Animals have ruled my life. Finally, I'm going to get back at them.

As a child growing up in New York City, I played with a basket of plastic animals instead of human dolls. Much later, I received a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and after about a decade in academia I decided to more or less fulfill the foreshadowing inherent in my dissertation acknowledgments, where I write that I’m not sure whether or not to thank John J. McCarthy for being such a good advisor “since I probably could have been a professional manatee keeper by now.”

I never did get to work with manatees, but after quitting my tenured job to take a temporary position as a small mammal keeper, I spent a while roaming the animal collections of the Washington/Baltimore corridor caring for mostly for frogs and reptiles. I also wrote a column about pets and animals for the Associated Press.

After all those years slaving over animals and writing about how great they are, I started the blog Animals Behaving Badly to expose the truth: They're not as cute as they want you to think. And now I've written a whole book that proves it.

 

Me on Twitter: wombatarama

Email me at:
creaturewriter (at)
gmail.com

 

 

 

 

This website is hosted on Squarespace.com; I deleted their logo and don't know how to get it back. The banner was made by my friend Paul McCrae and features my pug Lilly. I wanted more animals, but I couldn't afford to hire them so the costume was the best we could do for now.