The darkness within

I had such a laugh at this post over here by Ben. I make no judgment about a guy who abandons an axolotl (that’s what generous experiencers do (see below) - the situation was complex and stressful, clearly). Nothing could have persuaded me to keep an axolotl in the first place.

Despite the fact that I was once a zoologist/conservation biologist, I am worse than ambivalent towards cold-blooded creatures. When we did herpetofauna searches at university, I’d volunteer a little too enthusiastically to be scribe, which meant that I could walk around with the clipboard and pen and not have to touch things. And I think we have all found our darkness. Mine, well, once upon a time I joined WIRES, the Wildlife Information and Rescue Service.

I would drive around collecting sick and injured creatures with diligence, stop at road kills and rummage through the pouches of bloated and maggot-ridden carcasses looking for signs of life, only to take home some mostly-dead, tiny, probably unviable creature, then get up through the night to feed and warm (and toilet) something that lived my sock, which invariably died a few days later from imbibing too much putrefying milk. These days I'm cold and hard. I drive by road kills and feel scarcely a pang. There’s always too much traffic, or I can tell it’s male, or wasn't lactating (at 100kms an hour) or something, anything ...