Post by Admin on Feb 23, 2024 13:36:54 GMT
Kinship
Science must become attuned to the subtle conversations that pervade all life, from the primordial to the present
aeon.co/essays/on-the-shared-genetic-memories-between-us-the-cat-and-the-fly
Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!
We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth
or we climb to the knife edge of the snow with the voices of the dead dahlias.
– from the poem ‘City That Does Not Sleep’ by Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), translated by Robert Bly
Standing in the mix of muck and manure next to the dairy barn, I was talking to the camera about mad cow disease. This was the early 1990s, when farmers, the general public and politicians were in a panic about the possible dangers associated with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). When one of the heifers trundled over to me, bumped me with her nose, and proceeded to lick my coveralls, the news crew backed away, eyeing the heavy metal fence behind them.
‘Are they OK? Is that normal?’
I laughed and scratched the cow between her horn nubbins. ‘Completely normal. She just likes the salt on my coveralls.’ I then wondered if that was true. It was what, in veterinary college, I’d been taught. I was essentially a human substitute for the block of salt-lick used by many farmers. Or was there more to this cross-species interaction than the pursuit of basic physiological needs?
Recently, after I used a garden hose to flush a rat out of its hole in the chicken run, and then whacked it on the head with a brick, I was flooded with a deep sadness. My daughter suggested that I was channelling the grief I felt at a cancer diagnosis my wife had received the previous week. That may be true. However, this experience with the rat also evoked an intense, visceral memory from my days as a veterinary student. I had been asked by a professor to do away with a congenitally deformed newborn lamb. I do not recall instructions being given. In the service of some misplaced sense of moral doubt, I must have absorbed the idea that sudden death was more humane than lingering demise. I remember grabbing the lamb, slippery with birth fluids, by its hind feet, swinging it in a circle, and smashing it against a concrete wall. Were my subsequent feelings about these events misplaced anthropomorphic empathy?
What does it mean when a cat flops into my lap, and I immediately stroke it, or I laugh at a dog following its owner, who carries a small bag of canine scat? Are the cat and dog only after a snug, safe place to rest, some exercise, or food? When my half-dozen backyard hens settle down in a row behind the wire fence to listen to me sing Bob Dylan or Raffi, what are they hearing? If I read more than simple animal needs into these events, am I sentimentally anthropomorphising? Am I needlessly complexifying what are essentially simple relationships? I used to think so.
Science must become attuned to the subtle conversations that pervade all life, from the primordial to the present
aeon.co/essays/on-the-shared-genetic-memories-between-us-the-cat-and-the-fly
Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!
We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth
or we climb to the knife edge of the snow with the voices of the dead dahlias.
– from the poem ‘City That Does Not Sleep’ by Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), translated by Robert Bly
Standing in the mix of muck and manure next to the dairy barn, I was talking to the camera about mad cow disease. This was the early 1990s, when farmers, the general public and politicians were in a panic about the possible dangers associated with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). When one of the heifers trundled over to me, bumped me with her nose, and proceeded to lick my coveralls, the news crew backed away, eyeing the heavy metal fence behind them.
‘Are they OK? Is that normal?’
I laughed and scratched the cow between her horn nubbins. ‘Completely normal. She just likes the salt on my coveralls.’ I then wondered if that was true. It was what, in veterinary college, I’d been taught. I was essentially a human substitute for the block of salt-lick used by many farmers. Or was there more to this cross-species interaction than the pursuit of basic physiological needs?
Recently, after I used a garden hose to flush a rat out of its hole in the chicken run, and then whacked it on the head with a brick, I was flooded with a deep sadness. My daughter suggested that I was channelling the grief I felt at a cancer diagnosis my wife had received the previous week. That may be true. However, this experience with the rat also evoked an intense, visceral memory from my days as a veterinary student. I had been asked by a professor to do away with a congenitally deformed newborn lamb. I do not recall instructions being given. In the service of some misplaced sense of moral doubt, I must have absorbed the idea that sudden death was more humane than lingering demise. I remember grabbing the lamb, slippery with birth fluids, by its hind feet, swinging it in a circle, and smashing it against a concrete wall. Were my subsequent feelings about these events misplaced anthropomorphic empathy?
What does it mean when a cat flops into my lap, and I immediately stroke it, or I laugh at a dog following its owner, who carries a small bag of canine scat? Are the cat and dog only after a snug, safe place to rest, some exercise, or food? When my half-dozen backyard hens settle down in a row behind the wire fence to listen to me sing Bob Dylan or Raffi, what are they hearing? If I read more than simple animal needs into these events, am I sentimentally anthropomorphising? Am I needlessly complexifying what are essentially simple relationships? I used to think so.