Ivan the Gorilla Unless you grew up in western Washington State, as I did, Ivan the Gorilla may not have been a known entity to you—or, if he was—he was an absent ape who lived and died more or less anonymously. Not as well known as Penny Patterson’s Koko, Ivan was as well-loved and as…

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Last of the Close Calls Calf Near-Scalping When my family lived on a ranch in Cle Elum in the 60’s, we were all involved with the care, maintenance and feeding of the cattle, horses and hogs we raised. We would put the larger calves into stanchions to tag, brand, castrate, de-horn and immunize them. One…

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Bruised by a Bruin Bitten By a Real Bear While I was a student at an animal training school, I was exposed to animals from four different continents. One of them was a black bear named Bruno used in TV and motion pictures. (He was Gentle Ben for those of you old enough to remember…

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More Close Calls with Captive Cats Caracal Swipe The only time I was injured by a wild captive animal was at the Pacific NW sanctuary where I was a volunteer, and the injury was minor. I went into the caracals’ enclosure to clean up and refresh the water. The male caracal, Spock, was traipsing around…

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Dreyfuss (Excerpt from Let No Day Dawn that the Animals Cannot Share) Another time I was walking a leopard/jaguar hybrid. Because he was part jaguar, this was the BIGGEST, but easily the SWEETEST, leopard God ever made. He was three times the size of your average leopard—I’m guessing he weighed 230 pounds or more. NONE…

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Too Close for Comfort CLOSE CALLS Whenever you’re dealing with animals (or humans, or mechanical devices and conveyances) there’s the potential for calamitous injury. Fortunately, the risk rarely keeps us from “boldly going”—including, at times, to places where even Starship Enterprise crew members, left defenseless and to their own devices, would hesitate–at least temporarily! The…

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Animal Advocacy 101 (Excerpt from Let No Day Dawn that the Animals Cannot Share)   From 1981 to 1985 I worked as a Field Service Representative (later, as a Field Service Director) for an animal welfare group based in Sacramento, Ca. It was right up my alley so most of the time I was in…

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Scared Elephant (Excerpt from Let No Day Dawn that the Animals Cannot Share) She was a normal elephant in all ways except one. She grew up in an animal compound, so the proximity of “lions and tigers and bears” (oh, my!) upset her not one bit. Heck, elephants in the wild seem singularly unimpressed by…

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Sneakers Sneakers (Excerpt from “Serval Son”) I first learned about serval cats—the “poor man’s cheetah”—during one of my courses at a wild animal affection training school in 1977-78. I was assigned to train a pygmy goat and to tame/affection train an adult serval cat named Sneakers.   Sneakers (Before) Training a goat is child’s play.…

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Sex Ed: Horsing Around (Excerpt from soon-to-be-published ‘Womb Man’ ) When I was eight, Mom and Dad decided to have our mare Stormy bred. And they decided it would be a good idea to let me observe the process, since I wasn’t asking the usual “where do babies come from?” question and they thought it…

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