Books: The Whole Hog by Lyall Watson

I just finished reading this most enjoyable book, The Whole Hog by Lyall Watson, all about superfamily Suoidea: pigs (family Suidae) and peccaries (family Dicotylidae), but not hippos.

The book describes the domestication, species, and subspecies of pigs, the story of pigs and explorers, and the sensorium and intelligence of pigs. Watson is right: pigs are inexplicably overlooked when we think about domesication, culture, and animal intelligence. Except as stand-ins for humans in medical research, they are little studied.

Watson makes a good case for them more-or-less domesticating themselves, as they are sociable omnivores. Signs of pig domestication have been found at least 8,000 years ago. But do we hear about that great advance, the domestication of the pig? We do not. We hear about dogs, cattle, horses, and cats. He describes his childhood pet, a fostered baby warthog, that accompanied him and his guardian on walks through the African bush.

There’s a tiny population of Himalayan pigs which average about ten pounds—perhaps a better pet than the 80-pound Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. They are unique—and threatened—but is anyone their champion? He tells of the discovery of a remnant population of Giant Peccaries in Yucatan in the 1970s. Until those were discovered, we believed that they had gone extinct 10,000 years ago.

Find a copy if you can.

Superfamily Suoidea. comprises two familes.

Family Suidae:

• Subfamily: Suinae - “true” pigs
  • Genus: Sus (pigs)
    • Sus scrofa (domestic pig) - many subspecies
  • Genus: Potamochoerus (river hogs)
    • P. larvatus, bushpig
    • P. porcus, Red River hog
  • Genus: Hylochoerus (forest hogs)
    • H. meinertzhageni - forest hog, four subspecies
• Subfamily: Phacochoerinae - warthogs
  • Genus: Phacochoerus
    • P. aethiopicus, desert warthog
    • P. africanus, common warthog
  • Subfamily: Babirousinae - babirusa
    • Genus: Babyrousa
      • • B. babyrussa
        • Family: Dicotylidae
          • Genus: Tayassu (peccaries)
          • Genus: Catagonus (giant peccaries)

Cat on a parachute jump

A parachute enthusiast decided to take his cat to share the pleasure of a parachute jump. He has strapped the cat to his chest in a special restraining suit.

In the plane, and at first in the doorway, it’s trusting its owner and just looking around.

Then it starts to get alarmed.

At this point it’s pedalling its feet, trying to back off.

It’s twisting its head, trying to get back into the plane. You can almost hear it think, “Get me out of here!”

The owner had wrapped the cat’s paws in little mittens, which probably saved him a scratching and perhaps making his jump with a cat wrapped around his head. But the cat probably pee’d on him on the way down.

The animal origins of empathy

It’s still being debated. But people who are not clinging to “Humans are superior” can see affection, sympathy, and empathy among mammals, birds, and cetaceans. It never got into the scientific literature, but my first cat used to lead young strays with encouraging chirps and let them eat his food.

In an article ‘way back in 1995, Natalie Angier wrote about it in the New York Times: “Scientists Mull Role of Empathy in Man and Beast.”

Dr. Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University in Atlanta and author of a forthcoming book by Harvard University Press on animal morality tentatively titled, “Civil Like an Animal,” has gathered what he calls, “stories of remarkable instances of empathy.” …

Dr. de Waal said his observations indicate concordance between a species’ capacity for self-recognition in a mirror and its likelihood of displaying compassionate, empathic behavior toward its fellows. Monkeys do not recognize themselves in a mirror, and they would never put an arm around the shoulder of a friend hurt in a fight, he said. Chimpanzees have been shown to do just that, and they also demonstrate signs of self-recognition.

Adopt a cat!

My friend is giving up her two cats because she doesn’t think she can take proper care of them when she comes out of the hospital.

They are two spayed females:

• Daisy is a brown tabby about four years old with beautiful green eyes.
• Nelly is a plush grey cat about two years old.

Both are healthy, friendly, and well-behaved. They are used to staying indoors. And they get along well together. Daisy, at least, is used to dogs; I’m not sure about Nelly.

If you are in the general area of Toronto, Ontario, and have a cat-shaped hole in your life, please get in touch.

People, bah, humbug!

Sometimes amputating people’s hands seems like a good idea.

Four teenagers in Camrose, Alberta, broke into someone’s house over the Christmas holidays and cooked their cat alive in a microwave oven. The idea of someone doing that to a helpless and trusting animal has aroused considerable outrage.

It’s tempting to suggest, “Pick on somebody your own size.”

Which god creates parrot images?

On Neatorama blog archive, there’s an entry about a couple who sold their foul-mouthed parrot, only to find a parrot image in a bag of potato chips a few days later. It’s obviously a divine message, but from whom?

Doomed crustaceans

For the second week in a row, my grocery store had Dunguness crabs in their live seafood tank. These are big crabs, at least a handspan across.

The store also had lobsters, which is much more usual. One of them began to follow me around the tank to peer out at me.

Original Shroedinger’s LOLcat

Check here for the story of the first Shroedinger’s indeterminate kitty.

Trilobites are not isopods

Prof. PZ Myers at Pharyngula attended a talk by Kent Hovind at a U.S. college, Cloud State University. Among other things, Dr. Myers had this to say:

And the lies were just so painfully blatant: as an example, he claimed that trilobites weren’t old and they weren’t extinct, and to ‘prove’ his claim, he showed a picture of an arctic isopod and announced that there it was, alive and crawling, proof that the biology professors have all been lying to you.

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My comments:
Young-earth creationist Kent Hovind includes in his talks an assertion that trilobites are still around because he has—ta-da!—a picture of an isopod. That’s like saying that horseshoe crabs live in the Prairies because you found a grasshopper. But “Dr.” Hovind seems unaware of his mistake. It’s almost as if Hovind’s attitude towards God’s creations is, “If you’ve seen one bug, you’ve seen them all.” Is it a lie if you don’t care?Isopods are only distantly related to trilobites. Allow me to introduce Hovind to the Tree of life page for arthropods.

The further apart the names are in the list, the more distantly related they are. Trilobites are distinguished by the three lengthwise sections of the body. (Harvard University shows a nice selection of trilobite species.) They are also extinct, as shown by the little dagger beside their name. I know of no living crustaceans with bodies divided into three lengthwise lobes. Here is a fossil of a trilobite:
Here is an isopod:

You’ve seen them, because sowbugs and pillbugs are isopods. Sowbugs and pillbugs are those little, segmented grey bugs that hide in damp places. Pillbugs curl into a ball when you pick them up; sowbugs just run away. I remember learning in school that they are crustaceans and breathe with gills, so they must live around moisture.

Both trilobites and isopods are in class Arthropoda (”jointed legs”). To call them the same is like saying or that a clam is the same as an octopus. (Both are in class Mollusca.) To find the isopod branch of the arthropod tree, click on Crustacea, then Malacostraca, then Peracarida, then Isopoda. (The middle picture on the Isopod page shows a parasite that enters the mouth of a fish, then eats the tongue and lives in its place.)

But what is Hovind’s point? Even if an old form persists, “cousin” groups could still have evolved from their common ancestors, and evolutionary pressures continue to operate today. Is it simply a chance for him to laugh at the foolish scientists who can tell the difference between a crustacean or a trilobite? Besides being a cheap shot, it’s a remarkably useless one.

More links:

• Here’s a very large picture of the tongue-replacement isopod, Cymothoa exigua, mentioned above.
• Here’s an article about the Giant Isopod, Bathynomus giganteus.
• Incidentally, in another group of crustaceans, the Remipedia, there’s a family called Godzillidae.