Murder
Easy folks, easy now, for I am talking about crows.
If murdering means taking a life,1 murder is a way of making a life stop. And so I was reading about Authentic Crows and it turns out that there is more than one way to murder a murder2. You can either kill them outright, or you can cage them up.
The linked article looks at the complexities of conservation, in this case attempts to save a species of crows native to Hawaii, and that from the perspective of identity. The author argues that:
In order for this project to have succeeded in ‘conserving’ (the crow)– for conservation to be conservation at all – the birds that are held within the facility, and hopefully one day released from it, must in some sense be ‘equivalent’ to those that went in
(p. 30)
My last post here was about culture. I tried to problematize culture change, not because culture change is bad, but rather because culture is more complex a phenomena than we tend to give it credit for. Yesterday I was reading about crows and via that pernicious rabbit hole brain of mine I ended up reading about crow conservation in Hawaii. And of course, of course, I have this urge to tie it back to the overarching theme of this site, namely the 21st Century Fire Department. What do crows in captivity have in common with their fireman cousins?
They both are clever
They both will solve complex puzzles in exchange for food
And for both, “[if they are held] captive over multiple generations, then a range of additional problems arises. Foremost among them is inbreeding and the loss of genetic diversity, which is particularly difficult to manage in small populations, as most highly endangered species are” (p. 31).
For the fireman cousins the inbreeding has nothing to do with their off-duty behavior, it has everything to do with ideas. Over time the range of ideas available at the kitchen table gets smaller and smaller, until you look around and can’t tell man from beast? If you hold them captive in a small pool over a series of generations, they will congeal into an characterless conurbation.
If you change the species, and you change its role in the ecology, then it ceases to function as the species that it is purported to be
(pg. 35).
So I am still stuck on the culture thing. I have seen it and heard it a few different ways in a few different places over the last week or more. And I really want the culture to change to the extent that I believe the current culture, which I struggle to articulate the nature of beyond hyper-local scales, should not remain stagnant, but like my crow researcher asks, how much can you change a thing before it is not that thing any longer, and when it is not that thing, it can’t serve the same function, and if that function is necessary, what then? Another question that I can’t answer at scale.
In order to combat the claims of barely hidden eschatology in my recent work I must leave you with something positive to chew on.
Far from any singular telos, individuals and species are engaged in multiple forms of becoming, all of them reiterative and ongoing, all of them co-constitutive and collaborative (even if unequal). The jungle crows in Japan that have learned to use moving traffic to open tough nuts (and red traffic lights as a means of safely retrieving their contents), are just one example of what it might mean to be a crow in the 21st century (pg. 38).
There is hope that the firemen will learn new tricks, just like their Japanese cousins.
Yes, we could go on for years about murder v. killing v. letting die, just not today.
For the record, I waited all week for that one.