alias Bruce.

Bass-ackwards worldview of the day:

This quote from a story in today's NYT about the human-caused disappearance of the grizzly bear from the North Cascades, where there has not been a grizzly sighting since 1996:

“Grizzlies are a threat to livestock and to humans,” said John Stuhlmiller, the director of government relations at the Washington State Farm Bureau. “People might think they’re neat and they might want to go see them in the zoo, but in the wild they’re not a friendly, cuddly creature.”

People whose livelihoods are not threatened by predators do not get it, Mr. Stuhlmiller said. “If my 401(k) was being raided by grizzly bears, I would think differently,” he said.

We'll leave aside the further irony that an Alaskan governor-turned-performer has anointed her favored political players as "Grizzlies" while trying to get government out of the way of industry decimation of grizzly habitat.

As the person who posted a link to this,

Sean Paul Kelley at The Agonist, said, this has gotta be a gag:

From People's Daily Online, July 9, 2010:

Afghanistan's Taliban insurgents are training monkeys to use weapons to attack American troops, according to a recent report by a British-based media agency.

Reporters from the media agency spotted and took photos of a few "monkey soldiers" holding AK-47 rifles and Bren light machine guns in the Waziristan tribal region near the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The report and photos have been widely spread by media agencies and Web sites across the world.

Read the rest here.

I have to say that we already tried the armed monkey thing (see 2000-2008 US presidency) and it didn't work out so well.

The NYT reports that cruelty to animals

is often a sign of cruelty to others, namely humans. Not surprising, but interesting and important.

I took in a stray cat some years ago who I'm sure was abandoned. (He was tame, litter-trained, and hungry for affection, for starters.) He was an unbelievably terrific little pal and smart as a whip. From the ways he acted around different people, I suspected he had not only been abused at some point but had also witnessed people being abused, although I'll never know.

Anyway, that's anecdotal. But the Times story cites research. Check it out.

Human Rights As Animal Rights.

Recently, a person I was talking with suggested that when we talk about civil and human rights, we ought to start bringing the rights of non-human beings into the discussion as well. Her idea being that just as we link, say, black rights with women's rights with gay rights, we need to begin to link the rights of humans with the rights of other sentient beings. So that the welfare of non-human animals becomes part of the everyday progressive discussion about "justice" instead of being quarantined to the PETA and environmentalist end of the table.

This project gets messy. Because it is full of human ideas that we cannot just slap onto animal consciousness. For starters, what exactly is "sentience?" Who has it and who doesn't? Is it even a fair standard? Can a non-sentient existence rank as highly on a worth-of-experience scale as a sentient one? And what is "freedom" or "the pursuit of happiness" to a garter snake?

But messiness is never a good reason for not trying to do the right thing. There is, after all, plenty that we do know about the need to honor the rights of other animals. We know that an entire realm of mammals, birds, and other animals experience both enjoyment and suffering. We know that many of our fellow critters mate for life, and mourn, and court, and play, and seek revenge when hurt. We know that animals being led into slaughterhouses are scared literally shitless. We know, in our hearts if not in our scientific minds, that when we come home and our waiting pets cry at the door and turn in circles and jump up on us, there is more going on than a soulless appetite for dinner.

So what could be more natural than our beginning to pull together our various pursuits of fairness into a shared desire for "life justice," to pick a name out of the air, rather than segregating them as if they are not all about life experience? There are, as we know, many peoples who had already traveled far down this integrated road by the time armies of human-centric advance men arrived on their shores to begin the trade in human and racial superiority. So it's not that an understanding of inter-species rights is something new. It's simply that it's right.

I have believed for many years, and I still believe, that in some coming century it will be illegal in the dominant world cultures for a human being to own an animal. It will be recognized as both a moral wrong and a punishable crime for a person to try to exercise "ownership" of a sentient being. No buying and selling, no animal trafficking, no human authority to declare a dog or a llama as "mine." As the woman with whom I was talking suggested, future humans may take on declared roles as "caretakers" for pets, but no longer as "owners." The idea of "owning" a fellow creature will be as morally abhorrent and philosophically bankrupt as the notion of buying and selling a human being.

Again, confounding questions will come up: what is sentient, and does it matter, and how do we order our understanding of being? Answers might not be easy in coming.

But then, we're only human. We have a lot to learn.

Killing.

Sean Paul Kelley over at The Agonist recently posted a thoughtful piece about his having been raised as a hunter and his sorting out a personal stance toward the taking of life and the sharing of the planet. In response to what he wrote, I posted a comment. With its now being hunting season (my neighbor went out for deer last week but only saw a small buck, which he spared) and the immediate aftermath of the Thanksgiving feast fest, I am posting an expanded and hopefully more thought-out version of it here:

The act of killing is something a person had damned well better take seriously.

I have fished since I was about five years old, when I waded, scared to death, at the edge of an underwater drop-off in one of the big rivers in upstate New York, at the bottom of a 300-foot gorge, with my Dad. He was crazy to have let me do this at that age, but since I ended up not drowning I'm now glad he did it. I now spin fish and fly fish wherever there is clean water, fresh or salt, including a cold, clear river near my house where a few days a ago a fat, strong, more-than-foot-long rainbow trout gave me dinner. I never set foot in a river or in the surf without intending to bring home food, whether the day turns out that way or not. When I kill a fish I know damned well I am killing a being, and I express thanks for its feeding me. Nothing fancy or sanctimonious. It's just the reality: I've killed and I'm going to eat and I need to acknowledge it.

For me personally, knowing what it feels like to kill seems like the very least I can do as a flesh-eating person, and I'm pretty weirded out by our society's accepted habit of eating dead creatures while shielding ourselves from any experience of the killing. Sure, we have all gotten hints or explicit evidence of the predatory lie we live from news stories or horrific food documentaries, and we all know that the pale flesh beneath the plastic wrap in the market was a living creature that felt pain just a while ago. But for me, if we have have never held a writhing fish in our hands and then conked it to render it unconscious before disemboweling it and cutting off its head, or if we have never followed the blood trail of a dying deer and then put it out of its suffering, or if we have never wrung a chicken's neck, something at the heart of the death-for-dinner reality has escaped us.

I know better than to get up on any high horse about this. We all have hypocrisies in our personal ways of life. It goes with the territory when our beef comes from a far-off giant processing plant and our porch furniture comes from a repressive factory regime in Asia. I like and own leather jackets, but I have never executed or skinned a cow or witnessed its death in an industrial abattoir, and I never will. I may one day own a pair of snakeskin cowboy boots, but I will never slay and skin a rattler. You have your own version of the same dynamic. I know meat eaters who very comfortably eschew any knowledge of how cattle and pigs and chickens die on corporate killing floors. I know catch-and-release fishermen and women who regard my habit of catching-to-eat as awful and self-indulgent, and I respect the conservation ethic that makes catch-and-release the rule in many waters due to sheer human traffic and mistreatment of nature. To me personally, making fish suffer purely for one's own pleasure, when one intends simply to throw them back, is barbaric. But the fact is that, even as a food fisherman, I'm wild about fishing itself. I find something both primal and connectively grounding in it. I enjoy the strength and the wiliness and the fight of a healthy fish that is fooled by what I offer. So I cannot claim that this is purely a food thing for me (although, especially these days, that's a big part of it). More messily still, even if I am stalking a particular fish that I can see in the water, I cannot control my sometimes catching a young fish that I need to put back or that may die from the ordeal of having been caught. Hunters with guns or bows, I guess, at least have more control over which animals they kill. So I freely admit that my approach to this is no tidy or clean affair. It's just my way of working out what feels balanced and what I can live with.

But I do think it is important for us, as people, to put some personal thought, some feeling, some effort into trying to work this out within ourselves, wherever that leads each of us. Our see-no-evil consumer ethic encourages the opposite. And I think that's bad. At a time when manufactured experience seems to shield us from virtually all knowledge of the effects of our way of life, I think the effort of paying attention to these questions, however conflicted and incomplete, adds some leavening to our sense of place in the living world, some sense of impact. Especially when it comes to something as essential as what we eat.

Sometimes, I think, even a little knowledge can be a good thing.

Cats: the Music.

Did you know there is music for cats?

I don't mean plain old human music repackaged for cats, with our familiar homo sapiens assortment of scales and tonal ranges and ambient sounds given cute new feline names at $15 a pop. I mean a new type of music that is acoustically designed, melodically pitched, harmonically constructed, rhythmically paced, and otherwise aurally crafted for the physiology of cats' hearing and the psychology of what sounds they find pleasing.

Cat lovers, be intrigued. Non- cat lovers, laugh your heads off.

I've got a thing for cats. Always have. I think it's about their independence while still being good pals, their silken moves, their Bagheera-like grace in following the pure pouncing compulsion of one of nature's less pretty imperatives, their talk, their weirdness, all of it. Their car sickness and their litter-box needs? Not so enjoyable. But you can't have everything.

For years I took in stray cats and found them homes. In between, I had a number of cats of my own, the most recent of whom, Buddy, came off the street with feline leukemia and lived for three blessed years with a three-week death warrant hanging over his head. He was the best pal I could have asked for, and his presence taught me that the length of the time span before we die matters less than what we do with it. Someday I'll tell you more about him.

But today I'm suggesting you go here, if only out of curiosity. The site is MusicForCats.com. It's got (alleged) acoustical and behavioral science. It's got explanations of how all of this works. Best of all, it's got free cat music samples you can listen to. (They are at the very bottom of the home page.) You won't believe this stuff.

I swore that my cat Buddy's favorite was Mozart, which I played for him whenever I left the house for more than an hour or so. He always seemed more chilled out with Wolfie than without him. But maybe that was just me. From what I can tell, the animal music scientists, including a Wisconsin psychologist who does music research with monkeys, say that non-human critters are pretty much oblivious to human music.

Hence cat music, for cat ears and cat brains and cat memories of the joys of kittenhood -- such as suckling. (Funny that there apparently isn't human music about that. Although there seem to be plenty of films.)

Anyway, give a listen. And see if you feel a sudden urge to knead the couch with your fingernails or to run frenzied laps from room to room.

Seeing Whose Shadow?

So a few days ago I'm looking through my window watching a woodchuck, otherwise known as a groundhog. He (I'm picking a pronoun because I can't tell a male from a female woodchuck from a distance nor do I want to make a sufficiently close examination to know) is a pleasant enough woodchuck, unobtrusive and plump, although his pointed face and narrow-looking eyes make him less cute close up in my yard than, say, from 30 feet away in my speeding car as I silently urge one of his cousins to stay on his side of the shoulder and not try a dash across the highway in search of greener grass.

I have begun calling him "Chuck," which I know is both anthropomorphic and unimaginative, but hell, he lives under my porch and I see him every day and he's chomping my garden like I grew it just for him, so why shouldn't I be on personal terms with him? Actually, I need to take that back: I believe he is chomping my garden, but I don't know for certain because a practically Bugs Bunny-sized rabbit has also been hanging around lately. So it could be either critter who is shredding my salvia and cilantro and marigolds. And before I bait and set the Havahart live trap, I need to know whether it's Chuck or Bugs for whom I will provide free, albeit traumatic, transportation to ample grazing grounds miles away. I suspect it's Chuck.

Which is why, on this particular morning, I am intently watching Chuck through my window. (That's not him above, but a stock photo; I lack the gear to get a good close-up of Chuck.) He is a medium-sized woodchuck, not yet fully grown I'd guess but big enough to have moved into his own place, and he tends to venture forth from his burrow in the mornings, when it's cool, to browse for food and chill out in the shade. Right now, as I watch, he is methodically combing through a section of lush lawn, his nose nuzzling the carpet of grass, searching out the exact green tidbits that suit his appetite. I am amazed at how picky he is. Only after perhaps 30 seconds of waddling and nuzzling will he pause to pull and munch contentedly at the desired shoots before trundling on in search of more of whatever it is he likes. Clover? Young, tender grass? I can't tell. But his patient fussiness about food is striking, as I have also noticed with other animals, such as a feeding beaver I once wrote about.

Just as fascinating to watch is Chuck's hyper-vigilance. He bolts upright on his hind legs like clockwork every couple of minutes to scan for predators or other scary developments. The slightest odd sound – say, a small plane flying some distance away – will send him scurrying toward his burrow, where he will either nervously hover near the entrance or dive inside, waiting until all seems clear before creeping back out onto the lawn. It is completely understandable, even to a dumb human, why these habits make sense for a relatively small and timid herbivorous mammal who would make a luscious lunch for any number of carnivores, including neighborhood dogs.

But what engages me most about Chuck is the way he seems to enjoy some of his more elective choices, like when he lounges at length on the porch in the shade, reclining slightly to one side, his legs tucked beneath him like a house cat. I'm no authority on woodchuck pleasure, but this sure looks like it to me. I remember once seeing a squirrel lie down out of the sun on the porch, his head laid against the plank as if resting on a pillow, looking for all the world like an instant couch potato. And I recall seeing another squirrel tucked into the elbow of a leafy tree limb outside of my office window, fully reclined on his side on the branch, head nestled against the bark, eyes closed, taking a nap. That's right: a squirrel taking a nap. Why shouldn't he? And why shouldn't he have the experience of this and other kinds of squirrel intentionality? Who is to know? Who is to say that the intensity of a squirrel's or a woodchuck's visceral experience of life, and their desire to protect that life, does not equal ours? How can we say it doesn't? When you swat at a moth and watch it try to hide, or slap an ant in your kitchen and see the injured insect writhe, what does this tell you? I talked about this very question recently with someone who argued that these kinds of behaviors among such creatures are proof of nothing but "survival instinct:" a locked-in physiological response to danger or injury. Well, okay, but one could look at we humans' sometimes-frenetic attempts at preserving our own well-being and say the very same. Yes, we humans have the power of reason and nearly all other animals don't. But the intensity of a creature's raw sensation of life is not at all the same as reason, and I see no basis other than mere human vanity for posing reason as its prerequisite.

Which brings us to the death penalty.

The human death penalty is a classic example of this kind of vanity-based comparison of lives. It assumes that a murderer's life, by virtue of his or her crime, is subsequently worth less than that of the lives of the murdered and the lives of surviving loved ones and the rest of we non-murderers. It bases this assumption on the idea that one forfeits the right to one's own human life upon knowingly and deliberately taking another.

But there are three colossal problems with this assumption.

First, as we all know, the death penalty is inequitably executed (so to speak). Even if all racial and class bias were removed, the fact of human error would always assure that some innocent people would be executed. If you support the death penalty, you support the inevitable execution of innocents, whether you admit it or not.

Second, there is no sound evidence that killing a murderer brings much-ballyhooed "closure" to the loved ones of victims. At best, research to date shows that closure means different things to different people, and a hefty proportion of survivors find, in the end, that watching the convicted murderer die does none of the work that will ultimately be accomplished by the agonized process of good old-fashioned healing and spiritual surrender.

And third and most importantly, the very premise of murder as justice for murder utterly destroys the moral stance it claims to protect: that human life is sacrosanct. Become a backer of murder as revenge for murder, and you relinquish all claims to reverence for the sanctity of human life. You nuke your own moral foundation. You become, for the sake of presumed righteousness, the other edge of the same blade that hacked your loved one away from this earth. Sorry, but the moral physics are immutable. You cannot have it both ways.

So if we cannot kill convicted murderers without killing our moral being, what ought we do with them?

I believe that a morally-grounded society would do two things:

1.) A just society would take custody of people who have murdered and do all within our cumulative psychological knowledge and moral power to bring them to awareness and accountability for what they have done. In the place of the fruitless punishments of prolonged isolation, prison gang warfare and rape, and lifelong scapegoating, we need to take hold of those who have killed and immerse them in the most potent intervention we can muster: a combination of emotional repair and unrelenting demand for personal responsibility. With the rare exceptions of outright evil and cybernetic wire-crossing, it is an unpopular but irrefutable fact that humans who brutally or unsympathetically harm others have generally themselves been harmed in some profound way, and the prospects for rehabilitation have a lot to do with the profundity of the original harm. Some forms of damage can be addressed and countered over time to bring eventual healthy self-esteem and a sense of responsibility toward others. Some cannot. But within a confined setting where murderers are prevented from harming others, we as a society need to give this our very best shot -- for the sake of both morality and public safety. Right now, we are not even trying. And the crime is that we have both the money (consider the ballooning price of today's ineffective-by-design inmate warehousing industry and the huge costs to all of us of its failure) and the professional therapeutic knowledge to actually make productive use of incarceration. We can do this. If we are willing.

2.) A just society would make accountability toward victims, and toward the community in general, a part of rehabilitation for murderers. Instead of 30 or 50 or 100 years in a cell as an abstract penalty for having committed a horrific act, real justice requires the concrete practice of a killer's personally facing the consequences of what he has done: not just for one day in court in the face of weeping or raging survivors, but for years thereafter in a process of confrontation, conversation, and reparation that would keep a perpetrator continually aware of the meaning of his actions and his attitudes. Nothing can bring back a dead victim, including the murder of the murderer. But mandatory guided accountability – including contact with those survivors of murder victims who agree to be part of such a process – is the best hope for whatever healing is possible. Our current circus of punitive imprisonment, depersonalized "justice" for victims, and (often endlessly delayed) execution is a cruel joke that offers no resolution, no healing, and no solutions.

It goes without saying, but it needs to be said, that all of this has to be underpinned by a massive cleanup of the criminal justice process so that, say, being a black killer of a white person does not magnify one's sentence as it currently does. It also needs to be said that all the criminal justice reform in the world is meaningless until we change our public policy so that we are not running a national murder factory. We can start by treating drug addiction as a public health issue, carrying out true gun control so that American life at all socio-economic levels is not flooded with firearms, and addressing the problems of jobs and education and law enforcement that disproportionately nurture violence in poor communities.

One thing is for certain: if Chuck the groundhog deserves better than our convenient and conceited prescription for who we believe him to be, then fellow human beings do as well.

Thanks to Laurie for suggesting I put this in writing.

It's Spring.

So it's spring again and birds are building nests and those people who can are buying houses, with a little bit of help from a colossal burst bubble. The two cutest chipmunks on the entire Eastern Seaboard are chewing their way through my 5-by-5-foot "garden" like little bright-eyed chainsaws, but I cannot bear to live-trap and relocate them because a few years ago when I live-trapped 14 chipmunks in a single month (believe it, it's true) and released them on a strip of prime grassy rodent real estate a couple of miles away along the river, I drove past their new digs one evening and saw an adult fox happily hanging out in this newly-populated chipmunkville, a spot where I had never, ever seen a fox in the five years since I had moved into the area, and believe me, I see plenty of foxes around. I could lie to you and say I couldn't sleep that night. But I sure as hell felt awful, like a cosmic interloper, a lower-grade version of the guy in the Ray Bradbury story who goes back in time and ruins the future by stepping on a butterfly.

So anyway, it's spring, time for all of we creatures to munch fresh crisp plants and be sociable. And one day about a week ago I'm watching two starlings stake out a corner of the gutter above my porch to build their nest, right at the top opening of the drain spout, which strikes me as suicidal given the rainy spring we've had but appears to make sense to the starlings and is I guess a nice round anchoring pocket for the bottom of the nest if they build it to be flood-resistant. They don't particularly seem to care that if their nest holds it will then back up the rainwater like a beaver dam and, as with some previous bird gutter tenants, send sheets of water cascading onto my porch in a downpour. Like Dick Cheney dodging the draft, the starlings have other priorities. It's spring.

So in the middle of these two starlings' house-hunt, I'm watching from my window when suddenly, on the lawn near the porch, a fight breaks out between two adult starlings. I can't tell if it's the two would-be mates, or two rivals vying for the right to the prospective partnership, or two altogether different starlings with their own bone to pick, because I know nothing at all about starlings except for 1.) the little bit I learned about their anatomy while stuffing and preserving a starling during a taxidermy phase in my adolescence and 2.) the factoid, from my days years ago working in horse stables where starlings were a nuisance, that live starlings don't like seeing dead starlings, which is why when we found a dead one we would hang it by its legs from a rafter in the shed row to scare away the others. I can't say whether this actually worked, but to us it was a sworn ritual -- kind of like the belief that hopelessly failed kings of American industry will become keenly globally competitive by being propped up and allowed to keep their jobs -- so it didn't matter.

At any rate, these two starlings are going at it, and I don't mean World Wrestling Federation whacked-with-a-folding-chair fakery. This bout has the look of a fight to the death. The two warring birds are all over each other, beaks serially knifing at each other's necks and abdomens, wings a slashing blur, one bird pinning the other to the ground and seemingly ready for the kill when suddenly things reverse and the first is then held down in the grass for a seemingly imminent lethal beak-slash to its vitals, but then things reverse again. I almost can't watch. I know that one way or the other I am soon going to be carrying away and disposing of the bloody bodily remnants of a onetime starling. I have spent time as a critter low on the food chain in the Alaskan tundra and I have had a very large gun pointed at my head in an alley in a big East Coast city and I am telling you: this bird fight is about the most vicious thing I have ever witnessed. It lasts at least a full minute, the all-out thrashing and stabbing, and I cannot believe both birds are even still alive. 

And then, as if on cue, the two birds suddenly separate and fly away. Cleanly, briskly, with no apparent damage. I'm google-eyed in my upstairs window and I cannot believe it.

I learn later, when I look it up, that starlings, like the Pilgrims, are an invasive and aggressive species deliberately introduced here from England, in this case to control insects, but things haven't quite worked out happily. Starlings swoop in, sometimes in flocks of thousands that stymie entire towns and inspire desperate local anti-starling initiatives, and they physically attack and displace native birds, and they fight brutally and frequently with other birds (often woodpeckers, apparently) and among themselves for practically any reason: for food, for mates, for nests. Most of the fighting is by males (does this surprise you?). Anecdotal accounts and photos, e.g., here and here, portray starlings fighting, sometimes to the death, over suet and other food, and destroying the eggs of other birds. A Time article from 1930 bemoans the "plague" of bad-assed starlings that descended on Washington, D.C. that year. One monograph tells of starlings poking their beaks into small birdhouses to break the eggs and trash the nests of other species, even though the starlings themselves cannot use the birdhouses because their bodies are too big to fit through the holes. A 1962 article download from The Wilson Bulletin ornithology magazine provides an observer's incredible minute-to-minute diary, with hand-drawn action illustrations(!), of a full hour-and-15-minute blood match between two male starlings.

These birds are mean suckers.

As it happens, just a couple of days before I saw the starling brawl, I found two smashed starling eggs (they are blue like robin eggs, only slightly darker and smaller) on the lawn, not far beneath the sought-after gutter nest site and in almost the exact spot where the birds later fought. So there are all kinds of possibilities here: Rival starling attacks nest, trashes eggs, and tries to sidle up to the female to raise a new family in the same spot. (I'm not sure a female whose eggs have just been crushed would invite the egg-smasher over for tea. But I'm not a starling.) A fight ensues, and one of the contestants wins. Or: after the egg-fight an entirely new pair of starlings moves in to inherit the nest site. Or: the egg-smashers are actually the pair of crows who live around here, and the starlings fight over who now gets to squat in the gutter. Or: the fight has nothing to do with the eggs or the nest but is actually over the suet that I happen to keep in ample supply on my bird feeder year-round, mere steps from the scene of the combat. I know I'm spoiling the birds with suet in the warm months when there is plenty of natural protein around, but life is short and I figure raw natural selection isn't everything.

So in any case, in the wake of the lost eggs and within minutes after the fight, a male and female starling do in fact shack up in the gutter atop the downspout and immediately get to work building a nest, each zooming back and forth between the corner of the roof and some nearby pine boughs rich in dry needles and dead blown grass and leaves. A full beak on every trip. Upon landing, each bird disappears into the cup of the gutter, and there is an immediate brushy rasping sound which conveys, I'm guessing, their expertly weaving the nest material into position in their aluminum shelter. This goes on for a good while until, actually, I stop watching because I have work to do. As of this writing, a week later, the starlings have taken up full residence. If the two of them can defend their turf and build a domestic relationship of compatibility, respect, and active listening, they should be fine.

So what is the meaning of this story? Beats me. 1.) Our desires come in seasons and we are willing to fight for them. 2.) We need more women presidents. 3.) It's amazing and beautiful that parents manage to raise families at all. 4.) The gaggles of young heterosexual prom-gowned giggling clickety-heeled girly-girls and young acned grunting hooting hunching boyish-boys and young baseball-capped stride-swinging wise-cracking lesbian non-girly-girls and young sashaying, mutually-mocking, uproariously laughing gay boys -- all of whom, among many others, I see all the time at the hangouts where I write -- are all doing exactly the same obediently ritualistic thing. 5.) Animals are animals. All of us. 6.) I need screens over my gutters. 7.) It is good to spend as much time as possible watching things happen.

It's spring.

Bad Taste, Example #1,217.

Hey, I'm all for bikes that make a statement. My ruby-red chrome-laden '85 Yamaha Virago 700 (a glitzy Harley imitator for sure) gave me major kicks. But get a load of this furry provocation on wheels, seen in southern Pennsylvania. It's sure to be a hit with deer along the roadside. Not to mention seriously bad karma for its rider. (And note the red nose.)

Thanks to Cathleen for passing along the photo.

Some Days.

Thanks to Cathleen for this poster.