Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Ferreting out the details

I've been out of college for six years now, but it's really good to know that the whole kids vs. institution battle of "you, like, totally have to let us do whatever we want because otherwise you're compromising our well-being and that is SO not cool" is still alive and well.

This article is all about students getting colleges to allow more pets in dorm rooms as "service animals." The cover photo, which unfortunately I can't find online, depicts a girl holding her pet ferret which she claims helps her through panic attacks. I've never had a pet ferret, but someone in my hall sophomore year had two of them, so I feel that I have enough ferret experience to ask the girl from the article the following question: Does your ferret help you through your panic attacks by running into other people's rooms and shitting on the floor? Because it seems to me that that is the modus operandi of your average ferret, and if I'd only known that behaving in such a manner was helping its owner through panic attacks, I would have had way more patience with all that.

By the way, ferret girl goes to Our Lady of the Lake University in Texas. I don't have as much to say about that as I would have thought, since a cursory glance at its website revealed it to be not really all that scary. However...


There is the matter of this. Yes, that's armadillo racing. Clearly there's some speciesism going on at this school -- or actually, orderism since Wikipedia tells me armadillos are of the order Cingulata (superorder Xenarthra) while ferrets belong to Carnivora.

I wonder if ferret girl mentioned this issue in the complaint she filed with the Department of Justice (yeah, she actually did that). It would have been very entertaining to see the armadillo take the stand and then be cross-examined by the ferret.