Tan Lines X

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

"No Pet Rabbit"

Writes James Stevens:

Took this shot the other evening with my Nikon D70 having borrowed a friends lens+converter for 20 minutes. Pretty pleased with the results although I did have to crawl through a marshy patch of thistles to get close enough!

I’m sure if you’ve ever tried to get close to a Hare you will understand how tricky this shot was - he is no pet rabbit, that’s for sure!

I’m a big fan of Hares and am quite blessed in the fact that so many live near my cottage in rural Kings Ripton, Cambridgeshire. I only had to walk 200 yards to find this old chap.

The Tamed Hare

The following is excerpted from The Hare by Jill Mason.

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Books written a hundred years ago suggest that leverets were quite easy to rear artificially, but modern opinion differ with those findings.

The poet William Cowper kept three Brown hares as pets: Puss, Tiney, and Bess. Despite their names they were in fact all males. Bess was always tame but died soon after he was fully grown. Tiney never did become tame and would strike our with his forefeet, grunt and bite if anyone tried to handle him. He lived until he was eight years and five months old and Cowper described him as being “the surliest of his kind.”

Puss, however, grew to be tame and was delightful to have as a pet. Apparently he was happy to be carried around and could be let out into the garden. In fact, he would ask to be taken out there by drumming on Cowper’s knee or pulling at the skirts of his coat with his teeth. Puss lived until he was eleven years and eleven months old.

An account of his hares, written by Cowper himself, appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine on May 28, 1784, and filled seven pages. He observed that they would investigate everything, using particularly their sense of smell. He recounts that they detested some people but were immediately attracted to a miller who visited. Presumably they were drawn to him by the pleasant smell of wheat and flour on his clothes.

Another person who kept a doe for more than two years recorded that he found her to be most active after dark and very sensitive to changes in atmospheric pressure (changeable weather).

W.B. Yeats in his poem Two Songs of a Fool wrote, “A speckled cat and a tame hare eat at my hearthstone and sleep there.” There are other accounts of young hares being fostered on to cats feeding kittens, and of older hares living quite happily alongside pet dogs and even being taught to do tricks. J.J. Manley, author of Notes on Game and Game Shooting (1881), commented that “many of us have seen performing hares in the London streets,” although he himself had not been able to tame one.

It is generally agreed today that young hares are difficult to rear, even when they are artificially fed on milk substitute such as cat’s milk replacement. If they do survive, they usually prove to be very highly strung. A single hare is much more likely to be tamed than when two or three are reared together. [Case in point:] Carine Neyt, who lives near Ghent in Belgium, successfully reared a male hare that she rescued as a baby from the mouth of a neighbour’s dog. Poliet, named after a hare in a Belgium children’s book, spent the first year of his life in Carine’s home. He is now eight years old and unusually tame.


See also the previous posts:
Epitaph on a Hare
Hare ’o the Tabor
The Year of the Hare

Celebrating Eostre

I am movement towards becoming
expanding
enhancing
the impulse deep within all being
to develop
evolve
press onward
to fulfill
all that is possible

The Germanic Goddess of fertility and spring, Eostre (pronounced yo'ster), or Easter, was celebrated with the ritual lighting of dawn fires as a protection for the crops. She symbolizes springtime, new growth, and rebirth.

Once, when the Goddess was late in coming, a little girl found a bird close to death from the cold and turned to Eostre for help. A rainbow bridge appeared and Eostre came, clothed in her red robe of warm, vibrant sunlight which melted the snows. Spring arrived. Because the little bird was wounded beyond repair, Eostre changed it into a snow hare who then brought rainbow eggs. As a sign of spring, Eostre instructed the little girl to watch for the snow hare to come to the woods.

Eostre comes into your life with her springtime message of personal growth. It is time to open to things in your life that facilitate growth, development, evolution. Is there a class or workshop you've been wondering if you should take? Do it now! Is there something new that you want to include in your life? Let it in now! Have you just gone through a period of stagnation and lethargy where nothing seemed to be happening? Let it go! Now is the time of growth. The Goddess says that wholeness is nurtured when you stretch. The stretching promotes your growth.

- Source

See also the previous posts:
The Goddess Ostara
Magical Creatures
Sacred

Morning Light XX

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Tattoo You

Tattoos definitely suit some guys (as the images accompanying this post attest) but the Rev. Peter Mullen’s recent idea of certain types of tattoos for homosexuals is just plain wacky.

Thankfully, the Gay and Lesbian Review puts the Reverend’s proposal into perspective.

_________________

Understandable outrage erupted when the chaplain to the London Stock Exchange, Rev Peter Mullen, declared on his blog: “It’s time that religious believers began to recommend . . . discouragements of homosexual practices after the style of warnings on cigarettes packets. Let us make it obligatory for homosexuals to have their backsides tattooed with the slogan SODOMY CAN SERIOUSLY DAMAGE YOUR HEALTH and their chins with FELLATIO KILLS.”

Petting aside the medieval absurdity of the Reverend’s suggestion, not to mention the matter of his sanity, the proposal seemed oddly illogical even on its own terms. There’s the obvious fact that fellatio is often performed by a woman upon her male sex partner, who might even be her husband, so unless the reverend is on a war against fellatio itself (which is quite possible), he may want to rethink the whole “fellatio kills” idea.

Furthermore, there seems to be a design flaw in the proposed warning labels, both of which appear next to an orifice that could be penetrated by a male phallus whose owner is the supposed target of these messages. As it happens, the “top” in either of these sex acts is almost never the party at risk of infection or other harm; surely he should be the one bearing these dire tattoos next to that occasional disseminator of ills. But if health is the concern, and not just morality, then it hardly makes sense to restrict the tattooing to gay men; nor would the Reverend be the first to suggest that the male generative organ should come with a warning label.

- The Gay and Lesbian Review
January-February 2009