animals
Animal Sovereignties and the Wolves of Isle Royale
The biggest challenge posed by the question of wild animal sovereignties is to the operation of human sovereignty, which itself is figured through animality and in some cases through animals....
How Southern Africa’s Elephants Bounced Back
The sun is setting above the horizon in Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe, but it’s still 40°C (104°F). A large group of elephants has just arrived at a lagoon to refresh themselves and get their daily dose of water: Drink up 200 liters each, and they are good to go. They frolic a little in the water and then set off to search for leaves and grass in the parched savannah, only to be replaced by another herd with many young calves.
While most species’ populations are decreasing, elephants in southern Africa are doing well. A newly released study of 103 elephant populations from Tanzania southwards — the most comprehensive ever — finds that conservation has halted the decline of savannah elephants in southern Africa over the last 25 years. To be more precise, as of 2020, the elephant population had rebounded to the same number as in 1995: 290,000. The scientists found that large, well-protected areas connected to other protected areas are far better than isolated “fortress” parks at maintaining stable populations.
Even though these outer areas don’t have the same level of protection so animals face a higher risk of dying, they are vital corridors that allow the elephants to migrate back and forth when core areas are too crowded or when facing threats such as poaching or unsuitable environmental conditions.
The post How Southern Africa’s Elephants Bounced Back appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
Could Wild Horses Help Fight Wildfires?
In 2014, William E. Simpson moved to a remote hillside near Yreka, California, close to the California-Oregon border. He was trying to get away from his previous buzzing internet business, seeking isolation in nature. It didn’t take him long to notice that he wasn’t alone: He was sharing the hills surrounding his humble cabin at the edge of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument with bobcats, coyotes, elk, mountain lions, wolves, bears and more than 120 wild horses. At first, the horses kept their distance, just like all the other wild animals.
But eventually, a skinny, pregnant white mare with a foal in tow approached him. Simpson had once studied veterinary medicine, and his training kicked in. “I thought she was probably suffering from parasite overload and fed her some oats with an anti-parasite I had on hand,” he recalls. A few days later, the mare brought her entire family. Over the years, the horses have come to him with injuries, such as cuts from the barbed wire abandoned farms had left behind or gashes from mountain lion attacks.
William E. Simpson has become closely acquainted with the horses that roam the land surrounding his cabin. Credit: Michelle Gough
“It’s all voluntary,” Simpson says. “They are wild. You can’t put a halter or anything over their head. They just come and present their injuries. Some let you do more than others.”
When the 38,000-acre Klamathon fire tore through the hillsides in 2018, he had an “aha” moment. He and his wife Laura defied evacuation orders and helped the firefighters navigate the remote dirt roads. They stayed to defend their small ranch, but also to watch the horses. “I wanted to see how the horses reacted to the fire,” Simpson says. “Would they panic? Run the opposite direction and get entangled? Nobody had ever really done a study about that.”
The horses remained calm and kept grazing. “They are used to fires,” Simpson realized. “They have been here for two million years.” He now attributes the fact that his cabin and the surrounding hills were largely spared by the fire to the horses. “Each wild horse consumes about 30 pounds of grass and brush a day,” Simpson has observed. “They reduce the wildfire fuel, keeping the wildfire risks at bay.”
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Occasional Article: Cats Are Perfect
RIPLEY: How do we kill it, Ash? There’s gotta be a way of killing it – how, how do we do it?
ASH: You can’t.
PARKER: That’s bullshit!
ASH: You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with, do you? A perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.
LAMBERT: You admire it…
ASH: I admire its purity. A survivor. Unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.
* * *
Okay, this one is short. In an interview, an evolutionary biologist explains why cats are, in an evolutionary sense, perfect. There are big cats and little cats, but otherwise they vary surprisingly little in shape, diet and behavior. They’re all doing one thing and they’re all doing it superbly well.
From a philosophical (or pedantic) point of view, she’s being a little provocative with that word “perfect”. Is Patrick Mahomes a perfect quarterback? Was Tom Baker the perfect Doctor? Are McVities Digestive Biscuits (Milk Chocolate) the perfect snack with coffee? No — those things are just the best in their respective categories.
More seriously, when we’re talking about biology, perfection doesn’t exist. Evolution is an endless game of King of the Hill. You can stay on top for a very long time, but nothing is forever. Theropod dinosaurs were the cats of their day, and they’re not around any more. Cats aren’t really “perfect”. What they are is excellent.
That said, three offhand thoughts. One, cats are massively destructive to naive island ecosystems. In New Zealand alone, they’ve caused the extinction of nearly a dozen bird species. If you’re an island bird, then yeah, cats are almost exactly the xenomorph from the movie: a relentless, intrusive, murderous alien whose structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.
Two, part of cats’ excellence is that they combine a very conservative design with a fair amount of behavioral flexibility. Cats are the only hypercarnivore to establish a symbiotic relationship with humans, and that’s probably no accident.
And three, cats almost certainly shaped our evolutionary history. Leopards, in particular, absolutely love eating primates, and there’s abundant evidence that they preyed upon our prehuman ancestors. Superb night vision, ridiculously strong, ripping claws: they used to kill us with sickening ease. Big cats, those perfect predators, were literally the monster in the dark.
Some years back I visited a game park in Africa: lions, one elephant, a slinking thing in the distance that was a hyena. And I remember thinking, dear Lord, imagine being out here at night, armed with nothing but a sharp rock or a pointed stick. Out here with the big cats, who can see in the dark just fine. It gave me the shivers to think about it, then. It still does.
And that’s all.
* * *
RIPLEY: Final report of the commercial starship Nostromo, third officer reporting. The other members of the crew – Kane, Lambert, Parker, Brett, Ash, and Captain Dallas – are dead. Cargo and ship destroyed. I should reach the frontier in about six weeks. With a little luck, the network will pick me up. This is Ellen Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off.
[to Jonesy the cat]
RIPLEY: Come on, cat.
Krtek
I was walking with my teenage son in a large shop the other day, and we passed by the children’s section. I saw a duvet cover that so much reminded me of Kretk – or, in English translation, the Little Mole. We were recalling which of the Kretk films that we saw we liked most – but basically, we liked almost all of them. Thinking of the Little Mole brought back happy memories.
Krtek is a series of animations that have been made by Zdenek Miler in the 1950s and 1960 in Czechoslovakia. It has a very interesting artistic signature: not only the pleasing and colourful visual arts, and the typical light, cheerful and romantic music that would come with it; lots of anti-modernist themes (such as in this one that I just found on YouTube where the little mole tries to stop the damage a bulldozer will do to its flowers); and, of course, animals that are all humanized, as they are in many movies for children. Not all animals are nice, by the way; one of my favourite Krtek movies is one where there are large animals (wolves?) who are a danger to the other animals, and by painting themselves and standing on each other’s shoulders (and thus pretending to be huge, much more dangerous monsters themselves), they are able to chase away the wolves. (NB – I have this from my memory from watching this a pretty long time ago, so not 100% reliable!).
With for many of our readers the holiday season before the door, I just wanted to share this with those of you who have never heard of the Little Mole. If you have small children, I bet they (and perhaps you too) might like to see some of it, tucked away under a blanket on the couch. Happy holidays!
NYC Is Giving Teens Free Online Therapy
Three great stories we found on the internet this week.
Help in hand
Good news for teens who need to talk: As part of a broader effort to address rising mental health concerns since the start of the pandemic, New York City has launched a program that will provide free online therapy.
The initiative, called NYC Teenspace, enables New Yorkers ages 13 to 17 to text, call and video chat with licensed therapists via the online platform Talkspace.
Though live sessions are limited to one per month, texting is unlimited — and valuable. “We have learned that when people face something stressful, messaging is a powerful tool at their fingertips,” said Talkspace CEO Jon Cohen.
Building resilience
Bamboo is having an architectural moment. Yasmeen Lori, an award-winning architect — and the first practicing female architect in Pakistan — is using the material to build structures for displaced Pakistanis. The Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, which Lori founded, has built nearly 40,000 homes since 2022’s devastating monsoon floods. And it’s aiming to hit one million in the next couple of years.
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Lori draws a key distinction: these aren’t disaster relief shelters, but rather disaster-resistant homes. They are designed to be easily repaired, added to and, of course, replicated. Plus, bamboo can be harvested much more quickly than traditional timber, and bamboo products can store carbon.
“Architects call it natural steel,” said Liu Kewei, an engineer who has worked on bamboo projects elsewhere. “It’s really a marvelous material.”
Read more at the Washington Post
Hatching plans
The kiwi, a brown bird that one observer recently described as resembling an “avocado with legs,” is New Zealand’s most iconic animal. But while these flightless, nocturnal creatures could once be found all over the country, today there are only an estimated 70,000, mostly in remote areas.
A baby kiwi being nursed in an avian nursery. Credit: K Ireland / Shutterstock
That’s why it’s a big deal that two hatchlings have been discovered just three miles from the bustle of Wellington — the first, experts say, to be born in the wild in the area in living memory. This marks a small but critical victory for a multi-year conservation effort, which included reducing predator populations and reintroducing kiwis into nearby farmlands.
There’s a long road ahead, and those Wellingtonian hatchlings still have to make it to adulthood. But it’s a “special moment,” says Pete Kirkman, the conservationist who found them.
Read more at the New York Times
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Fresh audio product: political economy—the feline angle; understanding capitalism to smash it
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):
November 30, 2023 Leigh Claire La Berge, author of Marx for Cats, on political economy and the human–feline relationship • Michael Zweig, author of Class, Race, and Gender, on understanding capitalism in order to transform it
Presentism and veganism: If I’m wrong, I’m wrong now and forever (crosspost from Substack)
Within pretty broad limits[1], I’m an advocate of historical ‘presentism’, that is, assessing past events and actions in the same way as those in the present, and considering history in relation to our present concerns. In particular, that implies viewing enslavers, racists and warmongers in the same light, whether they are active today or died hundreds of years ago.
A common objection to this position runs along the lines:
Suppose that at some point in the future, the vast majority of people are vegans. They will judge you in the same way as you judge past enslavers, racists and warmongers. In anticipation of this, you should suspend judgement on people in the past.
I don’t buy this.
There are plenty of vegans around today and I have heard and rejected their arguments. While I condemn cruel farming practices, and try to avoid buying food produced with such practices, I don’t accept that there is anything inherently wrong with killing animals for food. Animals raised for food live longer and, with humane farming practices, happier, lives than their wild counterparts [2]. They aren’t aware of their own mortality, and have no life projects that are foreclosed when they die.
Vegans reject these arguments and judge me and others harshly for making them. Perhaps they are right. And they might, in the future, convince a majority of people. But if so, members of the future vegan majority would be just as entitled to condemn my views as are vegans alive today, and to view me in the same light as they would the remaining minority of non-vegans. The fact that I would by then be a “person of my own time” is neither here nor there.
I’ll qualify this a bit. No one can think deeply about everything so, most of the time, most of us go along with whatever people around us think. So, it’s unfair to pass judgement on ordinary Confederate (or Nazi) soldiers for fighting for a cause everyone around them said was right.
But that doesn’t excuse Calhoun, or Jefferson, or Locke, any more than it excuses Hitler. These are people who had been made aware of the evil they were promoting and profiting from, and promoted it anyway. And, if the ethical case for veganism is correct, then I am wrong, regardless of the fact that, at present, most people agree with me.
fn1. As examples of those limits, I don’t want to criticise people who failed to support equal marriage at a time when hardly anyone thought about it. And going back before the modern era (say pre-1600) the difference in world views is so great that it’s hard to make any kind of judgement on most issues.
fn2. Not to mention, happier than the lives of most people.
More discussion at Substack. Based on that, I expect most of the comments here to be about the merits or otherwise of veganism, and only a few to address presentism. This reinforces the point that veganism is not an example on which anti-presentists can lean to support their case. Feel free to provide better examples.
Drunk Rats Could Overturn Neurological Orthodoxy
A form of brain abnormality long regarded as permanent is, in fact, sometimes reversible, according to an unassuming little paper with big implications.
Here's the key data: some rats were given a lot of alcohol for four days (the "binge"), and then allowed to sober up for a week. Before, during and after their rodent Spring Break, they had brain scans. And these revealed something remarkable - the size of the rats' lateral ventricles increased during the binge, but later returned to normal.
Control rats, given lots of sugar instead of alcohol, did not show these changes.
This is really pretty surprising. The ventricles are simply fluid-filled holes in the brain. Increased ventricular size is generally regarded as a sign that the brain is shrinking - less brain, bigger holes - and if the brain is shrinking that must be because cells are dying or at least getting smaller. So bigger ventricles is bad.
Or so we thought... but this study shows that it might not always be true: alcohol reversibly increases ventricular volume over a timescale of days. It does so, the authors say, essentially by drying brain tissue out; like most things, if you dry the brain out, it gets smaller (and the ventricles get bigger) but when the water comes back to the tissues, it expands again.
As you can see here in Figure 2...
Maybe. I admit that just eyeballing this, it looks more like the ventricles are getting brighter, rather than bigger, but I'm not familiar with the details of water scanning. Maybe some readers will know more about it.
If it's true, this is big - maybe it's not just high doses of alcohol that does this. Maybe other drugs or factors can shrink or expand, the ventricles, or even other areas, purely by acting on tissue water regulation, rather than by anything more 'interesting'.
Take the various claims that some psychiatric drugs boost brain volume while others decrease it, just for starters...could they be headed for a watery grave?
Of course, this is in mice - and it might not translate to humans... we need to find out, and I for one am keen to apply for a grant. Here's my draft:
Participants: 8 healthy-livered neuroscientists.
Materials: 1 MRI scanner, 1 crate Jack Daniels.
Methods: Subjects will confer to pick a Designated Operator, who will remain sober. If no volunteers for this role are forthcoming, selection will be randomized by Bottle Spinning. All other participants will consume Jack Daniels ad libitum, and take turns being scanned. Once all Jack Daniels is depleted, participants will continue to be scanned until fully sobered up (defined as when they can successfully spell "amygdalohippocampal").
Instructions to Participants: i) what happens in the magnet, stays in the magnet. ii) If you 'dirty' the scanner, you clean it up. iii) Bottle caps are not MRI safe!
Er... seriously though, someone should check.
Zahr NM, Mayer D, Rohlfing T, Orduna J, Luong R, Sullivan EV, and Pfefferbaum A (2013). A mechanism of rapidly reversible cerebral ventricular enlargement independent of tissue atrophy. Neuropsychopharmacology PMID: 23306181