Fluffy Friday – behind the scenes

The marking and MOOC preparations continue this week.

On my morning run I came up with (what I think) is a great idea for one of our MOOC’s interactive sessions. Check out the preview below as I started working out the technicalities in my head. Spoilers? I guess? If you can understand them? Remember to check out our Massive Open Online Course in Animal Behaviour and Welfare which will start in the first week of July. Sign up! It’s free!

Plans Ahoy

 

 

 

And if that hasn’t whetted your appetite enough – check out the Jeanne Marchig Centre blog where you will find a particularly embarrassing video of yours truly capturing some of the behind the scenes action.

 

And to give you a sneak preview of what’s coming up on Fluffy Sciences next week  .  .  .

Fluffy Friday – Intermission

Hi all – it’s been a crazy week with lots of filming for our upcoming MOOC as well as thirty undergraduate essays to mark! Eek! So today’s Fluffy Friday is a little bit of a repost of a few resources we’ve been working on over the last few months:

What is Animal Pain?

How is Pain Produced?

How is Animal Pain Assessed?

Attitudes to Animal Pain.

How is Animal Pain Treated?

 

 

And finally check out this blog post from IFAW after their visit to the University of Edinburgh vet school. They’re very excited about our MOOC and rightly so!

Professor Waran and Fanta get ready to tell you all about animal welfare.
Professor Waran and Fanta get ready to tell you all about animal welfare.

Fluffy Friday – Fashionista

The letters after my name grant me a small selection of inferior superpowers. Cheaper car insurance. Better tables at restaurants. And the ability to go to very important meetings dressed quite casually.

In the land of animal behaviour and welfare, we don’t really do suits. This week I met the CEO of a very well known animal welfare charity in jeans and a shirt. I met a Board of Trustees in a summer dress. And in all four of the meetings I had this week I didn’t wear make up once (which I possibly should have done because stress spots are popping up on my nose).

The thing is, my colleagues complimented me on looking smart, and we all commiserated with one another about how we don’t own smart clothes. It’s just not in our nature. Oh sure we can look nice, but we’re not good at smart.

When you start at Glasgow Uni, at least back in the early noughties, you had an initial meeting with an advisor. Mine was a lovely microbiologist named Ailsa who wore amber jewellery and beautiful silk scarves. I sat in her office with three other students and clutched my maps of the campus on my lap. One by one she asked us what we planned to do our Honours in, all the time telling us that we could change our course right up until fourth year. Most people never took the Honours they started with, according to her.

What was I planning on? Zoology. She laughed when she heard and told me to buy a woolly jumper. “That’s what we call the zoology lot. The Woolly Jumpers.”

I still think that should be the name of my band. In the zoology museum of the University of Glasgow there was a truly staggering array of woolly jumpers. There’s also a lot of handmade jewellery, a lot of interesting tattoos in unusual places, and people trying soap hair shampoo from Lush.

I tried the soap hair shampoo from Lush. I have thick, dark hair that feels greasy within hours of washing. I used the soap shampoo. I tried the no-shampoo at all approach. I tried the compromise ‘natural type’ shampoos from Lush. I tried the shampoos from the independent little sellers in the studenty areas of Glasgow. In the end I went back to the shampoo that comes in plastic bottles. Greasy hair triumphed over my ethical concerns.

Working with animals and in the fields that I do, vanity becomes a very strange thing. How can you take pride in your appearance when you wear a pair of mucky overalls and steel toecapped boots? Is it appropriate to wear a summery skirt to the office if you might have to jump to the farm? Sometimes you can pay the price for a little bit of style. Once I was rocking a chunky knit jumper over a denim mini skirt one day when I had to pop to our beef unit. I slung some overalls over the top and completely forgot I had hiked the miniskirt up to do so. When we’d finished I was animatedly chatting to colleagues while stripping from the overalls, miniskirt still around my waist.

I have half a dozen little fashion faux pas to mention. Like the undergraduate student of mine who used to move cows with one great dangling earring (she only ever had one – it was when I realised I was no longer ‘down with the kids’), or the time I decided to wear a smart skirt to a conference and ended up sitting in a non-air conditioned lecture theatre sweating through a dry-clean only skirt beside a very important gentleman from another well respected animal welfare charity. Or the time I accidentally wore a top that had very large arm holes and exhibited my bright red bra to my brand new workplace. Or the time I was sitting in my supervisor’s office and pulled a swan louse from my hair. I could go on.

I’m not sure we make it easy on ourselves either. Most of us were the weird kids at school who wanted to know why home economics didn’t use free range eggs, or cried because they missed their dog when they were at camp. All our lives we learned how to pride ourselves in our differences, and I think there’s an element of that pride which tempts us to reject the more classical notions of ‘looking good’.

If you think I’m tarring the good name of scientists unfairly here, I can count two incidences in the past few months where scientist friends of mine have outright criticised or expressed shock at some basic sartorial choices I’ve made (basic in the dictionary, rather than the Tyra sense). At a sushi restaurant, I defended an £80 hairdressers bill to some of my very good friends who laughed at my expense while we all ordered a strange dessert we knew we wouldn’t like just to taste it. At tea break, a month or so later, some colleagues broke off on a discussion about how much they’d spent on their bikes to ask me how I could justify what I’d paid for a Shellac manicure.

In our field we place terribly arbitrary values on what’s considered appropriate. It’s fine to order tempura battered ice cream just to try it (don’t, it was disgusting), but it’s eyebrow raising to have nice nails for a few weeks. We will happily turn up to a meeting that could hold the key to millions of pounds worth of funding in a pair of jeans, but we wonder why the world thinks scientists are scatter brained and odd balls.

My superpower is the power of not needing to care about my appearance. But like all good superheroes, sometimes I try to hide my power. Sometimes I like to look good. Sometimes I like to retro it up, or blow out my hair, or get Shellac, all because I can.

And if you like a little bit of Fluffy Fashion in your life sometime, may I recommend one of the most stylish women I know who launched her Etsy store last week. HauteDog Couture is a geeky, handmade collection of dog collars and other pet accessories. It’s a new store, just starting out, but Armita is one of my favourite people and is a demon with a seam ripper, so check her out!

Fluffy Friday – Keep a Pen Handy

At the end of 2007, I was sitting on a high plastic stool in the feed prep area, scribbling with a biro on the corner of the admittance card of C390. The radio in the corner played inoffensive, slightly out of date pop music through a soft veil of static and in the corridor beyond one of my colleagues was folding freshly tumbled towels into the linen cupboard. It was called a feed prep area because it was for animals, a food prep area would be for humans, though having worked in both I was equally squeamish about eating meals in either. We just called it the kitchen.

 

In the far corner beside the bin, which stank in summer, I had learned how to skin, de-limb and de-yolk day old chicks in three quick hand movements. It was remarkably easy to do. You could use scissors, of course, but that involved finding scissors. In the middle of summer in a wildlife hospital, scissors are not always in ready supply. In the middle of summer there’s not enough of anything, not enough time, not enough staff, not enough food, not enough dry towels, not enough clean cages. And far too many orphaned animals. But right now it was winter, and I was wrapped up in a blue mac over blue overalls, my fingerless gloves tucked into one pocket, my latex gloves crumpled on the table beside my elbow. My boots were muddy and so had been left by the door. I’d have to sweep and mop the lino at the end of the shift, no sense in making it harder for myself by tracking animal shit through the kitchen whenever I came in to do some paperwork. So my be-socked toes were curled around the support of the stool as I worked on the biro. The ink would not flow.

 

At the time, I was sick of it. I earned decent money in child care, my part time job, and the animal work was fun but not nearly as rewarding. Less responsibility too. My first week into the internship, my boss sat me down and gravely intoned that if I didn’t do my job properly, animals would die. Sitting in the hot, stuffy little office, I thought back to the job I was going to leave for wildlife. If I didn’t do that one properly, children would die. But I’d a get a Masters, so I nodded and agreed and now, with a little over four months of placement left, I had been given a new project to turn into a master’s thesis.

 

There was considerably less shit involved with children. People who think babies make a lot of mess should work with orphaned animals. Or ill animals. Or animals. My hair, just growing out from an ill-advised short crop, was a regular refuge of feather lice and other beasties. Though never yet a bat, despite the myths. My hair, which I was growing long on the self-promise that I’d wear it down more often, was pulled back in a tight ponytail to keep it out of the way. This look, blue overalls, navy mac, welly boots, hair up high, a faint dusting of shit on my face, had become de-rigour for me.

 

Irritated as the project had made me, there were aspects of the wildlife work that I enjoyed. Namely, the clinical stuff. Dressing wounds and administering drugs were like a balm to my ego. Look at me, look how casually I wield these implements of miracles. Injections were the best, intramuscular the most fun, especially for birds. Do it in the wrong place and you stab through the heart. Working outside there was little opportunity to give an injection, but when you did, the joy of walking purposefully outside with a syringe gripped in your teeth, or gingerly placed atop the feed in a bucket, was unmatched. More often, outside drugs were continuations of antibiotic courses. These most often took the form of tablets. In the winter, I would stuff each animal’s dose down a separate finger of my latex gloves and write the ID number of the animal that needed the course on each plastic coated digit. This was less glamorous. Swans were the most common offenders. There’s nothing purposeful about chasing a large, grimy white bird around a fully enclosed paddock, cursing when it makes it into the water, only to catch it in the mud, hold it down and squat above it, wrestling with your glove to get the tablet out, try not to drop it in a puddle, and then stuff it down the bird’s very long throat. BD (bis in die) was worst. First thing in the morning and then at the very end of your shift, so you’d have to go out after you’d swept and cleaned, to return and clean after yourself again. The ineffectiveness of it grated on my soul.

 

Inside there was much more opportunity to look important. Microwaving saline for example. Hedgehogs, the little bags of disease, were always needing saline. That involve sub-dermal injections, so easy you could do it in your sleep, but impressive looking enough to any observing students. Changing a dressing involved a mechanical challenge, a puzzle component that was always fun, as well as the need to assess the progress of the recovery. There was also tube feeding, which was a pain if only because it was so tricky. It also looked more like torture than TLC and I did not enjoy it. Although, tube feeding a snake once was fun, if only for the mechanical challenge.

 

Working in the isolation unit looked very important. White overalls and white wellies, lots of drugs too. All kinds of clinical procedures, as well as assessments, and also a good chance there’d be a vet around to let me try some more advanced techniques. I had decided against the veterinary life but the intravenous injections and blood sampling I did in isolation did make me wonder if I would have enjoyed the veterinary life after all. These procedures could only be done under veterinary supervision, and only because we were working on wild animals. I enjoyed the physical challenge, sensing the pressure of the blood flow beneath the needle, trying not to blow it, trying to deliver the whole dose before the animal got too stressed. The  physics of blood flow, the chemistry of hormones, and all of it slotting together to form an animal who feels something. I still love that puzzle.  After the solution makes itself known you feel invincible, right up until your cheap Biro fails as you try to write it on the admission card. It’s a hard fall back to earth.

 

When you need to gear yourself up to every encounter in your day you want the little things to go smoothly. When you’re wiping sawdust from your eyes and spitting out feathers from your mouth, scooping up an admittance card from the freshly mopped floor – that would have to be cleaned again because you’re currently dripping blood on it – the ability to simply write on the card your name and the time you administered the medication is like a small miracle you have tamed and made your own.

 

After my masters project, I returned to university to complete my course. The backwards way that my university functioned not withstanding, it was odd to go back to the life of lectures and exams after working day in, day out. Lectures mean pens, you need at least three pens to make sure you can continue to follow the discussion leaping around taxonomy. The main writing colour, the highlight colour, and a back up just in case. I became a fan of the gel pens that stained my hands terribly but smudged on the paper less than biros. For all my love of laptops, tablets and phones, I will always have an inkstain on my right ring finger’s knuckle.

 

I write in my lab books, I write in post it notes, I write on papers to review, I write on my own papers. Pens are part of my trade, cheap pens, branded pens, giveaway pens. My one advice for working in animal welfare . . . keep a pen handy.

Fluffy Friday – Office Romances

“And they’ll try to mount you.”

Jenny, an affectionate Irish woman, a guru at my new work place, nodded vehemently as I stared at her. “Oh yeah. Especially at certain times of the month. You just feel this big head on top of yours. It’s horrible. All the girls on the farm talk about it.”

Before my PhD I’d never worked with cows. Seals, deer, horses, but never cows. My knowledge of them started and ended at big black and white things that stood beside country road accidents, and big black and white things talking about humans in a Gary Larson cartoon. So it was thought, a general opinion held by all involved in my PhD, that I should do a little work on the research farm to get used to handling the animals.

“And the heifers are the worst.” Jenny’s briefing was an informal one, I’d popped into her office to ask about something else and cows, as they always did, came into the conversation.

“Yes,” Jenny observed, mistaking my regret for disbelief. “It’s scary!”

As I slunk from her office, I didn’t need her to tell me that being mounted by a 500 kg animal was scary. I had enough problems shaking off my friend’s dog.

 

Office romances don’t come easily to people like me. In child care, you’re surrounded by the end result of flirting and it does put a dampener on things. There’s also a limited amount of romancing that can be done among brightly coloured Ikea plates and sweaty faced children. Animals lend an entirely different atmosphere. All that energy and unabashed sex. It’s carnal. Unfortunately, those that work with animals are usually covered in shit and their own sweat. It’s not a good look.

Despite this handicap, I can recall a few great love affairs. There’s the tragic love affair, the beauty and the beast situation between an RTA goose and a lead poisoned swan. That goose spent many a warm autumn evening chasing the swan round and around the pool, while she serenely floated away with a couple of flips of her black webbed feet. The fact she was on a course of antibiotics and so had to be captured twice a day was of no small concern to the goose, and he defended her virtue rigorously. I’m not sure she ever noticed, or appreciated those attentions. The staff at the wildlife hospital noticed. The goose had a powerful bite. One evening, after my colleagues watched me fend off the erstwhile lover while simultaneously stuffing an antibiotic tablet the size of my thumb down the swan’s gob, I returned to the kitchen picking white feathers from my hair. “It’s cute,” said one of my colleagues. My supervisor, shaking his head sadly, managed a morose: “It’s wrong,” which we all felt was rather unprogressive of him.

Swans lend themselves to love. Even in old age. They mate for life, so people tell me, and I try not to bring up the literature that says otherwise. The biggest problem about working with animals is how often people will tell you things they know to be true. I’m guilty of it myself, but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating. That same autumn, working the isolation unit, I opened up a swan’s pen and stepped onto the sawdust covered concrete. These pens are roughly 2m by 1m square and painted a soothing, hospital-y shade of green. I don’t think any of the animals appreciated that. The swans were bedded on sawdust, which could flake and get into your eye with alarming frequency. In two big, black plastic bins we kept protein pellets for ducks and corn mix for swans. The ducks and ducklings would get their specific kind of pellets in a shallow bowl. Swans would get their corn in a plastic basin filled with water, occasionally with a garnish of lettuce on top if we had some going. Carrying these basins into the pens was sometimes a balancing act, as the decaying plastic threatened to split from its heavy, sloshing load. This evening I gave the admission card a once over, noted the treatments on the back of my glove, and entered the pen.

The swan was lying with her head submerged in the bowl of water.

While birds, particularly diving birds, are capable of going without oxygen for considerably longer than humans, my initial reaction was to dread the impending paperwork. I plucked the animal’s head from the water and gave it a little shake on the end of its long neck. It rolled one yellow eye in my direction and gave a little flutter of its wings.

Just let me die, it seemed to say.

I cleaned the pen, medicated the bird, and made a slightly facetious note that the bird should be kept on suicide watch. On a more serious side of things, I recommended the vets upped the dosage, as her lead poisoning was severe.

On my final round of the night, I popped my head round once more to find her submerging her whole head. As she had plainly ate nothing, before I left, I made sure to move her bowl a little further away. Do animals have a concept of suicide? Did the poor bugger feel that bad? That didn’t matter. I was three shifts in to my four nights on the isolation ward and I hadn’t lost a single animal yet. The day shift had, but I hadn’t seen them, so it didn’t count.

The following evening I found her again, drowning herself. The day shift had written “seems to like submerging head in bowl” on her card. “Have moved bowl away”. I studied the sawdust shavings. Had the listless animal dragged herself closer to the lurid orange bucket in order to end her days? Could I really justify snatching that chance at swan heaven yet again? Maybe swan suicide was against swan religion. I couldn’t take that chance. Besides, the vet had upped her EDTA dose so surely she’d start feeling better after the double injection I was going to give her. Was this not what we lived for? The healing of poor, innocent animals?

EDTA solution needs to be diluted in saline, so the higher dose resulted in two injections, one in each leg. Despite her attempts at drowning, she was massively dehydrated too. Already feeling as though I was taking this far too seriously, I popped my head out of the door and tried to catch the attention of the vet nurse as she walked by.

The vet nurse was a dedicated woman who lived on site and, seeing the state of the bird, she went to set up a saline drip. I lifted the bird from its sawdust bed and saw, for the first time, its terrible case of Angel Wing. Her wings drooped at the ‘wrist’, she was probably flightless. I mentioned, gently, to the vet nurse that it might be kinder to euthanize. But no, she wouldn’t hear of it. There were plenty of ‘sheltered housing’ lakes we could rehome her to. The next morning, the swan was sitting on the sawdust, head up, a drip sellotaped to the wall above her.

I watched her recovery over the next few weeks and it was with some delight that we released her into the outside pen where she wasn’t even tempted to drown herself in the large pool. And a large one-winged male swan took one look at her and in the golden light of the sun setting over the aviaries, reflecting off the algae tinted pond and the fluffy yellow backs of the last of the year’s ducklings, he fell in love.

We rehomed the pair together in a stately Cheshire home where they could be flightless and happy together.

 

Not all love stories end well. Particularly when I’m involved. 813 and I had known each other for a little over two months. I was working on a farm in Friesland, a land so flat it gave me vertigo. 813 hadn’t paid too much attention to me until the unfortunate few days my hormones happened to spike at the same time hers did. Suddenly I was irresistible. Some things, like laughing at small women being pursued by amorous cows, transcend language barriers, and I never had quite such a good relationship with the guys on farm as when I was the subject of their amusement.

For this particular experiment I spent a lot of time in the pen moving cows, selecting cows, and for a whole week I was also avoiding 813. Sometimes I was even physically fleeing from her. I’d be checking out my notes to find out what cow I wanted next when I’d feel a slobber-covered chin alight upon my shoulder. 813 was nothing if not ever hopeful.

Alas, when her hormones subsided she wanted nothing further to do with me and all that remained of our love was a long drool mark down the right side of my overalls.

I’ve given up on office romances. It’s all very mooving at the time, but it seems best left to the birds and the bovines.

FluffyFriday – WolfQuest Part Four!

Oh Fluffy – it’s been such an epic quest, I am almost sad to see it at an end. Warning, some images may be distressing for anyone who got overly attached to Fluffy and her little family.

 

So overall, what are my final impressions of the WolfQuest game?

  • The game represents a large block of ‘learning time’. My final save-game was over two hours long, which is a decent amount of investment from the player.
  • There are lots of little touches. In Episode Three you’ll spot some lovely play behaviour from the pups.
  • The game was pretty difficult in places, not just because I’m a poor gamer, but the balancing of demands like time, food, chasing away predators was quite nicely nuanced in my opinion.
  • While it’s great for an educational game, the production values are a problem. It was very frustrating at times constantly having to correct Fluffy’s trajectories.

But overall I really recommend it for kids who are interested in wolves or animal behaviour. The interactivity, the role play and the community over on WolfQuest.org are all plus points in the game’s favour. It’s a great example of animal behaviour learning, so it gets the Fluffy Sciences stamp of approval . . . which I’ve just now invented.

FluffyFriday – WolfQuest Part Three!

FluffyFriday returns! And this time I have actually queued up a few posts so hopefully FluffyFriday will become a regular occurrence.

Today I present you the third act in the epic saga of Fluffy and Diet Coke. It’s a nailbiting tale (tail?) of bears, eagles and glitched games. Part Four will conclude the story next week.

 

On our last Fluffy Friday I said I wanted your animal welfare questions for a possible Q&A vid with one my colleagues. I’m still looking for questions! Ask us anything, guys! I have one colleague who has almost agreed to show her face on YouTube with me so this is your chance! Anything you want to know about animal welfare, we’ll be happy to discuss it.

So until next week – have a good one.

Fluffy Friday – WolfQuest Part Two

Welcome to FluffyScience’s ‘Fluffy Friday’! This will be a semi-regular slot on the blog reserved for silly pieces such as talking about educational gaming, personal stories, etc. I figure that by having a regular slot for it, we can keep a good balance between the fun stuff and the serious work.

So what have you got this week? First – we have the continuing adventures of Fluffy and her mate Diet Coke as they try to fulfil their genetic imperative on the slopes of Amethyst Mountain in Part Two of WolfQuest!

 

 

Secondly, Wednesday’s post on anthropology reminded me of something I’d written a few years ago. I’ve kept a diary throughout my PhD and my first experiment involved me spending 12 hours a day with a group of cows over a three week period. Much of this was because I wanted the cows to habituate to me before I started my behavioural observations. As a result you get to know the individuals very well indeed.

Somewhat facetiously, I must admit, I started recording my day-to-day interactions as if I was living with a tribe. A parody of the 19th Century Anthropologist. Based on this week’s discussion I’m amazed at how pertinent this four year old piece of writing is! I present the whole thing for your reading pleasure:

I had been lobbying for some months to visit the native cow tribes of the countryside. Visas took time, the locals were not willing to invite another documenter that will fall afoul of their own personal Everest – the Cow Tribe.

Still, after much negotiating, and agreeing that I would not bring a camera, I was able to gain access for three weeks. All I brought with me was a small, slim notebook, a palm computer and a selection of gifts for the Tribe if I was lucky enough to gain access.

Day One

I’m met by a friendly local. Like most of the villagers around here their language is almost incomprehensible to those raised in cities and I am thankful for my many years in other countrysides. I need no translator and with a small amount of effort at first I can make myself understood. The locals are wary, they know I will create more work for them, and they insist I stay with them and not in the Tribe. Previous researchers have been lost. I assure them this won’t happen to me and my guide leads me to the Tribe. My initial meeting with them is a dizzying blur of their peculiar naming system and splodgy faces. There’s evidently a strict hierarchy and communication that I am clueless of. The locals are sympathetic but they seem to expect this. I leave the Tribe with some relief that evening and return to my humble dwelling. It’s not perfect, but it is away from the Tribe, and gives me some time to collect my thoughts.

Day Two
I rise earlier than I would usually in order to be present for the Tribe’s morning rituals. Their milking is evidently an important routine, but they greet it with a strange mixture of impatience and irritation that I do not expect. I attempt to immerse myself in their culture, in their worship of Feed Truck. Feed Truck is displeased today and they are not allowed to reach their feed face. This displeases the matriarch 1019. She is a large, old cow with a grey face. She is almost dinosaur like in her physical appearance, with a large arching back and powerful shoulders. She is from another era, and she completely intimidates me.

Day Three
The Feed Truck is pleased with whatever penance the Tribe had paid and they are fed in time. However, the penance appears to be that one of the youngest members of the Tribe lost her sacred collar over night. These tokens appear to have religious symbology for the Tribe. I find the collar in one of their beds and return it to the young member, allowing her to once again approach the holy feed face. Although she reacts with annoyance, I feel as though I have done something for her that no one else could have. I hope her gods are happy with her now.

Day Four
Today is a day of celebration for the Tribe, one of their members is fertile. She is chasing all of the others, even the Matriarch at times. The Tribe tolerate this for a while, but will see her off when she becomes too persistent. I wonder at their behaviour. In her position, they are just as eager to show their amorous intentions. The Tribe appear to place great significance on their fertility, painting themselves differently when they are in-calf. I try to remember this.

The locals assign me an assistant, another traveller like myself. Girl and I are allowed access to the Tribe, although she must return to the locals more often, whereas I am allowed to be isolated with my Tribe.

I realise I begin to think of the Tribe as my own and know that I must curtail this line of thinking. I do not want to become one of those others . . .

Day Five
I am beginning to understand the Tribe. 1019 is the undisputed leader, deferred to in all manners relating to the Feed Truck God and feed face temple. Her ‘muscle’ as it were is 1405, an older Tribe Member who is quite simply massive. I expect some kind of power struggle between them, but 1405 is content in her place. The Tribe members then decrease in number to the youngest ones who are small and still slightly long haired. They are wariest of me and have no desire to communicate, whereas the older Tribe members have begun to approach me, and discuss the Feed Truck God, as well as the importance of their beds and the irritation that is the sludge scraper. I am honoured by their attention.

Day Six
The Matriarch has evidently passed some kind of judgement on me for her acolytes have accepted my presence in every facet of their lives. I am allowed to be present whenever I choose and I find their company soothing. When I return to the locals I am compelled to tell them of the Tribe’s activity. They are interested, but seem concerned at the amount of time I spend with the Tribe and continuously ask if ‘everything is going well?’ I reply that it is. My Tribe is fine. The Tribe members have started to groom me if I wait long enough with them. Their tongues are rough.

Day Seven
The Tribe were greatly disturbed today by a festival that the locals put on. This involved some kind of appearance by someone the locals worship, but who the Tribe regards as a devil. The Foot Trimmer Daemon selected six of the Tribe and I was complicit in this, wishing to observe every aspect of their lives. The Tribe were not pleased with me and I was forced to sacrifice my left index finger by having it jammed between a steel bar and one of the Tribe’s horn butt. The pain is intense but I cannot react as I would normally for the local children are there, and the Tribe know this. I nurse my wounds and retreat, I feel this festival has set my entire study back.

Day Eight
The Matriarch has announced that I may stay an extra day, a reprieve for my sins yesterday. I get the sense that the Tribe has some affection for me as 1825, one of the youngest, starts to eat my sleeve. I record of this in my palm computer which they have taken to calling my little demon. The Tribe accept me and my strange ways as I accept they and theirs. It is a comforting relationship and when I leave in the evening, I am somehow . . . tense.

Day Nine
One of the Tribe’s sister groups roams in a pen near to my Tribe. One of the locals discovered that one of the sisters had trapped her head in a pen. I go to assist, and though she frees herself, I get the feeling the Matriarch is pleased with me. I enjoy my time with the Tribe more than with the locals, and I feel they even enjoy spending time with Girl.

Day Ten
It strikes me today that I misjudged many of the Tribe when I first arrived. I wonder now why I ever thought 1405 was only the ‘muscle’. She is second in command, constantly at 1019’s side and pushing the smaller Tribe members aside. Today she initiates a grooming session with me. I can barely move for excitement, although her strong licks almost send me flying.

Day Eleven
Disaster strikes. The Feed Truck God makes a delay before his morning appearance. 1586, the best singer in the Tribe, raises her voices to the heavens in order to inform them they have forgotten to send their blessed angel. I try to reassure the Tribe that their Feed Truck God will come soon, he has just been delayed, but they disagree. One of them, 1541, who is small and strange looking, suggests we must sacrifice Girl to appease him. I discourage this firmly, and sure enough Feed Truck God appears. 1541 subsides, but she does not go to the feed face temple for some time. I am concerned. Later that evening I realise she is not as young as I first thought, in fact she is one of the older Tribe members, though small. She is also wearing the paint of an in-calf Tribe member, and I am surprised for some reason. She then disappears under my nose and reappears on the wrong side of the gates I promised to man for the locals. I fetch her with little difficulty, but I am informed by the others that she is their shaman.

I return to my dwelling and wonder about this.

Day Twelve
Today my ‘demon’, my palm computer that so fascinates the Tribe breaks. 1541 is watching me from her bed, saying nothing. I spend some time fixing it but I have lost precious notes. I am concerned that the Tribe are saying 1541 caused my demon to flee. I observe their rituals, but I do not believe. If I believed I would be in danger of losing myself. When Girl comes in, 1541 says nothing, but merely turns away.

Day Thirteen
Yet again my ‘demon’ breaks. I replace it with another that the locals have gifted me and it breaks also. I am terrified, and 1541 is watching everything I do. She wants the Girl. I cannot give her that, but I can wake Girl early for an emergency as I try to fix the demons frantically. My demons work suddenly and I sense that 1541 is appeased by Girl’s missed sleep, although I am later told she would have preferred spilled blood.

Day Fourteen
Girl attends the whole of the morning milking ritual, which greatly appeased 1541. I gift the Tribe with the jewellery I have brought and hope they like it. As we are waiting for the afternoon milking ritual to begin, I tentatively begin to groom 1541. The Matriarch is revealed to be in-calf yet again and her paint is changed. This is some celebration for the Tribe, and the Feed Truck God is lenient. I am content to sit among the Tribe that evening, in the sweltering heat, listening to 1584 gently singing as she eats.

Day Fifteen
The jewellery I have provided the Tribe with is now encased with dirt and sawdust, as everything is that the Tribe appreciates. I realise that I am one with the Tribe, that I am Tribe. I lean against 1541 as we wait for the afternoon milking ritual, and one of the younger Tribe members licks the left over feed from my arm.

Day Sixteen
A local invades the Tribe’s territory to provide some essential maintenance. 1599, the Tribe’s best hunter, is assigned to investigate. She once followed a flightless pigeon all the way through the pen, and I watched as she almost caught it before it escape through the fence. The Tribe and I all agreed it was a marvellous feat to even have her nose so close to its tail feathers, though 1599 is a proud individual, and was saddened to lose the bird. Today she investigates the man very slowly, and his power tools. She captures one successfully and he is forced to move.

I have negotiated for extra food from the Food Truck God, and this wins me great approval. With 1599’s success and my own, the Tribe is content this evening.

Day Seventeen
I am supposed to be returning soon, and I barely remember civilisation. I barely remember non-Tribe living. The fumbling of the afternoon milking ritual by the new young local priest irritates the Tribe, and I share their annoyance, share their jubilation when they finally return to the pens. As we wait, I find myself falling asleep against 1541’s flank and she takes me on a dream walk. We are interrupted by a laughing local, but I am oddly touched by 1541’s power.

How will I leave the Tribe when they have so much to teach me?

Day Eighteen
The Tribe do not want me to leave. They are incessantly grooming me, their rough tongues curling around my arms and pulling me into their mouths. I am concerned suddenly about why they were so keen to sacrifice Girl. The Feed Truck God is equally displeased and is late again, the Tribe sing for him and I find myself begging 1541 as my demon begins to play up. I think I will stay.

Day Nineteen
The locals have come for me. They say the Tribe must move on to newer pastures where I may not follow. I notice 1019 has a scratch on her hip that she did not have yesterday and I am suddenly afraid for the old Matriarch. I hope she continues her long and wise life. I hope 1541 remains strong and small. I want to know which of the young Tribe will grow to be as big as 1405, and if 1599 will ever catch her pigeon or if 1586 will ever stop singing. Will 1494 stop kneeling all the time and will 1825 learn that she doesn’t need to perch on the ridge of the feed face temple to get in? All these questions I can not answer because I must leave.

I return to civilisation and it feels odd, strange. I wonder what I will do tomorrow when there is no morning milking ritual for me, and yet for the Tribe it will continue. Their lives will continue as mine does not. I will miss them.