Half wild

I claim to write more animal stories than any other business reporter. So many that the office joke is that I work for The Maui Wildlife News.

But not many other dailies have an International Biosphere Reserve in the middle of their circulation area, surrounded by an ocean full of whales, fish, squids, seals etc.

However, probably no animal story of mine has had the legs of Wednesday's report that Skywalker the bull got his head stuck in a truck tire.

It was picked up in the Djarkarta Globe, my first penetration (so far as I know) of the all-important Indonesian news market.

Leave it to the Mail in England to sex it up. They picked up the AP version of my story but suggested that Skywalker was trying to get a place in the next Pirelli calendar.

That gave the Mail a chance to run a picture of a scantily-clad model from the calendar. The joke might seem a little obscure in America, where I believe Pirelli no longer distributes its cheesecake calendar -- it's a tire manufacturer, and we are all, at least for public consumption, above that here now.

It would complete my day if PETA issues some embarrassingly stupid, self-serving and self-parodying press release.