Could a skunk win an election? How about a snake? A spider? And how many of us would vote for a bat? Or a mosquito? A wolf?
Well, fellow Americans, today you are asked to reconsider, to make a fresh start, to see a new vision, to reassess where we have been and where we are going, to ask not what a skunk can do to you but what you can do for a skunk, to look down on no creature, not even a snake,
to . . .
Sorry about that, but it is so easy to get carried away in this election year. And it is particularly easy when the cause is such a good one.
We are going to campaign today to improve the images of some of the creatures who, through no fault of their own, have come to be known as the bad guys in the great scheme of things. This image problem is particularly serious now as more and more of us come to live in densely populated areas such as Du Page County, where our direct exposure to some of the creatures is limited and our attitudes are increasingly shaped by the wild gyrations of television and slap shots from the print media.
A small cadre of naturalists, biologists, ecologists and teachers strives mightily to offset the bad-guy images that plague some of the creepy, crawly, odorous set. Their task may seem at times akin to ants trying to take home the picnic watermelon, but they persist. In the words of one of them, Jan Gunther who is the naturalist at Fullersburg Woods Forest Preserve, ”We try to help people make the connections between themselves and the other creatures. It is very important work.”
”You don`t have to love every creature,” Gunther said, ”but you should respect it and realize that it has a place here and is a part of the whole system.”
With that introduction, let some of the candidates for image revision speak for themselves. Let them present their credentials and then let us decide if they will get our votes:
I am the skunk. You know me for my smell, which you say is stink, but which I say is safety. If I am not called upon to use my scent defense on some snoopy dog or other threatening force, I am no more smelly than a rabbit and can live under your back porch without you ever knowing I am there.
I am a relatively harmless fellow who leads a rather solitary life. I do most of my roaming at night when I dig for grubs, insects and other tasty morsels.
I am proud to boast of the endorsement of naturalist Gunther who says I am very adaptive, which means that I can fit into your community if you will leave me alone.
The reason I do not have camouflage colors like many other animals is that I want to advertise the fact that I am protected by my scent, which I can squirt into the eyes of attackers. That pretty much does the job for me except in the case of great horned owls, which are not fazed by my scent apparatus and come slipping silently out of the night to carry my kind off for their lunch.
From a standpoint of humans, many of us are also struck and killed by cars, which, of course, creates a big stink and even though we are the victims in this, our image suffers as a result of it.
One note of caution: We have a problem with rabies, which is a disease that affects our brains and is ultimately fatal. When we have rabies, we do not act naturally and may wander around your yard in the daytime. Stay away from us then and call an animal control officer for help.
In fact, all that we ask is that you stay away from us all of the time. We are wild creatures, and if left alone we will harm no one or nothing.
As Gunther says, ”It is not right to try to befriend any form of wildlife.”
Not that you would try to befriend us, of course. But, in closing, we would ask that you consider that we have been around for a long time, and just because we don`t use deodorant and perfume that appeals to you, we think we deserve better than we have been getting in the arena of public perception.
We ask, then, that you give us your vote. Or, as our bumper sticker says, ”Vote for a Skunk.” Thank you.
Our next candidate is the snake. Please hold the catcalls and the hisses. The snake is shy about speaking and has been since that unfortunate incident in the Garden of Eden. So, without further fanfare, we present the snake:
My friends . . . well, all you herpetologists then. We snakes would like to say at the outset that the reason we crawl about on our stomachs has nothing to do with our biblical behavior. It is because we don`t have any legs. If we had legs, we would be lizards, which is another story.
In asking for a reconsideration of our image, we would like to point out to you that we eat an incredible number of rodents. If there were a snake fast food place, it would have a sign out front that said, ”Billions of rats and mice served.”
And let us understand that the reason we don`t live with you in suburbia very much is not because you don`t like us; it`s because we don`t like you. There is nothing personal in that; it`s just that your lifestyle with its clipped, trimmed and rodent-free environment is about as inviting to us as the great dismal swamp would be to you.
But there are some of us in the forest preserves, and so we ask that you ask yourself, ”What has a snake ever done to hurt me?” We are confident that the answer to that question will be nothing and that you will then go on to form support groups if not political action committees that will have as their goal a new image for snakes, an image that everyone can be proud of and that will move the country forward again.
We might also point out that not only do we eat lots of rodents, but we in turn are eaten by a variety of predators-hawks, owls and fox, for example. We are not asking for protection from these characters because we accept the fact that we are links in the food chain and that if we take from the system, we must expect to be taken. You humans might think about that because in a more indirect way it applies to you as certainly as it applies to us.
If you would like to meet a snake up close, come to one of Gunther`s nature programs where a fox snake is one of the stars.
Thank you, and just remember, nobody has ever been kicked by a snake.
The next candidate for revisionism is the bat. Let the record show that as the bat is introduced, half the listeners in the audience have crawled under their chairs so the bat won`t get tangled in their hair. That is impolite, rather like falling asleep during a political speech; and it is totally unnecessary because bats do not get tangled in people`s hair. But let the bat speak for itself:
Friends, spelunkers and countrymen, I hang by my toes here before you in great saddness. For too many years, my family has been subjected to the outrageous slings and arrows of a cruely vilifying public, led by misguided ghost story writers and animators.
In the first place, we do not get in your hair, and we do not suck your blood. We do, of course, have those relatives in the tropics that live on blood, but they get most of theirs from cows and other dumb animals and rarely from a human. It might also be noted that we have relatives in other countries that are called flying foxes, which weigh from two to three pounds and which some people in parts of Africa and Australia kill and eat. So there. It all evens out.
We live on bugs. Billions and billions of bugs. We love mosquitoes and the moths of some of the most crop destructive insects in the world. In other words, we are out there doing good for you. And when we aren`t doing that, we hide away in caves, attics, hollow trees and do not cause trouble.
Trouble can come, however, when we get rabies. Then we act in an unnatural way and should be avoided at all costs.
However, we healthy bats ask that you respect us for what we are:
harmless, ambitious bug eaters with a radar system that is the envy of the Pentagon and doesn`t cost a cent of the taxpayers` money.
Let me close with a quotation from naturalist Gunther: ”A bat in your backyard is a more effective in controlling mosquitoes than one of those electric bug zappers.”
On the program next is the spider, the eight-legged relative of the insects, which is so numerous it could not only stuff a ballot box but spin a web around it and deliver it to the county clerk. So pull up a tuffet and listen to the spider:
First, let me tell you something about myself that might make it easier for you to understand me in a political context: I have no intelligence and everything I do is done instinctively. If that reminds you of others who have sought your votes in the past, so be it. The truth is that I do not have to think about all of those intricate webs that I spin. In fact, I can`t think, period.
So you see, I never think to myself that I will bite you. I do it instinctively, usually for defense purposes when it seems to me that you are going to crush or otherwise harm me. Most of the time, I do not bite people, but instead spend my time spinning webs to catch insects for my supper. Once I catch an insect, I inject them with digestive juice and later suck out the resulting solution. If you find that offensive, consider yourself eating corn- on-the-cob as butter runs down your chin and your arms, and salt gets into your mustache.
It has been estimated that there are 14,000 spiders on the vegetation of one acre of Illinois woodland. So the thing is, there are more of us than there are of you, and you might as well join us, or let us join you. We are, after all, good insect catchers and, unlike many of you, we have never been known to spin a tangled web.
Thank you.
Much of what the spider says about benefits outweighing harm applies to other creatures that carry the bad-guy label: flies, bees, wasps, wolves and lots of others, Gunther said.
”Sometimes people just don`t want to hear the good about creatures that they think are bad,” Gunther said. ”Some of them also do not want to hear about the serious environmental problems we face. They feel they can`t do anything about them so they don`t want to know about them.”
This head-in-the-sand attitude bothers Gunther who said, ”At least people should know enough to make the connections between themselves and other life forms. Everything is connected and that includes us. If we do not realize that, we endanger ourselves and everything else.”
So Gunther has inadvertently identified the only real bad guys in the natural arrangement of things. As Pogo put it: ”I have seen the enemy and it is us.”
Vote skunk!
