smart animals

From the BBC, my favorite source for critter news, two 21st-century entries in the venerable "sagacious animals" genre**:

1. "Wild" Australian dolphins develop "tail-walking culture"!
It seems weird to call a dolphin that lived close enough to humans to get trapped in a marina lock, rescued into a dolphinarium, then subsequently released to be closely observed by a team of scientists "wild." We humans sure have strange cognitive needs, don't we?

I never got around to seeing Happy Feet, but I can see this story being captured by Hollywood and genetically modified into a break-dancing cetacean flick. Or an even more anthropocentric version of Ratatouille, in which animals don't just want to become human, but aspire to be the funhouse version of themselves that humans want them to be.

2. Magpies can recognize mirror reflections of themselves!
And apparently they don't mind having random stickers stuck on their bodies as long as they can't see them.

** I'm using the term "sagacious animal" pretty loosely here, to refer to the kind of sometimes scientific, sometimes sentimental, sometimes a bit of both stories about smart animals and their funny ways that you'd find in the news and other popular sources. Harriet Ritvo, author of the wonderfully learned Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in Victorian England, gives a much more rigorous account of the concept of "animal sagacity" in the history of science:

... well into the last part of the nineteenth century "sagacity" was the standard term for intelligence demonstrated by animals. An individual animal or species might be described as "intelligent," but the term "intelligence" itself was generally reserved for strictly human capacities. (Conversely, if "sagacity" was attributed to human beings, it often had an ironic or less than flattering connotation.) The phrase "animal sagacity" in the title of a book or article often signaled an abstract discussion of instinct or intellect, the kind of discussion that might conclude by appreciating the intelligence of apes. But in the more common usage of naturalists, sagacity indicated not the ability to manipulate mechanical contraptions or solve logical problems, but a more diffuse kind of mental power: the ability to adapt to human surroundings and to please people. A somewhat circular calculation made the most sagacious animals the best servants. So dogs might not only rival apes in the mental competition, but surpass them - closest to their masters in mind as well as in domicile.

"The ability to adapt to human surroundings and to please people" - that may not be the official measure of animal cognitive capacities in 21st-century science, but it certainly still seems to be a potent force in the popular/pop-scientific imagination.

conquest of dogs, conquest of everything

I took advantage of a transcontinental flight to finish about half of Kathleen Kete's The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris, which I've been meaning to read all summer. The book is sadly out of print, but available used. It's chock full of fascinating and often amusing historical details, from popular, highly embellished stories of animal virtue in the press (Grieving dog kills herself after master's death! Dog rescues abusive master! Etc.) to the fumbling attempts of Parisian authorities to enumerate, classify, and tax pet dogs. (My first post on this blog is actually about dog tax, too - though in the much different social world of plantation South Carolina.)

Call me a killjoy, but my antennas are always twitching for connections between dog-keeping and institutions of human-on-human dominance, especially racism and colonialism. So I was struck by these pronouncements from French naturalists that Kete cites:

From the novelist and journalist Aurélien Scholl, quoting the comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier, infamous autopsist of the so-called Hottentot Venus: "[the domestication of dogs was] the most useful and most remarkable of conquests, 'perhaps essential to the establishment of society.'"

A more florid version from Oscar Honoré, author of the 1863 Le Coeur des bêtes: "The dog is probably the first conquest of man, and it is thanks to him that man has conquered some tens of other species of animals without which there would be today neither city, nor road, nor nation, nor maybe mankind itself on the earth."

(For a few more examples, see Kete, pp. 50-51)

So, as a kind of "gateway" objects of conquest, dogs also enable humans - by which these guys probably meant "Europeans" - to vanquish just about everything else in the world. These passages don't refer to the conquest of other humans as such, but it's strongly implied in Honoré's reference to nation-building (and perhaps also in Cuvier's "establishment of society"). It's easy to see the ideological potency in this trope of humans and dogs in league against the rest of the world - of humans turning nature against nature, of nature willingly serving "Man" against nature.

The subtitle of Mark Derr's A Dog's History of America: How Our Best Friend Explored, Conquered, and Settled a Continent is a contemporary American variation on this theme, with a more cano-centric twist. The frontier thesis triumphalism here strikes me as oddly tone-teaf, given that the book actually includes a substantial, well-researched section on the horrifying use of war dogs in the Spanish Conquest of the Americas that - how can it be otherwise? - is anything but celebratory. But perhaps the title is the marketer's handiwork.

dogs in early 20th-century china

The Special Collections Library at Duke recently launched a digital collection of the photographs of the early 2oth-century sociologist and China scholar Sidney G. Gamble. I have barely skimmed the surface of the collection, but did turn up these two striking images of dogs and children:



The bibliographic records for the photos are here and here.

murmuration of starlings

An addendum to my last post about the comic artist Kevin Huizenga's re-takes of Audubon and the genre of natural history. I compared Huizenga's squirrels to Audubon's pigeons, but didn't mention Kevin H's own wonderful swarming birds story, "The Curse," which is part of a 3-part cycle on the mysteries and miseries of suburban life. Salon ran a great review of these and other works in the collection Curses back in 2006.

In "The Curse," the bird in question is the starling, an imported "old world" species that has thrived in North America, not unlike the highly invasive human suburbanites they now torment, with their ceaseless chirpings and - true to the spirit of the departed passenger pigeons, perhaps - voluminous droppings.

Here's a post from Huizenga's own blog about the latest in starlings (well, latest as of April 2007) .

squirrels & pigeons

A very funny page from the mini-comic Or Else #4, by one of my favorite comic artists Kevin Huizenga (image from Beguiling, the on-line comic art store):These fictional squirrel marauders of yore have always reminded me of John James Audubon's description of the now extinct passenger pigeon:

In the autumn of 1813, I left my house at Henderson, on the banks of the Ohio, on my way to Louisville. In passing over the Barrens a few miles beyond Hardensburgh, I observed the Pigeons flying from north-east to south-west, in greater numbers than I thought I had ever seen them before, and feeling an inclination to count the flocks that might pass within the reach of my eye in one hour, I dismounted, seated myself on an eminence, and began to mark with my pencil, making a dot for every flock that passed. In a short time finding the task which I had undertaken impracticable, as the birds poured in in countless multitudes, I rose, and counting the dots then put down, found that 163 had been made in twenty-one minutes. I travelled on, and still met more the farther I proceeded. The air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse, the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow; and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose.

The last bit is probably the most charmingly gross passage in the annals of American letters.

friday monkey blogging

I don't really blog regularly enough for this "friday [insert your favored species here] blogging" to make sense, but here it is anyway.

From the Guardian's "The Week in Wildlife" series: "A golden langur – one of the world's most endangered species, found only in a few pockets in western Assam and adjoining Bhutan – and a Hanuman monkey in playful mood at the zoological park." Looks like monkey fight to me!

updates

I noodled around with two earlier posts about the "turnspit" dog. Apparently I'm kind of obsessed with it!