Friday, June 6, 2014

Interview with Off The Leash cartoonist Rupert Fawcett

Off the Leash Cartoonist Rupert Fawcett.
Thank goodness its Friday folks (at least for anyone who has the weekend off). This year my boss gave me a copy of "Off The Leash: The Secret Life of Dogs" by none other than a Mr Rupert Fawcett. Of course I had to ask him if we are related - especially when a number of his cartoons featured a dog called Phil. What are the odds? Well, it turns out we aren't related, but Rupert F did admire the photo of Phil I sent him, and was polite enough to answer some probing questions for SAT even if he isn't my second cousin twice removed.

Hi Rupert. You've been a professional cartoonist since 1989, but your dog cartoons have recently recieved a huge response on Facebook. Why do you think everyone has been so taken with Off the Leash?

I went art school many years ago wanting to be a 'serious painter' but kept drawing cartoons and always enjoyed them. During and after art school I had a few wild years in which I started a punk band and drank too much, then in 1985 I cleaned up my act, got back onto the straight and narrow and a short time later created Fred which was my first big success as a cartoonist.

I think people identify with the situations and behaviour I portray in my cartoons and recognise their own lives. They frequently say "You must have cameras in my house!"

Your dog cartoons have some recurring themes: dogs using their wits and charm to take over the entire bed, sofa-stealing stunts and sleeping positions. What is your source of inspiration?

Funnily enough I don't have a dog at the moment but I grew up with them and remember all the behaviours really well and with great affection.

Humans often talk down to dogs or project their feelings onto them. Do you think they humour us sometimes?

It's impossible to know, but I like to think so. I like to think they are sophisticated enough to humour us, and yes we as humans project all sorts of stuff onto our pets. That's all part of the human/dog relationship which I have always found rich in humour.

Do you think there's ever a mismatch between what makes dogs happy and what we think makes them happy?

There may be and in some cases definitely is, but I think most real dog lovers instinctively know what makes their dogs happy and unhappy and anyone who doesn't shouldn't have a pet.

How could humans improve their relationships with dogs?

The important thing is to love your dog, but also to respect it's individuality and it's natural instincts and needs. We don't 'own' our dogs in my view, we simply care for them during their lifetime and it is a privilege to do so. If we care for them well we are rewarded with love, affection and loyalty.

Thank you Rupert. And in breaking news, a poor veterinarian mistook a zookeeper wearing a gorilla suit for an actual gorilla and tranquilised him. To compound matters further, the zookeeper had an allergic reaction to the drug. However he has made a full recovery. Moral of story: wear a safety vest when dressed in a halfway-decent animal costume (although I can appreciate this would have somewhat detracted from the desired look). Second moral of story: some poor person is always having a worse day at work than you are.

Thursday, June 5, 2014

SAT giveaway competition: David Attenborough's Micro Monsters

Meeting a micromonster.

Everyone loves a little competition and this week we have a fine DVD to giveaway: Sir David Attenborough's Micro Monsters - a three part series about the real rulers of the world. If you fancy a nerdy night in viewing spectacular bugs in their insect armony filmed using pioneering macroscopic techniques, this is your DVD. 

Episode 1 is about conflict and predation - learn about how insects, scorpions and spiders attack (you will be impressed).

Episode 2 covers courtship and reproduction - need I say more. Definitely worthy viewing.

Episode 3 is about family and colony. Some bugs have moved beyond the urge to fight and established colonies which rival human megacities.



Thanks to ABC DVD, SAT has a DVD (RRP $29.95) to give away to one lucky reader. It runs for 150 breathtaking minutes - the perfect length of time to curl up on the couch/bean bag/air mattress with your favourite companion.

All you have to do is email us a photo of you and your non-human companion(s) watching TV. The best entry (judged by myself and Phil, and the judge's decision is final) will be mailed this awesome DVD. The rest of you will have to go and buy it when it is officially released on July 9! 

This giveaway is open to Australian residents only and we will take entries til midnight on June 30. That gives you plenty of time to get comfy and snap happy.

Winners will be announced in the second week of July (hint, we are planning on being inundated with entries).

By entering you give us permission to run your entry on SAT. Please try to send a JPEG around 1-2MB in size, that will help. 

Chester watches TV with Tanya. The happiness is palpable.

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Midweek mental health paws

Chillaxing with friends: it isn't just fun, its healthy.
It has been a tough week for the Australian veterinary profession with tragic news about the loss of two colleagues in two separate incidents. This information is really hard to process but it is a good reminder just how important support is and that there is no shame in reaching out for it. 

What is really upsetting is that last week's AVA conference had a strong emphasis on mental health and wellbeing. This is such a big issue for the profession, there are some excellent resources for veterinarians vet students, and no one is judged at all for using them.

For urgent help anyone can call Lifeline on 13 11 14 (24 hours).
AVA members can call the AVA Telephone Counselling Service (24 hours) on 1800 337 068.

The AVA has a great resource page for veterinarians here. The UK's VetLife also offers support and has a great website here.

University's have student counselling services which are almost invariably free, and set up to take walk-in appointments for emergencies.

Please take care of yourselves and each other and don't feel bad about reaching out. More often than not the person you reach out to has been there - or somewhere similar - before, and may have the clarity of distance that being in the midst of a storm can rob one of.
Moisie plays with a ribbon. Does she need a reason?

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Biodiversity: why does it even matter?

Most people want to preserve the so-called flagship species. But different people have different motivations.

For those of you with an interest in the animal studies field, The Human Animal Research Network and the Sydney Environment Institute are hosting a seminar on exploring biodiversity as cultural value.

I know not all SAT readers have a humanities leaning, so what does the above mean?

We all know about biodiversity and the threats to it (habitat destruction, climate change, rising sea levels etc). But how much does it really matter? Really? In the words of the seminar organisers, "There may be significant unforeseen consequences to the loss of some organisms (as became evident with the recent collapse of the South Asian vulture population), but the loss of others may have no apparent consequences for humans at all. It seems abundantly clear that human cultures rely on pollinators such as bees, but would they really miss the pygmy three-toed sloth?"

Personally one of my dreams is to go and meet some sloths, so I definitely would. But the point is, is extinction bad in itself? To whom does it matter? Why? 

It turns out that we often answer these questions on the basis of concealed usefulness. i.e. biodiversity is valuable to us because we need access to that genetic bank of hitherto unexplored resources that could be useful in medicine or industry. Maybe the three-toed sloth secretes sweat containing an antimicrobial substance. 

For others, justification for all this effort to maintain biodiversity is about emotional attachment to some species - or the natural world generally. The problem is this can be seen as a bleeding-heart, airy-fairy, sentimental approach, easily dismissed by economic or science-driven types. But is it any less valid?

A lot of us are sold on biodiversity, but may not be able to pinpoint exactly why.

The seminar will explore the values underpinning current public discussions about biodiversity.

For more info about this seminar please visit here.


Abstracts.
John Miller, “From Natural Capital to Dark Tourism: Biodiversity Loss and the Aesthetics of Conservation.”
The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio saw the signing of the Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD), the culmination of many years’ work initiated by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) to safeguard ‘biological diversity for the benefit of present and future generations’. It was, according to its own publicity at any rate, a landmark in international conservation, a ‘dramatic step forward’ in the midst of the planet’s sixth great extinction event. 
Although a significant aspect of the CBD’s agenda was ‘the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the use of genetic resources’, it has stimulated some sharp criticism on ideological grounds, most trenchantly in Vandana Shiva’s work. For Shiva, the CBD appears ‘primarily as an initiative of the North to “globalise” the central management and ownership of biological diversity’ in order to advance the portfolios of large corporations. International biodiversity legislation becomes part of what Shiva describes as ‘the ultimate colonization of life itself’, a penetration of economics into Earth’s biological fabric. 
Since the 1990s, the deepening entrenchment of a rhetoric of ‘natural capital’ has continued to emphasise the subsumption of species conservation into a neo-liberal logic; even environmental aesthetics are commodified into a ‘cultural service’. Public policy on biodiversity loss seems firmly installed in crude cost/benefit analyses that are paradoxically both widely discredited and progressively more influential.
Starting with debates around the CBD’s neo-colonial politics, this paper explores the relationship between the rise of ‘natural capital’ and the emergence of an increasingly prominent literary subgenre, the conservation travel narrative. 
Particularly, it examines Douglas Adams and Mark Cawardine’s poignant Last Chance to See (1990) in which the authors recount ‘an unforgettable journey across the world in search of exotic, endangered creatures’. Evidently, Adams and Cawardine are writing at some remove from a market-driven approach to conservation: we should preserve endangered species, Cawardine writes, because the world would be a ‘poorer, darker, lonelier place without them’. 
At the same time, however, Last Chance to See is structured around the necessity of rendering endangered animals available to a western audience. As such, it may be understood in an intimate relationship with eco-tourism, another expression of the economic logic of conservation that Shiva critiques. Given the framing ecological context of the collapse in global biodiversity, Last Chance to See (and ecotourism more broadly) may be read as an instance of ‘dark tourism’, travels associated particularly with catastrophe, violence or trauma. Consequently, neo-liberal biodiversity conservation insists not just on the commodification of ‘life itself’, but also on the commodification of death.  

Robert McKay, “Invaluable Elephants”
This paper begins from the perhaps obvious premise that all value is valuation: it is necessarily always contingent and distributed rather than inherent. A less apparent implication of this is that all such valuations necessarily both produce and ward off alternative redistributions of value. 
These claims hold true whether value is understood in a political-economic register or in an ethical register, to refer to moral worth. Such points warrant statement in the context of discussions of biodiversity and animal death for this principal reason. The discourse of species (as Cary Wolfe terms it)—the rhetorical, political, and institutional mobilization of the imputed fact of human-animal difference—consistently plays a crucial role in the presentation of contingent and tactical (anthropocentric) valuations as necessary, absolute values in the consideration of humans’ lethal encounters with nonhumans, of the kind that is omnipresent in conservation/”biodiversity management”. 
The coding of speciesist political choice as necessity is a good instance of the crucial mechanism that Wolfe, following Derrida, names a ‘sacrificial logic’. It is not just that affective possibilities that exceed anthropocentric/humanist accounting—such as a specific animal’s interest in its own or another specific animal’s ontogeny, or a cross-species value such as an ideal of animal friendship—are devalued. Rather, ironically imagined as unimaginable, they are ruled out of court, sacrificed in a presentation of the field of value as necessarily human and (thus) anthropocentric.
This paper will develop Wolfe’s position by suggesting that a crucial purpose of contemporary ecological and pro-animal critique is to address head-on the contingency of the anthropocentric valuations by exploring specific historical instances of the sacrificial logic at work. 
This can offer a genealogical account of both a) the reproduction of the discourse of species and its material effects on living beings and b) such redistributions of value as are both produced and foreclosed by anthropocentric processes of valuation. 
I also want to suggest that cultural texts offer particular leverage for this critical operation, because they have the power both to embody the social processes of value-making and distribution of their time and resist that process in subtle ways. The historical intimacy of conservation with the practices and legacies of hunting hints at the complex intertwining of difficult and competing values in relation to animal life that underpins environmentalist thought as it develops in the 20th Century. 
The issues become even more overdetermined when the animal at stake is under a number of different hunting threats and rationales for conservation, each of them very differently politicized, as was the case with elephants in the decolonization period after the Second World War. This moment, therefore, presents an important case study in the political and moral distribution of value I have been discussing. In this paper, then, I will discuss Romain Gary’s The Roots of Heaven (1956/1958) Peter Viertel’s White Hunter, Black Heart (1953) in relation to political discourses of the time. I will explore the competing political, moral and aesthetic valuations of elephants at play, and whether these texts might portray animals, in all the senses the word implies, as invaluable.


Monday, June 2, 2014

AVA conference wrap up: exams for fun, a veterinary orchestra and animal-themed footwear

"We promise it won't hurt" - the absolutely delightful, not-scary-at-all invigilators for the Australian Veterinary Boards Council Inc National Veterinary Exam.
During the AVA conference last week I visited the Australian Veterinary Boards Council Inc. booth to sit a voluntary exam. Yep. A voluntary exam. Not something you’d think would be hugely entertaining but if you have an opportunity to sit their exams I highly recommend it. I actually enjoyed the experience.

Part of our annual registration fee goes to the AVBC, an organisation which started in the 1980s as an annual meeting of all of the veterinary registration boards. The aim is to determine standards of acceptable veterinary practice and accredit veterinary schools.

In 1999 the profession was required to take responsibility for the National Veterinary Exam – that’s the exam that overseas vets take to ensure that can practice here. This is one of the roles played by the AVBC. And to make sure that is done fairly, they benchmark the questions by testing them on Aussie and New Zealand vets wandering around at conferences.

The AVBC team attend conferences and have a quiet booth where you can volunteer to sit the exam. Unlike most exams, you’re allowed to do it in your own time, you can bring a cup of tea and eat, its relaxed and very pleasant. They don’t even record your mark. In fact if you are a bit of a stress head when it comes to exams (who isn’t?) this might be a good exercise in desensitisation. And once you have sat the paper you can compare your answers with the actual answers (hopefully there isn’t too much discrepancy but as a small animal vet I did notice my performance in the large animal questions wasn’t exactly stellar, although I did recall more than I thought I would).

For more information check out their website here.

Another highlight was the debut performance of the Australian Veterinary Orchestra. The AVO, as it is known, is the brainchild of veterinarian Mike Woodham who owns Sugarland Veterinary Clinic.

Here’s an excerpt from an article I wrote about it in the Australian Veterinary Journal.

 “My father died suddenly in 2005 at age 55, which was a tremendous shock and hit me rather hard,” Dr Woodham said.
“As a professional I didn’t realise that I suffered from some of the usual stress and anxiety associated with busy practice. Adding the burden of the loss of a loved one made me recognise that perhaps I was not coping as well as I thought.”
As a scientist and diagnostician, Dr Woodham decided more research was in order. He sought professional advice and counselling, and learned how to recognise and cope with stress and anxiety. He’d played music from an early age, and his counsellor suggested that taking it up again might help. 
“After some music therapy I can certainly endorse the benefits of music to veterinary mental health,” he said. 
Dr Woodham plays seven instruments, ranging from piano to tuba.
“I learned bass guitar last year and am starting on acoustic guitar this year.”
The idea for the AVO came to Dr Woodham as he listened to a jazz ensemble at the 2013 AVA Conference, and thought that the veterinary profession would have enough musical talent to gather a music group.
“I have a friend in the Australian Doctor’s Orchestra who told me of their acclaim, and I thought ‘surely we are better than the doctors’!”
And they were pretty darn good, earning a well-deserved standing ovation at the end. And a few tears along the way.

Dr Woodham plays his tuba.
Joined by the Hills Symphony Orchestra (not to be confused with Hill’s Pet Nutrition, although the latter did sponsor the evening), nine veterinarians displayed their hither-to hidden talents, such as the ability to rock the oboe or wield a bassoon. It was like discovering someone you work with is really in the X-men.

All funds went towards the Veterinary Benevolent Fund, and gee it was nice to see members of the profession come together to support each other. Mental health issues affect everyone of course, but veterinarians have a particularly high suicide rate and often feel very isolated in practice. The job poses some unique stressors, so bringing awareness to the issue and promoting wellness, not just crisis management, is so important.


Finally, conferences are one place where vets get to wear things we can’t really wear at work for health & safety reasons. Like amazing shoes. I ran into a delegate from Victoria who was wearing the most amazing pair of rabbit heels. Maybe not something you’d slip on to hang the washing on the line or play squash, but we struck by serious shoe envy.

Gloria said her shoes were from Irregular Choice. I checked their site and they also make kitten heels.