Since my protagonist is a game warden, whenever something strange happens in the news involving animals, I hear about it. Friends, family members, and other authors point these things out to me. So I've seen a lot. This, however, is the grossest one yet. If you read Buck Fever, you might know where I'm headed. Make sure you read the last line of the article.

This is from the Duluth newspaper....

=================================================

Lawyer argues sex with dead deer not crime
BY MARIA LOCKWOOD, SUPERIOR DAILY TELEGRAM,
Published Thursday, November 16, 2006
Prosecution of a Douglas County case involving alleged sexual contact with a dead deer may hinge on the legal definition of the word “animal.”

Bryan James Hathaway, 20, of Superior faces a misdemeanor charge of sexual gratification with an animal. He is accused of having sex with a dead deer he saw beside Stinson Avenue on Oct. 11.

A motion filed last week by his attorney, public defender Fredric Anderson, argued that because the deer was dead, it was not considered an animal and the charge should be dismissed.

“The statute does not prohibit one from having sex with a carcass,” Anderson wrote.

Judge Michael Lucci heard the motion Tuesday.

“I’m a little surprised this issue hasn’t been tackled before in another case,” Lucci said.

The Webster’s dictionary defines “animal” as “any of a kingdom of living beings,” Anderson said.

If you include carcasses in that definition, he said, “you really go down a slippery slope with absurd results.”

Anderson argued: When does a turkey cease to be an animal? When it is dead?

When it is wrapped in plastic packaging in the freezer? When it is served, fully cooked?

A judge should decide what the Legislature intended “animal” to mean in the statute, he said. “And the only clear point to draw the line in that definition, I believe, is the point of death.”

Assistant District Attorney James Boughner said the court can use a dictionary to determine the meaning of the word, but it doesn’t have to.

“The common and ordinary meaning of a word can be found in how people actually use the word,” Boughner wrote in his response to the motion.

When a person’s pet dog dies, he told Lucci, the person still refers to the dog as his or her dog, not a carcass.

“It stays a dog for some time,” Boughner said.

He referred to the criminal complaint, in which Hathaway told police he saw the dead deer in the ditch and moved it into the woods. Hathaway called it a dead deer, Boughner said, not a carcass.

“It did not lose its essence as a deer, an animal, when it died,” he said.

Anderson argued that the statute, which falls under the heading “crimes against sexual morality,” was meant to protect animals. That would be unnecessary in the case of a dead animal.

“If you look at the other crimes that are in this subsection, they all protect against something other than simply things we don’t like or things we find disgusting,” he said.

Other crimes in that subsection include incest, bigamy, public fornication and lewd and lascivious behavior.

Boughner said the focus of the statute was on punishing the human behavior, not protecting animals.

“It does not seem to draw a line between the living and the dead,” he said.

Interpreting the statute to exclude dead animals would also exclude freshly killed animals, Boughner said. That, he said, could lead to people who commit such acts with animals to kill them.

Lucci said he would render a decision by Hathaway’s next court appearance on Dec. 1.

The misdemeanor charge carries a maximum penalty of nine months in jail and a fine of up to $10,000. If convicted, Hathaway could serve a prison term of up to two years because of a previous conviction. In April 2005, Hathaway pleaded no contest to one felony charge of mistreatment of an animal for the shooting death of Bambrick, a 26-year-old horse, to have sex with the animal.

===============================================

Is this man a groundbreaker, or what? Someday, we'll all be able to have sex with animal carcasses without the current stigma attached to it. He's like the Rosa Parks of the bestiality world.

My name is Ben Rehder. I write for a living, and I find it painful at times, which means I'm always looking for things to keep me from doing it. Hence this blog.

What will I discuss here? No idea, really. Writing, probably. Reading. Whatever pops into my head.

And here's the first such item:

I have four books out from St. Martin's Press, and in that time I have done a lot of publicity-related events. Booksignings, festivals, interviews, etc. They're a lot of fun, and I get to meet a bunch of interesting people.

However, these events don't always go as planned. When my second book, Bone Dry, came out, a friend of mine knew a woman who co-hosted a radio program in New York. He told her about me, and I was invited onto the show. The other host (he was the headliner and main host) had been a pioneering DJ from way back. Now he was broadcast on the AM band to 100 stations around the nation. It was in the middle of the night, but I'd be reaching something like a million listeners, so I was all for it.

Anyway, I get to the studio, and I'm nervous, but that's okay. I get to listen to part of the program as I wait, and it seems interesting. They are discussing a broad range of topics, including current events in NYC.

Finally, about an hour later, I go on. The hosts welcome me, very congenial, but within seconds it becomes obvious that they haven't read my books, nor do they know much about me at all. They know I'm from Texas, so they ask about George Bush. They make a remark about the awful heat down here. They finally ask a few cursory questions about my novels, but since they aren't familiar with them, the questions are very broad and vague. I do my best, giving them a quick overview of the series. Total time: about thirty seconds.

Now, I should say that I don't hold it against the hosts that they haven't read the books. They’re busy people, and I received sort of a backhanded invitation onto the show, so it didn’t surprise me. But the problem was, I hadn’t done many radio interviews, and I really wasn’t prepared to speak about anything EXCEPT my books. What’s more, I wasn’t familiar with recent events in NYC. The host has sort of a train-of-thought style, so he was quickly jumping from topic to topic, and I wasn’t contributing much at all. Truth is, I felt like a loser. The worst guest ever.

As the minutes went by, I was waiting for the host to say, “Okay, well thanks for joining us,” or something to that effect. Most interviews, after all, don’t last longer than five or ten minutes. But he didn’t say anything, and I kept sitting in that chair, speaking up occasionally, but not much, and before I knew it, an hour had gone by.

After a while, another guest joined us, apparently a regular, and he and the hosts were discussing all kinds of stuff that I knew nothing about. Now I really felt odd, sitting there, wondering why they hadn’t booted me yet. In hindsight, I should’ve had more fun with it and just jumped into the conversation with all sorts of goofy comments. Which is what I finally did. One comment, anyway.

The subject of the Dalai Lama came up because he had visited NYC the day before. If you put a gun to my head (please don’t) I couldn’t tell you anything about the Dalai Lama except that he wears some sort of funny robe. However, I am very familiar with Bill Murray’s rambling narrative in Caddyshack about having once caddied for the Dalai Lama. It’s one of the funniest scenes in movie history. And a line popped into my head.

So the two hosts and the guest were having a spirited conversation about the Dalai Lama, and I was completely mute until there was a small break in the patter and I said...

“Big hitter, the Lama.”

Keep in mind that the other three people on the show were all about twenty to thirty years older than I am--not the Caddyshack demographic--and I had a pretty good feeling they wouldn’t recognize the line. And they didn’t. After I made the remark, there was this slight pause--dead air--as they were all wondering what the hell this kid from Texas was babbling about. Then they continued as if I hadn’t spoken at all.

So I’ve got that going for me. Which is nice.