News & Articles

Vanilla sees the sky for the first time.

I’m tired of politics so… I’m going to write about animals with brains that don’t vote but seem to use good trouble to get out of bad trouble. I’m putting the brakes on writing about political “Breaking News!” for a week.

But, first, I’m going to write about Lori and George Schappel of Reading, Pennsylvania, who had bad trouble at birth by being born conjoined at the skull but had separate bodies. They shared brains and many essential blood vessels leading to two bodies for 62 years until April 7, 2024.

George had spinal bifida so Lori drove his wheelchair or pushed it around so they could move around. George transitioned in 2007, so they became the first conjoined same-sex twins. They did get around, although George was four inches shorter. They visited London to celebrate their 50th birthday, and, when interviewed by an English newspaper, said they vowed “to live to the full.”

They graduated from a public high school and the Hiram G. Anderson Center, a technical institute in Elim, PA. After high school, Lori worked in the laundry at Reading Hospital for six years. They were institutionalized in a school for intellectual impairments until aged 24 although they were not mentally disabled.

The twins then shared a two-bedroom apartment. They each had a bedroom and alternated use each night. Lori said in a 1997 film: “Just because we cannot get up and walk away from each other, doesn’t mean we cannot have solitude from other people or ourselves.”

George performed as a country singer in Europe and Lorie became an expert tenpin bowler. They also appeared in documentaries and talk shows and did a medical episode of the FX medical drama Nip/Tuck.

The Bible says God checks us out in the womb and has performed many “miracles.” If there is a God who can repair, nurse and bring people back from the dead, why didn’t He un-attach George and Lori as soon as He spotted their conjoined condition in the womb? One might think if He could create a living human being from dust or rib, He could prevent abnormalities in the womb.

In that there are examples of conjoined twins in thousands of species such as dogs, cats, chimps, bonobos, turtles, birds and cattle (two-headed calves are quite common and often displayed at fairs), conjoining humans is rare. Conjoined Homo sapiens occur once in every 50,000 to 60,000 pregnancies when identical twins from a single embryo fail to separate.

Most conjoined babies are stillborn, about 70% female, and are usually joined at the chest, abdomen or pelvis, not the head. Separation is always a risky business, requiring experts in many medical fields to be at the operating table. It was considered very risky for George and Lori. Lori was said to be engaged at one time, but her fiancé was killed in an auto accident.

The most famous conjoined twins are Chang and Eng Bunker known as the Siamese twins because they were born in Thailand. You may enjoy reading about their life in circuses, how they became rich American farmers, married well and had a total of 21 children. They were conjoined at the waist by a large band of flesh and nerves. They lived in two homes close by and took turns each night. Fascinating stuff about forming relationships. Has anyone seen a horse with one head and two bodies, or vice versa?  

How smart are animals? As a farm boy I was always interested in how smart some animals were. I have been collecting evidence for a long time. How much more did that cow know beyond her place in the barn and when she wanted to be milked? Why was our first dog Sergeant so prejudiced against blacks? How was he trained? He was given to us by one of my Marines, a redneck sergeant from Kentucky who loved Jim Crow laws.

Why was a herd of elephants always led by a mature female instead of a giant bull? They even had funerals for their dead. Why did an older silverback always lead a gorilla family?  

I have been looking for evidence for more than 70 years and have a thick file to prove it. Here are a few examples:

• Always among the smarter birds, parrots, who can mimic our speech, are now using children’s computer games to amuse themselves when not listening to humans. They cannot use their beaks to play, so they have learned to lick the screens. They play touch games and are rewarded food for skills. One company “employs” 20 parrots to help them develop games.

• The residents of Woburn, Massachusetts, are being terrorized by five wild turkeys led by their leader called Kevin. They stop traffic, attack postal workers and kids on bikes, chase walkers and joggers, and peck on car tires. While we lived at Pelican Lake, we would have a flock of about 25 wild turkeys come into the yard to clean up sunflower seeds under our bird feeders once a month.

• Dr. Cameron Clifford of Edmond, Oklahoma, bought his nine-year-son a California two-spot octopus, who had wanted one as a pet. Terrance, who turned out to be a female who presented the family with 50 little octopuses, greets the son in the morning from his tank by waving one tentacle at him. There is another great story about an octopus at Sea World who escaped his captivity by unscrewing a drain valve at the bottom of his tank and escaping to the ocean through a big pipe. There is a barrier reef off Australia that has so many octopuses it is known as Octopolis. Researchers claim octopuses are smart, curious, flexible and steal interesting tools and things from them if they are not careful.

• Scientists at the University of Buenos Aires have discovered that zebra finches, whose brain weighs half a gram, dream a lot while sleeping. They check out the dream by monitoring and observing throat muscles!

• Louise, an elderly bonobo, recognized her sister after 26 years of separation. Chimps and gorillas have often recognized human caretakers they have not seen for as long as 20 years.

• My home town of Little Falls was known as “The Biggest Little Pig Market in the World,” so we raised at least 600 little ones at a time. Mama pigs always seemed to behave themselves whether winter or summer. They never fought over food, and in  summer they enjoyed a large resort pond with great mud baths about a 100 feet from their bedrooms. They never seemed to have maternity problems, sometimes dropping a dozen. We did not have dogs because it was said pigs and dogs do not get along. Well, in an Arizona rescue shelter a chihuahua named Timon and a hog named Pumbas have formed a bond to the point where the pig gives rides to the dog on his back just for kicks. There is an artistic pig named Pigcasso who escaped from a Cape Town slaughterhouse who is now painting pictures at an African  rescue farm which sell for thousands of dollars. I wonder if the guy who just got a pig kidney to replace one of his own is still living.

• Biologists who placed metal anti-bird metal strips to keep magpies off buildings have discovered that the birds have built very sturdy nests out of them for themselves in Antwerp, Belgium.

• The Keep Swedes Tidy Foundation uses trained New Caledonian crows to pick up debris, particularly cigarette butts, from streets and deposit it in machines that give out food when stuff is placed on a plate. Member of the Corvid family of birds, this crow is considered to be equal to the reasoning of a seven-year-old human. A Swedish waste specialist adds this note: “Also from the perspective that we can teach crows to pick up cigarette butts but we can’t teach people not to throw them on the ground. That’s an interesting thought.”

• Male and female gibbons monkeys spend part of their lives singing duets together with rhythmic qualities not unlike our own. Researchers have recorded 216 different songs where gibbons have used regular rhythms.

• A young bar-tailed godwit, wearing a tracking GPS chip and a tiny solar panel to keep it charged, has probably set the non-stop distance record for migratory birds by flying 8,435 miles from Alaska to Tasmania. It took 11 days. Many birds can fly while “sleeping.” This godwit was only five months old, too young to identify gender.

• A California woman was grieving over Harriet, her lost cat, when she received a call from an Idaho town more than a thousand miles away saying her micro-chipped cat had been picked up while wandering the streets of the town none the worse for care. The ranch family had figured the cat had been eaten by a coyote while roaming the wide-open spaces.

• Kobe, a four-year-old Alaskan husky, was caught compulsively digging a large hole in the backyard of “his” lawn in Philadelphia, but he was named a hero when it was discovered he had smelled natural gas from a leaky valve under where he was digging. A detector revealed his sense of smell. He most likely saved the entire neighborhood from a huge blast.

• The story is, if you see a giant oarfish near Japan, better prepare yourself for an earthquake. After a damaging earthquake in 2011, 20 oarfish were found on Japanese beaches. It is also known as “king of the herrings” because of its weight of 500 pounds and length often exceeding 35 feet. It looks like a huge fat snake. I have a great picture of a giant oarfish held by about 20 American sailors standing side by side.

• Alfie was a tiny screech owl rescued from a nest by a Long  Island, New York, family when deserted by its mother. They raised her to an adult who not only has the run of their house now, she has an outside coop she occasionally uses when she wants to see her wild mate who shows up for honeymoon sex periodically. She hunts for food but also takes handouts from the family. The homeowner is a drummer, but he doesn’t drum when Alfie is around because she goes nuts when he drums.

• Vanilla is a chimp who spent 28 years in an experimental lab because she shares more than 98% of her DNA with us. She underwent dozens of invasive procedures but specialized in liver biopsies so doctors could learn about kidney failures. Always caged in a building, she had never seen the open sky until she retired to a chimp retirement home in Florida called Save the Chimps. Chimps in wild situations are very social animals. A video of Vanilla’s first look at an open sky went viral. She was slack-jawed and nervous. Chimps live in large social groups in the wild. Vanilla is finally learning how to do that.

Some week I will write about smart dogs. We have had eight dogs in our lifetime. Two of them were so smart we had to spell words if we didn’t want then to know what we were talking about.