Animals

Visiting a Chinese zoo is truly a practice in cultural relativism.

Travel street performers doing monkey shows is something that is straight out of Chinese history that continues today.

Six interesting things that Chinese people sometimes do to their pet dogs.

Puppies were stuffed end to end, belly to belly, head to foot inside of a shallow, rectangular cage that was sitting on the side of a busy street in Taizhou. There was roughly 16 little dogs in the two and a half foot long by ten inch high container, and they were packed in as [...]

High up in the Virungas Mountains, trying to balance on twigs with nothing to hold on to, Sheila looks up to see a large female gorilla approaching her with seemingly no plan to walk around her. Face to face with the gorilla, Sheila is unsure where to move. The ground below her is slippery and [...]

NANJING, China- “If I throw the monkeys my garbage will they eat it?” my daughter asked me as we stared into a pit dubbed Monkey Mountain. A more accurate moniker may have been Monkey Landfill. We were at the Nanjing zoo standing at the monkey exhibit. Below us in the enclosure were around 100 monkeys [...]

Nothing says “you are now in the tropics” quite like bamboo-bladed ceiling fans. Unless it is geckos on the walls. My ceiling fans aren’t bamboo but I do have the geckos. I have at least two geckos. I can tell them apart because Number One is bigger than Number Two. This is my Gecko number [...]

Long honed cultural traditions, sometimes even the most ridiculous, often make sense if observed in the environment or historical contexts in which they were honed. Traditional/ old/ indigenous cultures around the world often have mechanisms which either directly or indirectly teach its members how to live sustainably within their environments — a practice often referred to [...]

The ostrich opened its puppet like beak wide enough to deep-throat a grapefruit, stuck out its tongue, made to yawn, but instead shat a big load that splattered upon my boots. Appearing satisfied with this move, it rejoined its jowls together, cocked its head to the side, and stared me down with its ping pong [...]