Recently, a group of student-organized protesters picketed on-campus and outside the Helen Wills 10th anniversary symposium. The Helen Wills Institute is a neuroscience institute with affiliated labs on the Berkeley campus. Most of the animal protesters wore bandanas over their faces and carried signs like "vivisection kills" and wrote on the sidewalks phrases like "animals die while demons rejoice." I have come to the conclusion that protesting like this is an unhelpful contribution to on-campus activism as well as a distraction from a fruitful animal-research debate.

Continue reading "Vivisection at Berkeley: Protest all life sciences!" »

Filed under animal studies · berkeley · biology · cancer · hiv · mammals · science · stem cells

Posted by H. C. Hodges at 2:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

No, I don't mean that Franciscan question of whether or not animals go to heaven or hell. I mean physically, where are all the squirrel corpses? Laying aside for the moment all the squirrels I've seen run over then left as roadkill, I have never, not even once, seen a dead squirrel carcass. Isn't that weird?

Has anyone else? Where do they go? This is truly astonishing to me that, although I've seen small land mammals like squirrels, possums, and raccons alive many times, I've never actually seen one dead.

It's not like we have lots of other predators in metropolitan areas to kill, eat, and scatter their bones mercilessly... do they eat the remains of each other? Do raccoons eat the dead squirrels? I must know!

Filed under mammals · science

Posted by H. C. Hodges at 6:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)