good Friday

Isn’t it amazing the way life can seem too short, and intrinsically magical, yet at the same time feel like a long, uphill road, potholed with fuckwits?

Tom Cox

Good Friday. This is the holiest of holy days in the secular country I am living in. Seriously. By law, all parts of Germany observe nine holy days throughout the year, Bavaria, which claims to be more catholic than others, observes 11 holy days. And these are serious holy days, we stay home from work, all shops, restaurants, cafes are shut, TV programs act as if it's a Sunday. As for Good Friday, no music, no dancing, no long nights in clubs or pubs, no sports and so on. When I was growing up, these days felt like heavy weights of boredom, long and cold and often rainy. Today, I watch the rain, waiting for a break so I can go on a walk. The beep from the house across the road a steady reminder of human acts of fuckwittery. 

Many years ago, during Easter break, we were cycling along the river Danube towards Vienna, battling with rain and headwind so strong, we almost gave up. On Good Friday, we woke in a medieval country inn where I had spent much of the night wandering back and forth to the bathroom on the landing across, expecting an imminent UTI but it was just because my feet were freezing cold. We speculated about Good Friday rules and how to get supplies for the day but walked out into a busy market day with not the tiniest inkling of holy whatever. That's Austria for you. Now, in Ireland, it's also just another busy day, as are all other holy days, like Ascension or Whitsun or Corpus Christi. I was seriously shocked when I found out.

Last night, I've read my way through a couple of obituaries for Frans de Waal, a primatologist I greatly admire. On the bicycle tour mentioned above, we visited an exhibition dedicated to his work at the Natural History Museum in Vienna (one the world's most amazing museums, BTW). 

This is one of my favourite quotes from his work (I have posted this before):

 I cannot name any emotion that is uniquely human. There are maybe emotions related to religion — let’s say spirituality — but even for that, I cannot exclude that animals have those kinds of feelings. Who says they don’t? In humans, religious feelings are not expressed in the face. That kind of emotion is not visible. And if emotions are not visible, how can we exclude that it exists in other species?

One of his findings was the fairness concept, explained here:

I could go on a tangent about studies in primates and how this is so amazing and how we should watch and listen, but it's not just primates.  

Pigs have been found to plan and carry out rescue missions to help incarcerated or otherwise distressed fellow pigs. In an experiment, which has been repeated by others , researchers added two small compartments to a barn where pigs are normally kept and both had a window through which the animals could look in and a door that can only be opened from the outside. In the first part of the experiment, the animals learnt to open the compartment doors by pushing a lever upwards with their snout. In the second part, each pig was isolated from the group once and locked in one of the compartments. The other box was also locked, but remained empty. In 85 per cent of cases, the pigs freed the trapped group member from the test compartment within 20 minutes. The longer pigs looked through the window at the trapped animal, the sooner they freed it.

Cows develop livelong friendships with other cows, as well as dislikes. In a field experiment, the "best friend" and "worst enemy" were first determined for each cow. To do this, all the cows in a barn were fitted with transmitters. A type of GPS for indoor areas then records how much time which cows spend together. A cow's best friend is the animal she spends the most time with. The cow it spends the least time with is considered its enemy. Next, the cows are separated for 30 minutes at a time, once with the best friend from the group and once with the animal they has had the least contact with. Most cows started licking their best friend when they met, and when put next to her enemy, started to push her around. 

But really surprising are goats. Goats ask people for help, so to speak, when they cannot solve a problem themselves. Take this test that was originally developed for dogs. The goat is placed in a room in which a human sits next to a plastic box containing a reward. The lid is only loosely in place three times, the animal can easily push it away with its head and eat the reward. The fourth time, the lid is firmly closed. Now, the goat alternates between looking at humans and at the closed box, as if they are asking for help.

The more scientists find out about the behaviour of farm animals, the clearer it becomes that their cognitive and emotional abilities have so far been hugely underestimated. There is still a widespread belief that all these animals are dumb eating machines that have neither thoughts nor feelings and therefore do not need to be treated with particular consideration. However, this has long been scientifically disproved. 

I have milked cows and goats, mucked out stables of all three (and more) types of farm animals, I observed baby goats and lambs being born, bottle-fed some of them, and I have eaten them, lamb, goats, pigs and cows - disguised as ham, sausage, steak, cutlet, mice, bacon and so on. 

I've also eaten octopus, pheasant, chicken, rabbit, hare, venison, duck, geese, even flying foxes, snake and frog legs. Not including fish and seafood. About twenty years ago, I lost the appetite, my inflamed intestine couldn't handle meat too well and slowly it got less and less until I stopped it altogether.