I'm Adelimo, and this is the slowdown.

One of the wonders that never cease for me is the wonder of the animals.

I can stare at my dog's little paws that somehow always smell like fritos and be amazed

that she exists, that she has evolved.

She's a pug, and we often tell her that there is no way she evolved from wolves.

Most likely she evolved from some magical otherworldly being made for attitude and snuggling.

I remember as a kid, my older brother and I would watch Marty Stouffer's Wild America

on TV.

Glueed to one of the only channels we got back then, PBS Channel 9 in Northern California.

I loved watching the little animals, the frogs, the salamanders, the underneath things.

Then of course, the hawks in flight, the slow motion power when they took off from a branch,

the alligator swimming in the lagoon, everything was bizarre, everything was wonderful.

But there was something special about the episodes that featured the big cats.

The speed of a cheetah, the fastest-land animal capable of speeds up to 70 miles per hour.

The saunter of a lion with its enormous paws, the panther, the mountain lion, oh, the cats.

That was where it was at for us.

We'd watch an episode and stare at our small cat smoke, waiting for some semblance of her

lion and tiger genetics to come through.

We wanted to watch her leap to see if she was just as wild as a big cat on wild America.

In today's much beloved poem by William Blake published in 1794, we see the wonder

of the animal.

What sort of creator would have dreamed up the tiger?

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