Rudolph, you fly like a girl.
And you, Vixen, what kind of name is that? It makes you sound like some kind of ... well, you know, like some kind of little vixen.
Turns out, Santa's reindeer are probably all female (which goes a long way toward explaining why they don't get lost along the route.)
But this year, even with solid navigators who aren't afraid to stop and ask directions, the team's going to have a tough time breaking through America's beefed up security. The border cops are turning reindeer back by the herd, worried they could be carrying dreaded diseases from the north.
You know, diseases and parasites like the little bugs that crawled up Rudolph's nostrils and gave her nose that famous glow.
But wait a minute; let's take one thing at a time here. First things first. Now what's all this about girlie reindeer?
As it happens, reindeer are the only member of the cervid family (deer, moose, elk, etc.) in which both males and females grow antlers. But you don't have to lift a reindeer's skirts to determine gender.
Nope, all you have to do is look for antlers on Christmas Eve.
"The big bulls shed their antlers first," said Tony Gorn, "usually by October or November."
The females, he said, keep theirs until spring.
Which means, of course, that by Dec. 25, any reindeer with a nice rack is a girl. And when's the last time you saw a picture of Santa pulled by antlerless reindeer?
Gorn lives in Nome, Alaska, just a snowball's throw down the ice flow from the North Pole, where he works as assistant area biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. His office includes the 90 million acres used by the ever-migrating Western Arctic Herd, at 430,000 strong Alaska's biggest group of reindeer.
The reindeer start growing antlers in June or July, Gorn said, and by late August the headgear is bone-hard and deadly sharp.
"The bulls are pretty aggressive during the rut," he said. "They have a big area they try to defend."
The bulls fight constantly for the chance to breed, Gorn said, "and, yeah, there's a few mortalities along the way."
Come Christmas, the bulls not only have dropped their antlers, he said, they're also so whipped from the sex and violence of the rut that towing a sled full of toys and St. Nicholas too would be nigh impossible.
And so the chore is left to the ladies, some of them obviously pregnant by this time, while the men-folk settle in for the winter and try to put some fat on.
Border officials, for one, are just as glad that the bulls stay home for the holiday season. In fact, the guys patrolling America's northern border would just as soon the ladies stayed home, as well.
Ever since chronic wasting disease (CWD) appeared in cervid herds, the law has been clamping down. The brain disease has been found in wild and domesticated cervids in Montana, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Wyoming, Wisconsin, New Mexico and the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan.
As of this holiday season, all cervids - including Santa's team - are prohibited from crossing some 24 state lines. Another 13 states ban reindeer coming from places where CWD has been found. And Montana, along with five other states, have restrictions that, while not as stiff, make it nearly impossible for Rudolph and friends to make the trip.
The result: 43 of 50 states control or prohibit reindeer crossing their borders.
So, let's say Santa heads south from the North Pole with his herd of ladies, dropping off toys in Alberta on his way to Montana.
To get his reindeer out of Alberta, he's going to need a transportation authorization permit from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency; an export permit from Alberta Fish and Wildlife; proof of enrollment in a CWD surveillance program from Alberta Agriculture, Food and Rural Development; and a health certificate from the herd veterinarian.
Then, to get into Montana, Santa will need a state veterinary inspection and official health certificate; an import permit from the Animal Health Division of the Montana Department of Livestock; a Montana identification tag; a federal USDA tag; a certificate saying the reindeer have been checked for paratuberculosis; and a certificate saying they're coming from a herd that's been CWD-free for at least five years.
Even then, they cannot drop by just any rooftop.
No, the reindeer are only allowed to stop in Montana at a licensed alternative livestock ranch that's specifically approved to receive reindeer. Once there, they'll have to sit tight for 30 days in an approved quarantine facility, undergoing testing for tuberculosis and brucelosis.
And if you're hoping for any presents in Missoula, forget it. Reindeer cannot be brought to any Montana town west of the Continental Divide.
Actually, you can forget about any presents on the east side, too; it seems any reindeer coming into Montana must come from south of the Canadian border, which means Santa will never get out of Alberta.
In what could be considered the understatement of the holiday season, Evaleen Starkel, program specialist for the state's alternative livestock program, admitted, "There are a few safeguards in place."
Yep. A few.
"Almost every state has made it very difficult to move reindeer around," said Carol Borton, secretary of the Kalamazoo, Mich.-based Reindeer Owners and Breeders Association.
Her group, she said, is a national network of reindeer ranchers. They are the folks who bring reindeer to the parades, the malls, the photo-ops with St. Nick, the municipal displays that draw people downtown to shop.
"That's our bread and butter," she said.
A four-hour gig with a couple reindeer, she said, is worth about $1,000.
At least, it used to be, back in the good-ol' days before CWD and mad cow bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the days before tuberculosis and hoof-and-mouth and, now, West Nile.
"Now," Borton said, "Rudolph stays a whole lot closer to home."
These kinds of bureaucratic and biological barriers were unheard of back when the Clauses first began jet-setting around the globe.
Back then, Rangifer tarandus was little known outside the Arctic, which was the one place they had a long and storied history. (Check out Norway's reindeer rock carvings, dating back to 2000 B.C.)
In fact, according to ROBA history, reindeer are believed to be the some of the world's first domesticated animals, with a written reference to herding in the ninth century. In his ancient letter, Norway's King Ottar brags to Alfred the Great about his fine herd of 600 reindeer.
A millennia later, Clement Clarke Moore, a professor at the General Theology Seminary of New York, wrote of reindeer again, penning his 1822 poem titled, "A Visit from St. Nicholas."
It begins with the now-famous lines, "Twas the night before Christmas," and is the first mention of Santa using reindeer for his annual circumnavigation.
A century later, Rudolph arrived on the scene in a 1939 Montgomery Ward department store handout.
The facts behind Rudoph's meteoric rise are explored at some length in Roger Highfield's book, "The Physics of Christmas: from the aerodynamics of reindeer to the thermodynamics of turkey."
In the book, Highfield strikes gold in the reindeer research of a Norwegian named, oddly, Odd.
Odd Halvorsen, writing in that favorite Christmas magazine, Parasitology Today, concluded that the "celebrated discoloration" of Rudolph's nose is likely caused by a parasitic infection.
Yep. Bugs in the nose.
Turns out the reindeer snout is perfectly fitted for bugs, what with its cold-climate design to warm the air coming in and cool the air going out (toasty lungs, no drip). The result: Rudolph's proboscis is home to dozens of your usual bugs, plus 20 or so that only crawl up reindeer nostrils.
There's the pentastomid Linguatula acrtica, the larvae Cephenemyia trompe, the nematodes of the genus Dictoyyaulus and, of course, the ever-present Elaphostrongylus rangiferi.
"We have not been able to quantify the combined effects of these parasites," Odd writes, "but it is no wonder that poor Rudolph, burdened as he is by parasites, gets a red nose when he is forced to pull along an extra burden like Santa Claus."
(No, Halvorsen, the University of Oslo's pre-eminent reindeer guru, isn't getting his genders mixed up when he refers to Rudolph as a "he." It's just that Odd has another theory: Santa, he believes, uses castrated males to pull his sled. Once a reindeer is "fixed," Halvorsen writes, it will keep its antlers well into the New Year. Anyone who truly understands the spirit of Christmas and the nature of Santa, however, will reject this argument out of hand. Even Odd admits his castration notion "introduces another sad aspect to the story.")
Of course, Halvorsen has never met Rudolph personally, and Santa's reindeer have never met their match in a mere border agent. The fact is, all those toys get there, somehow, year after year, even as the world's population explodes beyond the six billion mark.
How do they do it, those hardy reindeer women of the north?
A few years back, Spy Magazine went looking for answers, determining finally that Santa would require 214,200 reindeer to pull off the annual pilgrimage of charity.
And even with a herd half again as big as Gorn's Western Arctic Herd, the trip would be no Christmas stroll. All those presents add up, the magazine concluded, and the enormous mass would generate equally enormous air resistance at high speed. The reindeer would heat up, just like a spaceship re-entering earth's atmosphere.
"In short," Spy concluded, "they will burst into flames almost instantaneously, creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa meanwhile, will be subjected to forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity."
Which really just goes to prove what we've all known since childhood.
Christmas isn't about science.
Biology and disease and bureaucracies and parasites and physics don't matter to Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen and Comet and Cupid and Donder and Blitzen.
Santa's reindeer don't get CWD, and they don't need no stinking permits. They don't have parasites, thank you, and they obviously don't vaporize in the atmosphere.
Nope. You need not worry; the presents will be there, just as they always have, delivered by a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer.
How do they do it?
The reason is clearly evident even to the youngest of children.
It's simple: They're magic.
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