With the exception of the occasional devil squirrel, or murderous feline, animals love me. They do. I’m like a damned Disney princess. Dogs, miniature donkeys, chipmunks, manta rays– they all want to flock to me as I sing soprano in a forest (yes, even the rays).
You want some proof? Check out this picture of Paul’s sister’s guinea pig, Ollie.
Shortly after this photo was taken, he set up camp by my ankles and ate grass for about seven solid minutes.
So, obviously, I’m loved by pretty much all animals.
So you can imagine how jarring it was to come upon a critter at The Living Desert Wildlife Park in Palm Springs that absolutely freaking HATED me. Like, wanted to rip parts of my face off and scatter them across the California landscape.
Behold the Owl:
Everywhere I went, it swiveled its terrible head around and narrowed its horrible eyes, as if to say, “I grow tired of voles; I’ll give this new walking meat a whirl.” I probably didn’t help matters, because I laughed aloud at it, and stared right into its freaky bird eyes and said “Hey, jerk! What’s up?”
Paul read somewhere that if you keep an owl, even from infancy, it hates you. You are its mortal enemy, and it spends its days, ripping the mice you feed it to shreds, imagining that they are your vital organs. It plots its revenge, each soft hoot its solemn vow to end your life. If you let it out of the cage, even for a second, it will flap its mite-laden wings, and descend upon you immediately.
Which brings me to my point: I think this owl has focused its intense cage wrath on me. It sees me as the person who is responsible for its captivity. So, if you or anyone you know happens to be affiliated with the Living Desert Wildlife Park, I am begging you right now, never let that owl out of its cage.
Uh-oh. I gave some owl your phone number. He said he was Oxy ’06.
‘Paul read somewhere that if you keep an owl, even from infancy, it hates you. You are its mortal enemy, and it spends its days, ripping the mice you feed it to shreds, imagining that they are your vital organs. It plots its revenge, each soft hoot its solemn vow to end your life. If you let it out of the cage, even for a second, it will flap its mite-laden wings, and descend upon you immediately.’
I know from personal experience that this is a fact. And I have 9yr-old Craig Medford for a witness.
I need to hear more about that. Immediately.
Hee hee….what a hoot!
Well Liz…we had an Owl Hawk (like an owl but very aggressive and with huge talons) as a pet for awhile and my late brother (he was a Craig Medford-soert of kid…lot’s of “what if we did this?”-type questions) and he suggested, since the hawk’s wings were clipped, that we open the cage and let him out in the living room. We spent the next 10 minutes crawling around on the floor until we could get out of the room (the hawk had the door blocked). It took my dad and a neighbor @1/2hr to re-cage him. Not too long after that, we let his clipped-wings grow long and then released him up in the canyons.