Family trees

Last week I wrote about the visit paid to us by a cousin, distant yet unexpectedly close. There is a temptation to give in to the addiction of following other branches of the family tree, but I have reservations.

Genes determine our hardware, but our software is cultural and includes language, reading and writing. Our software allows us to access an Internet, a world wide web along whose strands we can, if we so choose, connect with the greatest minds, past and present, across the Planet.

Another assumption demolished

This blog is a few days late and it has no connection with cats. Instead I need to write about an assumption I had which circumstances force me to correct.

When we were children two miniature photographs stood on a mantlepiece in the small room where we ate, did our homework and relaxed. One photograph showed my father's grandfather, my grandfather's father. The other showed his wife, Elizabeth. I still have both photographs.

Elizabeth's nephew, Richard Stanislaus, emigrated with his wife to Australia at the end of the nineteenth century. His son Austin enlisted as an ANZAC soldier during the first world war, was hospitalised while in Europe and later visited the home where his great-aunt Elizabeth and her husband had lived until their deaths a few years previously. While he stayed with the cousins who now lived in the family home, he met a girl related to his great-aunt, fell in love, married and brought her back to Australia.

A grand daughter of dashing Austin contacted me last year and we exchanged emails. I was struck by the quality of her writing. Last Sunday she came to visit.

I saw her walking past the kitchen window, went to meet her and found myself gazing at a reincarnation of my great grandmother. When I showed her the photograph she immediately recognised herself in it, and I saw her eyes return, time after time, to the little miniature.

I am a hybrid. At different times people have seen in me my mother, my paternal grandmother and my father's sister. I know I share a love of learning with Elizabeth (and with my Australian cousins), but no-one has ever suggested I bore any physical resemblance to her. At an intellectual level I realise it is possible for someone to have a closer resemblance to her great, great grand aunt than another person who is more directly related, but the idea is so counter-intuitive I never seriously harboured it. That is, until now.

Three Cart Horses

Six weeks of summer spent almost every year of childhood on our widowed grandmother's farm was for me a foretaste of paradise. We were there for haymaking in July and while oats and barley were being harvested in August. Our uncle, helped by a farm hand or two, was the farmer and his partners were three large-boned, muscular horses. If he ever considered replacing them with a tractor, that thought was quickly deleted.

Each horse had his own straw-strewn stable with a half door. When the top half was open he could stand and watch all that went on in the farmyard. Sometimes we, children, would gather windfall apples and, one by one, on the palm of an outstretched hand offer them to those horses in residence. Apples were titbits, interesting additions to a diet of oats and hay.

From the yard a gate led into the Yard Field, the road side of which was a mile long, or so it was claimed. It was never ploughed and abounded in red and white clovers, scarlet pimpernels, bird's foot trefoil, purple knapweed and many other wild flowers. Sometimes the horses, whinnying with delight were led into this bee-humming meadow to romp and graze. In their wake they left horse dung and that, we were told, was the reason field mushrooms could be found growing in this field. We threaded them on to a long grass stalk, brought them back to fry in butter and savoured a taste that is so much better than that of cultivated mushrooms.

Our stubborn uncle's death put an end to farming with horses on that farm. Is there anywhere left in Western Europe where horses pull carts and farm machinery? Is there anyone left with the understanding and skills needed to work with these breeds? Anyone who can fashion their harness? There was once a saddler in the town where I live. Horse brasses mounted on leather hung outside his shop while he adapted his business to produce robust leather school bags. At the other end of the town was a forge. My father once brought me to see the blacksmith shoeing a horse amid a shower of sparks. Soon afterwards he diversified into other types of metal work.

People still keep horses, more lightly built animals for recreation. It is the work horse which has disappeared.

Book Review - Animals in Translation.

This is my review of "Animals in Translation" subtitled "The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow" by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson.

I was motivated by the BBC “Horizon” programme devoted to her and more recently “The Interview” with her on the World Service, to buy a book by Temple Grandin. “Animals in Translation” had eighteen reviews, seventeen of which were very positive, on Amazon.co.uk, so I ordered it and started to read full of admiration for all she had achieved.

The first chapter offers moving glimpses into her very difficult childhood and adolescence and the start of her involvement with horses. It also divides humans into two clear-cut groups, autistic and normal, and has Temple Grandin making the astounding claim that “she is starting to be able to accurately predict animal talents nobody can see” based on what she knows about autistic talent. “This is a little like astronomers predicting the existence of a planet nobody can see based on their understanding of gravity.” Words like these raise very high expectations.

So what is so very different in the ways animals and autistic people think? They see details to which the rest of us are oblivious, claims Grandin, and they think in pictures. Her work with cattle does indeed demonstrate that these animals react to reflections on smooth metal and puddles, slow fan blade movement, differences in light intensity and other stimuli which people working in abattoirs do not perceive until it is drawn to their attention. When Temple Grandin’s book draws on her own experiences it is at its most convincing. I also found the common sense audits she devised very impressive. She has worked with horses, pigs and chickens as well as cattle. The problem is that she assumes what she has discovered about a few animals can be applied to all, and it is not even clear what she means by “animal.” Perhaps she means “vertebrates” because mammals, birds and occasionally reptiles and fish are included.

Several of the 324 pages are devoted to dogs and are peppered with anecdotes, as is the rest of the book. She gives what sounds like very authoritative advice on the training of dogs, but more than one person reviewing this book elsewhere has pointed out that her theories depend on old, outdated and discredited research.

In a book where the style is slang-spiced, occasionally toddler-speak, conversational, it is often hard to disentangle what is evidence-based from the matrix of opinion, over generalisation and highly imaginative speculation in which it is embedded. Here is a sample of the writing:

“...most of what animals do in life they learn from other animals. Adults teach their young where to eat, what to eat, whom to socialise with, and whom to have sex with. The adults teach the young ones social rules and respect for their own kind.”

Cats are the animals I know best. Our two cats were litter mates and arrived as kittens too small to have reached the stage where they would receive hunting lessons from their mother; yet these autodidacts progressed from learning to catch insects to catching mice once their deciduous canine teeth were replaced by permanent ones. Cats are also well known for regulating their social interactions and sex lives independently of their elders.

To write this review I read the entire book although I was tempted more than once to give up. I remain far from convinced that animals are autistic savants, that music is the language of many animals, or that Temple Grandin has no Unconscious. The book itself seems to contradict the idea that normal people are lumpers who generalise while animals and autistic people are splitters who see the differences between things more than the similarities. It also seems strange that, nowhere in this long book, is there any mention of the specialisation of right and left hemispheres of the brain. If we, normal people, seriously underestimate the intelligence of animals and of people diagnosed autistic, then this book underestimates our ability to train ourselves to see detail.