Bill's Bulletin Board
By Bill Rea

Like most people, I have a certain fondness of animals.

That especially goes for the cute kind of critters, but even the uncute ones can work their way into my affections.

Many men have pictures of wives or girlfriends on the screen savers of their computers at work. Me, I have a picture of a rhinoceros, taken by me at African Lion Safari a couple of years ago.

That got me into a bit a trouble a couple of months ago, when I describing a curvaceous young woman I had seen on one man's screen saver, and I was commenting that some guys had "cuties," while I had a rhinoceros. The problem was I made the observation in the presence of my wife, as I was addressing my mother-in-law. I quickly realized the trap I had walked into, and promptly launched into an explanation as soon as I was able pry Beth's fingers away from my throat.

The truth is rhinos have always fascinated me, for reasons I doubt I could explain.

I was once (many years ago) part of a group that was able to take a backstage tour of a zoo. It was the first time I had ever seen a rhino with my own eyes, and I was so taken up with the moment that I absent-mindedly dropped my sunglasses into the pen. A keeper had to retrieve them for me.

That same day, several of us ended up feeding apples and big raw carrots to one of the hippos. The monster spat up part of the snack all over your humble, but such is my fondness for animals that I still look back at the experience as being a happy one, in spite of the considerable ribbing I've taken over the years from several friends who were there and saw the whole thing.

Many of you are scared of snakes, but I have generally gotten along rather well with them. That wasn't always the case. I was a very little boy the first time I saw a garter snake, and being a typical little kid, I screamed my little head off, scaring the hell out of my mother while angering my father for creating such a disturbance. But I got over it.

I attended one of those outdoor education programs when I was 12, and the animals on hand included two boa constrictors. We were there for feeding time, and one of them, appropriately named Crusher, made very short work of the live rat that was tossed into his pen. The following day, one of the teachers took Crusher out and let us hold him. I draped him around my shoulders like a stole, and the two of us got along famously. Any fear I had of snakes died that day.

That was the highlight of the week I spent there. The lowlight came the following week, when Crusher got too close to the school's pet raccoon and bit a kid on the hand when he reached out to rescue the creature. The raccoon was saved, Crusher was forgiven and the kid made the front page of the Toronto Star; and that was followed by a major feature on the whole program in the paper the next day. At the age of 12, I had missed my first big shot at fame and publicity. Sigh!

I've had to handle big snakes in other situations since that day. I once attended a talk about exotic animals with a group of friends, and a great big python was part of the exhibit. We were huddled around some of the critters after the talk, and the python, demonstrating impeccable taste, showed a definite preference for my gentle touch.

"He really likes you," remarked one woman, with a certain amount of awe in her voice. Interestingly, this woman was among the group who had previously seen the hippo goober all over me. Some people just naturally are able to be on hand for the big moments.

My latest encounter was a beast in the wild come last Saturday. It being a holiday weekend, and since I hadn't taken a day off in some weeks, Beth and I spent part of the day in Muskoka. We were taking a stroll around a small golf course in the area. Beth was about 30 feet away from me when she noticed something along a row of trees, out of of my sight. But she looked at me, and quietly pointed in the direction of what she had seen. We had been around this spot a couple of months before, and had encountered a fox, so I quickly sized up the situation, surmised what had caught my wife's attention (she sometimes gets a little spooked that we're so good at cluing into what each other is thinking), grabbed my camera and realized that I had guessed right. The fox crossed into my field of vision and walked between Beth and myself at a purposeful pace, picked up a bit of speed and disappeared into another clump of trees. I was snapping pictures as fast as I could during all of this.

Now for all the affection I have for animals, I confess I don't know a whole lot about them. For example, I can only assume this was a fox. It wasn't carrying any ID that I could see, so I reached the conclusion largely through the simple process of elimination. I knew, for example, that it wasn't a hippo. If you have one spit at you, you tend to remember what it looks like.

Whatever it was, he (I'm guessing at its gender too) didn't seem to have to much trouble sharing his walk with us; no more than we had sharing ours with him. Since this was a golf course and since we had seen a fox there before, I don't think there was any great concern that there was anything wrong with this little guy. Had there been some concern, such as rabies, I would think (or at least would like to think) that someone would have previously taken some action. Neither of us tried to get too close to the other, and we parted on as friendly terms as could be expected. He didn't even spit up at me, for which I was most grateful.

If only I got along so well with out cat.