Pugnacious Beasts

I don't have any photos of snapping turtles, but here's a tiny little painted.

One morning I held a snapping turtle in my hands. Her shell was the size of a dinner plate, oblong and slick with a coating of greenish-black algae. Although she wasn’t the biggest turtle I had seen over the previous few days, her smooth carapace indicated she was an old one, lacking the ridges and keels that corrugate younger turtles’ upper shells.

Please click here read more of my essay "Pugnacious Beasts," which appears on Zoomorphic today.

I was a little hesitant to put up a self-promotion post today, the day after yet another national tragedy, riding on the heels of other tragedies. But as this is an essay about the vagaries of life and death and about doing something even when you know, in the big picture, it's probably pointless, it seems fitting, or at least not too callous. As long as our world is held in a stranglehold by those who make a lot of money off weapons of war and fossil fuels, we're as helpless as a turtle in the road, humanity—and all of life on earth—overridden by greed and violence.