I’ll have to save my zoo comments for another day – its a tough catch 22 when you have a kid obsessed with animals

AND, my cats own me.

First, I have this huge sorrow because I feel like we’re teaching my son to love animals that will be extinct before he is an adult – not just polar bears, but our local frog and turtle species, and maybe even the moose and wolves and beaver. It’s like the little knot of sorrow for the world I carry around all the time just explodes every time we run into a river turtle on the path or find just one tiny northwoods frog where there ought to be hundreds of them.

And then, I am really uncomfortable with zoos and wild animals in captivity generally – but I feel really strongly that along with supporting habitat preservation and working against the war in the Congo and all that, we need to support the wild animal sanctuaries & retirement homes and the zoo programs that are trying to prevent some species from becoming extinct. So we give money to the Wildlands project and subscribe to My Big Backyard and then we get all this mail that just exacerbates issue #1.

We have the book about Knut. This whole thing jsut makes me sad.

Yesterday the Today show did a segment titled:
How Safe Are Plastic Bottles?

and this morning they did a
follow-up piece

Thanks for your patience Beth!

Btw, I don’t have cats as pets. They have me.

other animals…im totally in agreeance with you. you call humans 800lb gorillas…have you seen what humans are doing TO the gorillas? there’s no land left really for animals to be wild anymore. and we’re changing these animals into weird genetically altered freaks with the chemicals, pollution, etc that we dump everywhere. blech. one day wild animals will be unreal…like the thought of dinosaurs ruling the earth once. yanno? depressing.