Category: Animals
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Frans de Waal on Primatology
Here is a wonderful essay by primatologist Frans de Waal that illustrates how cultural presuppositions are inseparable from our investigations of nature, that ontology (in this case our a priori view of ‘animal nature’) underlies the questions we ask, the answers we get, and what we make of them. Even categories like “reason” and “logic” are inseparable from culture (or metaphysics, more specifically), a point so often missed, including by so many self-avowed rationalists.
In 1952, when European ethologists still worked on instinct theories and American behaviorists still trained rats to press levers, Imanishi [the founder of Japanese primatology] wrote a little book that criticized the view of animals as mindless automatons. He inserted an imaginary debate between a wasp, a monkey, an evolutionist and a layman, in which the possibility was raised that animals other than ourselves might have culture. The proposed definition of culture was simple: if individuals learn from one another, their behavior may, over time, become different from that in other groups, thus creating a characteristic culture. Soon thereafter, his students demonstrated that the potato washing started by a juvenile female monkey on Koshima Island spread to other members of her troop. The troop had developed a potato washing culture. [Photo, taken by the author, shows Japanese macaques on Koshima Island are still washing potatoes half a century later.]Imanishi was also the first to insist that observers give their animals names and follow them for years so that they understand their kinship relations. His concepts are now all around us: every self-respecting field worker conducts long-term studies based on individual identification, and the idea of cultural transmission in animals is one of the hottest topics of today. But that is now: at the time, all Imanishi got was ridicule.
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Amazon Rainforest, Ecuador
For its size, Ecuador may be the most geographically diverse country in the world. Besides the volcanic islands of Galapagos, it has three distinct regions: a coastal belt, the Andes mountains, and the sparsely inhabited El Oriente, or the Upper Amazon Basin to the east. El Oriente is mostly primeval rainforest, merging into cloud forest in the eastern foothills of the Andes. It teems with rivers that feed the mighty Amazon, the lifeblood of the “world’s richest and most varied biological reservoir, containing several million species of insects, plants, birds, and other forms of life, many still unrecorded by science. The luxuriant vegetation and wide variety of trees include many species of myrtle, laurel, palm, and acacia, as well as rosewood, Brazil nut, and rubber tree.” As in parts of Brazil, the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador is also shrinking, led by the usual economic motives (timber, petroleum, etc.) and new human settlements. 
About six years ago, Usha and I went to El Oriente. We took a bus from Quito to the tiny town and jungle outpost of Tena, where we hired a taxi and went further east to a point along Rio Napo called Puerto Barantilla, where we took a boat to our jungle lodge near the mouth of Rio Arajuno. Over the next three days, we explored the region with local guides, including a memorable all-day hike through primordial forest, buzzing with streams and massive diversity of life (it rained hard that afternoon, making our hike path quite treacherous). We also went river rafting one day after assembling a raft out of logs with our guide’s help, and hiked to amaZOOnico, an animal rescue and rehabilitation center run by local and overseas volunteers. Here we saw some of the great variety of Amazonian wildlife, including macaws, toucans, trumpet birds, tortoise, many kinds of monkeys, jaguars, ocelots, peccaries, tapirs, capybaras, agoutis, etc. The lodge served all of our meals. Dinner staple was fish with vegetables, rice, yucca or plantain, and tropical fruit, served by candlelight (the lodge had no electricity). The mosquitoes were large and vicious. The forest comes alive at night with the sound of a gazillion crickets. The 10 min video below is based on the footage I took there (turn on HQ mode after it starts playing; a QuickTime version is here).
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Amazon Rainforest, Ecuador
A four-day journey into the rainforest of El Oriente, Upper Amazon Basin, Ecuador, 2004. For more details, return to the original post.
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Flesh of Your Flesh
Should you eat meat? Here is a really good essay by Elizabeth Kolbert that also reviews Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals.
Americans love animals. Forty-six million families in the United States own at least one dog, and thirty-eight million keep cats. Thirteen million maintain freshwater aquariums in which swim a total of more than a hundred and seventy million fish. Collectively, these creatures cost Americans some forty billion dollars annually … “We have so many customers who say they’d eat macaroni and cheese before they’d cut back on their dogs,” a Colorado pet-store owner recently told the Denver Post. In a survey released this past August, more than half of all dog, cat, and bird owners reported having bought presents for their animals during the previous twelve months, often for no special occasion, just out of love. (Fish enthusiasts may bring home fewer gifts, but they spend more on each one, with the average fish gift coming to thirty-seven dollars.) A majority of owners report that one of the reasons they enjoy keeping pets is that they consider them part of the family.Americans also love to eat animals. This year, they will cook roughly twenty-seven billion pounds of beef, sliced from some thirty-five million cows. Additionally, they will consume roughly twenty-three billion pounds of pork, or the bodies of more than a hundred and fifteen million pigs, and thirty-eight billion pounds of poultry, some nine billion birds. Most of these creatures have been raised under conditions that are, as Americans know—or, at least, by this point have no excuse not to know—barbaric. Broiler chickens, also known, depending on size, as fryers or roasters, typically spend their lives in windowless sheds, packed in with upward of thirty thousand other birds and generations of accumulated waste. The ammonia fumes thrown off by their rotting excrement lead to breast blisters, leg sores, and respiratory disease. Bred to produce the maximum amount of meat in the minimum amount of time, fryers often become so top-heavy that they can’t support their own weight. At slaughtering time, they are shackled by their feet, hung from a conveyor belt, and dipped into an electrified bath known as “the stunner.”…
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Food, Inc.
If you see only one documentary this summer, make it Food, Inc. Here is Roger Ebert’s review, and the first 3-1/2 minutes of it.
The next time you tuck into a nice T-bone, reflect that it probably came from a cow that spent much of its life standing in manure reaching above its ankles. That’s true even if you’re eating the beef at a pricey steakhouse. Most of the beef in America comes from four suppliers.The next time you admire a plump chicken breast, consider how it got that way. The egg-to-death life of a chicken is now six weeks. They’re grown in cages too small for them to move, in perpetual darkness to make them sleep more and quarrel less. They’re fattened so fast they can’t stand up or walk. Their entire lives, they are trapped in the dark, worrying.
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The Orangutans of Sumatra
In May 2009, Usha and I visited the Gunung Leuser National Park in north Sumatra to see orangutans in the wild. We hired a guide in the gateway village of Bukit Lawang and hiked several miles into a dense primary growth forest. Heavy rain on the previous night made the hike rather treacherous and we had to grab on to branches and roots to go up and down the hilly terrain. But the forest was beautiful, abundant with tropical flora and fauna (some of it unique to the island), rushing streams and animal sounds, and we did get lucky: we saw about ten orangutans on our daylong hike. One middle-aged female—rescued years ago by the orangutan center in Bukit Lawang and reintroduced into the wild—even came down and held Usha’s hand! Other primates we saw include gibbons and Thomas’s Leaf-monkeys.
The orangutan (“person of the forest”), whose habitat has shrunk to parts of Sumatra and Borneo, has cognitive abilities that rival those of the gorilla and the chimpanzee, the only primates more closely related to humans. Placid, deliberate, and mostly vegetarian, orangutans are known for their ingenuity and persistence, particularly in manipulating mechanical objects, and for their “cognitive abilities such as causal and logical reasoning, self-recognition in mirrors, deception, symbolic communication, foresight, and tool production and use. In the wild, orangutans use tools, but at only one location in Sumatra do they consistently make and use them for foraging, [defoliating] sticks … to extract insects or honey from tree holes and to pry seeds from hard-shelled fruit.” (source) We saw one juvenile male using a stick as a tool.
Here is a slideshow of my best orangutan shots set to music (2 min, 25 sec). Check out some more pictures and a primer on orangutans.
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Asian Food for Thought
Growing up in India, I ate meat only a handful of times until I left home for college. My mother, a moderately pious Hindu, had a deep aversion to eating animals and wouldn’t allow meat in her kitchen (I also remember her kindness and sympathy towards the ragged animals that shared our city streets: cows, dogs, horses, goats, cats, donkeys, and even occasional elephants and camels). My father was vegetarian for the most part, except when, on rare occasions, he pretended to enjoy a few morsels of meat. I think he did this despite himself, mostly to project the public image of an adventurous, cosmopolitan man. If no one were looking, I’m sure he would have picked a vegetarian option nine times out of ten.
I only ate meat when my older sister brought home a chicken or mutton dish from a friend’s place, or cooked it herself on a Sunday morning on a kerosene stove in our courtyard. When she cooked, my task was to procure the meat. I would bike up to the butcher’s shop and await my turn, squeamishly eyeing the goat carcasses hanging on hooks, and gallantly ask the man for ‘the best cuts,’ to which he always replied, ‘only the best for you, son.’ Washing and cleaning the meat, I felt a strange exhilaration—I saw it not as food but as the flesh and bone of a dead animal, hacked to bits just hours ago. Mother allowed my sister to use only the most beaten down utensils from her kitchen and later instructed the maid to scrub them clean thrice as long.Still, my parents encouraged us to eat meat, holding it to be salutary for growing kids. Their attitude later struck me as similar to Gandhi’s during his early struggle and experimentation with eating animals. Gandhi saw meat as a contributor to the enviable vigor, material progress, and sturdier physiques of people from the West, which conflicted with his own traditional disposition—and of his social class—against eating meat.
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Tarra and Bella
Tarra, the elephant, and Bella, the dog, live together at The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, where retired elephants from zoos and circuses across America may be fortunate enough to spend the last decades of their life in a natural habitat among friends. The Elephant Sanctuary is funded entirely by private donations. Read about the sanctuary and their elephants’ stories and behaviors here.
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The Lives of Animals
“Life on the farm isn’t what it used to be. The green pastures and idyllic barnyard scenes portrayed in children’s books have been replaced by windowless sheds, tiny crates, wire cages, and other confinement systems integral to what is now known as ‘factory farming.’” Here is a sobering look at how farm animals are transformed into food today (viewer discretion advised. Also see my previous post on this topic.)
(Click image below to go to the video site. Image source.)
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The Tiger of Jelepara
The amazing Sunderbans, land of superlatives, is where the Ganga River meets the Indian Ocean, a great expanse of flat, mangrove covered islands, and estuaries that change salinity with the tides. Both the world’s largest river delta and largest estuarine mangrove forest, it’s also home to the world’s largest population of Royal Bengal tigers as well as some of the world’s largest crocodiles, which can get to be over 20 ft. long, with the girth of two grown men. Every year villagers are killed by the local wildlife. Three years ago, we took a boat ride through the uninhabited regions of the wildlife sanctuary. Since the islands are heavily forested and we were confined either to the boat or to fenced-in walkways on a couple of the islands, we did not see much of the unique wildlife (except baby crocs at a breeding station). No doubt, the water, too, teems with life, including elusive pods of rare freshwater dolphins, but it’s too full of silt to see anything at all. The Sunderbans felt wild to me, and mysterious, a place where a thousand eyes peer at us, unsentimentally, though we are blithely unaware.
Here’s a recent article on the increasing conflicts between tigers and humans in the Sunderbans. It’s a story with a tragic ending, from every point of view, but it brings together several strands of complexity on questions of how people co-exist with nature (or don’t), and might have done throughout human history. The people in this article live by forest subsistence in tiger territory, much as people would have throughout southern Asia for perhaps the last 60,000 years, until the tigers (and lions, and forests) were mostly killed off, in just the last hundred years. John Vidal, of the Guardian, vividly recounts the story of one tiger:Tarak was walking along the high earth embankment that protects Jelepara from the river Chunkuri, and had just passed a small Hindu temple with its gaudy, painted wooden effigies of the tiger god Dakshin Ray. He would not have seen the real tiger that had just swum across the river from the great Sunderbans forest 400 yards away. It hauled itself out of the water and mauled him from behind. No one even heard Tarak cry out…. But that was just the start of the drama in Jelepara that night….
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Slaughter in America
A recent Humane Society sting operation at a California slaughterhouse brought to light some very cruel treatment of farm animals (see the investigator’s video; viewer discretion advised). The media attention caused a minor outrage and the largest beef recall in the history of the nation. Many wondered if cruelty is all that rare in the American meat business. Donations to animal rights groups followed (not unlike the spike in donations to charities following ads of emaciated children in god forsaken countries). Guilt assuaged, let’s do pork chops for dinner.
Curiously enough, what bothered people most was the cruelty itself, and the nutritional safety of meat from downer cattle. In other words, if all USDA rules were followed, in letter and spirit, the complaints would dissolve and people would go back to maintaining their equanimity about the industrial-scale raising, killing, and processing of animals for food and things. Notably, the USDA—US department of agriculture—regulates this industry. This is on par with agriculture? What does this reveal about the American society’s relationship with animals? How many little Eichmanns now thrive among us, within us?
Nearly ten billion mammals and birds are slaughtered each year in the US alone (a million per hour). How are they processed? The time-lapse footage below from the visually resplendent film, Baraka, has some details for chickens, mixed-in with scenes from modern life (a more disturbing one here. Also check out cartoonist Mark Fiore’s, Doreen the Downer.)Bird’s Eye View
It has long been a puzzle how birds manage to navigate the world without the specialized instruments that humans use—including the human brain. Birds, after all, have only bird brains.New evidence strongly suggests that birds actually use their visual circuitry to detect the earth’s magnetic field and navigate by it. That is, in some sense birds see the earth’s magnetic field, even in the dark.
How does it work? A certain chemical found in the eyes of migratory birds responds to electromagnetism, and according to the German team who pursues this research:
Five Primates
With its 300 or more species, primates represent the third most diverse order of mammals, after rodents and bats. They include lemurs, lorises, tarsiers, monkeys, apes, and humans. For their body weight, the primate brain is larger than that of other terrestrial mammals, with a fissure unique to primates that separates the first and second visual areas on each side of the brain.
In all primates except humans, the big toe diverges from the other toes, together forming a pincer capable of grasping objects. Not all primates have similarly dexterous hands; only the catarrhines (Old World monkeys, apes, and humans) and a few of the lemurs and lorises have an opposable thumb. Fossils of the earliest primates date from at least as far back as the Early Eocene Epoch (54.8 – 49 million years ago).*
(Left to right: Hanuman Langur, 3 Common Indian Monkeys, Black Monkey)
* Text adapted from the Encyclopedia Britannica, 2003On The Road With Jesus
Sam Fentress is a Jack Kerouac of sorts. He travels the roads of America looking to find not himself but Biblical signs and bill boards – messages to praise and persuade. In his many sojourns he has found farmhouses, grain silos, restaurants, hair salons, gas stations and even traffic signs bearing Biblical messages. An artist and a photographer, Fentress first started photographing roadside biblical messages when a student in his class brought him a picture of a barn covered in Scriptures. Fentress was stunned.“It just knocked my socks off as a picture,” he said. “The boldness of the farmer in covering the roof, the sides — every square foot of the barn had some sort of Bible quote, Old Testament, New Testament, Gospels, Epistles, Revelation.”
Fentress has photographed an urban billboard which rotated its message to read among other things.
Chinese Food for Thought
In gastronomic matters, I am squarely among the less intrepid of men. Raised by a vegetarian mother who wouldn’t allow meat in her kitchen and a near-vegetarian father, I only had chicken and goat meat a handful of times during my teens — egged on by parents who nevertheless held meat to be salutary for a growing boy. My introduction to fish and prawn came only in college. Thereafter, living outside India, I began eating other animals too — cow, pig, sheep, crab, calamari, etc., once even lobster, snail (Paris), guinea pig (Cuzco), and wild boar (Patagonia). Then one fine day six years ago, I renounced eating mammals, and now prefer veggies over even chicken and fish (though I retain a weakness for Bengali style fish). Long live tofu, beans, and lentils! Most Indians are even less “experienced” than me. It is no small wonder then, that in neighboring China things are dramatically different. What restaurants serve there would make many a hardy Indian stomach churn. Here are selections from a typical and popular restaurant in Beijing:
1. Traditional Peking style boiled sheep’s head
2. Duck blood in a spicy Chongqing style
3. Royal duck tongue / Marinated duck head
4. Braised donkey meat in superior soup
5. Spicy bullfrog
6. Delicious black fungus
7. Braised pork treasures (sic)
8. Duck heart with cumin
9. Eel sects with brown sauce / Toasted Eel
10. Pork ear slices
11. Hot quick duck gizzard
12. Hot duck viscera w/ sunny egg
13. Barbequed suckling pig Lashu style
14. Young frog in bamboo
15. Pig bellies with garlic
16. Hot tasting chicken feet / Duck web [feet] with mustard
17. Stir-fried duck gizzard
18. Chicken claw with pepper
19. Dry fried ass meat in Xiang style
20. Braised pork trotter tendon and sea cucumberDeath in the Afternoon
(Ruchira Paul’s excellent post on the barbarity of “dog fighting” as a human sport reminded me of a bullfight I saw in Aug 1995.)
A hot Sunday afternoon in Mexico City. The largest bullring in the world is packed with feisty locals. Restless, they whistle and hoot before the main event when emotions run high and which, oddly for Mexico, begins on time. A quick ceremonial parade by the human performers, and the first marked bull is unleashed into the ring. Today, three matadors will tackle six bulls, and for the first time ever, a female matador (from Spain) will perform in Mexico. In the first act, three assistants to the matador, the banderilleros, in gaudy costumes reminiscent of sixteenth century Spanish courtiers, enter the ring and start waving purple capes. By provoking the bull into empty chases, their job is to tire out the proud animal, weighing nearly half a ton. From the flanks, a matador takes note of the bull’s temperament.
Cats and Humans – Domesticating Each Other
Like Lucy, the mother of man who came out of Africa, the mother(s) of all domestic cats might have been a resident of the middle east. Don’t worry, this is not the start of Friday Cat Blogging – I refer to a paper to be published in the June 29 issue of Science which traces the history of the domestication of the house cat. The research conducted on behalf of the National Cancer Institute’s Laboratory of Genomic Diversity by Carlos Driscoll of Oxford University concludes among other things:- Cat domestication probably began some 12,000 years ago and became complete around 8,000 years later.
- DNA analysis shows that house cats all over the world, from Shanghai to San Paolo, can trace their ancestry to five distinct wildcat lineages in the near east – around Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE.
- Cats voluntarily adapted to humans and domesticated themselves upon finding safe living conditions around early agricultural settlements. Man probably played little or no role in the taming of the cat except to tolerate its presence around the home and the barn.
- Cats migrated with their human companions from their original habitat to different parts of the world.
- Although the cat earned its keep by killing rodents around the grain bins, the reason the cat became a beloved household animal (and even a divine deity, as in Egypt), probably had as much to do with its winning personality as its utility in the early agrarian society as a pest controller.
Painstaking genetic research shows that the cat first became domesticated soon after humans began farming and building the first civilizations, somewhere in the ancient Near East.
Eggs, Sperms, Bones and Brains
Here are links to some not so “Just So Stories” about animals – dead and alive.
A Supersized Chicken: [link] The original Nature article requires subscription for full access.
One of the world’s top fossil hunters has unveiled a previously unknown gigantic, chicken-like dinosaur that may change evolutionary theory on prehistoric animals.
