This remarkable video of a polar bear playing with a sled dog got me to thinking about our relations with the animal world and how we categorize various animals differently.
For example, Rina loves pigeons and throws food scraps to them over my protests that this is a violation of San Francisco’s health code. Well, she’s Dutch, and one of the things i love about them is their brazen disregard for little rules. What i don’t love is pigeons. I hate the damn things and consider them flying rats but without the high level of personal hygiene observed by rats.
But then one day during her visit last June we were out in the Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park, and there were these cute little squirrels politely, even graciously, accepting crumbs from kind strangers. They were just adorable, and even i could grasp the hypocrisy in my desperately wanting to feed one as i sat beneath a “Please Don’t Feed the Animals” sign knowing full well that if i had had a single crumb on my person i would have tossed it to the cutest.
And now my sister has just left after a brief visit during which she updated me on the progress in her decades-long war with those rats with fluffy tails that occupy her backyard trees and have made her life miserable by getting into the walls of her house and other atrocities.
So i’m sitting at the kitchen table this morning and look up to see a new sight: one of them sitting pretty on the banister of my balconette. Remembering my sister’s warnings, i grabbed a piece of bread out of the refrigerator. Alas, he was gone before i could get to the door with his treat.
The Welcome Wagon has placed on the balconette an introductory platter containing a wedge of cheese, a chunk of bread, and a few almonds to let him know that my balconette is an excellent place for a mid-day snack or an afternoon nap curled up cutely and safe from cats.
Actually, i’m getting ahead of myself there, as it’s now late afternoon and the food is untouched. Of course if he comes back i’ll be headed out to Costco for a fifty pound bag of Purina Squirrel Chow.
And since i don’t have a pic of my little bushy buddy, here’s one of yellow door i like:
