Animal meme

October 2, 2007

Animal meme

I got tagged for this meme by PZ Myers… not being a biologist myself, my answers aren’t nearly as interesting, but given the traffic coming my way from his blog, I guess I’ll give it a shot.

An interesting animal I had

An interesting animal I ate

An interesting animal in the Museum

An interesting thing I did with or to an animal

An interesting animal in its natural habitat

I suspect that Tiwa might be the most interesting animal I’ve had:

I can’t say I’ve eaten any particularly interesting animals. In fact, yeah, I’m pretty boring in that respect. Calamari is about the most interesting I’ve gotten (sorry, PZ!).

I’ve never grown out of my childhood fascination with dinosaurs. Evil Bender and I went to the natural history museum in Albuquerque several months ago, and my intellectual glee at seeing the dinosaur skeletons made me feel like I was still about eight years old — only better, because now I know more. So, for “an interesting animal in the museum,” I’ll go with a dinosaur. A Stegosaurus, if you want to get specific.

As much as I love animals, I have to admit that I was always fascinated by the dissections we did in junior high and high school, and I experienced a similar intellectual glee when dissecting a cow’s eyeball in eighth grade. My partner for that dissection was one of my good friends, and he was revolted by the whole thing, which was fine by me, because it meant I got to do all the fun stuff. I can’t remember if I just chased him away from the table with the eyeball, or if I actually chased him around the room with it, but either way I’d say that’s a fairly interesting thing I’ve done with [part of] an animal.

I love watching birds of prey in their natural habitat. I had another moment in which I was fascinated while others were horrified in college — I would walk by the corner of B.U.’s stadium on a daily basis, and one day I approached to find feathers fluttering down from far above. A hawk had found a perch above the stands and was, at that moment, using it to de-feather its prey, which appeared to be a pigeon.

And now I tag the following:

Friends: Evil Bender, Luaphacim, Little Hoot Owl, Gye Nyame, PoMo Golightly, the kafkaesque k

Pet/vet/animal bloggers: Christie Keith, Gina Spadafori (whose personal blog is now down, which is a shame, but understandable, since she’s been writing, like, 1001 books recently), Dr. Patty Khuly (I highly doubt any of these women actually read my blog, but on the off chance they find me through a trackback via Technorati or whichever such site they use for that purpose, I think they’d all have interesting stories to tell)

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