On Dasher….On Dancer….Canada’s Caribou Recovery Strategy November 30, 2011
Posted by cheesefish in : Uncategorized , add a commentI just got an email from the David Suzuki Foundation talking about the new Caribou Recovery Strategy, which doesn’t protect the habitat of these increasingly pressured populations. I went to their auto letter site, which was great, but didn’t have the flavour I like. A smart, political friend of mine once told me that she always started her letters to government officials with appreciation for their service and felt they were better received that way. Sort of links to the empathy idea from Redefining Beauty. So I wrote them a short, new letter which I posted below. Please let the government know in whatever is your own way if you are concerned about this issue! The link above on David’s name will get you to the site that will link to the auto letter…
Photo Credit: Mike Jones, Courtesy Flickr
To Environment Minister Kent and Staff:
Everyone wants to be good at their job and as a voting Canadian, I need the environment minister and his staff to be very good at their job since I cannot enact strong legislation to protect Canada’s natural resources. I have the utmost respect for the minister and his government, for choosing to serve Canadians, but the current Caribou Recovery Strategy that was released is inadequate. All animals need their habitat protected, as was recognized in the Nooksack Dace court case and the strategy does not currently do this. Although culling predators can be one tool in managing prey species populations, it is not the only thing that needs doing in this case. The strategy needs to be based on good science. Please take a stand for the preservation of important resources and modify the Caribou Recovery strategy to be effective and an example of good governance.
Regards,
Dr. Cheesefish
Not Useful at the Moment or the Slowvolution of a Filing System September 14, 2011
Posted by cheesefish in : Uncategorized , 1 comment so far
Yesterday, in a fit of procrastination from some work I knew I would just start and then have to put aside in a most unsatisfying, unfinished manner when other work came sliding back in my door for review, I did some filing. My office is now squeaky, minty-fresh clean and all my files are in order. Goody for me. While I was filing, I came across several hanging folders that I have used and re-used since grad school and one of them was labelled in bold, black, thick Sharpie script as ‘Not Useful at the Moment’. I laughed out loud and put a label on it instead that said ‘FiscalYear_Project Title_Client Name_ProjectComponent’ and I reflected on the slowvolution of systems when one is learning to be a professional in a field.
No one in the science department teaches you how to create a file structure on your hard drive that will make data and drafts findable without resorting to page matching with the hard copy you submitted 2 years later. No one teaches you what words to use and not use in your field notes so that if you get called to be an expert witness you don’t look utterly witless and like you are reaching beyond the scope of your practice and no one, but no one, teaches you how to file. ‘Why would they’, I hear you cry, ‘when you should have professional office managers and assistants to do such things for you?’, but the reality is that the remote or small office is more and more prevalent these days. In these situations, the support network of persons who have learned the arcane art of filing is minimal to non-existent. I remember, perhaps oddly, the use of the ‘NUATM’ file and it made perfect sense at the time. I was writing a paper and had reviewed hundreds of articles. The draft I had created used many of the articles, but several were tangential though potentially interesting depending on the reviewers’ comments that would come back in several months’ time. They went in the clever little hanging folder to wait their turn at being cited. It made sense then, but I still am evolving a system that will be understandable through long periods of time.
How Our Chickens Became Pets August 31, 2010
Posted by cheesefish in : Uncategorized , 3commentsMy husband just asked me if I had a fever when he saw the title of my new blog post. I was not sure what to make of that, so I laughed manically and continued writing. The farming gene is one that seems to be expressing itself all over the Kootenays right now. Accidental farmers, intentional farmers and sideline farmers (aka. hobbyists). We might be a different category even still – the abstracted hobbyist farmer. You might know one of these yourself – they read Barbara Kingsolver and decide virtuously to give up bananas and have raw rhubarb on their corn flakes, but then enthusiasm, time and effort wane and you become the abstracted hobbyist, with a few green tomatoes and a couple eggs to show for hours of hyper vigilant effort earlier on in the growing season. Self sufficiency is in a galaxy far, far away, but the intentions are good.
Last year we decided to get chickens, but we were far too disorganized as the abstracted hobbyists we were to order them ourselves. I was still shaking my head at the reality that I ordered animals that came by Canada Post when the deadline came and went, and my more organized and more sideline farmer friend down the way got her chicks in the mail. She generously offered us two chicks since she graciously demurred that she had ‘too many’ and our flockette was born (flockito if you are of Latin descent). The former owners’ treehouse was converted into a coop and away we went to buy a whole lot of organic feed. The chicks were cute, but they grew like those spongy things you throw in water and they inflate. Soon we had two full sized sex-linked brown hens on our hands. They were wild and we had a few occasions where we chased them around the yard with a small seine net trying to get them into the coop before we realized that they pretty much cower and roost up for the night and let you pick them up as soon as the sun is setting. We decided that chickens are not great pets and celebrated how it would be ‘no problem’ to kill them after their laying days were done since they were so reptilian, pecked at shiny things on our bodies when we were in the coop and virtually guaranteed that if you passed out in the coop with them, they would not, Lassie-like, run for help, but would peck your staring, comatose eyes out with genuine relish.
But something has happened in the last year. We abstracted hobbyists never finished the chicken run under the coop, so we hand carry our named girls out to the pasture and their customized, moveable cage every sunny day. They sometimes flap like possessed archangels and scratch the beejesus out of you, but mostly they are warm and quiet and you give them a couple pets as you drop them at their destination. Sometimes, they follow me like dogs when I walk around the yard and their eggs are the tastiest, yellow-yolks-like-July-buttercups, protein packets you could wish for. I have gotten fond of them. They have become part of the group. I was talking to myself/the chickens when I was carrying them out the other day and realized I had just said ‘I hope I don’t have to kill you because I don’t think I can’. Sigh
Steps to take if you want to turn livestock into pets.
1) Name them. Swear that it won’t matter when you have to chop their heads off, but it will. Oh yes, it will.
2) Carry them around like the chihuahua in Legally Blonde.Do it daily so you have plenty of bonding time.
3) Make their coop in a treehouse that used to be the property of children. That way, every time you climb the ladder to feed them you have childhood flashbacks intermingled with horror film images of dead chickens.
4) Take pictures of them as chicks with your yuppie dog. Thus, creating a ‘pet montage’ photograph that is so adorable it could be one of those nauseating greeting cards with sepia toned children holding blush-orange roses.
5) See how hard they work to effectively give birth daily to an egg that is as delicious as anything you’ve ever eaten. Admire their tenacity and subverted fecundity.
6) Grow fond of them. Game over.