Should Animals Be Soldiers? by Jane Desmond

Should Animals Be Soldiers? By Jane Desmond

April 24, 2012, on Huffington Post for the American Anthropological Association

Steven Spielberg’s latest heroic film, War Horse, is ultimately a sentimental love story between a young English man and his horse — a magnificent chestnut thoroughbred named Joey. Both man and horse go off to battle in World War I, get separated and barely survive the horrors of trench warfare, only to be reunited in a miraculous scene of mutual recognition amid the chaos of war. It is hard to resist the lure of this heart-tugging film, but beneath the emotion lies a more fundamental question: Should animals be used to fight human wars?

Spielberg realistically portrays the central role that six million horses played in that deadly war, serving as mounts for cavalry units, pulling ambulances to rescue the wounded and laboring to draw heavy artillery across mud-drenched terrain. The losses of human and animal life were both staggering.

But, the use of animals in war goes much farther back than WWI, and much farther forward too, and spans more species and places than we would expect. Elephants, camels, dogs, dolphins, sea lions and carrier pigeons have been used (or are currently in use) on the battle front in various parts of the world. Right now, for instance, the U.S. Army is exploring the use of the African giant pouched rat to detect landmines, and the Navy uses dolphins as underwater defense sentries to guard against intruders in U.S. ports.

I have a personal connection to this issue. Before I was born, my father, Alton Desmond, served in the dog training unit of the U.S. Coast Guard in WWII. One of my treasured possessions is a large photograph of him, his buddies and their German Shepherds training on a base in New England. The men are impossibly young and happy in their white uniforms, and the dogs by their sides look eager and muscular, poised to detect enemy infiltration of our nation’s coasts.

Read this full article by Jane on Huffington Post’s blog for the American Anthropological Association.

‘Animal Studies Cross Campus to Lecture Hall’

“Animal Studies Cross Campus to Lecture Hall,” By James Gorman, New York Times, January 2, 2012

Once, animals at the university were the province of science. Rats ran through mazes in the psychology lab, cows mooed in the veterinary barns, the monkeys of neuroscience chattered in their cages. And on the dissecting tables of undergraduates, preserved frogs kept a deathly silence.

On the other side of campus, in the seminar rooms and lecture halls of the liberal arts and social sciences, where monkey chow is never served and all the mazes are made of words, the attention of scholars was firmly fixed on humans.

No longer. . . .

Jane Desmond of the University of Illinois, a cultural anthropologist who organized a series of talks there about animals, says that what goes on in the public arena, beyond the university, has had a role in prompting new attention to animals. There are worries about the safety of the food chain, along with popular books about refusing to kill and eat animals.

Read full article here.

In Defense of Difference

SCIENTISTS OFFER NEW INSIGHT INTO WHAT TO PROTECT OF THE WORLD’S RAPIDLY VANISHING LANGUAGES, CULTURES, AND SPECIES.

FEATURE / BY MAYWA MONTENEGRO & TERRY GLAVIN /

 

SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

DECEMBER 2, 2011

As cultures and languages vanish, along with them go vast and ancient storehouses of accumulated knowledge. And as species disappear, along with them go not just valuable genetic resources, but critical links in complex ecological webs.

Experts have long recognized the perils of biological and cultural extinctions. But they’ve only just begun to see them as different facets of the same phenomenon, and to tease out the myriad ways in which social and natural systems interact.

Read more here: http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/in_defense_of_difference/P1/

 

 

 

 

 

[This article was originally published in the October 2008 print issue of Seed magazine.]

What Scientists Can Be Grateful for on Thanksgiving

By Adam Ruben

November 25, 2011

AAAS

 

Thanksgiving is a time when we’re forced to verbalize what we’re thankful for. Not that we’re ungrateful in general, but we usually don’t sit around the dinner table taking turns expressing gratitude while our food gets cold.

At Thanksgiving, we identify the usual culprits. We’re thankful for family, we’re thankful for friends, we’re thankful for the food itself. We’re thankful that Farting Cousin Barry’s flight was delayed. But do we ever stop and express our appreciation for science?

let’s do it now.

• We are thankful to the funding agencies that support our research. Without them, we’d be at home experimenting on our cats.

• We are thankful for coffee. So, so thankful.

• We are thankful for that one colleague who knows statistics. There’s always one.

Read more things that scientists can be thankful for here:

http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2011_11_25/caredit.a1100131

Credit: Hal Mayforth

A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain

Embodied cognition, the idea that the mind is not only connected to the body but that the body influences the mind, is one of the more counter-intuitive ideas in cognitive science. . . .our cognition isn’t confined to our cortices. That is, our cognition is influenced, perhaps determined by, our experiences in the physical world. This is why we say that something is “over our heads” to express the idea that we do not understand; we are drawing upon the physical inability to not see something over our heads and the mental feeling of uncertainty. Or why we understand warmth with affection; as infants and children the subjective judgment of affection almost always corresponded with the sensation of warmth, thus giving way to metaphors such as “I’m warming up to her.” . . .

One of the key figures to empirically study embodiment is University of California at Berkeley professor George Lakoff.

George Lakoff

Lakoff was kind enough to field some questions over a recent phone conversation, where I learned about his interesting history first hand.

Read the rest of the article here:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/11/04/a-brief-guide-to-embodied-cognition-why-you-are-not-your-brain/

Monkeys with Larger Friend Networks Have More Gray Matter

New research in the UK on rhesus macaque monkeys has found for the first time that if they live in larger groups they develop more gray matter in parts of the brain involved in processing information on social interactions.

Read the story here: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-monkeys-larger-friend-networks-gray.html

How Our Brains Got Big and Our Penises Lost Their Spines

Lost DNA provides keys to human anatomy and a new way to study evolution

Read more here:

http://chronicle.com/article/How-Our-Brains-Got-BigOur/128878/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

The human skull (left) houses a brain that's three to four times the size of a chimpanzee's (right). Scientists have spotted a stretch of DNA that could have prompted this expansion.