COLUMN: It’s dinnertime in dog town
I love animals, not in a PETA free-the-vile-minks sort of way, but I love the smile on a dog and I am on my second set of pet rats. Coupled with the fact that, as a species I think we humans have about run our course, I think it is way cool the wild animals are coming back to urban areas and reminding us we and our domesticated minions are part of the food chain again.
All over the country there are reports of wild, non-Pet Smart animals coming back into cities and foraging for whatever is available.
Often what is available is Fluffles the calico and Mr. Binks the wiener dog. Anybody who is surprised hasn’t taken a biology class or tried to apply our hallowed economic policy to everyday life.
Animals and businesses always chase cheap and easy to obtain resources. For humans, it is Haiti sweat shops. To wolves and mountain lions in the nearby hills, it is Mr. Binks who has grown fat and slow living his entire life on an Eddie Bower dog bed. Fluffles is next on the menu for having spent its life eating tuna out of the can and scamming the bird feeder for song birds.
Of course it is not Mr. Binks’ or Fluffles’ respective faults. They come from a strong and proud gene pool that was stretched to unrecognizable strands by humans in need of quadruped idolizers. Now Fluffs and Binks are on the menu at the animal kingdom version of the Donner Party cafeteria.
And you know what the coolest things is? These suburban interlopers don’t care if you and/or your pets are vegetarians or how much money you donated to the Sierra Club. They don’t care about your Birkenstocks or the fact that you have never been a deer hunter or owned a high-powered rifle with laser sighting. It’s dinner time and all God’s creatures gotta eat.
There are wolves running willy-nilly around New York City, bears munching on discarded Twinkies in Connecticut and killer bees raiding Krispy Kreme dumpsters through the southwest in search of free calories. Javalinas are slinking into Tucson. Mountain lions are bringing down property values in Boulder and rats are giving the rich and famous the willies in Hollywood. Yeah, go Hollywood rats. People have to be choking on the irony of that.
I can hardly wait till gray whales start swimming up the Mississippi, tipping over gambling boats to get at the all-you-can-eat shrimp platters. Or, maybe the birds will start doing something like the birds in the movie “The Birds.”
Of course it is going further and children and small slow-moving adults are endangered by wildlife. Nobody wants to see one of our species eaten by one those thumbless heathens, but you know we aren’t that many centuries removed from this being a daily occurrence.
Like the late Fluffles and Mr. Binks, we have become benign remnants of our former sinewy gene pool. And maybe it is just God’s way of saying, “Next? The last tenants disappeared and they ain’t getting their cleaning deposit back.”
Dennis Hinkamp’s column appears every Friday in The Statesman. Comments may be directed to dhinkamp@msn.com.