Tales From This Side

Part I Part II Part III Part IV I awoke mildly dispirited from the night before, and lest I be labeled a “sissy” or other such term, it is worth noting the importance of not killing without reason. To wantonly destroy is not “wrong” – concepts such as “right” and “wrong,” “good” and “bad,” are merely constructions that exist in our minds – but it does, if repeatedly enacted, reduce the ecological diversity of an area, and doing that reduces the fitness of that portion of the ecosystem. Reduced fitness, multiplied, is extinction. Thus, to destroy without reason (i.e., for purposes other than food or defense) risks creating a state of mind that, generation upon generation, could lead to our own destruction. It was with this sort of selfish thinking that I rose and lamented the unnecessary death of my roommate. Such sadness, however, would be short lived. As I entered the kitchen I expected to have a quick clean-up job before me, but to my surprise, the bait that I had left out – a ...

Part I Part II Part III Now, when it comes to mouse traps, there are more out there than you might think. The variety is immense. There are "bucket" traps that involve convincing a mouse to jump into a bucket of water to get bait, where they drown. There are glue traps, flat boards with powerful adhesives that the mice run across and then get stuck on. (We actually had a variation on this in my college fraternity house where spilled beer on the kitchen linoleum from the night before would turn sticky and catch cockroaches by the handful. Should have patented it.) There are electric traps that shock mice to death. There are even traps that gas chamber the insidious and dangerous beasts, Nazi-style. And, of course, there is the classic, wood-based spring trap. On top of all of these there are also what are termed "live catch" traps which are not dissimilar to the raccoon trap I previously mentioned, only much smaller, obviously. My goal was to "live cat...

Part I Part II It is at this point that the story takes on a decidedly darker hue. Among the contributing factors to my new earnestness to capture the mouse was the activity of my upstairs neighbor. Now, he and I share a door. Our apartments are, in fact, designed to work as a single unit, in case the school we work for ever found itself in need of a very large apartment for a family with several children. Like one of those connected hotel rooms with the door locked from both sides. He, his wife, and I, aren't enemies, but neither do we get along particularly well, and as such the door has remained permanently locked. What acts as a barrier for us, however, is nothing of the sort to this story's antagonist. It was after several weeks of comfortable cohabitation, just prior to the aforementioned issues that developed between mouse and I, that I was walking the main dorm floor, fending off inane questions from freshman boys. Just another day in the freshman dorm. "No...

Part I Now, I have told this story to others and have been accused of "over thinking" things in my life (whatever that means), but I swear by such an overactive thought process. I thought about the situation and realized that both the mouse and I were in a bit of a bind. The entire reason that the mouse was in my apartment was due to a series of chance events: two doors that were rarely open at the same time had, in fact, opened simultaneously, right when the mouse was in their proximity. This meant that, in order to escape by "natural" means, a similarly unlikely event would need to occur. As already stated, the dorm was new and seemed quite impervious to rodent penetration, and as happy as I was about that, it also meant that mouse and I were new roommates, he as unable to leave as I was to evict him. So I kept thinking, and I thought that if I kept the place clean of food and debris, as I normally did, he would have nothing to eat. If had nothing to eat,...

Neither Robert Burns , Tony Banks , nor Ian Anderson have adequately prepared me for my continuing adventures with our small and distant mammal relatives, though perhaps they have helped to bolster my esteem for such creatures. Though often thought of as mere vermin, I have a hard time looking at the mouse as such. Of course, my recent forays into Kafka and his first-person experience as a " monstrous vermin " have also helped to moderate my opinion of the fidgety little devils who seem to have truly been given the short end of the stick. Nearly everything that is predatory eats mice, and civilization even caters to this, selling them as a fodder-commodity in pet stores for everything from snakes to piranha to tarantulas. Once upon a time, in San Diego, I even saw a minute falcon drop out of the sky to catch one. I had been running Mission Bay's scenic bay loop and was routinely witness to male, American kestrels that would float, motionless, on the air streams tha...

Why, one often asks, do I focus so intently on the subject of food? The question dumbfounds me, no matter how often I encounter it. Every day you wake up and eat. It defines the chemical balance in your body. It is the main source of fuel by which the very cellular structure of your body is built, as individual cells die, over time, and are hastily reproduced. The question is akin to asking something as inane as "Why do you care about what you breathe?" The way most Americans eat today is to that first question what breathing in the fumes from an exhaust pipe is to the second. Though I often discuss the nature of cooked food, I need not even go to that extreme to expose the horror show that modern men, and their "civilization," have wrought upon mankind. Begin here: This trailer, pieced together from the longer expose, is enough to at least make one consider the past and future of what is on mankind's plate. The "green revolution" was indeed an...

The notion that speech is a singularly human skill is one that has only slowly been accepted as false. Repeated experiments, dating back at least 40 years, have shown that several species outside man have the ability to command intelligent thought patterns that express more than mere emotion. Sure, a dog can display anger or affection with ease in a manner that can be comprehended by virtually any other mammal that it encounters, but short of a clear acceptance or rejection of a bowl of food, can it tell you what it wants to eat for breakfast? Be they dolphins, apes, or even birds, long term encounters with individuals from certain species have shown us that communication beyond this basic level is, indeed, possible. Take, for instance, Akeakamai and Phoenix, two dolphins from the Kewalo Basin Marine mammal Laboratory in Hawaii that were heavily studied in the 1980's. Akeakamai and Phoenix are asked to create a trick and do it together. The two dolphins swim away from...