Time for An Episode of…

…Mutual of Fakename’s Wild Kingdom (formerly known as Fakename’s Animal Planet).  Normally, there would be a longer period of time between episodes of nature-watching, but this week we make a special exception for eehard.  First, he disparaged our last choice of featured animal–the cute little fruit bat from the Phillipines–then he compared our program to Wild Kingdom, with which we have never been affiliated.  http://eehard.wordpress.com/2009/04/03/puerh-part-1/  Also, we take no responsibility for the content of our programming, which does not necessarily reflect the views of our owners.  Or something like that.  Just consider everything disclaimed. 

The title of today’s program is, “If You Think the Bat Was Bad, Watch This”.  Today’s featured animal is the Tasmanian Devil, which, contrary to popular belief, is not just a cartoon character.  It’s a real animal, found only on the island of Tasmania.  If you don’t know where that is, go look it up.  Fakename does not do geography lessons in addition to her other duties.

These adorable creatures are about the size of a small dog:  males weigh an average of 18 pounds, while females weigh an average of 13 pounds.  They are very fierce, have an ungodly screech, and give off an odor when excited just like skunks.  In short, this is not an animal you’d like to meet up with in a dark alley.  While they do hunt live prey (including domestic animals like sheep) they mostly satisfy themselves with carrion.  It turns out that farmers like them, because when a Devil eats an animal, it eats everything…fur, teeth, and bones included.  Very tidy of them.  This cuts down on insects which could threaten livestock.  This proves that even the most unlovable of animals has a place on our planet–except, in my opinion, for mosquitos and fleas. 

Now for the really scary part.  In 1995, a new disease sprung up among Tasmanian Devils, which was named “Devil Facial Tumor Disease”, or DFTD.  Warning:  the following picture is not for the faint-hearted. 

These tumors often occur in or near the mouth and eventually cause the animal to die of starvation.  No one knows why it began, and there is no cure.  At present all they do is try to remove affected individuals from the wild population to prevent the spread of the disease, because here is the really, really scary part:  it’s considered cancer, but it’s contagious.  The only other known example is CTVT–Canine Transmissible Venereal Tumor. 

Personally I wish they would come up with another word to describe it other than cancer.  In my opinion, if it’s contagious, it isn’t cancer.  A suprising number of idiots in the world still believe that human cancer is contagious, and even those who would intellectually deny they believe it still shun people with cancer as if they did.  I guess it’s a good thing many people have never heard of DFTD, or for that matter, Tasmanian Devils, because they would be using the disease as proof their irrational fears have a basis in reality. 

In closing, Fakename hopes that they will at least come up with a treatment to save the species and alleviate these animals’ suffering.  Hoping for a cure is not realistic, since that hasn’t worked out so well for humans.