Sorry, but my father went to Alaska when he was just 18 with his cousin to make a good living and they both almost starved to death up there.  He was fascinated with the Nature Against Man stories and read lots of Robert Service poems and Jack London books.  So I am infused with the fact that Nature may be beautiful but it can also kill.  So the term "natural" to me doesn't ever connote "warm and fuzzy and kind".  

As we were growing up my hunter father (who lived on venison and trout and beans which he forever after hated during WWII) rescued tons of animals.  We always seemed to be caring for some bird with a broken wing or baby jack rabbit whose mom ended up as road kill.  Some mammals under stress will EAT their young as a survival mechanism.  

Some mammals are not so great the first time they have a litter as evidenced by our rabbits.  We had two males and one female and I SWEAR the males were NEVER out of their cages at the same time as the female.  Yet they managed somehow.  The first litter of 10 babies was a miserable failure.  She hopped out of her box and never allowed them to nurse.  I hate to admit it but my mother supplemented the second litter with dropper feeding cow's milk and they all survived. They probably would have done better had my mother not dropper fed them, but we'll never know because she was too afraid to trust the mommy rabbit to fully allow them to nurse.   

Growing up, our family room was often filled with newspapers (no wee wee pads back then) for whatever litter of whatever mammal we were currently caring for was crawling around alternately exploring and running back to mom.  

Apparently, when my father was around 7 years old, he convinced the town doctor to fix the broken wing of a pelican when the doctor was sufficiently drunk and convinced all the other boys to fish for the pelican for an entire year.  He claims he was beaten by his mother when she found the abandoned seal cub he rescued in the bathtub.  And he had a pet raccoon in the logging camp.  Quite a trick since they make the WORST pets.  He's still fascinated by animals.  Recently he had discovered that the crow he had been teaching to come to him for a piece of bread had stuffed up his drainpipe with the bread.  So he abandoned his crow training program.

My brother followed suit by purchasing a surplus zoo -- fox.  They also make terrible pets.  We had a basset hound poodle mix who didn't have the poodle smarts.  The would tease the dog into chasing him around our house and then slip through a railing between our kitchen and family room. The dog didn't fit and would always crash into the railing.  The fox ran away and joined the other gray foxes in the forest behind our house.  He was easy to spot since he was red.  The deer hunters knew him quite well and he lived a long life in the wild where he belonged.  I had a laugh over a radio show I was half listening to where they were trying to domestic foxes.  They were 20 something generations in (if my listening was to be trusted) and the foxes were barely started to show signs of being "domesticated".

What I find completely disturbing is that some of the conservation programs are tinkering with the natural rhythms of animals in their reproduction.  The worst was a program about pandas in China where the poor moms were being turned into baby making machines.  They used ABRUPT weaning so they could reproduce faster.  The panda moms were so upset they were physically ill after each weaning.  

Best
Susan Burger

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