a curious case of missing animals

Nate and I have been documenting an interesting phenomenon in our neighborhood this past week.  It began last Thursday when we saw this notice taped to a stop sign:

As a little background, our neighborhood seems to be fraught with missing animals.  Weekly there are new postings of missing dogs, cats, birds, and found turtles.  It could be wily pets, negligent owners or stealthy coyotes but the result seems to be the same- a lot of missing animals.  Nate will often point out the notices, commenting on the pictures, what kind of animal is missing, speculating as to what happened to it.

But then we saw the Mammoth sign.  Just one day after we had been to the zoo to see the new elephant exhibit which focuses on prehistoric animals- namely the Mammoth.

Nate was beside himself.  "Mommy, do you think we'll find the mammoth?  We should go driving to help find him.  Do you think he'll come back?  How do you think they lost it?"

I was torn.  On the one hand, I loved that he was so concerned about Helga the Mammoth.  I loved that in his four year old brain he still believed that dinosaurs and mammoths were a possibility. I loved that in his mind we may have been neighbors with a mammoth for quite a while.  On the other hand, I was loving this notice.  Some amazing child (assuming child based on the artwork but those assumptions should not be made as my own drawing would be quite similar to that one) had decided to create a parody of the hundreds of lost animal notices we saw over the course of a year in the neighborhood.  I liked her (or his) style.  I felt responsible, in some way, to let Nate 'into the joke.'

So, I posed the question, "Mammoths are like dinosaurs.  We've talked about dinosaurs and read lots of books and we learned that they aren't around anymore.  Do you think someone may be playing a joke?"

To which he replied after maybe a 5 second pause, "But mommy, crocodiles were around when there were dinosaurs and they are still here.  Maybe mammoths are too."

Damn smart kid.

And then, the next day, we came upon this notice on another street on the way home:

And we all know that spiders are real.   And that people have them as pets.  At which point I realized, I couldn't 'explain' the joke to Nate at all.  I just had to roll with where this was going to take us.  That afternoon he asked if we could look for the missing animals.  I suggested there may be more notices for missing animals (I had spied a piece of paper stuck to an electrical pole down the road and had my suspicions) and that we could go photograph them before the city took them down.  

So, that's how we spent a 90 degree afternoon.  And here's what we came up with (in addition to the two above):

So, if you're in our neighborhood and you have seen a mammoth, poisonous spider, fish, or tiger, please let us know.  We will be the mama and boy searching under bushes, up in trees and in small puddles for some very unusual (and not so unusual) pets.

I LOVE 4 year olds named Nate.