Monthly Archives: August 2011

Featured Creature Friday: The Killer Kakapo

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Friends, I believe I have been terrifying you long enough with creepy lizard-worm-things and jellyfish and whatnot. It is time that I bring you a featured creature which is cute and cuddly and won’t try to bite your face off or use you as a host for its offspring. That’s why I want to tell you about the Kakapo.

Just look at that handsome face. My God. (photo by Brent Barrett, under Creative Commons license)

First off, you should know that in the title of this post, I’m using “killer” in the same manner as “wicked” or “brilliant,” or whatever it is the kids are saying these days. Unlike some of our other featured creatures, the Kakapo is not out to destroy you and your whole family. It is not literally a killer. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: it’s a large, fluffy, vaguely friendly flightless bird. It’s a vegetarian (which is a nice change of pace after the Vampire Finch), and it has a distinctive style of eating in which it uses its beak (which is excellent for grinding things) to strip all the delicious edible parts out of a plant, leaving behind a neat little ball of indigestible fiber like an arts and crafts project.

It’s an incredible fact of island biogeography that species that evolve in limited habitats with limited predators tend to develop some wild specializations to suit their environments. Darwin saw it in the Galapagos, Wallace saw it in the Malay archipelago, and it’s pretty much a feature of islands everywhere, even the really big ones like Australia. As David Quammen put it, “Isolation plus time yields divergence.” (If you have any interest in biology, I highly recommend Quammen’s The Song of the Dodo, which is an absolutely fascinating read on the subject of island biogeography. And it’s totally not as boring as that makes it sound… it’s an incredible book and one of my all-time favorites, and perfectly accessible if you don’t know the first thing about biology.)

The Kakapo lives in New Zealand, and like many island birds that didn’t really have many predatory land mammals to deal with, it long ago traded its not-very-useful power of flight for a life on the ground. It is the only flightless parrot in the world, and perhaps as a result (too many Cheetos?) is also the heaviest parrot in the world, weighing in at up to eight pounds. It makes up for the lack of flight with strong legs and an ambling ground-covering trot, plus it’s able to handily scale trees and “parachute” from heights using its wings to slow its descent. Like other parrots, it’s long-lived — up to 120 years. When the youngsters are play-fighting, they win by locking their chins over the other bird’s neck, like that annoying cousin who always gets you in a headlock and then gives you noogies. Much like sage grouse, they have a booming mating call and construct leks during breeding season (little dish-shaped indentations in the ground) to help amplify their calls. (Next, they will learn to break guitars and trash hotel rooms.)

They have a luxuriously soft feather-pelt because they don’t need stiff flight feathers. Around their beaks they have little whiskers that help them feel along the ground when they’re looking for snacks and shenanigans. In short, they look very very cuddleable.

(photo by Mnolf, under Creative Commons license)

Of course, also like other flightless birds, the Kakapo was pretty much screwed when humans showed up. Aside from hunting the Kakapo for its delicious rotundness, they also introduced predators like cats, rats and dogs. The Kakapo had adapted to predatory raptors, which are daytime hunters, by becoming nocturnal and learning to freeze and take advantage of its foliage-colored feathers. When night-hunting mammals were introduced, the Kakapo population was decimated. It was down into the double digits for awhile there. But thanks to a rather novel form of population recovery plan, New Zealand’s Kakapos have been relocated to even more isolated islands off the New Zealand coast, which are predator-free zones (after they exterminated — sometimes repeatedly — the rat and weka populations) and where the Kakapo’s numbers are very slowly recovering (its rates of reproduction are among the lowest of any bird species).

So you must be thinking to yourselves that this is all very interesting and whatnot, but beyond everything I’ve mentioned here, what exactly makes the Kakapo so special? Why do I love them so? Well, I will tell you why. It’s because of that one time when a Kakapo shagged Mark Carwardine’s head while Stephen Fry stood by, laughing his ass off.

You Ask, I’ll Answer (Though I’ve Probably Made It Up)

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One of the things that I love most about having a blog hosted on WordPress is that it provides me with all sorts of interesting stats that, otherwise, I wouldn’t have even thought to want. I can find out who’s linking to my blogs, whether people check out my blog after I comment on theirs, how many visitors have stopped by, which blogs they liked the most… in short, it allows me to stalk all of you more effectively.

The best part is, of course, the common search terms that people use to find your blog. One of the nice things I’m getting lately is people searching specifically for the name of the blog or for my name, which is an awesome sign that I now have more readers than just my grandmother. Other people are searching for entirely different things, though. For awhile there I was getting a lot of stuff like “white worm snake” and “florida worm lizard face” (Google was undoubtedly directing them to my Featured Creature Friday post on The Amazing Amphisbaenians). These days, it’s all about the jellyfish. Sure, those people who are searching for “jellyfish with purple spots” or “deep sea jellyfish” might be seeking some sort of genuine, scientific taxonomical information for their school report or whatever, but I’m glad that instead I was able to warn them about the inevitable jellyfish invasion. Put that in your report, kids. If you dare. (And whomever among you searched specifically for “jellyfish are dicks”? I salute you.)

Other people are looking for things I only wish I could provide. “Roller girl fairies in pagosa springs”? Roller girls I can give you, fairies might be harder. “Horse book that is purple”? You’ve got me there.

I have noticed a trend however in search results directing people to me when they’ve asked very specific questions. So I’d like to just as a sort of general public service do my best to answer a few of those burning search engine questions. First up:

My stupid friend got stung by a portuguese man of war what should i do?

Well Carl — can I call you Carl? — if you’re right there on the beach with your stupid friend after said friend has fallen victim to an attack by a Portuguese Man o’ War, what you need to do is get out your smartphone, get on Facebook, and defriend his ass immediately. I mean sure, granted, technically the Portuguese Man o’ War isn’t actually a jellyfish, it’s a siphonophore, which is actually almost creepier on account of how it’s not just one organism, it’s an entire colony of ocean-going evil. But the point is, in the war against the jellyfish your friend has fallen victim to an animal that isn’t even really a jellyfish. It’s like getting into a war with bears and then being killed by a koala. It’s not dignified. Your friend has served his purpose by being the stupider, easier prey for the Portuguese Man o’ War, but now it’s time to move on, maybe find another sacrificial friend just in case. When they make a film about your exploits in the Great Jellyfish War, you don’t want to end up being “Private #3″ who dies in the opening sequence.

Next caller!

Do red roans buck more than other horses?

No. They are magnificent and majestic beasts, however, and if you’re considering buying a red roan horse and are worried about whether it will buck or not, just remind yourself that they are in fact the next best thing to owning a unicorn.

Can slugs only be slime mold?

My God man, that is a good question. I mean, I have absolutely no idea what you’re asking but you did ask it with a kind of bizarre confidence that frankly, I’ll bet the ladies find insanely attractive. But the answer to your question — whatever your question was supposed to be — is no, slugs cannot only be slime mold. That’s like saying that teenagers can only work at the McDonald’s drive-through or that dogs cannot fly. Stop trying to pigeonhole the slugs. Stop trying to kill their dreams. YOU MONSTER.

What does it mean if you see an echidna?

Well, first of all, it means you’re either Australian or you’re at the zoo. (Or you’re in New Zealand, I guess, which is actually the best option because doesn’t Frodo live there?) As far as I know if you see an echidna it doesn’t mean anything like four more weeks of winter or not to wear white after Labor Day (I guess it’d be Labour Day for you, mate). Apparently if you dream about an echidna though, it means you’re innocent like a child and your belly is exposed to Mother Earth or something like that. I don’t know, I looked it up on the Internet and it seems like what they’re trying to say is that you’re kind of immature and you should put more clothes on.

There were a few other questions, but they were frankly so incomprehensible that I couldn’t imagine what they were after… and one was seeking anatomical details on donkeys that, frankly, I feel are best left between the donkey and his lady-friend.

Trusting the Process

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If there’s one piece of advice I’ve heard most often lately, it’s probably this one: Trust the process.

As a chronic worrier and control enthusiast, trusting anything in particular doesn’t come easily to me. I recognize that I have a tendency to give up on things when I can’t jump directly from “starting out” to “end result.” And since I stepped out of the world of more traditional horsemanship and into the world of natural horsemanship, I’ve had to adjust to some pretty major shifts in thinking. Like, for instance, I would’ve never dreamed that I’d take my third ride on my green-broke horse as a half-day trail ride. Up a mountain. In a rope hackamore. But after having been through the process of training her myself in her groundwork, and then watching 3-Star Parelli Professional Terry Wilson start her under saddle, and having seen techniques that were sometimes counter-intuitive to me turn her into a different, more confident horse… I was finally ready to trust to process.

Sure, I might not know what I'm doing, but my horse looks awfully good!

Terry is a big believer in the power of the trail ride. He’d only put a handful of rides on Juno before taking her out on the trails near his property, and it was plain even to me what a positive effect it had on her development. After my first two rides on Juno, both in Terry’s round pen and neither of them terribly inspiring for me — in the sense that they revealed to me what an awful rider I am — I was certainly ready for something different. Terry thought a day on the trail would be just the thing; he’d ride Juno to begin with while I rode one of his lease horses, Jane, and if all went well we’d switch and I could ride my own horse. Terry’s wife Lvonne and our friends Laura and Bridgette joined us with their own horses, so we had a pretty decent-sized group, and the weather was beautiful, cool and overcast.

Terry and Juno leading the way

We hauled in to West Fork, scraped the previous day’s mud off the horses and got everyone tacked up, then we headed right out on the trail. You wouldn’t have known that Juno had only done all of this once before — and on that occasion they’d had to turn back after only a mile or so, because Juno’s unshod feet were a bit sore on all the rock. This time, Terry and Juno went right out in the lead, and she didn’t flinch away from tight horse-high vegetation, bridges, or even the singing cowboy on her back. (Hey, everybody likes a good Canadian sea shanty.) In short order, Terry proposed that we switch and I get up on my own horse for our first trail riding outing together.

We covered eight miles and six bridge crossings. We rode near the front of the pack, in the middle, and all the way in the back, but it was all the same to Juno. She naturally prefers to give the other horses plenty of room, so there was no need to constantly remind her to keep her distance from the horse in front of her, and she didn’t feel the slightest urge to rush home when we turned back. She was, in short, the perfect trail horse, and gave me the gift of the most enjoyable trail ride I’d ever experienced. And though I’ve suffered all kinds of confidence and fear issues when it comes to riding horses, when I was out there on the back of my own horse, in the middle of the wilderness, I didn’t feel even a moment’s worth of fear or doubt. Even though I’d had a bit of an emotional explosion just a few days earlier, I trusted Terry, I trusted my horse, and I trusted the process that had brought us to where we were. I trusted that it would keep taking us further.

Me and Juno, trailblazing!

Progress is often an uncomfortable thing. You don’t know yet what to do, or how to do it, or whether you’ll ever get it. You’re outside of your comfort zone — sometimes way outside of it — and sometimes you’re compelled to take risks to keep moving forward. That doesn’t mean you have to take up daredevil riding or do something that’s unsafe for you: it just means that you might need to put your pride on the line or sacrifice your usually zen-like emotional state for awhile. But with the right knowledge, the right attitude and the right support you can do things you never dreamed you’d do — even if it’s just taking your horse on a trail ride.

Terry Wilson is a 3-Star Parelli instructor living in Pagosa Springs. He teaches lessons and clinics all over the US and Canada, and I strongly encourage you to take advantage of his knowledge and general awesomeness by booking him for a clinic. Also check out his website and his Facebook page! This post is a follow-up to The Long, Dark Horseback Ride of the Soul; if you haven’t read that post yet, you might want to have a look. You know, just to see what I’m like when I’m a bit less emotionally balanced.

Featured Creature Friday: The Vampire Finch

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This week, for something a little different, I thought maybe instead of bringing you some bizarre and exotic creature you’ve never heard of, I’d bring you something a little more mundane. It’s just a finch: a cute, tiny little bird. It’s a subspecies of the Sharp-Beaked Ground Finch and the males are dark while the females are streaked brown. It’s overall a very boring bird, except that its beverage of choice is blood.

The finch is, of course, famous in circles beyond even the birdspotters of the world; it was essential to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and specifically helped him to understand and define the process of adaptive radiation, wherein a single species of animal branches rapidly into new species that each have specific adaptations for their individual environments. For most of the finches of the Galapagos, Darwin discovered different beak shapes and variations to make each species of finch more efficient in how it cracked open and ate things like seed pods and nuts.

The Vampire Finch, on the other hand, had to adapt to a lack of freshwater sources on its native Wolf and Darwin islands in the Galapagos. And adapt it did: it developed a habit of perching on another bird, pecking its way through the skin, and drinking the blood.

photo by D. Parer & E. Parer-Cook

It mostly drinks the blood of Nazca and Blue-footed Boobies, which in the vein (heh, vein) of emo Twilight fans, doesn’t seem to mind. It’s thought that the behavior arose from when the finches used to simply peck at the Boobies to eat parasites, before they came the parasites themselves, which might be why the Boobies don’t mind. They just think they’re getting a really deep cleaning.

Vampire finches also like to steal other birds’ eggs, roll them until they hit a rock and crack open, and then eat the delicious almost-omelette inside. From this I can only conclude that Vampire Finches are kind of dicks.

The Long, Dark Horseback Ride of the Soul

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My horse Juno and I don’t really share a typical horse/human history. For a start, she’s in her late teens, and she’s spent more years in the wild than she has in the paddock. She’s the first horse I’ve ever owned. Oh, and by the way, I have no idea what I’m doing half the time. It’s not really what you’d call a recipe for success, but somehow Juno and I have muddled along, with a harmony that comes of being kindred introverted spirits. I’ve mentioned before the particular challenges of moving beyond where we’ve been and into the exciting world of saddle training, which for a horse of Juno’s age isn’t necessarily an easy proposition. But I’ve always known that it was possible, and in recent years we’d reached a point where the only thing standing between Juno and a truly spectacular future was me.

Years ago when I first began to admit to myself that I wasn’t qualified to start my horse myself — which admittedly wasn’t until I’d taken my third ride on her, which ended with a spectacular unscheduled dismount — I didn’t really know what to expect. What I discovered was that there are some trainers who, when you say the word “mustang,” will immediately say no without hearing anything else. There are quite a few who won’t even bother to think about starting a horse as old as Juno is. (Horses can live into their thirties or even forties so she’s really kind of middle-aged, but younger horses are without a doubt easier to train, and a lot of equestrians would consider her practically over the hill.) And there are some trainers who, when you tell them the horse you want started is both teenaged and a mustang, will laugh until they’re red in the face and then offer to loan you a gun so you can just kill yourself since you’re apparently intent on dying anyway. (Cowboys are secret drama queens, apparently.) And it usually didn’t matter anyway what many of those rough and tumble trainers of the American west thought, because watching most of them work with horses was enough to convince me that I never wanted them to touch mine.

Luckily for both Juno and I, we wound up in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, where I’d taken a job with Parelli Natural Horsemanship and suddenly found myself surrounded by both experienced horsemen and fellow students who were on the same horsemanship track and speaking the same language that I was. And when I asked around about who might be able to start Juno under saddle for me, pretty much everyone I met recommended 3-Star Parelli Professional Terry Wilson. When I ran into Terry and asked him about training my horse, he was a little surprised at her age, but he was game to give it a go. He warned me that Juno might never work out as a saddle horse, but he was willing to try.

In deference to her age and introversion, he started off slow — compared to what he’d do with a young colt, anyway — with plenty of groundwork, filling in the holes I’d inadvertently left in her ground training and helping to get her accustomed to saddles and cinches, which was something I’d always had trouble with.

Wearing a western riding saddle

Ponying out onto the road with a pack saddle on

He was mounting bareback in the middle of their first session; by the end of the first week, they were out on the trails.

Riding out on Terry’s acreage on day 3

I knew that all of Juno’s groundwork, and her inherent good nature, would make things easier than Terry likely expected, but I had no idea how quickly they’d progress. I’ve had the very good fortune, with Terry’s kind cooperation, to be able to watch nearly every session he’s had with my horse. I’ve accompanied them out on trails and learned a remarkable amount just from watching everything that Terry does. It’s been amazing to see how much my horse is really capable of, and how much more I should be doing with her. And of course, the more I watched her progress under Terry’s tutelage, the clearer it became to me that one day, very soon, it was going to be up to me to ride her, to keep her moving forward both literally and metaphorically, to be the leader in our herd of two.

To put it succinctly, I was petrified.

The day of reckoning arrived today — Terry had suggested that after his session with her, I should get on and ride for a bit — and it would be fair to say that I spent most of the day at work vacillating wildly between excited and scared as hell. Not scared of Juno, or of getting hurt — even green as she is, I know her, and feel quite confident in her and in Terry’s work with her — but rather scared that I wouldn’t be able to be the leader she needed. Scared that I wouldn’t know what to do or how to do it. Scared that I’d set Terry back in his progress with her, and that I’d never be the rider she needs me to be.

So I sat and watched Terry work with her, as he ran her through the basics again and made sure she’d be okay with a rider that bounced on her back and flailed at random, which she was… though it was more than a little humbling to realize exactly how necessary that would be before I could get on. Then Terry asked if I was ready to ride, and I said yes, because no wasn’t even an option, no didn’t occur to me, no was not in my lexicon. So I went into the round pen, and I got on.

I wish I could give this story some sort of Disney finale where as I rode, I realized that I could be a leader, that I did know what to do, that I wouldn’t be setting my horse back at all. Rather, the experience was quite the opposite. On the one hand, it was incredibly thrilling after all these years to be sitting on my horse, feeling all in all calm and confident about being there (but slightly panicked about being able to follow Terry’s directions, because my mind was stuck on a bit of an endless loop that went, “Holy s***, I’m riding my horse!”). On the other hand, I discovered that I hadn’t been worried enough. I thought I’d be bad, and I was worse.

Everything I’d ever known about riding — which I can’t say was much — I suddenly forgot. Fine motor control was a thing of the past, as was language comprehension. When I asked her to walk forward, Juno kept diving nose-first toward the fence and sidepassing, which was awfully fancy, but would’ve been even more impressive if I’d been aware of asking for it. When I posted the trot she thought it meant I was about to go flying out of the saddle, and obligingly slowed down to save me from myself. Whenever I asked her for something, it was more of a timid suggestion than a confidently worded direction. When Terry asked me for simple maneuvers it felt like he was demanding rocket science.

After I’d managed to somewhat laboriously grasp a few basic concepts, I asked her for a bit of trot so we could end on something I could actually accomplish, and then I unsaddled her (and started training her to stand with her nose at the tie rail, even when she’s not tied, because by God if there’s one thing I can accomplish it’s training my horse to stand still and not move). I got her a dish of grain and held it for her while she calmly chowed down, undoubtedly secure in the knowledge that of the two of us, she’s by far the cleverer one. Terry left me to put her away, and headed up to the house (probably to pour a stiff drink, poor guy).

I watched Juno eat and relished the way that she’d occasionally turn her head into my hand for a rub, with a confidence and self-assurance that even a few months ago she didn’t possess. I reminded myself that nobody starts this journey knowing everything — or even necessarily anything — that they need to know. I gave myself credit for being proactive, trying to get more time in the saddle before bringing Juno home and even working on enrolling in some formal lessons in addition to all the DVD studying I could do at home.

And then I buried my face in my horse’s neck and had a complete emotional meltdown.

Horses are good for things like that, though. Juno just stood and curled her neck around me a little (I suspect she was giving me a “wtf?” look behind my back, or maybe just subtly inspecting my pockets for cookies) and waited for me to stop weeping like a little girl, which I’m only slightly ashamed to say took quite a long while. I apologized to her profusely and repeatedly for not having worked harder to be the partner and leader she needs me to be, and I promised to do better if she’d just try really hard to keep me out of the hospital while I tried to catch up. I pretended for awhile that she understands English, which clearly she doesn’t (otherwise, you’d think she’d respond a bit faster when I say things like, “Hey Juno, it’s dinner time!”).

I know it’s not necessarily anything to be ashamed about, having a moment of complete mental break and just absolutely losing it. I know it was about more than one lousy ride, and that I’d piled work stress onto personal stress with a shaky foundation of overall uncertainty about life, but as I drove back to town, still sniffling, it was hard to even begin to gather the scattered shreds of my dignity, much less think about putting myself through the same wringer again tomorrow. It isn’t the riding that’s a hardship, it’s more that when you’re in the saddle, you have to face yourself.

The moment I walked in the door, my friend and temporary house-guest Gina wanted to know how the ride went.

I told her, in all honesty, that it had been simultaneously awesome and horrific.

“Good,” she said. “That means you’re learning.”

I’ve been keeping an album of photos from Terry’s sessions with Juno on Facebook; if you have any interest in seeing a great many pictures of the process, along with occasionally-helpful commentary from me, check out the first album and the second album on Facebook. You don’t need a Facebook account to access these public albums! And if you’re on Facebook and would like to friend me, please feel free!

Edit: Wow, this blog sure has gotten a lot of attention! My thanks to the WordPress gods for Freshly Pressing this entry, and to my colleagues at Parelli for finding it interesting enough to post the link on our official Facebook page. If you’d like to continue following the saga of Juno and I, please check out my follow-up entry, Trusting the Process, wherein we go on a trail ride and nobody dies.

Featured Creature Friday: The Blue Sea Slug

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You might think, when I say “blue sea slug,” that what I’m going to show you is going to be… well… a slug. Like a banana slug, perhaps, only… blue. And you would be so incredibly wrong.

Really, when you think about it, I could fill the rest of my days writing Featured Creature Friday blogs about the bizarre and wonderful inhabitants of the oceans, because if there’s one place that animal adaptations take a turn for the bizarre, it’s in the sea. But we must truly begin with the blue sea slug, which at the moment is my favorite of ocean creatures, for reasons I’ll get into below. The first reason, of course, is that blue sea slugs are insanely beautiful. If you were going to make a movie with some exotic and beautiful alien creatures, you’d do well to start your search for inspiration with one of these:

They’re also unexpectedly tiny, only a few centimeters in length, with six separate appendages, each with its own collection of cereta — those little finger-like structures. It has serrated teeth. But wait, it gets even more bad-ass. Blue sea slugs not only prey on animals much larger than them, they actually prey on jellyfish (which as we’ve previously discussed are the enemy). Their most notable snack is the notorious Portuguese Man o’ War. They also eat blue buttons and purple snails and some other stuff, but mostly jellyfish. Bless them.

But they don’t stop with just devouring jellyfish. They continue to be crazy-incredible. Because when they’re eating the jellyfish, they ingest the nemocysts — the cells which produce the jellyfish’s sting — and store them in their own little fingers. And then? They use them as weapons in their own defense. They can actually be more venomous than the Man o’ War they feed on. It is possible that they are the most bad-ass tiny animals ever.

Aside from their excellent killer instincts, they have some other sweet features. They have gas-filled sacs in their bodies which they use to float on the ocean’s surface, but due to the location of said sacs they actually float upside down. All they need to make their lives more complete, clearly, is a tiny sea-slug-sized version of beer. Their sweet silvery-blue coloring is thought to be protective coloration that makes them difficult to spot for both sea birds above and fish below. They’re also hermaphroditic, which isn’t really all that amazing for strange little ocean creatures but is kind of interesting anyway. These little fellows are pretty common in temperate and tropical ocean zones, and you’re most likely to see them around Africa, Europe or Australia, but I’m hoping that in the event of the inevitable jellyfish invasion, they’ll be willing to travel…

An Interesting Idiom: “Coming Down the Pike”

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One of my favorite subjects is the origins of words and idioms. I really can’t get enough of it, and the more random the origin, the better. So I was delighted, while reading Beautiful Jim Key (review coming soon), to get an interesting little linguistic insight into the term “coming down the pike.”

It’s still a fairly common phrase (particularly among middle managers who like to say things like, “There are great things coming down the pike if we can keep blue-skying it and thinking outside the box”), and it’s relatively straightforward. Though here in the west you don’t hear much about “turnpikes” and “pike” isn’t really a common word for a roadway any longer, it’s generally understood that “coming down the pike” is pretty much the same thing as “coming down the road.” Though there are some interesting alternate interpretations if you look out there on the web, including “Pike’s Peak, driving down back in the day with only mechanical brakes.” (Uh, what?) My favorite alternate insane explanation is that it might have something to do with the way a decapitated head will slide down the pike upon which it is impaled as the head decays. (Uh, WHAT?)

James Scott's "On the Pike" two-step was inspired by the fair.

The most interesting explanation — but perhaps a flawed one — is the one I first saw in Beautiful Jim Key, though it pops up in other places as well. In 1904, the city of St. Louis held the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, one of the massive World’s Fairs that were so popular at the time. (Between Beautiful Jim Key and The Devil in the White City, I’m learning an awful lot about fairs lately.) Over 19.5 million people attended the exposition and strolled along one of the 1200-acre site’s major features, a massive pedestrian corridor known as “The Pike.” The Pike was a 90 foot wide, mile-long, brick-paved expanse bordered by over 50 extravagant attractions, with water slides, miniature railways, recreations of exotic foreign villages, an aviary, a 40,000-gallon deep-sea-diving tank, a wild west show, a trained animal circus, and much, much more. Because of the costs involved, it was known as “The Ten Million Dollar Pike,” and that was only one part of the exposition. Though the World’s Fairs would eventually die out — due in part to the constant delays and incredible cost overruns that dogged pretty much every fair ever, but also because of the rise of attractions like Disneyland — at the time they were just about the most incredible, mind-blowing thing you could imagine, like a cross between the world’s largest carnival and the world’s most awesome natural history museum. Supposedly visitors were so impressed by the whole affair, and the wide array of attractions on offer, that it was often said that “there is always something new coming down The Pike.”

Visitors on The Pike at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition

True fact? Perhaps not. According to The Word Detective, “coming down the pike” was first used in print in 1901, before the St. Louis World’s Fair.

As I said, “coming down the pike,” meaning in a figurative sense “appearing on the scene now or in the near future,” first appeared in print in 1901. The “pike” is, as you implied, simply short for “turnpike,” a road or highway where a toll is charged for passage. The “pike” in “turnpike” originally referred to the barrier (“pike” being a very old word for “spear”) which was raised or turned aside to allow the traveler to proceed once the fee had been paid. As turnpikes tended to be major roads, it was possible to see the approach of a traveler well in advance, and if someone new arrived in town, it was probable that he or she had “come down the pike” to get there.

(“Down the pike” is also an often-misspoken idiom, as you’ll often hear people say “down the pipe” instead. Tim Kowal has a really interesting blog about how, considering the new landscape of the way information and ideas travel, “down the pipe” may be the more accurate and appropriate expression in these modern times.)

Though The Word Detective and others are pretty insistent about the invention of the St. Louis story by travel agents and fanciful tour guides, at its root the phrase applies to both. The Pike in St. Louis was, after all, a roadway down which visitors traveled, coming down the pike… which may be the reason why The Pike was named The Pike in the first place. It all illustrates one of my favorite things about etymology and idioms (idiomology?): that the paths language takes from point A to point B — and the subjective truths about them — have a way of traveling a very convoluted path (down the pike, if you will) into the present.

Between the Lines

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Most of the writing I do is fiction. And prose. So I don’t really write poetry, by which I mean I’ve never been good at it so I’ve mostly avoided it. But I’ve made many a secret attempt at verse throughout the years (I’m currently wrestling with writing songs, lulz), and when I dug this up from my files and didn’t hate it, I thought I’d stretch myself a little and post it. Every day is a good day to try something new

Between the Lines – Mackenzie Kincaid.

These are my beasts of burden:
these words with their
bent necks and brute strength
and a grace that belies their
consonants –
these words that stand collared
side by side and waiting
keeping company without context
until these conjunctions are laid
as harness across their backs
so that their shoulders may strain
against the hames of my intention.

These are my beasts of burden,
that surge too eager forward
and push on, blinkered,
against the bit;
but pull the weight steady
from wheel, swing, lead
and know their paces.
Set them now to their rows
and let them pull the weight
let them drag their furrows
and do their work between the lines.

Horse Rescue Warning Signs

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Over the years, I’ve gotten quite a lot of experience with horse rescues. I’ve volunteered for a few, worked as an employee for one, visited plenty and helped to rescue horses from a few, as well. Which is part of the reason why, when people ask me which are the good rescues that they should support with their energy and their money, I have a very hard time answering. If I haven’t visited or worked with a rescue myself, I don’t feel I can comment on them, even if I’ve heard good things, and because my experience is limited to a handful of western states, I really can’t give advice to people on which specific rescues are deserving of your time and attention.

I can, however, give you a few tips on what to look for when visiting a rescue. (And I would strongly recommend just going for an open house day or a tour before you commit any time to volunteering or fundraising or anything else. There are plenty of places that have great websites and brochures but when you actually visit you’ll want to get out of there was quickly as humanly possible. So don’t commit yourself to anything until you’ve seen the place for yourself and know that you want to commit.)

If you spot any of these signs at a horse rescue you’re considering adopting from — or even volunteering for or having your name written in the same sentence with — you might want to give some serious consideration to running in the other direction.

The rescue staff resist efforts to have horses medically assessed. This goes for giving medical care to their own horses, and for urging adopters not to have a horse thoroughly checked out before adopting it. If you’re considering adopting a horse and want to have it vet-checked on your own dime — which you really should do — and the people you’re dealing with at the rescue have any resistance to this idea whatsoever, it means that they’re aware that their horses might fail that vet check and that their level of care is likely inadequate… or they’re worried that you’re going to witness their horse trying to kill the vet. When I worked in rescue, it was unusual for people to get a vet check — although we did recommend it — but when they did we bent over backward to accommodate the vet’s schedule, did all we could to help with the exam, and gave both vet and prospective adopter any and all health and history information we had on the horse. And if the horse did fail the vet check or the prospective adopter decided not to take the horse after all for whatever reason, the rescue still got the bonus of having a report from the vet on any problems he might’ve spotted. It’s a win-win.

If, as a co-worker of mine recently experienced, the rescue owner tells you that anybody who doubts the health of their horses should “come and look at them and then they’ll know we run a good rescue,” they are batshit insane. You can’t always tell by looking whether a horse is sick. That’s pretty much why they invented veterinary science in the first place. There is no reason not to have a horse thoroughly tested for disease or lameness before committing to providing it with a lifetime of care.

There are emaciated horses who have been in the rescue’s custody for more than a few months. I don’t care how old a horse is, there should be improvement in the condition of an emaciated horse pretty quickly after it’s put on a good feeding program. If there’s an underlying medical condition, like bad teeth or a metabolic disorder, the rescue should know about it because a emaciated horse should have already gotten a thorough exam by the vet if it’s failing to put on weight in a timely fashion (and in a perfect world, all new intakes would get an exam). You might hear all sorts of excuses for why a horse is still skinny… and I have yet to hear a good one. I met one horse recently who needed oral surgery, and was told it wasn’t going to happen because he was too old to be trailered to the oral surgeon and might not wake up from the sedation. What I heard was that the rescuer didn’t want to invest the money, and would rather let the horse suffer chronic pain and continue to waste away until it died. It isn’t a crime to not have the resources to put toward a costly surgery for a horse. But it should be a crime to let a horse suffer needlessly in that situation instead of either making an arrangement with an organization that does have the resources, or having the animal humanely euthanized.

Don't be surprised to find recent intakes at a rescue looking like this guy. If they still look this way after a few months in the rescue's care, however, then the "rescue" part becomes more questionable.

They have rescued animals which are morbidly obese, and have been for a long time. It can be tough to take the weight off of a horse that comes in to the rescue extremely overweight, and it usually takes longer to correct than an underweight horse does, but it can be done. So the flip side of the skinny horse problem is if the rescue has equines that are extremely fat. Neither is healthy for the animal, and the rescue should have those animals on a strict weight-loss regimen as recommended by their veterinarian. Simply asking visitors not to take photos of the exceedingly obese animals (yes, that has actually happened to me) is not a solution to the problem.

There’s anything on the property that they ask you not to photograph. Speaking of photos, if there’s anything on the property that you’re asked not to photograph, whether it’s a sick horse or a stretch of unsafe fencing or a ponderous manure pile, that’s a big warning sign. No rescue wants to be portrayed in a negative light, but if you spot something that they don’t want the public seeing, they should be worrying about how to address and fix the problem, not about how to keep you from talking about it on the Internet.

They refuse to put horses down, even when they should. A great many rescues would argue with me on this, and it’s a bit subjective. You have to look at the case of each individual horse. Personally, I think euthanasia is one of the kinder things we can do for a lot of horses. At very least, it shouldn’t take an act of Congress to have a horse euthanized who is clearly on his last legs and suffering. In my time as a rescue worker, some of my proudest moments were the ones where I managed to win the argument about whether a horse should be put down. I don’t take any pleasure at all in seeing a horse die — and when I advocated that a horse should be put down, I was also the one who was there holding that horse until the end, because I owed that animal no less — but I really don’t like to see horses suffer because human beings aren’t ready to let them go. My general standard would be that if the horse is in pain and there’s either little prospect for recovery or no funds for the needed medical intervention, the horse should be humanely euthanized. There are few phrases in the English language that drive me as crazy as, “But he’s a fighter! He wants to live!” He’s a prey animal. He doesn’t know how to do anything but keep living. It’s in every fiber of his being that even when a lion has dragged him down, he needs to keep trying to run, even if he’s only going to die of his mortal injuries a few strides later. Some horses do seem to give up when their situation is bad enough, and some horses don’t, but it’s a human being’s job to do what’s best for the horse’s welfare. You wouldn’t keep riding a horse along the trail when he’s got a broken leg because “he has so much try! He really wants to keep climbing this mountain!”

They don’t have enough staff to maintain a high standard of care. Unless a rescue has at least a few paid staff on hand — and the resources to keep them — it shouldn’t have more than a handful of horses at any given time. I can’t tell you how many backyard rescues I’ve seen with twenty, thirty, forty horses… and only one person to care for them all. If a rescue can’t maintain a good standard of care if every single volunteer were to vanish — which they do, frequently, because people who run rescues aren’t usually renowned for their people skills — then they have too many horses. In that situation there is no way for that one person to keep up on care and feeding and provide the training the horses need to find new homes. People who want to start a rescue in their backyards should take on one or two horses at a time, and not bring in more until those ones have been trained and found homes.

Can you imagine what an impact it would have on the “unwanted horse” problem if every horse owner who was up to the task took on a single rescued horse, retrained it, and found it a home? (That’s part of the idea behind the TIP program, which I think is a great initiative.) What if instead of one person taking on 30 horses — which is usually at least 28 more than they can give a truly high quality of care to — you had 30 people giving their all to a single horse for each of them? Of course, there are plenty of people already doing that. But for many backyard rescuers, one of their main motivations is being able to call themselves a “rescue.” And raise funds. Not that I’m cynical or anything.

They have horses that have been at the rescue for more than a few months and can’t be handled. Wild horse rescues get a bit of a pass here, because they get nothing but horses that can’t be caught. But they also tend to have systems in place to allow them to catch and handle horses who end up injured or sick or desperately in need of farrier care. They might have something as simple as a pipe-panel squeeze and the experience to use it, or something as sophisticated as a tilt-table hydraulic squeeze, but either way they get the job done and have the expertise (or should have, at least) to do it safely. For most rescues, it’s not unreasonable to expect that if they have new horses come in which are difficult or impossible to handle, that they’ll have the time to invest in changing that. If they don’t, they shouldn’t take the horse. There are a great many rescues now which simply warehouse horses, either keeping them without offering any training to improve their chances at adoption, or sending them out in the same state that they came in. Any rescue should be working to improve the lives and chances of the horses they bring in; otherwise they’re not being rescued, just relocated.

They have rescued studs who they have no intention of castrating, or they are actively breeding rescued horses. There are rare exceptions to the no-breeding rule; some rescuers are very successful horse breeders and rescue on the side, which is commendable. Sometimes a very high-quality horse is rescued from a bad situation and can find a home with a responsible breeder. But typically, rescues that are breeding are simply producing more unwanted horses which are going to end up in another rescue situation themselves somewhere down the line. It’s absolutely beyond me why any rescuer would want to breed; if you spend a little time in rescue, you’ll probably find yourself praying that people would stop making horses so you’d have to rescue less of them. I’m also not a big fan of rescues that are willing to adopt out studs, even with the understanding that the horse will be cut. Often the adopter doesn’t hold up their end of that bargain, and once the horse is out of the rescue’s hands, there isn’t necessarily much they can do about it. It’s much better to simply have a policy that studs won’t be adopted out until the rescue has had them gelded.

So after all of this, you might be asking yourself… if you come across a rescue like this, shouldn’t you adopt anyway, in order to rescue the horses from the rescuer? The short answer is no. Because the moment you remove a horse from that situation, another one is going to end up in its place. It isn’t an easy situation, because when we allow rescues to fail the horses are the ones who suffer, and the reputable rescues typically end up cleaning up the mess. But we also shouldn’t prop up poorly-run rescues — many of which are truly hoarding situations with a rescue placard out front  — with our time and our funds when it will only perpetuate the cycle.

If you’re thinking about giving a rescue your support, volunteering time or adopting, ask around about them. Google them. Schedule a tour of their facility. Despite all the doom and gloom in this post, there are good rescues out there, and the work they do is essential. They can use your help, and I hope this post will have helped you a little in figuring out what to look for in determining which rescues to put your effort into. This is by no means an exhaustive list of the many problems you may potentially see at rescues — and doesn’t even cover the good signs of a well-run rescue, which maybe I’ll get into in another post — and I’d love to have you input in the comments, too. If you’ve been involved with a horse rescue, how was your experience?

[Edit: So, I've never had a moderation policy on this blog, but I guess it's time to institute one. I realized this would be a hot topic when I posted it, and I realize as well that a great many people who have been involved in rescue -- including people I've worked with and greatly respect -- would disagree with me on some of these points. And I would love for people who do disagree to comment with a perfectly rational, "Hey, I disagree with you about this point, and I will tell you why..." As ever, I'm willing to be swayed by a good argument. Bearing that in mind, this is my personal blog. If there are comments that I feel are personal attacks or simply aggressive, I will delete them. This post is meant to be helpful for people who perhaps have not dealt with rescues before, and it is by no means a blanket attack on every rescue everywhere. As I said, there are many good rescues, even some great ones, but what qualities qualify a group as such in your mind is really up to you to decide. Thanks to all of you who have joined in the civil discourse in the comments. :)]