The Oregonian
Saturday September 06, 2008, 4:03 PM

Portland seems hugely proud of the new baby elephant at its zoo. What the city should feel is ashamed.
The new calf is not really an elephant. It's a caricature of an elephant, a shadow of an animal, a hapless beast that that all too soon will be exhibiting every known sign of severe trauma.
The terrible truth is that the 300-pound infant over which we're being invited to ooh and aah is a compromised creature in a contemptible cage. Putting such an animal on public display is as appalling today as it was in the time of the Romans.
That was when zoos began, as the playthings of plutocrats. For centuries, potentates dispatched their armies hither and yon to pillage and plunder. Among the treasures hauled home were "exotic" creatures displayed to amuse the masses.
By the 1850s, this exhibitionist offshoot of imperialism had "evolved" into the municipal zoo, an institution that hurried to cover its freak show nakedness with the fig leaf of an educational mission. In 1906, it must have been that passion for pedagogy that led the Bronx Zoo to exhibit a pygmy in a cage alongside its apes.
It's still a rite of parental passage to take kids to the zoo, exposing them to displays of institutionalized trauma, inviting them to gaze with wondrous eyes upon obvious suffering and interpret it as normal.
Today, almost everyone in America over 40 has a searing image from childhood. It's of a big cat in a small cage, the tiger pacing back and forth, back and forth, post-traumatic stress disorder made manifest.
Today we have bigger cages, with caring keepers and native foliage and wading pools and interactive toys designed for environmental enrichment. But the bars are just as sturdy, the confinement just as cruel. Only once ever have I seen a happy tiger. She was in an Indian forest. The reason for her contentment was clear. She thought she was about to eat me.
Our modern zoos perpetuate a whole series of myths. Foremost is the notion that their work is critical to wildlife conservation. But it's increasingly apparent that the creatures zoos are conserving are not wild animals at all. Their carefully calibrated breeding programs are producing nothing more than semi-domesticated shadows of the animals' true selves.
Nowhere is this more apparent -- or more tragic -- than in the American community of elephants. There is much about wild elephants, most especially the ways in which they communicate across many miles, that still we barely comprehend. But this much we do know. In their native habitat, elephants are profoundly social creatures. They raise their young within extended family structures that stretch across decades. They bury their dead, mourn them, stand vigil over their graves.
Gay Bradshaw, founder of The Kerulos Center in Jacksonville, is an ecologist and psychologist, formerly at Oregon State University, now pioneering the field of trans-species psychology. In a series of widely published papers, and an upcoming book from Yale University Press, she suggests that the global elephant population is suffering chronic post-traumatic stress, a species-wide affliction spurred by decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss.
Much of this might sound like advanced anthropocentric conjecture, but recent research in psychology, ethology and neurobiology points to increasing numbers of elephants -- in both captivity and the ever more abbreviated wild -- exhibiting behaviors associated with acute psychological distress.
This is the world in which a zoo elephant such as Portland's Rose-tu might try to trample her newborn calf, behavior utterly new to the species.
Portland has been in the zoo business since 1887. That was when a worker at City (now Washington) Park dug a bear pit and invited citizens to come by and ogle the grizzly. It's now almost 50 years that the zoo has been in the business of breeding elephants. That's long enough.
If the people of Oregon, with their zoo tickets and tax dollars, really want to serve elephants, they should contribute to the restoration and preservation of native habitat for these magnificent creatures. If citizens really care about wild creatures, after all, there's a simple solution.
Let them run free.

(note: the online version hasn't been as highly edited as the print version. I changed the few lines on the online version to match the print version, but linked to the online article.)