The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

Old, deaf, busy, important

Tag the Destroyer has a new bad habit. He goes to the side yard and barks. Bark bark bark bark. Pause. Bark bark bark bark. Pause. Bark bark bark bark. It's a strange pattern. He ignores our cries of rage and despair.

 Tag's getting deaf. He no longer barks at the loathsome package delivery trucks, or at dogs who insult us by being walked past our house, or the serial killers who carry the mail, because he doesn't hear these outrages taking place. But I think his conscience nags at him – I haven't barked at anything in days! – and he resolves to be vigilant. He'll go out in the yard and lurk near the street where he might detect a disturbance.

 Even if he doesn't, he sounds off. Bark bark bark bark! Pause. Bark bark bark bark you get the idea. Luckily, his conscience usually only nags at him on warm afternoons. He doesn't hear if we call his name or yell “Shut UP!” He can sort of hear it if we clap our hands, and he'll fall quiet and try to figure out if that was real or not. For a moment.

 

This reminds me of Clea, a dog I once knew.

 Clea was a large dog. When I met her she was antique, and had gone very white, and very deaf. I think she was the elegant ruins of a German shorthaired pointer. She belonged to my father's second wife, Vera (a renowned mountain climber).

Clea seemed somewhat feral, grabby, greedy, not eager to please. But Vera said that Clea had once been a beautifully trained dog. In those days, dainty and precise, she had had exquisite company manners. She knew and heeded common commands, like sit and stay, and also knew and performed fancy tricks, like barking four times when you asked “Clea, what's two plus two?”

  What had happened? Apparently, as Clea went deaf, she decided that if she didn't hear you tell her to do something or not do something, she didn't have to obey. Even if she knew what you wanted. You didn't want me to grab the bread off the table? You should have said something. You did? Well, I didn't hear you.

 Loophole!

Clea wasn't conscienceless. She still considered herself bound to protect the home from intruders. Due to her  deafness, she never detected any intruders. But periodically she would stand on the top deck and bark threateningly, so intruders would know she was on duty. The house was on a hillside, and the deck projected out impressively, so intruders over a great area would hear Clea's fierce warning.

 Alas, the idea that possible intruders should be menaced usually occurred to Clea around three or four in the morning.

 Clea would utter a series of barks, and then pause, listening in case anyone dared to bark back. No, apparently they didn't. Excellent! She would bark some more, pause, bark some more.

 This was interspersed with Vera calling, “Clea! Clea! Be quiet! Clea! Come in! Clea!” Which Clea didn't hear. Finally Vera would fling on a robe and rush out on the deck to drag Clea indoors, still barking defiantly into the night.

 (Why not close the door onto the deck? Um, Clea had other problems sometimes found in old dogs, and night-time deck access protected the rugs and floors.)

 

So Tag's strange barking pattern is familiar. If his hearing worsens, we could get him a vibrating collar – no, not a shock collar, a vibrating collar – such as people use with dogs who were born deaf. When yelling doesn't work, you can catch the dog's attention by spooky action at a distance.

 Tag's a good-hearted dog and doesn't use his poor hearing as a loophole. Barking in the side yard is a mild inconvenience. And it's a reminder of how feeble his hearing is getting, and what that's like for him.

 Gradual hearing loss can feel as if people are paying less and less attention to you. We still speak to Tag all the time. “Who's a good dog?” we ask. “Who's the foulest, stinkiest dog in the whole world?” “Who's been eating grass and puking on the rug?”

 But if Tag doesn't hear it, he doesn't know it, and it seems as if we've stopped talking to him. We seem less interested. Life gets lonelier. We have to remember to get his attention, rub his belly, pat him, scratch his forehead between the eyes, hug him, wrestle with him. That's what the strange barking signals. Not intruders, but the intrusion of time.

Nasty neighbors

Last week's post was of swans, mayhem, and the devotion of a husband and father.

Afterward my attention was drawn to a recent incident in Britain, in which authorities felt compelled to relocate a family of swans. The father of the family, Hissing Sid, had maintained a desirable territory on the River Chelmer, Essex, for perhaps 25 years, growing “increasingly crabby.”


Sid, aka Horace, appears to have begun a vendetta against the Chelmsford Canoe Club, attacking canoes almost daily. His technique: knock oars out of people's hands, and then go after the canoeists themselves. They say he tries to peck holes in boats.

Finally he made the very bad choice of knocking a 13-year-old girl out of her canoe and then attempting to drown her.

Naturally, the worried people turned to the Queen – okay, to the Queen's Swan Marker, whatever – and got permission to relocate Sid, his wife Nancy, and their six  home-schooled children. (English mute swans, if wild, belong to the reigning monarch. Because they do.)

A remote body of water with no canoes was located forty miles away in Sussex. This was the idea of the canoe club secretary, who said that she “thought of Lafarge, a quarrying firm, who are always digging large holes and filling them with water, so I gave them a call and they were able to help.”

Once the cygnets were deemed old enough to bear up, the entire family was captured, bagged, and taken to Sussex. They were reported to be “gliding serenely” around Gallows Hill quarry, which is closed to the public.

Perhaps they were less serene than they seemed. Violence is not the only tool at a swan's command. Instead of attacking Lafarge's estates manager, overpowering him, and forcing him to drive them back to Essex, the swans simply flew home, appearing on the Chelmer to the dismay of canoeists and the delight of swan viewers.

Or so we were told by the Daily Mail (whose website has some really obnoxious ads). “Asbo swan makes 40-mile journey back to his old stomping ground,” they proclaimed.

“Asbo” is short for Anti-Social Behaviour Order. That's an order under which a troublesome person is kept out of certain areas, or forbidden to do certain things. (Not the  Queen's idea, Tony Blair's idea.) Apparently anti-social behavior can include such things as public drunkenness, vandalism, a type of breakdancing called windmilling, spitting, and of course, attacking canoes.

But according to more recent reports, the swan family now cruising up and down the beautiful Chelmer River, accumulating grievances, is not Sid, Nancy, and their sprogs. It is a completely different swan family, with one more cygnet. “This is a nice, friendly family,” said the canoe club secretary.


Let's hope they stay friendly. Why not give them free canoe lessons as a gesture of welcome? And let's hope Sid and Nancy continue to enjoy the privacy of their quarry.



The tale of Sid and Nancy was brought to my attention by Daffodil Planter, who has a splendid gardening blog. Sometimes Daffodil Planter's gardening interests and my animal interests intersect, as in her post about the Next Big Thing: Backyard Turkeys. Of course, turkeys seldom have to deal with canoes.

Mice with Money

Five representatives were ranting and frothing in Congress the other day about how the economic recovery bill included a $30 million earmark for San Francisco mice. Representative Jackie Speier, who represents San Francisco and San Mateo counties, was surprised. She looked into it and wrote something on her findings for the San Francisco Chronicle, a newspaper to which I subscribe.

The short version: it's a deliberate lie. Slightly longer version: a staffer said someone said $30 million might go to wetlands recovery, and since the wetlands in San Francisco Bay contain an endangered species of mouse, and “mouse” sounds sillier than the names of other endangered wildlife that live there, not to mention the other reasons to restore wetlands, let's just say the mouse gets $30 million. Let's blow up a picture of a mouse into a poster and wave it around at a press conference. Forget the economy, let's grandstand!

(Speier points out that while the mouse in question, the salt marsh harvest mouse, does live in wetlands around San Francisco Bay, none are actually found in San Francisco itself. Odd—it's as if we had mislaid all the city's wetlands over the years. Somehow.)

Do I have to tell you what political party people pretending to be outraged about alleged money for mice belong to?

I don't feel like it. I bet you know. If you don't, you can read the newspaper story, but I bet you just know. Hint: they're not big on protecting endangered animals and they don't like San Francisco. (Although the fact that these legislators chose to pretend wetlands restoration was just a mouse boondoggle suggests that they're afraid many members of their party might actually like the idea of wetlands restoration. They want to be the party of hunters, for example, yet ducks like wetlands too.)

Suppose there was actually going to be $30 million just for the salt marsh harvest mouse. Suppose a powerful harvest-mouse identity-politics organization wrested control of the money away from the bureaucrats. What would these sly little featherbedders spend it on? I only hope they wouldn't get flimflammed into spending it all on lobbyists.

Would they buy a controlling interest in Habitrail? Would they order trucks full of sunflower seeds and instruct them to back up to the Bay and dump their cargoes? I doubt they have the imagination. I fear they'd go the obvious route. For their own selfish, greedy, short-sighted, personal gratification, they'd spend it on wetlands restoration.

                                     

An Inappropriate Octopus

Mike Wood is a scientist who studies salmon. He has a little remote-control submarine for observing salmon underwater, a self-propelled fish cam about the size of a slightly flattened washing machine. It was poking around the sea floor west of Vancouver Island in 2005 when it was suddenly attacked by a giant octopus.

In the video from the fish cam as it scans for salmon, the view swings slowly, swings past a Pacific giant octopus, and then swings quickly back to look at the octopus. Yikes! The octopus makes for the little sub at high speed, and reaches out to grab it by an antenna.

Wood says he was panicked by the idea of losing the uninsured little sub. What if the octopus bit it? Desperately, he throws the engine into reverse, kicking up a ferocious cloud of sea-floor debris. The screen fills with billowing clouds and flailing tentacles. Octopus and sub struggle until the octopus goes off, presumably wiping sand out of his face and planning to try again after taking a muscle-building course.

My favorite thing about this was a vocabulary sighting in a CBC News story. Jim Cosgrove, of the Royal British Columbia Museum, was asked what on earth the octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini) thought it was doing. Was it angry, curious, hungry, looking for love in one of the wrong places? “It’s certainly a mature male from what I can see in the video,” Cosgrove said. “Old octopuses become what we call senescent, or senile, reaching the end of their life. 

"And sometimes their actions are very inappropriate.”

Inappropriate. Never mind the image of octopus as senile old man cruising the ocean looking for targets to whack with his cane or ram with his wheelchair. He acted inappropriately. That is serious condemnation.

“Inappropriate” is one of those weak words which people use to camouflage their ferocity. They're used by those who have power but don’t want to seem powerful, like bureaucrats; and by those who have savagery, but don't want to seem savage, like parents.

Once upon a time “inappropriate behavior” was going out without gloves. Now it is often a psychiatric symptom. Children are expelled for inappropriate behavior. Restraining orders are granted against people who display inappropriate behavior. People are locked up and fed industrial-strength medication for inappropriate behavior. (If you think this is exaggeration, you’ve never found yourself being observed by medical personnel who don’t understand your nervous jokes and write “laughs inappropriately” on their assessment form, followed by the dread “inappropriate affect.” Me neither.)

Another camouflaged attack word is “uncomfortable.”

When a bureaucrat says he’s uncomfortable with your idea, he doesn’t mean that he is restless, twitchy, unable to keep from shifting from buttock to insincere buttock in his chair, he means that he will oppose it tooth and nail. If necessary he will have government attorneys seize your car, condemn your house, and arrest your brother on outstanding traffic warrants. (Or he may have you beaten, stabbed, and cast on the garbage heap to be eaten by jackals. Depending on the jurisdiction.) Unless you stop making him uncomfortable.

When a parent says she’s not comfortable with your lesson plan, she does not mean that she is unfamiliar with the ideas you present, doesn’t know how to fit them into her vision of a seventh-grade curriculum, and can’t stop fiddling with her hair. She means that like a tiger defending cubs, she will see you dead before you implement your plan, if she has to pour the lighter fluid on you herself.

If you do not seem to grasp what these people are saying, they may escalate. Keying your coordinates into their shoulder-mounted rocket launcher, they declare, “I’m afraid that’s simply unacceptable.”

They have issues with that. They have some concerns. They are troubled by your remarks. They never say they’ve already made up their minds. They do not say that they equate compromise with ignominious death. They never actually say no.

(I shouldn't complain about these euphemisms. That's so negative. A more positive approach would be to get new ones. Long latinate words seem to be the popular choice for disguising rage, so we’ll need a bunch of those. Inadmissible. Disproportionate. Inapplicable. Exiguous. Rudimentary.

When they give you the death stare and say your views are unacceptable, stare back. Say, “Your response is disproportionate. I think you’re inapplicable. I'm sorry for you, exiguous fool.”)

So that giant octopus was lucky that he only got a face full of seafloor sludge for acting inappropriately. Had there been any way of apprehending him he would have been taken into custody, assessed, and sent to rehab. After all, is it acceptable to have a giant octopus freely seizing research equipment? Are you comfortable with that? Wouldn’t it be more appropriate if he were, say... deep-fried?