Abstract
Night Vale is full of conspiracies, scientists, monsters, gods, and the people who live in the tiny city under lane 5 of the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex. However, the city is also full of more familiar animals like deer, dogs, cats, and zoo animals. As is typical of Night Vale, much of the time these animals are strangely different than those we know. They may have spines, venom sacs, or float four feet above the ground. But other times, despite their weirdness, they are presented in such a way that they conform to the attitudes and prejudices that animal scientists are all too familiar with. As one of these animal scientists, I will take a look at the furred and clawed denizens of Night Vale and pick apart the weird, the not-so-weird, and the downright normal in their characters.
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Notes
- 1.
These examples clearly do sound like science fiction, and even clarifying the context doesn’t necessarily make them easier to believe. In the case of the dolphins, the lab in which I was working was on the beach in Honolulu. People would regularly climb the walls to look at the dolphins and get yelled at to get down. The dolphins had noticed people on the wall and were vocalizing aggressively at the “intruders” and also toward us. The bonobo was a keyboard symbol-competent individual who sat and showed no evidence of distress while pointing to the symbol for “monster” and then into the woods. When I asked if there was a monster in the woods, she pointed to “bite” and gestured to the back of my neck, where I had shown her a large insect bite from earlier in the day. She then gave a small alarm call and pointed at the woods again. The joysticks and mirrors are well documented in the literature, for example, Washburn and Rumbaugh; Rumbaugh, Richardson et al.; Reiss and Marino.
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Lyn, H. (2018). On Floating Cats, Good Boys, and Shapeshifting Zookeepers: Animals in Night Vale. In: Weinstock, J. (eds) Critical Approaches to Welcome to Night Vale. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93091-6_4
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