Pursuing praxis

On my way into the office here in the bio building, I shared the elevator with two people I’d never seen before. From their conversation it looked like one was the manager, and the other was a new hire who would be working with one or more colonies of mice used for research.

I started paying attention when she said, "When was the last time you washed your house from floor to ceiling, including the walls? Probably never. We do it every week for the mice. And we change their bedding every day. Can you imagine washing your sheets every day? That’s what we do for the mice."

He said, "Um, I like sleep on the floor and stuff. I don’t have a bed."

She said, "Yeah, that’s just it. The mice get taken better care of than most people. We have lots of inspectors and regulatory agencies through here all the time making sure that the mice live better than humans." 

I’m sure that was some consolation for the guy: the clear implication intended was that the government cares more about mice than people. The sigh-worthy truth is that these regulations are actually a compromise between fully pro-human policies and fully pro-animal policies. A fully pro-human policy wouldn’t entertain the notion of governmental micromanagement of all animal-based research, much less the idea of animal rights. A fully pro-animal policy wouldn’t entertain the notion of any animal being used for research ever, human welfare be damned. The present compromise is therefore neither fully pro-human nor fully pro-animal. The only ultimate beneficiaries of the compromise are the government, which swells with power and unchallenged self-importance as it exerts more force in more human endeavors, and the mice, generations of which (through sheer dint of their existence) by government decree get fully funded, permanent residence in the Mouse Hilton*.

The sad thing is, had the new employee not been accompanied by this woman with a name badge around her neck, I would have been suspicious of him in my building.  His demographic doesn’t frequent summer school classes, much less the research floors of my building, and is the most frequent perpetrator of violent crime on campus. By a very large margin. Not knowing him at all, it’s hard to speculate past stereotypes, although I would like to think he is an exception to it, appearances notwithstanding. Either way, I’m glad to see he’s getting a job. Good for him. Who knows, maybe he’ll take an interest in science. Somehow, it’s hard to imagine science doing anything but good things for a person, regardless of their age, background, or level of education.

*The inverse is not necessarily true, and constitutes poor logic, i.e. that without government oversight, some or all research animals will be poorly taken care of or even abused.

Perusing books late at night, I came across the quote page behind the table of contents in Bob Carroll’s Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution. The quote is too good to pass up. I’ve never completely "gotten" poetry, but the kinds I like tend to rhyme and have a nifty beat and cool message. This one’s a little light on message, but hey, it has to do with fossils. Here ya go:

Last night in the museum’s hall
The fossils gathered for a ball.
There were no drums or saxophones,
But just the clatter of their bones,
A rolling, rattling carefree circus
Of mammoth polkas and mazurkas.
Pterodactyls and brontosauruses
Sang ghostly prehistoric choruses.
Amid the mastodonic wassail
I caught the eye of one small fossil.
Cheer up, sad world, he said, and winked -
It’s kind of fun to be extinct.

–Ogden Nash, "Carnival of the Animals"

The musuem and department are celebrating Darwin Day this weekend and early next week. Darwin was born on February 12th (as was Abraham Lincoln). Conveniently, he published Origin of the Species when he was 50, so we get to celebrate nice even numbers of his birthday and the publication of the Origin simultaneously. I am sure this will be ground into your memory come next year, the 200th anniversary of Darwin birth, and the 150th anniversary of the book.

Anyway, someone decided to organize a photo contest for the festivities this year. For once I had something artsy and sciencey and I dreamt up something Darwiny to say about it. Here’s the pic and my blurb about it:

This is a photo of a male mandrill (Mandrillus sphinx) from the San Francisco Zoo, taken in November 2007. Mandrills exhibit strong sexual dimorphism, and the bright facial coloration and larger body size in males is thought to be the result of sexual selection. Darwin originated the concept of sexual selection, and in his 1871 book he uses many examples of sexual dimorphism in primates to build his case.

But when it comes to evolution, many people are still as cognitively trapped as this mandrill is by his cage, comfortable and natural though it might seem. Some people look at primates and think that shared ancestry is a slur on mankind. But no fact changes an ever-present identity, and wonderment is not diluted when extended to facts at all scales of time and space. As Darwin so famously concluded, "There is grandeur in this view of life, . . . ; from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

Regular readers of my blog (at least during my trip to Africa) know that my favorite African bird (so far) is the lilac breasted roller. I got some ok shots of them when I was in Namibia, but nothing that quite satisfied me. Field guides don’t usually capture a bird except anatomically and quasi-ecologically. I tripped across this photo of an LBR and it’s perfect. I love it. Maybe you can see why they’re my favorite.

He has some more which are great. Seriously, it’s hard to get more colorful without being garish. I totally want one.

Roller1
Roller2
Roller3

I’m reading biographies of George Gaylord Simpson - his autobiography, Concession to the Improbable: An unconventional autobiography, and Leo LaPorte’s George Gaylord Simpson: Evolutionist and Paleontologist. I don’t know whether I stopped reading La Porte’s book because I wanted to read Simpson in his own words first, or if I just happened to order and receive Simpson’s autobiography ’round about that time.

To cut to the chase - I have no pithy summations, crusading opining or otherwise synthesized thought on the subject yet. I find Simpson fascinating and extremely rewarding to read and read about. In the various mentions of Simpson that I had come across in my previous readings, he was frequently described as irascible, though brilliant, and left at that. I read tonight that Simpson far preferred the written word - on both the giving and receiving ends - to the spoken word, given or received. There is the occasional tetchiness, but it is a tiny minority of the time. That said, I find it funnier when the anecdote is crabby, so there is a selection bias in the quotes copied below. Enjoy.

I was reminded of my short vacation in Egypt, and the few days in Cairo. While I saw less wildlife in the streets than described by Simpson on his (first) round-the-world trip in 1951, I think it’s only apt to cite that long-used, much-discussed maxim (which dates to at least Aristotle’s time): natura non facit saltus [nature makes no leaps]. My experience of streets in Cairo was similar in the feeling, if not in all the particulars. He wrote (pg. 149):

The streets of Cairo are dirty, noisy, and dangerous. As I wrote at the time, "The streets and roads are jammed with pedestrians, camels, donkeys, water buffaloes [Argh! I’m 50 years too late.], bullock-carts and horse-carts, jeeps, Coca Cola trucks, baby carriages, bicycles and motorcycles, crawling infants, dogs, cats, and in short everything imaginable that can move or be dragged with the possible exception of reindeer sledges, and it would not really surprise me to see one of those. There seems to be a slight statistical probability that cars will pass to the right if this is convenient, but otherwise no traffic rules seem to be applied."

For some reason, the following quote (at the very end) is my favorite so far (pg. 157):

It [Life of the Past, a "fairly short and not unduly technical book on general paleontology"] had some good reviews, and one bad one by a British zoologist who objected violently to the illustrations, which I had drawn myself during that winter at [his seasonal home in] Los Pinavetes [New Mexico]. I admit that my drawings are crude and inartistic, but they have a certain amateur freedom that some people find attractive or at least amusing. What did annoy me a bit was that my critic had also illustrated some of his publications and that his drawings were just as crude and inartistic as mine, and moreover that he had the poor taste to die before I could point that out to him. 

Simpson made several expeditions to South America over several decades. At the start of his last field expedition there, the woman in charge of the guesthouse where he and his team stayed for some time went to some length to counter the stereotypes about the town, Cruzeiro do Sul, "effectively the last outpost of civilization in that direction [in Brazil]" (pg. 166). About her he wrote (pg. 167):

A nice woman, talkative and a booster for her home town: "Those people down in Manaus think we are savages up here, nothing but forest and jaguars. Why! Jaguars rarely come into town. This is the healthiest place in Brazil. Almost no tuberculosis and only a few dozen lepers. The malaria is not bad this year. This is real white man’s country. It takes a little planning to get food, is all."

For those of you who don’t know, Simpson spent most of his life married to Anne Roe, a psychologist and for a time also a professor at Harvard (both Simpson and Roe joined Harvard at the same time, and left at the same time, as far as I know). They co-authored a couple of books together, both very good: Quantitative Zoology (1939) and Behavior and Evolution (1958). Simpson recounts the origin of the latter book, and indeed the field of study it spawned (pg. 177):

Another book in the 1950s resulted from a different and delightfully intimate form of collaboration. The idea came to Anne and me sometime in 1953. We remember the incident clearly but are not sure of the date. It was probably a Sunday because she and I were lying late in bed one morning talking about the universe and other things. Psychology is in the main a study of behavior, but up to that time most psychologists took observed behavior as given and paid little or no attention to the fact that it must have originated at some time in the evolutionary history of the species being studied, then usually rats and humans. Such evolutionary concepts as were currently in psychology struck me as generally naive, outdated, or simply wrong. On the other hand, evolutionists were studying mostly morphology, genetics, or to some extent ecology. Some of them did recognize that behavior is also relevant to evolution, but their concepts of behavioral studies in psychology struck Anne as generally naive, outdated, or simply wrong. We decided to something about this, got out of bed, and set about doing so.

[. . .]

That was a seminal work. It strongly influenced the direction of studies both of behavior and of evolution, as attested not only by those who had attended the conferences [organized to promote these kinds of studies] but also many of their colleagues and students. . . .  

The lesson of all this is that an effective method for getting really interdisciplinary studies under way is for students of different disciplines to wake up in bed together.

I will stop here with the quotes tonight. As you can see, I can’t even copy other people’s words briefly.  

Scientists for Better PCR music video. Please support the cause.  

Time for a little list-making of wierd biology stuff off YouTube. Isn’t the internet great?

What to do with a decomposing stranded whale? Here’s a dynamite solution. Sheesh.

Sometimes testosterone actually makes the males of a species sedate and pretty, like in this Nyala bull display.Very cool. Rather bizarre.

More usually, testosterone makes male animals retarded. Sometimes beautiful, but usually quite silly. Like the birds of paradise. I do wish giggling evolved more rapidly.  

Sadly, nyala cows are a bit more streamlined than the bulls, and considerably lighter, meaning these beautiful animals are preyed on by reptiles. Here you can see a nyala cow - well, the back end of her, anyway, as a python does what pythons do best - eat entirely too much at once, but very, very slowly, in a very creepy, handless fashion.

And, in case you missed one of last year’s most popular videos, watch this buffalo vs. lion vs. croc. vs. lion vs. buffalo action. Yeah it’s long - 10 minutes or so - and it just gets better and better. Beware the herbivores!

Check out these amazing photographs, from the Smithsonian Institutions’ Nature’s Best.

Index of 2007 winners
Index of 2006 winners
Flash of 2005 winners
Flash of 2004 winners

Among the 2007 winners, my favorites are the zebra, bison, mandarin duck, Fly Geyser, goliath grouper, and snowy egrets.

Among the 2006 winners (there are a lot more), I like the giraffe on a purple sunset, osprey, giant kelp, orchid cactus, pink cyclamen, Alaskan brown bear, horseshoe crabs, snow and ice at sunset, lightning strike, and ladybug.

And the idiot award goes to the photographer of this alligator.

Only two more posts on zoo animals - from San Francisco, anyway. Here are the remaining non-bovid ungulates, i.e. rhinos and zebras (perissodactyls, not artiodactyls), and muntjacs (related to deer), and deer (non-bovid ruminants).

So what’s a muntjac, apart from being a deer relative? Well, there are actually 11 species of muntjacs (which I just learned from ultimateungulate.com), and I don’t know which one this guy is. But, they’ve got long, hair-covered pedicles from which the antlers grow, and in at least one species the females have remnant pedicles on their foreheads. Pretty cool. They’re small, cute, and at least some of the species’ males grow protruding canines. That’s right, saber-toothed deer - about a half a meter tall. In cervids (deer, etc.) the size of male canines scales inversely with the size of the antlers, give or take. That is, the bigger the head gear, the smaller the fangs, which is why you don’t see them on North American deer, elk, reindeer, etc.

Anyway, here’s the muntjac. He busied himself patrolling the perimeter, and sniffing and licking the females’ genitalia. The Discovery Channel could do a purely factual, X-rated documentary on the sexual habits of ruminants, I’m telling you.

In’he cute??

On to reticulated giraffes. They’re the rare kind, I’m pretty sure. They have less white between their spots, and the spots are more square-ish, and less like puzzle pieces. It’s a love-hate thing with giraffes and me. I’m interested in their heads. The rest of the time I wish more bovids were as prevalent and popular as giraffes. At least they have personality. Unlike lions.

I take it back. I like giraffes - baby giraffes. Check out how short his neck is, and how stocky the body is, compared to adults. Amazing. Intriguing. Compelling. Ontogenetic.

Here’s an adult for comparison.

On to non-artiodactyls. Living perissodactyls include horses, rhinos (four species, did you know that?) and tapirs. Tape-whats? Tapirs. Pig-like horse-relatives with elongated semi-elephant like noses. I trust that clears up what tapirs are. lol.

This is an Indian rhino, notable for its bizarre folds of textured skin. His horn got sawed off (it’s just fingernail-like, no bone inside like horns or antlers), but I think he’s still pretty compelling.

Interestingly, the first time I became aware of this type of rhino was in Art History class in college - Albrecht Durer did an engraving of a rhino in 1515, and I thought he must have got his info wrong, because I didn’t think rhinos looked like that. I mean, we’re talking 1515, the tail end of DaVinci’s career. I don’t remember where Durer was from, but I’m guessing northern Europe, and that he spent time in Italy, like many artists of his day. Durer gets the last laugh I guess. 

[update 1/12/08: Yup, the top two tiger photos are of the siberian tiger, Tatiana, who killed a kid and was subsequently shot and killed herself.] 

Back in November I posted pics from the SF Zoo. I’d only gotten to the ruminants, but had a whole non-ruminant-but-still-cool critter feature planned. But then I got busy and it never happened.

In the meantime, as you probably heard in the news a lot, one of the SF Zoo tigers got out a killed a kid on Christmas day, and mauled two other people besides.

Oi. Well, I’m not sure which tiger it was - it was a female, but I can’t sex a tiger without it laying on its back - but I got tiger pics, so it’s probably one of these. If I can find a confirmed online photo of the now-dead tiger, I’ll compare stripes and see if it’s the same one as below. But, at any rate, this was the enclosure that didn’t do its job properly. This is the tiger that was pacing a lot.

(Actually that was him yawning, but it’s a nice scary pic nonetheless).  

I thought this lioness had a bizarrely stout head. I’m not sure why. I don’t know lions that well, but she’s not very gracile, as lions go. Maybe it’s one of those maneless male lions. But, I seriously doubt they’d put two males in a single cage, so probably not.  

So, I finally made it to the SF Zoo this weekend. My motivation was entirely bovidly, of course. They have greater kudu, which I had great trouble seeing well in the field, and Derby’s elands, which nowadays reside in countries I don’t care to visit (Sudan, DRC, and other central and west African gems).

This is a Derby’s eland bull. A.k.a. a giant eland, mainly because of its horns, which are a more stretched-out twist compared to common elands. Some authors say Derbies can be heavier than common eland, but it’s a really close call. This bull is pretty lightly built, although his horns are very nice. Derbies also tend to be a richer red-brown throughout life, and retain more stripes on the body (in male common elands, the stripes fade with maturity and age). The white spots low on the cheek are also key distinguishers of Derbies, and a dewlap that goes from chin to shoulder, but not down between the front legs. This guy doesn’t have much in the way of bangs; male elands often get that, and then they rub their bangs in the mud, in urine and feces and anything else that’s stinky. Either it attracts the ladies or repells competitors. Sometimes the males get grass or bushes wrapped around their horns, and end up with a bovid ‘fro.

There were also greater kudus, including one mellow bull and a few cows. The cows were rather variable in appearance, and I suspected some variation in age, although none was overtly juvenile. One was just fuzzier, had weaker stripes, and a bit of a pot belly. They do have very pretty eyes though.

In other bovid action, there were a few blackbuck ewes and one ram, though he looked a bit youngish, not be a very blackish buck. Blackbucks are from India. They’re they only living member of their genus (Antilope) and are the namesake of the whole subfamily Antilopinae. They’re rather bizarrely squat, for a gazelle (all their nearest African relatives are much narrower side to side), and don’t come up much higher than your hip. I don’t know as much about them, since I’m up to my eyeballs trying to get a handle on some 75 African bovids. There are a lot of them ranched in Texas though.

Next up, the scimitar-horned oryx. Normally I’d say these are desert animals, but they are apparently flexible enough to subsist at the zoo, which is about a stone’s throw from the Pacific Ocean. Males and females are virtually indistinguishable (unless you aren’t shy about peering for genitals, like I do). They’re not very tall, but they’re not midgets either. What can I say, the giraffe was in my way.

Oryxes are in the tribe Hippotragini, which in Greek means horse-goats, or something very close. Here you can see their horsey-ness: long tails, fairly even back, bit of a mane, and then kind of a goat-ish head with horns. They are my second-favorite tribe to tragelaphines.

The only other bovid I found was the yellow-backed duiker (rhymes with biker). Duikers are the most numerous African tribe, and most all are forest-dwellers. Since I haven’t been to the very forested parts of Africa, I’ve only seen the versatile common/bush/gray duiker. The yellow-backed duiker is among the largest, up to 80kg. Most are in the 10-20kg range. Proportionately, duikers are the brainiest bovids. They’re also the only ones that are habitually omnivorous; some actually hunt and eat birds! The smallest ones look kind of rabbity or rodenty, but that’s true of most ruminants under 20kg. The bigger duikers look a bit like pigs to me - arched backs, a wide wet nose, and a proclivity to eat some strange stuff.

Finally, to round out the ruminant branch of the mammalian family tree at the SF Zoo, we have the muntjac. It’s in the deer family (Cervidae), hence the antlers on its head. But, it’s quite small - probably not much taller than my knee - and it has very long, furry pedicles, from which the antlers grow annually.

This guy was on patrol most of the time, stalking the perimeter or stalking the does while they napped or got up to pee. Most ruminants males are obsessed with females’ urine; it’s how they tell if the female is in estrus or not, and so whether they get to have sex or not. It’s a pretty simple calculus, just not very appetizing to our tastes.

And I didn’t even get outside artiodactyla! Next up, the more mundane orders of carnivorans, primates and rodents, plus one very cool rhino.  

Revival of an old post, and a book I put down almost a year ago.

—- 

I’ve been learning a bit about Newton recently. Not having as natural a facility with physics as biology, and so having less immediate motivation to study it, I know very little about Newton compared to, say, Lamarck, Cuvier, Geoffroy St. Hillaire, Darwin, Owen, and other dons of biology. Nonetheless, because major advances in physics generally preceded those in biology, the methodologies and ruminations of great physicists (and the philosophic and cultural contributions of people influenced by these scientists) necessarily provide the relevant backdrop to advances in biological theory.

But really this is a post of cool quotes and tidbits in yet another riff on the awesomeness of reason, and people who live by reason, and heroes throughout the ages. I never get tired of those kinds of stories.  

From Andrew Bernstein’s The Capitalist Manifesto (pg. 42-46, 2005):

"[T]he essence of the Enlightenment, and of its influence on the new nation [America], was its uncompromising commitment to man’s faculty of reason. For this, the 19th century philosophes owed much to Newton. It is not merely the birth of the principle of individual rights during this period that is important. As will be seen, capitalism rests fundamentally upon the reverence for the reasoning mind that is the hallmark of Enlightenment thought and culture."

Said Newton (quoted from Bernstein, pg. 42): "If the character of so intangible a thing as light could be discovered by playing with a prism, if, by looking through a telescope and doing a sum in mathematics, the force which held the planets could be identified with the force that made an apple fall to the ground, there seemed to be no end to what might be definitely known about the universe."

Voltaire called Newton the "greatest man who ever lived," and wrote "If true greatness consists of having been endowed by heaven with powerful genius, and of using it to enlighten both oneself and others, then a man like M. Newton (we scarcely find one like him in ten centuries) is truly the great man, and those politicians and conquerors…are generally nothing but celebrated villains."

Among my favorites: Alexander Pope the poet wrot,

Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night.
God said, Let Newton be!
and All was Light.

Edmond Halley (of Halley’s Comet fame, and who played a vital role in publishing Newton’s Principia) said "It is not lawful for mortals to approach divinity nearer than this." 

And Thomas Jefferson hung Newton’s portrait in his study (as did many intellectuals of the day), along with ones of Sir Francis Bacon (perhaps the first philosopher of science - a man of applied reason) and John Locke (political philosopher).  

On an early giant in my own field, Bernstein writes: "The spirit and achievements of the Enlightenment are perhaps best represented in the work of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788). The ough of nobel birth and made Comte de Buffon by Louis XV, his life was devoted to science, not to politics. ‘The thirty-six volumtes of Buffon’s Histoire Natuelle  (1749-1785), which appeared during his lifetime, supplemented by eight volumes published (1788-1804) after his death, covered every subject in nuatre from man and birds to cetaceans, fishes and minerals." . . . Though a practicing Catholic, he sought natural causes for the world of nature he dearly loved. Buffon was tactful in dealing with the Church, but nevertheless claimed that the earth was vastly older than the religious belief of his day allowed and argued for a constantly-and-slowly-changing earth. Nature, he claimed, was not a finished product, but underwent caseleess processes of change, an idea that helped pave the way for the theory of evolution in the next century.

"Though fluent in Latin, Buffon wrote his empirical, encyclopedic work in French, seeking successfully to bring knowledge of natural facts and of scientific method to the literate common man. "For the first time in publishing history, books of popular science were best sellers." In the spirit of the age, Buffon not only immensely advanced the cause of scientific inquiry, he did so with the explicit conviction that knowledge was power, that it was not reserved for the aristocratic elite, but that it would bring practical benefit to mankind."

It occured to me that although I have blathered on about the awesomeness of bongos, I haven’t actually stopped to talk much about their biology, or even immodestly post a slew of my own pics of them. Well, time to fix that. Bring on the natural history!

The bongo is - big suprise - a spiral-horned antelope in the tribe Tragelaphini. That means they are closely related to things like bushbucks, elands, kudus, nyalas, and the like. Most phylogenies show bongos as closest to bushbuck (Gatesy et al., 1997; Matthee and Robinson, 1999) or sitatunga (Hassanin and Douzery, 1999) with bushbuck next most closely related. The strict consensus family tree compiled by Hernandez Fernandez and Vrba (2005) shows a three-way tie for next-of-kin between bongos, bushbucks, and sitatungas. 

What’s wierd about that is that these three species are best united by being forest-dwellers. After that they don’t seem to have much in common. Bushbuck males weigh 40-75kg; sitatunga males weight about 115kg; bongo males weigh about 300kg (Stuart and Stuart, 2000). Bushbuck are pretty wide-ranging in their habitats so long as its forest of one kind or another. Sitatungas are swamp-adapted, meaning they hang out in or near water pretty much all the time (they’ll comfortably submerge up to their nostrils to quietly flee an uncomfortable scene). Bongos range from lowland rainforests to montane tropical forests and high moorlands, and not much in between. In fact, there are two subspecies of bongos; the western one is the lowland rainforest variety, and the eastern one (very endangered) lives in mountain forests in East Africa. Presently it’s thought to be restricted to the Aberdare Mountains in Kenya, where park rangers see evidence of a bongo about once a year. Very shy, and very very rare. Also a preferred menu item for lions, I’m told.

Of primary interest to me, though, is the fact that bongo females (or more probably their ancestors) have evolved female horns. In fact, bongo females are more similar to bongo males than any other tragelaphine antelope besides the elands. And they evolved it totally independently. Way cool.

Plus they’re just plain strikingly colored, which makes them popular with tourists and scientists alike. Their facial markings make them look a little cross, which I think is cute, especially in the young ones. Without further ado, here are my pics, taken at the Mt. Kenya Wildlife Conservancy Animal Orphanage, outside Nanyuki, Kenya.  

I didn’t see any males there, but here are some good pics online:
http://www.brightszoo.com/images/BongoBoy_Large.JPG
http://www.foundalis.com/bio/zoo/bongo.jpg
http://dinets.travel.ru/bongo.jpg

References 

Gatesy, J., Amato, G., Vrba, E.S., Schaller, G. and DeSalle, R. 1997. A cladistic analysis of mitochondrial ribosomal DNA from the Bovidae. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. 7:303-319.

Hassanin, A. and Douzery, J.J. 1999. The tribal radiation of the family Bovidae (Artiodactyla) and the evolution of the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. 13:227-243. 

Hernandez Fernandez, M., and Vrba, E.S. 2005. A complete estimate of the phylogenetic relationships in Ruminantia: a dated species-level supertree of the extant ruminants. Biological Reviews 80:269-302.

Stuart, C. and Stuart, T. 2000. Field Guide to the Larger Mammals of Africa. Struik Publishers.  

These days, not too many people know what a horse nut I used to be. I dabbled in just about anything that didn’t require a carraige. My most serious interests were dressage, jumping, combined training, and horse judging. I tried to explain dressage to someone unfamiliar with it, and rather than struggle on verbally with the aid of locomotory gestures. (Heaven help you if you have to act out ‘dressage’ for charades). What I should have done was look it up on YouTube. Which is what I did last night, after about a 10 year hiatus from all things dressage.

So what is it? It’s kind of like figure skating for horses, minus the ice and skates and froofy costumes. If you’re curious, here are probably two of the best horse and rider combos in the world today.

The gray horse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKQgTiqhPbw
The dark horse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPJGEzI3aIc

These clips are from the World Equestrian Games 2006, in the freestyle. Freestyle means they get to compose their own pattern to execute specified moves, and they get to ride to music also of their choosing. I actually like the gray horse better overall, and the commentators occasionally lapsed into silence just to watch, she was that spectacular. But the dark horse was technically and artistically perfect, pretty much.

Maybe it’s relevant to mention the gray horse is female. I’ve been asked if all the best horses are male. Maybe more male than female, but this horse rocks my world.

To give you an idea of scoring: it’s out of 100 points, judged by upwards of 5 judges at this level. Scoring in the 50’s is like C performance (decent but in need of improvement), 60s are solid B-B+ performances to be proud of, 70’s are A+ performances to celebrate. The dark horse, w/ Dutch rider Anky Van Grunsven won by a 5 point margin with 86 points. God couldn’t perform that well, even if he had four legs and a beautiful woman on his back.

Terminology:
Piaffe: trot in place, pick the feet up high
Passage (rhymes with massage): prance slowly forward in a trot, hesitating mid-stride
Canter pirouette: canter in a circle, keeping the hind legs as close to the same spot as possible
Half-pass: trot or canter diagonally across the arena while keeping the horse pointed forward and bent in the direction of travel.