Animals – the chook house

May 25, 2019

Story #1

for Jane

1987. It’s the year when Scott and Charlene get married on Neighbours. The year of the Hoddle street massacre. Bob Hawke is Prime minister and QLD premier Bjelke Peterson is losing his grip on the state. In November MacGyver is to be released on Channel 7. It is the start of summer. We listen to the Bangles Walk like an Egyptian. It is the start of the long dry.

I have just completed a University degree that has consumed my life and I am about to start a career. I imagine mud and striding through fields. I imagine pulling calves in khaki coveralls and scrapping cow dung from the soles of my boots. I dream of soaking in a tub when muscles are sore from physical work. This will be the fulfilment of a childhood dream.

Life changes in an instant. How is it that one back bone can be so brittle and another allow the cord to bungee? Who chooses which spinal cord you have and which way it will bend? Is it soft like liquorice or able to fracture into shards like candy?

Loss of sensation is instantaneous. The swiftness of it disallows any savouring. Round and round the garden like a teddy bear. A mother’s finger tip makes spirals on the sole of chubby foot. One step, two step, tickle you under there. The touch creeps up the calf to beneath the knee. Movement and sensation here one minute. Gone, when the tin can strikes ancient wood. Such a banal way to lose what you have taken for granted since birth.

Moments before shoe-less feet had etched soles on squeaky sand by an ocean. The surf had thrown my body like a buoy and my heart had surged as my feet had lost contact with the sea floor. A bear of a man had surfed a long board and we had all traipsed sand into the little alfoil car. How long can skin recall the sensation of toes curling in yellow beach sand? Only the night before feet had found the cool patch on the sheets, and then cradled each other, before sleep. How long can a mind hold on to what is no longer possible?

An anatomy teacher visits the hospital and brings with him a bone. It is perfectly sculpted, as if it is made from polished pearl. He says it might be nice to hold, and he is right. It is snug in my palm. My fingers trace the valley of the bone, lie gloved by the trochlear groove. The fact that it is the talus of a horse, an animal I will never treat nor sit astride again, brings tears I let fall, after he has gone. I picture myself running a confident palm down the side of a mare’s leg and cupping her hoof. I feel the warmth from her nostrils as she turns to inspect the back of my neck with a snort. I smell the pasture on her breath.

A country vet, across the continent, is the first to take me on. He has no sense of what I can and can’t do and that is likely a blessing. He is the type to give someone a go because someone he trusted has said I can do it, and that someone is Jane. A blonde bob, brown eyes, strong thighs and tanned muscled arms. She has a kind of bolshie. She believes in me. She, too, has no idea. We are three people, inexperienced in paraplegia, and how that transects with being a veterinarian. We know little of what it means to a life either. When I arrive she collects me from the airport and drives me to her home, where she carries me, like a new bride, into the house and then leaves me for the weekend trapped hopelessly by the three meagre steps to the outside.

Before heading across the country a surgery teacher says I should come in and do a bitch spay in the Uni lab – just to check I can. After scrubbing up, betadine dripping from my elbows, I sit at the sink unable to move forward – someone will need to propel me from here. We discover some things are more difficult seated. The surgery table is hard to get under and besides it won’t go low enough. It can never go lower than my lap. I do surgery with my elbows out, like an ill-mannered child seated at the big persons’ table. It is the beginning of becoming a dependant again, in the eyes of others. My chest feels perilously close to the incision and I am, maybe, leaning and breathing into the surgery site more than someone would standing. But doing it is all we are checking for here. It can be done, and so it will. Rick says I can.

In the country the surgery table is difficult to get under too, with its large circular base – so I do my surgeries with the animals as close to sliding over the edge as possible, legs draped across the side, like shirt sleeves off an ironing board. Sometimes the single nurse and I are not able to move a heavy patient, so we time the surgery with the approach of the postman, and ask him to assist with the transfer. I am doing operations partially blind, as an incision in a big dog’s belly is level with my chest. But having done it no other way means I judge it is no harder than it should be. It is just what it is.

Jane and I are both new graduates, but she has six months of veterinary experience on me. I have six months experience of paraplegia and the internal walls of a spinal unit. I have learnt a lot about ceilings and how interesting they can be. I have counted the perforations in ceiling tiles and watched spiders spin webs. I have stared at nothing till nothing becomes something and then turns to nothing again. From a blue cloudless sky I have made poems on hue. From overheard conversations and inhaled smells I have constructed lives. I look differently at the small things and hear whole novels when only a word was whispered.

As vets, Jane and I are learning together, and she is my teacher. We both make mistakes – we are often alone, making them without knowing we are making them. Only later do they slip out from their mirage and reveal themselves – late at night mostly, alone and in a single bed. Sometimes we see the error before it is too late, and other times we are saved by the experience of the boss or the equally experienced vet nurse, Edna. Returning from lunch, I see my boss is doing the pyometra surgery I had placed on a drip without diagnosing.

At the end of a day I wheel the hundred yards home to my single bedroom flat on the same street as the clinic. Often I am swooped by magpies who distrust me, like they do stone throwing children. The flat has orange carpet tiles, the type to prickle beneath a bare foot. I toast bread under the grill and spread it thickly with peanut paste. On call, I answer queries about farm animals I have no experience of, other than as an undergraduate, and offer a disgruntled farmer advice to get him through till morning. I flip through Blood and Henderson for a respectable answer. I watch one-day-cricket. I wheel to the laundromat with a bag of washing on my lap. Weekly I slide across the red vinyl bench seat of the EH and drive along the Murray to the big town, The Smiths wailing from the tape cassette. Girlfriend in a coma. I buy myself a cappuccino and a piece of over-iced carrot cake.

The red-headed lad, who has never had a girlfriend, is consigned to me by Jane. We go to a Divinyls gig in a nearby town. He secures me a space at the side of the stage so I can see Chrissie Amphlett astride and thrusting her pelvis into her microphone stand. He stands just behind me and places a hand on the chair like it is any other bit of furniture. But it is not a chair. It is becoming part of me and I will him to unhand it. I view the crowd. I hate that people are able to dance, to crush up against each other and feel another person’s moving hips, sweating against them.

I stay in the country for nine months till the pain of the metal in my spine becomes too much. It wants out. I return west to my port town to have it removed, as the bone has repaired itself to a gnarly fist, and the metal is no longer functional. Who knows what the cord within the bone is doing. Perhaps it has hunkered down in its den of bone and sleeps on. I keep the shiny stainless steel nuts and screws, like spare buttons, in a cracked porcelain cup.

I apply for a job at the Uni I studied at, thinking that equal opportunity means what it says. The job is the pathology internship and will require that I post mortem animals of all sorts. Three middle aged men, tweed jackets with patches on their elbows, invite me in to see if I can complete a post mortem, unaided. They walk away and leave me with the corpse of a horse, stiff on the slab. I feel so small. I cannot physically complete the task and I can feel the tears, the heat in my face, the crack in my voice. They stand watching, rocking back and forth on the balls of their feet, waiting till I withdraw my application. They say it is better you see for yourself that you can’t do it.

1992. Apartheid is ending in South Africa. Charles and Diana are separating. Native title is recognised in Australia and Paul Keating is Prime Minister.

Alone, I am listening to Nirvana’s NeverMind. I decide I will learn to walk with callipers, as it is something that can be done. It is hard, takes physical and emotional strength, to keep trying to do it, day after day. I rupture all the ligaments in my ankle learning to fall. The tarsal bones slip over each other, like pebbles in a sock. I practice for six months with a young, enthused dark-haired physio and in the end can make about fifty metres. I see that walking with callipers is not walking. It is not freedom. It is lumbering and more disabling even than the wheelchair. Being upright is not giving me anything back. It is precarious and pointless, and I give it away.

In a house with polished jarrah boards and freshly painted white walls Smells Like Teen Spirit is loud and I can sway my upper body, with my arms above my head and with my eyes closed, I am dancing, as I was before. My chair is spinning, silent and fast leaving my hands free. It can dance. It can take me back there, where the memories still synapse.

2019. From my kitchen window I view the neighbour’s child swinging, upside down on the stair rails that lead to the oval. Her legs and feet monkey the hand rail. Her hair gravitates to the earth. A smaller brother kicks his footy into the canopy of a tree and the flimsy branches nestle the ball. She runs over and leaps towards the branch, grabbing it and swinging on the bough. Her weight causes the ball to dislodge and fall to the ground. They run off.

March 26, 2016

Let’s Talk Language

Today I spoke to vet students studying veterinary welfare, ethics and animal behaviour. It was their first lecture dealing with Animal Behaviour and I wanted to speak about language. I can imagine they might think it is unimportant. But it is the crux of the matter. You will hear it in vet clinics all the time – eroding the bond of compassion and caring that vets have with patients who, through the poor choice of language, become the enemy.

When we describe dogs as wimps, sooks, babies or as nasty, mean, vicious we use loaded terminology. We use descriptors that are full of emotional baggage. When we describe a dog’s attempt at keeping himself safe as an act of jealousy, spitefulness or protectiveness we do him no end of disservice and do not help his owner understand their dog’s choices.

Dogs who display aggressive behaviours do so because they have found a tool that works for them. It is one that people notice (finally) and gets them the outcome they are after – the scary thing stays away.

It is one of the most difficult concepts for clients to understand – that the aggressive dog is most often a very frightened dog, that through practice and rehearsal, and no one listening to his lesser signals (or having had them punished for previous displays), has learnt that going on the offensive early is his safest bet. These dogs are no less frightened than the whimpering, hiding dog that displays his belly, but they have just hit on a more successful strategy. And you can bet they will use it again.

The last thing this dog needs is to have his fears confirmed and continue to not be listened to – then he may resort to his final choice – biting. When we call these dogs protective, jealous, angry or mean we are missing the very point. The dog is communicating fear in the loudest and best way he can, when all the previous and polite signals have been ignored.

I tell the students to ask clients to describe behaviour. Don’t ask for interpretations and steer clients away from that too. What does the dog do? What did you do? What happened first? What does it look like? What would you like the dog to do? Let’s teach that…

Let’s give the dog cues NOT commands. Let’s make the dog feel safe, so he doesn’t have to protect himself by using aggressive responses. Give him choice, a way to escape safely. Let’s not put him in situations he cannot handle and he has previously shown us he does not cope with.

Let’s use the least intrusive and minimally aversive techniques to implement the change.

A prison officer working with youth offenders once told me that the kids in the centre weren’t bad, but sad, and I remember what a difference that change in label meant. Working with sad children engenders empathy and caring. Helping people out of a sad place is worthwhile, whereas dealing with bad suggests that changes aren’t even possible. One bad apple...It even suggests a contagion that is best isolated and thrown away. Use language that helps owners feel compassion and caring towards their pet instead of puts them in a position against their pet, pits them against one another, and tells them their pet is out to garner control over them.

Dogs, like all animals, including us, do what works for them. It is as simple and as difficult as that.

November 28, 2015

Lost Child

Murphy sits at Joan’s feet. Her hand finds his head and rests atop. Her fingers find their way through wiry fur to the bony skull beneath to massage his head. Her fingers are smooth and white. The fingers of an old woman whose hands no longer do work. Sometimes they wrap around a teacup, other times they rest on her lap. Her skin like latex. She once worked on the bodies of others as a physiotherapist. She would have touched a lot of skin. Kneaded many knots from muscles. Now she walks the corridors and attends any excursion she can. Anything to get out. The rest of the time she sits amongst the open-mouthed, the drowsy and the drooly.

She recognises us each time we visit, her face lights up, and she does not appear to have memory loss. The staff tell me she does. She cannot recall how long she has lived here. Today I find her standing outside one of the centre’s doors on a path through a manicured garden. Her hands come to her face that is breaking. I ask her, are you okay Joan, when I see her broken face. No I am not. I am trapped. I want to get away from here, she says, standing on the path and looking around, as if for the exit that is only metres in front of her. She has clear snot running from her nose and I say I will get you a tissue. No one wants to be without a hanky.

She takes it and holds it to her face. Murphy and I will walk with you, I say. Come sit in the garden. We sit. I offer suggestions as to things she might do. Others are inside playing Bingo after all. She is not the game-playing type. What about crafts or puzzles. Looking for ways to fill her time seems like asking her to pour sand into a bottle and then pour it out again. What would make you happy Joan? A dog.

Meanwhile a gardener is nearby and despite the heat is weeding, head down. Joan throws a question her way about her latest seedlings but the gardener doesn’t hear and so doesn’t answer. She is trying to make light of her tears now. I am sorry for being a bother. Joan tries again to question the gardener, and still she is not heard. She is an old unseen unheard woman, sitting. Beige and blending into paving. She is searching for conversation, for connection. She says she wishes she knew where the family of her dead husband were. Not her children, but still. She loved them, but they live far away and now do not visit. I don’t know where they are. Outside the gates somewhere. Her face is pained again like a small child lost. Gretel in the forest.

I wonder if audio books might be nice or even just the radio. There are so many interesting things on the radio, Joan. Like interesting matters. I don’t know how to use the buttons, she confesses. Come Murphy, sit here with Joan, and let her rest her hand on your head. Let her feel your warmth as giving and trusting as any human hand. Like family. He moves his head under her hand, shifts just a little to let her know she can leave it there as long as she likes. Good work Murphy.

October 16, 2015

Colouring-In for dogs

There seems a growing trend to use meditation and mindfulness exercises to ease anxiety and stress in humans. This is clearly a good idea. Research says that the naming of emotions, even a simple acknowledgement such as, “I feel frustrated” can ease the feeling, because naming requires that the brain think about the emotion, not just feel it. Thinking means other neural pathways are opened up.

Simple tasks such as colouring-in requires concentration on a job that uses parts of the brain that are not part of the emotional brain. You don’t colour in angry. Or if you do you start to head outside the lines and so in your refocus to stay within them there comes a calming. You have to choose colours and make decisions. Simple decisions. Creative, thinking decisions. Peacefully.

When we give dogs cognitive tasks such as searching and finding their food from enrichment devices and food puzzles we are giving them a task akin to colouring-in. In using parts of their brain that are necessary in achieving the goal of getting the food they are not engaged in reactive, primal emotional behaviour. Instead, they are thinking. They are using their senses – noses to locate the food, ears to tell if the device is empty yet, eyes to search out the scattered hidden morsels, touch to rotate and push and hold the device. Making use of these senses is what they have evolved to do. As the ultimate scavengers dogs have evolved to search, find and consume. Denying them this search is akin to asking humans not to be creative. To no longer seek. Seeking is strongly associated with a feeling of well being and we all crave it. Let them seek.

Colouring-in for dogs.

September 5, 2015

Happy Hens

I am at a seminar given by a guru in the world of animal welfare. This man is not a vet. He is a scientist and somewhat of a philosopher too. Professor David Mellor says that when an animal is engaged in its environment it does so with enthusiasm and purpose. He says you recognize easily the happy hen – there is nothing half-hearted about the way it forages and searches the dirt. He mimics the sound of a happy hen and the audience smiles. We all know the burp burp burp of the happy hen. It doesn’t require training.

I think about the analogy of the happy hen – of how I can use this in behavioural medicine with clients and their dogs. Why do people so easily fail to see the discomfort, fear and anxiety in their dogs? Do they not know what a happy dog looks like? So often people see compliance and tolerance in dogs as calmness, when really it is an expression of learned helplessness.

In behaviour medicine it is imperative to change an animal’s emotional response to the triggers of its fear and anxiety. This is done through association. As a dog learns to associate its fears with yummy high value treats, over time the fear and anxiety may decrease. This is our job – to change emotional response.

David Mellor says how new understanding in neuroscience is making changes to welfare. Animals (including us) do stuff because they find it rewarding – it results in the release of the happy neurochemicals. As I say to clients all the time – dogs do what works for them. If being aggressive is a successful strategy to keep scary things away then that is what they will do. The treatment here is not punishment of the aggressive response but teaching the dog that the scary thing is not scary in the first place. As scientists, who used to be so wary of anthropomorphism, it is now apparent that recognizing the emotional lives of animals is indeed an important part of welfare and behaviour medicine. I feel I have known this for some time – open your eyes and look at what the animal is doing. The dog is right there in front of you – behaving – you just have to look. Anthropomorphize well.

Often times owners are confused when we recommend enrichment in their dogs lives as a treatment for fear and anxiety. They are unsure how this will make a difference. I implore them not to underestimate what using your brain to find your food can do for the rest of your life. But it is hard to convince people. I think now, after listening to Professor Mellor, I might use the example of the happy hen. Giving dogs creative ways to forage and search for food allows them to do what they have evolved to do – scavenge. It fulfills in them a basic need to use their senses. Give your dog a hobby and watch it engage – if it is really enthused you will know it. It will not look half-hearted.

July 28, 2015

Uncinate fasciculus

I learnt about this tract of brain matter while studying for my membership in Animal Behaviour.

In a mentor’s recording on anxiety the words slipped past my ear. I had to replay it several times to make it out and then I googled it. Function Unknown, says Wikipedia. But when I queried her source she pointed me to a scientific paper. Out there in neuroscience La-La land lives a researcher who knows the tract like the lane behind his house. I wonder if he too fell in love with the way the words sound. Latin does that. A language belonging to no one but the body.

Uncinate fasciculus – It is a part of the limbic system that connects the amygdala and the frontal cortex. The wider and more robust your uncinate fasciculus the more control you have over your emotional state. People with flimsy fairy floss connections might tend to be more anxious and not able to think as much before they act.

What has this got to do with Animal Behaviour I hear you asking.

If we give animals things to do that involve cognitive challenge – perhaps working out how to source the food from the food puzzle – they channel their frustration into positive action. They problem-solve and, for animals with emotional problems, where they are apt to react quickly and inappropriately, thinking is a good thing. Just like we encourage young people to think before they act – we can motivate dogs to use a bit more cortex too. Requesting your dog to look at you, to watch, to sit and to touch are all ways to teach a dog to use his brain. When coupled with a reward the dog learns he has control and can predict his future. Having control over your life is powerfully soothing. Having no control, unpredictable encounters and no way to communicate your needs is frustrating and anxiety causing. Think of all the ways in which we make lives unpredictable and frightening for dogs (after all they are a captive species) and you can see why such simple things can make such a big difference.

I think of some of my troubled patients. Little terriers that shake with fear at human touch, pupils so large that irises have disappeared. Some have learnt to approach their fear with snarls and snaps and their success at keeping the scary thing away means they have perfected their timing, increased their speed of reaction. They have been labelled mean and nasty, but what a difference when they are seen for what they are – simply petrified. Their daily encounters with the human world are full of life-threatening fears. Piss-and-poop-yourself-scenarios. No thinking is done in this state. Just reacting. Just surviving and escaping.

Take some time out from your fear. Work to get your food. See you have some control over something you need. This can help. Like list writing for dogs. Organising your thoughts. Getting the washing done. Folding it neatly and putting it away. Jiffing the sink. All tasks done to still the mind. Suduko for dogs.

I attend some of the veterinary camp where the students are being invited to explore their personalities. They are learning about themselves and each other. Maybe it will help them later. They are being asked to work as teams and see another point of view. It’s hard in your twenties. They are being asked to stretch themselves, both emotionally and physically. The introverts are feeling the pressure. I too. Moments of solitude only found in the bathroom, away from the hubbub, bliss. The camp is held in an old detention centre – where lepers where housed. The feeling of institutionalised care fills the pores of the building, is steeped into the jarrah boards. Over lunch I sit with the psychologist who is the key facilitator discussing the brain. Later the students will be scaling walls and using ropes. For some it will be scary. I want to know if she thinks it is good for your brain.

I question the value of flinging yourself from solid into thin air. Why must someone overcome a primal fear? If you’re frightened of heights and asked to climb and then jump, how does this help you? But then I think of the uncinate fasciculus. If you can overcome the fear and the internal chatter that is telling you not to jump, that jumping equals death, and can take control of the glued feet that refuse to move towards the precipice, then maybe you strengthened the uncinate fasciculus. Maybe you have added a neuronal pathway not there before. Jumping from stuff. Feeling fear but surviving it. Feeling buoyed by doing something so unusual and against what your body and primitive emotions are telling you it is safe to do. Is this why?

Does the answer lie in making new neural pathways? I think of the study someone in neuroscience La La land could do – image the brains before and after jumping. See the uncinate fasciculus turn from dirt lane to super highway.

November 25, 2014

Grey t-shirt and Jeans

Today I heard the tail end of Mark Zuckerberg saying he wore the same thing every day to cut down on his cognitive choices. Wearing a grey t-shirt and jeans on a daily basis gave him one less thing to think about. Rather than it limiting him, it freed him.

Some of us have more anxiety over clothes’ choices than others, but even if this gives you little stress, it can still be possible to imagine that ridding yourself of having to choose can be a good thing. A liberating thing. Sometimes this is why I would like to shave my head.

Just as the monastic life and a hairless head gives the monk more time to meditate.

I think about school uniforms and the way individuals still attempt to put their personal stamp on their dress style. The skirt shorter than allowed. The hat more bent and battered than supposed to be. The untucked shirt – a duck tail. Some of us strive to choose. But does it equate with making us more content?

Ridding yourself of choices, the program goes on, relieves stress. Even small decisions take mental energy. For this reason I am thankful to have never discovered make-up. I never have to decide on lip stick, eye shadow, powder.

I start to think about this concept for dogs. When we give anxious dogs cues to follow that result in predictable outcomes for their actions we take away some choice. This can be reassuring and decrease their stress. Modern behaviourists also like to give dogs choice. We like to give cues and signals as opposed to commands. But this is not to say that choices are easy for dogs. It does cause them stress. Especially if doing one thing ends in a result that they cannot predict. One time they jump on Johnny and everything is fine, the subsequent time they get yelled at. The next time Johnny is over there is stress around his visit. Should I jump on him or not? What will happen if I do? Perhaps I might nip him and see what happens then.

Watch the dog without direction. The one with too many choices. He is a bouncing jerking mess of mayhem. He is all over the shop – pawing, licking, barking, whining. He is seeking information as to what to do. But no one has taught him to be calm. No one has rewarded calmness in him. He is trying on lots of outfits. Red shirt, blue pants. Green top, corduroys. Loafers, no runners. Top hat, cap.

Make life simple and predictable for dogs to give them back some calmness. Give them some cognitive space. Let them be a grey t-shirt and jeans type.

August 7, 2014

Straw House

Remember the story of the three little pigs – each attempting escape from the wolf in their houses – one built of straw, one of sticks and one of bricks.

The one built of straw did not fair well. One huff and one puff and I will blow your house down.

But he was the happiest of pigs.

I am watching Masterchef and the contestants are delivering food to a table of food producers on a property using the produce of the people they are feeding. Matt Preston asks the farmer about the pork – throwing around the words organic and free-range. All the farmer gets out is that the “pigs are raised on straw.” Cut to the next shot of lavish food. I think how lost on most viewers would be the concept of “raised on straw.”

But here’s the thing. Pigs love straw. Uncut, long, manipulable, regularly-changed straw. Being omnivorous means they are curious searchers. Being omnivorous means you will investigate all manner of things in search of food. There are many reasons why the raising of pigs in the modern tradition poses welfare concerns. When your natural desires are thwarted you are driven to do unnatural things. When we place pigs in their brick houses, away from the wolf, we take away their ability, but not their want, to explore the world. Deprived of rooting material they nuzzle one another. They chew each others very interesting and mobile tails. For what else is there to do?

Coles seems to want us to be seduced by their “sow stall free” pork products. But do people even know what this means. A “sow stall” is a small confined area designed to restrict the movement and hence promote the growth of the gestating sow. Being “sow stall free” does not mean that the sow, once having given birth, is not once again confined to a farrowing crate. Given a choice a pig might build a nest in the straw for several days before giving birth. Housed, all she can do is pace and paw the ground. The farrowing crate is an enclosed area with bars supposed to protect the piglets from the squashing weight of the sow as she struggles to lie down slowly on a concrete floor.

How much better would the life of a pig be if her need for straw was recognised? Straw, more so than toys or dangling chains, does more to improve the welfare of intensively housed pigs than just about anything.

Driving in the hinterland of NSW I see pale skinned creatures dotted over tussock land. I am surprised and delighted to see they are pigs. This is so rare a sight. Not only do these pigs have straw, but also mud and wallowing. Free range pigs – doing what they love to do – building houses out of straw.

Back home I visit the Fremantle markets and ask the seller of a supposedly free range pork where the pork is from. I wonder if she will mention the Byron hinterland pigs. It seems a natural question, and one I am expecting a detailed answer to. I imagine the purveyor to be selling such a product because they care at least about the conditions in which the animal has been raised. But sadly, she seems perplexed and confused by my questioning. Is their only care the empty assumption that people will pay more to ease their conscience? It is from over east, she offers first. I try again. But where? Perhaps she thinks I am interested in slow miles, so she says she has local stuff too. It is compressed into a vacuum bag without a label. It could be from the moon. Asked about the location of the “local” property she answers, “God knows.”

You would think that selling free range, organic produce would be a choice made out of compassion for animals’ needs and wants. You would think the vendor has thought long and hard about the decision to sell such a product and hope that they had done their research into the product they were selling. Naively, I even think that perhaps they have travelled to the farm to view the animals’ conditions. Do they think that consumers are happy enough with labels telling them a product is “sow stall free” in pretty pink chalk board writing, reflecting nursery rhyme style memory?

What I want to know is: do the pigs have any straw?

February 7, 2014

Coolidge Effect

When an ethologist, Frank Beach, needed to name an effect he had noticed whereby male animals show a renewed interest in sex when presented with a new and receptive partner he chose to use the anecdote of the 30th President of America, Calvin Coolidge, as he toured a farm with his wife Grace.

The President and his wife visited a government chicken farm in Kentucky and separately were taken to inspect the workings of the farm. In a large barn a rooster was busy servicing many fowl. Mrs Coolidge asked the stock man if a single rooster was capable of mating many times a day. Yes Ma’am. She asked the attendant to make sure he told the President when he came by. When the President arrived in the same barn the rooster was still mating. The manager said to the President – your wife wanted you to note the capabilities of a single rooster, Sir. The President, known to be a man of few words then asked the stock man – Same hen? To which the attendant replied, No Sir, always a different hen.

Make sure you tell that to Mrs Coolidge, said the President.

This is how the phenomenon, witnessed in mammalian males whereby there is an increased appetite for sex with a new partner, came to be called the Coolidge effect. It is the reason why a single bull can service many cows. It is the reason why a single ram can do the same with a flock of ewes. Maybe it is the reason men are aroused by affairs and strip tease. Maybe it is the reason why marriages fail or become loveless. Is it why men use the service of brothels more than women seek the service of male prostitutes? And is it why fluffers are required in the pornography industry? After all we are all just animals in the end. We like to think we are more than hormones and brain chemistry.

Frank Beach was a great scholar with a keen sense of humour. He also believed in seeking knowledge and continually learning. Beneath a list of things “to do” he wrote, “Of course, I shall never accomplish all the goals just listed, but that is unimportant. What counts is to have aims, to be able to work hard toward them and to experience the satisfaction of at least believing that progress is being made. I do not want to cross the finish line of this race – not ever – but I do hope I will be able to keep running at my own pace until I drop out still moving in full stride. It’s been one hell of a good race.”

Compare this effect with that called the Bruce effect after its discoverer, zoologist Hilda Bruce, in the late 1950’s. She discovered that mice could block their pregnancy if they were placed with an unfamiliar male after mating. This effect is seen only in some rodent species but is thought to have arisen because male rodents tend to kill offspring unrelated to them. Evolution has ensured that mice are capable of miscarrying and then mating with the new male rather than wasting time and energy gestating young that are likely to be killed after they are born.

Don’t you love science?

October 30, 2013

Nearly there…

The year has a way of picking up speed at the end.

Like a train with failing brakes – headlong down the mountain. Where’s the man with the Mars Bar when you need him?

Today is one of the first warm days. Only a moment ago it was still jumper weather. But then suddenly, forcefully it hits – Summer. In Perth it is usually dry and endless. The sky is Texas big. The blue is cornflower.

People seem glad summer has come. But by the end they will be feeling differently. Already the grass is losing its moisture. Turning cracked and dry. The gum is stressed by its home hemmed in by a concrete driveway. Its roots need to breathe. But instead like a face Glad-wrapped. Tortured.

It withers on.

I have one more module to go for my animal behaviour course and then it is over. Kind of. Because I have enrolled to sit an exam. You idiot!

I will have six months. To Memorise. It is a long time since I memorised anything, but it is my plan. Memorise, like I did when I was a student trying to get into vet. When I thought my world would collapse if I did not get in. Then, I memorised whole passages of literature, loads of French verbs, chemical equations, rules of physics. My brain was fitter then. I had determination. I rose at 4am to study before school when the rest of the house was still asleep. I tiptoed to the kitchen and made myself an instant Nature’s Cuppa and held it between my hands as I read over my notes. Over and over.

I did not have to take an eleven year old to tennis, to swimming, to piano. I did not have a floor to sweep. I did do the dishes. I still do the dishes.

I pray that memorising might be fun. It want to memorise to relieve the stress I might feel going into an exam unprepared. Memory will save me.

In the meantime I will brush my teeth with my non-preferred hand – believing it is forging new pathways in my brain.

The boys are out tonight on a twilight sail. There is no wind. Even better. Lulling around. Adrift. Becalmed. Graham’s preferred sailing. Bobbing really. Beer in hand. Bombies off the side. Jasper with the men. Armed with a hacky sack for entertainment (and brain training). Soothed by the slap of the water against the side. Taking in, as if by osmosis, the gentle way the men have of being together. No need to inquire really about the state of each other’s minds. More just being together, while the sun goes down.