4 posts tagged “animals”

Our company newsletter has a section that features team members from different offices. This section is one of the few sections that I read. After all, it's interesting to read about their memorable experiences with the company, what their job is like in a different location and what these team members are like outside the confines of the office.

This week, I opened the featured team member to find out that his photo on the homepage is a cropped photo of a bigger picture. He shared the photograph with someone--a panda, who badly needed a bath (because it looked dirty). The panda was comfortably slouched, holding what looked like his food, while the team member was next to it, bending a little so that his head was in the same level as the panda's.

Tin said that the animal is probably one of the few living today, and that we need to hurry so that we can have a picture with it too. Rhea commented that she wanted to give the panda a bath. Nonetheless, we all found Panda Exhibit A adorable.

I wonder when I'll see pandas and polar bears in person. And until now, I still wonder why I'm fond of them. The closest I got to a panda was in Field Museum, where some animals were preserved in fossils and stuffings. I had wanted to visit San Diego Zoo, which houses polar bears, another bear I'd like to see in person.

It is said to be the most ferocious land animal, but they just look cuddly and tame. Of course, I'll never attempt to hug a live one. But I believe that their ferocious behavior is influenced by their environment in the wild.

For now, I hope to get a close encounter with a panda and a polar bear, just like that team member whom I envy so much now for having a photo with a panda. Hehe.

The Nameless Cat

My parents adopted this cat in 3Q of last year. They told me that the cat would drop by our house and meow incessantly for minutes as if begging for food. Instead of throwing meal left overs away, my parents gave them to this beggar cat until she became at home with us. Kobe, our mongrel, even gave in to her charms and eventually stopped barking like mad at her. Despite keeping her, we don't pet her because she wasn't spayed and vaccinated yet. Thus, she is still, technically, a feral cat.

I named her Nala, after The Lion King character. I told my parents about it, but my parents wanted to call her Nila. Our helper had another idea, and decided for herself to refer to her as Ming-ming or sometimes, just "'yung pusa," since she's the only cat in our compound. Visiting relatives also simply call her "'yung pusa." Possessing a variety of names, I think this cat still lacks its own identity in our house, so I think she's still nameless. Thus, I dub thee, The Nameless Cat.

One Friday night in January, we forgot to lock the kitchen door. The following day, Saturday, my father woke up early for his weekly exercise and went through the kitchen to get his bike. At 5AM, it was still dark and he didn't see The Nameless Cat, who was in the kitchen. He accidentally stepped on the cat's tail. As a backfire, The Nameless Cat scratched my father's foot. It didn't bleed, though.

That same morning, my mother decided to take the issue to her hand. "She doesn't belong here," she reasoned. She asked our helper to put The Nameless Cat inside a big empty dogfood bag, and then the two of them drove off to the next town. Our helper dropped the dogfood bag on a grassy area along the highway.

I woke up at around 9AM that morning. My father had returned from his cycling and my mother from her cat-dropoff task. "I'm going to miss that cat," my father lamented and even pretended to cry. "We should've closed and locked the door so she didn't get in." I, on the other hand, felt no attachment to the cat. After all, she doesn't respond to me whenever I call her "Nala." I was content having Kobe and Balto around.

But come that Friday night, I came home, opened the garage gate and saw an orange cat under the parked SUV. "Nala?" I said. The orange cat didn't respond, but cats are naturally arrogant. So I turned to my mother.

"Is that the same cat?" I asked incredulously.

Yes, it's the same cat, my mother said. It's Nala/Nila/Ming-ming. Confused with her own name, she didn't even respond when I called her Nala. My mother said it returned that Wednesday morning, around 3AM, meowing by their room window. She had to get up from bed and fix The Nameless Cat a meal upon her return.

I remembered the song "When She Loved Me" by Sarah McLachlan, which was used for a Toy Story 2 scene when the toys were abandoned. It was pretty much like The Nameless Cat. The difference is, she was able to return and bug my parents to fix her a meal upon her arrival. From then on, we took care of her again. She recently gave birth to four kittens. We will have her spayed and vaccinated pretty soon, as we intend to keep a few of her babies too.

Canines: Baltik and Kobe-yucky

Balto, our rott, is no entertainer, as he is trained to kill guard. I used to play with him when he was younger and smaller. He got big and more ferocious-looking as grew older. Hence, I would recoil whenever he would run to me playfully. We drifted apart--estranged, actually. I stayed in Los Baños often, left for vacation, and then started working, thus leaving no time for us to really bond. Today, he goes berserk whenever I get near him to say hi and call him a variety of names--Baltik, Baltok etc.

He's a good dog, though. Watch him obey my order:

Despite his vicious look, my father claims that he's such a sweet thing because they get to walk together and play around. Here's a photo of Balto when he "kissed" the guest speaker for our Dog Walk last year:

While Balto gets annoyed by my mere presence, Kobe responds positively whenever I call him--even when I call him Kobe-yucky.

"Call me any names you want," Kobe would probably say. "I look handsome in this photo anyway."

City pets

Some pets don't respond at all. And you'd understand because they're inanimate, just like Crikey and Chantek. They're my "pets" away from home. I just can't keep dogs in the city because I just can't leave the burden of pet care to the ates in the dorm whenever I'm away. I also can't bring dogs to the office. Nor can they travel with me to and from the city.

I also can't keep a fish. It might freeze in our room. These dogs just have enough synthetic fur to keep themselves warm whenever we turn the airconditioner to super cool.

My personalized Google homepage informed me this trend.

Frogs, along with their amphibian friends, are disappearing. I think these creatures look slimy and disgusting, but I don’t hate them. I don’t want them to disappear. In the eyes of wildlife biologists, these are beautiful creatures. Its my limited understanding of amphibians that limit me from fully appreciating them and looking at them beyond their unattractive skin and cold body temperature. I understand, however, that they play a role in ecology’s balance.

I feel guilty because I probably played a role in their population decline. I was a toad assassin. Every BIO2 student used to be one. But I was worse. I was a torturer, because I wasn’t very skillful with pithing them.

When I was a freshman, I was enrolled in a General Biology II (BIO2) class. Almost every week of that semester, we all had toads and cockroaches to kill. I was lucky because we were paired and allowed to use gloves, and my partner would often handle the toad. The batches before us used to do it individually and they were not allowed to use gloves unless they have an open wound in their hands.

Sometimes, my partner would pass me the toad. So I still get my share of handling the amphibian. And I wasn’t spared at our last exam: every student had a toad to pith, dissect and leg skin to peel off, each with 20 pins to put on different parts, muscle or tissue.

Throughout the entire semester, I always had a pair of gloves during lab class. But at the last exam, I felt quite embarrassed and tried to blend in with my classmates who dissect toads weekly sans the rubber protection. My toad was inside a plastic bag and while the exam questionnaires were not distributed yet, I took my PhP5-worth toad and talked to it, “Behave ka ha? Wag ka malikot.”

It seemed to have understood me. It welcomed death with open arms. I didn’t want to fail the exam because of a sudden attack of pity, so I went through the procedure of pithing and dissecting as though it was like peeling potatoes for potato salad.

I can still remember how the toad lost its consciousness. As I pierced the pithing needle, I saw the toad close its eyes and stretch its neck forward a bit, then it returned to its original position. I twisted the needle in a 180-degree angle and started destroying the connection between its brain and spinal cord. I shook the toad to see if its legs would freely wiggle, an indication that it’s completely paralyzed.

Success! I thought. It meant twenty points. I also got to label most of the parts correctly, because I just killed a toad with my lab partner the day before the exam.

Five years later, do I still remember every toad muscle part? Hardly. Sometimes, I feel that these toads dissected by students like me died senseless deaths. Years later, the only significance that those lab activities left is the great feeling of accomplishment that I can pith with my bare hands and I was able to hold those cold-blooded creatures. I didn’t even appreciate how amazing their eyes are and that I should be doing some part in protecting their habitats. All I learned was pith and kill, just like how the Nazi were trained to just point and shoot at Jews.

And now, do we just let them vanish from the earth forever?

This “war against terrorism” is nothing but the human race’s egotistic, political mission to conquer the whole world. Why don’t you send your country’s top officer to swim the oceans and defend the country himself while he is equipped with all the necessary sensors and equipment?

The animal kingdom has nothing to do with your political bickering. Sure, they have the intrinsic talent that you just need, but survival is their only political agenda, not world dominance. So, spare these gifted animals of the dirty work of military defense. Terrorism is the human race's mess, not theirs.

Humans use animals for food, clothing, interior decoration, medicine, bomb-sniffing and as amusement in zoos. It would be abusive of us to maximize our power over other animals if we pursue that plan. Hope it won't push through.