The Insatiable Monster

Has anyone noticed the rash of giant snake attacks in Indonesia?  These alarming stories of giant snakes  follow a very ancient (and horrifying) narrative pattern: a lone villager or traveler chances across an enormous predatory reptile from 20 to 30 feet in length.  Mayhem ensues.  Usually the human survives and fights off the monster with a machete (or with aid from a torch wielding mob), but sometimes the human vanishes…only to be found being slowly digested inside a reticulated python.

Taken from an individual human perspective, it is hard not to think of the pythons as the insatiable villains of such stories, but the real narrative is more complicated.    Palm oil is made from fruit of the palm oil plant, a tropical generalist. Not only is this oil a lucrative (and delicious) additive to desserts and other processed foodstuffs, it is also extensively used in cosmetics, shampoo, and soaps.  Indonesia has the third largest rainforest in the world, but palm oil growers are destroying these forests at an unprecedented rate. Indonesia’s tropical rainforests are vanishing even more quickly than the rainforests in Brazil or the Congo.  These forests are cut down and replaced with palm oil plantations, enormous monocultures where most traditional rainforest animals cannot live, however rats can and do live there on the oily palm fruit.  The pythons are hunting rats in these plantations because their forests were destroyed.

 

Humankind the great hive organism is swallowing these forests whole (in the form of delicious candy and aromatic toiletries).  The animals which live there are likewise being eradicated. Indeed the most recent giant python to attack a villager who molested it was literally cut into pieces, fried, and devoured by hungry villagers.  It makes one wonder if the Saint George and the Dragon pictures were not so much about humankind surmounting evil as about the tragedy of deforestation in medieval England.

Wild Turkey Attacks

 

Wild Turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) in the suburbs and towns

Ferrebeekeeper has always been renowned for its unabashedly pro-turkey policies and stances (we are talking here about the large galliforme bird from North America—not the nation in Asia-Minor).  It is therefore this blog’s duty to look into the rash of negative stories which have recently been circulating through the media about bad behavior from these magnificent birds and see what (if anything) can be determined.

Apparently wild turkeys have been attacking people across the nation (and messing with our domestic animals and our precious stuff, to boot).  Emboldened by the ever growing size of wild turkey populations (and unaware of the true nature of humans), the birds are taking out their aggressions on churchgoers, children, and even armed officers of the law.  Here is an especially fine collection of “turkey attack” videos gathered together by Gawker.  Slightly more serious articles can be found here and here.

A homeowner attacked by a suburban wild turkey

The turkey attacks seem to be a result of turkeys coming into suburbia (the wild turkeys of the farmlands and the forests know quite well to fear the fell hand of humankind).  For all their fine qualities, turkeys (like humans) are territorial creatures.  Additionally, like humans, some turkeys are more aggressive or fearless than others. The convenience of factory farming (and humankind’s mastery over domesticated strains of turkeys) has conditioned some suburbanites to think of the birds as fat fluffy simpletons, but the stereotype is far from accurate.  Wild toms can stand 4 feet tall and weigh up to14 kilograms (30 lbs).  The birds have powerful legs with razor-sharp spurs and doughty wings (which spread to six feet).  The scary dinosaurlike quality of some of those gawker clips, illustrates the power, fearlessness, and intelligence of the creatures (which have evolved to be perfectly at home in the woodlands, plains, and swamps of America).

A wild turkey on a car in Burlington

The suburbs are lacking the predators which traditionally hunted wild turkeys and they are likewise lacking the human hunters who nearly drove the birds to extinction.  Turkeys meet non-threatening suburbanites and then began to regard people as fellow turkeys.  Unfortunately, wild turkey society is much like corporate America and involves lots of one-upsmanship, dominance displays, and outright threats (all so that dominant turkeys can rise to the top and obtain preferential mates and resources).  If you are attacked by wild turkeys you need to threaten them back and overmatch their displays with over-the-top sounds and movements. Do not feed wild turkeys!  Wild turkeys can see colors and they have a particular dislike for red (which plays an important part in their mating rituals and contests).  All of these turkey misunderstandings have happened because turkeys have accidentally assumed that we are the same as them (and we have sometimes assumed they are the same as us).  Turkeys and humans are indeed very much alike: both species are clever, territorial, aggressive, bipedal, and omnivorous. In terms of sheer vindictive murderousness and cunning, however, humans vastly outstrip the birds.  Please remember that if wild turkeys begin to play their mind games with you.