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Note 150.1 zoovival inc 1 of 1
LAOTZU::KELLY 92 lines 4-JAN-1991 16:48
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Greetings,
I belong to Zoovival. I've only been a member for six months,
but then the organization itself is only just two years old.
It's fascinating and I'm still enthralled with it. Maybe my
enthusiasm will die away in time, but right now I'm swept up.
I joined because I want to BREED things. I seem to have this
unconquerable urge toward fecundity. I bred gerbils years back. Lots of fun,
but I couldn't GIVE the buggers away! I bred angora rabbits, but I couldn't
sell them (I gave them away). Then I bred ciclids (a rough-and-tumble tropical
fish, a little gratuitously mean-spirited, but full of intelligence and maternal
feeling). I got so good at it that I was producing 300 babies every couple
months. I had no luck selling them tho, so I'd engage in these acts of what
people in my family call "guerrilla kindness". I'd go to pet stores with several
bags of several hundred fish each and I'd look for kids staring at the fish.
Then I'd give the them a bag and say it didn't matter if they all died because
they'd all die if I flushed them down the toilet anyway, and I knew
they'd provide a good home for them. But some of the mothers gave me these ugly
mother-protecting-child-from-the-nasty-world looks as if I were trying to
entice their kid into a life of crime or something by giving him illegally
caught bags of fish whose intestines were lined with vials of cocaine smuggled
in in the bellies of the fish to evade the DEA, or some such silliness.
(I'm a parent now so I understand their paranoia).
ANYWAY, after raising chickens this summer and getting two and
a half dozen eggs A DAY from the hens I was breeding, I figured I had either
better restrain my urges toward fertility and the increase of the world's
critters, or I had better find a way to sell what I was breeding - at least in
order to make enough dough to pay for the upkeep of the critters. I saw an
ad for Zoovival and it looked like just what I wanted.
Unfortunately, I'm not all that attracted to snakes or
parrots, which are the good sellers of the pet world. I'd rather have tree
frogs or skinks or tortoises or hedgehogs. So, I was looking to breed animals
that don't get breed often, but are still good pets and would be bought by
another weird-animal lover.
The funny thing is, I'm starting my Zoovival project with an
animal that I've been told by reliable friends in the pet industry will NEVER
sell for more than half a buck. But maybe the NEXT species I do will bring in
enough money to support my habit!
I'm starting with a species of mouse from Uganda. In fact, it's
the smallest species of mouse in the world, one of the smallest mammals.
It's called either the MicroMouse or the African Pygmy Mouse. It's partly
arborial and partly a ground dweller. At maturity, it weighs a grand total of
6 grams (one fifth of an ounce). I'd like to wax rhapsodic on how marvelous it
is, but I haven't taken delivery yet of my first pair. Once I get them in
($12.50 each and $40 for shipping! Not mice for snake food!), I'll let anyone
interested know what progress I make, or rather, what progress they make.
I'm not any kind of official publicist for Zoovival, but I'd
recommend it to anyone interested in breeding weird animals whose habitat ranges
from severely threatened to will-be-threatened-as-the-world's-population-grows.
They can set you up with a list of species that Zoovival members breed and
enroll your animals in a stud book (a stud book for mice!) so inbreeding
won't genetically weaken stock which may have to be used to repopulate the
wild after the species' extinction in the wild. And the species is bred by
a team all sharing breeding and rearing information sometimes on species that
have never been studied at close quarters before.
They have a long list of Madagascan day geckos that need breeders,
for example, if you're a lizard fancier. And they work with more common ones
too, like the snow swift and lava lizard. And you might be able to get a good
price for excess specimens on the pet market. They also have some of the animals
I've seen elsewhere in this file: red-foot tortoise for one - which is now a
CITES Treaty Appendix II listed threatened species. They have some fish,
amphibians (Like the Caecilian. My god, I never knew such a creature existed,
and I was an Animal Behaviour major undergrad so I thought I'd at least heard of
every animal in existance. Find a picture of it and be amazed {or repelled}.)
The reason I think Zoovival is doing a public service is because
of the extiction of the gastric-brooding frog. Ten years ago you may have
seen articles in Natural History or Discover or somewhere about a frog that
was discovered in Australia which incubated its eggs in the female's stomach.
The frog was immediately scooped up for research into gastric ulcers - because
the frog had found a way to switch off acid-production in its stomach in
order to brood the eggs there. But last year the researchers went back to
the same hils where they had collected previous specimens and there were none
to be found. The gastric brooding frog had become extinct within ten years of
its discovery. And it could have been saved if the researchers had just bred the
specimens they had on hand. Maybe the red-foot tortoise is in the same boat
now. Maybe the micro mouse too. So, maybe it's okay if I can't sell the little
buggers. Maybe I'll get karma points in my next life for breeding them. But
they'd be VERY SMALL karma points, I reckon.
Bandicoot
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