ond-wave feminism, it was popular to
question whether the master’s tools could
ever disassemble the master’s house. Perhaps a similar question is germane today:
can we tweet our way out of our ADD lifestyle? Trash/Track, at its best, might o=er
a wake-up call, but it’s not really providing
the tools to question a world of which it
is indisputably a part. Or, to put it in simpler terms, people don’t throw aluminum
cans away because they don’t have enough
data about where they end up. They throw
aluminum cans away because the government has subsidized the overproduction
of aluminum for half a century while industry has resisted attempts to make recycling mandatory, or even easy. It’s not
clear those problems will be solved by
having more specific data, no matter how
awesome MIT makes it look.
What Makes a Pet
a Pet?
BY KURT CASWELL
The flyer read: “LOST, Ring Tailed
Lehmur, Large Reward,” followed by a
federal license number, and three phone
numbers. Never mind the misspelling. In
the photograph, the lemur sat upright like
a child, a blue harness around its chest,
its arms outstretched as if ready for a hug.
It was the spring of 2005, and I had
just moved to Lubbock, Texas. Later, I
heard that the owner of Mattress Sale on
34th Street kept a pet black bear. When
I called and spoke with an associate, he
confided that no, they don’t own them,
those five black bears. They just know the
people who do. “Listen,” he said. “We use
them mostly for advertising purposes. We
use real horses. Real bears. And real Chi-
huahuas. Not those fake ones.”
But there was more: the pony out
for a walk in Tech Terrace Park near my
house; the twenty-five thousand aoudads,
or Barbary sheep native to North Africa,
roaming the canyons of west Texas; the
tiger rumored to live in a cage on a front
lawn in south Lubbock. And if you do a
little searching, you’ll find a host of Texas
ranches that keep exotic big game for
paid hunts. A Chinese water deer will run
you about $4,500, if you can kill it, and
a bongo (look it up) goes for $25,000.
A couple weeks ago, I went for a run on
the edge of town. Cruising up the trail,
my running partner’s dog dove into the
tangled mesquite and out came a huge
spotted cat. It must have weighed forty
pounds. It leaped up and over four feet of
brush, hit the trail in front of me, and in
one more bound, vanished.
Larry Munchrath, of Munch Ranch
Exotics, confirmed that Texas has a great
number of exotic pets, but how many is
“many” is anyone’s guess. The problem,
to his mind, isn’t that people keep exotics,
but that people who shouldn’t keep exotics
keep exotics. When people buy such animals on a lark— a wallaby say, or a sugar
glider, or something a bit larger, a bit
wilder, a wolf hybrid, for example—they
don’t consider commitment and responsibility. When a wolf pup grows up, an
unprepared owner finds he’s got a wild
animal on his hands, and this often leads
to the animal su=ering. So Munchrath is
very particular about his buyers.
If you’re thinking exotics should not
be kept as pets at all, Munchrath insists
that some animals may have better lives
in captivity. And what is “captivity”? he
muses. “Is it a cage, acres of fenced land,
shrinking native lands for some species?
