By Kelly Kazek
kelly@athensnews-courier.com
April 04, 2008 11:50 am
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Planning a career in journalism? Here’s a tip: Skip the English classes in favor of biology, anatomy, zoology…oh, and maybe animal husbandry, too.
Journalism professors will tell you about the government beat, the crime beat and the education beat, but they keep one thing under wraps in hopes of retaining the few prospective journalists who weren’t scared away when they heard the starting salary — the critter beat.
And be warned, potential Bob Woodwards, once you are assigned your first critter story, you unofficially become the “critter reporter” who covers the critter beat until death — or until you can figure out how to sucker the college intern into writing about the bat guano that is destroying a local landmark, thereby passing the torch.
Sometimes, though, a reporter may become an expert on a particular type of critter and then he or she won’t easily shake the title.
In our newsroom, Karen is the Wild Hog Writer (Side note: “wild” modifies “hog,” not “writer.” Although sometimes…) Yep, after writing last year about a flurry of complaints from residents whose property was destroyed by a rowdy band of feral hogs, Karen is now assigned all wild pig stories.
You may think those would be few and far between but just last week, I had another call. I didn’t even have to go into the newsroom and give a pop quiz to find out who was most knowledgeable — I had Karen right there wearing her Wild Hog Writer badge.
Then there was a call from a man about some roosters. This story was assigned to Jean, the All Things Fowl Writer. She earned the title when writing about chickens on the lam from the local poultry plant. In this case the roosters in question were, um, dead.
A reader said rooster carcasses being thrown beside the road near his home were scarred and had their feet filed to be fitted with spurs for illegal cockfighting, which, contrary to popular belief, we law-abiding Alabamians do not host on Grandma’s front porch come a Saturday night.
Readers expect the same expertise when we write about critters as when covering NASA’s space program over in Huntsville, so we try to educate ourselves on each critter we encounter. Sometimes, we fall short.
Which brings us to the Frozen Snake Incident.
When we received a call a few years back from local authorities saying a man housing venomous snakes had been arrested and his stash seized, a young writer took the sheriff at his word and reported the most venomous of the snakes, a type of cobra, had been euthanized using death-by-freezer (put into, not squashed beneath).
No one was thinking cobra popsicles could take the place of those pickle-juice pops sold at the ball field or anything; this was apparently just a tried-and-proven method of killing snakes among the badged population. (Guess none of the deputies had heard of the more common method of chopping them to death with a hoe.)
The onslaught of e-mails when the story hit nearly disabled my computer. Not only were the snake lovers of America (who knew there were so many?) incensed that the snake had been frozen but they pointed out that the particular type of cobra was not a danger to humans, never mind its 2-inch-long fangs and hypnotic death stare.
They were angry, not at authorities, but at us. As anyone knows, the entire newspaper staff — from the publisher to the tear-sheet clerk — is always in on any conspiracy, even the cover-up of the vile murder of an innocent cobra.
But some cover-ups benefit readers. Once, a reporter who had neglected to take a college course in reptile anatomy found herself needing to piece together the remains of a huge snake that had an unfortunate meeting with a haying machine. The thoughtful reader who had unwittingly dismembered the snake put each bloody piece in the back of a pickup and kindly drove it to our parking lot, rightly thinking this is the kind of thing that sells newspapers.
The reporter, looking at the scattered pieces, decided the resulting photo would be less likely to make readers lose their breakfasts if she assembled it into more of a completed-jigsaw snake than a snake in a blender, which, you have to admit, was prudent of her.
The good news is, one snake part looks pretty much like all the others.
The lesson, future journalists, is to be prepared to be dispatched to a scene of critter mayhem, such as the one where a woman and her child were recently trapped on the hood of their car, held hostage by a crazed raccoon we’ve nicknamed Cujo.
The resulting story? Soon to be a major motion picture.
See? Being critter reporter does have its benefits.
If she is not at the guinea pig sanctuary conducting an interview, Kelly Kazek can be reached at kelly@athensnew-courier.com.
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