Beavers Are Mysteriously Back in Britain—but Not Entirely Welcome...
Category: Animals
Outing the Other
I've been reading another book in animal studies that talks about the other and even "othering," a solecism I can barely tolerate and will keep in quotation marks. A number of philosophers have variously defined what the “other” is, ranging from God to animals to women to the disabled to the colonized. Except for God …
Sir Nicholas Gimcrack rides again
In today’s New York Times there is a report on some new experiments on rejuvenation. Blood from young mice, it appears, can reverse signs of aging in old mice. The article cites experiments in the 1950s by Clive McCay (famous for his experiments showing that calorie restriction extends life) that joined rats together by their …
Why fierce animals are fierce
The eighteenth-century Dutch physician Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738) wrote many books, but among his most famous were his Aphorisms and his Materia medica, both of which were translated and reprinted throughout the century. They distilled the conventional wisdom of the day and added Boerhaave's own astute observations. The following observations from Materia medica follow a logic we …
Playing Chicken
Back in 2012, the US Department of Agriculture proposed new regulations for processing chickens. These included speeding up the processing line from 140 birds a minute to 175 birds a minute. At the same time, the number of federal inspectors would be reduced. This head-scratching equation would supposedly save money and allow inspectors to pay …
An Ostrich for the New Year
Aristotle had not been entirely certain that the ostrich was a bird, but it took pride of place among the birds in the Versailles menagerie and in the 1676 Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire naturelle des animaux. Ostriches had first made the long journey from Africa to Paris in the early seventeenth century; the young …
Faith in Foie
Paris, 4 December The first world anti-foie gras day was a few weeks ago, on November 21. It was not noted by any French newspaper that I could find. Yet there was a demonstration in front of Fouquet’s, a renowned (and very high-end) restaurant on the Champs-Elysées, that attracted around fifty people. The animal rights …
The Ghastly Kitchen
Next month, I'll be giving a talk at the International Congress of History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (ICHSTM) in Manchester, UK. I recently blogged about it on the conference blog: In 1865, the physiologist Claude Bernard described the life sciences as “a superb and dazzlingly lighted hall which may be reached only by passing …
Ethical Evolution
Terra, the research magazine of Oregon State University, has just published this article about my book Experimenting with Humans and Animals (Johns Hopkins, 2003) as part of an ongoing series on animals and science at OSU.
“M. Couplet will find one”
When the anatomists at the seventeenth-century Paris Academy of Sciences wished to dissect an animal – which was often – they called on Claude-Antoine Couplet (1642-1722). Couplet was an élève (literally, a student) of the Academy, although he was hardly an adolescent. When the Paris Observatory opened in 1672, Couplet moved in as its concierge, …
Anita Guerrini 