Killing Coyotes

You know those old monster and/or sci-fi movies where the villagers and/or farmers gather up pitchforks, torches and/or possum rifles and storm the castle and/or space ship to kill everything inside?

Well, I was reminded of that when I saw this headline in an Ottawa newspaper the other day, Councillor calls on province to kill coyotes.  Seems that coyotes are running amok in Osgoode and Greely and parts of Ottawa’s south end. They’re scaring people and hurting/eating pets and livestock. City Councillor Doug Thompson, along with many of his constituents thinks the coyotes should all be trapped and killed.

From the Ottawa Sun, Sept. 24/09. This guy is proudly holding the preserved head and pelt of a coyote he killed.

People tend to want to kill wild animals when they see them in their backyards – bears, raccoons, skunks, foxes, whatever. In fact, humans’ first reaction to anything unexpected or unfamiliar or scary is to destroy it. Whether it’s a spider[1] in your bedroom or a weed on your lawn or a growth in your body or the citizens of a country of whom we’re not particularly fond. We’re forever battling something, beating stuff, waging wars on things, fighting fights. It’s exhausting.

And it doesn’t really work, does it?

Sure, it’s great that we’re able to kill the offending tumour with all the miraculous toxins we invented, but when are we going to start taking a serious look at where all these tumours are coming from in the first place?

And spraying poison all over our orchards and fields makes us conquering heroes over all the nasty pests and unwanted plants that try to invade our food sources. Don’t we care that we’re also going to end up eating those poisons?

We fight with our own bodies when we “battle” weight problems, “beat” addictions. Violence is a quick fix and gives the illusion of progress. But it’s almost always a short-term solution.

We tell our kids to use their brains not brawn when dealing with problems, but by example we ingrain them with the lesson of mindless destruction.

We need bigger homes so we destroy acres and acres of woodland and the finely balance eco-system that goes along with it. Some creatures are not polite enough to lie down and die when their habitats are pillaged and end up resorting to unusual behaviours in order to survive.

Do you suppose a coyote’s first choice for a fine dining experience is rooting through someone’s garbage or gnawing on a mangy old cat or a yappy Lhasa Apso?

And where does it say that it’s okay for your cat or dog to roam around free in the outdoors at night, but it’s not okay for a coyote?[2]  If the two happen to meet, inevitably one of them will become the other’s dinner.  That’s what the term, “it’s a dog eat dog world”  means. If you don’t want your pets to be part of that world, keep them indoors.

But WE are at the top of the food chain, so WE reckon WE have the right to ride roughshod over every other life form on this planet. The problem is that all this destruction is killing off link after link in that chain. And what will WE do when WE’RE the only link left?[3] 

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[1]What’s the deal with all the spidercide? Why are people always wanting to kill spiders? I read two spider killing blog posts in a row on Friday. (Linked in the text). It was horrible!

[2] In some native legends, the coyote is a messenger, bringing culturally significant information to the people.

[3] Once again, I will refer you to Soylent Green

How I Know For Sure That Aliens Live Among Us

Dog poo in plastic grocery bags by the side of the road. I’m human and no matter from which angle I examine this phenomena, I cannot explain it. You walk your dog. Your dog poops. You go to all the trouble of bringing a plastic bag; wrapping your hand in the bag; picking up the warm poop, tying a knot in the bag; and then you just drop the bag? Why not just leave the poop so it has some hope of biodegrading in the next thousand years?  Only aliens could do something so inexplicable. 

Capers. What are these things? They taste weird. They look like nothing else on earth.How do they end up in jars? Where do they come from? No one knows. I checked with my grocery store manager and one or two restaurateurs and they all claim jars of capers  just show up periodically at their back door. No one orders them. No one asks for any payment. There are no bills of lading. No one has any idea where they come from. But people buy them, so nobody has made too much of a fuss about this. Go ahead, try to explain it. I think they’re little alien scrota. That’s what I think. And this is their way of impregnating earthlings. Watch out for capers.

Sponge toffee. Again, no human would have invented such a thing. It looks like insulation. It feels like insulation. You can’t eat it.  Your tongue gets stuck to it. Yet it’s sold as candy. The ancients tell tales of an alien space craft circling the earth once upon a time and suddenly exploding, sending a shower of debris throughout the universe. The ancients go on to tell of a wily convenience store owner who gathered this debris and wrapped up the chunks in cellophane. And then lo, he sold it in his shop.   And the people from far and wide bought it. Well, not really far and wide. In fact, a lot of it was left to gather dust for hundreds of years. But it’s still occasionally being bought to this very day;  so they say.

Yoga. So a bunch of aliens living down in SoCal back in the 1960s were sitting around one night talking about how bored they were getting with life on earth. So, after a big night of drinking and hilarious brainstorming they came up with this awesome practical joke to play on the humans. The next day, after  a few Bloody Caesars,  they waved their magic alien wands and opened up a “yoga” studio. (“yoga” in alien, means “huge practical joke” — from the same root word as “yoke” or “joke”). Anyway, that very afternoon, the  aliens went on a big marketing binge and managed to convince a bunch of human hippies to come into this yoga studio and then they bent and twisted them into all sorts of unlikely shapes and played really quiet zitar music in the background and babbled in hushed voices about chakras and stuff. And then they charged the humans money for it all! What fun the aliens had. But, never in a million years did they expect the humans to take it so seriously and for so long! Ha ha! When they finally got tired of laughing about that one, someone came up with “yoga clothing” which sent them all into fresh spasms of laughter.

 

Cats. No, not the musical, although Andrew Lloyd Webber and many, many, many, many (too many to mention) other well-known people are obviously aliens or at the very least, bi-planetary. No, I mean these kinds of cats:

It’s no coincidence that cats and the pyramids appeared on earth at the same time.  Cats have to work very hard to seem just stupid enough that they’re amusing and endearing without being maddeningly stupid like fish.  Cats seem to spend most of their time just sleeping, but when you think about it, what real earthly animal could survive in the wild if it just slept all the time? Especially a purely carnivorous animal? It’s all an alien misdirection.  Cats are sent here to spy on us and report back to their planet.  That’s why  they’re not allowed to get too involved with humans.  And why we sometimes catch them looking at or listening to stuff that doesn’t seem to be there. And why the longer they’re here, the less interested they seem to be in everything — they’re like long-term public servants, just putting in time until they can retire and get beamed back to their home planet.

5 Mysteries of the Universe Explained

It’s been a while since my Crack Team of Researchers and Investigators has produced anything, but rest assured they have been hard at work. Today, after months of intensive scientific exploration, I am pleased to present their report explaining some of life’s heretofore most puzzling mysteries.

Mystery #1 – Missing Socks: It’s a cliché by now that you never get the same matching pairs of socks out of the laundry that you put in. A sock or two always goes missing and even more oddly, strange new socks appear – socks with stripes or cartoon characters you don’t ever remember owning.

Explanation #1: When humans first began hunting, capturing and using socks to cover the most abominable part of their anatomy, socks began to develop survival techniques. Socks do not thrive in captivity; their live spans are shortened considerably and they are unable to reproduce. So, over the centuries socks have developed shape-shifting abilities which are triggered by extreme moisture followed by extreme dry heat. They can change colour, texture, design and even become invisible. To the human owner it then looks like one or more socks no longer have mates and they are then tucked away and forgotten in the back of some drawer in hopes that the mate will eventually show up. Left alone, without stress socks can then plan and make their escape back to the wild.

Mystery #2 – Dust Bunnies: Every week we vacuum and every week new ethereal wisps of unknown material appear in corners of our bedrooms, living rooms and dens — behind dressers, beds. What are these things? My Crack Team took some back to the lab for analysis.

Explanation #2: It turns out that dust bunnies are in fact something the Crack Team calls “paranormal hairballs”. It seems that spirits of the dear departed must linger on earth until they have divested themselves of all of their earthly humanness. This doesn’t happen all at once, so they wait on ghostly benches in people’s homes, like travellers at a train station,  coughing up these remnants of their corporal being. Once they’ve spewed out the last bit they’re free and are allowed to go into the light.

Mystery #3 – Stuff that goes missing only to turn up in a spot you’ve already checked seventeen times. You’re on your way out the door and you can’t find your keys. They’re not where you always leave them, so you frantically turn the house upside down looking for them. They’re nowhere. You end up taking your spare key or another family member’s key. At the end of the day, you get home and there are your keys – where you always leave them. 

Explanation #3: Aliens. Yes, aliens do exist and they do come to earth once in a while. They come not to abduct and probe humans, however. No, they come to take our stuff. They examine it, see how it works, what it does, maybe make copies for their own use and then give it back. Think about it – if you were going to a strange planet would you take some loud, obnoxious, sweaty alien to poke or would you take some of their cool gadgets? What good is an alien when you could have a phaser? Or a tricorder? Or a transporter?

Mystery #4 – The Smell of Subway Restaurants: You know that smell is supposed to be their “freshly baking” sub buns, but if you’ve ever actually smelled real bread baking you know this smell is nothing like real bread baking. For about one half of a second Subway Restaurants smell good and then the smell starts to make your stomach churn.

Explanation #4: Of course, as you’ve no doubt guessed it has something to do with the flour used in the baking. The base for every Subway Restaurant bun is something they call “special subway flour,” which is actually that greyish-black dust that collects between subway rails. Cities with subways pay Subway Restaurants a substantial fee for collecting this dust on a monthly basis. It is then cleaned and bleached through a special, top-secret Subway Restaurant cleaning and bleaching process, combined with salt, yeast and the special flavours unique to Subway Restaurants (honey, oregano, whole grain) and baked up fresh daily at every Subway Restaurant location.  And, because they aren’t subject to fluctuating wheat prices, Subway Restaurants can continue to offer affordable, low calorie (and gluten-free)  lunches to its customers.

Mystery #5 – Corn. Yummy, crisp, buttery corn. Right off the cob, frozen niblets or even canned and creamed.  The corn goes in your mouth. You chew the corn up with your teeth. You swallow the corn. It travels down to your stomach where it’s exposed to acids corrosive enough to take the paint off your car. The corn then continues its journey through a few miles of intestines. Then out it comes – completely intact. What the hell?

Explanation #5: This one had the Crack Team stumped for months until; upon microscopic examination they discovered that corn was actually not food at all, but a plastic polymer with amazing attributes. (Native North Americans referred to it as Amaize for that very reason. And also because they were amazed to see white people actually eating it. That made for some raucous stories and speculation around the camp fire on many an evening, let me tell you) Anyway, each kernel is compose of two flexible, pliable plastic parts – an inner and outer portion. We can mash them up with our teeth or even a blender and they separate and look like they’ve been masticated. Once they hit stomach acids, however, they resort back to their original shapes AND develop strong magnetic properties that allow the inside of each kernel to be reunited with the exact outside of the kernel from which they were originally separated. It’s a miracle of nature. It really is.