Ferdinand & Diego & Grizzly Bears?

Diego

Staring Bid $68.99

Buy it Now $250.00

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Ferdinand

Starting bid $66.00

Buy it Nowy $95.00
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Well, I just finished these two little guys and listed them last night on ebay So far having a reserve on my auctions has worked a lot better than I had thought. But my eBay fees have more than tripled. So I'm starting these two with higher starting bids with no reserves. We'll see if they do as well. If not it's back to reserves. It's kind of a good thing that summer is sooo slow. I've got quite a few commissions lined up. My problem with commissions is that I tend to fuss and fret over them more. They tend to take more time. However they do stretch me and make me perfect my craft. So it's a good thing. The other good thing about it being kind of slow is that my sister and her husband are visiting me from Indiana. They'll be here on June 20. I have to make sure that I've got enough items done in advance so I won't be poking wool the whole time they're here.

Last night I watched Werner Herzog's documentary,"Grizzly Man", for the first time. It's about the naturalist, Timothy Treadwell who lived with the Grizzlies in Alaska for thirteen summers and was killed along with his girlfriend by a Grizzly. I think the guy was a wannabe bear and a wannabe Steve Irwin. He saw himself as the lone defender of the bears. It's really a tragedy. But he should have known that it had been a very lean summer for the bears and that they needed to gain enough weight in order to hibernate. Staying so late in the Fall was a fool hardy thing to do and even more foolish to take another person along with him. I think he had a death wish or an unimaginably huge ego to think that the bears would leave him alone. The upshot is that it was a very good movie that led me to ponder all kinds of things.

As an animal artist, I've often wondered that if my cute little wild ones help foster the "Bambi' syndrome where nature is just there to pet and hold and to sastisfy our need for companionship. We as human beings tend to either anthropromorphize animals or to think that they are so much lesser and different than mankind. I think there's middle ground. They all deserve our kindness and compassion. Animals should be appreciated for who and what they are and not what we hope them to be.