When Whales and Humans Talk

Sometime in the late 19th century, an Iñupiaq carver fashioned this amulet for an umiak out of driftwood, carving the likeness of a bowhead whale, its blowhole symbolized with a piece of obsidian. As with other whaling amulets Erica Hill has examined, this object may have also functioned as part of the boat’s structure. Photo by Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institute (Cat. A347918)

Harry Brower Sr. was lying in a hospital bed in Anchorage, Alaska, close to death, when he was visited by a baby whale.

Although Brower’s body remained in Anchorage, the young bowhead took him more than 1,000 kilometers north to Barrow (now Utqiaġvik), where Brower’s family lived. They traveled together through the town and past the indistinct edge where the tundra gives way to the Arctic Ocean. There, in the ice-blue underwater world, Brower saw Iñupiat hunters in a sealskin boat closing in on the calf’s mother.

Brower felt the shuddering harpoon enter the whale’s body. He looked at the faces of the men in the umiak, including those of his own sons. When he awoke in his hospital bed as if from a trance, he knew precisely which man had made the kill, how the whale had died, and whose ice cellar the meat was stored in. He turned out to be right on all three counts.

Brower lived six years after the episode, dying in 1992 at the age of 67. In his final years, he discussed what he had witnessed with Christian ministers and Utqiaġvik’s whaling captains. The conversations ultimately led him to hand down new rules to govern hunting female whales with offspring, meant to communicate respect to whales and signal that people were aware of their feelings and needs. “[The whale] talked to me,” Brower recalls in a collection of his stories, The Whales, They Give Themselves. “He told me all the stories about where they had all this trouble out there on the ice.”

Not long ago, non-Indigenous scientists might have dismissed Brower’s experience as a dream or the inchoate ramblings of a sick man. But he and other Iñupiat are part of a deep history of Arctic and subarctic peoples who believe humans and whales can talk and share a reciprocal relationship that goes far beyond that of predator and prey. Today, as Western scientists try to better understand Indigenous peoples’ relationships with animals—as well as animals’ own capacity for thoughts and feelings—such beliefs are gaining wider recognition, giving archaeologists a better understanding of ancient northern cultures.

“If you start looking at the relationship between humans and animals from the perspective that Indigenous people themselves may have had, it reveals a rich new universe,” says Matthew Betts, an archaeologist with the Canadian Museum of History who studies Paleo-Eskimo cultures in the Canadian Arctic. “What a beautiful way to view the world.”

https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/when-whales-and-humans-talk/?xid=PS_smithsonian 

by  Krista Langlois 

The social and cultural roots of whale and dolphin brains

Encephalization, or brain expansion, underpins humans’ sophisticated social cognition, including language, joint attention, shared goals, teaching, consensus decision-making and empathy. These abilities promote and stabilize cooperative social interactions, and have allowed us to create a ‘cognitive’ or ‘cultural’ niche and colonize almost every terrestrial ecosystem. Cetaceans (whales and dolphins) also have exceptionally large and anatomically sophisticated brains. Here, by evaluating a comprehensive database of brain size, social structures and cultural behaviours across cetacean species, we ask whether cetacean brains are similarly associated with a marine cultural niche. We show that cetacean encephalization is predicted by both social structure and by a quadratic relationship with group size. Moreover, brain size predicts the breadth of social and cultural behaviours, as well as ecological factors (diversity of prey types and to a lesser extent latitudinal range). The apparent coevolution of brains, social structure and behavioural richness of marine mammals provides a unique and striking parallel to the large brains and hyper-sociality of humans and other primates. Our results suggest that cetacean social cognition might similarly have arisen to provide the capacity to learn and use a diverse set of behavioural strategies in response to the challenges of social living.

 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0336-y

DMY Design Spots 2015: Pet Market at Galerie erstererster

Much as we adore our pets they can be troublesome. Be it the cat the refuses to move from your bed, the dog that chews your shoes, pillows, newspapers et al, or the sweary parrot embarrassing us at every (inopportune) moment. If only we could distract them. Maybe we should treat them better? Or at least treat them to better possessions, to objects that meet a standard of functionality and design quality that we demand from our objects. We’re not averse to claiming our pets are family members, why not put as much consideration into the objects they use on a daily basis as we put into those used by our other family members?

Open Cage by Dominik Hehl, as seen at Pet Market, Galerie erstererster, Berlin

Such, or at least similar, thoughts form the background to the exhibition Pet Market currently showing at Galerie erstererster in Berlin.

Pet Market began as semester project at the Kunsthochschule Kassel under the direction of Tanja Seiner, who is also curator of the exhibition. “I became aware that we are increasingly sharing our living spaces with animals, that there appears to be ever more pets in our lives”, explains Tanja, “and so I set my students the task of design a product for pets and humans, not just an object for the pet alone, not just an object for the human alone, but an object for both.”


https://www.smow.com/blog/2015/06/dmy-design-spots-2015-pet-market-at-galerie-erstererster/

http://petmarket.world

Rabbit with Axe

Gorleston Psalter, England 14th century, British Library, Add 49622, fol. 13v

Life Imitating Nature — Wenchuan

At Wolong National Nature Reserve, Chinese scientists face
the challenge of caring for a population of 150 giant pandas
 and reintroducing them into the wild to support this highly
 endangered species. The adult pandas have lost the skills
 needed to survive independently of humans, so the reserve
 staff focus their efforts on the newborn cubs.
In order to teach the cubs real panda ways, any contact with
 their domesticated parents or humans has to be avoided.
 The scientists came up with a cunning plan: by dressing up
 as pandas, and mimicking natural panda behaviour,
they hope to teach the cubs by example.
Despite their best efforts, only two giant pandas have been
 successfully reintroduced to their natural habitat in the
past 30 years.

by Anne Miltenburg

https://worksthatwork.com/artefacts/life-imitating-nature

Vinciane Despret @ SPEAP (Extrait)

Nothing biblical in factory farming

Something has gone badly wrong in relations between human beings and other animals, and it is not just animal welfare and animal rights organisations that say so. Large swathes of the public are troubled too.

Even people who take their lead from Genesis, from its assurance that God has granted us dominion over the beasts in order to feed ourselves, suffer nagging doubts whether factory farming and a food industry operating on an industrial scale to turn living animals into what are euphemistically called ''animal products'', are quite what God had in mind.



So it is not unreasonable that animal rights organisations are increasingly seeking to give voice to the (by definition) voiceless victims of the food industry, targeting factory farming, while not ignoring other practices - the use of animals in laboratory experiments, for example, or the trade in wild animals, or the fur trade - that might equally be condemned as cruel and inhuman.

The transformation of animals into production units dates back to the late 19th century.

Since that time we have already had one warning, loud and clear, that there is something deeply, even cosmically wrong, about using industrial methods to kill fellow creatures on an industrial scale.

In the middle of the 20th century a group of Germans had the idea of adapting the methods of the industrial stockyard, as pioneered and perfected in Chicago, to the slaughter - or what they preferred to call the processing - of human beings.

When, belatedly, we found out what the Nazis had been up to, we cried out in horror. ''What a terrible crime, to treat human beings like cattle.'' we cried out. ''If we had only known beforehand.''

But our cry should more accurately have been: ''What a terrible crime, to treat living human beings like units in an industrial process.''

And our cry might have had a postscript: ''What a terrible crime, come to think of it, to treat any living being like a unit in an industrial process.''

Animal protection groups work for the amelioration of the conditions under which animals spend their lives. In a longer time frame, some work towards the elimination of factory farming.

In the case of Voiceless, the animal protection group founded by the Sherman family in 2004, this is done not by direct action but by persuasion. Its persuasive efforts are directed at the vast majority of the public who know and don't know that there is something bad going on, something that stinks to high heaven. It offers such people practical options for what to do next after they have been revolted by a glimpse of the lives factory animals live and the deaths they die.

Factory farming is a new phenomenon, very new indeed in the history of animal husbandry. The good news is that, after decades of untrammelled expansion, the industry has been forced on to the defensive. The activities of organisations such as Voiceless have shifted the onus on to the industry to justify its practices; and because its practices are indefensible and unjustifiable except on narrow economic grounds, the industry is battening down its hatches and hoping the storm will blow itself out. Thus, in so far as there was a public relations war, the industry has already lost the war.

The task of animal rights organisations is to show ordinary people that there are alternatives to the animal-products industry, that these alternatives need not involve sacrifices in health and nutrition, that there is no reason why these alternatives need be costly, and furthermore that the sacrifices they are being called on to make are not really sacrifices at all - that the only sacrifices in the whole scenario are being made by non-human animals.

In this regard, children provide the brightest hope. Given half a chance, children see through the lies with which advertisers bombard them (the happy chooks that are magically transformed into succulent nuggets). It takes but one glance into a slaughterhouse to turn a child into a lifelong vegetarian.

Text by J. M. Coetzee, The Sydney Morning Herland, 5 dec.2011
Source:www.smh.com.au

The 2003 Nobel Laureate for Literature J. M. Coetzee is patron of Voiceless and chairman of the judging panel of the Voiceless Writing Prize sponsored by Australian Ethical Investment. The Herald is media partner of the prize, which seeks to advance public understanding of the relationship between humans and animals.
voiceless.org.au

Au hasard Balthazar

Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)
Dir: Robert Bresson
Here is the final scene, very painful especially for all those viewers that have seen the film in the past.

Can ecosystem engineering prevent ecological catastrophe?

For over a decade, University of Arizona ecologist Michael Rosenzweig has preached a gospel of what he calls reconciliation ecology: designing everyday landscapes to support as many plants and animals as possible.

He says it’s the only way of averting ecological catastrophe, which standard approaches to preserving nature will only slow. Some conservationists have embraced the idea. Others think it’s rose-tinted dreaming. With a computer program directing the design, reconciliation ecology will get its test in Tucson, Arizona.

“We decided to turn Tucson into a lab of a million people,” said Rosenzweig, who spoke on reconciliation ecology Aug. 3 at the Ecological Society of America meeting in Pittsburgh. “We’re not trying to restore old habitats. We’re trying to invent new ones.”

The project’s roots extend back to 1995, when Rosenzweig wrote a textbook on island biogeography, a field of research describing ecological dynamics on ocean islands. Over the last several decades, the research had been applied to terrestrial islands formed by human development. The findings were discouraging. Ecologists predicted the loss of 40 to 50 percent of all species. After reviewing the literature, Rosenzweig thought they were optimistic. He put the figure at 90 percent.

More island-like preserves and parks wouldn’t fix this, he reasoned. It required a “reconciliation” with nature inside human-dominated biomes that were largely ignored by conservationists, and cover almost every piece of non-tundra, non-desert land.

Rosenzweig pointed to piecemeal examples of this approach, like ecosystems flourishing amidst shade-grown coffee canopies, or the wetlands of southern Czechoslovakia’s fish farms. The strategy took shape in his 2003 Win-Win Ecology: How The Earth’s Species Can Survive In The Midst of Human Enterprise.

Reviews were mixed. There wasn’t much doubt about Rosenzeig’s diagnosis, but his solution was questioned. Wrote then-Conservation International ecologist Thomas Brooks in a review, “I genuinely fear that Michael Rosenzweig’s theories and examples are less broadly applicable than he argues. And yet I want to believe that he is right.”

In the intervening years, Rosenzweig hasn’t backed down. “The attitude we’ve had for 100 years is, let’s save habitats. We’ll have remnant patches and call them national parks and wildlife refuges. That slows extinction down, but it doesn’t change the endpoint,” he said. Mass extinctions won’t be avoided “unless we turn our attention to the habitats we haven’t paid attention to, that we haven’t even called habitats.”

In Tucson, those ignored habitats are backyards, schoolyards and the mosaic of neighbourhoods and businesses typical of America’s suburban sprawl. Rosenzweig wants to arrange their habitats with a program built on a database of life-history characteristics on 300 local plant species, plus natural history records gathered from a century of research on Tumamoc Hill, an 870-acre island of relatively undisturbed desert west of downtown.

People can decide what species they want to have. The algorithms tell them what other species they’ll need. “It calculates what the relationships are, and which need to be maintained in order for species of interest to live,” said Rosenzweig. Calculations are modified according to local soil type and topography.

Rosenzweig plans to do an “alpha test” at sites on Tumamoc Hill. Another is now taking place in the Barrio Kroeger Lane, a poor neighbourhood set in the Santa Cruz River floodplain. Native, rainwater-harvesting Sonoran Desert vegetation is being planted to lessen summer floods. It should also bring back four local hummingbird species.

If that works, other Tucson neighbourhoods could follow suit.

“There is so much potential to harmonise people and nature” in this approach, wrote ecologist Gretchen Daily in an email. As head of Stanford University’s conservation biology centre, she studies how to predict ecological changes in human-directed landscapes, a research branch known as “countryside biogeography.”

“There is a fair amount of scepticism about reconciliation being a viable model, which is why this is an important experiment,” said Madhu Khatti, an urban ecologist at California State University, Fresno.

Rosenzweig envisions the tested program becoming a tool for developers, neighborhood associations, businesses, anybody with a backyard -- first in Tucson, then elsewhere, as other ecologists localise the code.

“I can’t put out a general rule to fit every toon, but I can put out a general method, and program it,” he said. “That’s what we’ve done. This has to be done for every area.”

Of course, computer-aided ecosystem design is far from what John Muir or Edward Abbey had in mind, and old-fashioned preserves are needed for true wilderness. But as Khatti noted, “there’s very few places in the world where humans can be completely removed.”

“If you produce an ecological theatre that meets the animals halfway, they’ll do the rest,” said Rosenzweig.

Text by Brandon Keim, 16 August 2010.
Source: Wired.com

Apathy

Source: www.animalliberationfront.com

The Vulgarity of Luxury

cover of vogue / Great Britain , august , 1917

illustrator: George Lepape