Mark Twain wasn’t just a riverboat pilot, a raconteur, a mustache pioneer, and one of the great early American celebrity-authors: He was also an animal rights activist. The new Twain compilation Mark Twain’s Book of Animals (University of California Press) explores Twain’s treatment of animals —in literature and in life—throughout his career and arrives at an inescapable conclusion: He was a softie when it came to the beasts. Twain may have come to largely despise what he famously called “the damned human race,” yet he turned into a puddle of mush at the sight of a kitten.

In her introduction, editor Shelley Fisher Fishkin traces Twain’s sympathy for animals to his youth and especially to his mother, who kept a house full of cats with names like Blatherskite and Belchazar and once soundly berated a man in the street for beating his horse. Fisher Fishkin also digs up evidence that a formative experience for Twain was his shooting of a bird as a child, an act he deeply regretted. In the previously unpublished “Family Sketch,” he writes:

. . . I shot a bird that sat in a high tree, with its head tilted back, and pouring out a grateful song from an innocent heart. It toppled from its perch and came floating down limp and forlorn and fell at my feet, its song quenched and its unoffending life extinguished. I had not needed that harmless creature, I had destroyed it wantonly, and I felt all that an assassin feels, of grief and remorse when his deed comes home to him and he wishes he could undo it and have his hands and his soul clean again from accusing blood.

Fisher Fishkin goes on to follow the threads of Twain’s animal fascinations and sympathies in his writings, from his early celebrated story “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” to his “Letter to the London Anti-Vivisection Society,” which is perhaps the best known expression of his views on animal cruelty. “From 1899 until his death in 1910,” writes Fisher Fishkin, “Mark Twain lent his pen to reform efforts on both sides of the Atlantic and became the best-known American author—and, indeed, the most famous American celebrity in any field—to give outspoken, public support to agitation for animal welfare.”

When we blogged about rogue taxidermist Sarina Brewer, we thought we had bumped up against the outer limits of the taxidermist universe. We were wrong. Meet WTF Taxidermy, an online community organized on Livejournal to "discuss and share photos of taxidermy at its worst—funny anatomical abominations, ridiculous eBay auctions, cheesy novelty mounts, and just plain bad taxidermy! We also want to showcase the best and most unusual taxidermy mounts, including highly realistic or imaginative mounts as well as rogue taxidermy and mythological animals."

(Thanks, Art Fag City.)

Image courtesy of  Sarina Brewer .   

Fireworks: Who could hate them? Plenty of people, it turns out:

Chris Conway hates fireworks for their “toxic consequences to our personal and environmental health.”

Troy Patterson at Slate hates fireworks for their “pomposity, aggression, triumphalism, and hubris.”

The U.K. campaign Ban the Bang hates fireworks because “all kinds of wild and domestic animals, but also children, the elderly and those of a nervous disposition can be seriously affected by modern, excessive fireworks.”

And finally, the blogger TexasLiberal hates fireworks because they’re dangerous, there’s a drought in his area (Houston), and you ought to be reading a book instead.

Or making fireworks out of yarn.

Happy Fourth of July. Kaboom!

Sources: Toxic Fireworks, Slate, Ban the Bang, TexasLiberal, Craft

Image courtesy of Chris Conway.

Some people never leave home without their phone or wallet. Minneapolis artist Sarina Brewer never leaves home without a cooler, a hacksaw, and rubber gloves. That’s because she’s always at the ready to find road kill and other “pet casualties” to use as art subjects for her special brand of “rogue taxidermy,” which includes winged monkeys, conjoined squirrels and rabbits, and even a chicken-carp-lamb combo, Bust magazine reports.

She essentially creates fanciful, often irreverent sculptures by splicing together the bodies of various taxidermic animals, or, in other instances, transforming the creature into a freak-show mutant by adding an extra head, leg, or other body part.... Unlike traditional taxidermists, who preserve only animal hides, Brewer tries to avoid wasting the innards. As a consequence, she makes a fair amount of carcass art, which she creates by chemically treating muscle tissue before fashioning them into a whimsical pose—like a sculpture of dancing squirrel guts.

Brewer herself is fascinating, having grown up in a family so fond of their deceased pets that they relocated the remains whenever they moved. That same sense of memorializing has been a key influence in her work. The article isn’t online, but you can at least check out some of Brewer’s mutant creations in Bust's mini-mag if you scroll to pages 52-55.

Source: Bust

Image courtesy of Sarina Brewer.   

DAPRA-funded Berkeley researchers have tricked out a beetle with tiny electrodes that allow them to control its flight, reports California. Next step: Outfitting the insect with onboard sensors that relay information back to mission control. Hello, coleopteran espionage!

This certainly isn’t the first time animals have been “pressed into military service,” the University of Berkeley alumni magazine reports. The cyborg beetle is merely the latest in a line of distinguished (also often disastrous and no doubt PETA-enraging) military critters. California did us the courtesy of a recap. Here are a couple of my tragicomic favorites:

The common gerbil. “With their unique ability to smell increased adrenaline in sweat, gerbils had been slated to detect spies and terrorists since WWII. The Israeli internal security force put gerbils to work at the Tel Aviv airport, but cancelled the project when the furry creatures implicated innocent passengers who were just anxious about flying.”

The domestic cat. “The CIA inserted a transmitter and battery pack in a cat and put a microphone in its ear and an antenna on its tail, to eavesdrop on the Soviets during the Cold War. On its first test run, the cat was run over by a taxi before reaching the intended target.”

Source: California

Image by wildxplorer, licensed under Creative Commons.

The majestic whooping crane and the adorable polar bear tend to get plenty of attention from conservationists. Less charismatic animals, like the Choctawhatchee beach mouse (pictured left), need attention, too. In a photo essay for Audubon magazine, photographer Joel Sartore calls attention to the neglected endangered species, including insects, ugly fish, and the American crocodile. “At the heart of the story is this,” Sartore told Audubon, “Do we as a society treat the least among us with dignity and respect?”

Photo courtesy of Joel Sartore.

Source: Audubon

When parents talk about the birds and the bees, it’s usually a metaphor. When scientists talk about the sex lives of animals, the conversation tends to get interesting.

Researchers recently discovered that male chimpanzees give pieces of meat to females in exchange for sex, the BBC reports. For some time, scientists hypothesized about food-for-sex deals, but previous studies tended to look for short-term, payment-on-delivery exchanges. The researchers form the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany found that such exchanges can take place over time. Researcher Cristina Gomes told the BBC that males “might share meat with a female one day, and only copulate with her a day or two later.”

The researchers found that male chimpanzees who shared food with females were able to mate twice as often as the more selfish apes. Gomes thinks the findings could give clues into human evolution, and may provide a link between “good hunting skills and reproductive success.”

Similar food-for-sex exchanges have also been observed in flies. In fact, according to National Geographic, male flies have been known to cheat the system by presenting females with worthless gifts—wrapped up to look like food—to fool females into copulation. The strategy may work in the short-term, but the National Geographic reports: “the female dance flies that received the largest nutritious gifts copulated for a significantly longer amount of time than when given either a small nutritious gift or a larger worthless one.”

Though the strategies are similar, flies tend to be more indiscriminate about their sex lives than the chimpanzees. In Green Porno, Isabella Rossellini said flies “have sex several times a day: any opportunity, any female.”

To see Rossellini’s exploration into the sexual lives of flies, watch the video.

The Encyclopedia of Life, a website that came out earlier this year and crashed almost immediately from a flood of visitors, is a “project to organize and make available via the Internet virtually all information about life present on earth.” With approximately 1.8 million known species on earth, this is a great tool for scientists and students, and it grants open access to anyone who wants to brush up on their knowledge of earth’s creatures, from seals to viruses and everything else in between. 

Sounds great, right? Well, Randy Malamud, writing in The Chronicle Review (subscription or pass required), sees more going on here than an eight-eyed jumping spider, and asks if the digital nature of EOL will “encourage us to appreciate plants and animals more, or spend more time surfing online?” He suggests that the more we cite and arrange plants and animals the less we care about them in their environment—that taxonomy parallels destruction.

He also thinks the animals are out of their element, if you will, as a pin-up for each individual entry. All animals in life are affected by and play a role in their ecosystems. We should consider the role in history they play with human interaction, and their importance of place. An example he gives is Australian Aborigines' use of the imperial blue butterfly. Their host plant, the acacia, provides seeds to the natives as food and its gum as an adhesive for tool building. The butterfly then, is an integral part of the Aborigines' culture, but it's not referenced on the EOL website.

Who is classifying the animals, Malamud argues, tells you more about the human environment than the exotic outside world. "Structuring the natural world meshes with the structure of imperial power," he writes, and he quotes MIT historian Harriet Ritvo: "The classification of animals, is apt to tell us as much about the classifiers as the classified."

Any ecologist will tell you that life on earth is about ecosystems. Malamud thinks one step in the right direction for the website's success may be that “the EOL might take a cue from Facebook or Myspace for an enhanced sense of connectivity.”

Like fish and chips, cell phones and cameras, James Bond’s Aston Martin and stinger missiles, if something works in Great Britain, it might work even better paired with something else. Zoo animals are the same way. Sure, they’re cute, but they’re often desperate-looking and covered in feces. Thermal cameras can help, turning spiders and lions into the Predator-style pictures, featured recently in the British newspaper Telegraph. The critters have a hyper-colored shimmer, and there isn’t a single visible clump of mussed hair. The pictures were taken by an amateur photographer, and can help the zoo’s staff understand how their animals regulate body temperature, but more importantly, they look really cool.

—Morgan Winters