"'But seriously, I want to know - is there anything here that hasn't bitten you?'
I was forced to think hard for a response. Machita? Bitten me. Don Juan? Bitten me? Monkeys, cats, even my beloved Snotty McSnot. And as for the parrots... it did seem rather excessive.
'Is there anything?' he prompted.
'Yes actually, there is,' I told him. 'The horse!' And with that I stalked off to bleed in the dorm room."
To enjoy a book, I need it to do one to three things. It has to inform me, provoke me, or entertain me, or preferably some combination thereof. I had high hopes for That Bear Ate My Pants! Adventures of a Real Idiot Abroad, in which Tony James Slater recounts his time spent volunteering at a wild animal sanctuary in Ecuador. I've travelled in Ecuador and had some experiences with the wildlife and rescue facilities there, so I was looking forward to a fun set of animal-centric stories. I was pretty disappointed.
Slater's not an animal person, nor does he show much interest in animals. He frequently misidentifies things to the point where I'm not always sure what he's talking about. When he writes about the animals, they seem to occupy some nebulous space between pets and comedic props - there were some cases in which I felt death or sickness were being used for comedic effect. It almost felt like he thought everything was beneath him - I guess he was going for the classic, jaded Brit abroad stereotype. I get it, the dude wasn't traveling to Ecuador because he wanted necessarily to work with animals, it was just a chance to escape a humdrum life. Sometimes an outside perspective can be fun to read, and like I said, being informative isn't the only thing that a book has to offer. That's what textbooks are for.
It's just that the book also failed to be entertaining. I have to say, the author came across as kind of an unlikeable jerk. I swear, he spends most of the book complaining about one of his fellow volunteers to a degree that seems almost obsessive. What makes it more distasteful to me is that he (repeatedly) mentions that he wouldn't have minded her so much if she'd been hot. What a prince.
I've read a lot of fun books that have been about a young person's first crash-course in the unpredictable world of wild animal care. Some of them are my favorite books and I re-read them several times. I'd been hoping that this would be such a book. Instead, I was glad to finally be at the end of it.
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