The Revolution is lean...

Over 60% of Americans are overweight and 20% obese. Our pets have the same problem. They are getting obscenely large in all the wrong places for the same reasons humans are hefty: overeating and lack of exercise. These animals are now part of the cultural community and family of the human with all its residual ill effects.

Thanks to Ashley Porter for suggesting this site.

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.

Out of Africa... the swarm, the herd, the revolution

Evolution of a Goat Revolution

The article "Man vs Goat" develops the stages of an animal revolution from animals intended to serve us to pests an nuisances, to killers. The revolution is patient, the animals wait, but then strike quickly. Excerpts from the NY Times article of 10/28/10:
Olympic National Park, Washington

Veteran hiker from nearby Port Angeles, Bob Boardman, ran into an aggressive mountain goat on a popular trail in this park, the scenic centerpiece of a peninsula the size of Massachusetts. The goat pursued the hiker, using its two pointed horns to gore Boardman in the thigh.

In the last minutes of his life, Boardman tried to warn others of the danger, witnesses said.

They licked the bushes for salt from our sweat and urine. They nudged at the packs. They came close to enough to scare us. And when we tried to shoo them, they would not leave.

The Park Service spent years trapping the animals, tranquilizing them with shots fired from helicopters and then airlifting them to the Cascades. But that only spread the problem around.

With every passing year, the goats lost whatever fear they had of man. This was aggravated, of course, by knuckleheads who insist on feeding wild animals, which breaks down barriers.

But all of this was our handiwork. The goats were introduced to give humans something to hunt. A sport. A game. A chase. For almost 100 years, we never feared them. Now, they’ve stopped fearing us, and are even pursuing us.

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."

How to read signs of the animal revolution

“Of course, in order to practice this style of reading as art, one thing is above all essential, something that today has been thoroughly forgotten—and so it will require still more time before my writings are ‘readable’—something for which one almost needs to be a cow, at any rate not a ‘modern man’—rumination.”
--Fredrick Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals

Bull in a china shop...

When fables, proverbs, and idioms come to life, it is a sign of an animal revolution in the making... they warned us these days would come:

"The animal escaped from an auction market next to GB Antiques Centre in Lancaster, Lancashire, on Monday and barged its way into the shop, which was packed with 200 people.

Police had to shoot the animal in order to save customers and stock - china and all. It was herded to an area of the centre and blocked in using two antique organs before a police marksman opened fire. A woman was treated in hospital for a bruised shoulder after the incident. 'Hundreds of items will have been destroyed, at a cost running into thousands of pounds,' Mr Blackburn said."

Really, the owner could have invited the bull for tea. Where is his hospitality? Is it reserved for humans alone, and only for select humans...not very hospitable then is it? The absurd idea of inviting the bull for tea once it is in the china shop is a figure for saying: what does the animal want and why don't we think of its desire, which is to say, why can we not be hospitable. Here think of Derrida on hospitality:

it [hospitality] already broaches an important question, that of the anthropological dimension of hospitality or the right to hospitality: what can be said of, indeed can one speak of, hospitality toward the non-human, the divine, for example, or the animal or vegetable; does one owe hospitality, and is that the right word when it is a question of welcoming – or being made welcome by – the other or the stranger as god, animal or plant?”