Another Video Reading This Time About Animals

Goooooood morning, Friends!

 

I video-recorded another couple of excerpts on Facebook’s LIVE Video interface yesterday. Just sitting there, above, it looks like a mess, but if you click on it, you’ll see that it recorded very well this time–no audio delays, hiccups or hitches.

 

The above excerpts are from LET NO DAY DAWN THAT THE ANIMALS CANNOT SHARE. It includes DeForest Kelley’s Foreword and the first part of the chapter called Wild Animals I Have Known (Non-Human Varieties).

 

The Wild Animals part is about some of my earliest memories of wildlife interactions. They’re pretty funny, except that I still feel guilty over gathering a coffee can full of green tree frogs–I’m sure the ones at the bottom of it didn’t enjoy the adventure at all–and the sudsy bath I gave the bullfrog.

 

Kids can be really dumb when it comes to how to treat animals.  I think I’m showing them love and rapt attention, and they’re thinking, “WTF?!”

 

Thank God I had a mother who set me straight on what they were really going through as a result of my ham-handed “help”!

 

She helped he realize that animals have different ideas about “kind, considerate treatment” and that I really ought to bone up on their druthers if I was keen on keeping pets who would want to hang around with me. I got it right very early on, as a result.

 

(Note to English teachers: animals are who‘s to me, not that‘s or it‘s. You go ahead and teach proper English: I’ll feel perfectly free to violate norms any time I think they’re poppycock (too human-exalting/centric, to the everlasting detriment of the other sentient beings on our planet). Trust you understand and forgive!  I know the proper rules of grammar: I’m just choosing to ignore this one. Thought you (and other Grammar Police) might like to know…

 

By the time I was a teenager I had over 100 volumes of animal books, many of them care-related. I’ve worked with captive wildlife in sanctuaries (a good example is Tippi Hedren’s ROAR Foundation) and rehabilitation facilities. I’ve worked in a veterinary hospital. I took wild animal affection training in Southern California, where I met a pygmy goat and a serval cat up close and personal for the first time. The serval’s name was Sneakers; he appeared in a number of movies (The Island of Dr. Moreau and The Bible; he was in the Noah’s Ark episode) and TV shows.

 

My assignment with Sneakers was to tame/de-stress him (and he needed it). I passed with flying colors!

Kris and Sneakers 

 

Within a couple of years I had a “serval son” of my own. I named him Deaken (a mashup of his mother’s and father’s names, Rhodesia–whom we called Dea–and Kenya).

Baby Deke, late May 1979

 

The featured photo is of him and me (with him on top of me) was when he was about two years old.

 

And of course these days I have goats…and cats…and chickens… if I could, I’d have a Noah’s Ark of Animals.  Love ’em to the moon and back.

 

So as you’re already well aware if you know me at all, I did learn to treat animals the way they want to be treated so they want to hang with me willingly. (Getting a serval or a goat or a even a domestic kitty to hang with you “grudgingly” could end up very badly!)

 

I suppose this blog post should go on my KrisandKritters.com website, now that I think of it. But hey, it gives you a little taste of what you’ll find there if you decide to make it a semi-regular stop. There are scads of animal adventures from my life in it.