The hands-off policy

You've probably seen that commercial for Liberty Mutual Insurance that shows an emu running around as the mascot. Actually, there are three stars in the ad: Limu The Emu, a dude named Doug, and a painted-up 1970-72 Plymouth Duster.

These are the commercials they show to try to lure me away from the Geico gecko, and that won't happen. But like the gecko spot, the one with the emu uses anthropomorphism - the ascribing of human qualities to animals - to try to sell car insurance.

Now, I know this has been going on forever. Even when I was a young cub (!) the Kellogg's people used Tony The Tiger to sell Frosted Flakes, and we all knew better than to try to reach into a tiger's cage.  But now, I can't say that wisdom is pervasive.

ITEM:

A woman who was killed in an alligator attack last week in South Carolina was visiting a client for an in-home nail appointment when she was drawn to a nearby pond and yanked into the water by the animal, according to NBC News. 

The story goes on to say that the woman named Cynthia Covert, and she was 58.  An alligator grabbed her leg and pulled her underwater several times, and she drowned.

Covert was a nail tech, and of course nail salons are closed under state orders due to the coronavirus, so she was doing home visits in her field, and went to the Kiawah Island home of a client to give a manicure to a client who told the police later that " (Covert) was acting strange and speaking more than she does at the nail salon where she works. She saw the alligator in the pond and was fascinated.

After completing the manicure, Covert stood on the porch of the client's home and took pictures of the creature. OK, but then she went down to the water's edge...

“(The client) stated that she was cleaning up the porch when she noticed Covert down by the water,” Detective Keith Herriott of the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office wrote in a report.

And Herriott also wrote that when the client yelled to Covert that the alligator had grabbed a deer the other day, Covert replied, "I don’t look like a deer," then moved to touch the alligator.

That, as they say in novels, was her last mistake. She fell into the water, and came up long enough to catch a rope that neighbors flung into the water to save her, only to have the alligator grab her and drag her down.

Police and firefighters were called, and they arrived to find the water calm and nothing apparent, when suddenly the alligator broke the surface, his maw still clamped onto the woman's leg. In a desperate attempt to save the woman, an officer shot the alligator. It let go, but the woman was dead.

This is the third fatal alligator attack in The Palmetto State in the past four years.

On Saturday, with an exquisite but sad irony, an emu escaped from a sanctuary on the west side of our county, and although caught by wranglers after it roamed in traffic on LIBERTY Rd, it was not a MUTUAL pleasure to find later that the emu died of exhaustion and stress - probably because it was chased around the street by locals unaccustomed to seeing the world's second-tallest bird species walking by the seafood carryouts and 7-11s that dot their landscape.

Even worse in South Carolina (where the state motto is Dum spiro spero  - Latin for 'While I breathe, I hope'): a human being and an animal are dead because humans cannot seem to leave animals the hell alone. While I breathe, I hope we can learn to do better.