As people who know me well have come to know, I love animals. After all, I am one. I was born with the foot structure of 3.2 million year old Australopithecines and/or Chimpanzees and Bonobos. I also have some other physical attributes that make me resemble primates and pro-simians more than the average human. My mother had the same foot structure so I suspect that she was closely related to Big Foot.
For more information about Zygodactyly (this condition) check out: http://io9.com/1-in-13-humans-have-chimp-like-feet-510715308
About a week ago, I learned that my great friend and colleague, Tawni Tyndall, digs
snakes. It came up because a friend was commenting on a pet snake she had at her office. I mentioned that when I was growing up, we had around 34 snakes in the house (we kept the poisonous ones in the garage). Tawni states that when she was growing up, her family had around 50: her mother was head of the local herpetological society. I knew there was something I liked about her mom!
Over the years, I’ve done some outrageous stuff in support of animal welfare and animal rights. When I was seventeen (17) I wrote my first press release which resulted in a banner headline in the Los Angeles Times: “Four Giraffes Dead in Zoo Mystery.” Later I wound up as the last President of the Save The Animals Fund.
Some people think that my fascination with some animals is weird. For sake of comparison, that’s because they haven’t met my sister. She used to keep a body bag in the trunk of her car for road kill to feed two Egyptian vultures. Seriously: Egyptian vultures!
Then of course there was the time I spent at the Castle Dracula in Laurel Pass up in the Hollywood Hills, where we had three extraordinary guard dogs, Endora, Bobby, and Botan. More about them some other time. What was best about the Castle Dracula though is that we had a crocodile pond built into the living room, with Crockie the Crocodile, fish, snapping turtles, and a piranha that Crockie eventually took out. More about that some other time.
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