Bob’s feeling may have something to do, in this case as in many others, with the circumstances under which he first got to know his animal. After he paid $1,500 to a dealer in Missouri, Higgins arrived, at about 3 months old, in diapers, with a bottle. Although he had his own cage, in his own room, he often slept in the couple’s bed. Bob changed his diapers several times a day, and often took him to work at his construction equipment business, slipping him under his shirt. On the way back, they would get Higgins an ice cream.
—
“Living Together,” NYT
Higgins is a a 7-year-old Hamadryas baboon living with Bob and his wife in upstate New York.
Is this mutual bonding?
I will bring candy. You will bring an unquenchable thirst for liquor.
Is ant society as complex as human society? Are ants sophisticated in the ways we consider humans to be? So supposes The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies, by Bert Holldobler and E.O. Wilson, recently reviewed in Slate:
In an advanced ant city, thousands of individuals work closely together to create a functioning colony in which there is a balance of cooperation and conflict. Some ant societies feature spectacular architecture and climate control. The most remarkable ant species have agriculture: They farm fungus and even domesticate other insects as livestock. In fact, at its height, ant civilization is remarkably like ours. A key contrast is that their society emerges from the hard-wired decision-making of thousands of efficient little biological robots, whereas ours is, at least partly, conscious and intentional. Despite this seemingly massive difference, it appears you can go a long way without a mind.
I wonder how the authors unwind the ants-as-livestock-farmers thread here. The reviewer seems to think that livestock farming is a sign of incredible sophistication, and perhaps it could be, but I doubt there is an ant equivalent to modern-day farming practices that humans enact.
Ritzy New York event planner David Monn creates a spectacular(ly cheap), meat-free holiday dinner party for NYT writer Alex Williams and his girlfriend.
Click the photo (via NYT) for a quick video.
Just inland from the shore, the scope of the farms overwhelms the senses. The 500-foot-long chicken houses stretch from the roadways like airplane hangars.
Inside each house, 20,000 to 35,000 chickens cramp the floors farther than the eye can see. Feed and water are delivered in automated pipes that stretch the length of the houses.
Corn and soy fields separate the houses from the roads, and three quarters of the state’s crop go toward feeding the birds.
Gigantic fans suction ammonia from the birds’ waste, filling the air for miles around.
…
As the phosphorous and nitrogen levels in the bay have grown, so have the algae that deplete oxygen needed by other aquatic life.
In the past two decades, working oystermen on the bay have dropped to less than 500, from 6,000. The crab population has fallen by 70 percent.
…
State officials have started to realize that there are consequences to being able to sell skinless, boneless chicken breast for just over $2 per pound when virtually no other protein source with so little fat is that cheap, Mr. Winegrad said.
Really. Really? Come on. The last time I bought a pound of tofu it cost $2 or less. What about vital wheat gluten? That’s cheap to make. These must be the “virtual” protein sources he’s referring to. Or maybe, just maybe, he wants to draw out this sob story of an economically oppressed farmer who’s just trying to make a couple bucks and shovel himself out from underneath a pile of chicken shit.
“I will be continue shopping (sic—he’s French) because shopping is part of life. If you can’t shop you feel like you’re not living. So it’s like eating; it’s a necessity.”
“Now we can go home to our new gifts and eat some more turkey.”
—Jean Roukoz, average Westerner, and Steven Santiago, average American,
as told to the NYT.
At 4:55 a.m., just five minutes before the doors were set to open, a crowd of 2,000 anxious shoppers started pushing, shoving and piling against the locked sliding glass doors of the Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, N.Y., Nassau County police said. The shoppers broke the doors off their hinges and surged in, toppling a 34-year-old temporary employee, Jdimypai Damour, 34, of Jamaica, Queens, who had been waiting with other workers in the store’s entryway.
BUT I JUST HAVE TO BUY THESE FUZZY SLIPPERS FOR MY WIFE WHILE THEY ARE ON SALE. AND MY CHILD NEEDS A WII! HE IS THE ONLY KID IN HIS SECOND-GRADE CLASS WHO DOESN’T HAVE ONE! IT IS ESSENTIAL LIKE FOOD AND WATER AND ALL THE RESOURCES THAT WE CARELESSLY POUR INTO PRODUCTS WE DON’T NEED AND THEN TRAMPLE EACH OTHER TO CONSUME, CONSUME, CONSUME THE DAY AFTER WE SLAUGHTER 45 MILLION TURKEYS FOR THE PLEASURE OF OUR TASTEBUDS. IT’S TRADITION, DAMN IT.
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