Zoologists for Truth

The mainstream political parties are making vicious, deluded, self-aggrandizing descriptions of how animals live for their own partisan purposes. It seems that they will say anything to get elected, no matter how false or how odious.

The Bush campaign started off the latest round of lies with their slanderous depiction of wolves in the advertisement by that name. Backed by video of wolves and threatening music, a sinister voice claims that "weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm." In fact, wolves kill fewer people than lightning. They are hunters of quadrupeds who are not waiting to do us harm any more than lightning is. Further, the main cause of the few annual wolf attacks is not weakness in humans but rabies in wolves. There has never been a recorded example of a fatal predatory attack by a healthy wolf in all of North America. Yet, the Bush administration would cast the entire species as mortal enemies to be feared and fought off.

The Democrats responded, not with truth, but with a new ad, Eagle, that spreads their own nasty zoological lies and slander. Backed by a video of an ostrich that is torn away from any context that could indicate its reasons for its actions, they repeated the vicious stereotype about this noble bird. They claim: "The eagle soars high above the earth. The ostrich buries its head in the sand. The eagle can see everything for miles around. The ostrich? Can't see at all." In fact, ostriches have keen vision, and they face their problems strategically. Their heads are primarily lowered towards the ground when they are fighting other ostriches, when they are hiding from predators, and when they are caring for their eggs in the sand. The ostrich lowers its head to solve problems, for assertiveness, survival, and family values, not to pretend that these problems do not exist.

I hope that the mainstream media will stop spreading these willful and hateful distorsions of the facts about what happens out there in the animal kingdom. It is time for Americans to hear the truth about zoology.