Jonathan Balcombe

Response to listeners of my interview on the Diane Rehm Show (March 16, National Public Radio)

2010-03-19T10:34:00.000-07:00

http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2010-03-16/jonathan-balcombe-second-nature#comment-53

Thank you to all who listened to the show today, and thank you for taking the time to share your comments. I just now read them (all of them). I have mixed feelings about some of these comments, for sure, but they show that I struck some chords, tweaked some nerves and generally got people thinking into some uncomfortable territory. For that I am grateful. Also, I’m sorry I didn’t respond to all the questions that came through. A one-hour media interview goes incredibly fast and there’s a premium on time for both guest and host. I don’t assume to be the authority on these complex matters (thanks, Lori, for your comment on that) or to have all the answers. I do feel very strongly, however, that our current relationship with animals represents what the Hope Indians would call koyaanisqatsi: life out of balance. There is an enormous disconnect between what we now know of animals’ experiences of their lives, and how we treat them as a whole (most notably as in factory farms and commercial fishing — which consume some 75 billion sentient creatures yearly). That disconnect badly needs fixing. A key element to fixing it is information. Putting the information out there is the core aim of this book.

Snow sparrow

2010-02-11T09:48:00.000-08:00

This little fella flew into our deck window, ignoring the falcon silhouettes I’ve placed there. He lay trapped between the soft snow and the glass. I opened the door and gingerly picked him (or her) up. He was stunned but alert and appeared uninjured. You can see why they’re called white-throated sparrows. My cupped hand became quite hot beneath his body. He seemed to like the added heat from my hand. He flew after about 5 mins. Now that the next blizzard has arrived, I suspect he’s one of the many little birds out there on the snow pecking about for the seeds put out by me and the neighbors. I am amazed that these tiny beings survive winter temperatures, never mind when it storms!

Carrot narcissism

2010-02-11T09:46:00.000-08:00

I found this in my fridge. Can a carrot fall in love with itself? Or maybe it was just too cold in my fridge.

Gullwatching

2010-02-07T13:45:00.001-08:00

Today, after taking in the museum of plant sex (a.k.a. the Botanical Garden), in Washington, DC, I stopped to watch the gulls soaring above the reflecting pool in front of the Capitol Building. It was gusty and a few minutes before sunset. What are they doing up there?, I wondered. So I fixed my eyes on one gull and followed her flight. (I do not share a gull’s skill for distinguishing male gulls from females, so I have chosen this one to be a girl gull).

I followed her for five minutes. With the exception of a 30 second stretch when she lost altitude and flapped her wings, she soared with outstretched wings the entire time. She wheeled in circles, usually clockwise. Her altitude ranged from about 40 to 150 feet, and she never ventured far from the 3 acre pool. When I left, she was still soaring, as were a dozen or so other gulls.

Biologists seek adaptive explanations for practically all animal behaviors. So, what was she doing up there? Clearly, it isn’t energetically expedient to soar when one could be floating or resting on terra firma. I contend that these gulls are flying for the fun of it.

An observation I made week earlier at the same location brought me to the same conclusion. A couple of dozen gulls floated on the water, dunking and preening themselves. Several others soared overhead. I noticed a gull with something in his beak. And, as I’ve often seen in gulls, there was an aerial chase in progress. Gulls are aerial pirates. Like crows, frigatebirds and some other opportunists, they will chase other birds seeking to bully or intimidate them into relinquishing a food item. It often works.

At first glance, the chase looked like it was over food. The lead bird with the item in his beak uttered muffled squawks while three other gulls flew in hot pursuit. He arced upwards, swooped downwards, and made dramatic and sudden shifts in horizontal direction. After about a minute, he got sandwiched between two pursuers and, opening his bill, quite deliberately let go of his prize. One of the other gulls grabbed it before it fell even five feet. The chase resumed. Soon, this gull also released the tidbit. Again, it was grabbed by a pursuer. After 90 seconds of some highly entertaining aerobatics, this third gull managed to break free of her harriers. She flew to a far end of the pond, where I expected her to alight and have her well-earned snack in peace.

She did nothing of the sort. She got to the far end of the pond and—with the deliberateness of a grocery shopper returning a bruised apple to the basket—she dropped the object, which landed unceremoniously in the water 75 feet below. She flew back to her colleagues, alit on the water and proceeded to preen herself.

Like so many sentient animals, gulls are not slaves to their selfish genes. Theirs is not an unremitting, earnest struggle for survival, as some nature documentaries would have us believe. Gulls who soar and play tag are a triumph of emotions over genetics. They remind us of the whimsy of nature and the power of pleasure to add color to our days.

Avatar

2010-01-04T11:30:00.000-08:00

Since I discovered dinosaurs at age 8, it has been a lifelong fantasy of mine to travel back a hundred million years or so and explore the fauna and flora of a bygone era. Being a fantasy, I can have it on my own terms. I would be safely contained inside an invisible glass orb which hovered about as my mind’s desire directed it. If a stegosaurus drank at a waterhole a mile away, I would zoom over to it, silently. I would move in close enough to see the water reflected in its eye. I would listen to the exhalations between each sucking intake of water. I would reach out and feel the moist breath on my skin. A few minutes later I might be soaring with pterodactyls, or thundering across a grassland with a megatherium.

The new film Avatar brought me closer to living that fantasy than ever before. The film is set on another planet — lush with rainforest vegetation — where evolution has taken its own path to life forms no less splendid than those on Earth. We witness the wonderful turns Darwinian natural selection can take when organisms are subjected to different survival pressures through millennia. In addition to many intriguing plants, we meet up close at least a dozen vertebrate and invertebrate animal species. All are exquisitely rendered. The skin of the flying lizards is supple and vibrantly colored, and their four-winged layout as convincing as it is radical. Several of the land-bound beasts run and leap not on four but six legs, and they appear no less efficient for it. The domesticated equine-like beasts ridden by the natives breathe through a series of openings running up each side of the neck, reminiscent of an octopus’s siphons or the spiracles traversing a locust’s abdomen.

The film’s hero, Jake Sully, faces many perils and surprises as his avatar stumbles through this moist, tropical alien terrain. We glide voyeuristically alongside, taking in the visual majesty with the secure knowledge that nothing can harm us. So real is the scenery (enhanced by 3-D technology) that I found myself fully tensed, muscles primed for fight or flight, with each step Sully takes over a moss-covered log or under a massive fern frond.

Thankfully, there is a message to go with the entertainment value of this stunning visual feast. The story-line builds to a violent confrontation between the planet’s nature-loving Na’vi tribe, and an expedition of avaricious humans from whom the Na’vi are trying to protect their sacred homeland. One would have to be asleep not to draw parallels with the might-makes-right, colonial persecution and exploitation of native peoples (and animals) and their shrinking habitats on our own planet.

My enthusiasm was dampened somewhat by scenes of brutality towards animals by the Na’vi themselves, who hunt with arrows and kill for meat. The contrast between humans and Na’vis would have been more profound and poignant had the latter been shown to be animal-friendly to the point of not eating them. Also, there is a predictable emphasis on snarling, menacing animals bent on killing to eat. This is, after all, a Hollywood production. Still, one can hope that the film’s pro-environment message reaches audiences far and wide. After all, a film is just a fantasy, but it might provide inspiration and guidance for dealing with humankind’s real world shortcomings.

Philadelphia Foray

2009-12-23T13:29:00.000-08:00

12 December 2009, Washington, DC • Philadelphia

I arrived early this morning at Union Station for an overnight visit to Philadelphia, where I will speak tonight at a Holiday Party organized by The Humane League of Philadelphia. I took a walk over to the Capitol building a half mile away. There are many lawns with stately trees there and this crisp (0°C) sunny morning was great for walking. I paused to watch a squirrel perched on a low bough, soaking in some morning sunlight. A few minutes on, as I walked a stone path abutting the Capitol, I came upon another squirrel. This one was dead. He lay flat on the path edge near some shrubs. There was no sign of trauma. He looked as if he had bounded to a stop, spread his legs out, and just gone to sleep.

As I stooped to investigate, three young women walked up from the other direction. They gasped and made sad expressions at the sight of the squirrel, whose glazed eyes were half open. One of them suggested I not touch him, but I said it was okay, adding the irrelevant but effective excuse that I am a biologist and handle animals quite often. His body was stiff as I picked him up and placed him beneath a shrub. “Is it that way because of the cold?” one of the women asked. I replied that the squirrel had probably been dead an hour or two and that the stiffness was due to rigor mortis.

Two of the women had “fur” collars. I politely asked them if they were made of real fur. Neither was sure. They let me inspect the collars; one appeared fake and the other real, probably coyote or raccoon dog. I urged them to check the labels on their coats before buying them, adding that some companies had deliberately mislabeled fur trimming to dupe consumers, but that U.S. law has recently been passed to require proper labeling. One of the women, an Australian from Melbourne, asked if they kill animals for their fur or if they get them from secondary sources. I explained what I had learned of the appalling cruelties of the fur industry from having worked in animal protection for 20 years. She said she’s a vegetarian, apart from eating chicken, which she insists be free-range. I commended her, but I also asked that she not call herself a vegetarian when she still eats meat.

I feel like this encounter represents the current state of the public’s relationship to animals: native empathy, nascent awareness, but still plenty of ignorance. Someone, who recently heard a talk by Jonathan Safran Foer for his new book Eating Animals, said that Foer is saying that we don’t need new values — that our values already include compassion for others — and that what we need is a new story, one that includes the animals. I think he’s right, which is why public enlightenment is so vital to bringing about animal liberation.

13 December 2009, Philadelphia • Washington, DC

The weather has turned dull and gray, but my spirit is sunny, thanks to the Humane League of Philadelphia’s Holiday Party last night. Two hundred guests filled the room at The Ethical Society’s venerable headquarters on Rittenhouse Square in downtown Philadelphia. Lots of scrumptious vegan food and drink to please every palate. But the greatest joy was mingling with the humans who had come to share the occasion, each with their own talents and energy being put to the shared cause we call the animal rights movement. There is no denying the enormity of the challenges animals face on an increasingly crowded planet. However, it is also impossible to ignore the gathering signs of change, from caged activists in China protesting chicken factories, to news reports linking climate change to animal agriculture, to the vegan gardenburgers now available on the Amtrak train I’m riding back to Washington. The question is no longer whether humans will end our short-sighted, grasping, ultimately self-destructive dominion over the other animals; the question is when, and how soon.

Ordinary Not

2009-12-01T10:22:00.000-08:00

My blogs are not usually tied to any current events in the news, and this one is no exception. If you’ve come looking for the latest on Tiger Woods’s car crash or the elections in Honduras, you done taken a wrong turn. If, however, you find nature, and especially animals, to be an endless source of delight and surprise, read on.

This weekend provided two surprises, both of which are delightful in their different ways. The first involves fruit flies, the second house sparrows. Readers will note that these two species are among the most ordinary and routine among us. Ubiquitous in kitchens and parking lots, respectively, they rarely get a second glance. But, as a habitual animal-watcher, I’ve discovered that the rewards of watching and noticing are not linked to the rarity or grandeur of the object. On my playing field, a mouse is the equal of a lion, and a house sparrow no less deserving of my attention than a bald eagle.

The fruit flies were drawn like magnets to a half-peeled banana my daughter had left out. At any time of year, these tiny insects seem to materialize out of thin air. They also have an uncanny knack for getting at fruit, even fruit that is sequestered away. I once saw 100 fruit flies trapped inside a bowl containing a peach pit and sealed with a tightly stretched window of plastic wrap. Inquiring what it was for, my host explained that it was a fruit fly trap. She showed me the tiny holes she had poked in the window with the tip of a sharp knife. The flies, drawn to the alluring scent within, would find the holes, then push their way through the tiny apertures. The principle was like that of a lobster trap: relatively easy to get in, but virtually impossible to find one’s way out. Or so I thought. As I gazed at the trap, I was astonished to watch a fly walk across the translucent ceiling of his temporary living quarters, arrive at one of the tiny slots, then, using a front leg to gain initial access, squeezed his head through the slot and proceeded to wheedle his way through the crack to the outside. He paused briefly as if to reflect on his achievement, then he flew away. I didn’t expect that from a fly. I have since read of studies that show that fruit flies have an attention span. It makes me all the more pleased that I surreptitiously spared the fruit flies from the morgue in my genetics labs as a biology student, letting them instead recover from their ether fog to fly off into the room.

I thought I’d try the trap out at home. I peeled the remaining banana (sealing up a few other ripe ones in an air-tight plastic bag, to mute the competition), cut it in half, sealed it in a small bowl, then poked a dozen tiny slits with a knife tip. Four hours later, I counted about 15 flies inside, which I released onto the deck. This morning, another 20 flies found liberation on my rear deck. I didn’t notice any escaping through the exit holes, but I don’t doubt that they will if I wait to see. Meanwhile, there are now virtually no flies on the loose in my kitchen. This trap really works.

If you’ve watched house sparrows, you will have noticed that they have — like many birds — a quite nervous disposition. Chattery and active, they seem always on the alert for potential danger. They generally keep their distance from us, which seems a wise policy. The only ones I’ve gotten really close to have been either naïve fledglings with those tell-tale yellow corners to their beaks, or adults separated by a window, in which case they either know they are relatively safe, or more distracted by what is going on on their side of the pane.

Yesterday, as I went out to the deck to sweep leaves, there was a sudden commotion as a Cooper’s hawk flew by. These predators haunt the woods here, terrorizing the little birds that visit the feeders. When a Cooper’s swoops through (often catching a meal en route), it is usually an hour or so before any birds reappear at the feeders.

On this occasion, a red-bellied woodpecker flew squawking to a tree to my left, the hawk continued right, and four house sparrows remained inside my neighbor’s two thistle feeders. These feeders are surrounded by a cylindrical wire grid which allows entry to small birds but keeps out squirrels — and hawks. The sparrows seem to know this, for rather than fly off, they remained inside the baffles. The hawk, meanwhile, alit high in a nearby walnut tree, about 30 yards from the feeders and the sparrows they now protected. The sparrows were frozen stone-like in their spots. They didn’t move a feather. After a minute I quietly went back in and returned with my binoculars. For the next eight minutes, the hawk stayed at his perch, surveying his surroundings between bouts of preening. I also kept a close eye on the sparrows, who remained at their perches. Their stone-like stillness was uncanny. After five minutes, I began to detect the slightest movements to their heads, and some blinking. These were slow movements uncharacteristic for small birds. As far as I could tell, only one of the sparrows, a young male (judging by the sparse black feathers on his bib), had a direct line of sight to the hawk. But the big bird was not very prominent at the top of a tree 30 yards away; could they see him, I wondered?

I don’t know for certain the answer to that question, but I can tell you that within ten seconds of the hawk flying off over the townhouse rooftops, all four sparrows became palpably more animated — moving their heads about. Within 30 seconds, one of the females began taking seeds from the feeder hole that for the prior 8 minutes had been just beyond her face, but during which time she hadn’t budged. Five minutes later, only the male remained at his spot — the others had skidaddled.

There are many good scientific studies that attest to the cleverness and complexity of house sparrows, but for a wonderful layperson’s account, I recommend Providence of a Sparrow: Lessons from a life gone to the birds, by Chris Chester.

SOUTH AFRICA • 16 Apr – 3 May 2008

2009-11-23T17:23:00.001-08:00

April 19, 20:25, Port Elizabeth

This is my third visit to South Africa. Coincidentally, each visit has come at 23 year intervals, when I was aged 3, 26, and now 49. It shocks me to think that the next visit would be 2031 and I would be 72 years old.

The 15-hour direct flight from Washington to Johannesburg was grueling but smooth and I had an empty seat next to me. I had a 3.5 hour lay-over before my connecting flight to Port Elizabeth, which was complicated by a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop. Tiring of having blood either dripping from my nose or trickling down my throat, I found the airport first-aid center, where the application of an ice-pack and pressure eventually did the trick. But an hour later, as my nose thawed, the bleeding returned and I had to board the plane sheepishly with about the sixth bloody wad of tissues pinched to my nose. Good fortune found me sitting next to a nurse, who requested more ice and offered moral support by assuring me that these things are common from the dehydration effects of prolonged flights. I gratefully gave her a signed copy of my book when we deplaned. I was met at Port Elizabeth airport by a young driver with a sign sent to collect me, and when I finally arrived at my B&B in Grahamstown two hours later, it was 11pm and I was ready for a good night’s sleep.

My two presentations—a formal lecture and an interactive talkshop—at SciFest Africa were well-attended (200 and 40) and received. Curiously, the local bookstore which had ordered 100 copies of my book decided not to bring them to the SciFest venue, which probably cost them 30-50 copies in lost sales (perhaps not, for I was later informed by a Macmillan representative that they had almost sold out).

SciFest participants are mostly black students between 12 and 16 years. They exuded health and energy with their (mostly) slim bodies, bright eyes and smiles, and seemingly perfect complexions. Almost all wore uniforms and many of the boys played soccer or basketball on the terrace outside during morning and lunchtime breaks.

April 20, 21:20, Knysna

Today I drove from Port Elizabeth to Knysna heading west along the south coast of South Africa. The scenery was beautiful. Viridian surf on one side and grass-strewn mountains leaping up on the other. I saw two baboons, large males looking dark and intimidating following the rains. Also saw several vervet monkeys along the highway. Yesterday at the Amakhala Game Reserve I watched iconic African mammals—kudu, white rhino, giraffe, buffalo, blesbok, warthogs, red hartebeest, plains zebra—living free. I had watched a magnificent elephant bull yesterday, and wondered what sort of human it would take to terminate such a distinguished life as his. Today, I met him. This morning, an older man from England described how it took him four days to shoot a male kudu to add to his collection of so-called “trophies.” He gave me the exact weight of his victim, and the measure of his horns, as if describing his own worth. The nice fellow, also over 60, who ran the B&B with his wife, saw the “Friends don’t let friends eat meat” bumper sticker I’d placed on my rental car and said: ”God gave man the animals as food.” I’ve learned not to take up a contrary position with such thinking but rather to simply say something about my personal choices. In these two instances: “I also do a lot of hunting but I use binoculars and a field guide,” and “As an atheist and animal lover I prefer not to eat my friends.” It’s not as if one’s going to change these people. Youth, perhaps…old farts, hardly.

I’m looking out over Knysna Bay as a full moon shines overhead through scattered clouds. The hillsides surrounding the bay are lit with clusters of houses. Tonight I did a 45 minute live interview for a national radio program based in Johannesburg called Believe it or Not. I took a walk up the hillside streets afterwards. All quiet, dimly lit lawns, a few frogs calling from behind shrubs. A Siamese-mix cat looked nervously at me from a driveway. He looked ready to take flight until I stooped down and called to him in a friendly voice. His tail shot up and he bounded over. We shared 5 mins of greeting and rubbing against each other. He purred loudly. I rolled a stone down the paved slope and he took off after it, his belled collar jingling. He tried to follow me when I left so I tossed another pebble up the slope and jogged in the other direction. He looked back at me. Happy cat.

I’m sipping soy milk and chewing some vegan jerky (Primal Strips mesquite lime flavor) I brought with me. I hardly fit into the dietary paradigm here, but they will, inevitably, inexorably, have to shift more in the direction of my strange food choices than I theirs, that is if we’re to become sustainable. And the rumblings have begun here. Power in Grahamstown (at least) is switched off from 6-8am. Signs ask guests to conserve water. I let those radio listeners know tonight that what they put on their plates is more important to global climate change than what they drive to work.

April 24, 07:20, Cape Town

I’m sitting on the patio near the pool at Room in the Garden B&B. Located well up the slope of Table Mountain, it offers magnificent views of the rocky crags above and the city and coastal bay below, which now hums faintly with rush-hour traffic.

My drive from Port Elizabeth to Cape Town (900km) with stops at Knysna and Swellendam, along South Africa’s well-known Garden Route, was lovely. For most of the way there were mountains rising to the north, and especially near Port Elizabeth there were inspiring views of the ocean. I walked along the beach on the edge of PE, where cormorants, gulls, terns and gannets graced the air and a lone whimbrel explored the tidepools. A woman walked her dog along the sand while I walked the adjoining boardwalk. We struck up a conversation after she asked me if the next parking lot was very far along. She was a bit anxious about walking the beach with only her (friendly) dog so I offered to walk with her. Her name was Toin (Belgian name) and she works in the Winchester Hotel here in Cape Town. Her concern about safety was all too common here in South Africa, where crime—most of it petty—is a major problem. I took a half-hour jog yesterday morning in this affluent neighborhood and it looks a bit like a policed state, with electric wires running along the wall-tops and large metal gates enclosing the driveways, many with signs warning of guard dogs. Every place I’ve stayed at so far has had dogs. Here there are two elderly standard poodles, mother and son. At Swellendam there was a small and a medium dog, and a huge Irish wolfhound who resembled an underfed donkey. Karin, who immigrated from Germany 10 years ago, prepared a lavish plate of fruit to go with the bread/jam, coffee, juice and cake. Her daughter also loves animals and I signed a piece of paper to them to paste in the book they planned to get on an upcoming trip to Cape Town.

The media have shown an excellent response to my visit. I’ve done five interviews for the press, where there have been at least seven stories printed. Plus a couple of photo shoots and three radio spots, one of which has national reach. I spoke to an audience of over 200 at the Africa Geographic lecture in the lavish Nedbank Auditorium. A situation like that—rows of people in their seats, formal introductions, people coming up to have books signed, and catered food—makes me wonder if this is all real. Today I will speak at the University of Cape Town, then do a book signing at Wordsworth Books in the evening. I’m now fully acclimated to local time, and I expect to sleep well tonight!

April 26, 09:00 Cape Town

Yesterday provided one of the trip’s peak experiences as I went on a Baboon Walk. Jenni Trethowan, a dedicated protector of animals, launched Baboon Matters in 1998 to help improve relations between human residents and the wild baboon troops that live on the peninsula that juts south from Cape Town. Predictably, as humans moved in and began to build houses, grow crops and plant gardens, conflicts with the baboons grew. The baboons were labeled as “problem animals” and common “solutions” were to trap, shoot, poison or run over the baboons. Though their numbers declined, the wily baboons adapted to the persecution and their populations persisted. Today, Baboon Matters hires baboon monitors who move about with the troops and intervene to keep them off people’s properties, where the baboons may damage eaves and windows, strip trees of their fruit (can one blame them?), and occasionally break into homes to dine on easy kitchen pickings and leave smelly “gifts” for the home-owners. The monitors’ presence has reduced conflicts by about 85 percent. Most residents are tolerant or even welcoming of the baboons, but there are still those who angrily try to hurt or kill them. One of the females in the troop we followed is missing her right hand from an evil trap set many years ago by a resident, designed to amputate the hand as it was put into the trap for the bait. Four females lost their right hand to this trap. Slowed by their disability, the other three were killed trying to cross roads with a baby in their whole arm; the remaining survivor, Penelope, is currently raising her third baby.

The baboons are wild but habituated to humans. We could stand or sit within two meters of some of them, and more than once I felt the fur of an adult brush against my leg as s/he ambled past. For most of the time they were relaxed, and one could hear individuals making reassuring grunts which appeared to function to let others know that they were nearby when out of view. I watched various foraging techniques, including swiping brush aside to find seeds beneath, pulling out roots to pluck burrowing insects (I think—their hands move so fast), digging in the dirt for some other buried treasures which were deftly plucked up and eaten, and sitting in trees leisurely sampling fruit. One juvenile near me spied a fat spider, calmly plucked her from her web, and bit off the body like a berry, leaving three or four twitching legs in the grass.

One of the females was pregnant, and her flat rump was bright red. Two or three other younger females were in estrous, as indicated by the shiny red swellings wobbling beneath their tails like enormous tomatoes. These damsels were quite solicitous of the two or three large adult males, who seemed mostly to ignore the ruby hindquarters presented to them by a standing female just a meter away. The female looked back at the male as if to say “come and get it.” One of these females chased off another and while there was much yelping by the pursued one, there was no violence and little interest from the others. A more intense dispute with intense shrieks brought several troop members to their feet to see what was happening. A few minutes later, a large male chased a screaming female who took refuge in a dense thicket while he barked menacingly at her. He looked very intimidating but we saw no incidents of physical violence. The only blood-shed witnessed was from my shin which I scraped during a clumsy descent of a large boulder.

By far the more joyous sight was the rambunctious play of five youngsters (yearlings?) on a grassy hillside at the end of a residential street. They would scamper up the 10 meter slope then leap, roll, tussle or summersault their way down again. Flying ambushes, play bites and limb-tuggings were part of a stream of play that went on for at least 10 minutes. One could hear the thuds of their little bodies hitting the ground as they hurtled down the slope twisting and rolling in a grappling heap of as many as four individuals at a time. A leafy branch became the object of a three-way tug of war. The winner was soon left holding the branch while the other two scampered off; the branch lost its prize-status and the youngster dropped it to follow the others. When they ran back across the road a minute later, he once again grabbed the branch and the tug was on again. Animals at play are one of the most beautiful things to behold, for me. I was transfixed, and uplifted.

Today, following an hour-long slot on Cape Talk radio, I met Mike Picker at the Kirstenbosch. Cape Town’s botanical garden lies at the foothills of Table Mountain and is reputed to be one of the most beautiful in the world. It didn’t disappoint. Mike is a local entomologist and professor who attended my lecture at the University of Cape Town, and he wanted to meet to discuss the animal ethics committee on which he serves there. A short, very fit man in his early fifties, Mike is also a vegan, and he’s keen to see progress away from invasive animal use. Following coffee and a quite tasty roasted vegetable sandwich (the one vegan item on the menu), Mike, who is also a keen gardener and botanist, toured me through the greenhouses and outside gardens. There is a magnificent collection of succulent plants, of which South Africa supports a great diversity. Many species lie low in their hot summer habitats. They store water in their thick leaves which resemble fingers, tongues and even horses’ teeth (many are named for such likenesses). A few were blooming, and the flowers were surprisingly showy for such humble plants. I was astonished that the “cacti” I was looking at were not cacti at all; they were members of the extensive Euphorbia genus. Thick columnar stems with spiny seams made them indistinguishable from a cactus to the untrained eye, yet they evolved independently. We also saw cycads, one of which was one of just three remaining specimens on Earth. We sampled fruits, and the sweet nectar virtually gushed out of the bright crimson, bat-pollinated flower of a young sausage-tree. These are the trees whose rock-hard, sausage-shaped fruits grow to weigh twenty kilos or more and occasionally kill people when they fall.

April 30, 11:20, Cape Town → Johannesburg

I had a marvelous 8 days in Cape Town. The media and public response to my message was strong, with several radio appearances and press interviews and robust audiences at the five talks I gave.

The locals were also enormously friendly and helpful. Wendy Woodward, who hosted my lecture at the University of the Western Cape, also took me out to Baboon Matters for the baboon walk and hosted me with her family for dinner at their home. They have two large, affectionate dogs, and Wendy’s husband Chris is a Bach enthusiast like me. Rose, the sister of Louise van der Merwe who organized the CIWF event yesterday, took me to lunch and a walk round the harbor at the V&A (Victoria & Albert) Waterfront, which is a large commercial complex of shops and restaurants. Mike Picker, who attended my talk at the U of Cape Town, toured me through the Botanical Gardens (Kirstenbosch), where I learned a good deal about the native flora especially. Hermann Witteberg and his wife took me for a hike up the side of the Lion’s Head, one of several rocky mountains overlooking Cape Town. Ian McCallum, psychiatrist, author (he signed a copy of his Ecological Intelligence for me and former Springbok (South Africa’s national rugby team) hosted me for dinner with his wife Sharon at their home in Muizenburg (a CT suburb). And Fransje van Riel, a photojournalist and author whose family immigrated 12 years ago from Holland, not only arranged several of my media interviews but also took me out to Simonstown to see the 2,500-strong colony of African Penguins there, then on to the Cape of Good Hope, the most southwesterly point on the African continent, where waves sprayed over the rocks along the shelly beach, and, incongruously, a small flock of ostriches and a few eland grazed within a hundred meters of the shoreline.

South Africa’s wildlife history has been, like most places, one of eradication and extirpation of native wildlife by incoming humans. Through a combination of persecution, exploitation and habitat loss, most of the iconic African wild animals that dotted the entire landscape when Jan Van Riebeek arrived in 1652 are today all but gone, or limited to “game reserves” where, depending on the particular brand of profit-motive, animals are brought in either to be watched, or shot. It was a jarring experience to meet an Englishman who had just the day before shot an adult male greater kudu to add to his collection of trophies. One may shake one’s head that such “Victorian” behavior still occurs, but big game shooting and canned hunts are big business in South Africa today. Fransje van Riel, who campaigns against these operations, tells me that the number of lions bred, raised (on petting zoos for further profit) and then presented for hunters to shoot has risen 10-fold in the last decade to about 5,000 today. Most of the South African public is oblivious to this. But as long as these activities remain legal, and our education systems fail to instill empathy (a lesson which I sarcastically regard as almost half as important as algebra) in children, these injustices will persist. To that end, I was very encouraged to learn that Switzerland has just enacted epoch-making legislation that includes the following provisions:

• Dog guardians must qualify for ownership
• Anglers must receive training in compassion
• Social animals (gruppentiere) must not be kept alone
• Livestock may not be tethered and cattle and pigs may not be kept on hard floors

This, and PETA’s recent announcement of a $1 million reward to the first person or company to manufacture commercially viable in vitro meat before 2012, gives me some hope that humanity will yet come to its collective senses.

May 1, 21:10, Chimpanzee Eden (near Nelspruit)

It’s been a full day and I’ll probably fall asleep long before I describe it. I had an early breakfast at my Hotel Protea Wanderers in Johannesburg. I took my bird guide to the hotel restaurant and two of the staff there asked me about it. There were several masked weaver nests dangling from the large trees outside the window. I ate fresh fruit salad, granola with soymilk (yes, they had soymilk! I thanked them for this), and a piece of toast with fried potatoes, baked beans and fresh tomato. Tea. I needed a hearty meal because I had 400km of driving ahead of me. I was on the road at 7:45 and arrived at Chimp Eden at 1:45, following several stops along the way. About 50km outside Nelspruit I was getting desperate to pee so I pulled off at a picnic table. There was nowhere to go out of view of passing traffic, but there was a consolation prize. A row of large trees stood just beyond a barbed wire fence. Some of the branches dangled within reach. I went over to inspect the fruit. Several of the green pods were gaping open and inside each was a pecan shell. I cracked one open and it was perfectly ripe. I harvested about 20 nuts from the branches and a few more from the ground. They made an enjoyable snack when I sopped for a walk (and a pee!) at a tourist stop a few miles on.

Chimp Eden is situated on the Umhloti Nature Reserve, about 2,000 hectares of attractive, hilly lowveld. The narrow, paved entrance road passes through a security gate and winds about 4km to the Umhloti Lodge and restaurant. When I arrived. A tour group of around 30 were being shown some of the resident chimps in a fenced-in paddock adjoining the restaurant patio. I joined them to watch. The chimps were a picture of convivial contentment. This was Joao’s group, comprising 3 adult males (including 44 year old alpha male Joao), and seven younger chimps. All of the youngsters were engaged in some form of play, either in pairs or trios. One was horsing around with Joao, who was in no way aloof, gently grabbing, pulling and play-biting the smaller chimp like a good-natured uncle. One of the littler chimps performed seven somersaults down the gentle grassy slope. Another jumped on top of a wrestling pair and pushed herself off again with one hind foot. I saw two instances of what looked like the start of a game of tag, wherein one chimp reached out and tapped another with the fingertips then scurried off to avoid being touched back.

The playing went on for about 15 minutes—a constant flow of chimp happiness—until one of the staffers brought out a bowl of fruits and began calling the group over for feeding. They casually ambled towards the fence. Joao received the first morsel (a ripe avocado) in accordance with protocol. Each chimp held out a hand when their name was called, and the adults showed skill and reflexes in catching the tossed fruits. One of Joao’s hit a wire and changed direction, but he was equal to the challenge and successfully palmed the treat like a pro-baller.

Both Susan Slotar, who lives in Jo’burg but was planning to meet me here, and Phillip Cronje, the veterinarian who appears regularly on the successful TV series Escape to Chimp Eden that airs on Animal Planet, were away on a chimp emergency. But fortunately for me, Eugene Cossins, the amiable biologist and chimp expert who stars in the show, was in. He joined me for a beer as I had a delicious rice and sweet-and-sour vegetable dish at the restaurant, then took me out to visit the chimps before they went into their night dorms at 4pm. Eugene’s family have lived at Umhloti for several generations and he grew up here. He also conceived and designed the Chimp Eden sanctuary and rescue project. There are currently 20 chimps here, all of them rescued from various forms of human neglect and abuse. They live in 3 separate groups, each with their own large, natural outdoor territory with lots of trees and shrubs and grassy spaces. The firs season of EFCE was a big success in the US, and following just one week off, Eugene will once again be followed each day by a camera crew on Monday. The pan is to rescue 13 chimps this year from Sudan, Angola, Central African Republic and a couple of other locations. Limitations on government permits restrict the number of chimps that may be taken for rehab. I’ve watched several episodes of ETCE and I complimented Eugene on the genuineness of the production and the salutary animal messages it conveys.

When we arrived at the outdoor paddock, Eugene called to his good friend Zach, who immediately set off in our direction from 40 meters away. When this 7-year-old male arrived, he exchanged vocal greetings with E and each held out a hand towards the other in a gesture of solidarity and friendship. Zach took a few brief glances my way but his attention was focused on his human buddy. Nearby, Sally swung on the end of a Eucalypt branch 30 feet above the ground. The branch, stripped of leaves, bowed severely under little Sally’s weight and it looked like it would snap at any moment. But Sally, gripping effortlessly with one hand, bounced up and down with mischievous confidence. Just watching her was exhilarating. A minute later she deftly swung to her left, flying at least 12 feet before trapeze-landing in a shrub to joust with another youngster.

The long-term goal is to return these scarred apes to the wild, and Eugene has begun scoping out candidate locations for future release. There was a promising site in Angola, but the county has recently sank back into violent instability. Gabon, which is highly stable, is looking good. Eugene explained that getting these chimps to that stage requires undoing all the bad things they’ve acquired from their human captors, as well as teaching them to be chimpanzees. Some arrive never having seen a tree, let alone climbed one. Most have no clue about constructing a tree nest. Joao had been kept with baboons and came to CE with mainly baboon calls in his vocabulary.

I took a walk as dusk approached and watched a gorgeous sunset over distant mountains. I found what look like the remains of a wire snare next to a rocky outcrop. It is just a 10-foot length of twisted wire, but it has a loop at one end and looks suspicious. I’ll eave it with the reception staff tomorrow and tell them where I found it. Wildlife poaching is rife in Africa. A herd of impala grazed on the lawn outside the lodge this evening. The harem male stared at me for two minutes, making intermittent loud snorts. The male impalas also make a low growly grunt, which sounds incredibly menacing; one would never guess it was produced by one of these ungulates. The huge tree next to my balcony is flush with pink blossoms—a magnet for sunbirds and bulbuls.

May 3, 20:15, Johannesburg → Dakar

The nearly-full Airbus 340-600 is now cruising over northeastern Namibia. That’s a country I’d love to see on the ground, provided it was the Etosha Basin or the Skeleton Coast. I imagine Namibia has its less-than-pretty parts, too, as in: where people live in large numbers! South Africa has its share of slums, which appeared on this trip as dense arrays of wooden and corrugated shacks usually on the outskirts of cities. These of course contrasted sharply with the spacious, tidy homes in the mostly white neighborhoods with their manicured gardens and the “tick-ticking” of electric wires mounted atop the walls. One of my Cape Town hosts told me her parents keep theirs switched off because it was constantly triggering false alarms. It may come as no surprise that a country with such a socially conflicted history dating right p to the present time should have a crime problem. On my drive from Johannesburg to Nelspruit there were several stretches with signs warning “Danger, High-jacking Zone.” One is also instructed to not leave any valuables visible in one’s car. Most crimes are of a petty nature, but not all. Mike Picker spent a month in hospital recovering from an attack in his home. But no-where in the world is completely safe, and one must get on with life. I took the usual precautions (wearing chain-mail and carrying a small thermonuclear bomb at all times), and never once felt in danger on the trip—unless you count being sandwiched between a truck and an on-coming car on the dual carriageway.

M y visit to Kruger Park lived up to its billing, even though I arrived at Skukuza Camp five minutes too late to join the Night Drive I was booked for. It was just after 4pm and a good half hour before dusk. Neither the person who booked the tour nor I thought to clarify the start time. No worries—I just tooled over to Hut #24 at the nearby Research Camp, heated up a can of beans and had a simple but satisfying supper. At late dusk I stood outside the “hut” (really a small bungalow) and watched bats zipping overhead. A couple of times a quite large bat flew within about 5 feet of me, performing a semi-circle at waist-height. It made me wonder if this bat was curious about this new object planted in a normally clear zone. Earlier that afternoon while driving the 40km from the Phabeni Gate entrance to Skukuza, I had seen many beautiful African creatures, including elephant, hippo, crocodile, impala, Burchell’s glossy starling, and Lilac-breasted roller. The biggest thrill was watching a large gray “boulder” behind a shrub suddenly resolve into a white rhino. Another stood nearby and the pair passed within 20 feet of my car before crossing the paved road nervously just to my rear. About seven other vehicles were on the scene, but I had perhaps the best view. They looked so robust! As did all the animals I saw here . This morning en route to our morning walk we stopped to watch several more ellies, a lone hyena who loped along the tarmac ahead of us before veering into the grassy verge, and four magnificent (need I say?) lions sitting right along the road. Three were sub-adults and they gazed at us briefly with only passing interest, their amber eyes cutting through a million layers of human pride. One of the youngsters yawned, then playfully mouthed the other’s neck then they sauntered off into the brush.

As we received our instructions for the walk from our guides Bishop and Nicholas, who stood uniformed each with a loaded rifle, the older woman in our group of eight asked a rather naïve question: “How often do you have to shoot an animal?” Bishop explained that they don’t shoot animals, and that in the 15 years these two have been leading walks here there has never been a serious incident despite several charges by animals. At the end of this sermon, I leaned over to the lady and whispered that by far the most dangerous animal we would encounter on the walk would be the humans in our group. Quite early in the walk I spotted a pearl-spotted owl, which did much to redeem myself for having kept everyone waiting an extra two minutes when I had to run back to my car to retrieve my proof-of-payment. When the owl faced away, I noticed the false eye-spots on his nape, and wondered if these birds are aware that they have these spots from seeing them on other pearl-spotted owls, even though they can never see their own spots. We walked single-file for 90 mins with a short break for snacks. In addition to many birds (most unidentified because we mostly kept moving), we saw blue wildebeest, bushbuck, steenbok, warthog, waterbuck, and the fresh spoor of black rhino, and a leopard who had passed that way earlier that morning. The wildebeest took off when we were still 100 meters away, yet these and other ungulates forage contentedly together. Human persecution has created a culture of fear. It seems they know we can kill from a distance, and so they keep theirs. Some of the ungulate dung was shiny and greasy looking. It shone with a faint blue dross under the early sun. These beasts are so exciting even their poop has charisma. Pale, gossamer-thin mushrooms sprouted from the nutrient-rich clods like parasols. We walked past a couple of stumps and tree limbs that had been worn to rounded nubs by countless animals seeking the relief of an itch or the simple pleasure of a good rub.

Invertebrates. Dung beetles are among my favorite insects. (God’s too, apparently, for when the British geneticist JBS Haldane was asked what one could infer about God’s view of Creation from the diversity of lifeforms on Earth, Haldane replied that God obviously had “an inordinate fondness for beetles.”) I only saw three dung beetles on this trip: two small ones feeding on a dropping at Knysna forest, and one large one on a fresh pile of elephant dung at Kruger. Perhaps it was the southerly location (I visited the southern end of Kruger park this time) and the season (May is the onset of winter here—such as it is), for I saw many dung beetles in the north end of Kruger in November 1985. I managed to photograph a lovely butterfly, and I examined a small preying mantis on our Kruger walk yesterday. I photographed a cute invertebrate on the coast at the Cape of Good Hope—a warm-brown crustacean (I think!) looking like a cross between a cockroach and a trilobite. Lifting up beached kelp revealed lots of these little landrovers of varied sizes scurrying for cover. I managed to coax one onto my hand and could see two little black eyes on the head. When I switched on the light at my Kruger hut yesterday morning, there was a fairly large spider on the wall next to my bed. I was grateful to have this visitor and I well remember the variety of charismatic inverts frequenting our more rustic camp at Pafuri in 1985 (scorpions, whip-scorpions, solipugids, and matabele ants). This spider was remarkably flattened against the wall and the arrangement of the legs was in perfect symmetry. By coincidence, I have learned from the woman sitting next to me on my flight—an intrepid nurse from Pennsylvania who has traveled to rural Zambia the past seven years to work at a mission hospital—that these spiders are colloquially called “flatties”! My other welcome visitors to the hut included a tiny pale gecko who skittered across the patio when I went outside to explore the surrounding plot. S/he looked only about 2 inches long so I guessed s/he was a young one. As I packed my suitcase the following morning, a female bushbuck came gingerly poking through the scrub just beyond the perimeter fence, about 25 feet from my window. She was soon followed by her male consort. Their eyes were dark, liquid and large—a face to stir the emotions and take me to a serene inner space. How anybody can shoot creatures like these is beyond me. I noticed also how dark the impala’s eyes were, and how they wore fashionable puffs of dark fur around their ankles. Each one was an individual yet each to my relatively dull senses looks a perfect replica of the others.

I hope it is not another 23 years before I return to this physically beautiful country. On my previous visit I saw a “White’s Only” sign at a gas station toilet. Today, while many racial imbalances remain, nevertheless Africans are now integrated into all walks of life. May their emancipation continue, and that of nonhuman animals be swept up in the current.

Turning 50

2009-03-26T14:28:00.000-07:00

Schuyler, Virginia
27-28 February, 2009

On the eve of my 50th birthday, which arrives in 65 minutes, we have come to The White Pig, a vegan B&B in rural Virginia. It’s our 3rd year running and the 2nd year we’ve brought Emily and her friend Haley Warren (daughter of Frank, whose Post Secret books are best-sellers). Our arrival at dusk was heralded by a cluster of wild turkeys moseying near the border of a field and woodland. Half an hour later, a Big brown bat flapped overhead as Marilyn and I wandered the property in the last wisps of light.

I’ve been reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriett Beecher Stowe’s famous novel of 1852 which is credited with helping to fuel the end of American slavery. Bringing about measurable social change must be the highest achievement in writing. How desperate I sometimes feel to end the suffering of so many animals caught up every moment in factory farms, fur farms, research laboratories, abattoirs and fishing nets. The magnitude of human abuse of acutely sentient animals makes the hope of their eventual emancipation seem remote and unattainable. But there are so many little victories to be won, and in any case what is to be done during one’s time on Earth but to strive onward? The animals’ cause which consumes my heart and soul makes it oftentimes hard to locate peace within. But I also draw immense pleasure and inspiration from animals’ presence, be it a covey of wild turkeys melting into the undergrowth, a kettle of vultures wheeling high overhead on a thermal air column, or the ladybird beetles buzzing, bouncing and crawling about the lamp at my bedside. Tonight, as I stood on the dried grass lawn in front of the guest-house here, watching the last traces of light disappear behind wind-blown cloud patches, and a crescent moon brightening in the night sky, I felt peace and tranquility. As I get older and the planet grows more crowded, my appreciation and adoration of nature grows richer. Nature reminds me that the best things in life cannot be bought or sold. They are timeless things unfettered by the clamor of our false civilizations. I know just what Whitman meant when he marveled at the pismire (ant) that could stagger sextillions of infidels. Tomorrow the sun shall rise and I shall awake healthy and grateful for another day. Birds will sing again. Earthworms will till the soil. Humble mosses will lie soft and cool on the rocks. I will live.

Midnight fell as I wrote that last sentence. The next half century of my life’s journey begins. The ladybugs, oblivious to my thoughts, continue their own explorations. I will turn out the light that they too may rest.

Memphis Blues

2008-11-03T09:15:00.000-08:00

I’m in Memphis for the National Association of Biology Teachers 70th Anniversary convention (October 17).

I have noticed a dearth of two things here. The first is trees. From my 7th floor downtown hotel window, I can see only a faint scattering of green spots dotting an otherwise gray concrete landscape. I realize that cities are not noted for being like lush jungles, but this one is clearly impoverished compared to most cities I’ve seen. Nevertheless, squadrons of pigeons do aerial circuits and alight on roofs; starlings, house sparrows and mockingbirds are commonplace; and quite remarkably, I watched a Cooper’s hawk land on a church cross as the sun set. Also, there is a loose fairy-ring of large white mushrooms on the lawn in front of the nearby Marriott. And the weeds poking through the cracking seams of run-down lots remind me that nature lies waiting to reclaim her turf when we’re done.

The other dearth is of vegetarian and vegan fare at restaurants. Most menus I’ve perused lack even a single vegetarian option. I went with a colleague for lunch at TGI Fridays. There was no veggie-burger available (unlike their menus in Washington, DC), and the waitress patiently sat down with pen and paper to negotiate our requirements. Five animal ingredients (chicken, bacon, cheddar, blue cheese and egg crumbles) were struck from my cob salad. The waitress recommended fried green beans, which came deep fried in a thick batter that oozed oil. The NABT receptions are no better: meat dishes, no vegetarian options.

I attended a plenary lecture by Dr Steve Running, a climate change expert from the University of Montana, and one of the 450-or-so lead authors on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. As Al Gore did in An Inconvenient Truth (see my blog from Sept 2006, http://www.firstscience.com/home/blog/8.html), Running didn’t sugar-coat the crisis, and he mentioned several steps to address rising greenhouse gas emissions, such as biking/walking to work, supporting wind power, and addressing human overpopulation. But dismayingly, Running overlooked the enormous contribution of animal agriculture — estimated at 18 percent by his own Nobel-winning Panel. That contribution exceeds the entire global transportation sector, which the IPCC has estimated at 13.5 percent. Speaking to about 700 biology teachers, he missed a huge opportunity to edify a large body of influential citizens. I was prepared to rise and ask why Running missed the boat, but there was no time for questions. Instead, I sent him an email:

… I feel it is imperative that we not skirt this issue given its central role in the problem of climate change and its potential to empower people to take immediate and personal life-style steps to address a problem of global scope. If we don’t take personal responsibility for climate change, then I see little hope for our reversing the grim trends you presented.

… As you are a person of high influence on this issue, I urge you to add the meat and dairy connection to your lectures. People must be made aware of it, and the time is now. I’m hoping you’ll also remind them of the other benefits of plant-based diets — including benefits to human health, lower health care costs, and the relief of cruelty and violence toward animals.

I await his reply (stay tuned).

All is not lost in Memphis. I did find a spot (Bigfoot’s) with a decent veggie-burger, and most servers at least know what “vegan” means. Nor will I soon forget the sight of five adolescent mallards engaging in a game of chase round their circular marble pond in the ornate lobby of the famous Peabody Hotel.

A mouse's life

2008-10-18T11:50:00.000-07:00

This morning as I came downstairs for breakfast, I was confronted by an adult house. The poor animal lay prostrate on the kitchen floor, having been badly mauled by my two cats. Though I could make out no obvious external injuries, she appeared unconscious, taking in weak, gulping breaths at two-second intervals — very, very slow for a mouse. As I carried her outside I cursed my cats for their cruel indifference to the suffering of another, and wondered if they had been perusing the daily paper, filled as it is with news of similar cruelty among humans.

Mice are not infrequent visitors to our abode, especially in the autumn as the weather cools. In the previous fortnight I had discovered the grisly remains of another mouse, and rescued a third, half-grown mouse unhurt as our two cats toyed with it in the living room.

I spent several minutes trying to revive this latest victim, but her body remained slack so I euthanized her and placed her in the woods behind my house. Back inside, I quietly reproached my cats again, as I served them their “proper” breakfast, which ironically may be a poor nutritional substitute for what I had just taken outside.

I have to wonder why mice venture into my home when they must know — given their superb sense of smell — that it is prowled by cats. Just earlier that day I had learned of the tenacity with which a mouse will return for a free lunch. The manager of a sanctuary for rescued farmed animals at which I volunteer from time to time, told me of a house mouse they had caught recently in their home. They took the live-trap to the pig barn, gave the mouse some food, then released him. The very next evening, the same mouse was recaptured in their house. They recognized him because his front left foot is snow-white. For the next three mornings “white-foot” reappeared, almost mystically, in the Have-a-Hart trap, having traversed some 100 meters of mostly open pasture from the barn to their home. By this time he was rearing up on his hind-legs in anticipation of his daily snack. They eventually let him go next to a rill, a mile away.

Mice seem as inexorable as sunrises. As long as there are kitchens, and housecats, there will surely be mice. I am fairly certain that, should the day come when the Earth is no longer inhabited by humans, the tiny feet of mice will continue to scamper across the landscape.

June 4, 2008. Cape Town, South Africa

2008-06-05T10:34:00.000-07:00

On a visit to South Africa in April, I went on a Baboon Walk with Jenni Trethowan. A dedicated protector of animals, Trethowan launched Baboon Matters in 1998 to help improve relations between human residents and the wild baboon troops that live on the peninsula that juts south from Cape Town. Predictably, as humans moved in and began to build houses, grow crops and plant gardens, conflicts with the baboons grew. The baboons were labeled as “problem animals” and common “solutions” were to trap, shoot, poison or run over the baboons. Though their numbers declined, the wily baboons adapted to the persecution and their populations persisted. Today, Baboon Matters hires baboon monitors who move about with the troops and intervene to keep them off people’s properties, where the baboons may damage eaves and windows, strip trees of their fruit (can one blame them?), and occasionally break into homes to dine on easy kitchen pickings and leave smelly “gifts” for the home-owners. The monitors’ presence has reduced conflicts by about 85 percent. Most residents are tolerant or even welcoming of the baboons, but there are still those who angrily try to hurt or kill them. One of the females in the troop we followed is missing her right hand from an evil trap set many years ago by a resident, designed to amputate the hand as it was put into the trap for the bait. Four females lost their right hand to this trap. Slowed by their disability, the other three were killed trying to cross roads with a baby in their whole arm; the remaining survivor, Penelope, is currently raising her third child.

The baboons are wild but habituated to humans. We could stand or sit within two meters of some of them, and more than once I felt the fur of an adult brush against my leg as s/he ambled past. For most of the time they were relaxed, and one could hear individuals making reassuring grunts which appeared to function to let others know that they were nearby when out of view. I watched various foraging techniques, including swiping brush aside to find seeds beneath, pulling out roots to pluck burrowing insects (I think—their hands move so fast), digging in the dirt for some other buried treasures which were deftly plucked up and eaten, and sitting in trees leisurely sampling fruit. One juvenile near me spied a fat spider, calmly plucked her from her web, and bit off the body like a berry, leaving three or four twitching legs in the grass.

One of the females was pregnant, and her flat rump was bright red. Two or three other younger females were in estrous, as indicated by the shiny red swellings wobbling beneath their tails like oversize tomatoes. These damsels were quite solicitous of the two or three large adult males, who seemed mostly to ignore the ruby hindquarters presented to them by a standing female just a meter away. One of these females chased off another and while there was much yelping by the pursued one, there was no violence and little interest from the others. A more intense dispute with intense shrieks brought several troop members to their feet to see what was happening. A large male chased a screaming female who took refuge in a dense thicket while he barked menacingly at her. He looked very intimidating but we saw no incidents of physical violence. The only blood-shed witnessed was from my shin which I scraped during a clumsy descent of a large boulder.

By far the most joyous sight was the rambunctious play of five youngsters on a grassy hillside at the end of a residential street. They would scamper up the 10 meter slope then leap, roll, tussle or summersault their way down again. Flying ambushes, play bites and limb-tuggings were part of a stream of play that went on for at least 10 minutes. One could hear the thuds of their little bodies hitting the ground as they hurtled down the slope twisting and rolling in a grappling heap of as many as four individuals at a time. A leafy branch became the object of a three-way tug of war. The winner was soon left holding the branch while the other two scampered off; the branch lost its prize-status and the youngster dropped it to follow the others. When they ran back across the road a minute later, he once again grabbed the branch and the tug was on again. Animals at play are one of the most beautiful things to behold, for me. I was transfixed, and uplifted.

Racism by any other name

2008-01-02T17:44:00.000-08:00

I recently saw the new film The Great Debaters, starring Denzel Washington, Forest Whitaker, and several young African-American actors (including a young actor confusingly named Denzel Whitaker--no relation to either, I'm told). It was based on the true story of the debating team at Wiley College, an unheralded black school in Texas, which went undefeated and eventually gained the attention of the nation. Set in 1935, racial inequality was a central theme. The film included the aftermath of a horrible lynching.

Whenever I see such depictions I can’t help but draw the powerful parallels between such injustices toward humans and today’s ongoing injustices toward animals. It is so politically incorrect to show the slightest hint of racism today, and I thank goodness for humanity’s capacity for moral progress that we’ve made such huge strides in the past century with the emancipation of women and of “people of color.” Against this backdrop, the quest for animal rights is both exciting and frustrating. Exciting because there is such a movement afoot. Frustrating because so few embrace it, and frustrating that good, decent people have absolutely no clue to its moral legitimacy or urgency.

So profound is this moral blind-spot that it sometimes feels to me that I live in a world of zombies. A woman with a French accent who occasionally rides on my morning bus wore a new coat last week, with a fur collar. Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee appeared in the Washington Post playing in a jazz ensemble, and I thought “good on him.” The next day, he was pictured in camouflage and with shotgun over his shoulder, grinning as he returned from a hunting expedition where he had shot three pheasants. The folks next door stopped in the other day to give us a tin of cookies as a Christmas offering. You couldn’t ask for more amicable, helpful neighbors. They also love animals, feeding the deer and squirrels and drawing flocks of wild birds with their ever-filled feeders. As we hugged and shook hands in greeting, we asked what their plans for Xmas were. Barb said they had been invited to a friend’s place where—and at this point she leaned in with a hushed and confiding tone—they would visit the homes of several prominent niggers and burn crosses on their front lawns.

Of course, I made up that last bit. Barb and Paul are not in the least bit racist. What Barb really said was that their friends had invited them over to have roast lamb. For me, that was just as jarring, if less surprising, than if she really had admitted to terrorizing black Americans.

That decent, law-abiding and intelligent people are still buying fur, shooting animals and eating babies says much about humankind’s moral fickleness. The majority still finds it acceptable to treat animals as if they were so many blocks of wood. Or, to be more precise, they don’t find abject animal suffering acceptable, but they are either too ignorant or too complacent to do anything personal about it. To draw from a line in The Great Debaters, our task is to defy the tyranny of majority. That the masses think one thing doesn’t make it right.

Rarities

2007-11-03T17:47:00.000-07:00

Today, as I wandered a field bordering woodland near Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, I encountered a rare creature and a commoner. The rarity was a fox sparrow, by no means an endangered species, but one of those birds that most people who share its geographic range will go through life with no clue to its existence. As a bird watcher for over 30 years, I had encountered fox sparrows on perhaps four prior occasions. Through the naked eye, a fox sparrow wouldn’t merit a second glance. A small brown bird flitting furtively in the brush, they are what some might dismiss colloquially as an LBJ. Through binoculars, “little brown job” resolves into a strikingly handsome creature: eye ringed with white, arrow-head spots corn-rowed down a snow-white breast and converging into a central spot, and a robust, bicolored beak. For me at least, a fox sparrow sighting instantly transforms even the most ordinary nature foray into a memorable event.

The commoner, by contrast, was a cricket. A gravid female in her prime, she measured almost an inch, not counting her ovipositor of nearly the same length. She startled as I stepped across a patch of clover-strewn earth. Insects fascinate me about as much as birds, and I sat down to watch. She behaved as any wise one should in the face of potential danger, remaining stock still for at least three minutes. I stayed equally inert, until a wave of her antennae signaled that she was about to resume her activities. Then, this mundane insect, this shiny black creature whose kind I had seen on countless occasions, transformed before my eyes into a rarity. Inspecting a small patch of bare earth, she crawled forward slightly, pushed her abdomen upward, redirected her egg-tube downward and, with visible effort, tried to pierce the substrate. Unable to penetrate, she gave up and crawled to a new spot to try again.

Over the next ten minutes, I watched her make a dozen or more attempts to force eggs into the earth. She appeared successful on one or two tries. Between efforts, she paused to nibble at some clover.

I once watched a locust thrusting a sickle-shaped ovipositor repeatedly at the soil, but had not witnessed similar behavior in a cricket. It was a glimpse at a private moment, and a rarity every bit as significant as the sparrow. Hours later, as I sit in the glow of a wood-fire, I realize that rarity, like beauty, springs not from the prejudice of mere numbers, but from the heart.

Dear Editors of "Animal Behaviour"

2007-10-31T17:46:00.000-07:00

I’m grateful for your decision to have my book Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good (Macmillan, 2006) reviewed (vol. 73, p 737). However, it was unfortunate that you chose a poultry scientist to review it. Given that I argue ultimately for a more compassionate ethic in our treatment of animals, and that poultry science is invested in the continued exploitation of what is numerically the world’s most abused species, namely the domestic chicken (>300 slaughtered per second in the US alone), Graham Scott’s review wasn’t likely to be positive. Sure enough, he provided a dismissive, insubstantial critique.

Scott dismisses as an assumption my claim that the scientific community is reluctant to acknowledge that animals feel pleasure. How, then, does he account for the complete absence of any books or scholarly journals dedicated to animal pleasure? There are many journals and reams of papers on the equally “private” experience of pain, yet “pleasure” rarely if ever appears in the index of an animal behavior textbook.

Scott sums up my closing chapter as a consideration of “the joie de vivre of animals shown in TV documentaries.” I can only guess that he didn’t read it. Chapter 11 is an attempt to place animal pleasure in a broader moral context, including a discussion of the significance of individuals (species don’t feel things), recent ethological evidence that nature is more virtuous and cooperative than once thought, and the suggestion that ethologists take on the study of animal pleasure (hedonic ethology).

Scott suggests that “the author’s denial that ‘Nature is red in tooth and claw’ relies on the [single paragraph] anecdote that he, a cyclist, enjoys bicycling to and from work in the face of the ‘predator’ cars.” In fact, I spend five pages arguing that our popular portrayals of nature offer a skewed view by focusing on its competitive aspects and its edge-of-seat violent episodes.

Finally, Scott glibly states that I “do not really present good evidence for any of [my] arguments,” and that I have a “tendency to flit between anecdotal examples and poorly supported arguments that lack scientific evidence.” I intentionally sprinkle the book with anecdotes to make it more appealing to “popular science” readers, but that was not done at the expense of reference to scholarly sources, of which more than 300 are cited in the 30 page bibliography.

As a contributor to, long-standing member of, and manuscript reviewer for Animal Behaviour, I was hopeful that Pleasurable Kingdom would be given a better showing. Of course, none of these factors should influence how a book is reviewed. It is the merits of the book itself that are in question. It is as the first book dedicated to a broad subject with enormous potential for future avenues of ethological research that I thought it would be welcomed by Animal Behaviour. Finally, I have no idea if an ABS editor chose a reviewer with strategic intent to undermine my book’s goals, but I do hope it considers selecting reviewers more carefully in future.

Tuning in to others

2007-10-10T17:42:00.000-07:00

(discard from book ms)

In the autumn of 1985 I lay on my back staring at the sky near the entrance to a cave in Renfrew, Ontario. This spot is busy this time of year with bats preparing to enter the cave to hibernate for the long Canadian winter. It was late dusk, the perfect time to see bats emerging hungry for the evening’s first meal. Directly above me, silhouetted by the darkening sky, was a loudspeaker through which a tape recorder played a two minute playback of prerecorded bat calls, bracketed by a two minute control stimulus of tape recorded silence.

The bats’ response to the bat sounds was astonishing. I saw only a handful of random stragglers during the blank playback, but as soon as the echolocation calls kicked in, the speaker was swarmed. I counted hundreds during the two minute playback.

Why were they drawn to the speaker as if it were a magnet? I speculated that the responding bats were mainly youngsters listening in on other bats to find the best feeding spots. (Another theory is that they are just curious.) Several other playback studies by me and other biologists have documented that bats eavesdrop on the calls of other individuals to identify patches of insects. It’s a bit like choosing a good restaurant by looking to see how many people are eating there.

Fish, it appears, practice a similar art. Juvenile fish tune in to the crackling sounds that emanate from reefs. This cueing allows them to find reef habitats from the open ocean. The snapping of shrimp claws and other sounds distinctive to reefs can be heard up to 20 kilometers away. Scientists discovered this skill by setting up artificial “reefs,” broadcasting sounds recorded from reefs from underwater speakers (Stephen Simpson, Univ of Edinburgh, reported in NewSci, 16 April 2005, vol 186, p 19).

Some bats use the eavesdropping technique to muscle in on someone’s prospective meal. I’ve watched red bats dive-bombing towards a speaker playing the recorded feeding buzzes (rapid pulses made during an assault on a flying insect) of another red bat, just as they will dive after a juicy moth when another bat nearby is buzzing in for the kill (Balcombe & Fenton 1988; Griffin 1958). Such aerial piracy is well known in many bird species, whose daytime activities are more easily observed. It’s a hazardous business—I once watched as a dive bombing red bat miscued and collided with a patch of dirt. Fortunately, it was only a glancing blow and the little spitfire was soon airborne again.

A Sparrow's Life

2007-09-27T17:48:00.000-07:00

Yesterday as I stepped from the train on my way to a Bach concert, I noticed a house sparrow lying prostrate on the platform next to a rain shelter. No doubt she had flown into the shelter’s window. Hoping she was just stunned, I picked her up. Alas, she was quite dead. I stroked the soft feathers on her neck and head, noted the robustness of her pink beak and the perfect symmetry of her tail feathers, before depositing her beneath some ground ivy, where ants, flies and other members of nature’s recycling crew might perform their services undisturbed.

House sparrows are commonplace in the United States, and Washington, D.C. is no exception. They lurk in my neighborhood, chirping from eaves, taking shelter beneath cars, and holding noisy palavers inside cedar trees. Squadrons of these weaver finches arc over my town-home roof and settle in a spray on my generous neighbor’s thistle-feeders, where they nibble daintily at seeds or loiter nearby for the next available spot. They are anonymous, largely ignored by people.

And, as I learned from having recently read Providence of a Sparrow: Lessons from a Life Gone to the Birds, they are individuals, each with a unique character and personality. The author, Seattle-based electrical technician Chris Chester, discovered a newborn house sparrow while tending his garden. The naked hatchling, resembling “a testicle with a beak,” had fallen from an overhead nest. Chester and his wife successfully reared the chick, who became the pioneer of a small menagerie of rescued birds during the course of his 8 years.

Chester developed an especially close relationship with “B,” who would perch on Chester’s left shoulder and sleep in the crook of his neck. One of his favorite games was Hit the Cap. Chester would place a bottle-lid over the opening in his hand, which enclosed B. B would suddenly lunge through the opening, knocking the cap into the air with his stout bill. Occasionally, B would achieve a double play, hitting the cap a second time as it descended from its first flight. He also loved to play fetch, unless he wasn’t in the mood. Chester showed a full range of emotions, from frisky to irritable. He soon grew tired of fetching the same colored cap and Chester had to seek out unusual bottled products to sustain B’s interest.

Sooner or later we must come to the uplifting—if sobering—realization that all house sparrows are unique individuals. And all warthogs, meadow voles, starlings, iguanas and goldfishes. Each has a biography. Their seeming uniformity is only a function of our unfamiliarity. The more time we spend in their midst, the more their visages resolve into distinct personalities.

Later, as I sat in the concert hall immersed in the dolorous strains of Bach’s Mass in B Minor, my thoughts returned to the little grey/brown bird. How old was she and what sort of personality did she have? Who were her friends? How felt her first flight? What adventures did she have, what flashes of fear and moments of mirth?

I hope she had a good life.

A Dog's Will

2007-08-28T17:48:00.000-07:00

This morning as I went to fetch the paper from the front porch of my town-home in suburban Maryland, a neighbor took her dog across the parking area to a central green-space for a morning bathroom break. I’ve seen this mid-sized, thickly furred canine on his morning ablutions before. Usually it’s the man of the house who is on the other end of the retractable leash, but in either case, there’s a sense of rush-hour haste to the operation. These folks clearly have jobs to get to and the AM dog shift is all business—I only hope the evening walk is less perfunctory. This morning the dog took a wee then, in typical dog fashion, began sniffing about in the grass. The woman paused a few seconds then gave a half-hearted tug on the leash. Fluffy was pulled slightly off balance, but resumed her snuffling about. As she trotted over to investigate another smell served up on the morning’s grassy tableau, another tug altered her direction. But she once again resumed her Hoovering, probably hoping to savor one or two more bouquets before the inevitable return to the relatively bland landscape of indoor carpets and floorboards. Finally, the woman—perhaps growing impatient that the dog’s trivial pursuits were obstructing her own list of important tasks—produced a decisive jerk and the two re-crossed the pavement.

The dog probably knows the routine. She knows the AM shift is short, and that she won’t have long to sniff the world. But she also knows, from experience, that her busy humans, like the leash she’s on, will yield a little. By staying on-task she can buy some time. This, surely, is a dog exercising her will

Isn’t it interesting that the exercise of free will could ever have been viewed as a uniquely human trait? My New Oxford American Dictionary (2nd Edition) defines “will” as the faculty by which a person decides on and initiates action. Apart from the reference to a “person,” there’s nothing about the capacity that doesn’t also apply to any conscious creature who can plan and act. It is now widely documented—if not yet enshrined in popular thinking—that other animals are conscious planners. Furthermore, some philosophers, including the influential Peter Singer, argue that the designation “person” also applies to some animals. I agree, and if it would improve a dog’s lot, or a chicken’s, then I will it to happen. So, I suspect, would Fido.

Backyard nature

2007-08-24T17:49:00.000-07:00

It’s a Sunday morning and I’m sitting on my deck in the outer suburbs of Washington, D.C., which abuts a magnificent woodland plot. In the winter one can just see through the naked trees to a field 500 feet beyond. But in summer this space is transformed into a lush green world. Regardless of the season it throngs with life, but it seems that summer days are the busiest. I have the added good fortune of having neighbors who ply the wildlife with a smorgasbord of bird and mammal feeders, so it sometimes looks like rush-hour at Grand Central Station.

This morning I’ve been out here for an hour and as usual there are plenty of little stories unraveling. A blue jay begged noisily from a branch as another hammered at a nut between his claws, bolting back hunks with a forward jerk of his head. He gave the last piece to the obsequious loiterer, who gargled out a cry of thanks—or was it relief, or perhaps simply pleasure? A large solitary wasp alit on the rim of my birdbath, wings flitting restlessly as she descended to the water edge and daintily slaked her thirst. Her abdomen shone metallic blue-black. Little did the green looper nearby know how imperiled it was in the presence of this insect predator as it began a circuit around the rim of the birdbath. But another hazard threatened the tiny green grub. I’ve read reports of caterpillars which blindly do circuits on round rims until they exhaust themselves and die. But not this one; I’m not sure if she completed a full circuit before crawling back down the side. While checking on her progress I rescued a beetle floating on the water. It was so small that I couldn’t tell whether it was a living thing until I viewed it through my binoculars (which make a serviceable magnifying lens when used in reverse) as it crawled away over the copy of The Washington Post resting next to me. Its oval body barely filled the space inside the lowercase letter “o” printed on the page, yet it breathes, flies, and cleans its antennae.

I see that the looper has returned to the rim of my birdbath, so perhaps the “robotic march til death” theory may yet hold. The plot suddenly thickens comically as a pair of ants patrolling the birdbath bump headfirst into one another. They each take off at a sprint in opposite directions round the rim (why do ants panic like this when they’re so willing to sacrifice themselves in the interests of colony efficiency?). The looper doesn’t know what hits him as he bails from his perch, meeting the grass below before deploying his bungee-cord silk lifeline.

As I write, a robber fly collides clumsily with my laptop screen before landing on the cover of the Post’s BookWorld section, where it now perches on Gunter Grass’s cheek. Just as I think the insects have completely stolen the show, a half-pint gray squirrel plays solitaire at the wood’s edge, repeatedly practicing leaps onto a sapling’s trunk.

Piebald Ethics

2007-08-10T17:50:00.000-07:00

This morning, still recovering from jetlag, I went for a bike ride as the sun rose on the suburbs north of Washington, DC. As I cycled through one of the lovely state parks that grace my neighborhood, I spooked a small herd of deer enjoying some browse at the border of a woodland and field. At first I thought they were accompanied by a domestic dog, until I realized I had seen a piebald white-tailed deer. His upper half was normal gray-brown, but the rest was mostly pure white, as if he’d been sloshing about belly-deep in a pool of paint. Coincidentally, two hours later as I perused a magazine during my train commute into the city, I turned the page onto a painting of Mary Sabina, a piebald African slave girl born in 1736 on a plantation in Columbia. Painted at age four with just a sash around her waist, her body looks like a jigsaw puzzle assembled from pieces of ebony and white marble. While there is no surviving record of Mary Sabina’s life, she was something of a celebrity in her time.

Mary’s striking appearance results from a rare genetic disorder that disrupts the development of skin pigment cells (melanocytes) so that large patches of skin contain no color and appear absolutely white. In Mary’s case, this was not only a curiosity; it was also a source of consternation, for it raised questions about the exclusivity of whiteness and suggested that black Africans had the potential to be white too.

Today we look back on 18th century racial ideas as a product of crude social, political and economic agendas of the time. But what about the deer I saw? His piebald coat has no relevance to matters of race, but his social status has deep parallels to Mary’s. He’s a conscious, sentient, pain-avoiding, pleasure-seeking being with appetites, beliefs, and friends. No doubt he has his favorites among the shrubs and berries he nibbles with his prehensile tongue. Yet, like Mary in her time, he is a victim of piebald ethics. As a non-human, he could end up pierced by a legal bullet or arrow during this autumn or next. Because of an arbitrary set of rules forged from arrogance and sustained by convenience, he has no more rights of his own than does the bicycle I was riding when I saw him.

Someday perhaps, a few centuries from now, people may look back on deer hunting—and factory farms, vivisection labs, and fur-wearing—as most of us now do on slaving.

Western travelogue

2007-05-17T17:40:00.000-07:00

I’ve just passed through the security system at Phoenix International Airport. Today I happen to be wearing a black t-shirt with “MERCY FOR ANIMALS” in bold white letters and a stylized blue logo featuring a chicken, a rabbit and a fish. My blazer also features a small black “Praise Seitan” button that I purchased at a vegetarian festival I spoke at the other day in Portland, Oregon. As I began placing my wallet, cell phone, watch, shoes, and laptop into the plastic containers for the conveyor belt to the security scanner, I wondered if my animal rights accoutrements might stir suspicion among the security personnel. As the term “Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act” goose-stepped in my brain, I had visions of a stern-faced uniformed guard quietly asking me to step aside for questioning. I was prepared to counter any interrogations with gentle explanations of animal rights being a movement of compassion and nonviolence, and if necessary, to explain that the button refers to veganism, not demonism. As it turned out, my passage through security was smooth and the personnel affable.

Six days of public speaking and signing books in Oregon and Arizona have brought some rewarding encounters with nature. In a backyard festooned with over 50 varieties of wildflowers, I watched as a feral Norway rat made forays from the undergrowth to get seeds beneath a bird-feeder. She looked much like the tame rat I had petted at the festival the day before. A pair of Steller’s jays and a Towhee poked about right next to the rat, and none seemed to take much notice of the other. I admire the natural tolerance wild creatures often show each other; it reminds me of the civility we show strangers.

A lawn abutting my Tucson hotel swimming pool provided more intense fare for the nature-watcher. The close-cropped green carpet served as a courting ground for sex-pumped great-tailed grackles. A small cluster of the large, glossy males stalked about with bills pointed straight up, like royalty out for a stroll. Suddenly a male would stoop with gaping bill, puff up his feathers creating the illusion that he had just doubled in size, then scurry over to a female crouching with fluttering wings on the periphery. The air around the pool was constantly cleaved with a cacophony of grackle calls, including a loud warbling call that sounded as if the bird was making a derisive comment about my swimsuit.

At a rest-stop en route to Phoenix, I watched a pair of cactus wrens cavorting and preening in a small tree. Nearby, a mother thrasher demonstrated foraging techniques to her fully fledged chicks. She would trot a couple of feet and they would follow as if tethered to her by invisible string. She plucked and swallowed a tiny morsel from the sandy gravel, then hurried off again. The young pair stayed behind, making desultory probes at the substrate before trotting off to join her again. As I returned to my rental car I saw a sign warning visitors of the presence of rattlesnakes. Considering how many snakes get bumped off by humans, I figure it’s a good thing snakes can’t read, else they’d be scandalized, if not terrified, by such a sign.

Blog Entries (FirstScience blog)

2007-03-04T17:45:00.000-08:00

This morning I went grocery shopping at my local Whole Foods market. Whole Foods is the largest natural foods supermarket chain in the world. I consider people who shop here to be relatively enlightened.

I saw at least six people wearing coats with real fur trim collars.

Fur fact: the fur industry has staged something of a come-back since it reached its low point in the mid-nineties [link].

Each time I see someone wearing fur, a little bit of my faith in humanity dies. I think: here’s someone whose morals are mired in the Stone Age. Fur production involves immense suffering—be it ranch-raised (where deranged animals circle for months in wire boxes before being electrocuted, strangled or clubbed then skinned, sometimes still alive) or wild-caught (where animals struggle for hours or days while a leg or foot goes gangrene in a steel-jaw trap, and babies starving when their mother fails to return). That it’s all completely unnecessary makes it all the more offensive.

On my daily commute to work I display a large “Fur Shame!” button on my briefcase, next to another that says “Practice Nonviolence.” It’s my little way of expressing publicly how I feel about making innocent animals suffer for someone’s vanity, ignorance, or both.

Last week on my commute home I chatted with a neighbor who told me she recently had her beagle euthanized due to advanced Lyme Disease symptoms that left him unable (or unwilling) to walk. She is an educated, articulate compassionate person, and she was still agonizing over her decision to end the dog’s pain. I asked if she was planning to replace her dog but she said she was reluctant as she is single and her long work hours mean that a dog is alone for long periods.

I also noticed she was wearing a real-fur collar, probably coyote. I asked: “Is that real fur?” “I hope not!” she replied. “I didn’t pay enough for it to even consider that it might be fur.” I told her I was quite certain that it was fur and that the label would probably confirm this.

Fur fact: several coat manufacturers have been caught mislabeling real fur as faux.

Which goes to show that I’m wrong to assume that fur wearers just don’t give a damn. Many, if my neighbor is representative, are well-meaning but either careless or mis-informed. Perhaps there’s still hope for the demise of an industry that should have gone out with the invention of knitting.