Cats, Dogs, Walruses and a Bit of Sex

I've always been a bit antisocial, preferring the company of animals, even though I've never possessed a pet, and with my ecological background I am sensitive to what might be termed an animal's safe space. So it was stories from yesterday in the papers attracted me.

Let's start with the good new for the cats of Walldorf, Germany ... they are out of lockdown for this year!

Near Walldorf, crested larks breed, or try to. Trouble is, they are ground-nesting birds and now very rare (just three breeding pairs at Walldorf). They have been extirpated from previous breeding areas in Switzerland, Luxembourg, Norway and Sweden. Cats are interested in birds, and ground-nesting ones are easy game, so the authorities in Walldorf have decreed that for the next three years, cats must be kept under close control (indoors or on a short leash) during the crested lark rearing season. This should be until the end of August, but has been brought forward by a couple of weeks, probably due to climate change!

Even better news for Maggie, a Turkish Akbash dog that had been taken for a walk up Ben Nevis by three women. Sore paws and exhaustion led to it not being able (or simply refusing, as dogs do) to get back down the mountain and although the women tried carrying her down, she is 35 kg, so the Lochaber Mountain Rescue Team were called out to stretcher Maggie down! It was that, or stay on the mountain overnight.

Now, for upsetting news. Freya, the young Walrus who had been enjoying lounging on boats in Oslo fjord was euthanased killed because of a perceived public danger caused by the public. There could have been, there should have been, a better solution ...

Now for a bit of sex ... from the MIT Techology Review:The quest to show that biological sex matters in the immune system.

Research immunologists at John Hopkins are looking at the role sex (chromosomes, sex hormones, reproductive tissues) has in immune responses and Sandeep Ravindran has written a lengthy and interesting piece on this.

One of the aspects in the piece that relates to my previous blog entry is a hypothesis that takes on board  certain higher immune responses in females compared to males and suggests that "a stronger immune response in female mammals could help transfer more antibodies to their babies in utero and through their milk, thus protecting offspring from infections. The same heightened immune responses that help keep babies alive also increase the risk of autoimmune diseases when females are older, but the trade-off may be worth it from an evolutionary standpoint."

There's a lot to digest in the MIT piece. The above demonstrates how interactive everyday life and evolution may be. It's a long way from Mendel and his beans.

Stay Forever Jung!

I mentioned in Sue’s blog a while ago that I tended to subscribe to Jungian psychology as it had equivalences in ecology (my profession). I wrote I may write something on that in my blog … so here goes! I apologise in advance if some of it seems unwieldy ... but that's the way psychology is!

First things first, ‘though: I have no training in psychology and while counting daisies has been part of my ecological background, the ecology that informs my thinking is behavioural and evolutionary ecology.

I use the following terms solely for this piece of writing:

transvestite, a term used by Freud; and ♀ and ♂, to avoid the use of ‘male and female,’ terms that may carry social baggage.

Dumping Freud

I was raised at a time when Freudian psychology was mainstream (if any stream of psychology could be called that). As it affected me, his work seemed to suggest that anything that was not boringly dull was some sort of psychopathological state and for me, a ‘transvestite’ in his terms, he could provide a lifetime of analysis! I found that if I subscribed to the basis of his thinking, there was some contorted logic to his approach, but as with Blanchard et al. much later, that basis made no sense to me – it was anthropocentric with overtones of moral certitude.

What I’m Not Writing About Here

To explore (even superficially) how the basics of Jungian psychology relate to ecology is an enormous task. Rather than to try and write about everything, I’m going to take topics individually. For the sake of space I've avoided some good examples of behaviours, but am willing to add some in, if it helps interpretation. Depending on whether I get any feedback and, more generally, how much time I have, I’ll explore more. For now, it’s time for the collective unconscious.

THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

So, what is the collective unconscious and how does it relate to us via ecology (in its broadest sense). And how could that help an understanding of transgendering as a behaviour?

Initially, it is wise to demystify the term ‘behaviour.’ Anthropocentric concepts such as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour are irrelevant here. A quick look at dictionary definitions supports that, in that ‘behaviour’ relates to how an organism responds to something in its environment. The following extract from Journal Psyche expounds on that:

‘The theory of the collective unconscious is one of Jung’s more unique theories; Jung believed, unlike many of his contemporaries, that all the elements of an individual’s nature are present from birth, and that the environment of the person brings them out (rather than the environment creating them). Jung felt that people are born with a “blueprint” already in them that will determine the course of their lives, something which, while controversial at the time, is fairly widely supported to today owing to the amount of evidence there is in the animal kingdom for various species being born with a repertoire of behaviours uniquely adapted to their environments. It has been observed that these behaviours in animals are activated by environmental stimuli in the same manner that Jung felt human behaviours are brought to the fore.’

(Increasingly, ‘behaviour’ is nowadays also being applied to non-animal organisms, e.g., the turning of sunflowers to follow the course of the sun.)

The last sentence in the Journal Psyche piece is significant – an environmental stimulus triggers a behaviour for which the organism has an innate ability to express. With knowledge about how genetics act (both directly and indirectly), the “blueprint” mentioned above could be replaced by “framework within which they can behave.”

In the simplest of models of binary sex (i.e., ♀ and ♂) reproduction is the goal, but with increasing sophistication, especially amongst social animals, sex, its display, and act, may have many different meanings, depending on the species. Whilst animals cannot change clothes, some do portray attributes of the sex they are not (and, of course, some do even change sex). These abilities, whether expressed in life, or not, are innate. Since transgender and transsexual behaviour occurs across races in human species, it is reasonable to assume that the ability to express these phenomena is also innate – part of that “framework” of the collective unconscious.

Jung No More! Introducing Archetypes

Jung suggests that within us we possess archetypes. ‘These are described as a kind of innate unspecific knowledge, derived from the sum total of human history, which prefigures and directs conscious behaviour.’ (Wikipedia).

This is an aspect of Jung’s work that can be troublesome, as he moves into the realm of spirituality and beyond. An example of how Jung thought of archetypes is to imagine a snowflake. The archetype is not the snowflake, and it is not the water that forms the snowflake. The archetype has no form of its own, but it directs how the snowflake and all snowflakes form. Of course, such an analogy has limitations, although in later work Jung considered archetypes to include psycho-physical patterns existing in the universe.

These archetypes can be simply considered as sub-sets of the collective unconscious that act together to create a pattern of behaviour within the framework, providing part of the route to the conscious mind. Of particular interest are the contra-sexual archetypes – the anima in a male, and the animus in a female.

But that’s for later.