Komputer for Alle 1998 #6/1998 CD 6 (Gul).iso/web/ffa/wwwenv~1.org/arrs/digest/news38~6.htm/text0012.txt

Text File | 1998-04-03 | 33.4 KB | 722 lines

 Just seen the following on Teletext, but I'm sure more details will
follow:
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BBC1 Page 511
PROTESTERS BREAK INTO BEAGLE KENNELS.
 Animal Rights campaigners have broken into kennels which breed
beagles for laboratory experiments.
 Around 200 people came to the kennels in Ross-On-Wye and some broke
through a police cordon and entered the area where the dogs are kept.
 Others laid wreaths outside for all the animals killed in
laboratories.
 The protest was held to co-incide with "World Day For Laboratory
Animals".
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BBC1 Page 117
ACTIVISTS STORMLAB TEST DOG KENNELS.
 Animal Rights campaigners have stormed dog kennels which breed
beagles for laboratory experiments.
 The protest, organised to co-incide with World Day for Laboratory
Animals, attracted over 200 people.
 The Ross-On-Wye demo was expected to be peaceful, but dozens of
protesters broke through a police cordon.
 Demonstraters claimed that police has used CS spray to disperse the
crowd. Several people have been arrested.
-
ITV Page 315
ARRESTS AT ANIMAL RIGHHTS DEMO
 Several Animal Rights campaigners have been arrested during a
demonstration at a kennels which breeds beagles for laboratory
experiments.
 Around 200 people are at the demonstration at Ross-On-Wye, organised
to co-incide with World Day for Laboratory Animals.
 At least 6 people have been arrested, Herefordshire police have
said.
Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 09:40:17 -0700
>From: Andrew Gach <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail]
Subject: Pepper spray for elephants
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Marauding elephants feel the heat

N.Y. Times News Service

(April 19, 1997 01:19 a.m. EDT) - A pepper spray that deters elephants
from raiding farms is being developed by a zoologist at the University
of Cambridge and by an inventor in Pennsylvania.

"In Asia, elephants destroy crops each year," says Loki Osborn, the
Cambridge zoologist. The problem is also increasing in Africa, Osborn
says, as elephants are attracted to this rich source of food.

On both continents, the traditional way of combating the problem is to
try to frighten the animals away by shouting at them, beating drums and
throwing rocks. Elephants that raid crops are also shot.

"In Zimbabwe at least a hundred elephants are killed each year during
problem animal-control actions," Osborn says, "but this does little to
reduce crop damage." Osborn is working with Jack Birochak, an inventor
based in Valley Forge, Pa., who has developed pepper sprays to deter
grizzly bears.

The spray can holds around 1 kilogram of a mixture of chilli pepper and
oil. Because of the obvious difficulties of operating a spray can close
to a wild elephant, Birochak is developing a compressed air launcher
that can throw the can as far as 200 meters.

The launcher is aimed at an area near the elephants, and when the can
hits the ground it begins spraying. Alternatively, it can be set to
start spraying in midair. Tests on wild elephants in Zimbabwe have shown
that pepper spray does work.

"The elephant, with its long nose lined with mucous membrane, has one of
the most acute -- and sensitive -- senses of smell in the animal
kingdom," Osborn says. In the tests, he says, the elephants would first
freeze, then blow their noses before leaving quickly. The chilli causes
no permanent harm.

Osborn hopes that tests of the compressed air launcher this spring in
Cambridge will prove that the system is reliable.

"The next step will be to test it on elephants in Zimbabwe this summer."

(This article is excerpted from New Scientist, a weekly science and
technology magazine based in London.)
Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 18:08:55 +-100
>From: Dave Shepherdson <[e-mail]>
To: "'[e-mail]'" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Beagle Farm
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"


Ross on Wye   UK  19/4/97


300 AR activists demonstrated at Consort Beagles, an experimental beagle breeder.  Despite
being confronted by police in riot gear using CS gas sprays demonstrators managed to get into the
farm. 2 beagles were taken but unfortunaly later recaptured by the police. Several demonstrators
were injured and 10 arested.


NARC

Newcastle Animal Rights Co-illition
Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 18:13:32 -0400
>From: "H. Morris" <[e-mail]>
To: "[e-mail]" <[e-mail]>
Subject: (TW)peta protests pig slaughter
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Mime-Version: 1.0
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c The Associated Press

      By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN
      TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) - Taiwan has bludgeoned, electrocuted or
buried alive hundreds of thousands of pigs in a ``violent killing
spree'' to curb an epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease, an animal
rights group charges.
      The Virginia-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
urged Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui in a statement Wednesday to
end the ``torture and violent slaughter'' of pigs and give them a
``humane death.''
      ``The pigs are dying screaming helplessly and in excruciating
pain,'' the group said.
      The government's Agriculture Council said Thursday that the
slaughter was being conducted as humanely as possible. In the early
rush to control the disease, workers lacked proper equipment, but
now all are using electrocution, said Chen Chung-chang, vice
director of the Animal Industry Department.
      Foot-and-mouth disease is caused by a highly contagious virus,
but it does not harm humans. Pigs bleed and develop sores on the
mouth and trotter. The animals do not eat and ultimately must be
killed.
      The government ordered mass inoculations and selective,
preemptive slaughter, mobilizing army conscripts to kill pigs and
take the carcasses to incinerators and burial pits.
      Television has shown graphic images of older pigs being pushed
into pits to be buried alive and younger pigs being electrocuted.
      About 1 million pigs have been slaughtered, government figures
show. Chen said 100,000 to 200,000 pigs are being slaughtered a
day, and about 2 million will be killed before the job is done in
two weeks.
      Since the outbreak, pork prices have plummeted and the
government has promised huge loans to farmers. The disease has hit
1,299 farms, where about 2.6 million pigs are raised.
Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 18:14:15 -0400
>From: "H. Morris" <[e-mail]>
To: "[e-mail]" <[e-mail]>
Subject: McMurder
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

.c The Associated Press

      By HERBERT G. McCANN
      CHICAGO (AP) - McDonald's Corp. said Thursday its first-quarter
earnings rose 14 percent, helped by better advertising, improved
operations and its Monopoly game promotion.
      The nation's leading hamburger chain earned $344.5 million, or
49 cents per share, in the quarter ended March 31, compared with
$301.6 million, or 42 cents per share, a year ago.
      To lure customers, the restaurant chain used the Monopoly game
campaign and aggressive advertising for lower-price Chicken
McNuggets. Last week, it began giving away Teenie Beanie Babies
with purchases of Happy Meals.
      The first-quarter results were in line with analysts'
expectations, but the company's stock slipped 50 cents to close at
$49.87 1/2 cents per share on the New York Stock Exchange.
      Sales were $7.8 billion in the first quarter, up from $7.3
billion a year ago.
      ``Despite the extremely competitive U.S. operating environment,
we delivered impressive growth in U.S. sales and operating income,
exceeding our expectations,'' said McDonald's chairman and CEO
Michael Quinlan.
      ``We are poised to have a strong year outside the U.S., despite
a slow start attributable to weak economies in several major
international markets.''
      The Oak Brook, Ill.-based company reported good results from its
U.S. operations, reversing the trend in recent years of stagnating
same-store sales - a key measure of sales in locations open at
least a year.
      Operating income rose 5 percent, the first in seven quarters,
attributed in part to successful marketing and promotion. It also
cited the 607 restaurants added in the 12 months ending March 31.
      Jack Greenberg, chairman of McDonald's USA operations, said it
was the highest percentage increase in operating income since 1994.
Growth was tempered somewhat by higher costs.
      ``Same store sales have been flat to down for a year and a
half,'' Oakes said. ``McDonald's has seen some erosion of market
share. That erosion has been stemmed and we are seeing improved
signs of life.''
      A sales gain of 7 percent outside the United States was
primarily due to a 27 percent increase in the number of restaurants
operating internationally.
      Quinlan said McDonald's plans to add between 2,400 and 2,800
restaurants this year, with more than 70 percent outside the United
states.
      There are currently 21,276 McDonald's worldwide.
Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 18:14:54 -0400
>From: "H. Morris" <[e-mail]>
To: "[e-mail]" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Chicken Plant a Human Nightmare too
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

.c The Associated Press

      WASHINGTON (AP) - A Georgia poultry company will pay $608,000 to
settle a government complaint that originated after two employees
lost fingers and a third lost a foot in chicken-processing
machinery.
      The settlement with Cagle's Inc. was reached Tuesday in Atlanta
with officials of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration
and announced Thursday by the Labor Department.
      Acting Labor Secretary Cynthia Metzler said Cagle's promised to
hire additional staff to provide safety training both at its plant
in Macon, Ga., where the accident occurred, and throughout the
company. Cagle's also agreed to provide OSHA with monthly reports
on inspection procedures designed to avoid employee injuries.
      ``The settlement agreement furthers the efforts of both OSHA and
Cagle's to provide safe workplaces and avoids the burden of
prolonged litigation,'' Metzler said.
      OSHA last month proposed $1.27 million in fines against Cagle's,
accusing the poultry company of 23 deliberate violations of federal
employee safety rules and three serious violations.
      Inspectors said the company failed to ensure that hazardous
machinery at its Macon processing plant was turned off and locked
during repair, maintenance and servicing work.
      Cagle's has some 3,550 employees nationwide, including about 900
at its Macon plant. It produces deboned chicken and chicken parts
for groceries, fast-food stores and restaurants, mainly in the
Southeast.
Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 23:51:14 +0000
>From: "Miggi" <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail]
Subject: [UK] Consort Beagle Breeders (update)
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>

Just seen an update on Teletext
-
ITV Page 315
PROBE INTO ANIMAL RIGHTS DEMO
 A police enquiry has been launched after 23 Animal Rights activists
were arrested after a violent attack on a puppy breeding centre.
 Police wearing riot gear used CS spray after protesters stormed the
beagle breading premises of Consort Kennels of Ross-On-Wye in
Herefordshire.
 The premises are being guarded by security staff and police.
-
BBC Page 117
INQUIRY AFTER ACTIVISTS STORM KENNELS
 A police enquiry has been launched after 23 Animal Rights protesters
were arrested for storming a kennels which breeds beagles for lab
experiments.
 Officers in riot gear used CS spray against the demonstrators
during the incident at Harewood in Herefordshire.
 Several police officers were said to have been injured by the
protesters, with one being knocked unconscious.
 Detectives say they will be studying video film taken at the scene.
Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 19:51:58 -0400
>From: Vegetarian Resource Center <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail]
Subject: With Cloning of a Sheep, Ethical Ground Shifts
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Mime-Version: 1.0
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February 24, 1997
New York Times

With Cloning of a Sheep, Ethical Ground Shifts

          By GINA KOLATA

When a scientist whose goal is to turn animals into drug
factories announced inBritain on Saturday, February 22
that his team had cloned a sheep, the last practical barrier
in reproductive technology was breached, experts say,
and with a speed that few if any scientists anticipated.

Now these experts say the public must come to grips with
issues as grand as the possibility of making carbon copies of
humans and as mundane, but important, as what will happen to
the genetic diversity of livestock if breeders start to clone
animals.

For starters, quipped Dr. Ursula Goodenough, a cell biologist at
Washington University in St. Louis (formerly of Harvard),
with cloning, "there'd be no need for men."

But on a more serious note, Dr. Stanley Hauerwas, a divinity
professor at Duke University, said that those who wanted to
clone "are going to sell it with wonderful benefits" for medicine
and animal husbandry. But he said he saw "a kind of drive
behind this for us to be our own creators."

Dr. Kevin FitzGerald, a Jesuit priest and a geneticist at Loyola
University in Maywood, Ill., cautioned that people might not
understand clones. While a clone would be an identical, but
much younger, twin of the adult, people are more than just the
sum of their genes. A clone of a human being, he said, would
have a different environment than the person whose DNA it
carried and so would have to be a different person. It would even
have to have a different soul, he added.

The cloning was done by Dr. Ian Wilmut, a 52-year-old
embryologist at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh. Wilmut
announced on Saturday that he had replaced the genetic
material of a sheep's egg with the DNA from an adult sheep and
created a lamb that is a clone of the adult. He is publishing his
results in the British journal Nature on Thursday.

While other researchers had previously produced genetically
identical animals by dividing embryos soon after they had been
formed by eggs and sperm, Wilmut is believed to be the first to
create a clone using DNA from an adult animal. Until now,
scientists believed that once adult cells had differentiated -- to
become skin or eye cells, for example -- their DNA would no
longer be usable to form a complete organism.

Wilmut reported that as a source of genetic material, he had
used udder, or mammary, cells from a 6-year-old adult sheep.
The cells were put into tissue culture and manipulated to make
their DNA become quiescent. Then Wilmut removed the
nucleus, containing the genes, from an egg cell taken from
another ewe. He fused that egg cell with one of the adult
udder cells.

When the two cells merged, the genetic material from the adult
took up residence in the egg and directed it to grow and divide.
Wilmut implanted the developing embryo in a third sheep, who
gave birth to a lamb that is a clone of the adult that provided its
DNA. The lamb, named Dolly, was born in July and seems
normal and healthy, Wilmut said.

In an interview, Wilmut said he wanted to create new animals
that could be used for medical research, and he dismissed the
notion of cloning humans. "There is no reason in principle why
you couldn't do it," he said. But he added, "All of us would find
that offensive."

Yet others said that might be too glib. "It is so typical for
scientists to say they are not thinking about the implications of
their work," said Dr. Lee Silver, a biology professor at Princeton
University. Perhaps, he added, "the only way they can validate
what they are doing is to say they are just doing it in sheep."

Few experts think that sheep or other farm animals would be the
only animals to be cloned. While cloning people is illegal in
Britain and several other countries, John Robertson, a law
professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies
reproductive rights and bioethics, said there were no laws
against it in the United States.

If such a law was passed, Silver said, doctors could set up
clinics elsewhere to offer cloning. "There's no way to stop it,"
Silver said. "Borders don't matter."

Dr. Ronald Munson, an ethicist at the University of Missouri at
St. Louis, said the cloning itself was relatively simple. "This
technology is not, in principle, policeable," he said. "It doesn't
require the sort of vast machines that you need for
atom-smashing. These are relatively standard labs. That's the
amazing thing about all this biotechnology. It's fundamentally
quite simple."

One immediate implication of cloning, Silver said, would be for
genetic engineering: custom-tailoring genes. Currently,
scientists are unable to take a gene and simply add it to cells.
The process of adding genes is so inefficient that researchers
typically have to add genes to a million cells to find one that
takes them up and uses them properly. That makes it very
difficult to add genes to an embryo -- or a person -- to correct a
genetic disease or genetically enhance a person, Silver said.
But now, "it all becomes feasible," he said.

After adding genes to cells in the laboratory, scientists could fish
out the one cell in a million with the right changes and use it to
clone an animal -- or a person. "All of a sudden, genetic
engineering is much, much easier," Silver said.

Wilmut is hoping that the genes for pharmacologically useful
proteins could be added to sheep mammary cells and that the
best cells could be used for cloning. The adult cloned sheep
would produce the proteins in their milk, where they could be
easily harvested.

Because cloning had been considered so far-fetched, scientists
had discouraged ethicists from dwelling on its implications, said
Dr. Daniel Callahan, a founder of the Hastings Center, one of
the first ethics centers.

In the early 1970s, "there was an enormous amount of
discussion about cloning," Callahan said, and ethicists mulled
over the frightening implications. But scientists dismissed these
discussions as idle speculation about impossible things,
Callahan recalled, and urged ethicists not to dwell on the topic.

"A lot of scientists got upset," Callahan said. "They said that this
is exactly the sort of thing that brings science into bad repute
and you people should stop talking about it."

In the meantime, however, cloning had captured the popular
imagination. In his 1970 book, "Future Shock," Alvin Toffler
speculated that "cloning would make it possible for people to
see themselves anew, to fill the world with twins of themselves."

Woody Allen's 1973 movie "Sleeper" involved a futuristic world
whose leader had left behind his nose for cloning purposes.
Allen played a character charged with cloning to bring the leader
back. A later movie, "The Boys From Brazil," released in 1978,
involved a Nazi scheme to clone multiple Hitlers. That same
year, a science writer, David Rorvik, published a book, "In His
Image: The Cloning of a Man," that purported to be the true story
of a wealthy man who had secretly had himself cloned but was
found to be a hoax.

But gradually, the notion disappeared from sight, kept alive only
in the animal husbandry industry, where companies saw a huge
market for cloned animals and where the troubling ethical
implications of cloning could be swept aside.

Now these questions are back to haunt ethicists and
theologians.

Clones of animals, FitzGerald said, might sound appealing --
scientists could clone the buttery Kobe beef cattle or the
meatiest pigs, for example. But these cloned creatures would
also share an identical susceptibly to disease, he cautioned. An
entire cloned herd could be wiped out overnight if the right virus
swept through it.

FitzGerald wondered if people would actually try to clone
themselves. "Because we have all this technology and we have
this ability," he said, "we can spin off these fantasies. But that
doesn't mean we'd do it. It would be going against everything we
desire for the human race."

Others are less sure. Robertson can envision times when
cloning might be understandable. Take the case of a couple
whose baby was dying and who wanted, literally, to replace the
child. Robertson does not think that would be so reprehensible.

Cloning might also be attractive to infertile couples who want
children and who "want to be sure that whatever offspring they
have has good genes," Robertson said.

Of course, there are legal issues, Robertson said, like the issue
of consent. "Would the person being cloned have an intellectual
property right or basic human right to control their DNA?" he
asked. If the person did, and consented to the cloning, would
cloning be procreation, as it is now understood?

Robertson thinks not. After all, he said, "replication is not
procreation."


Other Places of Interest on the Web
"Sheep Cloned by Nuclear Transfer",
     report by Dr. Wilmut on an earlier experiment
     at the Roslin Institute
MedWeb: Bioethics, a web directory
The Roslin Institute in Edinburgh
Should We Clone Animals? from the Society, Religion and
Technology Project of the Church of Scotland
Nature, international weekly journal of science
     (registration required, free)

Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 20:05:41 -0400
>From: Vegetarian Resource Center <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail]
Subject: Jane Goodall's Chimps Go Digital
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Mime-Version: 1.0
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February 20, 1996


Jane Goodall's Chimps Go Digital

          By JANE E. BRODY

LOS ANGELES -- HOLD on to your mouse: Jane Goodall's
Gombe chimps are going digital. No, these wild
anthropoids have not yet learned to use the computer, but any
human who can, will be able to discover billions of bytes about
their behavior without ever having to leave a desktop PC.

By the time the ambitious project is completed, Gary Seaman,
a professor of anthropology at the University of
Southern California here, whose real specialty is
Chinese ritual, will have created some 200 CD-ROM's
of Gombe chimps in action, complete with highly descriptive
texts, maps and other materials gleaned from 32 years of
laborious field research by the world's most famous observer of
primate behavior.

Both field biologists, and anthropologists who are also using the
technique to store observations of humans, say the interactive
computer disks, and the videos from which they are being
made, represent an incomparable resource, not only for
students but also for researchers who have long depended on
note-taking, audio recordings and somewhat subjective
observations.

Dr. Seaman, who is director of the Center for Visual
Anthropology at USC, has already created, with his colleague
Homer Williams, a research archive of about 40 CD-ROM's on
the Yanomamo Indians of South America, who have been
studied for 32 years by Dr. Napoleon Chagnon, anthropologist
at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

That archive is available for researchers to use at the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Chagnon, who called the new approach "probably the most
powerful thing I've seen, not only for teaching but also for
research," predicted that "it will be the wave of the future, an
easy way to tap into a vast amount of information" that
heretofore had been available to only one or two people.

Dr. Jane B. Lancaster, an anthropologist at the University of
New Mexico, said the computer technique will permit "a level of
analysis never before available in field biology." And Dr. Frans
de Waal, psychologist and anthropologist at Emory University in
Atlanta, predicted that through videos and digitized material,
"there will probably be a time when theories can be tested in an
office anywhere, without going into the field."

In extolling the virtues of film, Dr. Christopher Boehm, director of
the Jane Goodall Research Center at the University of Southern
California here, said the human eye is necessarily selective.
Send a trained observer into the field with pen and notebook
and you will get lots of data, but only about activities the
observer thought relevant at the time and only those activities
the observer had time to record.

The video camera, Dr. Boehm said, records anything
and everything the chimps do while the lens is pointed
at them and the motor is running.

So in 1986, two years after joining the Goodall project in
Tanzania's Gombe National Park, Dr. Boehm started a jungle
film school. In an intensive two-week course, he trained Ms.
Goodall's Tanzanian field assistants in the operation of
mini-video cameras.

These assistants, who have on average a third-grade education,
were already experts at watching chimps for hours on end and
writing down what they saw in field-observer code. And none
have totally abandoned pen and notebook in favor of the new
research tool, Dr. Boehm said, since observers with
synchronized watches go out in pairs or groups and one
observer always takes detailed, timed notes while another does
the filming.

"With a video camera," he explained, "you don't need to be an
expert photographer to get a lot of terrific footage. You just point
and shoot. With our diminutive cameras, we can film the chimps
anywhere they go at anything they do. Not only does the camera
record the action in its entirety, it also picks up the
accompanying vocalizations" and can record comments from
the observer. He said the hardest part had been recharging the
batteries in the jungle, where a gasoline generator and solar
batteries must substitute for electrical outlets.

In the near-decade since the video project began, nearly 600
hours of videotaped behavior, including virtually every
vocalization the chimps make, have been recorded. About 150
hours of the best material are being coded and digitized for
computer read-out on CD-ROM's in a project Dr. Seaman calls
"Virtual Chimps." Eventually, Dr. Seaman said, Virtual Chimps
may be available on the Internet so that anyone anywhere with a
computer and access to the World Wide Web could study the
Gombe chimps in living color fully annotated with descriptions
based on Ms. Goodall's 333-word lexicon of chimp activities.

Perhaps most valuable to the researcher are the videos from
which the computer disks are derived. The films have already
yielded some surprising interpretations and reinterpretations of
chimp behaviors. For example, the alpha male, Goblin, of Ms.
Goodall's study animals, was observed one day running up a
tree and tossing two fighting females toward the ground. Initially,
Gombe scientists thought that Goblin was just being a typical
aggressive male expressing his dominance.

But when the video was viewed over and over again, it became
obvious that Goblin was acting more the peacemaker than the
warrior. He had tossed the females from their tree-top perch to
break up their fight; as they fell, they had to let go of one another
so they could grab branches to avoid hitting the ground. Goblin
then raced up and down the tree, chasing one of the females up
and the other down and making sure they did not try to resume
their dispute.

"This was an ingenious way to stop the fight," said Dr. Boehm.
As a cultural anthropologist who originally studied conflict and
conflict resolution among Mountain Serbs, he took readily to Ms.
Goodall's training to study similar behaviors in chimpanzees.
"The video made an ex post facto microanalysis possible. Often
in the field, things happen very rapidly and involve many
individuals. Even the very best observer would have very great
difficulty recording it all. But not the camera."

In another tell-tale video, Goblin was leading a troop on patrol
when the animals caught sight of an enemy troop approaching.
Would the encounter result in a screaming match, or a fight, or
would one or both troops retreat?

What the camera recorded, in Dr. Boehm's interpretation, was a
group "decision" about how best to proceed. Dr. Boehm said
one member of the troop began to vocalize softly, then choked
off his sounds and turned to look at his leader, Goblin, who then
rushed past him to get a better look at the enemy. Goblin looked
at the chimp who served him as a sort of first mate and at the
chimp who issued the initial scream. Within 54 seconds, after
having visually "consulted" with his mates, Dr. Boehm said,
Goblin made a decision and the entire troop began screaming
and hooting and jumping about in a display of their toughness.
The approaching troop did the same, and after a while both
troops withdrew and went home.

"Without the opportunity to view this encounter literally dozens of
times on the video, I never would have seen this exchange of
glances, almost like a conference, which resulted in a group
decision about how to behave," Dr. Boehm said in an interview.
"If the incident had been recorded on paper by a field assistant,
we would have had a reasonably detailed description of the
actions, but the information would never have come across as a
decision."

Even the super expert, Jane Goodall, is sometimes baffled by
field observations that become explicable once seen on a video
screen. For example, Ms. Goodall was filming two young
chimps, Fanny and her baby sister Flossi, who were frolicking at
the side of a stream while their mother, Fifi, dozed nearby. The
youths were looking at something in the water, "their reflection,
perhaps," Ms. Goodall surmised. At 10 or 15 feet from the
animals, which is the closest researchers allow themselves to
get, she could not tell what was so fascinating.

Suddenly Flossi went to a nearby tree, broke off a branch,
stripped it of leaves, and returned to the stream. She began
poking the stick into the stream as if "termiting the water," Ms.
Goodall said, then putting the wet end to her mouth. This is the
technique the chimps use to extract termite meals from a
mound, but Ms. Goodall remarked that she'd "never seen this
before" in water.

Was Flossi "termite fishing" in the stream? Using the stick as a
sponge to get a drink? Or what? Enlarged on the screen and
viewed frame by frame, the video provided new insights, Dr.
Seaman said. Having seen her elders use a stick tool to collect
termites, Flossi seemed to be trying to use the same technique
to extract tadpoles from the stream. And had the stream housed
clutching crawfish instead of slippery tadpoles, Flossi's
experiment might have succeeded and a chimp "invention"
would have been born.

"A researcher could go into the whole corpus of video tapes and
look for segments where the observer couldn't figure out what
was happening," Dr. Seaman said. "The videos provide a
powerful tool for new discoveries and for testing hypotheses."

But even videos have their limitations, the scientists said.
Though film is more objective than human observations, a
human decision-maker determines where to point the camera.
And not everyone has the time or patience to watch hundreds of
hours of film to find a few examples of the behavior they wish to
study. "Films don't have page numbers," Dr. Seaman noted.
Hence the CDs. They will, in effect, serve as a quick-access
library. By requesting any topic in the "card catalogue," any and
all examples of the topic can be viewed on the computer in
minutes.

But it will take several years to compress the already voluminous
and still-growing amount of video data into computer memory
and annotate it properly. The main obstacle right now is the
large amount of money Dr. Boehm needs to get hundreds of
hours of video plus the written and spoken field notes coded into
small pieces of information that the computer can handle. Dr.
Seaman's job is setting up the computerized retrieval system so
that all this material can be digitized and called up on a screen
in a sophisticated way that saves incredible amounts of time.

Dr. Seaman is also thinking about making some of the
computerized material three-dimensional so that viewers with
wrap-around goggles could experience Virtual Chimps as virtual
reality, in the field at Gombe with the world's most studied
primates. It is a task that at the moment Gary Seaman finds
exciting.

Similar projects are under way elsewhere. For example, at the
Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund at Rutgers University in New
Brunswick, N.J., material on the mountain gorillas of Rwanda is
being gathered and digitized. And Denise Herzing, director of
the Wild Dolphin Project in Jupiter, Fla., is interested in adapting
the method to her study of spotted dolphins.

As Dr. Seaman said, "The technique can be used with any kind
of field observations, making visual data available worldwide to
anyone who wants to use it. It's an idea whose time has come."

Date: Sun, 20 Apr 1997 22:03:54 -0400
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