"a commentary on our own culpability"

canary 2, 2008, by Kate McDowell.

Artist Kate McDowell's statement about her work begins:

We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words--to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. – C.S. Lewis.

In my work this romantic ideal of union with the natural world conflicts with our contemporary impact on the environment. These pieces are in part responses to environmental stressors including climate change, toxic pollution, and gm crops. They also borrow from myth, art history, figures of speech and other cultural touchstones.

You can view Kate McDowell's portfolio here. Her work, as she says, is "a painstaking record of endangered natural forms and a commentary on our own culpability."

Cuckoo. [In case it's needed, here is some context.]

Related:
Urgency increases as oil spill grows
How oil affects birds
Birds, Sharks, Whales, Sea Turtles, and Other Wildlife Threatened By Oil Slick Nearing Coast -- with information on "some of the birds and other wildlife experts are most concerned about."

Tweets from the past

Hasn't changed much since White's day: the village of Selborne, by Mockney Rebel on Flickr.

Ebert rouses his followers on Twitter:

Has ANYBODY noticed I've been starting each day with Gilbert White's "Natural History of Selborne?"

White's journal entries, as it happens, often make perfect tweets — and now I have another book to buy. From Ebert's link, The Natural History of Selborne:

Gilbert White (1720-1793) was the curate of the village of Selborne in Hampshire, England. He was a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, a farmer in a very small way, and a passionate gardener. From an early age he was fascinated by nature and recorded his observations, and in later life began to correspond with several prominent ‘natural philosophers’. These letters were eventually edited and compiled in a book, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789). It has never been out of print since its publication and established the genre of nature-writing in English. Gilbert White’s commitment to close observation of the mundane and everyday in nature– what we would now call ‘field study’– was pioneering and inspired Darwin; his influence felt in pastoral English writing from The Mill on the Floss to The Wind in the Willows.

Trivia: one of White's correspondents was the Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant, first to describe the fisher [Martes pennanti] for science in 1771. I love fishers.

Here's the Penguin Classics edition of Gilbert White's book at Amazon. Honestly, Roger Ebert's Twitter feed is the reason God created the computer.

The Summer-Maker. [Check out these beautiful shots on Flickr.]

Related: Pacific fisher [Martes pennanti], at Sierra Forest Legacy.

HeroRATS to the rescue

One man's ratatouille is another man's hero. [Photo source]

They have little rat tails and little rat feet and little rat voices that go squeak squeak squeak, and when they locate an unexploded landmine, these African Giant Pouched Rats alert their handlers by sitting still and giving themselves a nice scratch. If you live in a region with landmines, these clever rodents may save your life and your livelihood.

[Oh, and let's get one thing out of the way right off the rat... er, bat: "they are too light to detonate a mine by themselves if they step on it."]

The HeroRATS are currently deployed in Mozambique where they have enabled over one thousand families to reclaim their land. They have also helped with clearing areas so that power lines can be passed through – so bringing electricity which would not otherwise have been possible to over ten thousand local citizens.

Read the whole thing here. H/T: Nag on the Lake.

Best idea ever

Heaven on earth: the Santa Rosa Plateau, much as it looked 200 years ago. Before the Gold Rush, a Spaniard wrote that it was possible to ride from one end of the San Fernando Valley to the other and never be out from under the shade of a giant oak. [Click for big.]

In the top ten of best ideas ever, at any rate: bulldoze sprawl, return suburban blight to nature. MacArthur Genius Grant for Maria Streshinsky, please!

How’s about a stimulus-started plan to buy up the nation’s foreclosed and empty McMansions and hire out-of-work construction workers to deconstruct them? It’s an idea that could keep giving and giving. Aside from the obvious benefits of employment as the deconstruction took place, de-developers could offset costs by selling used housing materials (recycle!) or donating us able building materials to low-income- housing renovation projects (help the poor!).

De-developers could then restore the housing lot to the area’s original native-growth environment (employ out- of- work landscapers, help the native critters!), have it designated as a conservation easement, and donate it to, say, the Nature Conservancy. Or perhaps the local community could take the lot over for the construction of playgrounds or the planting of victory gardens.

Sounds absolutely perfect to me.

Related:
US Government May Bulldoze 50 Cities; Create More Green Space
US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive
Bulldozing America’s Shrinking Cities

The Cuteness: Christmas Edition

Warning: graphic images of a polar bear attack. Witnesses were powerless to intervene, but not, apparently, powerless to take pictures.

These photos are all from the blog ZooBorns, a cuteness timesink that will make holiday-softened minds even mushier.

Go, baby Speed Hippo, go! I am so GIMPshopping this photo.

Dear little Upala's mother wouldn't care for him, so he was transfered to the Wilhelma Kindergarten for young apes. Wouldn't care for him...?! Who wouldn't want to care for such a precious little baby? Good grief, moms these days...!

All these and a ton more at ZooBorns, where everyone is above average on the cuteness scale. [H/T: MAKE Magazine.]

Mouse has mad skillz

No, not Danger Mouse — this is Brain Storm, the famous Agility Mouse.





Check out the trainer's web site: Mouse Agility - The Official Site.

[H/T: 3quarksdaily.]

Serial mouse-murderer given a pass by speciesist animal rights activists

Are we having fun yet? Pooka "plays" with a mouse. Photo by abux_77.

Al Martinez of the L.A. Times wonders whether Ernie, a serial mouse-killer, will become a target of animal rights activists:

Our cat Ernie killed a mouse the other night and I was terrified.

It is not the first time he has done in mice that have invaded our home, and now I fear he may be targeted by animal rights activists.

I buried the mouse in the dark of night in an unmarked grave and hope that the masked terrorists who attack homes with firebombs in the name of animal welfare realize that the rodent's death was simply the result of the age-old game of cat and mouse.

You can read the rest of Martinez's most excellent take on animal rights violence here.

Odd that cats get a pass but researchers are firebombed. What do the activists who shun silk and honey think when they read about the tarantula hawk, a wasp that lays her egg on the body of a live, paralyzed spider so that her larva will have a ready supply of fresh food? Do mice caught by cats matter less than mice used in medical studies? The movement to "end all animal suffering" is a sea of double standards, if you ask me. "Madman's logic," writes Al Martinez.

Firebombings: researchers targeted at UC Santa Cruz

"Antiscience violence," the University of California calls it. "Domestic terrorism," says the FBI. Several days after his name appeared on an apparent hit list of "animal abusing" scientists, UC Santa Cruz biologist David Feldheim was awakened by the blast of a firebomb. The device exploded on his front porch at 5:40 Saturday morning. Above, firefighter Cody Muhly checks the damage. [Photo from the NY Times.]

Fliers identifying 13 UCSC scientists, some of whom use mice, fruit flies and other nonprimate creatures in their research, were discovered at Caffe Pergolesi on Tuesday. The fliers say, "Animal abusers everywhere beware; we know where you live; we know where you work; we will never back down until you end your abuse."

The names, home addresses, home phone numbers and photos of researchers were published on the fliers.

The firebomb at the Feldheim residence melted the front door frame and filled the house with smoke. Dr. Feldheim, his wife and their two children escaped on a fire ladder from a second-story window. A car belonging to a second UC researcher was blown up on campus at the same time the Feldheim home was attacked. FBI officials are expected to take over the case today.

Statement from the animal-rights house o' crazy:

While a spokesman said he didn't know who committed the act, the Woodland Hills-based Animal Liberation Front called the attacks a "necessary" act, just like those who fought against civil rights injustices. Spokesman Dr. Jerry Vlasak showed no remorse for the family or children who were targeted.

"If their father is willing to continue risking his livelihood in order to continue chopping up animals in a laboratory then his children are old enough to recognize the consequences,'' said Vlasak, a former animal researcher who is now a [non-practicing] trauma surgeon. "This guy knows what he is doing. He knows that every day that he goes into the laboratory and hurts animals that it is unreasonable not to expect consequences."

Clark, the Santa Cruz police captain, said it was "unconscionable'' for anyone to defend such acts: "To put this on par with any of the human rights issues is an absolute insult to the integrity of the people who fought and went through the human rights movement. This is what people do when they have an inability to articulate their point in any constructive way. They resort to primal acts of violence. Any reasonable person would need a logic transplant to begin to understand this level of degraded thinking."

Brian Israel, a UCSC senior pursuing a legal studies degree, lives a block from Village Circle on Moore Street. The 21-year-old checked out his neighbor's house Sunday. He called the attacks "hypocritical."

"If you're against killing animals, but you're trying to kill humans, there's no logic to it," Israel said. "It doesn't make sense to hurt people. I'm just thankful no one got hurt."

"Just like those who fought against civil rights injustices"? To paraphrase the great Yogi Berra: If Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive today, he'd be spinning in his grave. Read the rest in the San Jose Mercury News.

NatGeo's "Animals Adrift"

National Geographic posted this memorable image by photographer Joe Raedle, who must have been in a boat. Check out the galleries [Animals Adrift (June, 2008); New Orleans People, Pets Flee Flood (August, 2005); California Fires Force Animal Evacuation (October 24, 2007)] here. From the link:

In recent days heavy rains and failed levees have fueled the worst Midwest flooding in 15 years, killing 24 people and claiming an unknown number of pets, livestock, and wildlife.

Over at Pet Connection, Christie posted links for those wishing to donate and/or volunteer to help flood victims. [Wise, if cynical, remark in the comments section: "I would caution everyone to employ the utmost skepticism about any individual’s or organization’s self-accounting of their own disaster heroics. Especially when done in the vicinity of a PayPal button."]

Edited to add: The Boston Globe online has a great new blog called The Big Picture: News Stories in Photographs. The editor is Alan Taylor, who has a keen eye for the indelible photo. You can check out some mind-boggling shots of the Midwest floods here.

Industrial farms: "animal husbandry has been turned into animal abuse"

Where good fruits and veggies grow up. Where beef should come from. My blog: where dangling prepositions hang out.

You know sustainable agriculture is going mainstream when the NY Times [editorial: The Worst Way of Farming], Johns Hopkins and the Pew researchers put factory farms on the front burner. The report Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America is a joint project of the Pew Charitable Trusts and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

From the Pew Commission:

The current industrial farm animal production (IFAP) system often poses unacceptable risks to public health, the environment and the welfare of the animals themselves, according to an extensive 2½-year examination conducted by the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production (PCIFAP), in a study released today.

Commissioners have determined that the negative effects of the IFAP system are too great and the scientific evidence is too strong to ignore. Significant changes must be implemented and must start now. And while some areas of animal agriculture have recognized these threats and have taken action, it is clear that the industry has a long way to go.

"Food animals that are treated well and provided with at least minimum accommodation of their natural behaviors and physical needs are healthier and safer for human consumption."

(Washington, DC – May 8, 2008) The response to the Pew Commission on Industrial FarmProduction’s (PCIFAP) final report and recommendations has been overwhelming. Influential elected officials, health, environmental and farm organizations and newspaper editorial boards are weighing in on the Commission’s report and recommendations, which, if followed, could help alleviate the negative effects the industrial farm animal production system currently poses on public health, the environment, rural communities and animal welfare. The report garnered so much attention that the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy invited PCIFAP staff to debrief several of its staff members last week on the Commission’s report. [Source]

Hope springs eternal [sigh].

The right way:

Photo by Richard Morgenstein for Morris Grassfed Beef. 'Our cows are never put into feedlots. They are born, raised and finished on California’s breathtaking Central Coast rangelands.'

Want a dog? Go to class!

It's the law in Switzerland: beginning this fall [and fully in effect by 2010], before you acquire a dog you must take a class on dog care. Then, during your first year with your new canine companion, the two of you must attend a training class so that you will be able to "control your animal in all situations of daily life." [The law already requires dogs in Geneva, Switzerland to be muzzled in public parks: see photo.] You must be un chef dominant, because your dog is un animal hiérarchique, descendant du loup.

Dust off Google Translator [if necessary] and check out this link: Les futurs propriétaires de chiens doivent désormais suivre une formation théorique et pratique.

More here: New Swiss law protects rights of 'social' animals. As opposed to... you know.

Foie gras returns, non-stick never leaves (your bloodstream)

It's foie gras city. Chicago Tribune photo by Charles Cherney.

What can I say — the stuff's delicious. [It's even possible to produce foie gras without force-feeding the geese [ducks, on this side of the Atlantic] whose fatty livers wind up on the plate, according to farmers in Spain.] In any event, Chicago overturned its two-year ban on foie gras this week, to much gnashing of teeth on both sides of the debate.

"If I had to come back today as an American farm animal destined for the dinner table, I'd choose to be a Moulard duck raised for my fat liver in a heartbeat."

Chefs Anthony Bourdain and Michael Ruhlman sound off:

Ruhlman: In my opinion, the four farms that grow ducks for foie gras in this country -- especially the largest ones, in New York and California -- they ought to be made examples of by our legislators, not as places of animal torture, but rather as models of humane farming. Unlike factory hogs, which have their tails painfully cut off and never see the light of day before winding up as cheap grocery store pork, the billions of chickens that live packed wing to wing and live in their own ammonia-reeking waste, or the feed-lot antibiotic-laced beef -- if I had to come back today as an American farm animal destined for the dinner table, I'd choose to be a Moulard duck raised for my fat liver in a heartbeat.

Bourdain: Yes, it seems to me that the activists for whom the suffering of animals is unbearable, their lobbying against foie gras is not just bad time management, it's cynical time management.

Billions of chickens, hogs and beef are being harmed -- that's carnage on a far vaster scale -- but big agribusiness is a difficult and powerful target. They don't get much bang for their buck, from a political standpoint. It's much easier to go for the small artisanal farmer with little resources and no lobbying group in D.C.

Read more from Ruhlman and Bourdain here.

And while I'm on the subject of food: how about those chemicals in non-stick cookware, eh? From The Ethicurean:

The study released last week also included some new and disturbing findings about the health effects of PFOA. Residents living near the DuPont plant who had high levels of PFOA in their bloodstreams tended to have lower levels of a protein that helps the body fight off bacteria and viruses. They also had reduced thyroid function. In kids, high levels of PFOA were associated with high cholesterol levels. Researchers fear this could lead to obesity and heart disease risk later in life … as if exposure to the rest of our dysfunctional food system wasn’t bad enough.

These impacts are scary not just because of what they’ve done to the workers and residents studied, but because PFOA appears to be one of the most “persistent” chemicals — chemicals that do not break down into less-harmful compounds over time — that scientists have come across. That means that the impacts they’re seeing now could be just the beginning. Here’s the Globe and Mail again:

In an ironic turn for chemicals that are used to make non-stick products… PFOA [and PFOS, a related chemical] have been found to have an extreme affinity to stick to living things and, once absorbed, are incredibly hard to shed, often taking decades to be excreted. “We’ve never seen them degrade under any relevant environmental conditions,” said Scott Mabury, a chemistry professor at the University of Toronto. “I often say they redefine persistence as we know it.”

Awesome.

It was not until May of 2000, 21 years after it first began testing workers, that 3M announced it was ceasing the use of PFOA. The reason? New tests had found it in the blood of people around the globe, including in places far from manufacturing facilities. Here’s 3M exec Charles Reich in the Washington Post the day after the recall: “The surprise wasn’t that it was in our workers — that’s something we’ve known for some time. It was a complete surprise that it was in the blood bank supplies” of the U.S., Japan, Europe, and China. Double awesome. And by the way, by “awesome,” I mean “mindblowingly terrifying.”

Great-grandmother's cast-iron cookware is starting to look real good.

Look! Something shiny!

I am easily distracted.




Dogs with Cones:




That's Bingo, top, and Pogo.


Ugly Overload [you've all been subjected to Cute Overload, yes?]:


That is SO cool. [As always, click for big.]

The natives are restless

Shark 1, seal 0. Photo by Chris and Monique Fallows, via The Telegraph.

Grizzlies, mountain lions, rattlesnakes, coyotes, sharks... Do you ever get the feeling it would be safer to stay home? Well, kids, let me disabuse you of that notion: 402 Americans drowned in their bathtubs in 2004; 1,638 died after falls on stairs or steps; 596 suffocated in bed, oy. So go for a swim in the ocean, already. Go for a hike in the mountains. I'll be right here when you get back, because I'm, ah, expecting a call. And then I'm — washing the dogs. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Seriously, sharks don't scare me a bit [and why should they, when I stay as far from the ocean as possible]. More precautions: I don't pick up rattlers, which effectively eliminates the odds of my being bitten by a poisonous snake. Coyotes leave me and my stock alone [knock wood]. Bears and lions, on the other hand, scare. me. to. pieces. PSA: When house-sitting alone at a remote ranch in lion country, do not, under any circumstances, watch The Ghost and the Darkness. OMG, that was like the scariest movie ever.

I live in the 'burbs, and a week or so ago a big mountain lion was killed crossing the freeway about four miles from my house. [Wildlife corridors in this neck of SoCal? Surely you jest.] A coworker saw the lion's body at a local ranger station, waiting to be shipped to a taxidermist [the lion, not my friend]. He said the animal was scarcely marked from the impact, huge -- "seven feet, 180 lb" -- and beautiful. The lion made it safely across the westbound 10 but was killed trying to cross the eastbound lanes: that is, he was traveling from my side of the freeway back to the foothills/forest side. I wonder how much [if anything] last year's fires have to do with this activity. All you big predators stay on the Fawnskin side of the lake this summer, please.

Shark links, because big white sharks are amazing:

Killer was great white shark

Shark research in Northern California's Farallon Islands

From The Devil's Teeth:

According to Scot and Peter, the Queen Annihilator of Surfboards was a shark named Stumpy. Stumpy was nineteen feet long and weighed five thousand pounds, and when she was in residence, she ruled the Farallones. "She was the only shark that I think understood who we were, what we were trying to do," Peter recalled. "And she didn't care for it. When Scot was first putting out the decoys Stumpy would just come up and destroy them, more because she didn't like them than because she was fooled by their silhouettes."

[...]

Stumpy patrolled a swath of sea along the east side of the island near the main boat launching spot at East Landing. For prey, this was not an advisable route onto shore. "No seal gets by her," Peter said. And while other sharks would take twenty minutes or more to consume their kills, Stumpy could polish off a five-hundred-pound elephant seal in three minutes flat. Though the distinctively cropped tail fin that earned Stumpy her name hadn't been spotted for several years, Scot and Peter still talked about her with a respect that bordered on awe.

Monterey Bay Aquarium White Shark Research Project [we're not supposed to call them "great whites" -- it's as bad as "sea gulls"]

Apex Predators
[For the two people who may not have seen it: the Apex Predators site has breathtaking photos of great white sharks hunting seals off the South African Coast.]

Coyote and rattlesnake posts in the pipeline.

World Migratory Bird Day

Read more here. [H/T to the most excellent Mike's Birding & Digiscoping Blog.]

Also: be sure to check out the terrific Cornell Lab of Ornithology site, the eBird site and, of course, Audubon.

"A reminder that medical research can change lives"

Thanks to Caveat for directing readers to a surgeon/scientist's look at the use of animals in medical research. Bad scientific arguments in the service of 'animal rights' activism is the title, and the author is an oncologist who blogs under the name Orac. His post begins:

One of the greatest threats to the preclinical research necessary for science-based medicine today is animal rights activism. The magnitude of the problem came to the forefront again last month with the news that animal rights terrorists tried to enter the home of a researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) whose research uses mice to study breast cancer and neurologic disease while she and her husband were having a birthday party for one of their children and assaulted her husband, who had gone to the front of the house to confront them. This unrelenting attack on the use of animals in research is primarily based on a belief that animals and humans should have equal rights and that eating meat or even having pets is viewed as immoral. However, increasingly, I seem to notice animal rights activists trying to use science to justify their beliefs. In other words, it is not enough to use ethical arguments; they feel they must argue that animal research is bad science.

Orac mentions a hero of his, Dr. Judah Folkman:

My favorite example to cite when I hear the argument that other methods besides animal research can do better than animal research in helping us understand disease (or, in its more sophisticated form, that animals may have been needed a few decades ago to discover, say, insulin, but our understanding has advanced to the point where they are no longer needed) comes from my field and my area of research interest. It also happens to come from my scientific hero, Dr. Judah Folkman, who passed away suddenly in January. It shows an area of cancer biology whose importance would have been incredibly difficult to model, appreciate, or target for therapy without mouse models of cancer. That area, of course, is tumor angiogenesis, and Dr. Folkman did his pioneering work that has now resulted in drugs like Avastin and other antiangiogenic drugs that are making it to market now and making a real impact on cancer. Dr. Folkman did it through an ingenious strategy that began from the clinical observation that sometimes tumor metastases appear shortly after the operation to remove the primary tumor.

Read the rest here, and check out the comments as well.

As it happens, there is an article in today's NY Times that mentions Dr. Folkman. In A Daring Treatment, a Little Girl's Survival, reporter Denise Grady writes:

Melanie was 9 months old when her parents faced an agonizing decision. She had already had two operations for a malignant brain tumor [see x-ray above], and doctors could not be sure they had removed all the cancer. She needed more treatment, but standard chemotherapy offered little hope in exchange for its harsh side effects. And yet the McDaniels knew that if they did nothing, the odds were high that the tumor would come back.

“It won’t save her, but it may help other people,” her father, Paul McDaniel, told me in an interview for a Science Times article published in April 2002. Then he paused and added, “Maybe it will save her.”

After the article was published, I was afraid to call the McDaniels again. I didn’t think Melanie would survive.

Recently, Mr. McDaniel sent me an e-mail message. “Melanie is now 7 years old, attending first grade, and doing very well,” he wrote. “The doctors told us last year that they do not see any residual tumor in her brain. Their original diagnosis was that her tumor had no known cure.”

What had prompted him to get in touch was the death on Jan. 14 of Dr. Judah Folkman, the researcher at Dana-Farber whose work had led to Melanie’s treatment. Mr. McDaniel wrote that he wanted “to celebrate the accomplishments of Dr. Folkman, who faced resistance on his ideas that, by the grace of God, cured my daughter of an incurable brain tumor.”

May Melanie go from strength to strength, and may Dr. Folkman's name be a blessing. Thanks again to Caveat for the link [and for fighting the good fight in the Great White North].

Blessing of the Animals, Part II

Wake me when it's over: a pup sleeps during the blessing of the animals in Madrid [slide show]. Click on photos to enlarge.

Blogger QoE [knitter of green socks I covet, and parent of kids that fit in Christmas stockings] wondered, "So how did Minnesota get this mixed up with St. Francis? We do the blessing of the animals in October." ["Frozen holy water," heh.] As it turns out, lots of churches have a Blessing of the Animals on October 4, St. Francis' feast day. You can see the 2007 schedule here. That last website, you'll note, is run by Franciscans of the order of friars minor.

"Order of friars minor" has a cool Sword in the Stone, Brother Cadfael vibe, and in fact the Franciscans brought the tradition of blessing animals -- on St. Anthony's feast day -- to the New World not too long after the days of real knights and squires and crusades and codes of chivalry. The custom of blessing animals on St. Anthony's Day, based on the saint's legendary compassion for his fellow creatures, was already established in Europe and soon became tradition in Latin America.

You'll notice in the photo on the right that Anthony is portrayed, as he generally is, with a pig at his feet [photo by Gregorio Fernández].

Legend says that whenever the saint saw an injured animal he would heal it, and on one occasion he was approached by a sow seeking help for her blind piglets. After Anthony cured their blindness the sow never left his side and protected him from harm. Another legend says that when Anthony visited fellow saint and hermit Paul in the desert, a crow carried food to them in its beak, and when Paul died, lions and other animals helped Anthony prepare the grave. Velázquez illustrated both scenes in one painting, below.


Francis of Assisi was born some 800 years after Anthony of the Egyptian desert, and founded what is now one of the largest male religious orders in the world. He called the animals "my brothers and sisters," and he loved nature, believing that if one loves God one must love all God's creation. How perfect for the age of ecology and environmentalism, no? With encouragement from the friars minor, many churches here in the U.S. and in Latin America now bless the animals on October 4, St. Francis' Day. And good luck finding an Anthony of Egypt medal for your dog here in the States. My pups have St. Francis medals in their Quiet Spots [even though my own first allegiance is to the Parking Space God, and yes, I know I'll be a valet parking attendant in hell for that. At least the dogs should be OK].

For those interested in blessings of hunting hounds, horses and more, Diana Guerrero has written an entire book on animal blessings. Read more here.

I bought the St. Francis medals for my pack online from a store that no longer carries them -- great little medallions. Other St. Francis medals are available from Diana Guerrero's site, though I'll offer a correction: the St. Anthony/St.Francis medal actually shows St. Anthony of Padua, a hugely popular Franciscan contemporary of Francis, in a characteristic pose with the infant Jesus.

To paraphrase Francis, May the Lord [whoever your lord might be] give you and your animals peace and all kinds of good blessings.

Blessing of the Animals

"Whether you're a cat, dog, tortoise or spider, today's your day. Visit St. Anthony to get your blessing." Click photo for a larger view.

The tradition of blessing animals began, so they say, with Saint Anthony [not St. Anthony of Padua and the eponymous California mission, the other one] in the third or fourth century. Today, January 17, is his feast day, and in Madrid and other communities the dogs, cats, fish, birds, hamsters and iguanas are lining up -- along with turtles, sheep, tarantulas, horses and hermit crabs -- to receive their blessings. [As it happens, Anthony is considered one of the first Christian hermits.]

The photo above and the smaller one on the left were snagged from El País, where you can find an article [in Spanish -- Google Translate Beta will be glad to translate for you] about Madrid's celebration. In L.A. the blessing of the animals is held in April. Way too cold in January, she said on a beautiful 63F day ;~)