
Kickass and the platypus
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the excitement over the photo—taken by Phyllis’s grandchild Ollie off the keeper’s deck–of an unidentified animal continues to grow as the keeper is now fairly certain that, rather than a fisher, the critter may be a duck-billed platypus. It is the keeper’s contention that the platypus may have arrived in Mazomanie during last year’s flooding of Black Earth Creek. Just how the platypus got to the US from Australia’s Tasmania is yet a mystery, but it may have something to do with the current administration’s participation in globalization. After DNR biologist Julie Widholm suggested–after viewing the photo, that the keeper’s mystery critter might be a common woodchuck, the keeper spent more time with Ollie’s picture and concluded that it was unmistakably that of a duck-billed, egg-laying platypus. While the possibility of a fisher—a big weasel, on the keeper’s ridge was interesting, the recent development of a possible platypus takes on larger issues. Research shows that the male platypus has a venom-producing spur on its rear legs which produces venom powerful enough to incapacitate a human and kill small animals such as dogs. It is one thing for the keeper to face the possibility of “incapacitation,”—that has been known to happen, but it is quite another thing for dogs to face the threat of death, and Kickass will be working to convince the keeper that there is no room on the ridge for a platypus. He—Kickass, knows—considering the keeper’s recalcitrance, that it will be a heavy lift.

