9/3/02
Rasmiliya Sporny
ENG 101

Question: Think of a species of animal you have wide experience with. As hoagland does, describe these animals as distinct individuals and as common representatives of their species.

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Srilanka is a tear-shaped island known as 'The Pearl of the Indian Ocean'. Its a tropical island, teaming with all kinds of wildlife. It is not uncommon to have strange animals wandering into gardens, or having spotted geckoes chatting to each other in the middle of the night. The most unusual group of animals we have had in our house was a group of monkeys. They are the most ferocious animals I have ever encountered. They have reddish-brown feiry eyes and these teeth that look like they can rip out the arm of a man. When they run across the roofs of houses, it sounds like thunder, literally. There are more 'loveable' animals though, including elephants. They are such majestic creatures and they have very similar qualities to that of humans, in the way they care for their youung, mourn their dead and work together as a community to feed themselves. Their mouths are so pink and rather disgusting looking and they drool a lot when they are fed. Take it from me, its not pleasant to have your arm covered in elephant drool. Riding one is an experience I can't quite explain. Its scary, because you never know if the elephant will suddenly get angry and crush you to death. One thing I have noticed is if you look at an elephant's eye, you can almost tell what they are thinking. An elephant's eyes are so small compared to the rest of their body.

But I'm not going to write about elephants, because where I come from, they are a common topic and everyone sees them on a regular basis. I'm going to write about the reptiles that wander into my garden every once in a while. The "queen" of the garden is my pet tortoise, Ibbie(her original name was Angie Esiotrot, but was changed to Ibbie for convenienve). She trots around, grazing on the grass, or toppling over one of the 'forbidden' potted plants to devour the contents. The reason why many of the good plants are potted is in order to keep them out of her reach, a point which she doen't seem to understand.
She is about the size of a dinner plate, about ten inches long, eight inches wide and six inches tall. She does not fill everyone's stereotypical idea of what a tortoise should be. She is pretty fast and is able to run (which is actually speed-walking) from one place to another in a matter of minutes. She always seems to be in a hurry to get to someplace in time, like she has a mission she has to accopmplish befor the day is out. This mission usually involves the trip from the garden, to inside the house where the refridgerator is. She knows that there are vegetables in the vegtalble bin, which is inside the fridge. She even tries to open the door of the fridge by bumping her shell against it and even tries to crawl under it in a vain attempt to get to the vegetables inside. She loves beans. One whiff of a bean and she gears into 'super-trot' speed. She can actually walk in a straight line if she wants to. Her personality is a mixture of that of a pig, a goat (for her gluttony),a dog (for her affection) and a truck. A truck? Yes, truck. When she lowers herself to the floor, where she doesn't stand up, allowing the bottom of her shell to rest on the floor, she makes this sound like a truck does, like a loud sigh.

When she wants to be affectionate,or just plain obnoxious, she steps on your toes if you feet are on the floor. When she feels insecure, she comes into the house and finds a corner to hide herself or she'll lower herself on top of your feet. She likes toes, to bite that is. If she sees toes that have been painted red or pink, she always wants to take a bite out of them to see what they taske like. I think she can see color because she always gets attracted to the colors red and yellow. Red must remind her of the hibiscus flowers and bits of watermelon we give her to eat, and yellow must resemble the color of babanas, one of her favorite fruits. When she comes into contact with either of these colors, she stops, stares and then goes into this zombie-like tranze, where she just stares at the object with a look of sheer disbelief, like she is seeing the most beautiful sight in the world. But the a minute later, she snaps out of her tranze and rushes towards the object and sniffs it, then tries to take a bite of it. One day my best frien had worn a yellow dress when she came to spend the day with me and my tortoise followed her everywhere! And at one point when we were sitting out in the garden, catching up on the latest gossip, Ibbie trotted over, her eyes bright and wide, and looked at my friends dress and bit it! Not once, but twice, as she must have thought that it was a fruit that you had to bite really hard on to get a peice of it. It was so funny. Tortoises don't really have 'teeth' as such, they just have these rigid teeth-like protrusions situated on the top and bottom of their 'beak'. But if they do bite you, by accident mostly, it really hurts. Ibbie had nipped me on my finger several times, and there has often been small amounts of blood from where she bit it. It wasn't intentional, of course. If she is scared or doesn't wan to socialize, she either tucks her head and feet into her shell or she just hides in her 'corner, which is under a large peice of wood, which leans against the wall in the garden.

The most interesting thing about this tortoise is that she has so much life in her and is extremely curious. Her curiosity has resulted in her injuring herself. She tries to climb down the steps in the garden, but instead ends up rolling down them. We are always afrid that one of these days she'll crack her shell and die. Or if she falls down the steps and lands upside-down on her back, she could die. Tortoises find it very difficult to roll back to their correct position once they are upside down. At a time like that, they are extremely vulnerable to predators and can get dehydrated quickly. Due to he inquisitive nature, she has chipped and scratched her shell and has lost two toe-nails. But she is still as plucky as ever. The fun really starts when the 'visitors' start appearing in the garden. There are two chamelions, which are smaller than the regular chamelion and run faster. Srilankans call them 'katussas'. Well, they sun themselves on tree-trunks and on garden rocks, keeping one eye out for food-on-legs and the other eye out for predators. These reptiles are a bit wary of the oblivious tortoise who trots accross the grass once in a while, and if she gets too close, the lizards scuttle away. The squirrels are a bit cautious around Ibbie as well. They don't quite know what to make of this moving rock thats makes a lot of munching sounds. The baby monitor lizard isn't that afraid of Ibbie, but always keeps an eye on her, expecting her to jump out and bite the lizard's tail off. Ibbie has come nose-to nose with the baby monitor lizard (adult monitor lizards grow up to eight feet long and can kill at any given moment. Thieir tails are especially dangerous because when their tails lash out, they have such a force, that they can break a man's leg in half.). She and the monitor lizard usually stare at one another and Ibbie walks away, looking back at the lizard behind her with a suspicious eye.
My mother and I have this joke that if we looked at the animals in our garden through a magnifying glass it would look like something out of the prehistoric ages, with all these 'dinosaurs' roaming about. Its another world.

It was a hot summer afternoon in Louisiana and the sun was scorching the grass with its fierce glare. I was watching a beetle that I had helped to its upright position , as it had landed upside down on the pavement, fly away into the summer sky. I was four years old at the time (I still can't believe I remember this) and I was playing with some of my neighbors, who were around my age. In the middle of a game of tag, one of my friends stopped running and called us to look at something on the side walk that she had discovered. So, being the curious little tykes we were, we all gathered around to see what she was excitedly pointing at. "Look! Look at those ants stuck in the chewing gum! They look so funny!" she squealed.
There was a large glob of pink chewing gum that had been spat onto the pavement and due to the intense heat, it had partially melted and had become this gooey mess. Some wandering ants had been attracted to it and had got stuck on the surface of the gum. There were about ten of them, the large red-kind, all madly waving their antennae and flexing thieir pincers in a vain attempt to free themselves. I felt extremely sorry for them, but my friends found the whole thing quite amusing. They were saying things like "Hey! How's the sticky food down there you stupid ants?" ,and then one boy said "Here! Have a drink to go with it!" and spat on top of the ants. I thought that was the meanest, most disgusting thing anyone could have done. Instead of saving them, they spat on them and laughed. I went home to my mother and cried because I felt so guilty and angry at myself about not standing up for the ants and saving them. She told me that there were plenty of ants in the world and that they die everyday. Thats when I learned that people killed animals and that the chicken legs I ate for supper came from real chickens who hopped around after their heads were chopped off with a clever. My brother explained to me that we had to eat animals at some point or other, and the ones we did not eat were kept as pets.
I have always had pets throughout my life. The first pet our family had was a gog named 'Poochie' , who was a dalmation- alsation cross, which I always found rather amusing, considering the size of the two dogs. I never knew that dog as I was still a baby and she died from a snake-bite when I was a year old. After that, we had several fish in a tank. I always liked the background pictures that we'd put behind the tank, to make the whole ecosystem seem more "at home" for the fish. I liked putting my hand in the tank and allow the fish to nibble at my fingers as it made me feel ticklish all over. These fish belonged to my mother, not to me. I never had a pet of my own untill I was about seven years old. All the previous pets that were welcomed into out home belonged to either my brother, or to my mother. Even my step-mother had a dog and she 'shared' the dog with my dad. I was just allowed to 'look and not touch'. I was especially forbidden to open the gerbil cage or the budgie cage. One of the gerbils did escape. Actually it was a kangaroo rat. He had escaped and hopped all the way downstairs and decide to hide behind the fridge. My brother and I tried in vain to lure the rodent out with Frootloops. We did this for about a week, but that stubborn rat didn't want to come out from behind the fridge and we didn't want to move the fridge in fear of the animal getting all excited and electrocuting himself.
But it was all in vain. We got the smell of a dead rat a week later. We have had so many pets after that. We have has rabbits,gerbils, goldfish (that got so fat we donated them to a Buddhist Temple nearby that had a large pond), parrots, dogs, love birds, hamsters, more fish and another dog. I had my first pet dog when I was seven. I named her Lassie, after the brave pooch who was the first earth-creature in outer-space. When she was three years Lassie died old, from an undetected cancer. I had always wanted to be a veterenarian, but after seeing so many pets die through the years, I decided against it.

When I was about eleven years old, I remember watching a program about marine animals on the Discovery channel. This particular episode was about turtles. I thought they were such beautiful creatures, so graceful and calm. The the program went on to show how turtles were killed for their flesh and their shell. I never understood how anyone could film such a thing and not try to save the animal being killed. I watched a few local fishermen on some pacific island drag the turtle after it had layed its eggs and with a knife cut its shell off. It was still alive. It just opened its mouth and if anyone really listened hard enough, they would have heard a scream of anguish and pain. Then the cameraman (whom I had absolutely no respect for by this point) shot a close-up of the turtle's face and from its large round eye, which was the color of the depths of the ocean it once swam, a tear rolled down onto the sand. I was so angry at the whole idea of killing a turtle. Then the islanders dug up the turtle's eggs and took them to the village and ate them, which disgusted me even more. I just wanted to go and strangle all of them and try and save all the turtles in the world. This was, of course, impossible. What angered me even more was that every species in the world has been tortured at the will of man. I'm no saint. I've killed mosquitoes and cockaroaches. These are pests and I have no feeling for them because they are vile and disgusting creatures, but I still feel sorry for them after I've killed them. I can't help it. I've always put myself in the position of an animal. I ask myself "How would I like it if I was smushed to death with a broom, or sprayed with some lethal acid?"

For my thirteenth birthday I asked my mother if we could go to the turtle sanctuary, which was located in the southern coast of Sri Lanka, about four hours from where I lived. There were several sanctuaries in the country, but this one was the closest. So, on the 27th of September, the day after my birthday, a few of my friends, my motehr and I wen to the turtle sanctuary. There were all these baby turtles swimming around in these massive concrete tanks. They were so adorable and we were allowed to scoop them out of the water and hold them. They were all so tiny and they looked like they wanted to get out of there, away from one another and swim in the ocean. The baby turtles were kept in the tanks for a few weeks and then they are relaesed into the ocean. Very few of them survive because they are eaten by birds and larger fish or get dashed against rocks by large waves. There was also an albino turtle who couldn't be released because she was vulnerable to predators as she wouldn't be able to blend in with the environment. I wanted to release some but the man there said that they were only released at night time. I felt so sorry for all the little turtles and I prayed that they would all survive so that they could reproduce and keep their species from becoming extinct. About four years ago, one of my mother's friends gave us one of her tortoises as a gift. She already had five of them and her garden was too small for a family of tortoises. Thats when Ibbie came to our house. She was the closest thing to a turtle .Even though she was a bit dumpier looking and lacked the gracefulness of a sea turtle, she was one pet that I had always wanted. Hoagland's essay reminded me of my tortoise and it also made me remember the turtles I saw when I was younger. Some people might think I'm crazy because I love reptiles and lizards and amphibians, but I can't help it. Thats the way I am and I don't think I'll change.