Every so often, I rediscover a strange animal and get very invested in its doings. It’s usually through instagram since my feed knows that’s all I care about. It’s actually how my obsession with wombats began. Parasocial relationships are fine when it’s with animals like Mr Wine the oldest wombat in the world who lives at Satsukiyama Zoo in Japan and who just turned 37 this February and I made fan art of him and am definitely not inordinately attached to this creature who doesn’t know I exist and probably can’t even comprehend the idea of different continents. Please, Mr Wine, I promise I’ll visit you one day!! Just don’t die before then.

Over the past year, I’ve become invested in the plight of the kakapos. There’s this one particular kakapo conservation account that kept popping up in my feed and before becoming a wombat lover, I was historically a bird lover. Still am. In case you don’t know what a kakapo is, here’s one of the little weirdos:

image taken from @kakapo_recovery on instagram, the official social media account for New Zealand’s Department of Conservation Kakapo Recovery Program

They’re those green kinda chubby flightless birds with stubby wings from New Zealand. Not to be confused with kiwi birds, the other kinda chubby flightless bird with stubby wings, also from New Zealand.

If you scroll through the account, there’s been a somewhat grim counter of the number of living kakapos over the past few years. You scroll through the photos thinking ‘ah wonderful, what a cute little bird’, and then BAM the caption hits you with “This bird is dead btw and now we’re down to 200 of these guys”

RIP Tutu ::’(

HOWEVER!

It’s gotten a lot better recently!! We’re sitting strong at 236 adult kakapos. And even better, this spring’s been the biggest breeding season they’ve had in a while, which means lots of eggs and chicks!

LET’S GOOOOOOOOOO

I love when birds fuck!! I need them to BREED MORE!!! I hope that all of these little baby birds grow up to become big strong chubby birds and REPRODUCE. If I could, I’d arrange them all cozy little nests with all the berries they could ever want and play soft, encouraging music to set the mood.

Unfortunately, I cannot be a kakapo intimacy coordinator so here’s the website for the people who actually can: https://www.doc.govt.nz/our-work/kakapo-recovery/ in case you also want to get invested in these guys’ journey. In the meantime, I’ll be watching the kakapo numbers and hoping that these birds are doing their best.

REPOPULATE! REPRODUCE! THE KAKAPO NUMBERS MUST RISE!!!!!!!

I used to think they were cute, in an abstract sort of way. I remember reading about how ants farm them like cows, as in, they protect aphid herds because they love milking them for their dew. Phids are like little green jellybeans full of honeyed sap, ripe for snacking on by all predators of the insect world, so this symbiotic relationship between the ants and aphids works out pretty well for them. I thought about aphid cows and their soft, unprotected bodies with the fondness of one who has never grown crops. Now that I’m a tomato farmer (of three whole plants), I think that they’re EVIL.

Why are there so many of them!! Why do they reproduce so quickly!!?? Why do they just CHEW UP ALL MY LEAVES?!? On one hand yes, I’m glad that my tomato plants have gotten the Phid stamp of approval that yes indeed your crops are luscious and tasty. But they could’ve done that in a way that didn’t involve literally sucking the life out of them!!!! They got so floppy and withered and sad and you could see how the phids were weakening the structure of the leaves and stems from all their sap-sucking. :(((

As such, I’m launching the ANTI-PHID MOVEMENT:

SEE A PHID? SQUASH A PHID!

Here’s my propaganda poster. Note the evil beady stare of the phid (that I totally did not draw on) and its sickly radioactive glow. You think these are harmless? That’s what they want you to think!!! Do not be fooled by their small green selves. They are in fact very hungry sapsuckers who will destroy all your hard work in a matter of days. They’re also surprisingly resilient, as I thought I managed to wash them off, only to find that they’d repopulated themselves within a week. It took a judicious amount of pruning and plucking + squishing by hand to thin out their numbers, and I still live in fear of a resurgence.

This is why we must stay vigilant. Do your part today: SQUASH A PHID!

I love bullying innocent animals. I love the rush I get when I tell my villager that their outfit sucks and their house decor is bad. Have you seen some of these houses? Why is it set up like a school classroom, Ozzie? Where do you sleep? You’re a koala, that’s your entire deal. You don’t learn. Everyone knows that koalas barely have the brain cells to manage eating and sleeping in the same 24-hour cycle.

Frita, on the other hand, has a whole restaurant setup in her house. I have to assume it’s a personal hobby because her house definitely isn’t zoned for business, not to mention the lack of food handling permits, etc. Hey, I’m the mayor, I take my job seriously. The other day, I found fleas on Frita, which just goes to show that you can’t trust sheep to make food. They’re always dirty.

Something that no one addresses is the fact that everyone in this world is a talking animal, while I’m human. I have a mother and father who send me letters sometimes, but as they never show up in person I can’t be certain that they’re not also animals. It’s also very strange to me that a random human child moves into town and is instantly handed the role of mayor. Reeks of nepotism. Is this an Animal Farm situation where animals have fully embraced “two legs good, four legs bad”? The animals are all bipedal now, which must be hell on their spines.

The shops on Main Street sell clothing for a humanoid figure with no allowances for any extra appendages like ears, shells, or tails. There’s a salon called Shampoodle that opened up, and it does human hairstyles only. This leads me to believe that all commerce in this world is specifically for my benefit. I am the sole human; I deserve it. This world was built for me.

One day, they will remember that they don’t have to venerate me for simply being human. Animal researchers will invent technologies that can be operated without thumbs. I will lose my only advantage. I feel it closing in on me. I can’t let them know that I know, though. I have to keep flaunting my flimsy superiority. This entire system is held together with spit and tissue— the moment they figure out that I have no real power, they’ll swarm me. As the mayor I can enact the “Beautiful Town” ordinance or “Wealthy Town” ordinance, but they’re just going to enact the “We Outnumber You Greatly and Your Rules Are Made Up” ordinance right in my face, with several hoofprints cosigning it. I’ll be lead to the guillotine where they’ll strap my hands down, thumbs out, and remove the appendages that I boasted of so smugly.

Some may say, why don’t you just stop bullying them? To which I say: absolutely not. With great power comes great responsibility or whatever, and I’m an irresponsible bitch. I was elected mayor solely by happenstance, and I will milk every last second of it.

some might say, well, pokemon aren’t pets, they’re your partners, which i guess is true because i’d never force momo to fight other animals for a myriad of reasons namely 1) she has the combat ability of a worm and 2) it’s “animal abuse”. in the pokemon world it is apparently not animal abuse to make them beat each other up which implies that either they don’t have rights, or they actually enjoy battling. i think the official stance might be that they crave battle, which is also pretty alarming because living in a world full of creatures that can call down lightning bolts, cause earthquakes, and are apparently very aggressive does not bode well.

ethical concerns about fight rings aside, i also think it’s very alarming how they evolve. some evolutions make sense, ok. an eevee goes from a little brown foxdog guy to an elemental foxdog guy. sure. i’ll take that. give it the darwin seal of approval. spearow evolves from a bird into a bigger bird. excellent.

but then you have torchic to blaziken, and i love that little fire chicken but the thought of going from cuddling a cute small bird to hanging out with a 2m tall birdman. manbird. how does one handle that shift? what if blaziken remembers when i squeezed its tubby little bird body and called it stinky boy and one day, i wake up and see a big chicken man looming over me, with a far too intelligent look in its eye?

torchic: cute lil fire bird. i’d probably let him sleep on my pillow.

blaziken: THAT IS A MAN.

why does he have a waist. why does he have hands. why did they make him 2m tall/ 6ft3. do you know who’s 2m tall? no one. no one needs to be that tall, let alone a bird. former bird. i don’t think he can be classified as a bird anymore. i went out and adopted a chicken and now, i’m living with a man.

official blaziken height from bulbapedia.com

imagine this: you’re a wee 10 year old setting out on your pokemon journey. you worry about your single mother (pokemon trainers never have dads) left alone at home with no companions, but it’s all right, she says. she’s got a pokemon friend now. she went out and adopted a torchic. aw, what a cute little guy, you say. sounds like you’ll have a great time together. she names him Nugget.

“take care of my mum, ok, Nug?” you say.

the torchic looks up at you and squawks, not a thought behind those round beady eyes. you’ve seen him dig for worms in the garden. Nugget isn’t capable of taking care of himself, let alone a human, but it’s ok. people say that to animals all the time, but they don’t actually expect a dog to care for anything.

you set off to go tour the continent and beat up other children.

it’s a year or two, and you’re the pokemon league champion. you’re all of twelve years old now and you decide that it’s time to come home at last. retirement sounds good in your old age.

you fly home on the back of your Altaria, admiring how small your hometown looks from above. as she descends, you allow the wave of nostalgia to wash over you.

you get to your house, and everything looks just the same. you open the front door and call out, “ma! i’m home!”

from the living room, your mother says, “come on in, honey! we’ve been waiting for you.”

Blaziken sits on the couch with his arm wrapped around your mother as they watch TV.

“hey kid. i took care of your mother, just like you asked,” Nugget says, with a smile.

momo, 12 inch wombat for scale

my cat suffers from alarmingly small poops. to be fair, she is a small cat, so naturally she’d have a small intestinal tract, rectum, butthole, etc, so i never thought it was much of an issue. i suppose i first noticed the problem when someone pointed out her crimson her butthole was.

"hey, momo’s butt is super red,” they said, with a note of concern.

“um isn’t that how butts are?” i replied, not being a butt expert (yet).

“no dude it looks, like, inflamed?”

sure enough, it turns out momo had an impacted anal gland. for the non-butt aware, cats and dogs have two anal glands located on each side of their anuses and they’re supposed to secrete some amount of fluid whenever they poop. however, sometimes things happen and the fluid gets blocked up and then it could possibly get infected and that’s just bad because now you have a clogged up infected cat butt.

all this to say, momo’s butt glands were clogged. the fix is simple enough: just express the glands before they get infected a.k.a. some poor soul has to wrangle a cat and squeeze out her clogged butt glands like one squeezes a pimple, except with way more fur and screaming.

now i really hope my vet never ever finds this, but the first few times she needed to get her butt declogged, i gamely brought her in and paid for it. then, the DIY-loving gay in me had a Thought.

“how hard can it be to squeeze a cat butt?”

so after extensive googling, staring at diagrams, reading medical articles and surprisingly no youtube videos (i guess no one wants to film a cat’s ass), i grabbed momo and got down to work.

oh, she hated it. it was awful. it was 2am on my small bathroom floor and she had been rudely awakened for an impromptu butt checkup which turned into me tucking her under my arm and prodding around her butthole while saying “stop wiggling!! i’m trying to HELP you i swear, look i know what it looks like but i assure you i am doing this in your best interest” while she wailed disbelievingly at the utter betrayal.

but then, it emerged. the secretion. it was thick and brown and it squeezed out so very satisfyingly. i felt a sense of accomplishment at seeing it ooze out, perhaps like how nurses feel when watching an infant’s head crown.

this was just a cure for the symptom, though, not the cause. you see, anal gland impaction is a fairly common problem although it should be self-resolving. the anal glands are supposed to express themselves naturally whenever stool passes through the sphincter, but sometimes this doesn’t happen.

because momo has stupidly small poops.

they’re just not big enough to apply the proper amount of pressure on her glands to get them to discharge. this stupid dumb lump of grey fur has the audacity to be all petite and demure to the point where it affects her medically. come on, momo, you’re a cat, what’s there to be embarrassed of?

the vet prescribed her with a diet of mushed up pumpkin, like the kind you get in a can around autumn to make pumpkin pie (hypothetically as idk how many people actually make pumpkin pie as opposed to just scarfing it) because pumpkin has a ton of fiber which should help beef up her poops.

so now, whenever i see someone buying a can of pumpkin, i wonder:

“does your cat also have small poops?”