Deer just want to be free

Armed government forces come for a fawn who was rescued when abandoned by its mother. The disproportional force agains the fawn is yet another reason the animal revolution will not be kind.

Day of the Dolphin

The film Day of the Dolphin is inspired by Lilly's work on dolphin intelligence. In the film the dolphins are trained by a 'good' scientist then 'kidnapped' to be used to kill the US President. The Simpons parody the film and undo the anthropocentrism by showing intelligent dolphins invading land and wrecking havoc on humanity. This then became a video game but which, alas, became anthropocentric as gamers play as the human characters to beat back the dolphins. When do we get to join the animal revolution?! And when do we get to undermine the head of state?

Bovril for Strength

Spy Animals

Cats, Squirrels, Hawks, Insects and more at Huffington Post.

Sample:
In the 1960’s, the CIA reportedly explored surgically inserting microphones and transmitters into cats, a project dubbed “Acoustic Kitty.” Former CIA officer Victor Marchetti told The Telegraph that the project "slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up. The tail was used as an antenna. They made a monstrosity." The first wired cat was, according to the Guardian, released for spying and took just a few steps towards its target before the cat was run over by a taxi. The CIA concluded that the project was impractical for intelligence gathering.

Radioactive Rabbit

A radioactive rabbit was trapped on the Hanford nuclear reservation, and Washington state health workers have been searching for contaminated rabbit droppings.

The regional director of the Office of Radiation Protection, Earl Fordham, said Thursday that no contaminated droppings have been found in areas accessible to the public.

The Tri-City Herald reports that officials suspect the rabbit sipped some water left from the recent demolition of a Cold War-era building used in the production of nuclear weapons.

The rabbit was trapped in the past week and was highly contaminated with radioactive cesium.

(from Salon.com)

This is similar to the radioactive boar post earlier this year as a return of the repressed.

Militarized Dolphins

These are my field notes from an excellent essay on the strange history of military dolphin experiments.

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/5503

Dolphin’s militarized

They could be very useful as antipersonnel self-directing weapons. They could do nocturnal harbor work, capture spies let out of submarines or dropped from airplanes, attacking silently and efficiently and bringing back information from such contacts. They could deliver atomic nuclear warheads and attach them to submarines or surface vessels and to torpedoes and missiles.

Dolphins and Other aliens:

dolphin laboratory could provide a model system for “breaking through” to a nonhuman mind. In the era of Sputnik this meant actual extraterrestrials, which may sound crazy now, but these issues lay on the cutting edge of national concern in those days: if we met the little green men (or, more likely, started receiving radio signals from deep space that looked to carry nonstochastic levels of information), what would we do?

One of these visionary “Dolphins” was a brilliant young Harvard astrophysicist named Carl Sagan, who made his way down to St. Thomas several times in these years to meet Lilly’s dolphins and muse about alternate forms of life in the cosmos.

If dolphins prove as intelligent as the initial studies suggest, then “for a long time presumably they will be in the position of the Negro races in Africa who are attempting to become Westernized”

see “we shall not be moved” blog entry.

Gregory Bateson visits Lilly:

Bateson laid out a sweeping theory of cross-species language development: human beings, in his view, possessed a language disproportionately preoccupied with stuff. This was our joy and our pain, since the evolution of such thing-centered linguistic abilities had gone hand in hand with the extraordinary material culture of Homo sapiens, from moldboard plows to supersonic cruise missiles. Yet in Bateson’s view this same evolution had left us with a grotesquely impoverished intelligence in the domain of social relations: those intersubjective complexities, he averred, “are very poorly represented in language and consciousness.” Homo faber was, in this sense, “stunted,” and the consequences, for Bateson, were clear: war, social conflict, pervasive psychological maladjustment.

Permit a human-sized intelligence to develop over millions of years in a highly social animal, which—on account of its aquatic evolution—possessed no hands, and thus no real capacity to manipulate a material culture, and it was reasonable to hypothesize that the cognition of such a creature would be radically, fundamentally, pervasively social. Theirs would be a language not of things but of beings. As Bateson put it to Lilly, “If I am right, and they are mainly sophisticated about the intricacies of interpersonal relationships, then of course (after training analysis) they will be ideal psychotherapists for us.”

/See in ecology of mind chapter: Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication.

Animal fArmS

March, 1947. From Orwell's Preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm (two years after the English Edition was published):

"I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge carthorse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat."

Radioactive Boars, a return of the repressed

Yeah, we forgot all about Chernobyl. We just up and abandoned the site but animals haven't. They inhabit our disasters and return them to us in new strange fur and teeth forms. Wild boars in southern Germany have been feeding off the plant life and roots deep in the ground that have absorbed radiation. These boars then take to the countryside and city looking for food and generally causing a ruckus. They are not only vicious, they are radioactive! Techne and animality return to foil the human.

If, as Nietzche claims, our strength is our ability to forget (or as Freud might say, our ability to repress), then these boars leverage against our strength. We've forgotten the radioactivity while they absorb it and live it only to return it to us. Super-boars for the comic books?

More info from Spiegel online and NPR.

WE3: animal+techne, posthumanism in action

"A dog, cat, and rabbit have been adapted by military scientists into automated fighters, resembling cyborg robots with animal heads. When the project is about to be shut down, the three escape. Here, they’re not seeking a home so much as continued survival, even in their tortured state. Their quest for freedom and the way they no longer fit anywhere — they’re not animals, not soldiers, and distinctly not human — is immensely sympathetic. The result is a condemnation of a military/industrial system that warps living things and then discards them without thought of the potentially devastating results."

Review at Comics Worth Reading. The DC Comics website for the graphic novel. Anntennea art journal issue 9 has an interview with Grant Morrison (the comic's writer) who worked with Frank Quitely (illustrator) on this project.

commando sheep

Sheep the Pennines UK have learned how to roll over the cattle grid barrier to get to greener pastures.
"sheep have perfected their version of the commando roll"
Guardian Fri. 30 July 2004
and
Jul 27 2004 The Huddersfield Daily Examiner

incidents in the animal revolution

I am interested in collecting curious incidents in which the animality of animals creates a friction with human worlding. Also, I am interested in collecting incidents (like the one below) where the animality of the animal is co-opted by humans to serve not human cultural ends but to serve human animality (as, for example in animal experimentation where the animal is a stand-in for the human).

Animal Parachute:
"In 1785 Blanchard carried out the first successful parachute experiment. He placed a small animal in a small basket attached to a parachute. This was then dropped from a air balloon and the descent was so slow that the animal survived the fall." (source)

Might the animals use this techne for their own revolution?