Animal April Fool's

Most of the animal-themed April Fool's jokes this year play on   our overwhelming desire to befriend, understand and get close to our animals.

Michigan's State-Sponsored Canned Deer Hunts
The Detroit Free Press was the boldest and funniest, with a plan to corral Michigan's 1.7 million deer and allow canned hunts in an effort to prevent bovine tuberculosis. "Hunters could drive to any of the eight or 10 state deer ranches after breakfast -- no more need to get up before dawn -- and be in a stand by noon. It shouldn't take more than an hour to shoot the deer and get home in time to watch the football game," a bogus biologist said. State financial crisis? Solved!



Google Translate for Animals
Google gave us a bit of wish fulfillment with Google Translate for Animals, which comes just its only marginally less amazing program to translate a ton of human languages. Hold your Google Android up to an animal and finally get to understand what they're saying. Their demonstration animals were all mushy, only offering compliments and affection. I'd have liked to see more opinionated animals, critiquing outfits, their food, their human handlers.

Montana State Flower
An outdoors writer for the Billings Gazette wrote about a  proposal to recycle all those obsolete, giant satellite dishes at camp sites, providing both shade and some controversial outdoor television enterntainment.

Nanaimo Non-Mermaid
The poor folks at the Nanaimo News on Vancouver Island no longer have a prank story about a mermaid sighting on their website. All they have is this pathetic explanation "for those who missed the clues" that wends its way to the serious point behind it all..."pollution is no laughing matter"...blah, blah, blah. This kind of thing--along with all the other hacky, humorless stories out today bemoaning that offshore oil drilling or whatever sounds like an April Fool's joke but it's serious--is exactly what gives animal lovers and environmentalists a bad name.

Who's Your Emperor Now, Mr. Penguin?
Animals make a natural subject for April Fool's Day pranks. Or so says the Museum of Hoaxes, a hoax authority quoted by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, though they count such innanities as calling the zoo and asking for Mr. Lion and such. Occassionally a prankster will hoax an animal, like Tokyo Ueno Zoo did in 2005, putting human emperor penguins in their place with a human-sized overlord.



Where to Go to See Weird Animals

Montana Hunts Wolves--Along with Bison and Sandhill Crane

Montana will start hunting for the recovering wolf in two weeks--unless a judge steps in to stop it. The plan is to shoot 75 wolves, though by yesterday hunters had bought 9,000 permits, some just for a fun souvenir ($19 a pop.) Hunters are supposed to call in within 12 hours so Montana Fish Wildlife & Parks can call off the hunt.

That got us thinking about what other kinds of rules Montana has about hunting. Here's a sampling that will give you how hunting trumps all other concerns.




Photo Courtesy of Thomas Roche

• Go ahead and hunt wolf pups. While you are banned from hunting lactating mountain lions, you can shoot wolves born this year. "This means you can shoot any wolf you see including pups if you so choose," notes huntwolves.com. You can't bait wolves or use electronic calls, but you can use manual or old-fashioned ones (typically calls of prey animals.) You can't use night vision or--unlike Alaska--an airplane. (Well, you can use it to spot them, but you can't shoot them till the next day.) Also, you can dump the carcass in the field, but you have to bring back the head and "evidence of sex: males: testicles; females: vulva or mammaries."
• They hunt bison. That's right--the symbol of the west, the symbol of wasteful hunting. Apparently there was a reason for this rule: "It is unlawful to possess or transport the fetus or reproductive tissues of a bison away from the kill site." Just as Alston Chase described in Playing God in Yellowstone, they hunt them just outside the border of Yellowstone National Park.
• They hunt Sandhill Cranes. Cranes! You get a free permit at either the Bowdoin or Medicine Lake National Wildlife Refuges or Fish, Wildlife & Parks regional headquarters. You can take up to three a day and have up to six. There's also a drawing for more convenient Sandhill crane hunting sites. According to the International Crane Foundation, their population is expanding, except where "small breeding populations can face disproportionate mortality on fall staging areas due to over-hunting."
• They hunt swans. "Swan hunters must have, as a means of retrieving swans, a
  watercraft, a dog capable of retrieving or chest-high waders along while hunting the dikes at Freezout."
• They hunt mountain lions--but not lynx or bobcats. "Mountain lion is excluded from being considered as “suitable for food” under big game regulations. A person that harvests a mountain lion must possess the head and hide, with evidence of sex naturally attached. The remaining carcass may be taken in possession or be left in the field."
• They're still trapping fisher, wolverine and and marten.
• They want an urban deer hunt.