I have always brought home stray animals - everything from squirrels to wild rabbits to foxes and turtles.
I just need green. I need to wake up and see grass and squirrels. I don't want to see skyscrapers.
In my garden, which is a big garden, I have one part that is my bird garden, and every morning, 365 days a year, they get buckets of food - for the birds, for the squirrels, the chipmunks and the turtles in the summer.
I go to Union Square Park, mostly to take care of squirrels.
If you like affection, then about one in three squirrels makes an excellent companion.
I love the outdoors and looking at snakes, squirrels, bugs - just going through the woods and being part of it. You can smell the different trees. And I listen. There's so much you can learn by listening, by sitting and watching things happen.
I'm not really out in the world all that much. I mean, I live with no phone signal, in the hills surrounded by trees, and I have, like, a mom and two baby deer that come by all the time, and my dogs and the squirrels are in a full-on feud every morning.
All us Youngs could throw. I used to kill squirrels with a stone when I was a kid, and my granddad once killed a turkey buzzard on the fly with a rock.
So often we talk about saving the planet, but what we really mean is to save the planet the way it is, so we can live here. So that is can sustain us. Because the planet doesn't need to be saved. It doesn't care if all the squirrels, elephants, and trees die and there's just a couple of amoebas floating around at the poles.
People and squirrels are very different. Most people will not argue that. But I find that there is one situation in which they're very similar. And that is: when I am driving towards them in my car. Then they're kind of hard to tell apart - especially if the human is kind of hairy.
