Animal Stories

Because the Repuglicans have been so vile lately that we all need something heartening, refreshing, just plain cleansing, not more of the evil slime.


The U.K. Telegraph is reporting that an elephant who was captured by addicting him to heroin-laced bananas has successfully completed rehab.

Xiguang, a wild bull elephant, was captured, together with three of his family members, by illegal traders in 2005. Fortunately, the traders were soon, in their turn, captured by police, who released four-year-old Xiguang and his relatives back into the wild. However, the authorities noticed that the poor guy was going through withdrawal — cold turkey, no less! So they sent him to Hainan island, to a rehab center, where he got methadone treatments to help him kick the habit.

It took him three years, but he appears to have been successful, and will now go, with the rest of his family, to a wildlife park in Kunming, the capital of his home province, Yunnan.

Before anyone says anything about giving rehab to an animal while heroin addicted humans languish in jails, Xiguang never wanted heroin; and he belongs to a species that has fewer than 33,000 living members that daily risk death at the hands of poachers.

Heroin-addicted humans share the earth with 6.x BILLION of their kind. We don't wish death on them or anyone else, but as anyone who has raised bacteria in a petri dish knows — when the colony outgrows the nutrient medium, it dies. We have exceeded the carrying capacity of our planet. We'll all go together when we go. It's a pity that we'll take with us wild elephants, tigers, lions, bears, buffalo, flamingoes, butterflies, whales, humuhumunukunukuapuua, whooping cranes, porpoises, tortoises, dogs, wolves, foxes, martens, skunks, stoats, leopards, civet cats, deer, turtles, alligators, frogs, toads, crocodiles, and every other living thing, creeping, flying, walking, solid or airy life.

Good luck, Xiguang! Long may you live in peace.

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