Cody the Coati of Murfreesboro, Tennessee's Animal City

Something that has always fascinated me are animal stories.
Animals have been players in some of the biggest moments of human history.
And sometimes?
They play a part in some of the smaller moments...
Like a lttle coati named Cody in Tennessee.
Around 2009, Cody wound up at a pet store in Murfreesboro, Tennessee called Animal City.
Cody was yet another victim of the illegal animal trade. Animal City received him after coming from the Mississippi from an exotic animal breeder (whether legal or illegal I do not know...but I'm absolutely against the breeding of coatimundi for this purpose).
For 11 years Cody was something of a local celebrity with people coming to the pet store specifically to see the little coati.
Described as a lightning-fast pickpocket, Cody's life at Animal City came to a quiet end during a dental surgery he was undergoing.
I have not reached out to understand why Cody passed during his surgery but as someone with several years of animal experience, anesthesia can become risky with older exotics.
I think it's fantastic that a local paper picked up on the story of Cody and posted it for others to read.
His small part in the story of a big world is important to document.
To let anyone who might read this or the original article about Cody know he was here.
After all, as an animal trainer I respect once told me... "They're just little people in different costumes."


Read more about little Cody and just a small sampling of his 11 years worth of antics at Animal City here.

Peel Street Monster Updated!

One of the earliest posts on this blog was an entry about the "Peel Street Monster" that I'd read about in the magazine, Fortean Times.
At the time that it had been published, the internet was still in its infancy-ish stage. Information continues from humankind's collective history; things like old newspapers, newsletters and various periodicals are making their way online more and more quickly adding more information to stories we're already aware of.
One such story is that of the "Peel Street Monster" that I wrote about in one of the first posts on this blog back in 2009.
Since that time, the "Peel Street Monster" has also become known as the "Wolverhampton Monster". More information about the incidents surrounding the story have shown up in additional sources and a clearer picture of what actually took place from the moment the "monster" first attacked to its death at the hands of a teenager with a brick to the misunderstanding that it was allegedly attacking a baby (it wasn't) to being dumped in a gutter to discovering it was a female to discovering there was another coati as well that was never caught (which makes me wonder if that coati had anything to do with reports not long later of a troupe of coati a few miles from this story's location).
Author Thomas Fair has written a fantastic short article about this little moment in history...
A moment when one of the most interesting animals in the world became a monster...
And, like a lot of alleged monsters and misunderstood characters throughout human history?
Repeated a lesson that continues to haunt us...
Our primitive fear of what we don't understand.
A fear that, more often than not, has time and time again brought about violence against the innocent.
Like an innocent litle coatimund a long time ago whose only crime was being curious and unusual.