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Sound the Alarm!

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I yield today to former mainstream media reporter Bud Buck, who continues his quest to re-establish himself in this new digital environment by any means necessary, including the time-honored technique of breathless conclusion-jumping and its close companion, baseless fear mongering. He sent the following commentary:

Citizens, it is time to wake up!

I look with increasing alarm upon photos and videos traded back and forth on the Internet under the guise of “memes” or “jokes”, and the callous way people laugh at them without a thought to what is REALLY GOING ON!

The latest one surfaced on You Tube just within the last week, and it is horrible. I hesitate to show it to you here, but I fear I must as a way of jolting a sleeping populace into action. The plain fact is that formerly docile beasts are finding the courage to contest our authority. Prepare yourself for a glimpse of the next monumental challenge to our civilization – an animal-led Armageddon!

What is so funny about this?
An unidentified reindeer (probably Prancer or Blitzen) just ran off with that man’s wife! Apparently this is good for a laugh for many unthinking Americans who are unable to put themselves in the shoes of that unfortunate woman or her powerless, strangely ambivalent husband.
I, for one, am shocked and appalled!

Animals who in the past were content to show their disdain for us by swishing us with their tails, nudging us with their noses and bumping us with their flanks have how taken the next horrible step and are abducting people with increasing regularity! How rapidly is it increasing? Up until yesterday, I had never seen anything like this before. That’s a 100% hike in just the past 24 hours!

And then there’s the ransom note:

Tird of wearng thse dam bells.
Think change time is now.
I hav her in place wher U don’t find.
Meet by glashur to trade wife for food, freedum.
Com alone. No game warduns or Santa.

That note is no less chilling for my having just made it up. I’m sure it will surface just as soon as Dancer learns to hold a Sharpie with his hoof and Rudolph lights the scene so this outrageous demand can be scrawled and sent.

The cheek of these beasts!

No doubt they will point to “global warming” as a justification for their uprising and they will lay it at our feet just as they litter our path with steaming dung, accusing us of carelessness for our hydrocarbon rich lifestyles while ignoring their own wanton methane production.

I know this has just started, but where will it end? I fear a monumental contest has begun and I know we are not prepared. Please, until further notice, don’t turn your back on the animals!

This is Bud Buck!

I told Bud I would run his “commentary” because I had absolutely no other ideas for a blog entry today, and in an ironic twist I would use his “warning” as a caution for all of us to be skeptical of those who would use alarmist techniques to bull rush us into irrational action.

Why is this dog smiling?

Animal uprising indeed! Stop the nonsense!

After I sent that message to Bud, I turned to my faithful pet and saw this troubling sight. Those startlingly pink lips and razor-sharp buck teeth stood in stark contrast to the sad determination in those dark brown eyes. I suddenly realized I sleep each night with these potentially vicious fangs just a few short feet away.

Her eerie smile will keep me awake, I guarantee it.

Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad? Discuss.

65 thoughts on “Sound the Alarm!”

  2. I am afraid of deer. When I am up north, I run, of course, just as I would do at home. Every now and then, however, I will encounter a buck on the trail who will not budge, move, or otherwise run away. I stop my Garmin, wait for the buck to depart, start the Garmin again, and resume running. It’s not difficult to understand who would win and who would lose in a match between a full grown deer and myself.

    It’s not only the deer that have been too accustomed to the presence of people. I’ve had two unwanted encounters with urban animals this summer. I was riding my bike when a bird flew into my helmet, his wing brushing my forehead. (It didn’t seem like there would be a favorable outcome for the bird, since I was traveling 19 miles per hour or so at the time.) The second encounter took place in my front yard where I was sitting with my 15 year old son Henry chatting late one afternoon. Two squirrels were chasing each other about the yard, and they ran alongside of me, one brushing my ankle in transit. This did not seem less disconcerting than having a rat do the same.

    That said, they are probably thinking there are just too darn many humans and that is it is near impossible not to bump into them (literally) at times.

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    1. Elinor–don’t worry! In a lifetime of reading outdoor stories I can’t recall even one example of a deer attacking a human. It happens in confinements, but that doesn’t apply here. Now and then a wounded buck will fight a hunter, but again that isn’t the issue. Healthy, “free-range” deer don’t attack.

      Moose do. It is highly seasonal. If you encounter a male moose in September, start looking for a tree you can climb. Several friends have been run up trees, but by moose, not deer.

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      1. A Garmin is a stopwatch, Global Positioning System (GPS), and heart-rate monitor all rolled up in a wrist watch. Dick Tracy would be jealous. I never run without it now. It’s nice to know just how slow I am running and how high my heart rate is. Wondering when Garmin will come out with a new model with a built in defibrillator!

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  3. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    After seeing the YouTube and the scary dog smile? I’m on the side of hermits everywhere– 2 legs, 4 legs, millipedes. Interact with no one, ever. It is just too dangerous. They are all out to get us.

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  4. Dale, please turn off the camera in my kitchen.

    Late last night, I woke up an realized the Twixiecat had not come in for the evening. She is getting on in years and there are some new whippersnappers in the neighborhood who seem bent on taking over her territory, so I like her in for the night. On these hot nights, she thinks that is silly, and I admit, she looks a lot more comfortable sleeping on her chair on the porch than I feel sleeping in the house.

    I opened the back door to call her in and she came running and seemed very excited to see me. Only when she was completely in did I realize that she was not alone, she had brought in a not-so-dead mouse, which she set down and started to chase around the kitchen. When she had it again, I grabbed her and tossed the whole menagerie out the door.

    Is she just trying to be generous? Clueless? Out to get me?

    This is not the first time (so I now know some of the signs and can end the game before a broom and piano get involved, like the first time-oh yes, there was also a 3-year-old perched on the rocking chair that time). I wonder……

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    1. Catherine, I have not met your Twixiecat, but I am confident I know what she was up to. She was proud of the capture and was showing off to you. Feel flattered.

      I lived in the basement of a flyfishing tackle shop along the Brule River for two summers. We had our cat, Pippin, with us. Pippin got into hunting in a big way. He kept bringing living creatures into our basement bedroom so we could enjoy them along with him. I vividly remember him bringing in some kind of kangaroo rat that bounced all around the basement on two legs. A veteran outdoorsman, I was stunned to learn that such creatures lived in northwestern Wisconsin.

      Pippin ate the mice and shrews he caught, all but their little noses and whiskers. He would leave those parts as evidence of his skill as a hunter. (I thought of WWII fighter pilots with painted planes to mark how many enemy planes they’d shot down.) When we woke up in the morning we knew better than to run around in the dark in bare feet because Pippin would arrange the noses and whiskers of last night’s kill in little rows on the floor for us to admire. Stepping barefoot on Pippin’s trophies was a bad start to your day.

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      2. The same thing. She wants you to see she caught something. I think cats often kill stuff they catch by accident. My cats have several times been playing with a tiny bird or rabbit and then seem confused when the dead baby animal won’t go on playing.

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      3. Kanagroo mice, thinly but widely spread across the boreal forest. Where they can really be a problem is that because they can jump, they have been known to get into vehicles and be very destructive and diffcult to get out. They are on the whole more destructive than field mice.

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    2. you didn’t want to share in the fun of the chase. we have cats that wait for night with great anticipation because the mice come out. i don’t think they kill many, they just mess with them. when they do kill they will bring it up and leave it outside the door. every blue moon they will get a bird on the porch and bring us the feathers. its the dog trophies that i don’t want to talk about here. my big dog waits all day and all night for an opportunity, the fish are pretty mellow though, must be the fact that they have no legs. i had one with legs a whle back and when the lights went out for the night that thing turned into a night warrior.
      as for the 2 legged representatives, when they jump on your wife, then you have reasons to be concerned, the 4 legged ones its usually just a momentary thing, not to much to be alarmed about

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  6. Good Morning to the Two Legged,

    Really it is the two legged that are potentially the most dangerous, but the four legged certainly can be a little scarey. Once a stray cat walked up to me and urinated on my leg. What was that cat thinking? I also have know a couple of cats that were pets, but some times would decide to bite for no apparent reason. Then there are the half wild barn cats that can do serious damage to you if you try to catch them as I did when I was a kid. I have also had cats that brought thier half dead prey into the house, but none that arranged trophy parts on the floor as Steve describes.

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  7. With Tim gone, someone has to fill the void by supplying off-the-wall commentary. Bud Buck is typically inflating this issue and jumping to conclusions. And he utterly fails to give consideration to the wife’s point of view. Who says she is frantic to get back to her old life? What evidence is there of that? I’ve watched the tape four times. This might be an abduction, but that woman isn’t putting up much of a fight. It looks to me like she is possibly delighted to be escaping her husband–a slow-moving human egg in a hat with ear flaps. Could that doofus possibly look less heroic? He just stands there watching the reindeer make off with his woman. That’s a handsome and powerful deer. If she lives a while among the deer this woman might do the Stockholm syndrome thing and start enjoying a diet of lichen. Having enjoyed intimacy with a husky deer, she might not want to “go back.”

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    2. Nice Tim imitation, Steve, except that you used caps. Otherwise I would have been fooled. Doofus (dufus?) husband is right.

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  8. This reminded me of the urban myth of the man who decides to shovel snow off his roof but does not want to fall. So he ties a rope around his waist, runs it over the peak of the roof, down the other side and to the bumper of his car. While he’s working, his wife decides to drive off and drags him over the roof and some distance–take your pick of that–before she sees him. I have heard this many many times sworn to as truth, as happening to a cousin of a friend from two towns over.

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  9. When I was in high school my girl friend was very much a town girl, the one I referred to yesterday. She never wanted to be on our farm, hated the smell, was afraid of even the chickens. But one day I talked her into bareback riding our horse, me in front, her in the back. We were riding through the pasture near the cows. When a cow is in “heat,” she climbs on the back of another animal, in imitation of how a bull copulates with a cow. (I have always wondered why this is, but thus you know when a cow is ready to be inseminated. Farm children learn sex early.) Well, can you see it coming? A cow climbed up the back of the horse, she was convinced it was trying to get at her. I tried to explain the cow had zero interest in her at that point but she was not accepting that. It was shortly after that that she dumped me.
    Fo those of you who did not cathc it, this is what is going on in the video.

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    1. Which I would say, just makes Steve acting as Tim’s point that much more valid.

      Mythology is full of just such tales. I wish her well.

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  10. I have to say that I’m a fan of the four-footers. Of course, I’m saying this as a two-footer that, when faced with a problematic four-footer, can usually take steps to alleviate the four-footed problem. So, I’m a little biased.

    My folks have a real domesticated deer situation up in Duluth. They really ~live~ in the back yard. My Mom has finally stopped sinking $1000-2000 every year in plants that the deer eat just about as fast as she can put them in the ground. A big doe actually attacked a little yip-yap dog of the neighbor’s. The dog tried chasing the deer out of the yard and the doe looked down, snapped its front hoof, and sliced open the side of the dog. They got the dog patched up and he’s fine. But the deer are really thinking that this is their turf now.

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    1. Along the shore south of Gooseberry Park, my old stomping grounds, are many people who feed the deer. The herd moves thorugh the day going from house to house collecting corn on a pretty regular schedule. If you come into a yard when they are there, they will try to bluff you away, and will now and then attack. One couple had a big German shepherd they had trained to leave the deer alone. If he was outside when the deer came, about 2 pm every day, which the dog tried to avoid, the deer would tease the dog by keeping it from getting back to the house. The dog, by the way, could tell time. Hw would ask to go out around 1 pm and rush out and back in to avoid the deer.

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  11. Can’t we all just get along? The two legged and the four legged (and the six legged and eight legged)? Wasn’t that what all that fabulous late 60s and 70s education I received was all about? Cooperation and getting along with each other and peace and harmony and sunshine and rainbows and save the whales (who have no legs) and baby seals (who have flippers) and don’t pollute and “Come and play…Everything’s A-OK…Friendly neighbors there…That’s where we meet…”

    Oh dear. Was Grover brain washing me for the future four-legged revolution?

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    1. You should tell Grover to lose the bare-chested blue-haired look. That is so 1980s. If Grover, like Mr. Rogers, were to adopt the sweater look, I got a friend who would knit for him. (Him? Is Grover a him? Those Muppets are so hermaphroditic.)

      But your main point is well taken (and beautifully expressed — you could write cards for Hallmark).

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    2. Grover and his lot are all bipedal (when you can actually see that they have legs)-just furry.

      Sure Steve, I’ll knit him a sweater, tell him to take a number.

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      1. I think Grover is just a pawn of the revolution – it’s Snuffleupagus who is the mastermind. That’s why he was invisible to all but Big Bird for the first several years – he was building his army of fuzzy minions and pre-school foot soldiers.

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  12. I am currently planning for the well being of our four four-foots and our finned friends in the fish tank as we travel to Ontario and Quebec tomorrow. The dog goes to the vet for boarding and the cats and the fish will be cared for at home by daughter’s best friend from across the street. The cats view the dog’s absence as a vacation and act as though they own the house, something they can’t do as much as they would like given our vigilant terrier, who pounces on them at the first sign of kitty fun. I expect to come home to things knocked over, objects in mysterious places, and signs of kitty wrestlemania and feline foot races. The dog likes going to the vet because she can bark at the resident cats there to her heart’s content and no one will scold her. We will see Christopher Plummer in “The Tempest” at the Stratford festival on Saturday night. Sunday is the start of the Suzuki Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, and daughter will play her fingers off for 6 days. Then we are off to Montreal for a couple of days of rest before returning to the ND. I will be sans computer, so I will catch up on all the baboon antics when I return.

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  15. Morning–

    I’m OK with most any two or four legged critters… it’s the four legged chickens that Dr. Kyle created that bother me. And spiders; hate hate HATE spiders. Mostly I’ve learned not to jump and shriek like a little girl when I see them. In fact, had one crawl on my arm Tuesday during elections and I managed to smush it without alarming the voters or evacuating the hall… And it was HUGE!– I think.

    I agree, as has been said, most animals will leave us alone if we just leave them alone. It’s when we’re in ‘their space’ — or trying to stab them with pitchforks that they get a little defensive… and who can blame them really? When I first met my future wife I told her that one of our dogs liked it when you blow in it’s face. Well, the dog liked it when I did it; not when she did it… I was lucky I didn’t get dumped right then and there.

    I’ve seen snakes the last few days too. Must be the hot weather bringing them out, eh? Just garden snakes, nothing too exciting.
    Hey, can someone tell me what is that insect (or bird??) that makes the loud, sort of buzzing sound? I’ve looked up cicada and Katydid but that’s not quite the same sound… or are those just bad recordings? I don’t know how to describe what I’m hearing; starts soft, gets loud, steady sort of buzzing / almost piercing, shrieking, whistling sound? Wasn’t there a ‘sewing bug’ or something?

    Thanks gang!

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      1. Ben, I think you are probably hearing cicadas which I think I am hearing in my area. I saw one the other day and they do make a fairly loud buzzing sound. Insects and spiders usually are not any thing to be afraid of, but I know many people don’t like them. I think they are very interesting.

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    2. “It was HUGE!–I think.” Funny.
      Have you had independent testimony that the sound is outside your head?
      My former parnter just built a new house west of Lawrence, KS, in a new development out on the prairie. They got title last Wednesday. His family was at the house getting ready to move in so he drove out after work. He drove there after work. His wife came out all excited with her new home and wanting to warmly greet her husband. As she ran between the garage and his car, she suddenly shrieked and ran back in. A moment later his 22-year-old son came out, looked and ran back into the house. My partner just had his hip replaced and has to be careful. He stepped out of the car, almost onto a very large snake slithhering by, and they do have poisonous snakes there. He had to freeze. But it was just a big bull snake, whose territory they had no doubt invaded with their home.

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      1. Second story of their new house and a snake of the two-legged kind. They sold their large house in town with the furniture. So they bought all new furniture from a dealer in town who promised delivery the next week when they moved in. Then he “discovered” that it wasn’t in stock as he thought and jhe could not deliver most of it for 6-10 weeks.

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  16. It’s the 6- and 8-leggeds I’m mad at, and no, apparently we can’t get along when you bite me! Husband and I have been waking up almost daily with new bites. It happens some every summer, and we’ve always called ’em spider bites but who knows? They’re not mosquito bites. I just hope we haven’t somehow gotten bedbugs.

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  17. OK, I’m afraid maybe Bud might be right. I just went out to pick raspberries and had a bumblebee literally chase me away – twice. Never happened before, I always just mind my own business and they mind their’s. Is it possible I brought “fearmonger” energy with me? I need to talk to the bee devas, I think.

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      1. I thought maybe I just needed a shower, but the bee went after Husband too. (Of course, maybe he needs a shower too.)

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  18. One of my brothers used to work on the oil rigs in the Southern Louisiana bayous. (Not for BP.) The inbound oil rig platforms are only a few feet off of the swamp/water. He said that one time he was sitting on the edge of the rig with his feet over the side. Out of the placid, still water there erupted a sizeable thrashing rather close to him. Suddenly an alligator bobbed to the surface with a large fish in its mouth. The ‘gator slowly turned to display his tooth-laden profile as he chomped this fish, no doubt to show how impressive he was. In his slightly agitated state, my brother estimated this particular alligator to be in the low hundreds of feet long. A native cajun corrected him, stating that it was closer to twenty feet long. My brother did not dispute these findings but, nevertheless, quickly developed a healthy respect for critters in the swamp. He said that they also used to hire native cajuns specifically to patrol the perimeters of the rigs. Not just to keep the ‘gators off but the water moccasins as well.

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  20. So I missed the last of the posts yesterday – went back today, and was incredibly moved by Barbara’s and Clyde’s poetry and wisdom. Incredible. Thank you.

    Then I come to today, and I immediately think of Gary Larson when I read the ransom note (the dog saying “I’m leaving. Stay! Stay!” or some such line). And I haven’t stopped laughing – one entry after another.

    I met up with a GIANT Minneapolis raccoon the other night while picking up the mail for my neighbor and brother. Crawled right out of the storm sewer and scared the life out of me until I got my wits about me and gave him/her wide berth by crossing the street and not making eye contact. Not that I would have fit into the sewer when it dragged me back to show the family, but still……

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      2. Fair warning, we have them here in St. Paul too. One was coming in under the back gate as I was letting our Twixie out, so a quietly went out, and scooped her up, as I did not want to know how a close encounter might end up.

        The brazen little guy came right up to the back door and the two of them stood looking at each other nose to nose through the glass.

        Took care of the last few scrappy ears of corn in the garden for us too.

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