Bestiary

In 1999, Chuck Jones, creator of the Coyote and Road Runner, published his autobiography Chuck Amuck, in which he details, at one point, the nine rules that governed his writing of the cartoons. This miniseries on our relationship with the coyote takes its structure from those rules. Part 1 begins with Jones' first 3 rules. Rule #1: "The Coyote cannot harm the Road Runner except by going, 'Beep beep!'" Our greatest effects on coyotes come from the ways in which we alternately demonize and valorize them. Rule #2: "No outside force can harm the Coyote - only his own ineptitude or the failure of the Acme products." In our efforts to exterminate the coyote, we do as much harm to ourselves and the ecosystems on which we depend as we do to the coyote. And rule #3: "The Coyote could stop anytime - if he were not a fanatic," and so could we.

Season 2 launches November 1. Subscribe now!

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In which we announce our upcoming live episode and read from Mark Twain on the "cayote." Come see us perform live at George Mason University for the Fall for the Book Literary Festival, Saturday, October 14.

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In 1973, a chimpanzee was born and tattooed with the research number 037. Columbia University psycholinguist Herbert Terrace immediately adopted that chimp and placed him in the home of his former student, Stephanie LaFarge, who would be the chimp's first teacher of American Sign Language. In this new study, Terrace intended to push beyond what Allen and Beatrice Gardner had accomplished with Project Washoe, whose work played a significant role in this new project's inspiration. But this research wasn't just about going beyond what the Gardners had done. Terrace was a devoted student of the world-renowned BF Skinner, whose legacy had been attacked some fifteen years earlier by the also world-renowned Noam Chomsky, who argued that only humans had the capacity to use language. In these new studies on apes and language, Terrace saw an opportunity to undermine Chomsky and to become a new champion for Behaviorism in linguistics. So he dubbed research subject 037 "Nim Chimpsky," and launched Project Nim. But the challenges of raising a chimpanzee in a human environment would, as they had time and again in the twentieth century, prove too much for Terrace, LaFarge, and the rest of Terrace's constantly rotating team of graduate and undergraduate students. And the pressure of proving wrong a master rhetorician like Chomsky would drive Terrace to a full reversal on the subject of apes and language. As for Nim, the wake of that project would drag him through research facilities and sanctuaries for the rest of his life.

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In 1965, a chimpanzee was taken from the jungles of Africa and placed in NASA's space program, where her handlers dubbed her "Kathy." She went through just one year of "chimponaut" training before Allen and Beatrix Gardner, scientists at the University of Nevada, adopted her for an experiment in which they would teach her American Sign Language and raise her as a deaf human child. The Gardners, concerned first and foremost with scientific objectivity, stripped Kathy of a name that they worried lent itself to anthropomorphism and renamed her "Washoe," the name of the county in which the University is located. In the coming decades, Washoe would become one of the central characters in the historical melodrama of the ape-language studies. We tell the beginning of her story and consider the significance of her name.

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In episode one of our Bestiary of the Ape-Language Studies, we tell the story of Viki, the first non-human ape whose intelligence, including her capacity for language, was studied in a structured, scientific way and compared to those of humans. Cathy and Keith Hayes attempted to raise her as they would a human child--if said child were also a research subject trained to speak and solve problems through operant conditioning and had her progress constantly monitored and compared to that of other children. But hey, didn't all of our parents tie one string to a bottle and another string to a wooden block and then record how long it took their child to choose the right string? Kids these days are so coddled.

We've posted pictures of Viki on our website, http://BestiaryPod.org, and you can help support the show at our Patreon page, http://Patreon.com/BestiaryPod.

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During World War II, famed psychologist BF Skinner started working on a project in which he would train ordinary street pigeons to guide pelican missiles (the irony of which was not lost on him) into German warships. In this fictional episode, Eric imagines a piece of radio propaganda in which the US government asks its citizens to send their own pets to war--which, it turns out was not totally unheard of at the time.

Eric continues his philosophical ramblings from part 1 about life, death, and a frozen chicken. He answers the question: If given said chicken in a Ziploc bag, would he eat it or leave it to rot? Also, Meg swears in this episode.

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Welcome to Bestiary, the podcast about humans and other animals. I'm your host, Eric Botts, and since you've probably never heard of me, we've decided that I should use this episode to introduce myself and show you where I'm coming from with this podcast. So our first two episodes are about my ongoing decision, the one that I make on multiple occasions every day, of whether to eat animals. I promise, future episodes will not feature me preaching vegetarian morals. Rather, I hope to come across as a thoughtful person who considers his diet to be an important part of his worldview. Future episodes will focus on more worldly and external discussions, such as the language studies that have been done on great apes since the 1960s. For now, part 1 of our pilot episode: A story about that ongoing dietary decision, a story about guilt and a frozen chicken.

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This podcast is sponsored by Anchor