Skip to main content

I did a good deed today

Image
By
Lest anyone accuse me of being a complete waste of Peace Corps money, for the defense I present the following.  With God as my witness, for Uncle Sam and freedom and democracy, for peace and love and harmony and low trade barriers, today I rescued a baby goat with her head caught in a rusty tin can.
Kinda funny, but pitiful.
I was walking back along the riverbed from the neighboring village, where I have been helping with a world map project for the past couple days, blasting some Opeth on my headphones.  The poor thing was totally helpless, and tried to run when I approached but didn't know which way to go so I caught her easily.  The issue was her little horns—maybe an inch long—had gotten wedged under the lip of the can, which was bent into an oval shape.  (God knows what enticed the thing to stick its head in the can in the first place.)  At first I couldn't get both of the horns out.  The goat was panicky and panting hoarsely into the can, and kept trying to escape.  After a time I tried wrenching the can into a better shape by main force, and managed to succeed enough so I could get both horns out.  Then when I held the can and she tried to escape again, she got loose.
Freedom!
The goat's clan seemed to have left her behind, so she immediately set to bleating and looking around for them.  I hope she found them. 

It was a reminder of the benefits of arms and opposable thumbs.  The other day I was thinking of the very few number of animals that can touch themselves basically anywhere on their body.  Being human does have its perks.
The face of the abyss.
Labels:

Comments

  1. UnknownNovember 19, 2010 at 7:49 AM

    Go Ryan!! :D

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sara J.November 19, 2010 at 9:47 AM

    Hahaha!
    This gave me a good laugh first thing in the morning--thanks. I will be thankful for my opposable thumbs all day.
    Kudos for the good deed, RyGuy!

    ReplyDelete
  3. RyanNovember 19, 2010 at 1:07 PM

    That's 40,000 taxpayer dollars well spent.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

By
So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b
Post a Comment
Read more

The Basic Instinct of Socialism

By
This year I finally decided to stop beating around the bush and start calling myself a democratic socialist. I think the reason for the long hesitation is the very long record of horrifying atrocities carried out by self-described socialist countries. Of course, there is no social system that doesn't have a long, bloody rap sheet, capitalism very much included . But I've never described myself as a capitalist either, and the whole point of socialism is that it's supposed to be better than that. So of course I cannot be a tankie — Stalin and Mao were evil, terrible butchers, some of the worst people who ever lived. There are two basic lessons to be learned from the failures of Soviet and Chinese Communism, I think. One is that Marxism-Leninism is not a just or workable system. One cannot simply skip over capitalist development, and any socialist project must be democratic and preserve basic liberal freedoms. The second, perhaps more profound lesson, is that there is no s
6 comments
Read more

Varanus albigularis albigularis

By
That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that
4 comments
Read more