The Nature Podcast in Second Life parties are going well, but last week’s was a bit sad because of the bad news in the show: Lonesome George is probably not going to be a father.
I wrote about this a few months ago and now it seems that the eggs are probably infertile.
Anyone who missed the Podcast in SL can listen to it any time on the website or on iTunes. Listening to it with other people is much more fun, though, so hope to see you there this week, Thursday, 11am PST/SLT, at the Rooftop Cafe.
It’s unfortunate. We anthropomorphise unfortunateness into ‘sad’ because he looks (to us) so morose. But we might wonder whether George himself actually gives a damn (if tortoises can).
But I’m being flippant – it is bad news.
Very true, Lee – especially poor basis as all tortoises look “sad”, along with almost all other animals who have mouths which don’t naturally curve upwards.
I read a book about this once, Animals in Translation, by Dr Temple Grandin. She’s written a series of books about her own autism and how that led her into her career as (IIRC) an animal behaviour specialist of some kind. To be honest, I don’t remember the details clearly, but she was employed by a series of farms, zoos, etc to work out why the animals weren’t behaving as the humans wanted them to. Her theory goes that animals and autistic people see some parts of the world in the same way, and she was therefore in a unique position to see beyond anthropomorphising guesswork and actually identify the animal’s “problem”. There was an example about some cows which were refusing to go for milking all of a sudden, and it turned out a fence had been repainted a shinier colour which was distressing them – a minute distinction that her autistic brain could see immediately. Or something like that. Have forgotten the details, and I certainly didn’t agree with it all at the time, but it was interesting.