and other thoughts

It has come to my attention (to quote Dave Barry, I am not making this up), that an enterprising group of researchers at Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Base in Sichuan province is trying to make lemonade from lemons.

By 'lemonade' I mean 'paper', and by 'lemons' I, of course, mean 'poop'. After visiting an elephant reserve in Thailand last year and learning that elephant dung was being recycled into paper, our panda officials reasoned that, given the panda's bamboo-rich diet, the excrement would be even richer in fiber than the elephants', and therefore make a higher-quality paper. All this of course got me thinking about other products that could be generated from animal waste. Dogs who chew leather shoes could conceivably give rise to beef jerky (not much difference, in my opinion). Cows who eat grass could produce'well, they already give us milk, butter and cheese (not to mention their flesh), what more do we want from the poor creatures? I've known labs who ate nearly anything that wasn't nailed down (keep reading). The possibilities there would be limitless. The axiom 'You are what you eat' could be modified to 'You may be able to mass produce what you eat.'

I'm as green as the next person, and would like to see more things recycled. I draw the line, however, on things that have passed through the intestinal tract. That was nearly the fate of Pepper, the red-eared turtle. Pepper had been relocated from an outdoor pond to an indoor bathtub during a cold snap (in Florida, mind you), and Bella the Golden Retriever decided that poor Pepper looked tasty. Ten minutes after realizing that Bella had consumed the palm-sized turtle, Bella's 12 year-old human, Shelby, made the dog vomit. Out came Pepper, with her shell (and dignity) shattered but otherwise no worse for the wear.

My own late yellow lab, Hobey (my husband named him after the dumbest guy in his high school) turned garbage-diving into performance art. I came home one day to find the previous night's chicken carcass, corn cobs and coffee grounds beautifully landscaping the house. Hobey was impervious to scoldings. Once I left him in the car to drop some things off at the dry cleaners, and came back two minutes later to find my tissue box torn apart and most of the tissues gone. I started to scold him as he sat in the passenger seat, and he indignantly turned his profile to me, as if to protest his innocence.The whole effect was spoiled, of course, by the trail of Kleenex dangling from his chops.

Now if only we could have recycled it.