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Paul Turner: Is Spokane safe for our wildlife?

An injured moose, shot with a tranquilizer dart, ignores police units blocking the street and rambles down Cannon St., Tuesday, June 28, 2016, in Spokane. (Jesse Tinsley / The Spokesman-Review)

I saw a deer the other morning on my bike ride to work.

It was leisurely crossing Eighth Avenue west of the Sacred Heart Medical Center.

It was not the first time I’ve seen a deer on my early morning commute. And I know their forays inside the city limits are not rare. But I immediately cycled through the stages of an Urban Wildlife Sighting.

Delight: Oh, look. A splendid woodland creature.

Concern: Gee whiz. Hope it’s able to make it out of here OK.

Resignation: If it doesn’t find its way out of the city before the traffic picks up, it’s probably a goner.

It used to take longer to move from the first stage to the third. But living in a roadkill culture tends to make you cynical about such matters.

Maybe that’s why some people around here live out in the country. If you see some turkeys or a coyote, you don’t have to automatically begin calculating the odds of them getting hit by a car or truck.

Remember when little kids used to accept it when told by parents that a dead animal on the side of the road was “sleeping”?

Maybe the kids never really believed that, but suspected it was what their parents wanted to believe.

Mailbag

Here’s a sampling of recent reader feedback.

In the matter of walking outside in bare feet, a couple of readers noted the same hazard.

“I was about 10 years old and playing ‘Hide and seek’ with a neighborhood group of kids,” wrote Patricia Garvin. “As I ran along the shady side of our house, barefoot, I slid on a slug. I seem to remember that it squeaked. I never thought I would get that slime washed off. The memory makes me shudder to this day. Poor slug!”

Susan Bates-Harbuck answered this way. “The worst thing to step on with your bare feet? Obviously it’s a slug. The slime never seems to wash off. Eeeeuuuuw! You have to wait for natural shedding of skin cells.”

John McTear reported that the column on summer camps left him with Allan Sherman’s “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh” rattling around in his head.

Sorry.

The column on coffee drinkers and caffeine-craving talk prompted predictably polarized responses.

Some readers, such as Eric Rieckers, offered praise for my pet-peeve piece. He suggested a follow-up piece on people who whine about Mondays.

Others, such as Dennis DeMattia, had nothing but disdain for that column. Some suggested various ways I could improve myself.

Barb Beck said those who don’t drink coffee just don’t get the allure. “I happen to be married to one. He always says that coffee doesn’t taste like it smells. It is definitely an acquired taste.”

In the matter of whether air conditioning is a necessity in Spokane, transplanted Texan Jim Clanton answered “seldom.”

Caryn Alley said the column on motel swimming pools left out a category of vacationing families. “Not sure if it was one or both of my parents who decided we should always take a box of groceries in the trunk and only stop at motels (cabins) that had kitchenettes so we could do our own cooking and not blow our travel money on fast food or expensive restaurants … it was the one time my dad would actually help with the cooking.”

Several readers, including Spokane Valley’s Barb Smith, had stories about drinks exploding in the freezer after they were placed there to chill and were then forgotten. (Though, in Barb’s case, it was a mini-fridge that got stuff way too cold.)

“Your column reminded me of the six-pack of root beer that woke me in the middle of the night,” wrote Keith Hegg. “It took me until the next day to discover it. It was not the easiest thing in the world to clean up.”

Glenn Winkey offered a solution. “As almost everyone has a smart phone now, I’ve found the easiest thing to do is set an alarm for XX minutes from now.”

Responses to the column on the Little Bighorn battlefield could be summarized as pro/con on Custer, though I never actually mentioned him by name.

And Sharon Enterline said the idea of apartment complexes using canine DNA testing to track problem dog droppings (for the purposes of assessing fines) made perfect sense to her.

“People are just too darn lazy to pick up after their dogs.”

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