The end of an era?

By Andy Young

The 100-year agreement designating the bunny as Easter’s official animal has just expired. Until recently it was assumed the continuation of the adorable cottontail’s reign as the holiday’s trademark was a mere formality.

However, determined digging by attorneys skilled in trademark law has revealed the 1925 contract included a clause allowing, after a century has gone by, a one-time opportunity for either of the involved parties to “opt out” of the agreement.

Bunny fans are concerned, and with reason. Easter’s original owners sold the holiday to a consortium of greeting card conglomerates, chocolatiers, and plush toy manufacturers in the late 1970s, and hammering out a new deal with a cartel consisting of a bunch of corporate CEOs is a lot different than negotiating with a genial pope and the Vatican.

Easter has become a multi-billion-dollar industry, and there’s no shortage of groups and/or individuals wanting a piece of it. Those trying to get Easter to re-up with the bunny have their work cut out for them. The competition is fierce, as plenty of animals are vying for what is a potential gold mine, not to mention a public relations bonanza.

“Who says bunnies are cuter than squirrels, chipmunks, or hedgehogs?” asks Avaricious Q. Farquhar, an attorney representing a variety of small animals.

American Avian Association president Harold Rapacious called bunnies “Yesterday’s news,” dismissively adding, “they’ve had their day.” The AAA represents groups advocating for both the Easter Parrot and the Easter Dove.

Adds Nestor Skroobawl, public relations director for a group touting the Easter Eagle, “When’s the last time a bunny laid any eggs, let alone the Easter kind?”

Ching-Ching Yeah, spokesperson for the Easter Panda Association declares, “The ugliest panda is infinitely more adorable than the cutest bunny.”

“What have rabbits ever done besides rob Mr. McGregor’s garden?” asks Conrad Eurograbber, head of a group hoping a lovable, drooling service animal, the Easter St. Bernard, will gallop in with a basket of Easter eggs each April and become the holiday’s future logo.

“It’s high time Easter ends their unholy alliance with these unseemly creatures!” huffs Eunice Priggish, who has campaigned for the Easter bunny’s excommunication ever since “Bunnies” became an integral part of the Playboy empire in 1960.

Attacks on the Easter Bunny aren’t limited to the Northern Hemisphere. “You call those hops?” scoffs Laughlin Downunder, spokesperson for an Australian group bidding to replace the Easter Bunny with the Easter Kangaroo. “Compared to one of our ‘roos, bunnies don’t hop; they limp!”

Individuals or groups pushing to replace the bunny include proponents of the Easter Elephant, the Easter Tiger, the Easter Flamingo, the Easter Weasel, the Easter Jellyfish, and the Easter Giraffe, among others. “Sure, we’re a longshot,” says Spiros Noncomposmentis, who represents a group trying to install an unlikely holiday animal. “But if we don’t point out the attractiveness of the Easter Jackal, who will?”

Says one industry insider: “Those rabbit people have the toughest job this side of selling pork in Saudi Arabia.”

The Easter Bunny’s spokesperson, Virtuous D. Fender, vigorously defends her client. “Rabbits in general and the Easter Bunny in particular are inherent parts of society. Who’d watch a movie called ‘Who Framed Roger Raccoon’?” she asks rhetorically. “And seriously, could Bugs Beaver have dominated Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam? Buck teeth aren’t everything; long ears matter, too.”

Ms. Fender admits, though, that with billions of Easter industry dollars at stake, she and her leporine clients are facing an uphill battle.

“There’s no question it’s dog-eat-dog out there,” she says of the current competition for official Easter animal status.

She’d better hope it’s not jackal-eat-bunny. <

Andy Young: Going nuts over acorns

By Andy Young

Recently I was entertaining company when a sudden noise coming from outside the house made my guest pause mid-sentence and murmur, with a concerned expression, “That sounds like gunfire.” Chuckling knowingly, I explained it was just the sound of acorns falling onto my garage’s roof.

Moments later we heard a sudden rat-a-tat-tat that sounded like machine gun fire. I don’t want friends thinking I reside in a war zone, but that second volley was indeed alarming. Thankfully, it was just another fusillade of acorns coming down in rapid fire fashion on my neighbor's metal roof.

Were acorns locusts, people would be describing what’s currently going on in southern Maine in biblical terms. There is no overstating how many of these ovine nuts are being produced by the oak trees along my street.

There’s always a reason for what Mother Nature does, even if human beings can’t always understand her rationale. I know next to nothing about dendrology (the study of trees; I looked it up), but that ignorance allows me to make up my own explanations regarding why certain things occur (and what’s going to happen as a result) without being contradicted by any pesky documented facts about the subject. Intelligence and education can be awfully inconvenient at times, but fortunately I don’t have that problem when it comes to science.

Or in many other areas, now that I think of it.

I’ve decided that because of all these acorns there’s going to be a bumper crop of small rodents around here next year, since they’re currently stockpiling acorns, and will no doubt be gorging themselves on them this winter.

I’d like to take this opportunity to invite any winged predators who can read this to take up residence rent-free in any tree in my neighborhood. It’d be nice to thin the chipmunk population, since they’ve been a local scourge for the past few years. Given that most of these objectionable rodents will be all but inert next summer thanks to their upcoming gluttony, well, it’s likely that any nearby owls, hawks, or falcons will be looking at a potential cornucopia thanks to the hundreds of morbidly obese chipmunks and squirrels that are all but certain to be waddling around next year. It’ll be like shooting fish in a barrel for any flying carnivore.

The only reason the local rodent population hasn't exploded even further is that there’s competition when it comes to consuming the ongoing oak-provided bounty. Pigeons, ducks, woodpeckers and other birds go for acorns because they’re high in vitamins, carbohydrates, and good fats. Blue Jays have been known to bury acorns and go back to recover them months later.

Bears, possums, and raccoons are all acorn-consumers, too. Another fun fact: acorns can make up 25 percent of a deer’s autumn diet.

So why can’t hungry humans eat some of this fall’s acorn bounty? Well, they taste pretty bitter for one thing. They also contain tannins, which are complex chemical substances derived from phenolic acids. Tannins are considered nutritionally undesirable for humans, even though they can, in low doses, stimulate the immune system and help lower blood pressure and cholesterol. Unfortunately, ingesting too many of them can irritate the stomach lining and intestines, which can cause kidney damage. Tannins can also be toxic to certain animals, so don’t feed acorns to your dog, horse, pig, or sheep.

Eating acorns can harm humans, yet mice, squirrels, chipmunks and deer can munch on them to their little hearts’ content. How does that make sense?

I wonder if an owl or a hawk could take down an acorn-bloated possum, deer, or bear? <

Insight: Blame the dog when things go wrong

Fancy, age 5

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Thanks to my stepson Daniel we now have a new living room rug after the old one was soiled by our dog Fancy.

The evil deed was perpetrated one evening last week when we were the dinner guests of Daniel and his fiancé Mckayla. By the following day, the rug smelled terrible, and my wife Nancy and I decided to pitch it out.

The rug was old and had previously been used in Nancy’s classroom for several of her first-grade classes at school. Fortunately, Daniel had given us his apartment rug when he and Mckayla got together, and it happened to fit our living room perfectly.

This is not the first time Fancy has been caught ruining our home furnishings. As a puppy she chewed rat holes on both ends of our sofa and once while we were at work, she got out of her crate and tore the covers off several sofa cushions.

When we moved from New Hampshire to Maine, she took a liking to the taste of the baseboards in our first-floor office resulting in them having to be covered. We don’t mind her looking out the dining room window in the summer but learned quickly to keep the window shut as she ripped the screen trying to get at squirrels that she spotted in the neighbor’s yard across the driveway.

Can’t begin to tell you how many television remotes we went through before we got the expensive smart TV. Since that smart TV remote is costly, we now make sure we either take the remote with us or place it higher than the dog can reach when we get a phone call or are summoned away for a minute to the kitchen.

The old TV is now in the spare bedroom, but its $16 remotes were an ongoing order for a while from Amazon after Fancy chewed and mangled them. Same thing for the DVD remote ($12). By my estimate, we went through eight TV remotes and four DVD remotes, courtesy of our dog.

She also was caught chewing on one of my wife’s school yearbooks and has been apprehended numerous times stealing papers from my desk and frequently from Nancy’s desk in our office. Quite often the papers she grabs and dashes away with to chew on are student’s school papers that have been graded, but Fancy is also known to snatch paper clips, rubber bands, ballpoint pens and pencils.

That usually ensues in a frantic chase around the dining room table or down the hall into the living room to extract the items from her mouth before she swallows them.

Early one morning last year, I had toasted a piece of raisin bread and had just sat down at my desk to eat it when Nancy called out from the bathroom and asked me to bring her a clean towel. I was only gone for 15 seconds but in that length of time, Fancy had jumped up and grabbed the piece of toast from my desk and was swallowing it whole when I had arrived back there.

Because raisins are highly poisonous to dogs, I was advised to bring her immediately to the 24/7 animal emergency facility and what typically takes a drive of about 40 minutes was made in half that time. After having her stomach pumped and being put on an IV, the veterinarians released her after I paid the $585 bill for treatment. And for the record, since then I have not had one slice of raisin toast.

This dog is a serial mischief maker. She’s been known to go through your coat pockets to extract Kleenex placed in them and she will scoop up leather gloves and race by you at breakneck speed to the other room with her prize possessions.  

Fancy will knock the toilet paper roll off its holder in the bathroom and strew it all over the house. She’s always vigilant for socks, napkins and wash cloths fresh out of the dryer awaiting folding before being stored and put away.

Once in New Hampshire we visited a couple that sold alpaca merchandise and I purchased Nancy some warm alpaca mittens to wear in the winter to school. Those lasted less than a month before having a hole torn in them by our dog.

If you are careless with your food, Fancy is laser-focused and has been known to grab cheeseburgers, tuna fish sandwiches and an assortment of snacks and crackers right from your plate at both the kitchen counter and from the dinner table.

We’ve tried exiling her to her crate during dinner and putting her on a leash while we’re eating, but nothing so far has worked. I’ve found that it’s hard to guard your food, cut your meat and pass the potatoes all with one hand on the leash and one foot stepping on the leash to restrain her impulses.

The moral of this tale is that new dog owners (like we were at one time) should be rigorous in training their furry friends or else they could create a rascal like we have. But then it’s truly all the dog’s fault. <