This is a post I meant to finish several weeks ago, but never did. I’ll post it now in the interest of showing how ideas are developing over time, but keep in mind a fair amount of the individual project information is stale. The first two projects are less likely now (though I still intend to taxidermize a rat).

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This rat project is blooming. It feels good to be back tilling the fields after 7 months of fallow with no ideas. I’m still in the mental soup stage, in which I let my free associative brain wander and build connections on its own. This is a crucial stage and can’t be forced. If I try to BE CREATIVE and come up with ideas nothing will happen. It works best when I sit there and daydream, just let my subconscious drive the car and hold the map. It’s not a passive process. It’s like imagining your childhood bedroom in three dimensions and as much detail as possible. It’s like traveling through your neighborhood like a mental Google maps car with a third eye. How much detail can you see? This is when the wildest ideas come and censorship has no apparent role.

This envisioning inevitably produces solid images. The project as it exists in my head now is finished, wrapped up and presentable. What’s in my head is shallow, however, and nothing like the way it will really turn out, but that’s how I move through artistic processes: backwards revisions, like remembering the future. The trick is to be flexible in my thinking so the project can evolve on its own. For this, I allow decisions to be made based on coincidences and confirmations, I follow the serendipitous and the correlative signs that have no place in critical or logical progression of thought. Since I’m neither a scientist nor a truth-seeking artist, necessarily, an allegiance to the empirical is not needed. In a certain way, I have very little interest in truth since fiction can illicit the same emotional responses; a narrative discourse can be truthful without a basis in reality. I thank several artists and writers for this realization, most notably Roland Barthes, Deborah Hay and Omer Fast.

Now onto rats.

There are several projects I’m pursuing that all fall under the rat umbrella. Again, these ideas are imagined final products that help me understand the process as I move through. These are quite literal, with very little nuance. Not all of them will happen as depicted below, and there will be more that come up along the way.  Some of these may never happen at all! Here’s what I have so far:

1. Rat Abortion Apparatus: how to solve the rat problem. Picture this: a brown rat splayed on its back with it’s limbs stretched and pinned back. Brown fur is real, taxidermized from an NYC rat. The mouth is opening and closing ,the limbs are shuddering. A person is allowed to operate the controls, one of which operates a scalpel. Vivisection. The scalpel makes a T-cut from sternum to anus, like in an autopsy. Another control pries the incision open exposing the insides of the rat are exposed, but rather than guts there are countless rat fetuses made of green plastic. The control panel reminiscent of a back-hoe controls a scooper that excavates the rat. It seems rather real even though it is a simulation. The scooper is able to remove several fetuses at once, kind of like one of those games at the arcade that drops a mechanized hand onto a stuffed animal and drops it into a chute. Not a delicate process– brutal, direct, destructive. An antechamber behind the rat is filled with more plastic fetuses that are pushed upward as more are emptied. People can take home their prize. The apparatus distances the person from the repercussions of their actions, it emphasizes the machine as an enabler of gross activity. The entire interface could be viewed through a spy camera, which would add a layer of difficulty as well as distance. This may also draw parallels to surgery on humans. Is that a can of worms worth opening? I’m currently researching how to successfully taxidermize a rat. I have no interest in a store-bought rat or any other rat I would have to kill myself or know that someone killed for this purpose or something similar (feeding a snake or a science experiment). I am interested in a rat that I would find on the street, fresh, poisoned or maybe killed by a dog (I’ve seen this happen in Washington Sq. Park). There is a certain amount of respect and duty I feel towards rats as a species, and rather than using a produced rat, I’d rather use a rat that is the equivalent of road-kill in the country. A wild NYC rat A rat that wouldn’t have to die if we humans were not here. A rat that wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for us.
2. Rat Spermicide: sterilizes, safe and easy to use. Oral. Pellet form. A plastic bottle that looks like it could contain over-the-counter drugs like Advil. A safe alternative to poison. Sprinkle the same as poison, in safe area away from children and pets. Make a mold of a bottle, print label stickers with corporate design. Pellets are little, colorful, candy-like. Make a flowchart for use a la nyc.gov. This could also reference the fact that we humans have our own birth control problems. Why is the onus on the female to protect herself by taking birth control or telling the man to wear a condom? There should have been a male pill long, long ago. Here it is, but with obnoxious comments like: “It is time for men to have some control. I think it would empower men and deter some women out there from their nefarious plans…” According to Caroline Bragdon, an official at the NYC Dept. of Health and Mental Hygiene with whom I spoke on the phone recently, the city has already tried sterilization as a means to control the rat population, but it didn’t work as well as simply killing the rats. One rat can breed hundreds of rats in the lifespan. Humane number reduction/control was trumped by simplicity and efficiency.
3. The rat costume. (will write more later)
4. Tracking wild rats in NYC using RFID, and camera traps. (will write more later)
5. A series of new rat trap designs based on the current relationship we have with rats. (more later)

At first, it was a great idea. Then it started to fall apart.

I based my ideas on these newer drawings that show how a compound pulley system might amplify my jaw motion. The drawings show the axis of rotation for the jaw above my forehead, which would put my head in the rats neck. Not quite right. And since I was mentally referring to these drawings when I built the framework and mechanism, those proportions are also incorrect. Back to the drawing board.

The left one above is the closest to what I should have made.

This is an “artistic rendering”.

I ordered parts from Pololu, made by Tamiya, thinking they would suit the nature of the bench build of the mechanism, namely the framework and the mechanical system, but the parts turned out to be difficult to use. First of all, they’re injection molded so in order to use a part I have to cut it away with a blade. The tolerance is not great on some pieces, with too much slip. Girders and shafts can be adjusted to suit the specs of the system, but it’s destructive, and the part may not be useful for another project later. You have to break the plastic pieces and cut the metals ones with a file.Basically you have to buy a crap load of parts and hope you don’t make mistakes. The metal hardware (nuts, bolts, screws, shaft collars, and shafts– no washers!) are quality, and there’s variety, but they don’t give you enough of them to make it easy. I had to dip into other sets for more bolts/nuts and shafts. There are these really horrible plastic nuts that you thread yourself by wrenching them onto the bolts. They only work once, and they don’t work for very long. The pulley wheels are okay, but the rubber bands are not, and neither are the plastic parts that keep the pulleys on the shafts. Those parts are tiny and very similar too each other but not easily identifiable– it would have been nice for there to be a color system. And again, there’s not enough of them. My review: not great for prototyping, but the parts can be used in projects in lieu of building small parts to spec out of wood or aluminum. Legos seem to be comparably priced with a lot more yield, especially reusability.

The disaster area:

So after wallowing for a night, I set out to build the frame and mechanism out of wood and aluminum, with just a smattering of Tamiya parts. I built a curved, aluminum jaw-like part that would interface with my jaw, and placed it between two wooden blocks. To the front of that I attached another piece of aluminum, the curve of which somewhat followed the line the jaw piece draws in the air, but it straightens a bit towards the top. That piece pulls on two cables that are threaded through two pairs of pulleys before reaching the rat jaw piece. A spring causes the rat jaw to recoil back into closed position. It’s basically a third class lever with two parts acting. Behold the phallic torture device reminiscent of a cardinal tombstone:

Main problems with this design are:

• static hang: when the mechanism is in the correct orientation, the minor weight of the wood I used for the jaw pulls on the spring. This problem is exacerbated when any motion is applied because of the uncontrollable bob and dangle action.
• spring tension: as the spring is extended, the tension increases and more power is needed to extend it further. My jaw works hardest when it is closed, and has the least force when fully open.
• there is no comfort.
• it is nowhere near head mountable.

To make it better I will try making the rat jaw lower on my head, closer to mine, and fit it around my head a little closer. Since I don’t want the rat costume to be ENORMOUS and unwieldy, I should spend a lot of time making the head smaller, and have less dead space in the inner real-estate. I need to split the work of the pulleys better, widening the space between them. In v.2 it may be that there are no pulleys and the rotational axis of the rat jaw is placed exactly over my jaw’s axis. If the piece that interfaces with my jaw is melded with the rat jaw, the motion will be 1:1. That would function along the same principal as a small pulley/gear sharing the axis of rotation with a large pulley/gear: the small rotational motion is amplified in size and speed. However, this would mean I need more power in my jaw.

Video of the torture device in action:

More pics/drawings are available in this Flickr set.

I found these three links on Russ’s blog, and decided they were very relevant to what I’m trying to do with tracking wild rats.

Animal Tracking Whitepaper- Princeton University

Tiny Transmitter Tracking Bees

Dragonfly

I’ve also been accruing a bunch of Delicious links on RFID. Eric Rosenthal recommends passive tags that have supercapacitors in them for wider range, and then I’d build the transceivers. The research I’ve done has not yielded results yet, there’s just too much out there and I don’t know enough yet to discern the useful from the non-useful. Give me a few weeks.

I started a flickr set dedicated to rat sightings. It can be a representation of a rat like this one below, or a real rat like the one below that.

Post-mortem for Animals/People mid-term project. Take one animal and create two pieces, “two small companion projects – one from an external POV (objective), and one from an internal POV (subjective).” We made plastic casts of rat parts as the object, and wrote a medieval ballad about the trials and tribulations of RS99GP3, a scientific abomination, the descendant of a lineage dating back to times before rats had names.

Chris Alden and I used the laboratory rat, commonly touted as “the hero of science.” The lab rat happens to be the same species (rattus norvegicus) as the species that ones notices on the subway tracks of New York, the Aleutians, in London, and nearly every continent. The wild rat is considered our sworn enemy, the “shadow” of our species, and humans have long been at total war with them. The rats used in laboratories today are descended from various samples of wild rats from the late 19th and early 20th century, cross-bred and in-bred for various traits. The nearly absent genetic difference between individuals of a strain, the fast rate of reproduction, and the similarity to the make up of humans made rats them perfect Cartesian machines for scientific tests.

In discussing the subjective elements of lab rats Chris and I remembered Elizabeth Costello in Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals drawing the parallel between kept animals and slave races. We took it a step further, based on our war-torn history with rats, and imagined them as ancestors of prisoners of war, a derived from the captured enemy. Our diptych intended to build a mythos around the prototypical lab rat– produced, tortured, used, scrutinized, killed, disposed of– similar to how the martyrdom of some saints might be recounted in medieval modes of storytelling. We wanted to create pseudo-religious icons that symbolize the body of the fallen hero, honored by those by whose hand the hero may have died. Based on first hand accounts of our friends who work in labs, its easier to do things to animals if you see them as objects rather than individuals, like cogs in a giant science wheel. Quoting John Burt in Rat:

“the story of the standardization of the laboratory rat resembles the twentieth-century story of factory farming, as the rat increasingly became a sophisticated factory product . . . the connection between the rat and the machine component seemed to haunt organizational thinking at Wistar [a producer of rats specifically for laboratories], with its interest in the ‘efficient production of large numbers of quality controlled animals’. The 1910Director’s Report reflected this when the Director, Milton Greenman, used as an example of efficiency the standardization of screw threads.”

This seems to contradict the anthropomorphizing notion of the “hero” of science. Paraphrasing Elizabeth Costello, perhaps humans created gods to relieve ourselves from blame accrued by ritualized murder in the form sacrifice, to undo the guilt we feel when we see ourselves committing gross acts to others, be they animal or human. On the one hand the rat is an object bereft of agency, to be pulled apart, and on the other hand the rat is a hero, who conceivably has character traits to which we should aspire.

To understand how science’s treatment of the lab rat (and other species) might be negated, how to retroactively apply acknowledgment and respect, we looked to ideas of chivalry and the “warriors’ code“. These ideas were useful in thinking about the contradictions between scientists objectifying and venerating lab rats:

• “One reason for such warriors’ codes may be to protect the warriors themselves from serious psychological damage.”
• “Grossman writes about the dangers of dehumanizing the enemy in terms of potential damage to the war effort, long-term political fallout, and regional or global instability”
• “In a segment on the “Clinical Importance of Honoring or Dishonoring the Enemy,” psychologist Jonathan Shay describes an intimate connection between the psychological health of the veteran and the respect he feels for those he fought. He stresses how important it is to the warrior to have the conviction that he participated in an honorable endeavor: “Restoring honor to the enemy is an essential step in recovery from combat PTSD. While other things are obviously needed as well, the veteran’s self-respect never fully recovers so long as he is unable to see the enemy as worthy. In the words of one of our patients, a war against subhuman vermin “has no honor.” This is true even in victory; in defeat, the dishonoring absence of human themis [shared values, a common sense of “what’s right”] linking enemy to enemy makes life unendurable”³.

The last quote within a quote may hold the key. “a war against subhuman vermin ‘has no honor’”. Through domestication, production and perceived utility rats have been promoted from vermin to hero, yet in practice they have been denied the honor that noble humans would grant their subdued enemy. It would appear that the title of hero is as much an impotent gesture as the identity-denying objectification is an excuse for carte blanche.

Chris and I began assembling these ideas . We thought about how naming an animal is the simplest way to create a bond, and realized that we had no idea how scientists kept track of lineage. The Google gods pointed us to this site that outlines the MGI guidelines for nomenclature in rats and mice. We were fascinated by the ways in which scientists keep track of which strains are used, and how they insert location of breeding, scientists names, genetic and behavioral traits into the names appending super script, dashes, italics– for example: ”C57BL/6JEi-tth : The tremor with tilted head mutation in the C57BL/6JEi strain.” This method of naming gives detailed personal information about individuals of a particular strain without functioning as our names do; they do not give individuality. We read the interview between artist Kathy High and Joel Taurog, Professor of Internal Medicine and Immunology at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who co-invented the HLA B27 transgenic rat line. Kathy High adopted some of the HLA B27 transgenic rats and treated them as pets, and included them in her artistic practice. This inspired us to name the rat in our song RS99GP3, and relate the deeds of this rat through the lenses of medieval chivalry, heroism, and martyrdom.

We paired up the dismembered body parts of RS99GP3 (objectified) with a medieval ballad that relates the deeds of an individual rat (subjectified). We both agreed on aspects of each part, and wrote the lyrics together. While I sculpted RS99GP3′s body parts out of plastiline clay, Chris composed the music on his mandolin. To make the music sound more medieval and foreign, he used the mixylodian mode. I molded the body parts in Dragon Skin silicone, and then casted in Smooth Cast 300, liquid plastic. For the presentation in class, we wanted to push the sense of honoring the fallen hero/foe. Chris and I appropriated the archetypal white lab coats that are commonly associated with scientists, and eulogized the body parts with our song, The Ballad of RS99GP3. The lyrics are below. More pics of making are in this Flickr set. Pics of the finished product as we presented it, and video to follow.

The Ballad of RS99GP3

Here lies a hero of great comport,
Not for naught died she.
Her life lost thrice under the knife,
And back but not free.
Though names are but numbers and letters between,
A home beyond cages sterile and clean.
For Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat RS99GP3.

Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat RS99GP3,
Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat RS99GP3.

A rat was born an abomination,
But destined for valor was he.
Placed in the labyrinth hideously wrought,
But soon again she was free.
Upon him rubbed the most noxious unctions,
With resolve he chose to survive.
For Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat RS68DI5.

Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat RS68DI5,
Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat RS68DI5.

Her blood was let and dripped and drained,
Into a thousand vats.
He was denied the brotherhood,
Of any fellow rats.
Given neither sword nor shield,
To defend against scalpels that hands do wield.
For Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat hung, flayed and peeled.

Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat RS99GP3.
Rat begat Rat begat Rat begat Rat,
Begat RS99GP3.

I just finished the J.M. Coetzee reading (The Lives of Animals) and I must say, that is one of the most engaging texts I’ve read in a long while. Who do we include in our tribe? Where do we draw the line separating the familial from the “another” [sic]. This is my favorite way to read philosophy: clashing viewpoints of characters developed through narrative discourse. It evokes imagery and action which, to me, speak louder and are more memorable than pure, text-based logical reasoning of arguments. It leaves room for the bombastic, the naked personal opinion, which tends to be frowned upon in classical philosophy (unless you’re Baudrillard and Co.).

I’m not going to do a blow-by-blow breakdown of the text, or write a review, or outline the characters (it’s better if you just read it), rather, I’ll highlight ah-ha moments that stuck out to me.

Sympathy. The main ingredient in Elizabeth Costello’s point. Amy Gutman puts it better than I can when, in her introduction, she says:

Our sympathetic imaginations, [Costello] argues– to which poetry and fiction appeal more than does philosophy– should extend to other animals. The fictional form, in Coetzee’s hands, therefore appears to have an ethical purpose: extending our sympathies to animals. If fiction does not so extend our sympathies, then neither will philosophy. If it does, then perhaps philosophy will follow.

Fiction and poetry have the ability to show passion through description, and sometimes passion can draw the reader in better than a well-formulated argument. As a reader I find myself living vicariously through an author’s characters, and yes, sympathizing with the murderer who did it because of a messed up childhood, or the complex characters in a Paul Auster novel, all of whom are round and make mistakes as well as fight for what they feel is right.

On pg. 23, Costello paraphrases arguments made St. Thomas Aquinas, Descartes and Plato, that, “the universe is built upon reason,” and that, “God is a God of reason.” The difference between humans and animals is that animals lack reason and because they cannot reason they are part of the universe, “but not a part of its being: that man is godlike, animals thinglike.” That basically sums up how we justify the meat industry, our dominion over animals. Not new territory for me necessarily, but this phrase hit it home: “…reason looks to me suspiciously like the being of human thought; worse than that, like the being of one tendency in human thought. Reason is the being of a certain spectrum of human thinking.” Another way of saying that contrary to the notion that we are created in God’s likeness, God was created in our likeness, with our reason and our sensibilities. Costello comes back to this point on pg. 41 when she talks about how through ritual sacrifice and offering meat to Gods we divert blame from ourselves and remain clean, “it’s convenient. God told us it was OK.”

The laboratory-based methods of determining the intelligence of animals have always seemed a bit absurd to me. And the character of Elizabeth Costello says it so eloquently when she responds to Professor O’Hearne’s second assertion, that animals are not persons and should not have rights that they cannot understand. She says:

…the program of scientific experimentation that leads you to conclude that animals are imbeciles is profoundly anthropocentric. It values being able to find your way out of a sterile maze, ignoring the fact that if the research who designed the maze were to be parachuted into the jungles of Borneo, he or she would be dead of starvation in a week.

To me, this says it all. It is narrow-minded to assess the scope and elasticity of a brain with a different configuration than ours by examining how that brain performs in an unnatural setting, and then comparing it to how we might perform in a similar context. Our capacity for garnering information from our senses is pretty poor compared to dogs, cats, rats, and others, so denying them that artillery in the setting of a scientific experiment doesn’t say as much about their reasoning as it says about our egos.

To comment on how the story aspects fit in with the philosophical aspects, the son, John, is depicted as constantly feeling shame for his mother, Elizabeth. At the dinner table after Costello’s lecture he does not defend her when someone makes a comment about parents teaching their children well or poorly. There are only two points where John comes to her defense, 1) towards the end of her visit when he’s in bed with his wife, Norma, as she basically calls his mother senile or insane, and 2) at the end when he is driving his mother to the airport and she starts crying, he comforts her by saying, “there, there… soon it will all be over.” In that private act the shame has turned to sympathy not unlike the sympathy his mother feels for animals. But to take it a step further, unlike her sympathy his seems impure, like he’s walking, “flank to flank, beside the beast that is prodded down the chute to his executioner.” He cannot or will not help her. It’s more like pity.

Another quote about the meat industry and loss of ritualized killing, “We have become too many. There is no time to respect and honor all the animals we need to feed ourselves.” To be simplistic, generalizing and insensitive to the plight of individuals, this is yet another argument (soft though it may be) that supports an opinion I’ve long held: many (possibly all) of the major problems facing our species, and indeed the rest of the world, are owed to the fact that there are just too many humans. There is currently no considerable solution, or anything closely resembling one. In any case, whenever our era has passed, the world will move on in one form or another.

I can’t remember where I read it (multiple sources, likely in animal behavior, social psychology or dog training literature), but animals and humans tend to be most inclusive of others who are most like themselves. First is the nuclear family, then friends with common interests, and so forth until we reach insects and slugs. I think I read it in Lyall Watson’s book Dark Nature, A Natural History of Evil, a must read for anyone interested in whether or not what we have come to think of as human traits (good and evil) are by nature ours alone. Sometimes the hidden agenda of DNA can narrow the possibilities for who we show kindness (related to who we consider similar to us in kind), and sometimes not. In reference to humans, war and zoos, the most relevant quotes are, “The prisoner of war does not belong to our tribe… that’s what our captive herds are: slave populations.”

Lastly, I was very pleased to see this part of the text (pg 59) given my rat project:

However, there are still animals we hate. Rats, for instance. Rats haven’t surrendered. They fight back. They form themselves into underground units in our sewers. They aren’t winning, but they aren’t losing either. To say nothing of the insects and the mircrobia. They may beat us yet. The y will certainly outlast us.”

I am taking this assignment in a looser way than may have been intended. I’m defining pop culture as anything in the media public domain that may have been seen by many people, or a persona perpetuated by a well-known image.

Rat. It’s the animal I’ve chosen for the “three views of an animal” assignment. It’s one of the universally reviled, thwarted, killed, mocked, and shunned species that exists on Earth today. I am choosing to show the rat as a being of the light rather than the dark, as a public servant hero (in the case of rats that detect landmines), underground art hero (as in the spray stencils of Banksy), and symbol of solidarity against corruption (as in the giant inflatable rats that union workers rally around).

There are places in the world where nobody lives or tills the field, or goes for walks, because there are active landmines from old wars. Starting in 2003, rats (primarily large Gambian pouched rats) were trained to sniff out explosive material in small areas with the hope they could be of service in safe mine detection. The rat was chosen for its size (too light to set off a mine), for its superior sense of smell, low cost maintenance, intelligence and ability to be trained, and ability to navigate space. A small team of rats and handlers can cover a much larger tract in a shorter period of time, in fact, they, “can check an area a man would take two days to cover in 30 minutes.” Far from being “vermin” these rats are saving the lives and limbs of children, adults, livestock and wildlife. Here is a recent article about the humanitarian organization that works in the field. Here is a paper that focuses on methodology.

This image says it all. Underground art hero, Banksy (not to be confused with Blek le Rat), is mysterious as ever. His real name and origin are not well-known, even Wikipedia the Great has very little information about this graffiti art star. One of the reasons he is so popular is that he blurs the line between art and criminal activity, and certainly the rat has ever been charged with misdemeanor upon petty larceny. His images are subliminal, happened upon, like a rat scratching behind the wall, or underneath your bed. One of the recurring personas found in his work is the anarchist rat, seemingly a self-portrait, a clandestine rebel. His art requires the talents of a rat, sneaking around, avoiding detection and detention (especially when making something like this and this) yet the work is for the public viewer not the private buyer. There is no signature except style. The rat in Bansky’s work functions not only as dark knight, critical of The Man, but also functions as a system of values to aspire to:  don’t sell out motherfucker.

The worker unions are plenty and powerful. They have huge influence on corporations, politicians and the course of history. Belonging to a union ensures a worker that certain expectations about pay, hours, safety and quality of life will be met. When an employer does not meet these expectations, or does not hire union labor, the giant inflatable rat descends upon their auspices to show what kind of “rat” runs the place or works there. While originally intended to mock, scare and call attention to such “scum,” the giant air-filled rodent seems to have become a symbol of fidelity around which to rally for a common cause. This representation of a loathed creature has been adopted and re-casted as a political mascot. But ‘lo, the rat was reported “endangered” in NY back in 2005– and was protected as “free” in NJ, according to the first amendment (which was ratified on Dec 15th 1791). Here is a quote within a quote about the rat from this article:

Does the Rat work? “Usually, employers go bonkers when they see it across from their property,” says Randy Mayhew, organizing director of Laborers International Union of North America, which employs about 20 rats. “It’s an effective piece of street theater,” says Peter Jones, executive director of the Labor Heritage Foundation.

So the rat has apparently added to its repertoire. The inflatable rat has also made it out of the political arena and into art and infamy, fascination and cult following.

Other occurrences of rats I considered looking into were:

Splinter

year of the rat

Ratatouille

Templeton

Rat (The Rotter)

Ben (the sequel to Willard)

Rat King from Nutcracker

And this rat king, which is when a large group of rats gets their tails tangled and wreak havoc. Reports date back to the 16th century.

Rat Fink

I tried getting in touch with Sam Easterson to see what kind of cameras he uses and how he attaches them to large wild animals like wolves, and small nearly weightless animals like chicks. I wanted to know about power, transmission, and hardware, but he replied that he is short on time and cannot answer my questions. I hope he finds the time soon…

On a slightly different and somewhat less appetizing note, neuroscientist John Chapin at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn has been affixing cameras to rats for search and rescue missions, as well as to locate bombs. The rats, however, are remote controlled via direct neural interface, with electrodes attached to the portion of the brain that reads impulses from the whiskers, the most sensitive physical sensor on a rat. I heard a rumor from my friend Karl Cronin that rats with cameras had been used in the days following 9/11 to search for people trapped under the rubble.  I know dogs are very good at this task, but rats can navigate much smaller spaces and find their way back out again. Dogs trained in search and recover are divided into two categories through training, 1) search for living people, 2) search for dead people. The former is replaced by the latter after about three days of search because if a dog trained to find living people kept finding dead people it would place a huge amount of emotional stress on the dog, who expects a living person at the end of a search. The reward, in this case, is not a hot-dog, but a reunion with a stranger.

[click here to view larger size]

“He was thinking about the bread lady. The wind from the sea blew right through him, his fur might as well have been straw stuck to his skin with spit. Playtime was over. Hungry, cold, thirsty. The salt water and sand left his throat clenched, gritty. Professor Echo wanted to see old lady who used to feed him bread in that town, down by the bar, long ago. He would sit and place his paw on her lap and smile, she would deposit a spongy morsel into his mouth. She talked to him in high pitches and scratched him behind the ear when he leaned his head on her thigh. “Good Professor, good.” She was good, her bread was good. And she looked like a sheep.

That town was very far away. Home was closer. Home was a nice house with wooden walls, in the lee but not the shade, and rosemary grew in the yard. The neighbors were friendly and there were other dogs to play with. But despite the exceptional luck of luxury, something made him uneasy, morbid– nothing could be so good and not break sometime– cracks were already showing– or was it all just his imagination? For some dogs, imagined worlds are just as real as the sun.

The shore curved gently in the direction of home as though it was a path just for him. The shore also curved in the opposite direction, continuing the same line around the bay. Given the disquiet and anticipation Professor Echo had to go back to, the opposite direction with its unknowns and dangerous consequences held more promise. Yet he would not go that way. New people to meet, new experiences, yes, but he didn’t have the energy to start over once again. In some ways, he was stuck with what he had because he’d had it for so long. As the saying goes, old dogs can’t learn new tricks. The rhythms of the shore made him think.

Professor Echo had no enemies on the outside. If they were, how easily they could be vanquished. There was a bowl of fresh water waiting for him at home.”

“Professor Echo was a cocky recluse. Or so it seemed. No one knew where he came from. His past was shadowy though rumors spread that he was related to a saluki. It was not apparent that terrible things had been done to him, and that he’d done them too. He had no remorse anymore. The things Professor Echo wanted to do were the things he wouldn’t, and the things he needed were the things he should go without. He had no remorse. There was a time when that dog could grieve for people he didn’t know, and could let loose long enough that a chuckle or a smile appeared almost natural. For a while, rousing games with others made him less self-conscious; crepuscular hunting trips made him feel more alive. The hunting trips alluded to quiet moments in puppyhood when he was alone, thinking about death, and sometimes dying. Apples in his throat and leaves in his eyes. At some point he decayed, all husk and loose fur, the dust of fathers and mothers unsettled. Time passed. People came and went, some stayed, others faded into the scenery, grimacing. Professor Echo lurched on, untamed, the ghost in the dunes. A cut on his toe– it could get infected. He would have liked to feel misunderstood but he was simpler than that, like a rock in the sand wanting to know how the flow goes in order to go with it. Someone said his discomfort with convention grew unbearable and wanderlust took over. Another one said the rain got in but couldn’t get out. He’d gone too far on his own path and it was unattractive. The pit inside of him was too hard be chewed, to big to be disgorged.”

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