Benefits of Vitamins for Animals

One of my favorite fictitious creatures, this little guy was created by Dr. Seuss as a lesson for kids on the dangers of destroying the environment.

The wonderful thing about the Lorax is that he is not a champion of a creature. He’s like the uncle no one appreciates. He’s gruff, grumpy, frumpy, sad. He doesn’t particularly like anything or anyone. And yet when his home is destroyed, Dr. Seuss has an uncanny ability to make us feel sympathy for the creature.

This is the genius of the Lorax. He reminds us of the basic humanity in everyone hiding under thick surfaces, and how easy it is to destroy someone else’s humanity with a little carelessness. The Lorax is about much more than saving trees, it reveals the importance of selflessness, of not just loving your neighbors, but even your unapreciative uncle.

And on a health note, if you’re looking for a good book on how to relieve stress, I’d first suggest stopping the this Primal Nutrition website and reading up on some supplemental health.

Yes, people. I suppose most people consider people animals as well. According to the biological sciences, we do belong to the animal kingdom (yes, Viriginia we aren’t plants, hooray). And quite popularly in fiction we are always being compared to beasts, turning into beasts, we are sexual beasts, primitive beasts, yada yada yada.

Certainly I won’t argue the scientific. Yes, we are animals. Yes, we need essential vitamins to survive. Yes, we used to be apes, lizards, and way back when we were single celled organisms I suppose.

But I’d like to argue that we aren’t animals. We have animal like behaviors, but we also have machine like behaviors, uniquely human behaviors, collective behaviors, and– for God’s sake– god-like behaviors.

Post tagging man as animal is a lazy way of summing up the essence of man. As weird as this sounds, it’s stereotyping. It’s almost prejudice. No, I don’t take offense to those who like to route us back to primal behavior, I simply disregard their opinion.

Ironically enough, we can learn much of who we are from studying the animals we were. The primal version of man, the actual animal version of what we are now is a great place to look for where we’re going evolutionally, and even how to better our minds and bodies today. Mark Sisson has a wonderful health blog on the subject. He uses the primal man as a way of explaining evolutionary good health. The paleo diet of the animal that we were helps guide the modern diet of the men that we are.

Panda Bears

Penguins

Unicorns

hampsters

chipmunks

Lolrus

and the infamous…

LOLcats.

The internet sucks up animals like celebrities, youtubing and blogging about the latest animal to reign in the funny/cute market any given month.

This is base, low quality entertainment.

Why? It is raw Id.

Most people associate id with explosions, sex, horror films. Surface gore and blood and action and lust, the things we crave on a primal level. But yearning, adoration, and infatuation are also id. In other words, the cute. Internet animals tap into the nurture of the id as much as an explosion taps into the destruction.

Animal planet is not id. At the end of animal planet we UNDERSTAND. We rationalize what an animal is, we have learned. The animals that reign the internet do not fascinate us, they just make us giggle.

Okay, quick line up:
Visit Washboard Abs.
Then visit the best antioxidant.
Finally, visit Primal Nutrition.
And have a good day.

Do any animals have orthorexia. Probably not. I wonder if there has ever been an animal in the public records now database. Probably not either.

Anyway, the animal I’m going to talk about today is the Koala Bear. Technically a Koala isn’t in the bear family, it’s actually a marsupial, but who’s counting?

There are a couple significant tid-bits about this adorable tree creature.

The first: Koala bears smell. In fact, they are only to be outdone by the skunk and the wolverine as far as smelliest mammal goes. Apparently the stench of the Koala has something to do with their mating habits, and their lack of grooming (no joke). The reason for the Koala’s lack of grooming brings up the second peculiarity…

Koalas sleep 22 hours a day! Eleven twelfths of a Koala’s day is spent sleeping! More than any other mammal on earth, including the house cat! It doesn’t seem possible to achieve such laziness, even sloths have to spend a few hours a day foraging and swimming around. But a Koala doesn’t do anything, it sleeps, sleeps, climbs a tree and munches grass for a few minutes, and then goes back to sleeping. Who knows how these stinky, sleepy fellas ever make the effort to reproduce!

This is trickie. Is a Brownie an animal? I’m not sure.

Historically, brownies were the little forrest and garden trixter demons that would come and wreak havoc on your petunias. The little buggers took the heat for all oddities and inconveniences garden and nature related for just about a hundred years. It’s so much easier to blame problems on the develish workings of mystical creatures than face up to the fact the the fence probably broke because no one repaired it all summer.

Brownies are described as short, piquest. Unlike gnomes, they are scrawny and quick. Brownies are supposedly humanoid, but they also take on the appearance of rodents, forrest animals, dodgers, and even beavers. Brownies are supposed to be intelligent, they talk, which is why some scholars might suggest they are not animals, but a subcategory of mongoloids and humanoids. I disagree. There are plenty of intelligent mythological creatures who speak which we categorize as animals. The sphinx, the hypogryph, and of course, the dragon.

The main reason I categorize brownies as animals, is they don’t seem to have names or comunities. Gnomes are humanoids, they live in gnome clusters, have gnome culture. They name their children Britton, and Bimblebrook, and Claizee. Brownees, on the other hand, are feral, wild, they have no culture, and no names. Thus, they are animals.

My two links this month are about how to relieve stress and omega 3 benefits. Turn a page next month and learn a little bit more about the carto fish. Something thought to be mythological for centuries, until it was discovered to not only be a real fish, but actually a common one as well.

I do not like Raccoons. This stems from a terrible incident when I was seven. A raccoon killed my dog by drowning it in our pond.

The simple fact is, raccoons are mean. Baby raccoons are adorable, but around the age of two the scavenging instinct kicks in, and the little terrors will do anything to get at food. They will tear up a house. They will rip open garbage bags, ruin bird feeders, even break screen windows to get into a kitchen.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because I just watched one of those “cute” youtube videos where a kitten eats from her cat bowl, and a raccoon sneaks up and grabs her food.

The video is meant to be funny, but all I can think of is how dangerous that situation is. If the raccoon had felt really threatened, it might have torn the cat to pieces. Of course it didn’t, so the video goes on youtube and everyone laughs.

Sorry for the dismal post this month. Next week we’ll be back to happy creatures, honest! For now, you’ll have to subside with a couple health blog links. Either vitamins online or the best multivitamins are two sources to find good vitamin information on the web.

See you soon!

Animals. Straight up, I love animals.

I’m not a prissy, flower printed biddy with no life and a hundred cats. Nor am I a hunchbacked entemologist squinting at a new species of unremarkable mosquito in the bottom of the Smithsonian. I am simply a man who excites in all things creature, the way some people take to historical biographies or celebrity faux paus, I take to the wild world of living things, exotic, real, or mythical.

Yes, even mythical. I don’t lend my interest solely to our scientific discoveries. I revel in the dragon, both Komodo and Arthurian. I believe in the lion and the eagle and the griffin equally. I especially love cryptozoology and animals that actually did exist, but their imagining is almost mythical because of the sheer wonder of such an an animal. Can you imagine the Kangaroos of fourteen million years ago as twenty foot tall creatures? Can you imagine the giant sloth of the Amazon? So large, and so docile and slow? And yet today we have the wonderful, sexual bonobos, and the gentle giant pandas. Ah, animals. Better than ever.

This week’s animal is the chimera. The chimera is a myth. It’s actually broader than a myth. “Chimera” pretty much encompasses ANY mythical animal. Saying someone saw a “chimera” isn’t much help to classification. That’s like shouting at your friend during a camping trip, “Run, I saw a mammal!” More traditionally, a chimera is a mix of two animals. A griffen is a camera. The sphinx is a chimera. One of my favorite websites is the New York City Zoo website where you can actually create a drawing of yourself as a chimera. Human culture has more-or-less demanded chimeras in their legends and lore all the way back to the bible. The ancient egyptian gods were even chimeras.  Ah, chimeras. Better than ever.