My Point ... And I Do Have One (15 page)

1. Why put a weasel in the blender when you can chop it up by hand?
   
2. When you see a chipmunk, poke it in the eye—hard.
   
3. More than one way to file a kitten’s tooth.
   

I
went camping recently for the first time. It was a fantastic experience. I went to an amazing place: Montana. I don’t know if you’ve been there, but it is gorgeous. I’ve never seen any place so spectacularly beautiful as Montana. Or was it Maine? It
was
Maine. Anyway, it is beautiful, and I’ve never seen any place like it. It is so special.

The important thing is that I went camping. Now, I normally don’t wake up that early, but I woke up to watch the sun set. I was sitting in front of my tent, and eating breakfast—some type of Mueslix, or some other kind of outdoorsy stuff, just eating it right from my hand. I didn’t even have a bowl. I just had milk and the Mueslix and my hand.

Anyway, so I’m enjoying my Mueslix (that may be an exaggeration—let’s just say I was
eating
my Mueslix), when suddenly I hear some kind of noise. Since I’m alone in the middle of the woods, I’m a little bit scared. But I gather my courage, look up, and … Awww, how cute! Only ten feet away from where I’m sitting there’s a family of deer drinking from a little, babbling brook thing (I’m not sure of the technical outdoorsy term). Just the mother, father, and two little baby deer lit by the reddish glow of the setting sun. It was so beautiful, so perfect, so wonderful, and I thought, “Oh, I wish I had a gun.” I could’ve just
 … BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG!
I could have shot ’em, gutted em, skinned em, then sprinkled em on my cereal.

Actually, none of that story is true. Well, some of it is true. I did go camping in Maine.

No, that’s not true either. The closest I’ve come to camping in Maine is spending a few nights at the Hilton on Maui (come to think of it, that’s not very close). My point … and I do have one, is that I was being sarcastic. I don’t understand hunting at all.

My cousin Archie is into hunting, and he knows that I hate it, but that just makes him want to talk about it to me more. He called me the other day and said, “You should’ve seen it, Ellie. Heh, heh, heh. I got myself an eight-point duck.” Well, I don’t know the terminology, but it was something like that.

Archie told me all the details, ending with him dragging the deer up to his car. Luckily, he got his license back; before, he would have had to drag it up to the highway and hitchhike. Not many people will pick up a man and a deer—maybe one or the other, but not both.

All through Archie’s story all I could think about was that poor little innocent animal just standing around thinking little deer thoughts: “I wonder where the berries are. What’s this on my hoof?” Whatever they’re thinking. Then Archie killed him and put his head (the deer’s, not Archie’s) on the wall of his living room. “Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh. I shot it. Heh, heh, heh. I killed it. No, it wasn’t doing anything to me, just standing there. What’s your point?”

I can see if it was something that you hated, just something that you were so proud that you killed. Like a burglar. Get his last expression of surprise before you shot him. “Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh. Shot him. Heh, heh. I killed him. He was coming in. Going for the Sony.”

I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls, and they say, “Because it’s such a beautiful animal.” There you go. Well, I think my mother’s attractive, but I have
photographs
of her. “Wasn’t Mom pretty? She had great legs, too. They’re in the next room, come on.”

I tell you, the deer heads that I feel sorry for the most are the ones on the walls of bars or restaurants. They have the silly party hats on them, silly sunglasses, streamers around their necks. These are the ones I feel sorry for. I mean, obviously, they were at a party having a good time. They were in there dancing to their little deer music, “A crossbow will make ya
JUMP—JUMP!”
Then, all of a sudden … 
ker-plow!
 … the party’s over.

N
ow, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I’m a strong supporter of animal rights, but I do feel that some activists go a little bit too far. For instance, going up to Alaska and throwing paint at the Eskimos because of the fur coats they wear seems wrong to me. Some activists even eliminate the middleman; they throw paint right on the animal itself (I suppose that would really be the middlemink and not the middleman). The activist says to the mink, “Why wait? You’re going to end up on somebody eventually.” But the mink is still pissed off. “Hey! I just had a bath. How am I going to get this red paint off? And don’t go telling me about club soda—that won’t work.”

I do believe, though, that most animal testing is improper. If you want to test cosmetics, why do it on some poor animal who hasn’t done anything wrong? They should use prisoners who have been convicted of murder or rape instead. So, rather than seeing if some perfume irritates a bunny rabbit’s eyes, they should throw it in Charles Manson’s eyes and ask him if it hurts.

Another type of animal testing that I think is really wrong is having animals take the SATs. Their scores are always so low, and it’s just not fair. It makes them feel stupid, but that’s only because the tests are biased toward humans. Because if you asked a person if some type of food is edible, they might not know. They’d eat it and die. An animal wouldn’t do that. But if you asked a dog, “Egg is to nest as baby is to what?” it would just stare at you. Or maybe bite your leg. Or go to the bathroom on your carpet. They feel so depressed afterward, because they just don’t know. You give them their score, and they just look and say, “Huh?” Then you have to say, “I’m sorry, Mr. Doggy, but you can’t go to Harvard.”

Even though the animals we share this earth with don’t do well on standardized tests (partially, I think, because it’s hard to fill in the circles completely with their little paws), they do have an intelligence and beauty that is all their own. It’s inspiring to me to be with them, watch them, and try to understand them.

So, I went to the zoo today … maybe it was yesterday … or last year. It’s hard to tell when you’re writing a book. I mean, I could have gone to the zoo today, but you could be reading this five years from now. You might read this same page every day for a month and think, “That’s odd. Every time I read this page, Ellen says she went to the zoo. That means she’s gone to the zoo every day for thirty days in a row. Boy, she must really like the zoo. Come to think of it, I must really like this page. I mean, why else would I be reading it every day for a month? I either like this page a lot or I’m going insane. Maybe I should see a doctor. Maybe I already have seen a doctor. I’m hungry. I think I’ll fix myself a sandwich.”

Anyway, at the zoo they’re very proud about how they’ve managed to re-create the animal’s natural habitat. I’m not exactly sure who “they” are. I just know that “they” hang around the zoo, wear funny hats, and tell everyone how proud “they” are that the zoo has re-created the animal’s natural habitat. And, I must admit, the zoo has done a great job. I’m sure I’ve seen in those Jane Goodall chimpanzee documentaries plenty of tires on ropes swinging from trees in the jungle. And who can visualize a pride of lions on the Serengeti without imagining cages, moats, and little kids throwing marshmallows at the lions? I know I can’t. Also, most animals get real ornery if they don’t smell cotton candy, the natural odor of the wild.

You’ve got to wonder what the animals think in a zoo. The first day at school is bad enough; imagine your first day in a zoo. All these strange species staring at you, arid you’re saying, “What are they looking at? Is there something on my lip? Hey, you see I’m locked up; get me out of here!” I’m sure some animals go crazy in captivity and crack. “Hey, it wasn’t me. It was some other polar bear who looked like me. Let me out and I’ll help you find him and we can beat the crap out of him.”

A lot of times at the zoo you see the monkeys throwing their own poop. I don’t blame them. It must be so boring in there, you’ve got to do something to entertain yourself. I mean all that’s there is a tire, a tree, and a few bananas. If I were in the zoo, I’m sure eventually I’d be throwing my poop. (I’m misquoted so often in the press that I’m sure this will be the one paragraph taken out of context in the reviews of this book. The headline will probably be. ELLEN WANTS TO THROW HER OWN POOP. Oh, well.)

I bet they get sick of the food they’re served, too. I can just imagine some monkey saying, “Man, they see us eating bananas once and they figure that’s
all
we want to eat. Geez, would it kill them to give us some Chee-tos, a ham sandwich, or some cotton candy?”

It makes me especially sad to see dolphins in captivity, because they are such incredibly smart animals. That doesn’t mean that I’d want a dolphin to perform brain surgery on me. It has less to do with intelligence than one, I don’t want anyone performing brain surgery on me and two, dolphins don’t have any hands. It is very hard to hold a scalpel in flippers—as, I believe, Benjamin Franklin once said. Benjamin Franklin, by the way, wanted to make the dolphin the national bird of the United States, that is until he was told that the dolphin is an aquatic mammal and not a bird. He tried to cover his faux pas by quickly suggesting the turkey instead. But by that time, everyone else had voted for the eagle, mainly because it was already on the back of the quarter.

But getting back to my original point, dolphins are incredibly intelligent. They have a highly developed cerebellum, are able to learn complex tasks, and have been known to help swimmers in distress. So what do we do to reward this intelligence? We capture dolphins to put in marine shows. (Not the U.S. Marines, but water parks. I don’t even know if the U.S. Marines put on shows. Well, there was
Gomer Pyle
, I guess.) It’s kind of like saying, “Boy that Albert Einstein sure is smart. We should have him in a show. I wonder if he would put on a tutu and jump through a ring of fire.”

Dolphins are also killed by commercial fishermen. They get caught in the nets that are used to catch tuna. I’ll eat tuna, but only if it has that little sticker of the smiling dolphin with a slash through it. This means that the tuna is dolphin free. Actually, I’d like to see that sticker on other things because, frankly, I don’t want dolphin in any of my food. I’d like to see that smiley dolphin sticker on Trix, chocolate cake, toothpaste, everything. They’re looking for any way to sneak dolphin into our food because they’re so abundant.

I was buying some spaghetti sauce and I saw something really frightening on the can: a sticker with a smiling monkey with a slash through it. I thought, “My God, what was in this stuff before?” Has animal testing become so advanced that it’s now animal taste-testing?

I rest my case.

I
have always loved animals. When I was about eleven years old, I wanted to be a veterinarian. We had a little laundry room downstairs and I made that my office. I’d sit there, take an encyclopedia, and copy from it entries about different types of cats. I’d have a separate file for each breed. So, if somebody came to my house and said, “You know, there’s no difference between a Siamese and a Burmese cat,” I’d reply, “Oh yeah? Come to my office and I’ll show you how wrong you are, Mr. Smartypants.” Unfortunately nobody ever came to my house and said that. But, if they had, I’d have been ready.

I think I realized, even at an early age, that the real beauty of pets is that they love you unconditionally. AH they would like in return is a bit of attention and some food. And, the food doesn’t even have to be that good. It could just come out of a can.

I try to save dogs and take them to shelters so that their owners can find them. It’s because I have dogs, and I know I’d be devastated if either … damn, what are their names? Oh yeah … if either Bootsie or Lippy … no, not Lippy … Muffin. If either Bootsie or Muffin got lost … Bootsie is a beautiful Labrador retriever and Muffin is … I’m not exactly sure what Muffin is. When I got her at the shelter, they told me that she was part cocker spaniel and part terrier, but I don’t think they knew. They were just making conversation. I think she’s part … rodent. She’s got hair like a possum and a snout like an anteater. But, don’t get the wrong impression; she’s very pretty. She’s got offbeat good looks.

I’ll see stray dogs wandering in front of houses and they look so sad. I just feel compelled to do something to rescue them. Sometimes it’s hard because they’re tied on a leash on someone’s front lawn, so you’ve got to untie it. Or worse, they’re behind a fence, so you need wire cutters (which I always have in my car) to get them out. “C’mon, girl. I’ll rescue you and find your owners.”

Just last week I was driving when I saw this skinny looking stray dog out on the street. So I stopped, got out, and tried to coax the dog into my car so that I could take it to a rescue shelter. All these people on the street were staring at me like I was crazy. Well, I’m kind of used to that, so I continued, “Here boy, here Scrappy.” When I don’t know an animal’s name, I always assume that it’s Scrappy—even though I’ve never been right.