Wild Animals

This morning I sat down at my computer to this headline: "Giant Creatures Attack Villagers."

I had two reactions. The first was, I have got to switch home pages. My husband has the New York Times as his home page. And in general the headlines, while not cheerful, are fairly reasonable. My homepage is AOL, which features things like, "Enormous snakes threaten Texas Town," or "Silent Killers: How Many are Lurking in Your House?"* So my husband sits down and reads all the bad news in the world without being in a heightened state of anxiety, while I sit down and say, "Oh my GOD! Tommy! Did you read this? Some woman ate her children in Brazil!!"
(Which reminds me of women I grew up with who had scanners and and could open a conversation with, "Brian McPherson** got his balls cut off by his lawn mower over at his house yesterday and those guys at the fire station were over there for three hours.")

This particular article was a sad one about Komodo dragons, who are starting to attack the villagers who have been living peacefully next to them for years, and how people are scared and no one is sure what to do about it. One of the reasons given for the attack was that the dragons are running out of food. I think it's also because human activity is starting to drive animals mad.
I just been talking about this this weekend with my friend Suzanne. We at a party and someone brought their dog, and Suzanne said she had grown up with dogs and always liked dogs, but she'd recently been peed on and bitten by two separate dogs on two different occasions.
"Animals are going crazy," I said. "Humans keep messing with the the order of things and they're just getting sick of it."
I started going through my list of back up for this-the giant sting ray in Florida (or maybe it was Louisianna, I can't remember) that leapt out of the water onto a boat and stung a man to death, the otherwise gentle panda who bit a tourist, and the rise in violent behavior in elephants. (A phenomenon I found especially sad and alarming.)
And then I read a story about pharmaceuticals turning up in drinking water and doing things like feminizing male fish. So to me it isn't a stretch to imagine those chemicals might start to affect a small animal's brain chemistry more quickly than they would a human. I mean really, how would you like to be a dog, going along fine, and then suddenly you're getting viagra, antidepressants, estrogen, and medication for someone else's angina in your water dish? I'd start peeing on people, too. In fact, when I read about all this, I felt like biting someone.

Suzanne was unconvinced, and so was my husband, who may have said I was starting to sound like that character in James Thurber's essays who thinks that electricity leaks from the ceiling. I don't think either of them have read about the elephants.

*not actual headlines, but you get the idea.
**A name I made up, and does not refer to any Brian McPhersons you might know.