The Comfort Of An Acronym
I looked out just now and all I could see was a little baby rabbit under the pine tree, hopping out towards the hay fields. I did not see the other thing but know it is out there. It was in the front yard this morning walking in circles and except for emaciation and rib protrusion was showing most all the signs of a progressive neurological disease, although one not yet reported in this state. I took some up close photos and it's not pretty. And it wouldn't run away which was perhaps the scariest thing. Wild animals should run away when you get close. I didn't get too close though, that's what the zoom lens is for. After I got a local government official on the phone, who gave me a number for a wildlife biologist I might like to call on Monday, and told me also that there was up to this point in time not a single reported case of CWD in Virginia, I felt a little better. But not that much better because something is very wrong with that deer. I got up enough courage to blow up the photos a little and it could be that the deer was shot in the face and is just suffering from that. There is though so much to look at in the photos that it's hard to tell. The head is coated with flies, as is the left flank. The ears are thickly dotted with both flies and swollen ticks. I have a gun and could kill the deer and take it to the burn pile and set it all on fire but without a front end loader the scooping up of a potentially diseased deer is difficult. On farms, when large livestock dies and burning is impractical the front end loader is also useful for digging the hole to bury the dead animal. I've seen a pickup truck drag a dead cow with a heavy chain around its neck down a gravel road in Texas to...I'm not sure where he was taking it but what he was doing, unpleasant though it may seem, was taking care of business.
Well, just in case it is CWD the state requests that you do nothing until you contact them to check it out. They don't want you to kill it. Which lets me off that hook, I'm frankly not keen on killing, although as I understand it, you can develop a knack for it.
What are the chances that during those hours I wasn't paying attention, between the time when I saw it this late morning, acting in erratic fashion, and this early evening when I noticed all my roses eaten, that it had come within five feet of my living space and munched and drooled and pissed and left behind a few flies and tics? I would say about 93 percent.
Really, is it any wonder people have nightmares? I've been wondering lately about post traumatic stress disorder. Partly about how nice it is to have a name for something which on the surface might appear, to the casual observer, as simply bad manners, and partly wondering how many people could be suffering from it just by nature of their environment? Worldwide for sure but I'm mostly meaning in these United States.
Deer and Elk have the acronym CWD to cover them in the event they start acting really weird. The downside to some of the acronyms is that they lead to slow and horrible death. Oh, I should have told you this by now that CWD stands for Chronic Wasting Disease. It would appear there is no sensitivity training for the disease naming committees of non-sentient creatures.
I don't know what else to tell you. I've brought my cat inside and locked up her cat window. I've washed my feet and (dammit to hell) put on shoes when I leave the house. I extracted that deer tick a few minutes ago and am feeling fine about it. The thing about nature is that while it is sometimes pretty, it is also sometimes not. Not pretty can be good though, we would have no extraordinary art and literature without it, so in the end what we have, what we always have, is win win. Does this screen look blurry to you?
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