It
is the age of micro-technology, pixels and cyberspace. The age of
ever-evolving gadgetry, access and communication. 24-7 isn’t a
halftime score … it’s our social mantra. Raise the bar! Push the
envelope! Think outside the box! These phrases reflect the current
thinking that hard work and experience are not enough to satisfy our
urge for progress. Hard work is … well, too hard. And experience
takes too long. Instead, if we all hold hands, close our eyes and
think hard enough, we will be rewarded immediately with ideas borne
out of god knows what. It’s the only way to meet our
self-inflicted timelines for success. We are under pressure to make
the future happen faster every day.
Alongside our cultural speedway, the destination of which can be
nothing other than a collective nervous breakdown, is an unnerving
movement of quite a different nature. Its approach has been
discrete, hoofing it quietly across the countryside. Closer and
closer it has advanced, cloaked in an undercoat of secrecy. And
covered with fur. Yes, fuuurrrrrrrr. But I’m not talking about
mink stoles and leopard skin pillbox hats. I’m talking about fur
on the bone. Walking, living, breathing fur. Fur you can sink your
fingers into at the risk of losing one or two of them.
Surf the Internet, peruse the bookstore, or read the good
old-fashioned classifieds and you will find the evidence. Web sites
advertising retreats that abound with exotic fleecy fauna, books
dedicated to the husbandry of bushy beasts, and an assortment of
"pets" for sale that, 20 years ago, you might just as well
have had for dinner.
It started with dogs. Their popularity increased dramatically,
right along with the Dow Jones, during the Reagan Administration.
But, as Nancy can tell you, dogs are to fur-lovers as marijuana is
to drug addicts. Introductory material. Hooked fur lovers are now
escalating their addictions and euphoric states with creatures such
as mop-topped Scottish Highland cows and the truly morphineous
alpacas. You can also choose from Navajo-Churro sheep, guanacos,
angora bunnies and chinchillas, among others. Pet a llama in
Petaluma, or get yourself a miniature Sicilian donkey from Half Ass
Acres.
One purveyor of plush pets refers to this phenomenon as
"hobby livestock." But this goes way beyond 4-H. These
animals, rather than being fattened for carving, are carving places
for themselves in our vacation plans, in our homes, even in our
wills. But why? What is their attraction? They are not particularly
efficient, almost never exceed Wall Street’s expectations, and
whereas they may seem to have a mind of their own, can probably do
no more than poop outside the box at their best. Is it our fate, as
fellow mammals, to be forever drawn to the ancestral mounds of hair
still clinging to our inner psyches? Or is it just follycle?
Perhaps we are simply looking for a way to take the chill off.
Despite global warming, the world seems to be getting colder, thanks
to our chronic affluenza and other unearthly obsessions. It’s a
side effect that even a planetary dose of Nyquil cannot relieve, and
so the fur movement seeks to soften the edge of our ever-sharpening
society with something that is a little easier to stomach. After a
long hard day of road rage, power lunching and profit taking, who
can resist a face full of fluff? Or perhaps the fur movement is not
intended to save us at all. Rather than a therapeutic gesture, maybe
it’s all just a barnyard conspiracy to infiltrate our lives and
stomp us after we’ve fallen. Nineteen Eighty Fur?
I’m willing to take a leap of faith and embrace the former
theory, primarily because I’m not convinced that an alpaca has the
capacity to conspire. I take this leap despite a recurring dream
where Pooh and Eeyore suffocate Christopher Robin in a giant pile of
leaves after he loses all of their honey in a poker game. But better
keep some spare Purina under the mattress, just in case.
