The Year of the Manatee
Every year, I pick out an animal and name the year in its honor. This is my own personal selection of animals, unlike the selection in the Chinese calendar. No rats or boars or horses. This is the year of the comfort animal. This is the Year of the Manatee.
Nothing says comfort like a nice baked potato. No animal resembles a potato like a manatee. Manatees are also known as sea cows, since they spend so much of their time grazing for freshwater and saltwater plants. They are oddly blobby-shaped animals, curious herbivores who live in shallow, marshy coastal area and rivers of the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, the Amazon basin and West Africa.
The main causes of death for manatees are human-related issues, such as habitat destruction and being struck by objects. Their curiosity and their slowness leads them to violent collisions with propeller-driven boats and ships. Their more natural causes of death include adverse temperatures, predation by crocodiles on young manatees, and disease.
I was pondering about writing this blog about manatees, when I came upon a video of a Sea World worker feeding a baby manatee in a pool. She brought it towards herself, with its back towards her, folded its front flippers criss-cross, brought out a bottle with a long nipple and embracing the baby from the back, fed the bottle to it. It was so adorable, I immediately…
