Greenish tigers, 'lost' animals & adaptable deer

Nimmo

“Tyger Tyger, burning bright,/In the forests of the night . . .”  Yes, as poet William Blake knew, tigers are big, beautiful cats.  And in their natural habitat, they are fierce hunters. 

But doesn’t their vivid striped orange beauty make them conspicuous to prey animals, who might see them “burning bright” in time to get away?  There’s a good reason for why tigers don’t miss too may meals (explained and illustrated in the March ’22 newsletter from the Performing Animal Welfare Society [PAWS]).

Tigers’ prey animals see them very differently from how we do.  Humans and many other animals (including great apes and marsupials) have “trichromatic” color vision, so we and they can see blue, green and red, and those three colors in combinations.

However, most mammals – including tigers and their prey – have “dichromatic” vision that lets them see only two colors, blue and green.  So prey animals see tigers’ orange coloring as shades of green in the forest, making tigers well camouflaged and harder to detect.

Dinner is served.       https://tinyurl.com/54zztave

Watch your words!

Our word choices can help determine whether a dog or cat outside alone with no owner around will be taken to an animal shelter or reunited with her owner.  That’s because “lost” and “stray” can suggest different meanings to people.

When people think of an animal as being “lost,” they’re more likely to assume he lives locally and take steps to help find his home than to take him to a shelter.  But when an animal’s described as “stray,” people are less likely to work at re-unifiying her with her owner, and take her to an animal shelter instead.

The problem is that for many reasons, once in a shelter an animal has little chance of being reunified with his owner.  And that’s a real shame because the great majority of animals brought to shelters are lost -- they belong to somebody.   

Still another good reason for reunifying lost animals with owners: that’s the #1 way to reduce animal

shelter populations.     https://tinyurl.com/y4r2nbjp

Oh, my deer

Lately, it seems, deer have become a popular discussion and argument topic for a wide variety of people – from activists who want to protect them, through environmentalists who rue the plant life that deer destroy, to hunters, who want license to kill them wherever and whenever possible.  

Since last November, I’ve held onto a New Yorker magazine article studded with surprising info about deer and how people have regarded them so differently over time – capitalizing on them, sterilizing and hunting them, protecting them.  One key sentence sums it all up pretty well: 

Many of our ideas about animals – which we eat, which we keep as pets, which we vilify or protect – are changeable with time and context and culture.     

Opening with a narrative about a 2016 deer-sterilization project on Staten Island, the writer moves on to other issues involving both deer and human inconsistency toward them.  One big surprise for me was learning about synanthropes: “a tiny minority of wild animals – not livestock or pets – that have adapted to thrive in the places that humans like and are forever building more of.”  These include city pigeons, rats, coyotes, Canada geese . . . and deer.   

“Today,” the author says, “there are an estimated thirty million white-tailed deer in the U.S., a hundred times more than there were in 1900.”     

 https://tinyurl.com/49j49cje

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