Opinion

The Problem of Exotic Pets
Published: July 13, 2003
Over the past few months we've had several unfortunate reminders of the biological common ground we share with other species. The SARS virus probably crossed over from animals to humans in Guangdong Province in China. Humans got monkeypox from pet prairie dogs, which probably caught it, in turn, from an imported Gambian rat. Meanwhile, at the movies, there is ''28 Days Later,'' a horror film about a ''rage'' virus that passes swiftly and catastrophically from chimpanzees to humans. We can probably discount the dangers of a fast-acting horror-movie virus, but not the others.
If nothing else, the emergence of SARS and the recent outbreak of monkeypox in the United States are reminders that the potential biological effects of globalization can be chilling. Ordinarily, prairie dogs, native to America, do not catch diseases from rats native to western and central Africa. And humans do not ordinarily catch diseases from prairie dogs. What made the chain of monkeypox infection possible were humans who keep wild animals -- prairie dogs and Gambian rats -- as pets.
Although the federal government has now banned the distribution of prairie dogs and the importation of rodents from Africa, the monkeypox scare demonstrates how poorly regulated the ownership of and traffic in wild or exotic pets really are. A dozen states and some localities outlaw owning dangerous animals, and the federal government, as a signatory to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, prohibits, in most cases, owning or transporting endangered animals. But that still leaves most of the world's wildlife free to be captured, transported, sold and kept as pets. There has been a significant escalation in the trafficking of such pets in recent years.
For selfish reasons alone, Americans should avoid keeping exotic pets. The dangers of sharp teeth and long claws are obvious, but so are the dangers of zoonotic diseases, which can be transmitted from animals to humans. Monkeypox affected only a few dozen people, but those who get salmonellosis from pet reptiles number in the tens of thousands. Macaque monkeys carry a form of herpes B that is very dangerous to humans. As monkeypox also demonstrated, it can be very hard to predict just what opportunities viruses will exploit to make the jump from animals to humans.

Building Ads: Two examples of an ad Self-taught Newspaper Advertising
You should know that I am not especially gifted with creative abilities. I have no formal education or training in art, design, or any other graphics field. But I work from a basic understanding of what I'm doing when I'm building an ad. I am drawing attention to a product, a service, a sale or other important event. With that in mind, I have learned a few things through trial and error. Here are two examples of a newspaper ad, as I might build it today for any client. | I built the above ad from scratch, including the search for a sofa, which was then transformed into a rendered image, creating the background color shapes and schemes, making up the business name, address and phone numbers, in about an hour. Notice the use of large and bold type, shapes and arrangement of parts of the ad to create balance and to make it easy for readers to get the message. | | | This is basically the same ad, set up for black ink only. I use shades of gray in various patterns to create some illusion of depth, making the ad look more interesting and (hopefully) more appealing. Stark contrasts between bold white and dark grays help make everything clear. Both ads were created in CorelDraw. The bitmap images (of sofa and completed ads) were worked on in Corel PhotoPaint (included with CorelDraw) and Adobe PhotoShop.Thrift Store SeminarsFor more ideas, I suggest you spend some time looking through newspapers and magazines, picking out the ads that appeal to you — and also those that seem to miss the mark. Keep a collection of ads that you feel do a good job of telling readers what they need to know, and a few of those that wasted someone's advertising dollars.Sometimes, even today, I go to a local secondhand or thrift store and buy old magazines, just so I can cut out the ads that really stand out to me. Study what works, and also try to learn from the ads that don't work. You will save yourself wasted time, and save your clients wasted money. |