Tag Archives: animals

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Uxo, Bomb Rat

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RatWe interrupt our usually po-faced seriousness for a brief dose of vaguely topical cute… assuming your definition of cute extends to rodents.

You may have read and enjoyed Eliot Fintushel’s “UXO, Bomb Dog” when we published it here last year (and if not, you should, because it’s a great story), but you may not have been aware that even smaller animals can be trained to de-mine battlefields – like rats.

Trainers begin socialising the young rats to the sights, sounds, and textures of the world by walking them on wet grass, going for a ride in a lorry and interacting with humans.

Then the sniffer rats are taught to recognise the smell of metal land mine casings in return for a food reward.

Thirty sniffer rats are already being used in Mozambique, Africa, and have proved incredibly successful for the detection and removal of land mines.

The rodents are fitted to a leash before scrambling their way over a piece of ground, sniffing out any explosives.

A trained rat can clear 100 metres square in 30 minutes, equivalent to two days work for a manual de-miner.

I used to share a house with a guy who kept rats, and I can vouch for their intelligence… and their tenacity. Their ability to come when they’re called? Not so much. [via grinding.be; image by charlycoste]

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This is your pet. This is your pet on anti-anxiety drugs. Any questions?

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sad pet dogThe recent hospitalization of a woman at the hands of her pet chimp has raised questions about the use of human psychiatric medicines in animals, after the victim’s initial (and now retracted) statement that the chimp had been given Xanax to control his agitation. Apparently it’s more common than I’d have expected:

As recently as the early 1990s, it was practically unheard of to treat animal behavior problems with drugs. Today it’s routine.

Prozac, for example, has been used in a few zoos to treat wild animals, including Johari, an adult female gorilla at Ohio’s Toledo Zoo that had been prone to violent fits.

But dogs and cats are by far the most common animals to be drugged to combat separation anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, aggression, noise phobia, and other issues.

The majority of anti-anxiety medications given to animals are the same ones used for people, although in different doses.

There’s a whole ethical can of worms here, and the sensitivity of the subject is exacerbated by the closeness many pet owners have to their charges. The angle I’d tend to take is that I’m not entirely convinced that the drugs in question are the best solution to the problem in humans, let alone animals – psychiatric pharmacology has what appears to be an alarming obsession with treating the symptoms rather than the root causes, and pharmacology in general seems to promise cures when it can only deliver crude controls.

But even if we take the efficacy of anti-anxiety or anti-depressant drugs as a given, is it right to give them to animals? Who are we to judge their mental states as being in need of correction? I know for a fact that my mother – an animal owner and breeder since long before I was born – would be appalled at the idea of giving psychiatric drugs to animals to control their mood, as she would consider dysfunctional behaviour to be a direct result of poor training and care. [image by Phil Romans]

Furthermore, as George Dvorsky points out his responses to the article, it begs the question of whether we should own pets at all. I think most of us could agree that keeping a chimp as a pet is not just unethical but foolish, but what of dogs and cats? The more we understand about animal psychology, the trickier these questions become.

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DVD gift ideas for science-minded kids

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My son, age eight, has always been interested in animals, extinct or otherwise. But he’s played to death the three-DVD documentary series The Future Is Wild, which depicts the evolution of life on Earth millions of years into the future. The CGI animation is pretty good; the extrapolated life forms in the post-human world are mind-bending.

My son doesn’t seem frightened or depressed by the depiction of a universe without human intelligence or galactic empires, which is more than I can say for his dad. You don’t have to be a kid to get into this. And if you’re even considering writing an sf story about nonhuman aliens, please see it.

There’s an animated TV adventure series on Discovery Kids, but my son and I agree that it’s not as good as the original.

Just as good, and getting almost as much screen time in my house, is Alien Planet, exploring via space probe the planet Darwin IV, where evolution produced creatures like nothing on Earth.

I hope they go over as well in your home as they have in mine.

[Bladderhorn from Alien Planet]

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Strange squid caught on video: This is what ETs should look like

National Geographic News got the footage from Shell Oil, which was running a remote-operated vehicle about 200 miles off the coast of Houston, Texas.

In a few seconds of jerky camerawork, the squid appears with its huge fins waving like elephant ears and its remarkable arms and tentacles trailing from elbow-like appendages.

Despite the squid’s apparent unflappability on camera, Magnapinna, or “big fin,” squid remain largely a mystery to science.

Four species of Magnapinna have been discovered since 1998. They live about 4,000 feet (1,129 meters) deep. (BBC posted a video of one some years ago, but I can’t seem to find the link. They called it a “batsquid,” a term which seems to have been appropriated by H.P. Lovecraft fans)

[Photo: National Geographic via Shell Oil]

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Climate change all over the place

And speaking of climate change there is an interesting story at the BBC about how monsoons/droughts, as recorded in the concentrations of minerals in stalactites, have been linked with Chinese dynasties:

By comparing the rain record with Chinese historical records, Pingzhong Zhang of Lanzhou University in China, and colleagues, found three out of five “multi-century” dynasties – the Tang, the Yuan and the Ming – ended after several decades of weaker summer monsoons with drier conditions.

…

These moisture-laden winds bring rain necessary for cultivating rice. But when the monsoon is weak, the rains stall farther south and east, depriving northern and western parts of China of summer rains.

This could have led to poor rice harvests and civil unrest, the researchers speculate.

It’s an interesting theory, and reflects how important climate is in the lives of humanity, and also in the lives of lemmings, with the discovery that the lemming population of Norway is no longer as fecund as it once was:

The research team, composed of Norwegian and French scientists, believes the winters are now too humid, leading to the “wrong kind of snow“.

This results in a less stable subnivean space (the space between the ground and the snow layer above), meaning substantially fewer animals survive until spring.

Aww. But apparently it’s not all bad news vis a vis climate change. Apparently certain Alaskan glaciers have in fact grown this year for the first time in 200 years.

This will please Sarah Palin – who apparently has only recently discovered that Africa is a continent, not a country.

Congrats on the win, America!

As to the glaciers – only time will tell.

[wanxiang cave image from BBC News, lemming from kdleditsch on flickr]