animals | The Smart Set

Daisy Goodwill and the Montana Rockies

Darlene West — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 11:30:00 +0000

I remember a lake rimmed with lily pads; a meadow filled with sun. The uphill stretch of trail where I stepped round a bend and came eyeball to eyeball with a mountain goat. Now, the goat may have been a bighorn sheep. It wasn’t the curve of the horns, so much, or the softness of […]

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Death Loses, Love Wins

John Ballantine — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 12:30:00 +0000

Teddy died in my arms. Teddy tipped his toy box over, pushing it back against the wall. Growling, he looked up for help as he scattered his toys. “Where is my bone? My bones are here, where are they?” Another scratch and growl. He tossed Catia’s turquoise turtle to the side, searching for his Old […]

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Seeking Refuge

Vanessa Blakeslee — Thu, 27 Aug 2020 13:11:02 +0000

The lion, hunched in place, let loose a guttural bellow unlike anything I’d ever heard. “What was that?” I asked the nearby volunteer. “A lion’s roar,” he said. “That’s a lion’s roar?” I replied, incredulous. He held up a hand, said, “Listen.” From across the sanctuary, out of view, the young lion’s mother answered — again, that same peculiar, heaving rasp, more of a retch than a roar. “Not what […]

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Horns of a Dilemma

Daniel Hudon — Thu, 16 Jan 2020 12:30:42 +0000

I imagine a rhinoceros. A gray hulk standing in the South African savannah, with a massive, brooding head and wary eyes, the horn a perfect mathematical curve sharp enough to slice the wind, one of nature’s great achievements. I can’t hold the image for long because it is soon replaced by another rhino in Kenya […]

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On the Line

Eli Zeger — Thu, 15 Aug 2019 13:16:33 +0000

One of the most popular internet memes of 2019 is “cats meowing into microphones,” according to the online encyclopedia Know Your Meme, and it’s one of my favorites of the year. The trend refers to videos of pet owners shoving microphones in their cats’ faces, but you never see the people, let alone the grips […]

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When Bison Attack

Matt Grant — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 11:30:40 +0000

Before Yellowstone, I never thought about the murderous qualities of buffalo. After Yellowstone, it was all I could think about. In the fall of 2007, my then-girlfriend Katelyn and I were on an epic cross-country road trip. Passing through Wyoming, we made a detour to visit America’s oldest national park for a few days. As […]

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Cave Artists

Paul X. Rutz — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 12:30:01 +0000

In Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the great filmmaker Werner Herzog explores Chauvet, which contains some of the most absorbing cave paintings yet discovered. They also appear to be some of the oldest, dated to 32,000 years before present. Herzog’s camera pans slowly across Chauvet’s bulbous tan walls while his crew moves handheld lights to make […]

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In Search of Yasuní

David Bartholomae — Mon, 20 Nov 2017 12:30:46 +0000

Once on the water, we could see the rainforest pushing close to the river. The town of Coca, a depot on Ecuador’s Rio Napo, was already slipping away, disappearing behind a bend. It was early morning. There had been a week of heavy rain and trees had fallen into the river as the bank washed […]

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The Allure of the Egg

Bernd Brunner — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 11:18:26 +0000

The following is an excerpt from Birdmania, the latest book by author Bernd Brunner, translated by Jane Billinghurst. The science of eggs is called “oology” (from the Greek “oion”) and not, as one might have guessed, “ovology.” Is interest in the outer covering of an egg an expression of the joy the observer feels as […]

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Between Porcophilia and Porcophobia

Bernd Brunner — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 12:10:56 +0000

Both Jews and Muslims consider the pink, snout-nosed animals we know as pigs to be unclean. The question of why this is so has not been conclusively resolved. Did the Koran follow a Jewish rule? Or does the ban stem from the fact that eating raw or undercooked pork meat can contain roundworm larvae, which […]

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