scrunch scrunch scrunch

If you saw last year's Wallace and Gromit movie "The Curse of the Were-Rabbit", you were probably amused by the Bunvac, Wallace's contraption that sucks rabbits out of their burrows (the European rabbit, unlike the American cottontails, have large burrow/warren systems, as anyone who's read Watership Down will know).

What you probably don't know is that there's a real-life Bunvac - Gay Balfour's Dog-Gone operation, which sucks prairie dogs out of their burrows with a giant truck-mounted vacuum, just like how Wallace removes bunnies. The great thing is that the guy likes prairie dogs and keeps them instead of just euthanizing the lot, also like Wallace with the bunnies (except that he sells some of them to captive breeding facilities for native carnivores like black-footed ferrets, hawks, etc.).

We've been getting blood samples from the guy to see if his animals have or haven't been exposed to a certain disease (we shall use them for fiendish experiments bwahaha). The first time around, he'd frozen the samples, so the cells couldn't be spun down and Susan was annoyed (for ELISA, you centrifuge the blood to separate cells from serum and use the serum, but if you freeze blood it gets all mushy).

Animal rights people (1 2) apparently don't like him because they claim that the pdogs are injured by the vacuum and by subsequent poor handling. =( As methods of extermination go, I think it's still better than gassing them (refer to Watership Down again...). The prob with most animal rights activists is that they aren't willing to acknowledge that forcing farmers, scientists, consumers, and other mainstream people to make sudden radical changes to lifestyle and economic activities is unreasonable. If you want to reduce and prevent animal cruelty, be willing to compromise, and provide reasonable alternatives.

Or you could just be a damn bloody terrorist and bomb research institutions, I guess.

I'd like to go out to Colorado and watch Balfour's operation for myself...boss was joking about "let's all take a road trip". Too much lab stuff...want to do fieldwork again...wah wah.

The one thing that I find really weird about it is the guy's given name. Bad enough for a woman (although very very old fashioned, obviously) but if you're a man, how can you show your face with a name like that?
(no, I'm not being homophobic. just that i imagine he must have been teased half to death in high school.)

Do watch Curse - it's such a funny movie. The part with the little bunnies in the woods howling at the moon is priceless. I just wish my boyfriend would stop quoting it...