Creature Feature
Welcome to the first-ever Seven Days Creature Feature. This content will give you warm fuzzies.
Birdsbesafe Cat Collars Keep Felines From Killing Songbirds
It all started with a murderous house cat. His name was George, and he was a skilled killer with an eye for birds. When Nancy Brennan, a bird-watcher, moved in with George and his owner, who would become Brennan’s husband, she found George’s hobby upsetting, especially when he dragged his prey into the house. “It…
At the Charlotte Equestrian Center, Ashley Meacham Isn’t Just Horsing Around
Ashley Meacham has a horseshoe tattoo behind her ear and a ring shaped like a snaffle bit resting above her sparkly pink fingernails. She twisted it around her finger absentmindedly as she walked the grounds of Charlotte Equestrian Center in early March. Her 42-acre horse farm bustled with activity. In the indoor ring, a trainer…
Gimme Shelter: How the Pandemic Affects Interstate Animal Transports to Vermont
Normally, when Brigitte Thompson’s dogs reach the end of their journey to Vermont, she lets them out of their crates and gives them time to play, wrestle and chase each other around on the grass — “letting dogs be dogs,” as she put it. Thompson runs VT Dog Rescue, a non-brick-and-mortar shelter founded in 2015.…
How (Accidentally) Raising Butterflies Lifted My Spirits
Among my favorite short stories when I was a teen was Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder.” In it, a frightened time traveler falls off the approved levitating path in a prehistoric jungle and inadvertently steps on and kills a butterfly. When he and his companions return to 2055, life has changed: The English language…
Meet Vermont’s Pandemic Pets
When the coronavirus pandemic hit in March, hundreds of thousands of people around Vermont had the exact same thought: Oh, sh*t. An only slightly smaller number of them had an immediate follow-up impulse: We gotta get a pet. And so they did. While it’s impossible to know exactly how many animals have been adopted in…
Animal Magnetism: Welcome to the First-Ever ‘Seven Days Creature Feature’
In a normal year, the theme issue Seven Dayzers most look forward to — whether they’re writers, editors, sales reps, distribution peeps or designers — is our annual Animal Issue. And that speaks to a universal truth: Everybody loves animals. But in this, the Year of Oh-Lord-What-Now-2020, nothing is normal. From the pandemic to widespread…
