FERN’s Friday Feed: What goats would do for a cigarette
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The saga of the Judas goat
Ambrook Research
“In the American meat processing plants of yesteryear, sheep destined for dinner plates didn’t follow humans to their final destinations. Instead, they trailed behind aptly named Judas goats, trained to ‘betray’ other livestock by leading them to slaughter,” writes Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton. “In a move meant to keep the sheep docile, the plant’s live-in Judas goat would receive training to routinely lead the flocks to their fates like a four-legged pied piper, stepping aside after completing the job — and often earning a reward of a cigarette to munch. The natural instinct of sheep makes them prone to follow a leader, even to their demise.With a bell around its neck and tobacco in its belly, the goat would carry out its duty, time and time again at the slaughterhouses of the 20th century.”
How modernity made us allergic
Noēma
“Allergies have grown worse over the last few decades,” writes Theresa MacPhail, noting that food allergies have constituted the most “dramatic and visible rise … There are, unsurprisingly, multiple theories about the cause. The hygiene hypothesis is one front-runner, positing that people who are ‘too clean’ develop allergies. Many others think it’s our diet, that changes in the way we grow and prepare food have altered our gut microbiome, fueling allergies. Still others argue that manmade chemicals and plastics we encounter daily are making our immune systems more irritable. What everyone agrees on is that the environment’s influence on our genes, or epigenetics, has played a large role in the rise of allergies, as does the makeup of our nose, gut and skin microbiomes. In the end, it appears, we are at least partially doing this to ourselves. Modern living is likely at the root of the recent rise in allergies.”
Can hydroponic fodder help stem the West’s water woes?
Modern Farmer
“Deep in the mid-winter Maine woods in 1902, a young chemist persuaded six lumberjacks to be his lab rats. For one 18-meal work week, he cataloged every scrap of food the men were about to eat, then he collected all the relevant feces, sealing them in ‘museum jars’ and freezing them in a snowbank cache. With the cooperation of the camp cook, he also assembled and froze samples of every type of food served to the men,” writes Paula Marcoux. “The research was part of an early wave of metabolism and digestion studies that would become foundational to the nascent field of Nutrition Science. But it also provides an incredibly detailed portrait of the diets of lumberjacks at the turn of the century. The study’s subjects were Canadian migrants in their late 20s who were supremely physically fit, spending long days doing ‘severe work under more or less trying conditions,’ as the study’s authors put it.”
The abundance of subsistence
High Country News
“One late-summer day, a day so hot the mosquitoes weren’t flying, my brother and his wife and I traveled nine miles up the Unalakleet River to seine for humpies, or pink salmon,” writes Laureli Ivanoff. “Hundreds of humpies danced in the shallow, cold river, their flapping tails and heads splashing us, the sound of gallons of muscle and slime slapping against the water filling the air. ‘Holllly cooow!’ I can hear my brother Fred Jay saying. His wife, Yanni, and I stood in the ankle-deep water and pulled all the fish we could onto shore, grabbing them by the gills to throw them into our gray plastic fishing tubs … Fred Jay, on the beach, started throwing some back. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked. ‘There’s too many!’ he called, laughing. Yanni and I ignored what he was doing and grabbed all the fish we could, to cut, to dry, to eat throughout the year, dipped in seal oil sprinkled with salt. Our family’s staple food. Our family’s bread and butter.”
What extreme marine heatwaves mean for fisheries
Grist
“Scientists first spotted the Blob in late 2013. The sprawling patch of unusually tepid water in the Gulf of Alaska grew, and grew some more, until it covered an area about the size of the continental United States. Over the course of two years, 1 million seabirds died, kelp forests withered, and sea lion pups got stranded,” writes Max Graham. “It’s not just gulls and sea snails that suffer. Some 100 million Pacific cod, commonly used in fish and chips, vanished in the Gulf of Alaska during the Blob. In British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest, salmon runs — and the fishing industry that depends on them — floundered. The acute warming also triggered a toxic algal bloom that disrupted the West Coast’s lucrative Dungeness crab business. ‘It occurred in this place where we have some of the best-managed fisheries in the world, and it still created all these impacts,’ said Chris Free, a fisheries scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.”