Lions; Aging; A Schizophrenic Kitten

Part II

            Further reflections on my interview, of thirty years ago, with Steven Austad, expert on aging and lion-wrangling.

            Part I covered his hands-on pre-academic work with lions, tigers and bears, bringing him up to the PhD program in biology at Purdue. At first, that seemed a step backward:

            "I had an idea I would study lions in Africa. All the lion projects were full. I wound up studying spiders in Indiana."

            But his adventures were not ended.

            At Perdue, he met Veronika Kiklevich, and they married. When I talked to them they had two daughters and sixteen cats, dogs and birds.

            "A few years back," Austad said, "we had a python. Ten feet long and as thick as my thigh. That was the worst pet that ever lived. It was so bad, when you went past its cage it would smash against the side trying to get you. We were expecting some friends over, and the python had pneumonia, we had to take it out and inject fluids. I was holding its head while Veronika injected. The friends walked in, and the python was flipping us all over the room, and the needle came off the syringe and flew across the room, and the people just turned and left."

            A hardier friend had an even bigger python, with which he lived in a house trailer. "He had these pills taped all over the walls. We asked him, 'What are those things?' He said, 'Amyl nitrate. When the python gets ahold of me, I grab one of them off the wall and pop it; that's the best way to make him let go.'"