When scientists first started capturing ceratioid anglerfish, they noticed that all of the specimens were females. These individuals were a few inches in size and almost all of them had what appeared to be parasites attached to them. It turned out that these “parasites” were the remains of male ceratioids.
…When it is mature, the male’s digestive system degenerates, making him incapable of feeding independently, which necessitates his quickly finding a female anglerfish to prevent his death. The sensitive olfactory organs help the male to detect the pheromones that signal the proximity of a female anglerfish. When he finds a female, he bites into her skin, and releases an enzyme that digests the skin of his mouth and her body, fusing the pair down to the blood-vessel level. The male then atrophies into nothing more than a pair of gonads, which releases sperm in response to hormones in the female’s bloodstream indicating egg release. This extreme sexual dimorphism ensures that, when the female is ready to spawn, she has a mate immediately available.
The tentative vegetarianism of my youth was more a comment on my ability to get grossed out than any socio-political commitment. Another reason, one that still stays with me, is that I don’t want to benefit from or wallow in another living being’s pain (save your healthy dose of schadenfreude). I love bacon, and I do enjoy a mid-well fillet, but I’m still far more enamored with the vegetables on my plate than I am with any cut of meat. One thing I know about myself that will undoubtedly annoy the army of vegetarians around me is that I can not eat meat if I am too reminded of where it comes from, and even moreso if I know that the meat that I am eating comes from an animal that had a shitty, restricted, joyless life.
Several months ago, dear Chef brought home a large book on cooking meat that he pored over for hours at a time, insisting on reading me passages aloud, in the same way that I bug him by reading blog passages aloud, that ooged me to the nth degree, oftentimes illustrated by, say, a photo of a cute, fuzzy-headed duck peering out of a linen sack on one page, and it’s cousin on the next, sliced limb by limb, seared and sauteed, and covered in a delicious mustard sauce. This kind of thing requires too much willful cognitive dissonance on my part, and I demanded he stop immediately if he ever wanted me to eat his food again, becuase there are three things that are certain when you live with a French chef: 1) you will gain weight, and 2) you will eat more meat.
3) Bacon.
There’s something ironic in the knowledge that my chef husband, the one who learned to cook because of his decade-long vegetarianism, is now the meat-pusher, the one trying to get me to consume stinky fish (which doesn’t always suck) and bloody steak (which does), the one frequently found sitting in the dark alone in the living room sucking marrow out of a bone so as to avoid my judgement and disgust. The good news is that Ethan is growing up in a house where asparagus and brussel sprouts are delightful instead of gross, and one in which the person barefoot in the kitchen is a big, funny dude with a beard, not a little lady in an apron. I still can’t get beyond the idea of meat.
A couple of years ago Hugo wrote about how, despite the widespread Friday Cat Blogging trend, he was still unnerved by cats. Hugo runs a chinchilla rescue, and because chinchilla pets are often the prey of cat pets he had a hard time seeing cats as anything other than predators of the things he loved. I remember blowing off the idea at the time, but regardless the idea stuck with me. I sometimes gaze at Doug with the stinkeye, Pablo especially, because both of them have bloodlust for the other animals I love. Birds, squirrels, especially birds. Just like I have to ignore where meat comes from, I have to ignore that my pets are the predators they are.
Some part of me wants to believe that we’re all in this big, crazy utopia where herbivores eat greens and omnivores and carnivores eat tofu look-alikes and we all live together in a happy world where no animal is ever hurt through malice, need, or oversight, and everyone dies in happiness of old age. Which is why, even as an obsessive cat lover, even a big cat lover, I totally rooted for the buffalo in this video:
On Sunday the cardinals starting squawking and haven’t let up since. The peep-peep, peep-peep doesn’t abate from dawn until well after dusk, and a pair of cardinals dance around the edge of the garage to attack anyone who comes near.
Yesterday Chef held a chair for me while I balanced on a strained ankle winding vines. The silver lace vine is taking over the trellis on the side of the garage, and every day I wind the new vines around the posts, around and around, trying to catch the tendrils on some splinter of wood. Two cardinals swooped over our heads peep-peeping. The bright tufts on top of their heads stood erect and frantic as they jumped from one post to another, warning us away from something. Chef looked for a nest in the vines but found nothing. We moved away, not wanting to disturb whatever was bothering them.
I left for work this morning in a torrential downpour. The cardinals were quiet. I thought I would die on my way to work boxed inbetween semi-trailers on the rainy interstate, but I made it okay. When I came home tonight the cardinals were loud and insistent again as I pulled my car up to the garage. I walked my mom and sister around the yard naming plants — clematis and yucca, basil and watermelon, valerian and mint — until we arrived at the trellis. I stopped short, naming the trumpet flower and silver lace from a distance.
They will swoop at your head, I explained, pointing upward at the angry birds.
Look, a baby, my sister said. And there in the clover was a baby bird, a little brown thing with downy feathers and shiny black eyes, shivering in the neighbor’s yard and trying to fly. Screaming, the beige cardinal swooped at our heads and the red one guarded the baby on the ground. We moved away.
After three years in this house I’m well acquainted with the birds in our yard, and we’ve tried to make a better home for them as we’ve cut, trimmed, and planted. We’ve had babies and adolescents, live and dead, cardinals, bluejays, and finches, and we’ve watched them mate and fight and build nests and play in the sprinkler. We’ve hung feeders in the winter and suet in the fall. Never have I felt for them as I did this evening. For three days a bonded pair of young birds have protected a fallen baby from a flooding rain in ninety degree weather, and from the look of that baby bird, if it lives a few more days it might make it.
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