animals
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There are a number of words that bother me in common parlance. Let’s begin with Superpredator: The word “superpredator”, now almost exclusively used to report on wolf reintroduction in the American west, originated with a racially charged criminal theory in the 1990s designed to demonize juvenile offenders and imprison children for their entire lives. This…
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One morning, you take yourself out on your morning walk and notice the birders have descended. Their telescopic lenses are trained on a cluster of black-brown-white birds squabbling on the ice in the far distance. You squint, you can’t tell what they are. Hawks, maybe? Geese, you guess? ‘Tis the season, but the shape is…
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The horns sounded on the track, and on the back stretch Aggie pulled the syringe out of Sunny Red’s vein. He capped the needle and leaned against the stall to watch the bay filly in the tense seconds as the cocktail took hold. Sunny’s haunches twitched, her jaw fell open and long strings of drool…
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My dog is going to report me to the ASPCA. The heat of the day wears off into a warm, easy hush. I have an alarm set for it, 7:30 PM, an hour before sunset so I can walk my shag carpet of a dog without worries of him baking beneath his lush fur coat.…
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It is 0730 and I have prions on my mind again. Have I posted about this particular interest before? Probably, somewhere, I’m not going to dig it up. On this morning, I’ve got prions on my mind as a curse. Consider this: You and your flock of sheep take up residence in a lovely little…
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We moved. See blog post from about a week ago. Our new apartment overlooks open pasture and a wide, shallow lake and features a balcony that you can watch the local prairie dog colony from. Well, if you’re human. If you’re a dog, you can listen to them bark but I don’t think you can…
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The word superstition comes from the latin word superstitio meaning “standing over” ie. that a superstition is a belief that stands over or outside of the logical standards of a time. A large part of the way we interpret this word today comes down to Christian thinkers, who used the word superstition to categorize small…
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I’ve given this question an enormous amount of thought over the years, and as time’s gone on the answer’s changed a bit. Mostly because I learn about new animals, or encounter new people, or develop new traits, or encounter a furry in the wild in such an incredibly made fursuit that it makes me want…
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Many occult signs are simply a matter of training your brain to notice certain things in your surroundings. Your eyes linger on the hawk circling above you (longer than usual, in my case), you notice the way the coyote’s eyes flash while it crosses the road in front of your car, you’ll spot graffiti you…
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I was ten years old. Tired, with a plate of dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets on the plate in front of me in a bar after four days of camping in the woods. The TV showed a newscast, an aerial shot of a small boat on the water and a headline: “Steve Irwin, Crocodile Hunter, Dead at…
from the pen of icarus blake 