The animal kingdom is a fertile source of personal passions. Take my case, for example, I love dogs, big clumsy lumbering dogs. Not the dinky little pipsqueaks that yap and nip at your heels and make life annoying for everyone but their owners. Listen, I feel that if someone wants a cockroach for a pet let him get one at the pet cockroach store and not employ a minuscule canine for that purpose. But big dogs are different. They may be stupid but they are not judgmental nor are they especially demanding. They wag their tails a lot and sleep a lot more and have breath that would cause a lush, flowering bush to wither and they take up a lot of room and get in the way. But they are mostly lovable.

Cats are very different animals. Many people adore cats. I do not share their ardor. When you buy or adopt a cat you are really buying or adopting an attitude with sharp teeth, fur and claws. I don’t think they like humans very much but will put up with us as long as it suits their “what’s in it for me” purposes. They are cold, indifferent and judgmental. They are also conceited. They fancy that they have developed into superior beings and would, at this very moment, be ruling the world if only they had opposable thumbs. We should be very thankful that they don’t and we do.

Some animals I find very appealing, like chipmunks, oysters, mourning doves, cardinals, lobsters, lambs, ducks and elephants. I don’t like serpents, rats, mocking birds, sea cucumbers, roaches, yellowjackets, banana slugs, or oversized hungry carnivores with long, sharp teeth. I like moles even though they are shy, dirty, secretive and very rarely show themselves. I think seagulls are beautiful fliers although they are extremely greedy creatures and if you don’t feed them they will fly overhead and try to smite you with a very unpleasant smiting substance. I think emus are amazing anomalies that, along with camels and aardvarks, were probably a big mistake made somewhere in the evolutionary process by the Evolutionary Progress Committee (EPC) that otherwise came up with some amazing productions, like knuckles and spleens, adenoids and a lot of other useful items that have helped its favored species achieve its deserved dominance.

Of all of the animals that have engaged my affections, I think that my all-time favorite is the wart hog. I love these creatures. Not intimately, mind you, but the way you might love some well known and admired television series, like Petticoat Junction, or Heehaw or Gilligan’s Island. I have only seen a wart hog a couple of times, in real life. And that was at the local zoo. But they are superb animals.  I am certain that they are the ugliest mammals ever to evolve and must be the result of one of nature’s most egregious miscalculations. They are about the size and shape of a poorly formed pig and move like they have a serious rupture or hernia. I haven’t actually heard their sound but I suppose that it is some kind of obscene, adenoidal snort.

Most of all I love their faces, which sport long vertical, upward—pointing tusks that must make chewing very difficult since most of it must be done outside the mouth, since that’s where their tusks are, and would present to any viewer an unpleasant sight. But their most appealing feature, at least to me, are their distended, unlovely, snotty snouts featuring a matched set of distinguished warts. These snouts, I have been told, are used for rutting in the ground in search of unspeakably disgusting morsels of food, which, I truly hope, is strictly vegetable or mineral. The idea of these creatures eating a fellow animal strikes me as unthinkable.

I have never been close enough to a wart hog to smell it, but I suspect that its odor is overwhelming. It appears that most other animals, at least those in the zoo I visited, avoid coming into close proximity to them, which I consider a dead giveaway of the nature of their aromas. While their marvelous ugliness and, probably, distinctive, pungent odors may be unpleasant to other species, it does not seem to bother members of their own. There is evidence that they do manage to socialize and reproduce themselves with timely regularity.

It is truly their remarkable unsightliness and near total lack of other redeeming features that have endeared them to me. No animal, vegetable or mineral that so lacks appealing attributes should also be lacking in devoted admirers. I have undertaken to fill that void and invite others to join me.