Of Fowls, Cattle and Creeping Things

It was as though Noah's Ark had docked on the Potomac. The marble stairway to the Capitol swarmed with 82 goats, several dozen chickens, two guinea hens and a mule. The menagerie was turned loose by striking farmers of the American Agriculture Movement, who were dramatizing their demands for higher farm prices. The animals succeeded fully in that mission before being halted by dogs and impounded. They also illustrated, in a way, the odd relationship between Americans and the lesser species that share their turf. It is a relationship that seems to alternate between concern and cool indifference--and sometimes combines both. Examples:

P: In Cedar Falls, Iowa, the humane society demanded a ban on performances by Victor the Rasslin' Bear, a toothless, clawless, 600-lb. beast that takes on all challengers. The society charged that the bear was being "tormented." Judge Dennis Damsgaard watched one exhibition and decided that the bear was motivated by "praise, marshmallows and Pepsi-Cola."

Said he: "Victor just waltzes around with his opponents, and when he gets tired of that, he drops them and sits on them."

P: In Ann Arbor, Mich., citizens were dismayed to hear that seven baboons faced death in auto-crash tests at the University of Michigan's Highway Safety Research Institute. The institute agreed to spare the apes, but the physiology department decided to use them in tests to control salt and water levels in the body as a remedy for hypertension. Three baboons have succumbed to those tests, and the rest will be "terminated" by the end of the month.

P: In South Kingstown, R.I., Barbara Silva picked some caterpillars off the carrot tops in her garden last July. Instead of killing them, she decided to keep them on her kitchen windowsill so that her three children could watch them hatch into butterflies. Last week five baby swallowtails began emerging, and Mrs. Silva realized that they would die of cold. She eventually persuaded an airline to jet them to safety in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

P: In Lion Country Safari in Southern California, animal-park guards sought to recapture a two-ton hippopotamus named Bubbles, which had escaped and found refuge in a small pond. Hearing that the rangers were armed with rifles, a judge forbade them to use lethal weapons. Instead, they relied on a tranquilizing dart gun. The doped hippo staggered into a tree, fell on her snout and suffocated.

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