The View from Mudsock Heights: The Hills Are Alive With Not-So-Cute Cartoon Animals

Disney it ain’t. I think you know what I mean: all those lovely Walt Disney cartoon movies, in which the birds flutter lovingly around the sky, and the fawns gambol in the meadows, the butterflies flit about like ballerinas, and the ever-so-cute bunnies and squirrels and chipmunks scurry — the word probably was invented to describe cartoon rodents and lagomorphs — nearby.

There are, or at least were, the Disney films that anthropomorphized actual animals that had been caught on camera, giving them human emotions and reasoning, with them being sad or even amused.

Those lovely images find themselves distanced from reality on mornings such as this one. I awakened to the belief that I had a headache. It took me a couple of minutes to realize that no, I felt just fine; what I had misdiagnosed as a headache was a particularly persistent woodpecker on the other side of the wall, a couple feet from my head, seeking to reduce my house to sawdust. I have no idea whether it is talent on the part of builders who make resonant, drum-like structures, or some superpower possessed by woodpeckers, but the whole package can be very, very loud.

Nor was this a huge pileated woodpecker, those denizens, usually, of the deep woods that look like Woody Woodpecker but are 18 inches tall. Nope, this was one of the dinky little ones that are astonishingly quick in their movements and very shy. They like to go at the corners of buildings, so they can dart to the other side as soon as a human appears. They are good at getting out of the way, as well they should be.

The fact is, the critters around here have become extremely impudent this year, and I don’t know why.

I’m not talking the usual run of things, the unwelcome arrival of the Asian ladybugs and the little flying squirrels getting into the attic and, as soon as it gets cold, the need to set mousetraps — take that, Mickey! — but something more. And I’m not the only one who has remarked upon it.

“Have you noticed the number of dead squirrels on the road?” asked a friend over dinner a few weeks ago. “I think they’re moving around, crossing more roads and getting hit, because it’s been a bad year for them.”

“Why are there so many squirrels this year?” asked another friend at a gathering I attended a week later. “I’ve never seen so many. You should look into that.”

The truth is, I think that there really are more squirrels this year, but they’re last year’s crop. And the squirrel class of 2008 comes with attitude. Fortunately, the attitude is unmatched by intelligence. If they got smart, too, we would have a real problem.

Not long ago I looked out the kitchen door and there on the porch were three fat squirrels, just wandering around. If this has been a bad year for squirrels, this trio hadn’t heard about it. They were truly chubby, with rich, luxuriant fur. Of the view that squirrels on the porch can do no good, I tapped on the glass — something that is usually sufficient to send them, yes, scurrying. These three glanced up for a second, then went about their business on the porch. I opened the door. They stared at me. I hollered at them. They stared at me.

By the back door there is a .22 pellet gun. Its purpose is to encourage deer to move along. Pumped way up, eight pumps instead of the two employed in stinging the backsides of deer, it is an effective small-game weapon. For something like a squirrel at close range, it needs to be pumped way up, because one does not want to send any animal away wounded. I thought for a second about grabbing it, but the notion of cleaning and cooking a squirrel did not especially appeal to me. (I once covered a story that involved a fire in which numerous squirrels got burned. With their hair gone they looked too much like rats for me to have a taste for them anymore.) So I stepped out and jumped up and down and made noises worthy of a cartoon crazy man and in due course the squirrels wandered off, in a fashion suggesting that they were not so much afraid as bored.

It has been this way right down the line. The deer in the yard no longer respect me. The wild turkeys do not flee upon my approach; they more amble away.

I do not like the precedent that is being set. If animals do not fear us, we have big problems.

The whole idea of ascribing human emotions and characteristics to animals is something that I find unbearable. But I could be wrong.

Even if I am, I don’t think our little woodland friends are in any way like the population of the cute Walt Disney cartoons. No, I think that they are more like the animal occupants of the Warner Brothers shorts (who is old enough to remember cartoons before movies?): Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Pepé Le Pew, the Tasmanian Devil.

In which case, I’m — Elmer Fudd.

Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large to Open for Business. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.