post 09 INTEGRITY

Rebuilding INTEGRITY in Joe Pindel's backyard, 1981. This is the same boat pictured in post 03. I've scraped the white paint off and re-calked her, and now I'm applying a coat of pine pitch. I also built and fastened the galvanized strap on the keel. It was three eighths by two inches flat bar and formed and welded (before galvanizing) into one continuous strap from the top of the stem to the top of the stern post to hold the boat securely together. Bob Donovan's machine shop was right next door and the big-hearted guy cheered me on and let me use his facilities for the metal fabrication required. Both Joe and Bob died of heart attacks about 10 years ago, but after I had sailed INTEGRITY to Hawaii and returned to tell the story. I hope the vicarious pleasure I gave them helped repay the tremendous assistance they both gave me on the project.
INTEGRITY was an enormous learning venture. I had taught myself a little bit while rebuilding SCHOOL MARM that summer, and now I hunted up books and kept learning. Of course, I could have used a great deal more knowledge. She was fastened with copper rivets, and the rivets were still in pristine condition, but I should have refastened her anyway to do a really good job. As a ship's lifeboat she originally had various steel fittings for her intended existence secured on deck. But then when she was used as a commercial fishing boat on the ocean the steel wasn't removed and it caused electrolysis with the copper. The copper stayed perfect. The steel fittings rusted badly but they were easy to replace and were small loss. The problem was that the electrolysis created an alkaline condition in the wood adjacent to each copper rivet and that made the wood in contact with the copper soft. The condition is called "nail sickness". The best procedure would have been to reposition each rivet in hard wood. But even if I had understood the condition then, I probably would not have done it. Copper rivets cost a fortune. Metal fastenings are one of the big, but often not anticipated, expenses of boat building. When you're rebuilding an old boat you have to become pragmatic or you will never finish the job.
If a lapstrake boat is carefully made it does not have to be calked. They typically leak like a sieve and sink when they're first put in water, but after a day of soaking the wood usually swells enough to seal the leaks. But a lifeboat has to be watertight when it's first put in the water, so INTEGRITY had been mechanically calked; maybe with a handheld air tool. I dug all the old calking out and replaced it with oakum hand made from old rope like the old time sailors used to do. (I came across a pile of old hemp rope for sale cheap at a yard sale.) I tried to buy pine tar to bed the oakum in, but I found that the junk they try to pass off as pine tar in marine stores in the US now is a foul smelling, greasy and totally worthless waste product of paper making. Pine tar is not manufactured in the US anymore. The only resemblance the fake stuff has to real pine tar is that it's black. I found genuine sticky, good smelling, pine tar (imported from Russia or a Scandinavian country) in pint cans in a gardening store and advertised for tree surgery--but it was tremendously expensive. I contacted the company that imported and repackaged it, but they would not sell in bulk. With the knowledge that I have gained since then (while building COMPROMISE) I would now use black tarry roofing mastic sold for making roofs watertight. It's very cheap and does a wonderful job. (But beware, it bleeds through any paint and makes stains.)

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Installment 09 of:
IN OPPOSITION TO CIVILIZATION
by Andy Van't Hul

Each of our brains (of all higher animals such as mammals) contains an involved pleasure system. Life is full of situations where we identify a goal, such as catching a rabbit for food, which we would like to achieve. After identifying a goal, if we then reach that goal (or at least become convinced we have reached it), our brain gives us a jolt of pleasure. I believe that this is a most important self-teaching mechanism that helps us learn and remember newly acquired culture information, such as an easy way to catch rabbits. Maybe the pleasant memory, like an endless tape, is run over and over again until its information is burned into our neuron connections. The brain delivers this jolt of pleasure by injecting a dose of a chemical (I call it happybrain to generalize since there may be different chemicals and mental processes involved) into some of our neuron synapses. We are actually, literally, drug addicts, and to acquire our drug, happybrain, we must solve problems (i.e. achieve goals). From observation, I would say that the more we must struggle to achieve a particular goal, or perhaps the more apprehension is involved, then the greater pleasure we receive.
In our distant past this involved pleasure system made our simple, natural, lives very enjoyable--like the European explorers recorded of the hunter-gatherer aborigines they first met. Killing a deer for food, or building a snug shelter, or finding a compatible spouse, made us genuinely, instinctively, happy and contented. Those simple goals were attainable by nearly everyone, so nearly everyone became happy. In our present hi-tech and complicated civilization, the goals set for us are too often unattainable. When, after persistent effort, we fail to reach those modern goals we have struggled toward we receive a distinctly un-pleasurable sensation; which too often becomes chronic, as in the case of my despondent nieces.
Unfortunately, that addiction to technology I mentioned has just gotten us deeper and deeper in trouble as civilization has become more sophisticated. We have the compulsion to invent novel and fascinating solutions to problems. We get our brain drug pleasure hit, our fix, just by believing that we have solved some problem. But we have absolutely no reliable way to evaluate the long term consequences of those "solutions" we come up with. And the long term consequences do not immediately assume great importance in our day-to-day life. We get our jolt of pleasure, our happybrain fix, just by believing that we have solved some problem. So we then gleefully search for another problem to solve so that we can get another shot of happybrain pleasure. Our research scientists become workaholics and spend their lives peering through microscopes in desperate hope of achieving the euphoria, the massive happybrain hit, of a peer-reviewed publication.
The scientists rationalize and attempt to justify their addiction by professing that they are making the world better for mankind. They are doing just the reverse. Humans do not need more comfort and convenience. We desperately need some physical and mental exertion in our lives to exercise and maintain our bodily functions. Life is a test of genes. It is supposed to be a struggle to stay alive and reproduce so that the weak combinations of genes can be identified and eliminated by natural adversities before those poor genes are propagated. Our species desperately needs natural adversities, severe adversities that actually cause the death of some people. The scientists are well-meaning, but mistaken and deluded. I believe that absolutely no invention since the onset of agriculture and civilization has actually benefited the human species. There is a huge difference between benefiting a species in general and benefiting only certain individuals of that species. What benefits one individual and prolongs his life may allow the proliferation of a genetic defect that spreads throughout and seriously weakens his entire species. A colony of wild chimps (if they are in a real wilderness far removed from humans) is much healthier and better off, from the welfare of the species viewpoint, than any city of modern humans.
A few minutes of realistic, logical, thought leads to the inescapable conclusion that the long life expectancy of civilized humans is not something to be proud of at all but is instead a sure sign that unfavorable gene combinations are not being weeded out efficiently before puberty and must therefore be contributing to massive, exponential, decline of the human genome. In an old book on human genetics I read the statement that the human species already had ten times the genetic defects of a comparable species in the wild. I'm sure that figure was just a guess--but whatever the real amount was when the book was written, it is certain to be greater now and rapidly rising. The "advances" (that word doesn't seem appropriate in this context) in medical technology during the last hundred years, and our exponentially exploding population, must be having a strong effect. Remember that most genetic defects, such as a weak immune system, or slow reflexes, or reproduction problems, are very difficult to detect and quantify. I am sure that the genetic quality of the human species is deteriorating rapidly, and that that deterioration is linked directly to our present artificially long life expectancy.
Hunter-gatherer people did live to a ripe old age--some of them. But their average life expectancy was low because a large percentage of them, just like with all other wild species, died from some natural adversity while they were still infants or juveniles. Mother Nature systematically discarded the gene combinations unsuited for the current environment, and she did it at a young age--before those poor genes were reproduced to another generation.
I believe that the concepts comprising this essay are important to understand, or I wouldn't waste time trying to put them into words, but I find that translating my mental concepts into verbal words is certainly a difficult task. I am much afraid that I will be misunderstood. What makes this misunderstanding almost certain in some quarters are some unfortunate events of history.
The Nazis of World War II became obsessed with the idea that they were a super race and that it was their duty to purge any undesirable elements from the human species. This led to such great atrocities that even the average German soldiers assigned to the purging task were traumatized and the Nazis had to outsource much of the job to others they could intimidate into doing the dirty work. Because of this history anyone who now mentions genetic inferiority or the possibility of eliminating poor gene combinations is immediately accused of being a Neo-Nazi and is saddled with all of the stigma associated with that era.
The Nazi doctrine is a good example of the hopeless intertwinement of truth and fiction prevalent in our civilized culture today. Any large scale livestock breeder (and I was one at one time) knows for a certainty that there are such things as poor gene combinations and that those undesirable genes must be rigorously removed from the population to keep a species strong and healthy. That is truth. But the concept of a human, or a committee of humans, having the wisdom to decide which individuals should be purged in the process is pure fiction. Livestock breeders are no better then Nazis in that regard, and all domestic livestock species have been seriously corrupted by the narrow minded decisions of farmers selecting breeding stock solely for short term personal profit rather than for the symbiotic welfare of Mother Nature. A healthy Mother Nature is our only hope for a continued existence.

To be continued.
This is a work in progress.
Comments are welcome.

post 08 Cattle Drive

Midday on a cattle drive. 1988. We had started at first light to move the cattle with the freshly

branded calves from the high country down to the ranch proper. Now, in the heat of midday, we

are letting the cattle, the horses, and ourselves rest. After an hour or so we'll get moving again.

During the three years I trekked Oregon's High Desert with my burros, and with the mustangs I acquired there, I occasionally stopped at ranches, always coming in through the back door--off of the desert. On a few ranches I stayed for a while, working for my keep and asking no wages. One rancher confided in me that if I had come in on a bike, he would have chased me off. But when I came leading pack animals, he had to invite me in for a cup of coffee.

In that sparsely populated area, where the neighbors may be 30 miles away, the ranchers are basically good people, but they tend to be clannish. They may tolerate newcomers--but never really accept them. The only people they accept as equals are those whose grandfathers were born in the area. This jibes with my belief that we have a genetic instinct which identifies only members of our own clan as being "really human". A young lady hired as the only teacher at a tiny and totally remote school (French Glen) where she had to live in was in tears as she related that she was not invited to the rancher's few social events--which were absolutely the only social events in the entire area.

I'm not complaining. I think being clannish is an instinctive trait, and I think we should obey our instincts. I'm just warning others who might find themselves in a similar position so they will have an idea of what to expect and not think they are being ostracized for making some terrible social blunder. I ran into the same situation in Hawaii (Among the second and third generation immigrants--not the original natives.) when I sailed there in INTEGRITY.

If you want to get along with the ranchers, especially those in desert country, you must understand that grass is their lifeblood. They have every blade inventoried and allotted. Even if the grass is on government land, they've leased it and they feel that it belongs to them. If you come with animals that eat grass you had better be gone again quickly, or else be competent and willing to work at work the rancher really needs done. Fortunately, I'm a jack-of-all-trades. I rebuilt a haying machine at the ranch pictured. At another ranch I installed the bathroom plumbing and fixtures in three bunkhouses. At still another, I added a room to the front of the small ranch house. (I have photos of the room addition for another post.)

The only time I aroused ire from a rancher was when I gave one a copy of my book "Work Ethic Hell" as a friendly gesture. The book has a chapter, "Soils", which outlines my belief that overgrazing is seriously changing, damaging, the ecology of much of our land. After he read that chapter, the rancher, who I had considered a friend, ordered me off of his place and told me to never come back.

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Installment eight of:
IN OPPOSITION TO CIVILIZATION
by Andy Van't Hul

The way I reconstruct past events that have led to our present desperate predicament, humans at one time were entirely hunter-gatherers not much different from chimpanzees. Maybe we walked upright, like Neanderthals, and used tools more, but we still learned essentially all of our cultural information by personal experience or by watching others have personal experiences. We were probably capable of making a lot of sounds, like a parrot (we must have already had the physically unique larynx required), but also like a parrot or magpie, we probably didn't use those sounds for much more then just mimicking other animals for mindless amusement. Even at that stage, we had our present range of "human" emotions including sympathy and compassion (many mammals do), but our basic instincts, some of which our species acquired way back when we were considered reptiles, or even before, were unclouded by the verbally transmitted and often totally mistaken "moral" concepts of civilization. If food was scarce and our kids were hungry, we got rid of any competition for that food--even if the competition was our brother, and even if we had to kill him to get rid of him. That free expression of our inborn instincts, instincts acquired through millions of years of evolution in symbiotic harmony with all the other species, kept our population in a proper, mutually beneficial, proportion to all the others.

Then came the insidious mutation, the cancer gene that turned our species into a dread disease of Earth Entity. It must have started with only one person and very gradually spread through a clan and then through nearby clans as members migrated and interbred. The mutant members had a specific knack for mentally combining parts of old concepts and from those concept parts creating a new concept. Before mutating, their species could make a sound to imitate a snake hissing, and like most mammals, they had a sound to express fear. But with their new verbal instinct ability, their inventing ability, they could hiss and then make the fear sound, and with that new combination of those two sounds they could warn their comrades that a dangerous snake was in the vicinity. Their ability to combine concepts helped them in many other ways also. Their species was long familiar with clubs and also with chunks of stone they used as hand axes. But the new mutants became very clever at tying a stone onto the end of a club in various configurations to construct hafted axes, adzes, and other tools.

Of course their new inventing-communicating ability gave them a tremendous advantage over any competing species that required the same type of food and habitat, specifically any near-human species, in the same area. Goodbye Neanderthals. Also, their enhanced tool making and communicating skills made them a more efficient hunter. With a greater supply of food from hunting they multiplied rapidly.

Also during this period they became very good at translating their mental concepts, their mental visualizations and dreams, into verbal language. The concepts themselves were often impossible and bizarre, a random, illogical, mix of old brain data, like nightmares frequently are, but via words the people efficiently propagated some of those bizarre, false, concepts (like sacrificing first born infants) for literally thousands of years. Words had the effect of crystallizing a concept into a form that was very easy to store, and then concept could easily be added to concept in a rapidly accumulating exponential growth of information of all sorts (including true, half-true, false, good, half-good, and bad).

Unfortunately, absolutely no quick and foolproof method has ever been found for determining if a concept expressed in words is actually entirely true or what the long term consequences of that concept might be. We have no dependable way of cleaning up our libraries and throwing out the trash. Most of our present culture is a hopelessly intermingled amalgam of truth and fiction. Many religions are thousands of years old, but we still heatedly debate, even our world leaders debate, the veracity of those tenets. Concerning consequences, when Nobel invented dynamite I'm sure he never dreamed that illegal fishermen would someday use it to ruthlessly destroy the fragile coral reefs so desperately needed by a vast assortment of marine life for reproduction. In my view, the damage done by dynamite has already greatly exceeded any actual benefit our species ever obtained from it. And after considerable contemplation, I'll say the same about virtually all of our modern, post-Stone Age, technology. (Harking back to keeping this essay concise, I could write a thick book on only that aspect.)

As the clever cancer people, our ancestors, became ever more populated and became ever more efficient at hunting, they decimated, or forced into extinction, many of their prey species. Then they became hungry. Of course they observed and they had enough sense to realize what seeds were for. Plowing, planting and weeding a crop, and defending it, was tedious, but they were desperate. They didn't want any of their kids to die of hunger. And their cleverness had enticed them into the trap of trying to solve every problem with a more high tech solution. Their inventing-communicating gene, their cancer gene, had addicted them--addicted us--to a fascination with technology.

To be continued.
This is a work in progress.
Comments are welcome.

post 07 Good Friend Joe

My good friend Joe Pindel, April 1987. He's helping me haul my gear down to the canoe for a survival training trip down the Columbia. We're at the northeast corner of Portland, OR.
Joe had a degree, and a professional license, in Mechanical Engineering, but in his heart he was an artist, a sculptor in bronze. We got acquainted back in 1981 when I was making the rounds of Portland half-heartedly trying to market a computer aided system of sheet metal layout which I had developed while making wine tank manufacturing equipment for JV Northwest. Joe had no need for my procedure, neither of us were tuned into the mundane pursuits of civilization, and our conversation somehow got around to boats. Joe was fascinated with boats. He had read everything he could find about sailboat cruising.

I happened to have a sailboat then, 22 foot SCHOOLMARM, which I had just that summer learned the rudiments of sailing on. SCHOOLMARM was 50 years old, her iron nails were rusted to half thickness, and she leaked, but she was complete and she sailed.
But then Ann Ehrlich and I had her out one day, and at a moment when neither of us were paying any attention to the boat the jealous thing beached herself on a log raft. I knew that couldn't be good. I handed the bailing bucket to Ann, I pried the boat off of the raft, and we headed full speed for the haul-out ramp.

To shorten the story, at the time I talked to Joe I had a disabled boat sitting on a trailer, and the boat badly needed a new stem, centerboard trunk, and a complete refastening. But, as usual, I had no money or facilities (or experience) for that sort of thing. I was a nomad (bum) living out of a small camper shell on an antique Chevy pickup. However, it looked like Joe had a complete machine shop and space available. Always the opportunist, I seized the moment and offered Joe a half interest in SCHOOLMARM if he would help me overhaul her. He accepted.

It was a couple of weeks later before I realized that the shop we put SCHOOLMARM in did not belong to Joe. The shop belonged to Bob Donovan, a wonderful good-hearted Irishman who owned a business building big rollover machines for large foundries around the country. Joe just lived right next door and did some work for Bob occasionally. Bob also loved boats, and he had practical experience. He was in charge of the Boy Scout boating activities around Portland, and that involved real boats and sailing.

To shorten the story some more, Joe only did a half day of work on SCHOOLMARM before his fantasy evaporated and he left the chore to me. But he did pay for the lumber required and we became good friends. I ended up rebuilding three boats, SCHOOLMARM, live aboard INTEGRITY, and finally, years later, the canoe, in Joe's big backyard. Joe got his vicarious pleasure from helping me actually live the fantasies.

I have had several wonderful, adventurous, learning experiences throughout my life and none of them would have been possible without the generous participation by good guys like Joe and Bob. Most people don't dare unplug themselves from the slavery of civilization, but they will gleefully help someone else and cheer him on.

Joe loaned me his books on cruising and got me dreaming about the possibilities of exploring remote islands as a latter day Robinson Crusoe when civilization goes through its death throes. SCHOOLMARM was a day-sailer and obviously not designed for the open ocean. I never quite finished rebuilding her before I acquired dilapidated ex-lifeboat INTEGRITY, a boat born for the ocean, and started anew on rebuilding. Ann finally sold the almost finished SCHOOLMARM at a yard sale for twice what I had paid for her.

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Installment seven of:
IN OPPOSITION TO CIVILIZATION
by Andy Van't Hul

When diagnosing a disease, it is a common error to mistake a symptom of the disease for a cause of the disease. Nearly everyone can see that our world, Earth Entity, is sick right now and has been for some time. It is typical to blame this sickness on the overpopulation of humans. But the overpopulation is not the cause of the sickness. It is only a result of a sickness.

For several years I believed that agriculture was the cause of Earth Entity's sickness. If humans had no food available to them other then what grew naturally in the wilderness, there certainly could not be the massive overpopulation we see today. But what was the cause of agriculture? How and why did it come about?

As I developed the analogy of Earth Entity to a human body, the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. When one type of body cell, a cell that used to perform a healthy service for the body, reproduces wildly out of proportion to all the other cell types, we have a cancer. A cancer typically starts when a mutation produces an aberrant cell whose mutated characteristics allow it to reproduce without restraint. In my analogy, civilized humans are now cancer cells. In looking for the genetic mutation that allowed humans to reproduce without restraint, I realized that agriculture had to be intimately involved--but agriculture is not itself a genetic mutation. It can only be caused by a mutation.

I finally recognized verbal communication as the logical culprit. I am convinced that verbal language made possible, and is the cause of, agriculture. The verbal language gene(s) in humans is the cancer gene(s) that has transformed humans from a beneficial symbiotic member of Earth Entity's life to a terrible disease to EE.

A small clan, even only one nuclear family, of hunter-gatherers can survive in an appropriate wilderness. Even if there is a chance brief encounter with an opposing clan, there is not likely to be a serious fight (unless the wild food is in critically short supply due to overpopulation). The reason is simple. They have nothing valuable enough to risk lives fighting over. Even belligerent bears will not pick a serious fight with each other as long as there are plenty of salmon to catch in the stream.

Most hunter-gatherers must spread out in small groups and move camp constantly in order to find sufficient food in the wilderness. Since they must carry every bit of their possessions on their backs, they keep only basic, multi-purpose, tools that they can replace easily from natural materials found in their travels. They have no way to store large amounts of food or valuable personal possessions, so they just do not have any. Their lack of possessions to steal is their security.

Farming is entirely different. A crop ready to harvest or in a grain bin, or a herd of confined animals, is a very precious commodity. The food value may represent the difference between life and death for a sizable group of people. Also, sedentary farmers are pack rats. Since they don't have to continually carry all their possession, they accumulate all sorts of precious goodies in their houses. In short, an agricultural lifestyle absolutely requires an army, the bigger the army the better, in order to defend and perpetuate that lifestyle.

Agriculture had to start from scratch; so of course, there was quite a period of trial and error learning involved. Those clans or communities that hit on workable solutions to maintaining a large, cooperative, group with a strong army survived while others who were less successful were killed off or absorbed during warfare over their farm produced food.

Anyone who has been in any army can attest to the fact that the first thing taught to new recruits is discipline. No army can tolerate any dissension or spurious behavior. Above all, there must not be any conflict within the group. It is imperative that internal harmony be enforced. This requires a really authoritative voice (such as a God) establishing explicit rules (such as the Ten Commandments). It also requires some dire threat (Hell) if the rules are broken or a promise of fantastic reward (Heaven) if the rules are obeyed. Agriculture, and its related civilization, may be able to exist without religion, but some religions certainly aided and abetted it.

Agriculture is not just digging up some turf and spreading seed on the exposed dirt. Agriculture requires a very complex culture with explicit and well understood rules, plus rigid enforcement of those rules, that I do not believe could have come into being, or have been propagated to future generations, without the ease of transmitting complex concepts between brains presented by verbal language.

In my mind, agriculture and civilization are synonymous; they are one and the same. A farm community requires a town community, a source of army protection and manufactured tools, and a town community requires a farm community, a source of food and fiber.

To be continued.
This is a work in progress.
Comments are welcome.

post 06 Training Burros

Training burros, February, 1988. I'm leading the three young brothers around the neighbor's house in Brownsmead, OR, on a training hike.

When I traded some work for the burros they had been farm raised, but never touched. A dairy farmer had just felt an empathy with burros and let them roam the back pasture as sort of an aesthetic decoration.

I was raised on farms and have been a farmer myself, but I still have mixed feelings about enslaving another creature. Actually, I'm against it by personal inclination, but I'm also pragmatic. I've done my share of backpacking in my younger years, but the older I get, the lazier I get. I figured that pack animals would make the trekking easier, and they sure did. At that time I still had dreams of raising a family in the wilderness. Pack animals would make it a lot easier to haul all the gear plus little kids around.

A lot of people have frustrating problems dealing with the animals they enslave, and nearly all of those problems can be laid directly to a lack of training, or improper training procedure. A college professor friend of mine was an avid big game hunter, but city raised and inexperienced around animals. He bought three burros for a big hunting expedition he planned in Idaho's Primitive Area. But he didn't know how to train them or what to teach them. He just assumed that they would docilely do whatever he wanted them to do. Burros are docile, but they are also intelligent, thinking, critters with a strong mind of their own.

When he started on his expedition and came to the first creek that had to be forded, his burros rebelled. Burros are desert animals. They have an instinctive phobia for water. They won't walk through a one inch deep mud puddle if they can avoid it. My friend's big hunting trip that he had planned for so long ended right there at that first creek. He never did get the burros across it.
There are various tricks, knacks, for training equines and I have photos of some of these--teaching to lead for example--from when I worked with wild mustangs. I will show and discuss them individually in later posts.

While I was comfortably house sitting the winter in rural Brownsmead with the burros in a corral right across the road, I tried to imagine any experience I might encounter on a trek, and I patiently introduced the burros to such experiences in a repetitive manner until they were all just routine. I taught them to lead, with packs on, always at a fast walk. I taught them to willingly enter a trailer or truck bed even if the loading situation wasn't ideal. Then we progressed to fording fairly substantial creeks and jumping fences (I'll show and explain the fence thing in a later post).

When I acquired the burros they had long, misshapen, hoofs, which I looked at very closely. Equines of all types, but maybe burros especially, are prone to fonder and fonder is a permanently disabling condition. An equine's hoof is its fingernail. It walks on its fingernails. If the animal gains access to a heap of rich food--like if it breaks open the oat sack and gorges itself (a situation which could never happen to wild animals)--an odd condition results whereby the animals feet become highly feverish. If you are alert and notice this quickly enough, you can stake the animal out on the soft wet ground of a marsh or spring (maybe stand him on soft straw and cool the hoofs with ice if that is more readily available), and you might save him from permanent injury. If no action is taken, the hoof--the fingernail-like portion--typically separates partially from the foot and stays that way forever. The animal is then in pain when it walks and it cannot carry any weight to speak of.

But I could see that my burros did not have tender feet at all. They had just been raised on soft, wet, ground all their life (a typical situation in the rainy Northwest of Oregon) and no one had ever trimmed their hoofs. I took care to get the brothers well used to having their feet messed with and I gradually trimmed the hoofs back to a reasonable shape. Once I got the burros out on the desert and traveling I never had to look at the hoofs. The dry desert grit kept them in fine shape.

The professor I mentioned earlier wanted to work on the hoofs of one of his burros, and he ended up with the animal hogtied and lying on the ground before he could get the job done. I've seen the same thing with a thoroughbred brood mare at the vet college in Pullman, WA. It's much better to take the time to patiently train your animals to tolerate having their feet worked on. I'll discuss immobilizing the animals for the start of this training with a photo in a later post.

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Installment six of:
IN OPPOSITION TO CIVILIZATION
Andy Van't Hul

Somewhere, and quite a while ago, a small group of our ancestors acquired a particular combination of genes, a mutation, which greatly increased our human ability to communicate with each other verbally. I'm not positive, but I'm guessing that those same communication genes also much enhanced our ability to invent. Inventing is the mental process of merging components of two or more concepts (held in memory or observed) and from the pieces of those previous concepts constructing a new concept that no one has been aware of before. No computer or brain can generate significant coherent information from a vacuum, but it is quite possible to merge two or more information sequences (originally acquired by observation) according to previously determined logic principles. To me, it seems that much the same process is used when inventing and when communicating with words. I see the communicating as maybe being just a variation of inventing, so the mutation involved might be considered primarily a considerable enhancement of inventing ability.

Information is often critical to survival. Information is of two categories, instinct and culture. Instinct information is embedded right in our genes and is inherited just like the color of our hair or eyes is inherited. It occurs because of the way our neurons are hardwired and because of our ability to manufacture hormones. Instinct information causes us to jerk our hand away the instant we touch a hot stove, or it causes us to fall in love. Culture information is everything we learn after we are born. Culture information reminds us that a glowing red stove is hot and painful, and we had better not touch it again. Culture information can modify or supercede instinct information. Our instincts might tell us to fall in love, but if we know from some experience that the person we're attracted to habitually and grossly squanders resources (money) that is critical to our survival, it is possible to squelch the impulse to love and wait for a safer prospect.

All animals that have sufficient memory and brain power depend greatly on culture for their survival. The more complex an animal is, the more information it must teach its offspring in order to insure the survival of those offspring. With nearly all animals, that culture information is passed on almost entirely via physical or visual experience. The adolescent kitten learns to hunt by following in the footsteps of its mother and watching her hunt.

But humans are tremendously different. A brain is not precisely the same as an electronic computer, but it's close enough to say that all mental concepts are merely sequences of electric signals, or the stored means of generating such a sequence of signals. Humans have acquired the stupendous genetic ability to translate such a sequence of brain signals into spoken or written words and vice versa. The system is not perfect--there is often misunderstanding--but it's still a monumental feat. Our kids don't have to actually watch us do something in order to learn from us. We can pass information directly from our brain to theirs fairly well just by talking about it.
A most important side effect of this ability is that once brain information is translated into words, that information can be stored long periods of time in those words for future generations. This storage was first done in the form of spoken legends, but various means of writing have resulted in more permanent and much less corruptible storage. The capability of storing information immediately resulted in the accumulation of stored verbal information until now we have great libraries, ever exponentially expanding libraries, stuffed with stored human culture. (Culture, as here used, being all information, true or false, from Santa Clause to quarks, acquired after birth.)

Nearly everyone, including learned academicians, think that verbal communication is a great blessing to humans. It undoubtedly did give us a tremendous advantage over our competitors (such as possibly the Neanderthals) in the past. But the genetic trait that might at one time have been our salvation has now become the greatest scourge that our species has ever faced. The reason for this is simple. The verbal information communicated is not all true, and even when it is perfectly true (such as a technology like gunpowder) it may be tremendously damaging to our species when evaluated over the long term. The problem is that we have absolutely no reliable way of distinguishing truth from fiction or of accurately assessing the long term adverse side effects of information we propagate.

A clear example of mistaking fiction for truth was the culture of the Phoenicians who lived in Carthage. They firmly believed that first born infants had to be sacrificed on the altar. A parallel example was the Incas of Peru who sacrificed young virgins from their community.
The Aztecs sacrificed literally thousands, and ate them, but in that case the victims were enemy warriors captured during hand to hand combat and the sacrifice practice, though gruesome, was probably quite beneficial in that it weeded out presumably weaker genes from the overall human population. But sacrificing babies or young maidens, who might have perfectly good genes, from one's own ethnic group is so wrong that it's bizarre. And we have not acquired one bit more ability to discriminate between truth and fiction or evaluate consequences since then. Not very long ago sophisticated people were involved with the Tokyo subway nerve gas bombings, and the Jonestown mass suicide and the Waco, Texas debacle. Even our world leaders right today heatedly debate the veracity of various tenets of opposing religions and cultures. Concerning consequences, we still do not have the foggiest notion of what repercussions might arise in the future from our rapidly growing junk heap of radioactive nuclear waste.
Essentially the only way that coyotes and crows can teach their offspring is by example. Without a special effects crew manipulating the image, there is seldom a way for falsehood to creep into the observed visual information. Without a library storage means, all information must be presented anew to each generation. If inappropriate information ever did arise, it would almost certainly not be perpetuated over many generations. The cultural information passed on by most animals may be simple and sparse, but it has the blessing of being true and not having lethal side effects. And I feel that the simplicity and sparseness themselves are huge blessings.
But humans are not so blessed. Kids accept the words of their parents as gospel truth and those words are then passed on in the guise of truth from generation to generation for literally thousands of years even though those words may have first originated as outright lies from some self-serving charlatan or prankster. The words that do purport to be scientific fact frequently are parroted statements from a bygone time when science was much less knowledgeable about the long term side effects of various practices. What I am saying is that our verbal transmission of culture has turned out to be a Trojan horse. At one time it appeared to be a great gift, but over the long term it has resulted in causing all of our serious problems.

To be continued.

This is a work in progress.

Comments are welcome.