Girl With a Pearl Earring (2003)
Kat Eschner's newsletter about animal-human relationships Vol. 2 Iss. 7
Happy news from Vancouver! In the fall, I wrote about the koi of the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden. Eleven of them were eaten by a rogue river otter, and the remaining two were evacuated. As of yesterday, the CBC reports that koi swim in the garden’s beautiful pond once more and new defenses have been put in place to keep the otter out.
Image description: Vermeer’s famous “Girl With a Pearl Earring.” (Wikipedia)
Oh mother of pearl/I wouldn’t trade you for another girl
For Topic, Andy Wright and photographer Maggie Shannon headed to the United States’ last pearl farm in Kentucky Lake, Tennessee. This story and the photo captions are packed with things I didn’t know about the pearl business: for instance, mother of pearl (or nacre) is called that because literally a pearl is made out of layers of it.
Extra credit: I wrote this short history of synthetic and farmed pearls for Smithsonian. And if you’re curious about the history of blue paint, well–here you go.
Big dairy is milking almonds for all they’ve got
Alt-dairy is on the rise, write Lydia Mulvany, Deena Shanker and Leslie Patton for Bloomberg. Who better to invest in this new field than… dairy? This piece charts some of the connections between big dairy and alternative milk producers who make things like almond, coconut and oat milks. Although it might seem like milk vs. mylk out there, the two industries are more connected than you might think.
Extra credit: Wash this piece down with a nice tall glass of vat meat criticism from Christy Spackman at Slate. “In key ways, lab-grown meat is built on the same foundational logics of our current industrial food system,” Spackman writes. “As a result, it’s firmly on the road to replicating many of the challenges that it claims it will address, and in the process risks making a food future that is worse, rather than better, for eaters.”
Land-based octopus farming startups
Shot: Like vat meat (see above), octopus farming faces a problem of scale! Also, people are worried about what farming will do to the octopus! Ritoban Mukherjee writing for Medium’s OneZero takes us through the issues.
Chaser: “The inner lives of farmed animals cannot be characterised entirely on a species level,” writes neuroscientist Lori Marino in Aeon. “Instead, they are unique individuals with personality to spare. Those personalities map familiarly onto the same characteristics that comprise human personalities.” I have questions about how true one could say this is of octopuses, who are pretty much the closest we’ll get to aliens. Then again, does it matter how much an animal is like us when it comes to evaluating its wellbeing?
“With apologies to Shakespeare, Diane Way loved her cats ‘not wisely, but too well’ and as with Othello, there were tragic results.”
–Ontario Court Justice William B. Horkins in The Toronto Star
Bonus round
More things I read this week.
Big egg is behind a new Washington cage-free egg bill (New Food Economy, Jessica Fu)
Don't feed the hedgehogs, they chonk up (The Guardian)
Poop is no reason to kill the pigeons (The Canadian Press)
Walmart opens online pet pharmacy (Kate Gibson, CBS)
Celebrity chefs, ranked by cookbook animal deaths (Dylan Matthews, Vox)
Please read me
My most recent work.
Only 1 in 5 donated lungs can actually save lives. These pigs could change the odds
Opioid addiction treatment reveals how unfair the healthcare system really is
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CREATURE FEATURE is edited this week by Tien Nguyen.
All images in CREATURE FEATURE are used under Creative Commons licensing. Efforts have been made to ensure that photographs of living animals or natural scenes have been taken ethically, in responsible pet ownership conditions, at AZA-accredited zoos and aquariums or under safe, non-damaging conditions in the wild. If you see an issue with any image we share, please notify me.