Stories
Over my lifetime, I have had interesting relationships with animals as well as with people. Here are some of the stories.
On Rice Peak the animals were my companions. I made friends with the ground squirrels and the mother brought me her babies to meet me. I captured a Rock Pika and kept it for a while in the Alidade before letting it go. It ran away and then came back to touch me and thank me for letting him go. I followed the path of the eagle around the mountain by the calls of the pikas, and I listened to the terrifying cries of a deer or elk being eaten alive by the pack of wolves.
I had a special relationship with the cats of my dissertation. One of them, a Siamese, used to walk freely and proudly along side of me down the hall of the hospital on the way to the lab. With his little umbrella-like cap covering his brain electrodes, he was an amusing sight! Another, called the monster, was recommended to me by the animal care service knowing that I worked with aggression. We have an aggressive cat for you, they told me. He was huge, like a small dog, and not very friendly. Usually he tolerated the experiments, but one day when I attached the stimulus wires to the electrodes on his head, he wheeled quickly and seized my wrist completely in his big mouth of sharp teeth. He held me firmly but did not bite. Instead, he looked up at me and I understood him clearly to say, "You are not going to stimulate me any more." I didn't. And yet another cat escaped from me carrying the first electrode that worked properly as I describe with my dissertation.
Cats fighting for my dissertation
When it came time to extract all of the brains, and I had to kill my cats, I sat on the floor with them in any empty room and let them climb over me. And I promised them, I would not work on cats ever again. Actually, I did in Italy, but after than I changed to rats. For a funny cat story, see the Moscow circus in "living in the Soviet Union."
In Italy I was known as the "cat man," because I was the one who tamed the cats. And when the year was up, I went to meet the true "cat man", Paul Leyhausen, in Germany.
At first, working with rats at Wesleyan did not get me involved with them on a "personal" level. But 0ver time, however, the rats, too, became my friends. Despite the fact that I bought or bred homozygous strains where all the animals were genetically identical, I found that some of them had personalities.
There was the rat called Rocky who was so amusing that the students told their friends to come to lab to see him. After copulating with a female, Rocky would stand on his hind legs and beat his chest with his forelegs like a boxer showing off. And then there was the rat, shown here, who was photographed by the official photographer of the Middletown newspaper for an article he was writing. The rat was to be shown sitting on a box of hair dye, illustrating how rats had been used to test of the dyes were cancer-causing. After a few flash photos, the rat started to pose, as if it were her chance to become a Hollywood star. The photographer was so amused that he took literally scores of photos while the rat stood on her hind legs, did pirouettes and literally danced for him!
Rat posing for newspaper photographer
On another level, animals once saved my life. Against advice, I went swimming outside the coral barrier in Kenya where the sea was shark-invested. A pod of dolphins surrounded me, singing in their peculiar voices, and accompanied me back into the safety zone within the barrier.
With Kiki, we had a special relationship with our "children" - the golden retriever Marcel and the black angora Charlie, not to mention our canary and goldfish, and we took special pleasure swimming with the tropical fish when we vacationed on the atolls near Tahiti. Later came the goats with Armand, Johnny after the death of Marcel, and Finette after the death of Charlie.
 |
Stages
1986-1992
Seville and Peoples Peace Appeal
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme