Birds, Bugs Named as Steroid Users!
By NATALIE ANGIER
New York Times
I am a baseball fan of the most fitful and narrow-minded sort. I love the Yankees, but really only when they’re winning, I hate the Red Sox, especially when they’re winning, and the other teams, as far as I’m concerned, can all go take a whiff.
Nevertheless, I care enough about the future of America’s beloved pastime to offer players who have been accused of using anabolic steroids, human growth hormone and other disreputable performance-enhancing drugs some exciting new excuses, culled from the behavioral and pharmaceutical annals of the nonhuman community. Among them: (a) this stuff isn’t for me, it’s for my wife, and any minute now I’ll explode out the contents of my stomach to give it to her; (b) this stuff isn’t mine, it belongs to the poor slob I pretended to befriend and then killed and ate; and (c) don’t blame me — my first dope pusher was my mother.
Frown though we may on steroid-style supplementation as cheating, or as competitiveness taken to unsporting and unnatural extremes, in nature such pious niceties do not apply. In nature, as the saying has it, it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s whether you win — and animals will do or ingest the most outrageous, dangerous, blechy things in their quest for victory.
Egyptian vultures consume large amounts of cow and goat dung to extract traces of plant pigments that will turn the birds’ pasty faces a sexually alluring shade of mustard. A male goat will demonstrate his ardor for a nanny by drinking her urine and soaking his beard and belly in his own. Hedgehogs, according to the new “Book of Animal Ignorance,” will gnaw on the skin of poisonous toads to incorporate the amphibian toxin into its saliva, which it spits up and down its spiny frame until it is virtually immune to predation. Hedgehogs are so eager to coat themselves in foul chemicals, it seems, that they’ve been known to start salivating and self-anointing at the merest whiff of odiferous items like cigar butts, furniture polish, boiled fish and, I’m sorry to report, coffee beans.
(Continued here.)
New York Times
I am a baseball fan of the most fitful and narrow-minded sort. I love the Yankees, but really only when they’re winning, I hate the Red Sox, especially when they’re winning, and the other teams, as far as I’m concerned, can all go take a whiff.
Nevertheless, I care enough about the future of America’s beloved pastime to offer players who have been accused of using anabolic steroids, human growth hormone and other disreputable performance-enhancing drugs some exciting new excuses, culled from the behavioral and pharmaceutical annals of the nonhuman community. Among them: (a) this stuff isn’t for me, it’s for my wife, and any minute now I’ll explode out the contents of my stomach to give it to her; (b) this stuff isn’t mine, it belongs to the poor slob I pretended to befriend and then killed and ate; and (c) don’t blame me — my first dope pusher was my mother.
Frown though we may on steroid-style supplementation as cheating, or as competitiveness taken to unsporting and unnatural extremes, in nature such pious niceties do not apply. In nature, as the saying has it, it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s whether you win — and animals will do or ingest the most outrageous, dangerous, blechy things in their quest for victory.
Egyptian vultures consume large amounts of cow and goat dung to extract traces of plant pigments that will turn the birds’ pasty faces a sexually alluring shade of mustard. A male goat will demonstrate his ardor for a nanny by drinking her urine and soaking his beard and belly in his own. Hedgehogs, according to the new “Book of Animal Ignorance,” will gnaw on the skin of poisonous toads to incorporate the amphibian toxin into its saliva, which it spits up and down its spiny frame until it is virtually immune to predation. Hedgehogs are so eager to coat themselves in foul chemicals, it seems, that they’ve been known to start salivating and self-anointing at the merest whiff of odiferous items like cigar butts, furniture polish, boiled fish and, I’m sorry to report, coffee beans.
(Continued here.)
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