Free Coptive Anlimals (sic)

(Emily)


I was rather afraid that I would experience furry animal withdrawal while in China, but the country has exceeded my expectations and offered many animals, furry and otherwise, for my enjoyment. In Lijiang we went to a market that featured more vendors for the Lantern Festival. There were turtles, both large and small, for sale, as well as parakeets and another kind of bird that looked like a large wren with long tail feathers. We also saw a cage full of small Russian hamsters, which I hope were for pet purposes only (I have been telling myself that they are too small to be worth eating). One street vendor was selling live chickens, and many others were selling live fish who swam little circles in buckets on the streetside. One man had a cart with a cage full of live rabbits. On our way home we passed a girl and her mother feeding lettuce to a fluffy white baby rabbit who was about the size of a fist. It was incomprehensibly adorable.


While in Kunming, Mr. Hoover took us to see the Bird and Flower market, which over the years has evolved into a normal market with just a few vendors selling flora and fauna. Not all the animals we saw there were adorable; we saw a few buckets full of beetles, a tarantula, and observed one man putting a snake into a plastic bag. (We judged this to be a generally bad idea, for all parties, but especially anyone who picked up the plastic bag not expecting to find a snake within it.) More worrying, though, was the fact that none of the animals really had enough space, or food, or water, or sun protection. We classified them not as free coptive--a term meaning an animal that is being contained but has enough space, a fact we gleaned from a sign describing a fish pond--but as simply coptive.

While we’ve seen only a couple of cats, we’ve seen quite a few dogs. Many are mutts or are of Asian heritage, but others are definitely Western breeds. I’ve seen a Dachshund, a couple of Huskies, a Collie, several Golden Retrievers (most of them in Kunming), and quite a few small Poodles.

By the way, we are confused about the whole New Year thing. We understood it to be 15 days long, which means it’s over now...why are there still fireworks going off? We get it China, you invented gunpowder! That was a bit extreme--but really, when do the fireworks end??

Hi this is Mel just adding in a quick shout out: HAPPY BIRTHDAY JOSH!