This isn’t news, I admit. But I think it’s worth reading, and I’m trying to make a point. Bear with me. As soon as I heard a capybara was coming to the newsroom, I decided to leave.
I don’t mind if others have fun with a rodent of unusual size, but it’s not my thing. It seemed unhygienic and annoying.
So I headed upstairs to the offices of a sister paper, where I’d scheduled a meeting, and immediately encountered the capybara, which had apparently been taken to the wrong place in error. I sighed and dutifully took photographs.
To explain, at the time of writing a Toronto zoo is missing a mating pair of capybaras, which are large-ish South American animals with surprisingly-creepy shoulder movements. The naughty things were being delivered to the zoo and made a break for it, reaching the undergrowth and freedom. Their keepers remain baffled.
Willow, our visiting labrador-sized rodent, is bait for the errant capybaras, to try to tempt them back into their enclosure with a friendly scent.
Whether that works remains to be seen, but we took the opportunity to interview Willow, through her keeper, and quote her at length. Yes, really.
The process was fun, but not news. Meanwhile, the polar bears at the Winnipeg Zoo are being fed glitter so their droppings are colour-coded and their health can be tracked.
And some vegans bought a lobster from a shop in Ontario and had it shipped to a friend in Nova Scotia, where it was released to the freedom of the ocean.
Sometimes, the media report things that might be described as fluffy, and that’s not limited to animal stories. Sometimes, it’s things that humans do, like establishing a record for how many pool balls you can fit in one hand. Nobody cares, except for all the people who do. (It’s 15.)
The online reaction to light stories is interesting. “This isn’t news” is its mildest form. But people read and share them in huge numbers, and the alternative is unrelenting gloominess in the news.
Sometimes we might learn to relax, even if it means tolerating a capybara.
