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Lunchtime bestiality
01 Jun 2007, 10:04
!-- Lunchtime Bestiality-->

Long Beach sees the sun all day 350 days of the year, and the annual average temperature is in the middle-low 70s. So your chances of seeing a nice day weather-wise are pretty high. Of course the air around our port is the worst in Southern California, but only sailors and truckers loiter around the port anyway. If you're down there after dark, or any time at all in fact, it's not the ambiant foulness that you're going to be worrying about.

So for the past two weeks I've been taking my lunches in the park. There's a rather large park just across the freeway from where I work—combining the free and paying areas and the juxtaposed golf course, its girth is about eight square blocks. I made that figure up because Google couldn't find the correct figure for me in the alotted time. It's a nice place to find a tree to sit beneath, take off the shoes, eat your Happy Meal and read the copy of the New Yorker you took from the lunch room.

It's also a nice place to observe the mating habits of animals. I'm not talking about the creatures that mow the grass or spear the trash, but about ducks.

Whilst taking my lunch in the park last Thursday I was witness to a duck gang rape. I might never be able to unlearn just how beastly those pretty beasts can be.

It started with a little common brutality. A drake had a hen penned down in the grass, going at it while she squawked. Then nearly a dozen other drakes came rushing. They leapt at the enacting drake, knocking into him, trying to dismount him by force and aiming for a point of entry. And they also leapt at one another, as horny idiots will do, beating and pecking at each other's faces and fluffed-out chests with their beaks and wings. Twas duck melee. The hen, a few times, was able to escape. She scrambled up and half ran half flew toward the pond. The horny gaggle gave pursuit. The first to reach her pounced upon her back, pinned her neck down with his beak, and otherwise reassumed the position.

I told my friend Asya about this the following evening. We talked about gang rape and how horrible it is and about infanticide and how it's nearly as horrible under most conditions but not under the condition that the mother is forced to eat her own child—it was decided by consensus among the females there (I was the only male there) that that would be the worst thing ever—and we also talked about gang bangs and how the physical repercussions of a gang bang might nearly be as horrible as those of a gang rape but without, of course, the psychological trauma. We also talked about the memory spans of animals and whether or not ducks could remember such trauma. I told her that a goldfish, with its mixed blessing of a three-second memory span, could be gang raped for 19 days straight and not remember any of it a minute later. She told me I should have intervened anyway.

Should I have intervened? Wild animal people repeat this: don't intervene. The seagull wants to eat the baby turtle, relies for his survival on eating a couple of those baby turtles, you shouldn't step in to protect the baby turtles, you're screwing up systems with scales and consequences much larger than you, keep back. So I didn't intervene. I just watched. Oh, brother, did I watch.

I also told Max about it. He said the image of it gave him a boner.