October 23, 2014

Watching This Porcupine Taste a Pumpkin Is Why the World Is Going to Be Okay Today


Imagine if we were all as happy as this adorable porcupine, enjoying the seasonal harvest with this much gusto. (You really need to wait until he takes his first bite—the sounds he makes are amazing). This video was posted to YouTube by Zooiversity, a traveling animal education company in Texas, last year, and appears to be enjoying an encore seasonal run this week, as the nation heads into full-on pumpkin madness. (H/t to the website Unwindly, where I first saw it).

Teddy Bear, an 11-year-old male North American porcupine (Erethizon dorsatum), is something of a YouTube star at this point, it seems. According to Zooiversity’s website, he’s raked in 11.5 million views from 16 viral videos and enjoys a following from over 19,000 Facebook fans. 

He’s even…a movie star. Yes. A movie star. According to Zooiversity, Teddy gave voice to Sebastian the hedgehog in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. He’s come a long way since his days as an abandoned newborn found by a rancher in West Texas.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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