— It’s a little-known secret that I played a chicken (specifically, a rooster) in my second grade class play!
My elementary school had a tradition that once a year, each class would have to present a play to the rest of the school. During my second grade year, my class presented some kind of cutesy barnyard drama in which most of us played animals; this left me…strangely excited, possibly the earliest stirrings of the furry that I would someday become! Now I didn’t really want to play a chicken, and would have much preferred to play a horse or one of the cooler animals. This wasn’t even a mutant chicken or a Big Buckin’ Chicken like in the Burger King commercials a while back. I didn’t even get to wear a fursuit; the costume was largely comprised of a woman’s nylon over my head to which were attached construction paper eyes, a beak, and a chicken’s comb. Then as now elementary schools didn’t have big budgets…but hey, it was a gig, right?
…of course, years of therapy were required to deal with the issues raised by the nylon over my head, but at least I didn’t grow up to be a bank robber! And in sixth grade, I got to play a ghost, a role indicated by chains I had to wear around my neck that trailed down each shoulder, a la Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol. This may have led to my long-time interest in the paranormal.
Today, of course, school plays don’t dare include ghostly characters as some in the community would interpret that as promoting occultism or who knows what else…but what did we know back then? <sighs>
— In an incident reported July 17th, a Colorado man used an 18″ chainsaw to successfully fight off a mountain lion that attacked him during a camping trip with his wife and two toddlers in northwest Wyoming! The adult male lion was described as being emaciated and showing other signs of starvation when he pounced on the man, an ex-Marine…Semper Fi, Dude! 
— MonsterQuest 
— Jeez, you can hardly turn around these days without another beloved 
–My people are moving on in…to Detroit, that is. That’s right, the Motor City! ‘Ya see, Detroit had a population of 1.8 million hyoomans in 1950, and it’s down to 900,000 now. With the big economic meltdown and GM goin’ belly-up, Detroit has an unemployment rate of 23%. Bad for hyoomans, good for us foxies; we’re movin’ in, ‘ya see. We figure we just might be able to do somethin’ wid da place…
— In his planned comeback concerts in London that now we’ll never see, Michael Jackson reportedly planned a nature theme which heavily involved live creatures; for his entrance, there was talk of Michael riding an African elephant while panthers were led on gold chains and parrots and other birds flew behind him. PETA and other animal rights groups understandably filed protests with officials, pointing out that “Animals don’t want to perform stupid tricks on a stage surrounded by screaming people, bright lights, and stage explosions.” Jackson subsequently announced that he would not be using any live animals in his concert series.
—Sarah Palin
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— Disney stuff is usually too mainstream and white breadish for me, but I have to love Perry the Platypus, pet of the title characters in the Disney Channel show, Phineas and Ferb. Unknown to his owners, Perry (aka “Agent P”) lives a parallel life as a secret agent for The Agency, a government organization of animal spies. Pretending to be a mindless house pet, Perry is secretly a fedora-wearing secret agent who enjoys romance soap operas and potato chips.
– – Experts originally thought that the Egyptians were the first to domesticate the cat about 3,600 years ago, but recent genetic and archaeological discoveries indicate that cats were being tamed nearly 10,000 years ago in the Mediterranean.
FOXSYLVANIA 
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