Another Close EnCOWnter at the Zoo

Nothing like a little cow-luring to brighten one's day.

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For Valentine's Day...

...Some atrocious puns just for you!

I like lion around with you.



You belong to my hart.



I udderly adore you.



Llama give you a kiss.



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Ask Not for Whom the Cow-Bell Tolls...

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The Default Sex

The problem with scientists is that they—like most people—tend to be products of their time. This is why females, from the perspective of development biology, have been referred to as the “default sex” even up through my time in college (1998-2002, if you’re wondering). Apart from the social/cultural assumptions involved—which I’ll get back to, don’t worry—the reasoning behind this is in itself flawed, but it’s based on the fact that, in humans, even if your sex chromosomes are XY rather than XX (that is, “male” rather than “female”), if you don’t have “male” gonads and/or the hormones secreted by them, your secondary sex characteristics (genitalia, aspects of physical appearance) will generally develop as female. Of course, you still won’t have female primary sex characteristics (ovaries); also, the development of any primary sex characteristics, male or female, is an “active” process that requires various signaling cascades and genes being turned on and so forth: there’s no automatic female- or male-hood.

So to call any sex the “default” is the result of conflation as well as sexism. (See, I told you I’d get back to the assumptions. Because you just know that, if male secondary characteristics developed in the absence of “female” hormones, males wouldn’t have been called the “default.” You certainly don’t see any Judeo-Christian religious leaders referring to Adam as the “default” parent-of-the-race, now do you?)

On the positive side, the terminology is changing, and one of the most common (and I think best) undergrad textbooks reflects this not just in its section on sexual development but in an appendix piece on the inherent and long-standing chauvinism of this concept. —Which is great, but is all mere preface to the real subject of my post, which is the existence of a different “default sex” in our cultural mentality.

You see, the problem with people is that they—like most scientists—tend to be products of their time. This is why they usually refer to every single animal they see as “he,” unless—and sometimes even though—the animal in question is nursing or giving birth.

You may remember that I’ve complained about this before. Unfortunately, even my vast and compelling powers of persuasion have not been enough to cause a social revolution in language use—and so, since the behavior continues, I continue to complain about it.

Why do so at this moment, you may ask? A couple of reasons: one is that, this past weekend at the zoo, I heard even more visitors than usual blithely mis-pronoun-ing a host of animals; the other is that I’ve been rereading Seeing Voices, a book by Oliver Sacks about Sign language and language acquisition in deaf and hearing people. Sacks doesn’t address the misuse of male pronouns (in fact, even he—a hero!—consistently refers to a hypothetical child as “he”)—but he does, very briefly, touch on the idea of language being the means of not just conveying but shaping our reality. So when we indelibly gender the world, unnecessarily and inaccurately—when every animal, every unidentified “I” in a story, every author without a first name, is assumed to be male—we are structuring for ourselves a reality that is pervaded by maleness, in which all visible actors are male.

[Is this elephant male? It is holding
something pink...hmm...]

What then have we told ourselves, taught ourselves, about who among us is capable, or even present? What does a little girl visiting the zoo learn when her parents tell her that every animal she sees is a he? What does a little boy learn?

The process through which embryos develop involves tremendous, almost magical, changes—proliferation and reorganization and specification—in order to create tissues and organs and structures from a simple spherical collection of cells, a ball of potential. It’s a process that’s at once remarkably resilient and incredibly fragile. The signals an embryo receives—the cues, the interactions, the feedback, the impulses—determine how, and how well, it forms. In other words, the environment in which it develops has enduring consequences. I wonder, after all the textbooks change, how much longer it will take our language to rid itself of a default sex.

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One Good Shot: More Close EnCOWnters

There’s nothing like engaging in a little cow-luring at the zoo…

Stay tuned for tomorrow or Monday’s announcement of Beasts in a Populous City’s caption contest!

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One Good Shot: More Close Encownters

“That’s the worst joke I’ve ever heard!”

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Close Encownters

This morning I once again practiced my time-honored cow-luring technique (see my earlier post for details), and with great success!

Well, I admit I only had mild success with the alpacas.


—However, I was able to, first, engage the interest of the nearest cow, who eyed me, then approached:


And then approached a lot:


(I still have a little bit of cud smeared on the side of my camera.)

Then, the more-distant cow—the one with whom I’d had a previous bonding moment (and later an icky moment)—noticed me,


And came by to take a look:


Great days, I tell you. Great days.

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Frailty, Thy Name is Bessy

[yes, this is a different cow]

My next cow photo shoot did not turn out so well. Not only was neither cow interested in coming up to me when I crouched down, but my weekend model udderly spurned me—literally: she kept her rear end facing the fence, where a woman with a toddler and I were standing.

Not only that, but suddenly, the cow let out a jet, a super-powered stream, of urine that shot over the fence towards us and cascaded to the ground like a mini Niagara—we barely escaped being struck or splattered by it.

And there I was, betrayed. I will never trust cows again.

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Not-So-Wild-Life: Sunday Morning at the “Kids’ Farm”

Yesterday I took an early-morning walk in the zoo (made less early by having gained an hour—hooray for the end of that abomination, Daylight Savings Time!). It was pretty chilly, and not too many animals were out, although the river otters gave me (as per usual) some dark looks, one of the pandas crunched away at a big stalk of bamboo, and the flamingos were feeding and honking up a storm (more about them on Flamingo Friday). My camera was running out of battery power, and—as I said—it was kind of cold, so I decided to head back out. But on my way back from the outdoor bird exhibits, I had a couple of animal encounters that impressed me quite a bit.

The first happened as I was walking along the boardwalk that leads between the bird-house ponds back to the Asia Trail; these ponds are almost always full of mallards, and yesterday was no exception. As I walked, one female mallard was either startled or needed a very immediate change of place, because she burst out of the water in the pond to my left and flew over the boardwalk into the pond to my right. She passed two feet in front of me, flying at head-height, and I saw the water droplets falling from her, heard the rush of air and saw her wing muscles working furiously as she beat them. I know that ducks, once they’re airborne, can travel along without too much exertion, but this was just after take-off, and the intensity of her effort was incredible: her neck was stretched—straining—forward, her wings pounded, even the sunlight that struck her feathers appeared to pulse from her with the energy and power of her passage. The instant she was in front of me seemed to last a half a minute at least, although I’m sure that in reality in was only a second or two—and then she was past, and splashing into the water of the other pond.

The second occurred as I was on my way out of the zoo and decided to stop by the Kids’ Farm (“petting zoo” suggests you can actually reach the animals to pet them). I rarely stop there, but I was on my way home, my camera was almost out of juice, and I was feelingly pleasantly without obligations, even to myself, so I wandered along and leaned against the rail, basking in the sun and watching the alpacas and cows graze and drink from a barrel of water.

One of the cows ended up grazing near the fence, and I decided I'd try out something that I’d read about in a book by Temple Grandin: apparently cows feel less threatened, and more inquisitive, about people if they (the people) are lower than the cows. In fact, if you want cows in a field or pasture to approach you, it’s a good idea to lie down; this will make them more likely to stroll over and investigate you. I wasn’t in the field with the cow, so lying down seemed silly, but I did squat down so that I was peering up through the lowest of the slats in the fence. To my amazement, the cow stopped her grazing for a while and came over to investigate, thrusting her giant, stippled nose through the fence to snuffle me (though I tried to keep a centimeter or two of space between us; being smeared with cow-snot is not my idea of a good cross-species interaction). Although the suddenness of her approach, along with the angle and proximity, didn’t allow me much time to focus, I was able to take a couple of pictures that, I believe, appropriately capture the encounter:



After a little while the cow determined that I was neither edible nor about to feed her and went back to browsing. I left the zoo wearing a goofy grin, my mind’s eye still full of cow-nose. It was great.

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