Returning briefly to Bill Bailey’s book, My Animals and Other Animals, I was shocked to see what he said about Whale Sharks (and therefore all animals, or just fish?). Is our imagining that they live lonely existences just a projection, since they do not have “the faculty of self-awareness”? That is one hell of an assumption and extremely controversial, but is thrown in lightly as though it were a universally accepted given. For me, it’s nonsense, or as Ingrid Newkirk, CEO of PETA put it, “Animals are not like us,” she said, “they are us.” Her interviewer provocatively suggested that animals do not have consciousness. “Of course they have consciouness … they think ahead, they can plan,” it is just, she said, that the failing is ours, we don’t understand how they communicate. They have their own cultures. For more on her HARDTalk interview, see here:
HARDtalk with Ingrid Newkirk – Animal Wild
With the best will in the world it was hard not to be irritated by a description of what badgers look like “in case you’re unfamiliar”. Is there really anyone who doesn’t know what a badger looks like? Bill Bailey thinks badgers being a protected species is”fair enough” since “They keep other animals and predators such as foxes, rats and mice, in balance.” Badgers keep foxes “in balance”? Erm, no they don’t. A tranquilised Jaguar in Brazil is found to have a missing tooth and an infected gum – “… in the end the experts decided to let nature takes its course.” But they could have treated it. I have it on good authority and am glad to say that documentary makers and wildlife rangers and wardens often do treat animals and why on earth not end suffering? In one tv programme about big cats it was possible to see quite clearly that a group of lions had been ‘blue-sprayed’ around their mouths, probably the same antiseptic spray used for animal wounds the world over (and indeed at Trindledown Farm, the animal rescue where I volunteered for a number of years).
I then began to go through the issues of New Scientist which continued to arrive until my trial subscription expired. I have been trying to pin down why the magazine did not sufficiently appeal to me (apart from the fact that weekly is too often, my brain is too full and I am not interested in human medicine), and the issue of 16th November last year helped with that. Everything in science is mere supposition but there is far too much, for my liking, of this might happen one day, we might be able to do this. I am more interested in what we have actually learnt. But not if it is at cost to animals and especially not if the results seem meretricious. “Chimps do better at hard tasks when they have an audience” reads the headline to one article. So far so interesting, but these six chimpanzees imprisoned (there can be no other word) at Kyoto University were given numerical tasks over a six-year period thousands of times. So what are the potential benefits of this research? “… in a casual way, we may be able to ease the tension of those [people] who are extremely nervous in public by saying chimpanzees are the same!” Say what now? And, “It would also be fascinating to explore these effects … to understand more fully how these dynamics play out in a natural social context in order to generalise these results to the natural behaviour of chimpanzees”, which I don’t think means anything at all. So, zero research value.
On the very next page is an account of experiments on twenty mice at Harvard University, twelve bred to have impairments in sensory neurons making them insensitive to physical forces (pressure, stretch or touch), the rest impaired so as not to be able to feel cold. There was also a control group of a further seventeen mice. Each had a drop of oil placed on the back of his or her neck. The mice that could only feel touch responded, those that could only feel cold did not. What was the point of all this? To find out why dogs shake water off themselves after a swim. How very trivial, how very unnecessary. Who is paying for this poppycock? Dogs shake off water because they feel wet and perhaps cold too. Beyond that, who cares? End of story.
Then it’s elephants, held captive at Berlin Zoo. They have become adept at using hoses to shower themselves and have learnt to stop water flow by kinking or compressing the hose. Could this possibly be, wondered researchers, because their trunks are themselves a bit like hoses? “This research reiterates the idea that elephants show very sophisticated trunk behaviours.” No shit, Sherlock. Again, why are people paid to do this purposeless ‘work’?
It goes on (and this is just in one issue). Another headline is “Vampire bats have rare ability to use [recently ingested] protein as fuel”. Well, that is quite interesting and, we read, “separates these animals from most of the rest of us”, but to gain this knowledge the bats were forced to run on a treadmill in a small box “at speeds of up to 30 metres per minute.” 24 Vampire Bats were captured from the wild in Belize and transported to the University of Toronto for this.
There is also a piece on comparative thanatology, the study of animal grief in comparison with ours. We need to be other than anthropocentric about this of course, but that they may grieve differently (if they grieve at all, which of course they do) is hardly a revelation.
Speaking of pointless wastes of money, bearing in mind that the badger cull has already costs taxpayers around £22m, the Labour government is now apparently about to give a further £1.4m for a study of badger vaccination. The studies have been done, we know the truth, only the government and vested interests choose to be blind to it. The badger cull has not worked, does not work and the problems lie within the cattle industry, not the badger population. To whom has this money been given? In partnership with the Zoological Society of London, it will be awarded to … drum roll … the National Farmers Union. Boom tish. The very organisation that has lobbied so hard for the cull for all these years and have repeatedly shown themselves entirely unwilling to take notice of the science or to change how they do things. To use that old cliché, you couldn’t make it up. If that turns out to be £1.4m well-spent, I will eat … well, probably not actually my hat, but I am absolutely sure it will be more money down the farming industry drain. These things are presumably agreed at the same government / NFU meetings which are “not formally minuted” and held behind closed doors and where we are not even permitted to know who was present.
Incidentally, yesterday saw farmers turning up in their tractors in London to protest Labour’s inheritance tax changes, causing serious traffic problems. Nigel Farage was there of course, dressed in what I can only described as a caricature farmer costume (what one might wear if going to a fancy dress party as a farmer). I am all for peaceful protest of course, but I think it is safe to assume that not one participant will have been arrested or face a jail term, unlike the Just Stop Oil protestors. Five of them were given four or five years just for attending a Zoom call planning the 2022 M25 event. Five participants who climbed the gantries were given around two years each. Surely it can’t be one rule of us, one rule for them, can it? Governments are terrified of the farming lobby, fearing that we are only three meals away from anarchy or revolution. They should take steps to make the big supermarkets pay fair prices for food but let’s end the ridiculous idea that only farmers work hard for a living.
It is now accepted fact that experiments on animals for the supposed medical benefits to humans don’t work either. It is a myth that they do perpetuated by those who make very large sums of money out of the whole horrific business.
Reports of more unnecessary cruelty in the following issue of New Scientist: the capture of 21 adult Reed Warblers in order to better understand how migratory birds use the earth’s magnetic field to navigate. The results of artificially messing with magnetic fields where they were confined don’t seem to me to tell us anything at all and as even one researcher points out, in any case, “Not all birds work the same way.” To be fair, the magazine does at least loudly sound the warning bell on climate change and global warming alongside these bizarre reports, but there is also a protracted discussion in the letters section on why cats like to sit on newspapers and magazines. It is all too much of a mish-mash, it feels that the publication has not found its voice, its tone.
Moving on through the issues, researchers assert that wild chimpanzees not only use tools but also pass on the knowledge to their young. But have we not known for years now that they do this, that they have a culture? In one issue there’s a letter from a PETA representative wondering at the fact that an article about US election outcomes being predicted by chimpanzees failed to mention that the poor creatures were strapped into restraint chairs for hours for this entirely meretricious purpose.
At HART Wildlife Rescue this week I was excited and fascinated to be shown three of the parasites that infect hedgehogs (and other animals) through a microscope: coccidia, which present symptomatically as green faeces (we check for this and take a sample if we see it), the ones which cause trichonmoniasis, and capillaria which cause ‘lungworm’. ‘Trich’ is treated with the antibiotic metronidazole but when rescues and vets are not allowed to treat animals with it if there is a chance they may enter the human food chain. Feral Pigeons, yes, Wood Pigeons, no.
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