The dogs vs. cats debate has raged on for all time and for all time the dog side has won! Dogs are man's best friend and cats don't even like us! So why should we like them?
Unlike cats, dogs are very faithful and give you unconditional love forever. Cats barely seem to know you are around most of the time. If there is any problem a dog will serve and even protect you really well, but what would a cat do? Nothing!
The dogs are very obedient creatures and will sit or lie down or heel on command unlike the cats who will just smirk and walk away. Cats cannot be trained as easily as dogs. In fact it can seem impossible to train a cat.
Whenever the owner talks, a dog will tilt their heads and listen but cats don't really seem to have much interest in human speech. Dogs will come upon hearing their name called while cats either don't recognize their name being called or don't care that it's been called! A dog's obedience makes him even more lovable and that is the biggest reason many people prefer dogs over cats.
Dogs also serve as very good companions and will play Frisbee or other games with you in the afternoon while cats, being selfish and self-centered, would prefer to take their afternoon nap quite lazily. Dogs are not at all mischievous by nature and will bring you your slippers or your evening newspaper unlike cats who might bring you a dead mouse.
Dogs also serve as very good watch dogs. There's a reason they call it a watch dog and not a watch cat! They will bark to wake you up if the house is on fire or if he finds anything suspicious going on like thieves or somebody else breaking in while cats will just quietly sneak out the back door.
Dogs are so obedient that they will let you give them a bath quite easily, while a cat will struggle the entire time.
Dogs also look much better at the end of a leash. A dog can be a great partner on daily walk or your daily run. You can't take a cat with you on a run!
Another great advantage that dogs have over cats is that they are easier to co mingle with each other. Dogs tend to get along with other dogs much easier than cats tend to get along with other cats.
Possibly the best reason that dogs are better than cats? Dogs don't use the bathroom inside of your house! They go outside! No matter how much the litter is supposed to keep the smell under control, it still stinks!
Dogs seem to understand your emotions and will try to comfort you whenever you are sad while the cats don't really seem to notice this sort of thing. A cat is far more interested in his own life.
I'm sure there are many more reasons why dogs are better than cats but these are the ones I've thought of today. Dogs are the best friend a man (or woman) can have. Cats? Not so much.
Having a dog in the family reduces a child’s risk of asthma by 15% and contact with farm animals can halve it, a comprehensive study has shown.
The findings lend strong support to the “hygiene hypothesis” that suggests living in too-clean conditions early in life can increase susceptibility to allergy conditions such as asthma.
Scientists analysed data on more than 1 million children born in Sweden between 2001 and 2010, where dog and farm animal ownership has to be registered by law.
Dog exposure during the first year of life was associated with a 15% lower likelihood of childhood asthma, while living close to farm animals cut the risk by 52%.
Lead scientist Dr Tove Fall, from Uppsala University in Sweden, said: “Earlier studies have shown that growing up on a farm reduces a child’s risk of asthma to about half.
“We wanted to see if this relationship was true also for children growing up with dogs in their homes. Our results confirmed the farming effect and we also saw that children who grew up with dogs had about 15% less asthma than children without dogs.
“Because we had access to such a large and detailed data set, we could account for confounding factors such as asthma in parents, area of residence and socio-economic status.”
The research, published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, was possible because of Sweden’s organised system of national databases accessible to scientists. Every visit to a specialist physician and every prescription is recorded.
Co-author Prof Catarina Almqvist Malmros, from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, said: “These kind of epidemiological studies look for associations in large populations but do not provide answers on whether and how animals could protect children from developing asthma.
“We know that children with established allergy to cats or dogs should avoid them, but our results also indicate that children who grow up with dogs have reduced risks of asthma later in life.
“Thanks to the population-based design, our results are generalisable to the Swedish population and probably also to other European populations with similar culture regarding pet ownership and farming.”
According to the hygiene hypothesis, lack of early exposure to microbes and parasites may prevent the immune system developing properly. As a result, natural checks on unwanted immune responses that can lead to allergy are lacking.
Erika Kennington, head of research at Asthma UK, said: “Asthma is a complex condition with many different types and causes. While this study identifies a link to living with a dog or regular exposure to farm animals in the first year of a child’s life, and their chance of developing asthma by the age of six, more research is needed. This will help us better understand the effects so that it can be turned into practical advice for parents of young children.”
Breaking news: Lil Bub, one of the best loved internet cats, will release her debut album Science & Magic on 4 December. According to Andrew WK, who helped create the record with Bub, not only is she the softest creature he has ever encountered, but “also the most musically and compassionately gifted. The songs on this album are her vision. They are by her, about her, and are her.”
Whether you consider it a callous effort to capitalise on one mutant cat’s craze for, or a pioneering step into the outer limits of musical experimentation, the cat album is currently having its moment: take rap duo Run the Jewels, who have released Meow the Jewels, a cat-sound remix of their last album. Or … actually that’s it. Just two albums. But two albums sampling cats in one week is two more than the previous 2015 years have offered up, so worth marking none the less (for the purpose of journalistic integrity, let’s include Mr Mitch and his meow-based track Catford. Which came out in 2013. Three’s a trend).
While the Lil Bub album smacks slightly of a traffic chasing marketing campaign, and Meow the Jewels is a gesture of goodwill (donations to its Kickstarter go to victims of police brutality and neglected animals), previously samples of animals in song have been used for their atmospheric, musical value. The sound of an animal can be symbolic, more evocative or expressive than that of a human’s voice. Take the distant murmurs on Kate Bush’s Moving – 15 seconds of whale song sampled from Songs of the Humpback Whale. In an interview with Sounds, Bush said: “Whales say everything about ‘moving’. It’s huge and beautiful, intelligent, soft inside a tough body.”
It can also be a handy scene-setting device: the nostalgic sound of seagulls squarking through Gruff Rhy’s Shark Ridden Waters, Minnie Riperton’s Lovin’ You – its tweeting birds replicating a bucolic idyll and the first flutters of fancy, or the clip clop and whinny of reindeer on Sleigh Ride by the Ronnettes. No mention of animal sampling symbolism would be complete without the salacious honk of an elephant on Missy Elliott’s Work It.
It’s not always used as a pleasant reminder of mother nature’s creations. Matthew Herbert’s One Pig – an album that documents a pig’s 20-week life, from birth to brutal slaughter – used the samples for a stark look at the meat industry. It’s a terrifying tool for music’s more malevolent, too – the sound of a predator snarling at the start and end of Butthole Surfers’ Mark Says Alright or HateBeak’s Feral Parrot. The world of EDM offers some savage sampling, too – such as Deadmau5’s use of rattlesnakes, or Raff Riley borrowing the sounds of febrile barking dogs.
The sampling of animals can even have its textural qualities, adding layers that an instrument may not – the cooing pigeons on Panda Bear’s Bro’s, or the quiet chatter of birds flitting throughout Radiohead’s The King of Limbs – during the introduction to Give Up the Ghost, the fade out of Codex, and layered under the flugelhorn (yes, flugelhorn) on Bloom.
If, last week, you’d quizzed me about the dispersal strategies of spiders, I would have told you all about “ballooning”, how Charles Darwin, at sea on the Beagle in 1832, was stunned to see thousands of tiny, dusky red spiders come floating on board, borne on silky parachutes that trapped them in the rigging. This and other observations led him to conclude that “the habit of sailing through the air” was probably “characteristic of this tribe”.
I would not, however, have told you that ballooning spiders can sail on water too, because I didn’t know they did until I read a paper out today in BMC Evolutionary Biology. These sailing skills, documented by Japanese research fellow Morito Hayashi and colleagues, make a lot of sense. Earth, after all, is largely water, so aerial dispersal is not a great idea unless you can cope with the presumably frequent fate of alighting on water.
Working in the “SpiderLab” at the University of Nottingham, Hayashi put hundreds of spiders from more than 20 different species “in a shallow tray filled with water to 1cm height”. When buffeted by “pump-generated air (i.e. wind)”, “spiders actively adopt postures that allow them to use the wind direction to control their journey on water,” he says. They are competent sailors even in salty and turbulent condition, the researchers find.
The paper describes five different water-related behaviours. Here they are:
1) Sailing
Sailing spiders raise their legs to create a kind of sail. “Sailing spiders smoothly and stealthily slide on the water surface without leaving any turbulence,” note Hayashi and co.
2) Upside-down sailing
This demands a “handstand-like posture”, the spider using its abdomen rather than legs to catch the wind.
3) Anchoring
Silk is released onto the surface of the water. This slows down the spider’s movement and may help tether the spider to the relative safety of a floating object
4) Walking
It’s just that, the spider rapidly propelling its legs in an effort to walk on the surface. [Re-reading Darwin’s account of the dusky red spiders he encountered off the coast of South America, it looks like he observed them walking on water: “The little aeronaut,” he wrote in his Journal of Researches, “could run with facility on the surface of water.”]
5) Death mimicry
“Death mimicry behaviour is likely to be a predator avoidance strategy, as is common to many animals.” Essentially, the spider touches the water and freezes. But owing to its water-repellent feet (see the dimples on the surface of the water), it still floats.
In a related investigation, the researchers collected data on ballooning. Those individuals and species that showed a readiness to balloon their way off a dry surface were also the ones with the greatest talent for sailing. “The sailing behaviour is almost completely associated with, and possibly a requirement for, the aeronautic behaviour,” they conclude.
“Being able to cope with water effectively ‘joins the dots’ as far as the spider is concerned,” says Sara Goodacre, head of the SpiderLab and a co-author on the paper. “It can move from one land mass to another, and potentially across huge spatial scales through the air,” she says. “If landing on water poses no problem then in a week or two they could be a long way away from where they started.”
Darwin would have loved this, a neat set of observations that helps explain why spiders are amongst the first to colonise new habitats and why many species are found all the way around the globe. They haven’t just been flying. They’ve been sailing too.
It may not be considered a landmark birthday for humans, but turning 37 has made Hong Kong’s Jia Jia the oldest ever giant panda in captivity, and she celebrated in style.
Jia Jia is said to be still mobile but suffering from high blood pressure. Photograph: Bobby Yip/Reuters
The equivalent of more than 100 years old in human terms, Jia Jia was presented with a towering birthday cake made from ice and fruit juice with the number 37 carved on top, in her enclosure at the city’s Ocean Park theme park.
“Jia Jia has achieved two Guinness world record titles – the oldest panda living in captivity and the oldest panda ever living in captivity,” said Blythe Ryan Fitzwilliam, adjudicator of Guinness World Records, during a ceremony at the park.
He offered her his congratulations, saying it was an “amazing longevity achievement”.
Jia Jia was born in the wild in Sichuan, China, in 1978 and was given to Hong Kong in 1999 to mark the semi-autonomous city’s handover by Britain two years earlier.
The previous record was held by a male panda called Du Du, who was also caught in the wild and died in July 1999 aged 36 in a zoo in China’s Hubei province.
Vet Paola Martelli said Jia Jia was still “moving about” though she suffered from cataracts and high blood pressure. “She is sleeping more, so is doing everything less. But she is ageing gracefully, just like your grandma,” she said.
Jia Jia. Photograph: Bobby Yip/Reuters
Because she eats less bamboo she relies on fibre supplements, Martelli added.
Jia Jia, whose name translates as “excellence”, picked at fruit slices and bamboo around the ice cake to celebrate her big day.
Although the exact birth dates of Du Du and Jia Jia are unknown because they were born in the wild, Guinness said that based on the evidence, they concluded that Jia Jia had claimed the title by a few months.
There are fewer than 2,000 pandas now left in the wild, according to the World Wildlife Fund, as their habitats have been ravaged by development. Roads and railways cut through the bamboo forests they depend upon in China’s Yangtze Basin, their primary habitat. Pandas rely on bamboo and eat almost nothing else.
Given their low birthrate, captive breeding programmes have become key to ensuring their survival.
The National Zoo’s giant panda Mei Xiang, who was showing signs of being pregnant, is actually carrying a developing fetus and could give birth in coming weeks, the Washington zoo said on Wednesday.
Expectant mother giant panda Mei Xiang sleeps indoors at Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park in Washington on Tuesday.
Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA
Veterinarians detected a 1.6in (4cm) fetus during an ultrasound on Wednesday of Mei Xiang, who is a star tourist draw in the US capital, the zoo said in a statement.
“Today, we are cautiously optimistic,” said Dennis Kelly, the zoo’s director.
Veterinarians estimate that Mei Xiang could give birth early next week or possibly in early September, the statement said.
The zoo warned, however, that there is a substantial possibility that the fetus could be miscarried or resorbed, a process in which a fetus is broken down into components and dispersed in the panda’s circulation.
Mei Xiang started showing a secondary rise in her urinary progesterone on 20 July, a sign of pregnancy or a false pregnancy.
Mei Xiang was artificially inseminated on 26 and 27 April. The procedures used frozen sperm from Hui Hui, a panda living in China, and fresh sperm from the National Zoo’s Tian Tian, it said.
Mei Xiang is showing behaviors at the David M Rubenstein Family Giant Panda Habitat in line with pregnancy, such as spending more time in her den, body licking and cradling objects. The inside of the habitat has been closed to the public.
Giant pandas are one of the world’s most endangered species and have a very low reproductive rate, particularly in captivity. Their natural home is in a few mountain ranges in central China. There are about 1,600 giant pandas known to be living in the wild and some 300 in captivity, mostly in China.
The cartoon rabbits pictured on Easter cards may look cute and cuddly, but real rabbits have no place in the “pet” industry. These complex animals are often purchased on a whim, especially in the spring, and potential caretakers rarely understand the specific needs of their new companion. Once the novelty has worn off, many bunnies are neglected, relegated to outdoor cages, dumped at shelters, or simply turned loose in the wild, where they have little chance of surviving. Hundreds of organizations and shelters are trying to deal with this growing problem.
Dealers and “pet” stores usually request 4-week-old bunnies because they require less space and are “cuter,” but bunnies of this age are ill-prepared to be weaned from their parents. Many people who purchase these young, small bunnies do not realize that depending on breed, the average weight for an adult rabbit is anywhere from 2 to 20 pounds.
Rabbits are social creatures with gentle natures and individual personalities, and they need just as much attention as a dog or cat. They are not suitable companions for young children. Rabbits require specific foods, stimulating environments, and veterinarians who have specialized knowledge of their species.
How to Spot Neglect
Federal regulations apply only to those breeders or “bunny mills” that do at least $500 of business with a particular pet store, and enforcement is lax, so the rabbits that you see in the store may not have been properly transported or cared for.
A runny nose, sneezing, head-tilt, listlessness, and diarrhea are all signs of a sick bunny. Rabbits have extremely delicate respiratory and digestive systems, and any change in the balance of these systems can result in death if they are not treated properly and quickly. Bare spots or scabs anywhere on the body suggest that the rabbit has parasites or has been fighting with other rabbits.
Adoption
If—after careful consideration—you have decided to welcome a rabbit into your home, please adopt from your local humane society or rabbit rescue group. Rabbits can live up to 10 years and require annual checkups by a veterinarian who is familiar with rabbits. Bunnies need lots of company and can become withdrawn and depressed if not provided with plenty of love and companionship. Rabbits do get along with dogs and cats if they are all safely socialized.
If you plan to adopt two rabbits, consider a neutered male and a spayed female, as they are usually more compatible than two fixed same-sex bunnies. It is crucial to have your new companion spayed or neutered immediately. Otherwise, males mark their territory, females run a high risk of uterine cancer, and the already serious overpopulation crisis becomes worse.
Rabbit-Proofing
Rabbits cannot tolerate extreme heat and must be provided with shelter from the cold. They prefer to live indoors, where they can participate in their caretaker’s everyday life, but before you let your new friend into your home, there are a few things you need to do to ensure his or her safety and happiness. Bunnies are natural chewers and they love to play, so be sure to provide plenty of toys. Untreated wood; straw; wire cat-balls; keys; paper towel rolls; and hard, plastic baby toys work well, but even with all these fun toys to play with, bunnies are drawn to electrical and phone wires, books, baseboard molding, door jams, and plants.
You’ll need to cover or redirect wires and move the rest of these items up and out of the way before bringing your bunny home. You’ll also want to set up a large box or basket filled with shredded paper for your new companion to dig in. Not all rabbits are chronic diggers, but those who are will take their natural digging instincts out on your rugs and other furnishings unless you’ve supplied an alternate digging spot. And while you’re setting up, don’t forget that rabbits also need a safe, quiet haven such as a cardboard box or plastic carrier with a towel inside. Wire cages are not suitable for bunnies.
Litter Training
Litter training is possible at any age—since rabbits like to relieve themselves in one place—and older rabbits tend to be quicker students than youngsters. Even if you plan on giving the bunny the run of the house, you’ll need to conduct litter training in a relatively confined space. Fill a litterbox with paper pulp litter. Do not use clay, as it is deadly for rabbits’ delicate digestive systems! Place the litter box in the corner of the cage or room. Try encouraging your rabbit by putting some of his or her droppings into the box or try using timothy hay or treats. Rabbits learn easily, and before long, you will be able to leave litterboxes in different locations around the house.
“We’re Vegetarians, Thank You!”
The bulk of a rabbit’s diet should be grass, timothy or oat hay, and fresh vegetables. You may also try giving a limited amount of pellets and a small amount of fruit to him or her. Dark leafy greens, broccoli, carrots, parsley, watercress, bananas, apples, pears, and pineapples are all good choices. Stay away from iceberg lettuce (too much water) or large amounts of cabbage (can give a bunny gas). Like dogs or cats, rabbits may be prone to begging at the table. As tempting as it may be to give your rabbit a taste of whatever it is that you’re eating, rabbits have digestive systems that are easily disrupted, so you should stick to his or her normal diet. Check with your vet before you add other treats.
Grooming and Handling
Although rabbits clean themselves much as cats do, rabbits do not have the ability to cough up hairballs, so it is imperative that you groom your rabbit a least once a week. Most rabbits love the attention and grooming prevents digestive problems later in life
Rabbits are instinctively nervous when lifted off the ground. Because of the delicate structure of their spines and the power of their leg muscles, struggling rabbits can actually break their own backbones. Never lift a rabbit by the ears or with just one hand under the stomach. Rabbits do not like to be carried around as cats or dogs might. It is best to get down on their level to interact with them, but if you must pick your rabbit up, make sure that you are supporting his or her hind legs and rump at all times and using your other hand to support his or her chest. Once acclimated to your home, bunnies will come to you, jump into your lap, and even sleep with you.
Siegfried and Roy pose with Pride, another white lion, in an undated photo.
Photograph: Getty Images
A white lion on loan from the Siegfried and Roy animal and magic act has died
after undergoing a medical procedure at the Toledo Zoo.
Zoo officials announced Friday that 14-year-old Legend died after being
immobilized for an hour to allow veterinarians to treat problems with one of its
paws. Legend went into cardiac and respiratory arrest after being removed from
anesthesia.
A zoo veterinarian says in a statement that while there are risks whenever
anesthesia is administered, the procedure was necessary for Legend’s quality of
life. A necropsy will be performed to determine a cause of death.
The zoo has one other white lion, Legend’s 14-year-old brother Courage. The
pair came to the zoo in 2003. A white lion named Wisdom died during surgery at
the zoo in 2013.
The relationship
between shepherds and their dogs is one of the longest-running stories in human
history. But in the US, that story paused for a while and almost looked like it
might come to an end. Since the second world war, by and large, Americans have
stopped eating sheep.
In 1945, there were 55
million head of sheep in the US. By 2013, there was around a tenth of that
number. The decline in the demand for wool led to some of the liquidation of the
sheep flock, but so did changing food tastes. Americans used to eat upwards of
4lbs of lamb in any given year, but now two out of three don’t eat any at
all.
The consumers who
still eat lamb are a now a small niche market, incorporating immigrants from
countries where lamb is a staple and foodies in search of pasture-raised
authenticity. Demand is slowly regaining strength, along with a growing
consciousness about the provenance of animals and the conditions they’re raised
under.
Michelle Canfield, sheep farmer, with Bronte (right) and
Moses . Photograph: Jason Wilson for The Guardian
For farmers like
Michelle Canfield, who since 2008 has run a small herd of sheep near Snohomish,
Washington, it brings both opportunities and constraints.
First, she runs
“shedding sheep”, which drop their hair, meaning she doesn’t have to pay to
shear them. Hers are Katahdin Hair Sheep, first developed in Maine and prized
for their prolific lambing and easy-care characteristics.
Second, the absence of
a USDA-approved slaughterhouse close by means that if you want to eat her sheep,
you have to take them away and get them butchered yourself. She doesn’t have a
problem selling them – Seattle is close by, she says, where “the Muslim market
is huge” (she says it is thanks to the number of migrants who have moved to work
in the tech industry).
As much as any other
foodies, this highly educated clientele “want their grass-fed, natural, local
meat, but they want to do their own slaughter, and make sure it’s Halal”.
This “exploding
demand” for strictly grass-fed animals means that she has to leave the flocks
out in the fields full time, including overnight. In turn, the animals are
vulnerable to predators, particularly in lambing season. The most dangerous,
persistent and clever predator of lambs is the coyote.
Canfield tried llamas
as guardian animals, and they worked for a while, but the coytoes worked out how
to get around them at the same time her border collies did. She started to take
losses.
Lockjaw traps are
illegal, and poison is fraught with risks, so she needed another solution.
This is where Moses
and Bronte came in. Both dogs are around eight years old, weigh in well over 100
pounds and are off-white in colour (so they can be distinguished from
predators). Each is descended from two different ancient lines of livestock
guardian dogs.
Moses (left) and
Bronte resting in the grass. Photograph: Jason Wilson for The Guardian
Bronte, the Maremma,
was the first dog Canfield adopted . Maremmas are an ancient central Italian
breed, created to protect the flocks of Abruzzo, Tuscany and Lazio, a job they
still do in a country where wolves are present and protected.
Bronte had been raised
in the traditional manner of guardian sheepdogs, in a barn with sheep to whom
she was bonded. She loved Canfield’s flock, but she had to learn to cool her
exuberance. “She tried to play with them, she’d want to wrestle with them, even
the lambs.” She was challenging and wilful. “She went feral for a while and I
had to retame her with food.”
It worked, and now
Bronte attends to the flocks dutifully and gently. She looks and acts a little
like an oversized Golden Retriever, one who “perceives the sheep as her primary
peer group”.
To keep her company,
and to help at the times when they needed to split up the flocks, they got
Moses, a Kuvasz. They are a Hungarian breed whose precise origins are lost in
time, but who are said to have arrived with the Magyars in the Carpathian Valley
some 4,000 years ago.
Kuvasz almost
disappeared in the second world war, when many were killed by German or Russian
soldiers for protecting their families. There were revived, and now they are
another part of the array of working dogs available to livestock ranchers.
Moses was a failed
show dog; he was too reactive and grumpy for the ring. When Canfield acquired
him, she quickly realised what the problem was: “He’s terribly far-sighted. He
was growly at dog shows because everything up close was just a jumble of stuff.
He’s worked out well here.” The fact that he has learned to be a guardian
despite not being raised as one is a tribute to Canfield’s training.
While other breeds of
guardian dogs might be more assertive and aggressive, these two mostly get the
job done with their booming barks. A bark is enough to warn Canfield (“I’ve
learned to tell which kind of bark means trouble”) and is also enough to scare
off a coyote. They haven’t yet had to physically tangle with a predator.
Looking to the future,
Canfield worries about wolves. “We’ll see how quickly they make it out here”,
she says. Reintroduced in Idaho and the still-protected apex predator, wolves
are slowly making their way west of the ranges. They’re already in western
Oregon, and one day, perhaps, they will show up in her corner of Washington.
Perhaps the same
conflicts that have played out in eastern Oregon and Washington between
conservationists and ranchers will play out closer to the big cities of the
Pacific Northwest, or maybe by then new techniques and new dogs will provide a
solution.
For now, these two
dogs are happy sleeping, living and eating with their flocks. Soon, Canfield
will introduce a new puppy who will learn from them – which is how a tradition
as old as domestication itself will be renewed.
Every time he hunts, Peter Williams sends a
silent message to his prey before he squeezes the trigger: “Please give me your
life. I’ll eat some of your meat, and I’ll make something beautiful out of your
hide.” On a cold afternoon in mid-January, Williams, who is 33, was kneeling on
the barnacle- and birdshit-encrusted rocks of an uninhabited island. On all
sides was Sitka Sound, a narrow stretch of water off the coast of southeast
Alaska. Williams wore an orange raincoat and earmuffs; his rifle rested in a dip
between rocks. About a hundred feet away, a dozen sea otters were bobbing in the
water. He wanted a stray, at the edge of the group. He was moving with the
sureness of ritual. For him this is ritual. When he scans the water for targets,
Williams’s eyes get unnaturally wide, like a mask, and his head starts to
swivel.
His prey seems to have evolved for heart-melting cuteness. Black beseeching
eyes, soft triangle nose, puckered little mouth: sea otters look like puppies’
or human babies encased in fur. Pairs “hold hands”, paw in paw, to stay
together. As Williams says: “They’re very human-like, not only their physical
appearance but also their behaviour. They’re very social, they’re very
family-oriented. They’re intelligent, they’re playful.” Sea otters float on
their backs, limbs in the air, up to a hundred massed in a “raft”. Snoozing,
they tuck themselves into stringy beds of kelp, to keep from drifting out to
sea.
Williams is after their fur, which is the densest and softest in the animal
kingdom – Russian traders once called it “soft gold”. There is no material like
it. The black, silky, lustrous stuff is so instantly comforting that it hardly
seems like fur at all. Few human heads have more than 150,000 hairs, but sea
otters stay warm with a double layer of never-moulting fur, up to a million
hairs per square inch. Williams designs and sells clothes and accessories, made
from the otters he hunts. By reviving a forgotten and forbidden market for their
fur, Williams sees himself as restoring a wounded culture. His father was
Yup’ik, from the largest tribal group of Alaska Natives – who suffer as a whole,
disproportionately, from poverty, substance abuse, suicide and rape. The
tradition of marine mammal hunting runs deep among the indigenous peoples of the
state, but beginning in the 18th century, white settlement brought the forced
conscription of Native hunters and the near-eradication of many species.
Out on the rocks, a muffled shot cracked the stillness. The raft split up, a
dozen black heads adrift in seemingly random motion, and Williams picked off a
second. A shot to the head is the quickest and cleanest way to kill, according
to Williams. “There’s a sound when it hits, a thump you can hear when the bullet
stops. It mushrooms out, expands, and fractures,” he said of the 55-grain,
soft-point .223 rounds he fires.
Williams made for the Jenna, his ramshackle aluminium skiff, docked just off
the island. He bailed out a few buckets’ worth of water and set the outboard
motor, racing after the harvest before it could sink or float away. Wild little
islands lay scattered across Sitka Sound, which opened wide on to the freezing
North Pacific in the distance. A volcano stood glazed with snow.
A few minutes later, the Jenna pulled up alongside two floating bulges of
sleek fur. Both females: a “sub-adult” (or teenager) and a hefty “old-timer”,
with distinguished white hairs, maybe 5ft 6in long. “There’s times when I go out
to pick up the animal and it’s still alive,” said Williams. “That’s what I bring
the aluminium bat for. Life is a powerful force.” He maintains that “clubbing is
a really efficient way of killing something, especially if you do it right, you
club it in the head.”
He grabbed the otters by the scruff and dropped them in the skiff. One had
blood on its whiskers, and its eyes were filling up with blood. Williams guided
the Jenna into a sheltered bay of foam-flecked green water and towering spruces,
known as Pirates Cove. On this cold cobble beach, Williams would do the
skinning. Blood dripped on his waders as he pulled the corpses onshore. Then he
lifted each otter’s maw in turn and gave the dead their last drink of water,
following an old Yup’ik custom he learned from an anthropologist’s study. “The
idea is that spending their life in the salt water, they get really thirsty,” he
told me later. “If they know that the hunter will give them their last drink of
water, they’ll give their life to the hunter.” The spirit of the animal,
reincarnated in another body, will visit the hunter again. Williams took a swig
of water himself.
Peter Williams on the hunt for sea otters.Photograph: James Poulson
“I don’t really like to do it,” said Williams – not of the skinning, but of
the plastic gloves he was pulling on to do it – “because of the disconnection.”
But he wasn’t taking any chances: some months earlier he had contracted “seal
finger”, an infection common among people who handle the bones or pelts of
seals. First his left thumb blew up like a balloon; he went on antibiotics for
months; then came the tingling, the burning feet, insomnia, pain in every joint
– a possible autoimmune reaction. Work had become almost impossible, whether
hunting, designing, or sewing. Still, he had little choice but to continue. Deep
in debt, Williams had managed to network, charm, and spend his way into a
foothold during New York fashion week in February. Living well below the poverty
line, he saw it as his last, best shot to get his business off the ground.
Fashion week was less than a month away, and he had a to-do list 37 items
long.
Working fast on the sub-adult, he cut inside the thighs and around the tail,
slit down the arms and around the wrists, then up to the chin. The fur opened up
like a onesie unzipped, revealing ribs racked with perfect purple meat and a
steaming tangle of intestines. Williams produced a larger blade, curved and
medium-sharp, for scraping away the tissue and membrane. Ten minutes later, the
hide peeled off with disturbing ease.
“I like to leave some meat for the birds,” said Williams as he worked on the
backstrap, the tastiest part, pushing chunks of meat into small Ziploc bags.
“Sometimes I make friends with seagulls. I’ve learned to not feed ’em until I’m
nearly done. They get pretty demanding.” He carved out a tooth – it’s how
biologists age them, he said, and hunters are supposed to submit a tooth for
every kill, a grisly way of keeping tabs on the population. In the past you had
to take the skull. He tossed the carcass and innards into the water.
“That blood,” said Williams, euphoric in a patch of bay going Day-Glo by his
feet, “such a beautiful electric red.” A seagull was hovering and crying in the
darkening sky.
“Kind of like heaven,” he said.
* * *
The first time I met Williams, two years ago, it was over plates of seal
curry. I was in Sitka on a summer-long fellowship, and he brought the seal,
which he’d hunted and cooked himself, to share with the fellows. He said what he
always says right off the bat: “Alaska Natives are exempt from the Marine
Mammals Protection Act. We’re allowed to hunt marine mammals for food, clothing,
and to make arts and crafts for sale.”
Williams was a giant, gangly guy with shoulder-length hair and hippie
sideburns. He had a way with women, but cracked off-colour jokes. “Right on,”
was a favourite phrase, but the mellowness melted fast, giving way to a
charismatic intensity. He was “a radical lone-wolf nonconformist”, as he said,
but a friendly one. “I’m this country bumpkin,” he once told me in New York. “I
don’t really know what I’m doing.”
Williams is a hunter-designer-entrepreneur with an unusual ethic. “My
business is not separate from my activism,” he said, “it’s not separate from my
spirituality, it’s not separate from my culture.” His clothing label, Shaman
Furs, is a one-man operation: Williams hunts, skins, fleshes, stretches, sews,
designs, markets and sells. Tanning, the process of treating the hides to make
them wearable and durable, is one of the few things he outsources. He prints and
uses Wi-Fi at the library and takes credit-card orders on his iPhone. Influenced
by Italian design and indigenous art, he designs for simple elegance, confident
that unique materials can speak for themselves.
Williams is aware that his identity and livelihood are based on killing a
beloved and magnificent animal, but he argues frankly for subsistence – the
cultural and economic right of Alaska Natives, which is legally recognised, to
live off the land and the sea. He understands that fur carries a lingering
stigma, particularly for liberal North Americans and Europeans and partly as a
legacy of Peta’s famous 1994 campaign “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur”, which
featured supermodels. But Williams holds that conservation, imposed from the
outside, can look a lot like colonialism. A small-scale, Native-run hunt can be
sustainable and empowering, he tells anyone who will listen – and it is the
thing that saved him.
In and out of therapy since he was eight years old, Williams struggled for
years with drugs and alcohol, depression and antidepressants, a sense of
cultural trauma as an Alaska Native, amplified by a very personal sense of doom.
He was “locked up” in treatment centres, left home at 16, got kicked out of high
school. “I would go from job to job, trying different things,” Williams told me.
“I worked at the local television station, as a janitor, at the tribe,” trying
to make it as an artist. He hit rock bottom, suicidal, among anarchist punks in
Portland, Oregon: “I had to change, or I was going to completely destroy
myself.” He came back to Sitka and taught himself to hunt, but for almost a year
he wouldn’t or couldn’t kill a sea otter. He shot and missed, or couldn’t bring
himself to shoot at all. Six years later, he is deft and thorough as he hunts.
He can manage when the bad feelings come.
Homeward bound from Pirates Cove, Williams revved the engine and got us “on
step”, skipping over the crystal waters of Sitka Sound. The Jenna hit a constant
speed – “Plateauing!” he shouted – and zoomed past stunned-looking ducks.
Humpback whales were breathing up columns, smoke-white above the horizon. Sea
lions, lovely and fierce, swam towards the boat. Retreating glaciers had formed
the landscape: a submerged chain of icy mountains incised with innumerable bays,
channels, straits and many-fingered fjords.
Peter Williams sets off in his ramshackle aluminium
skiff.Photograph: James Poulson
And there were 17m acres, 5,000 islands more of this: the Tongass National
Forest, encompassing almost all of the southeast Alaskan panhandle. Nowhere else
in North America does the natural world feel so vast, wild, and abundant –
during a salmon run, the rivers here can turn dark silver. Barely populated and
mostly roadless, Alaska is three and a half times the size of Texas. Nowhere
else in North America does the natural world feel so vast, wild, and abundant –
during a salmon run, the rivers here can turn dark silver. The modern state
emerged in the 1970s as a strange sort of compromise when oil companies, Alaska
Natives and conservationists fought each other to a standstill, then divided up
the land. Car number plates proclaim it “The Last Frontier”, but the frontier
mythology now comes with a postmodern twist, thanks to the bizarre boom in
Alaskan reality TV. The Deadliest Catch, Yukon Men, Bering Sea Gold – more than
20 shows are currently in production.
A few hours after the hunt, we were in the trailer eating sea otter
backstrap, pan fried and lightly seasoned. “It’s some of the best wild game,”
said Williams, “it’s iron-y,” close to venison. The hides had been salted, the
Jenna dragged up on to Eagle Beach, just out back. We ate the wine-dark meat
with salad and mashed sweet potatoes.
Williams’s trailer is a home, office, design studio, storage unit, and sewing
room – with magnificent views facing out to the hunting grounds. The yard was
strewn with useful stuff: tyres, oyster shells, sand beds for a garden, the
skulls of sea otters. Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew was
on the record player and spent shell casings filled a former jar of artichoke
hearts. There was fur all over – clippings and scraps, along with some of
Williams’s products: scarves, hats, pillows, blankets, earmuffs, six
fur-encircled mirrors in a row on the wall. Hanging across from them was a 5ft
stalk of baleen, primevally beautiful, and two Chagall-like scenes of hunting
and addiction, which Williams painted himself. Three freezers – Alaskan freezers
are not like other freezers – stood stocked with otter, seal, salmon, halibut,
black muktuk (the blubbery skin of a bowhead whale) and elk meat sent
by an uncle in Utah.
Despite the legal restrictions and ambiguities around marine mammal meat, not
to mention the lack of market, Williams speaks lyrically about the culinary and
dietary possibilities: “I’d love to open up a little taco truck with seal
barbecue, or make sea otter sausage. I would love to make omega-3 fatty acid
pills out of seal blubber. They do that in Canada.” He cooks seal jalapeño stew,
praises seal heart jerky, and calls seal liver “the best of all livers”, though
personally he’s cutting back – high cholesterol.
Peter Williams making clothes from sea otter
skin.Photograph: James Poulson
* * *
The next morning, we were in church. Yesterday’s bloodied hunter was spiffy
in a dark blue dress shirt and the “Peter Williams vest”, a waistcoat he
designed himself: half otter and half seal on plaid. Williams values Christian
community, but comes from a bloodline of Yup’ik shamans (“Good shamans, I’ve
been told. Apparently there were good shamans and bad shamans – good and bad in
the sense of intent and forces, not necessarily skill quality”). He describes
his hunting as a “spiritual act of harvest”, and before going out, he always
“smudges” with a shrub called Hudson’s Bay tea, passing the sweet-smelling smoke
over his body as he prays for safety and for quick kills. He keeps these kinds
of details quiet at church: “To talk about trees communicating to me, to talk
about salmon speaking to me, I have other forums that I do that in.”
Williams is used to straddling worlds, the traditional role of the shaman. He
grew up doubly displaced: an Alaska Native among white folks, a Yup’ik among
Tlingits (the indigenous people of Sitka). His mother’s family was Pennsylvania
German, missionaries and teachers who settled in Sitka. His father was from the
Yup’ik village of Akiak in western Alaska – a land of subarctic tundra,
thousands of thaw lakes, a thousand miles northwest of Sitka. His parents met
while his mother was teaching in the village. Linguistically, culturally and
physically distinct from most other Alaska Natives, the Yup’ik have adapted to
life near the Arctic, beyond the tree line. They are part of a broader Eskimo
family of cultures – extending from the eastern edge of Siberia across Alaska,
along Canada’s remote northern coast and all the way to Greenland.
When he was just six weeks old, Williams came to Sitka with his mother. His
father, who suffered from alcoholism, stayed behind in Akiak. “When my father
died, I think I was eight,” Williams told me. “He drowned in an alcohol-related
boating accident. Four of his other brothers died in alcohol-related deaths. Out
of eight years I don’t remember a phone call, I don’t remember a letter, but I
also wondered if he did contact and I just wasn’t aware of it.”
Until recently, Williams had only been to Akiak once; he still doesn’t speak
much Yup’ik, the first language of Akiak and arguably the most resilient
indigenous language in the US. “I thought you were a kass’aq [white
person],” his father’s mother once told him, not recognising him when he spoke
English to her on the phone. “Some people call it decimation, not assimilation,”
said Williams. “A lot of it [Yup’ik culture] I have to rediscover.”
After Williams started hunting, he learned the ways in which the history of
North America is bound up with furs and hides. From the 1600s to the end of the
19th century, millions of fur-bearing animals were killed across the continent,
as indigenous subsistence patterns gave way to industrial-scale slaughter. Fur
trappers and traders, often exploiting Native American labour, played “a major
role in the settlement and evolution of the colonies”, writes historian Eric Jay
Dolin. At a massive, crumbling mansion in upstate New York, Williams once met an
Astor descendant – the first American fortune was made with fur.
The European rage for beaver hats propelled settlement and trade from the
Atlantic to the Rockies, but the history of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest was
shaped by the mania for sea otter pelts in late imperial China. Feeding that
insatiable market, Russian colonisation followed the otter, whose traditional
habitat centred on the vast peninsula of Alaska with its 34,000 miles of tidal
shoreline.
In 1804, Sitka became the capital of Russian America, and 18,000 pelts were
going to Canton annually. Forced labour fed the slaughter. Under Russian
coercion, Native hunters went out in skin-covered kayaks, armed with bone- or
shell-tipped spears and later with guns. By 1911, barely a thousand sea otters
were left, and a single pelt commanded £200 on the London fur market. That was
the year that an international ban on fur seal hunting, signed by the US, UK,
Russia, and Japan, also protected sea otters, almost as an afterthought.
In 1972, US Congress passed the Marine Mammals Protection Act, adding a
further layer of conservation and regulation – but also carving out an exemption
for Alaska Natives with a “blood quantum” of a quarter or more, who “dwell” near
the coast and hunt for subsistence. “Now we have a theoretical monopoly over
this valuable resource, which brought us so much pain and oppression,” Williams
told me, “I see the potential for healing and empowerment.”
Today there may be as many as 100,000 sea otters worldwide, most of them in
Alaska. Furriers and fashionistas have forgotten they even exist, while
conservationists pride themselves on a textbook success. The southern sea otter
of California is considered endangered and the otter population in south-west
Alaska is officially “threatened”, but the stock around Sitka is by all accounts
healthy – far too healthy, say many locals.
An Alaska state senator recently went so far as to propose a bounty on sea
otters, citing the threat to commercial shellfish beds. By eating up all the
shellfish, the otters harm not only commercial shellfish divers, but themselves
as well – creatures that consume more than 25% of their body weight in food,
every day, tend to run through resources quickly. “Go get ’em” is what many
locals tell Williams.
“Sea otters are becoming almost kind of a despised species,”
hunter-conservationist Richard Nelson told me in Sitka. “They’re devastating
their own habitat. From that standpoint, Peter Williams isn’t just out there
trying to make a living, he’s out there carrying on an important ecological
service.” But Nelson adds that an expanding market for the fur could necessitate
“management regulations” – like a season, or a bag limit – ideally run by Alaska
Natives in consultation with biologists, “so we don’t have a replay of the
extermination”. Sea otter earrings by Peter Williams.Photograph: Tim Knox
“All of us live by taking other life,” he added, “you can’t opt out of it and
stay alive.” As Williams put it: “Disconnection from the environment led to
exploitation and taking too much. The other extreme is you can’t touch it, but
that continues the disconnection instead of continuing the relationship,
continuing the harvest, and adapting.”
Last year, up to a hundred regular hunters across Alaska, people like
Williams, harvested a record 2,100 sea otters – double what it was a few years
earlier, according to a government-run tagging and monitoring program. (Williams
took 38, “a minimal year for me”.) While few make a year-round living, sea otter
and seal are becoming an important source of supplementary income for many more.
With economic opportunities scarce in the villages, Native leaders are quietly
promoting the hunt and the craft with skin-sewing classes, a state-funded
“sustainable arts project”. The hunt happens quietly – many hunters are aware
that sea otters have their adoring fans, especially “down south” in the lower
48. Williams, too, knew what he was up against.
* * *
A few days after the hunt, visibly unwell, Williams got around to fleshing,
the final stage before sending the sea otter’s hide off for tanning. He clipped
a hide to a board and blasted it with the jet of a power washer, removing what
was left of muscle and fat, taking care not to tear a hole in the fur. Globs of
flesh ran off, staining rocks a calamine pink. Once 80lb or more, the animal was
now down to less than a tenth of that. Williams laid the hide on a rock. After a
few weeks at the tannery – drying, hydrating, pickling, rinsing, oiling,
tumbling, and brushing – it would be a fur: something Williams could work with,
something people will wear.
Back in the trailer, he had started stretching hides that were already
tanned. There were enough for fashion week, he decided. Now it was time to
create pieces, non-stop. Williams sat on the floor, tracing with tailor’s chalk
on a swatch of fabric – the flaps for a trapper hat to be lined with fur, for a
model to wear in New York. Once he cuts the fabric with a craft knife, a
seamstress may help with the fabric sewing, but any fur sewing Williams does
himself, by hand.
For all the rugged individualism, the frontier is highly regulated, utterly
rationalised. A mouthful of committees, commissions, and councils “divvy up
resources” and ensure that the voices of “resource users” get heard, as one
local fisherman told me. The sea otter hunt isn’t “managed” like others – no
season, no bag limit – but legal ambiguity and periodic enforcement sweeps have
left Williams with understandable paranoia. “I’ve got to make the thing from
start to finish,” he told me. Unless sold to another Alaska Native, pelts must
be “significantly altered” by the hunter, in a traditional manner consistent
with a cottage industry. Williams’s friend and mentor, Wade “Marty” Martin, once
sold 10 sea otter hides to a non-Native, unwittingly he says, and a federal
judge hit him with two years’ probation and a $1,000 fine. A Native craftsman in
Sitka was once hauled in for putting a “non-traditional” zipper on a sea otter
parka and two “non-traditional” metal snaps on a hat – he only won the right to
do it after a seven-year court battle.
There is a tension, too, between the economic pressures of modern American
life and traditional Alaskan culture. Many cash-poor Alaskans subsist on what
they can hunt and fish, but there is also a traditional cultural ideal around
self-sufficiency, autonomy, connection with nature, and a gift economy that
extends to family, friends and neighbours. Capitalism is “a slave system, a
prison system”, Williams once told me. “I’m not an anarchist,” he said another
time. “I’m just a Yup’ik.” But he had just bought his plane ticket to New York,
a capital of capitalism. He was staking the last of his savings on fur and on
fashion.
On my last day in Sitka, we walked around a museum where Williams goes for
inspiration and sometimes gives demonstrations. There were shaman masks and
bentwood boxes a century old, looking pristine and timeless; there were snow
goggles eerily reminiscent of Google Glass, and a giant sealskin suit fit for an
astronaut.
“I go to craft fairs,” said Williams, “and I hear about elders not even
covering their table fees, let alone their time and money to get there.” Young
people cannot devote themselves to traditions that will not make them a living,
he added, and he hoped to change that by going to New York. He pointed to
dazzling totem poles at the centre of the room. The art of totem pole carving
traditionally went about as far north as Sitka, and the creation of such ornate
and specialised indigenous art is often attributed to the abundance of the
Northwest Coast fisheries. Meanwhile, life was harder, and the art more spare,
among Williams’s people further north. “They had time to develop,” said Williams
of the totem pole carvers, “they had resources to develop.”
* * *
When Williams brought his furs to New York in the middle of February, it was
the coldest day in 20 years – much colder than Sitka – and the rivers were
turning to ice. He had finished sewing the vests on the plane and assembled 100
pairs of seal earrings for gift bags while crashing on a friend’s couch in
Bushwick, binge-watching House of Cards. Overnight lows hit -5C, -25C with the
windchill. The weather brought to mind an era when fur was a status symbol, when
seven city blocks of New York’s Garment District were wall-to-wall fur.
Six years before, Williams had shown up at a glitzy fur expo in New York,
wandering the halls in baggy cargo pants, hair down to his shoulders (“I saw
people wearing jewellery worth more than I’ve made in my entire life”). On
periodic trips to the city since then, he would wear his furs, crash on couches,
talk his way into parties, make friends on the subway. With no contacts in the
world of east-coast fur, he cold-called his way into a relationship with a
century-old fur firm, where he picked up tips about sizing, grading,
pattern-cutting, and the kind of garments to make. “I felt like I was in an
episode of Project Runaway,” he said.
Now, uptown at fashion week’s Lincoln Center headquarters, fur scarves and
stoles were trending, and fur trim – much of it fake – seemed to be everywhere.
The Nepalese-American designer Prabal Gurung was debuting a fur coat inspired by
Native American motifs. A 19-month-old North West was rocking a crystal fox fur
coat, at an estimated cost of $3,500. Fur is “making one hell of a comeback”,
gushed the website Fashionista. “We’d be hard pressed to name a major show so
far this season that hasn’t showed an excess of fur.”
Downtown, Williams was setting up at the TechStyle Lounge, a one-day
“anti-trade show” organised by a fashion PR firm. Buying the “Insider Package”
had got him into a loft space with views over the snow-covered city, plus
signage, invitations, VIP gift bags, “logo inclusion”, and other symbols of
professionalism. There was no runway, but he had been connected to the three
young models – attractive and approachable, but not preternatural – who were now
sporting his vests, cuffs, and headbands. They greeted the invited bloggers,
“influencers”, one-percenters and assorted hangers-on who were taking a break
from the runways to discover something a little different. Williams was paying
for the chance to get noticed.
The TechStyle Lounge was not a venue for selling, but Williams had brought
eight different products, ranging from a $60 seal headband ($300 for otter) to
three different vests, priced around $1,500 each. “I’m hoping that I’ll find
some retailers,” he said, “people that want to buy some stuff at wholesale,” or
even a boutique that would carry a few items. His price point might be high for
Etsy, the online marketplace, or for the craft-fair scene, but it was normal by
high-end fashion standards. It was all about finding his customer, maybe a
certain kind of well-heeled hipster, who was looking for stories and sources and
something unique.
Williams stood by the entrance with his models and products, next to a big
photo of himself with an unapologetic caption: “I Hunt the Otters I Sew With.”
About a dozen other “brands” had informal stations around the room, each one
straining to seem successful and established. There was organic lip balm
(“handcrafted in a private kitchen in Harlem, six ingredients or less”), and
“hot yoga towels that attach to your mat, like a fitted sheet”. The morning
“influencer fitness event” had featured ayurvedic lollipops; now people were
hydrating with raw organic maple water and “couture tea”. Peter Williams models his clothes in New
York.Photograph: Tim Knox
Completing the new-age new-economy carnival were the minor celebrities, said
to be circulating: Billie Carroll of the reality TV show Made in Chelsea: NYC;
18-year-old IndyCar driver Luca Forgeois; author, instructor, and fitness coach
Nadia Murdock. It was all about the connections and exposure, but nobody famous
was hashtagging Shaman Furs on Instagram, or tweeting out mentions. As the
afternoon wore on, Williams seemed increasingly anguished: “It’s really funny to
have this premium product where just about everybody who sees it loves it, but
not being able to sell it yet,” he said. “I have it, people like it, it’s
unique, it’s special. How do we start selling it?”
“I don’t think anyone has walked by without touching something,” said
Anthony, one of the models. A lifestyle coach from Atlanta posed for a few
pictures, trailed by a publicist in gold shoes and army pants. “That’s sexual,”
said the publicist as he ran his fingers over the fur. “That’s like in front of
the fireplace.” A blogger awarded Shaman Furs her “close-to-nature authenticity
prize”, but disclosed an unease: “What would the folks from Peta have to say?”
The global fur trade may be booming – $40bn a year, according to the
International Fur Federation, 85% of it farmed, rather than hunted in the wild –
but the anti-fur campaigns still resonate.
When I called Williams the next morning, he tried to sound hopeful: “People
seemed to be pretty interested and supportive of what I do, but I wasn’t aware
of any connections made. I wasn’t aware of talking to any boutiques or any
retailers.” He was on his way to the airport, and I wondered if I would see him
in the city again. “I’m trying to stay positive,” he said. “I’m trying to pull
back and relax and open up, and that’s usually when the magic happens.” But if
something didn’t give, Williams said, he might have to work as a luggage handler
for an airline, or train to be a drug counsellor. Hunting and designing would
become an occasional thing.
When we talked again a few days later, Williams was back in Alaska, sounding
a little better. He and his girlfriend Carol had missed their connecting flight,
but the airline put them up in a swanky hotel room, and they watched a dog show
– “boyfriend points,” said Williams, laughing. He was looking forward to
gardening, he said, and anxious about the application he had just submitted to
Fashion Week Brooklyn, which happens in April. The first day back, he was out in
his hunting grounds. Ross Perlin is the author of Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn
Little in the Brave New Economy. He writes on labour, language, and
culture.
Follow the Long Read on Twitter: @gdnlongread
On Wednesday, Uber delivered puppies on-demand. For $30, office workers in
10 cities across the US could use the company’s app to order 15 minutes of
cuddle time with the adoptable dogs.
The company, which is usually geared toward taxi and limousine service world
domination, brought the pups to offices in partnership with the Animal Planet
television channel.
The deliveries were part of a promotion for the station’s upcoming Puppy Bowl
XI special. The show airs annually as an alternative to the NFL’s Super Bowl,
which kicks off in Glendale, Arizona, this Sunday. Puppy Bowl cameras follow the
tiny canines as they play in a field-themed pen packed with football toys.
Puppies were delivered between 11am and 3pm in Phoenix, Baltimore, Cleveland,
Dallas, Washington, Denver, Indianapolis, Los Angeles and Seattle.
The dogs delivered were from local animal shelters. Notably, some were
dressed for the occasion in tutus and jerseys. In the past, Uber has delivered
kittens, Halloween costumers, food and flu shots.
Tian Tian the giant panda at Edinburgh zoo. She is believed to be pregnant
after artificial insemination. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
Following a sustained frenzy of pregnancy speculation on a scale that perhaps
only the Duchess of Cambridge can relate to, Scotland's celebrated female giant
panda, Tian Tian, is likely to give birth at the end of this month, Edinburgh
zoo has announced.
The 10-year-old panda underwent artificial insemination in April after she
and her male counterpart loaned to the zoo from China, Yang Guang, stubbornly
declined to proceed as nature intended.
Iain Valentine, the grandly titled director of giant pandas for the Royal
Zoological Society of Scotland, said: "The latest scientific data suggests Tian
Tian the giant panda is now pregnant and that implantation has taken place,
therefore she may give birth at the end of the month. This is all very new and
complex science and we still have a bit of time to go yet, as like last year,
the late loss of a cub remains entirely possible."
The artificial insemination took place on 13 April, he said, but it was still
not certain Tian Tian was pregnant. "Our team of internal and external experts
have continued to analyse specific hormone and protein levels on a daily basis
in Tian Tian's urine. In simplistic terms, when this information is studied
retrospectively this allows us to predict if she is pregnant, if she is likely
to carry to full term and when she is likely to give birth.
"It is very likely that we will not know 100% if Tian Tian is pregnant until
she gives birth, however very new scientific tests will give us a strong
indication. They are just too new to be definitive.
"Monitoring a female giant panda's behaviour – for example if she is sleeping
a lot, eating more or spending time in her cubbing den – is not an indicator of
if she is pregnant or otherwise, as giant pandas experience pseudo pregnancies
and she will show pregnant-type behaviour whether she is pregnant or not."
Two Chinese panda experts were due to visit Edinburgh later this month to
assist the zoo, he said.
Tian Tian became pregnant last year via artificial insemination, but the
pregnancy failed late in the term, something common for giant pandas both in
zoos and in the wild.
Tian Tian and Yang Guang are the first giant pandas to live in the UK for 17
years. They arrived on loan from China in December 2011 and will remain at
Edinburgh zoo for a decade. Their presence prompted the now popular taunt among
Scottish independence supporters that there are currently more giant pandas in
Scotland than Conservative MPs.
Giant pandas, most common in the bamboo forests of a few states in central
and southern China, most notably Sichuan, are famously reluctant to mate, both
in the wild and in captivity, and even if they do subsequent pregnancies often
fail. The species is extremely rare, mainly as a result of habitat loss, but
numbers have been boosted by the success of captive breeding programmes at
China's pre-eminent giant panda research centre in Chengdu, the capital of
Sichuan.
