Mammals: people too.

Tim Harrell in the fakahatchee Strand with a motion-sensitive video camera. 2/16/2019

Whitetail deer, gray squirrels, raccoons, white ibis, great blue heron, white egret, woodstork. Panther cub at beginning of video with still camera.

Trying to feed a baby elephant without success.

Elephant companionship at Elephant Nature Park, Thailand.

A-stotting we will go, a-stotting we will go, heigh-ho the derry-o, a-stotting we will go. In slow motion.

Tim Harrell's motion sensitive video camera in the Fakahatchee Strand, Florida, gate 7. Many opossums, squirrels, raccoons, and panthers including a napping panther.

May 5, 2019.
Tim Harrell with his motion-sensitive video camera in the Fakahatchee Strand Preserve. New shoes, camera theft, and old video. 2 ghost orchids. Many animals including: bobcat, deer, black bear, a very persistent opossum, turkey vulture, rabbit, raccoon, chuck will's widow ( bird at night on log with shiny eye), and dog.

If wild animals could talk to us, this is what they would say:

Feck off you bunch of ******##*$@*.........anthropocentrists, so just Feck off!

When they look at us, this is what they see:

I think there is no doubt that opossum babies are some of the cutest animals around, but the adults seem to contradict that. If not ugly, they have in common with other marsupials a certain weirdness in form. It's as if God got tired of creating animals in the placental form and left the designing of the marsupials to his apprentices who hadn't fully learned the art of designing animals. That being said, the monotremes--echidnas and platypuses--were definitely practice animals.

However, anesthetics aside, I do love opossums as much as any creature, though some say that is a failing of mine for I also love some of most commonly despised animals around, for example, snakes including those of the more venomous ilk.