Scientists Should Wake Up and Smell the Fish Farts

When studying something which can be tested in a lab, scientists don’t hesitate to employ the tried and true formula: if it looks like shit, and smells like it, chances are it’s actually shit. When it comes to literal excrement, some scientists are real whizzes. Even without a DNA test, they can tell you with near-certainty through which species of animal’s anus a particular scat has passed. But when it comes to animal sentience, some scientists still don’t know shit (pardon my French—throughout).

Thanks to his creator, author Arthur Conan Doyle, the criminologist Sherlock Holmes famously pointed out that, “If you’ve eliminated all other possibilities, whatever remains must be the truth.” Well, scientists have spent centuries toying with every other possibility to avoid the obvious fact that non-human animals are conscious, thinking, feeling beings.

Incredibly, there are some who’re still grappling with the question: “Are animals aware?” What the fuck—of course they’re aware! Most animals are far more aware of their surroundings than the average human, for that matter.

The science of animal behavior has come a long ways from the dark days of Rene Descartes, thanks to the likes of Donald Griffin, Marc Bekoff and other pioneers in the study of cognitive ethology. Just last summer, an international group of prominent neuroscientists meeting at the University of Cambridge issued “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-Human Animals,” The document stated that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness,” and concludes that numerous documented animal behaviors must be considered “consistent with experienced feeling states.”

Having witnessed remarkably intelligent actions on the part of individuals throughout the animal kingdom—from the family dog leaping to his feet at the whispered mention of a “walk” or “car ride,” to a herd of wild bison mourning over the remains of their dead—my response to the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-Human Animals is, “Well duh, tell us something we don’t know.”

Speciously, the Cambridge Declaration drew an arbitrary line and left the world of fishes out in the cold when it comes to animal consciousness. Far too many of today’s “behaviorists” still ascribe to the long outdated notion of fish the way science had long thought of all non-human animals—as automatons: mindless machines going through life without any more than random responses to stimuli.

Now I’m in no way anti-science—far from it, in fact—I just think that sometimes a scientist will spend an exorbitant amount of time chasing his or her tail when the answer they’re looking for is as plain as the nose on their face.

Take the question of animal communication, for example. We all know whales and dolphins are able (when they can find a quiet stretch of ocean—devoid of the deafening drone of ships or navy sonar) to communicate with one another through songs or clicks, respectively. But lately observers have learned that even fish have devised clever ways to keep in touch. According to an article entitled “Fish Farts: Herring Use Flatulence To Communicate” in the Huffington Post, apparently some types of herring pass gas to “speak” to each other without alerting other fish.

Researchers Bob Batty, Ben Wilson and Larry Dill made that Nobel Prize-worthy discovery after studying Pacific and Atlantic herring in Canada and Scotland, noting (importantly) that the gas is not caused by the digestive process. Instead, the fish swallow air from the surface and emit it through a small opening near their bung holes. Thus, profound as they may be, the bubbles aren’t really farts in the stinky, human sense.

So, it seems to me a bit arrogant to write an entire class of animal life out of a “Declaration on Consciousness in Non-Human Animals.” Granted, herring may not be flatulent enough to recite the Preamble to the Constitution, but then, as Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote, “Only a man can draw a self-portrait, but only a man wants to.”

Time for skeptical scientists to wake up and smell the sentience when it comes to fish.

WTF’s Up w/MFWP?

What the Fuck (WTF) is up with the Montana state wildlife officials these days? Now they want to make it even easier to hunt and trap wolves in their state.

Last year, just after wolves were removed from federal endangered species protection, the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks department (MFWP) seemed comparably tame (well, compared to Idaho anyway). Though they wasted no time in implementing the state’s first season on wolves in seventy-some years, at least they spared wolves the torment of trapping.

Ignoring 7,000 letters in support of wolves, this year they added trapping to their wolf assault and upped the original “bag limit” from one to three per trapper—before the season even started. Instead, they’re bowing to the whims and whinings of ranchers, hunters and trappers who have called for an expansion of wolf killing and more liberal rules than the state had last year, when “only” 166 wolves were ruthlessly murdered. MFWP officials responded to anti-wolf, anti-nature, anti-environmental pressure by making the 2012 season longer, eliminating most quotas and allowing wolf trapping for the first time.

The agency is now mercilessly asking for additional measures in the form of a state House Bill, HB 73. Their proposal would let hunters and trappers buy multiple tags; use electronic wolf calls; reduce the price of a non-resident tag from $350 to $50 and eliminate the potentially life-saving requirement that hunters wear fluorescent orange outside of elk and deer season. (Okay, I’ll go along with that last one—who cares if wolf hunters shoot each other?)

“We want to get a wolf bill out of the Legislature so we can implement those things that can potentially make a difference,” said FWP spokesman Ron Aasheim, adding selfishly, “More management flexibility. That’s what we want now.”

The House committee will also take up a second bill by Republican Rep. Ted (oh shit, not another Ted!) Washburn, of Bozeman, which would also limit the total number of wolves allowed to live in the entire state (we’re talking 147,046 square miles) to no more than 250. Washburn’s plan also asks for an Oct. 1-Feb. 28 wolf hunting season and an even longer season for special districts next to Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks!!

No doubt you all remember that fateful day in 2011 when congress lifted federal protections for wolves in Montana and Idaho, handing management over to those openly hostile states.

Meanwhile, the nefarious Montana state wildlife officials are currently opposing federal Threatened Species protection for the depressingly rare wolverine, down to only 35 breeding individuals in the lower 48.

Not many hunters can honestly say that they don’t mind sharing “their” elk, moose or deer with the likes of wolves, cougars or coyotes. But those few who claim to support a diversity of life need to realize that every time they purchase a hunting license and a deer or elk tag, they validate wolf hunting and trapping. To game managers, every action, right down to the purchase of ammo and camo at Outdoor World, is a show of support for their policies—including killing wolves to ensure more deer, elk, moose or caribou for hunters to “harvest.”

A far cry from living up to their laughably undeserved reputation as the “best environmentalists,” hunters are just foot-soldiers carrying out a hackneyed game department program of “harvesting” ungulates and “controlling” predators. It’s an agenda based not on science or the time-tested mechanisms of nature, but on the self-serving wants of a single species—Homo fucking sapiens (HFS). Modern hunting is about as anti-environmental as mining, clear-cut logging, commercial fishing or factory farming.

Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson, 2012. All Rights Reserved

Compassion For All, Not Just the Endangered

On Friday I drove out to spend a peaceful, sunny afternoon at an ocean beach, but instead of finding serenity, I came across an emaciated female California sea lion. I learned from locals passing by that she had been seen there for the past 5 days!!  She was obviously sick or injured and had been starving for a long time. I couldn’t see any bullet holes, but there were over two dozen commercial fishing boats (trawlers) visible just offshore. There has been a rash of 20+ dead sea lions with gunshot wounds washing ashore this spring, and no one has any doubts that they’re being shot by the fishermen who view them as competition, the same way elk hunters in the Rockies see wolves. 

I called a nearby Aquarium who has been performing necropsies on the dead sea lions in the area, but they said they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) do anything about her. Everyone I spoke with to try to get some help for her said they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) get involved because they feared the National Marine Fisheries Service would “bankrupt” them with fines (no great threat to me as I’m pretty much broke anyway). The so-called Marine Mammal “Protection” Act makes no allowances for protecting injured sea lions–especially not a member of a species, such as the California sea lion, which isn’t currently endangered. 

When I told the people at the Aquarium that it might be a Northern sea lion (an animal on the list of endangered species, thanks to historic sealing and the ongoing over-fishing of their food supply), they showed a bit more interest, but still not enough to come out and do anything to ease her suffering. There was a strong undercurrent that no one would do anything to help a wounded animal which ”competes” with fishermen for salmon and other commercially valuable fish. They told me there is a “hands off” approach regarding sea lions (no doubt because of what they eat). This is ironic since their policy of branding them with a hot iron, fitting them with cumbersome radio tracking devises and killing them if they are caught eating salmon at the dam upstream on the Columbia River is anything but “hands off.” 

It was a prime example of how the powers that be don’t allow any compassion for an individual animal whose species is not currently on the brink of extinction. Fisheries agency representatives have the same kind of detached attitude as land-based wildlife “managers,” showing no concern for individuals who may be suffering, only for animal populations as a whole. 

As you can see in the photos, the sea lion is starving. Judging by how little she was able to move around, she is surely unable to feed herself. I spent the afternoon shielding her from getting run over by the many rigs driving up and down the beach, and asking people not to stop and gawk (she would lift her head up whenever anyone pulled alongside her). I left for a while, and when I returned she appeared to have passed on. So I went home, but when I called on Sunday to someone who lives there to find out what happened to the body, he said she is STILL ALIVE! He nonchalantly echoed the attitude of the locals and the authorities alike, “She’ll either pull out of it, or she won’t.” 

Why isn’t there something we can do for her? There are plenty of veterinary and medical facilities nearby, but no one can legally help ease or end her suffering. The authorities say they don’t know who is shooting sea lions out at sea (and they’re not doing anything to try to find out), but they’d love to bust anyone they thought was “interfering” with “nature taking its course,” even if it’s for humane reasons. 

Earlier in the week I discovered a dead juvenile porpoise that had net marks above his tail. It most likely drowned in a fish net and was pitched overboard as bykill. These are just two of the many examples of the hidden cost of that fresh-caught salmon or fish filet in shrink wrap at your local market.