#like how it's so common to boil crustaceans alive when it's so much more humane to kill it quickly right before cooking it

[lillybean730]

im always saying this

[the-kryomancer]

In Addition of Things to Know About Monster Fortress

They all have somewhat strict diets as to what they can and can’t eat.

Dell is pretty much the only human so he eats normal human foods, but they’re mainly higher calorie foods. When using his Alchemy it takes a lot of energy so he has to eat more to refuel.

Medic is strictly blood and meat only. He eats his steaks extra rare and… is that wine in his cup? Nope. That’s just straight up blood. Sometimes mixed with ale or beer. He can’t eat garlic bread much to his disappointment because he’s been told it’s delicious. He also can’t eat Kale or anything with Vitamin C in it, for that matter.

Scout’s half Gargoyle so he has to eat the same things as Spy right? Wrong. Scout eats normal human things like Engie but he also eats what normal Gargoyles eat as well. Although, because of his mutated digestive system Scout can pretty much eat whatever he wants. So, Scout’s decided he’s going to live off rock candy, chocolate rocks and chicken wings. To help him become a strong Gargoyle, though, Spy will sometimes make him eat other types of birds or larger insects like crickets and spiders. For some reason that no one knows, Scout can’t eat anything with trout.

Heavy, even though he’s a Golem, enjoys the taste of food. His favorite food being sandwiches of course, after Medic introduced them to him. Because his digestive system is made of clay, he can eat anything he wants, as long as it isn’t heated. Heated foods will melt him from the inside out.

Spy, being a Gargoyle, eats some of the oddest foods of the whole team. His diet mainly consists of insects of all kinds, except butterflies. He also eats an array of birds, ranging from large to small. His favorite being the precious doves Medic cares for so, but he wouldn’t eat Archimedes. Spy also eats a variety of fish, ranging from common to exotic. However, Spy can’t eat crustaceans for whatever reason. If he does, he gets a very bad fungus on his neck and wings, as well as parts of his back.

Pyro will literally devour everything. Whether it’s food or not. But his favorite thing to consume is leaves and trees, mainly because he enjoys the nice greenish-yellow color the fire gives off as he consumes it. But Pyro can’t eat cold foods, especially ice cream.

Demo eats the flesh of living or dead. He isn’t picky, but if he’s honest he prefers them alive so he can soak his hat in the blood. Tavish also isn’t picky about what he drinks, but he prefers any alcohol. Except tonic. It burns his throat.

Sniper eats well done steaks, thank you very much. In human form, anyway. And he prefers meat, over vegetables but he does like the occasional corn on the cob or boiled potatoes. In his wolf form, however, he gets pretty blood thirsty. During the full moon, the team has a joke for Medic and Demo to “go walk the dog” which means take Mundy out for the full moon rampage. And yes, he can eat chocolate, in both human and wolf form. Although, he can’t eat broccoli, no matter how much he tries.

Soldier eats brains. Plain and simple. He can eat other things too, like extremely rare steaks and raw chicken or eggs. But he likes brains. The team, save for Medic, Heavy and Demo, find it rather unnerving when he eats brains in front of them. As a solution, Engie will cook brains into normal looking foods. Soldier’s favorites are deep fried brains, and spaghetti and brain. He loathes eating liver, though. But no matter how much he liked it in his human life, Soldier can’t eat pizza.

[nedsecondline]

Crabs and lobsters deserve protection from being cooked alive – Jonathan Birch | Aeon Ideas

Crabs and lobsters have a tough time at the hands of humans. In most countries, they are excluded from the scope of animal welfare legislation, so nothing you do to them is illegal. The result is that they are treated in ways that would clearly be cruel if inflicted on a vertebrate.

This might in part be because they are so alien to us. It is hard to begin to imagine the inner life of a 10-legged, faceless creature with a nervous system distributed throughout its body. Worse still, crustaceans lack the headline-grabbing intelligence of the octopus. With only about 100,000 neurons in their nervous system compared with the octopus’s 500 million, crabs and lobsters are unlikely to set the ocean alight with their cognitive prowess. They are easy to overlook and difficult to empathise with.

Nevertheless, if you care about animal welfare, you should care what happens to crabs and lobsters. Consider live boiling. The animal often takes minutes to die, during which it writhes around and sheds its limbs. Crustaceans can be killed in seconds with knives, but most non-specialists don’t know the right technique. Electrocution using a ‘Crustastun’ takes about 10 seconds, and is probably as humane as it gets, but the expense of this device means it is hardly standard kitchen equipment. Some processing plants use them (and some UK supermarkets require their suppliers to do so), but many do not, and there is no legal requirement to stun. Crabs are often still, as one recent study put it, ‘processed in a live state’. ‘Processed’ here is a euphemism for ‘carved alive’.

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Does any of this matter ethically? For many, the key question here is whether these animals are capable of feeling anything – whether they are sentient. If they feel nothing as they are boiled or carved alive, then ethical qualms about these practices seem as misplaced as they would be for vegetables. But if they do feel – if they are sentient – then they are cruel and inhumane.

So what is the reality? Are crabs and lobsters sentient or not? Can science settle the issue? Before we can address this question, it helps to be clearer about what we’re looking for. I will focus here specifically on the phenomenon of pain. There is much more to an animal’s subjective experience of the world and of its own body than pain alone – but pain is the aspect of sentience with the most obvious ethical consequences.

Animal welfare scientists define pain as ‘an aversive sensation and feeling associated with actual or potential tissue damage’. When they talk about pain, they mean pain in its most elemental, evolutionarily ancient sense – a feeling that might have some but not all of the aspects of pain in humans. In particular, to feel pain in this basic sense, it is not necessary to be self-conscious – to be aware of oneself as being in pain.

Do crustaceans feel pain in this basic sense? Over the past few years, a series of experiments by the biologist Robert Elwood and colleagues at Queen’s University Belfast has demonstrated impressively sophisticated behaviour in crabs. Here is one example. Hermit crabs live in shells vacated by other animals. They prefer some types of shell to others, and will often switch from a less-preferred to a more-preferred shell in the wild. Elwood drilled holes in the hermit crabs’ shells and poked electrodes through the holes to see how they would react to small electric shocks – not a pleasant procedure, but a necessary one to gain insight into their responses.

Unsurprisingly, crabs would sometimes vacate a shell, even a good one, if the shock became too severe. More surprisingly, the crabs traded off the quality of the shell against the intensity of the shock received within it. For a given intensity of shock, they’d be more reluctant to give up a high-quality shell than a low-quality one. This is known as a motivational trade-off. The crabs were balancing their need to avoid shocks against their other needs.

In another experiment, Elwood and colleagues found that shore crabs rapidly learn to avoid locations they associate with harmful experiences. The crabs were offered a choice of two dark shelters: in one, they received shocks; in the other, they did not. In general, crabs prefer to return to shelters that they have previously occupied. But after repeatedly receiving a shock in one of the shelters, the crabs were much less likely to return to it – a phenomenon known as conditioned place avoidance.

Motivational trade-offs and conditioned place avoidance are what I call credible indicators of pain – credible because they cannot be explained away as mere reflexes, and because they tie in with a reasonable theory about the function of pain for animals that feel it. The idea in the background here is that pain is a guide to decision-making. To make flexible decisions, animals need to be able to weigh the seriousness of an injury against other things they need. Sometimes fleeing is the right thing to do; sometimes carrying on as normal is the right thing to do; sometimes tending the injury is the right thing to do – it depends on the situation. Pain is the currency in which the need to stop, or the need to flee, is measured. When we find an animal making flexible decisions by integrating information about past or present injury with information about its other needs, that is a credible indicator of pain.

Is it conceivable that motivational trade-offs and conditioned place avoidance occur without any pain? Of course, but no one is suggesting that pain is conclusively established by these experiments. We are talking about credible indicators, not conclusive proof. If we demand conclusive proof, this will never be attained – not for any animal, not even for other human beings.

What should we do, then, in this state of uncertainty? I suggest a common-sense approach: apply a version of the precautionary principle. The precautionary principle was originally devised for environmental policy. It says, in effect: when you’re uncertain about the link between human actions and a seriously bad outcome, don’t let your uncertainty prevent you from taking effective precautions. The principle has been applied to environmental threats as diverse as climate change and neonicotinoids (or neonics), the pesticides linked to colony collapse in bees.

It should also be applied to the question of animal sentience. I have recently proposed the following ‘animal sentience precautionary principle’:

Where there are threats of serious, negative animal welfare outcomes, lack of full scientific certainty as to the sentience of the animals in question shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent those outcomes.

In short: when the evidence is suggestive but not conclusive, give the animal the benefit of the doubt.

The phrase ‘lack of full scientific certainty’, taken from the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, is, admittedly, far too vague. It does not specify the evidential standard that has to be met. This is why I have also proposed a specific, pragmatic standard: we should act to mitigate risks to animal welfare when there is at least one credible indicator of sentience in at least one species of the order of animals in question. The decapod crustaceans meet this standard. Arguably an even stronger case can be made for octopus, squid and cuttlefish, which already receive some protection in the European Union.

The phrase ‘cost-effective measures’ is also vague. So here is my specific, pragmatic proposal: when the evidential standard is met, we should bring the order of animals within the scope of animal welfare legislation in a way appropriate to their particular welfare needs. In the case of crustaceans, that means banning processing methods with a substantial risk of inflicting pain, such as live carving and live boiling.

To be clear, the precautionary principle is a guide to policy, not to individual action. In light of evidence of pain in crustaceans, you might feel it appropriate to stop eating them. That would be a reasonable reaction, but it isn’t entailed by my proposals, which are concerned with the law rather than with individual behaviour. What my proposals do entail is that decapod crustaceans deserve a basic level of legal protection.

We could wait for evidence to pile up, demanding more credible indicators in more species, while decapods continue to be ‘processed’ alive around the world. But there’s a good chance we’d regret our inaction, just as we might well come to regret our inaction over climate change and neonics. Alternatively, we could take precautions now. On climate change and neonics, it is common sense to act now to mitigate the risk of environmental disaster. Likewise, we should act now to protect decapods, to mitigate the risk of a continuing animal welfare disaster.

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[itsnelkabelka]

Speech: Foreign Secretary keynote speech at the Lowy Institute

Good evening.

It is great to be here in this wonderful Town Hall, alongside my friend and colleague Julie Bishop, and with Stephen Lowy and Michael Fullilove.

When I first came back to Britain after a year in Australia – at the age of 19 – it would be fair to say that I bore a pretty heavy imprint from my time in this country.

My conversation was studded with words like “bonzer, mate” or “you little ripper”, and on the streets of London in broad daylight I insisted on wearing the same “Stubbies” daks – shorts of appalling brevity – that I had worn in the bush until my then girlfriend said that it was her or the stubbies daks.

I am not sure how the contest was resolved. After years in the UK educational system my infatuation with Australian dress, manners, vocabulary and general cast of mind was so intense that I had become a kind of unconscious Les Patterson – a self-appointed and unwanted cultural ambassador.

In so far as my friends were able to understand me, it helped that this was the time when Neighbours and Kylie Minogue were propelling Australian life onto our screens, and when young Australians were beginning to pop up across the planet in a phenomenon that was set to music in 1980 by the band Men At Work.

You will recall that the peregrinations of the man from Down Under – how he met a man from Bombay with not much to say; how he met the man from Brussels 6 foot four and full of muscles, and he asked him do you speak a my language and he just smiled and gave him a vegemite sandwich – the point being that he was himself Australian.

And from that lyric you deduce that second characteristic of the Australians – not only a fierce sense of identity and independence, but also a truly global country, engaged with the world in a way that is positive and fearless and upbeat.

So keep those two features in your head – strong sense of national political and cultural identity, combined with a truly global outlook – as I ask you to conduct a thought experiment.

I am told that Australia has just joined Eurovision. All I can say as a representative of a country that often seems to score nil points is - good luck with that. But protract that logic.

Imagine that in 1972 Geoffrey Rippon and Ted Heath had been able by some miracle to persuade our friends in Paris that distance was no obstacle. Suppose that by her abundant self-evident influences from Britain, Greece, Italy and elsewhere it had been decided that Australia was really European; a great, glorious syncretic European country and therefore eligible for accession – and suppose the French had said oui, and Australia had been admitted to the Common Market. What would have happened?

Who would have wanted Australia to join the Common Market by the way? Let’s have a little retrospective referendum here…

Well, I think you could argue that there would have been advantages and disadvantages. Australia would certainly have continued to catapult huge quantities of butter and beef to Europe – more than ever, perhaps. But other things would not have been so easy.

I mean no criticism of the model and methods chosen by our EU friends but you wouldn’t be running your own competition law or your public procurement programmes and you wouldn’t be able to tailor your green energy programmes to suit Australia’s needs.

You would find yourselves regularly out-voted in the Council of Ministers on hours of work or the definition of chocolate. You would never have been able to come up with your own immigration policy – the fabled points-based system.

And for the last 44 years you would have had to conform to the Common Agricultural Policy, and we must face the terrible probability that the EU’s ruthless quota and intervention policies – designed to protect existing Mediterranean producers – would have meant that Australia’s now legendary winemakers would never have got beyond the first tentative vintages because the whole lot would have been compulsorily boiled up and turned into bioethanol; and there would be nothing from the Hunter valley on our tables tonight.

And above all an awful lot of your brightest diplomats would be spending their lives trying to STOP things from happening, grappling in distant corridors with brilliant graduates of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, instead of actually trying to get things done.

And even if you think I am being paranoid - even if you think it might not have been as bad as all that – I think we can look at Australia today and after 26 years of continuous growth, and with per capita GDP 25 per cent higher than in the UK, I think we can say that it was not absolutely necessary for Australia to join the Common Market.

Indeed, it is safe to say that it was not necessary for Australia to join any bloc or grouping organised on the integrationist principles of the EU.

Australia is not required to send well remunerated parliamentarians to an APEC parliament; and there isn’t a single APEC court of justice or currency, called the abalone, or whatever.

Australia hasn’t been required in the last few decades to sign up to a series of treaties designed to create a single political unit out of a patchwork of 27 countries; and no one claims that such a process is essential for Australia’s economic health and well-being, nor that this prevents Australia being a successful member of international economic organisations or a committed multilateral player.

So when we look at the forward momentum of Australia in the last few decades you can perhaps see why we in Britain are inclined to take with a pinch of salt some of the very slight gloom and negativity that is emanating from some distinguished quarters about the decision of the British people to leave the European Union.

And you can see why we might be moved to reject their notion that little old Britain is just too small, too feeble, too isolated, to cope on its own.

They say the UK is like some poor wriggling crustacean about to be deprived of its shell. I say – don’t come the raw prawn with me.

On the contrary, when we look at what Australia has achieved, we can see grounds for boundless excitement and optimism.

It is true that we may not have all Australia’s sunshine and other natural advantages; but we are the fifth biggest economy on earth, rated number two or perhaps number one for soft power, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, the second biggest contributor to NATO, we have the greatest financial capital anywhere in the world, with the biggest creative, culture and media sector anywhere in our hemisphere.

And we are like Australians in that our population is possessed of the most extraordinary wanderlust – one in ten of Britons now alive is estimated to be living outside Britain, a higher proportion than any other rich country.

Not just diplomats and aid workers either – though we certainly make a huge contribution to international activity. If you look at the five worst current humanitarian disasters – in Syria, South Sudan, Somalia, Yemen and North East Nigeria – you will find that the three biggest donors are the US, the UK, and the EU; and that is before you even take account of the sixth or so of the EU aid budget we also pay.

We are hugely proud of that record - but of course we are not just talking of public officials. We are talking about 6 m bankers and journalists and artists and lawyers and athletes and – I kid you not – a policeman from Uxbridge who tours the world testing water slides: 6 m Brits spread out across the world in a great bright throbbing web like a scene from Avatar.

And we have the chance now as we leave the arrangements of the European Union to become even more global, and when I say more global I do not mean for a minute that we will become less European.

The Channel is not about to get wider. Britain is not going to sprout funnels and steam across to the Mid Atlantic. We remain historically, culturally, intellectually, emotionally and architecturally European.

Shakespeare is just as European as Michelangelo or Cervantes or Beethoven. Indeed, when you consider the range of his locations: Denmark, Austria, France, Greece, Italy, Cyprus, Croatia, Turkey, to say nothing of Lebanon, Syria and the New World – I think you could argue that he was more European in his interests than any other great artist.

This European-ness is not just words: we show our commitment to Europe by our moral and military willingness to come to the defence of our friends, a commitment that we make unconditionally, irrespective of our EU negotiations.

It is 100 years since British and Australian soldiers stood side by side in the Third Battle of Ypres, in what I still believe it is right to think of as a fight against tyranny.

Today there are 800 British soldiers in Estonia, almost a quarter of the NATO mission in Eastern Europe, there to give reassurance in the face of any potential provocations from the east. We will continue to stick up for the rights of Ukrainians, threatened by Russian aggression and revanchism.

We will work with our friends in the western Balkans, where there is currently a political and geo-strategic arm wrestle taking place; and we will continue to help them to achieve what they see as their Euro-Atlantic destiny.

We will help our Italian partners as they face the challenge of migration from North Africa– cracking down on the vile people traffickers who put their victims to sea in leaky boats.

We will continue to argue for balance and moderation in our European foreign policy; and yes we join our friends in deploring the actions of the Turkish authorities in arresting and imprisoning journalists and human rights activists, including Amnesty International campaigners. We call on Turkey to release them from pre-trial detention, ensure fair and speedy trials, and to find a new way forward.

But we also believe that we must engage with Turkey, and that it would be a great mistake to demonise or to push that extraordinary country away from us. That is not the right way forward, either.

And we believe that this European engagement – military, diplomatic, working together to defeat all those who would do us harm – is in our interests, in our partners’ interests – in our mutual interest.

And that mutual interest is nowhere more blatant than in the negotiations on trade that are about to begin.

I wore this morning a sweater derived from Spanish sheep, reared in New Zealand, whose wool was shorn and shipped to Italy where it was turned into cloth that was shipped to China – imagine that vast triangle – where it was stitched together and then back to New Zealand before being exported to Britain, France, all over the world. Think of that woolly jumper as it bounds over borders and barriers and customs posts with not a bleat of effort or exertion.

That is how trade works today, with standards and supply chains that are increasingly global; and with the help of the excellent negotiators on both sides I have no doubt that we will get a great deal that preserves and even enhances the frictionless movement of goods that is in the interests of both sides of the Channel.

And I am sure that we will get a solution that does nothing to undermine the interests of London’s financial sector, because the real rivals of the City are not in Paris or Frankfurt; they are in Hong Kong and New York and Singapore – and in the end I think everyone understands that London is an asset for the entire continent.

And when we do that deal I believe we will create a solution that has been so long in the making – a strong EU, buttressed and supported by a strong UK, with each side trading freely with the other, and with the UK able to think about new opportunities in the rest of the world.

There is nowhere more exciting to do that than here in the Indo-Pacific; here where there is a third of the global economy, around two thirds of the global population – here where the growth is.

And that is why we have decided once again that the UK must be more present, more active, more engaged in this region. and in each of the three countries I have visited in the last week – Japan, New Zealand, here in Australia – I have heard people ask for Britain to get more involved.

And we will be here as a partner and friend; aiming at good relations with all the major countries of this region – not choosing between them. Our relationship with China, the engine of global growth, will be crucial now and in the future. As will our deep and long-standing partnerships with Japan and India. And of course those with you in Australia and our friends in New Zealand.

But we need to do more. So I can say tonight that after leaving the EU, we will be seeking to strengthen our own national relationship with ASEAN as an institution.

We want these partnerships because they are a big part of how we uphold the liberal international order, in Asia as elsewhere.

That is why last week I stood shoulder to shoulder with my colleague Fumio Kishida, the Japanese foreign minister, in denouncing the nuclear adventurism of Kim Jong Un. A man who reportedly deals with his enemies by strapping them to the side of a mountain and shelling them with an anti-aircraft gun.

That is why we stand up for the rights of the people of Hong Kong and for the “One country, two systems” principle to be upheld - and I thank Julie Bishop for making that same point when she spoke a couple of nights ago.

In the South China Sea, we urge all parties to respect freedom of navigation and international law, including the ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.

We are also ready once again to articulate our commitment to international order with money and a military presence.

That is why we last year sent our Typhoons for the first time to train with Japan, South Korea, and Malaysia, as one of the few countries able to deploy air power 7,000 miles from our shores. That is why one of the first missions of our two vast new aircraft carriers will be to sail through the Straits of Malacca, the route that currently accommodates a quarter of global trade.

And if you look at these vessels you will see that they are not only longer than the Palace of Westminster but more persuasive than most of the arguments you will hear in the House of Commons.

Not because we have enemies in this region – on the contrary, as I have made clear, we are keen to intensify our friendships – but because we believe in upholding the rule of law.

And that brings me to the final key point I want to make tonight. Winston Churchill identified what he saw as the special genius of the English-speaking peoples.

For my part I think we must be careful to avoid any such conceit or complacency that English-speakers are especially blessed; but it is certainly true that there is a series of interconnected ideas that have been highly successful, and that I certainly believe in.

They are democracy, the rule of law, habeas corpus, an independent judiciary, the absolute freedom to make fun of politicians, and above all the freedom to live your life as you please provided you do not harm the interests of others.

It is because they know that they can fulfil themselves in that way that people of talent are drawn to such beautiful cities as London and Sydney – and it is that very freedom that makes these cities so prosperous and so innovative.

And it is to defend and expand that ideal – of freedom under the law – that Britain and Australia work hand in hand; because we know that ideal is not really the property or copyright of the English-speaking peoples – but something that belongs or can belong to all humanity.

Today with Julie Bishop and our defence colleagues we discussed every issue under the sun.I must tell you that in the course of those talks we have over the last 24 hours had an almost embarrassing failure to disagree.

We are building greater global security together, and now we look forward to intensifying the trading and commercial relationships that greater security makes possible.

We both have great Commonwealth events next year – a great London Summit and I am sure a fantastic Gold Coast Commonwealth Games – and we both believe in the Commonwealth’s capacity to strengthen common values among its members from here, across Asia, into the Pacific.

After we leave the EU I am confident that Australia will be at, or near, the front of the queue for a new Free Trade Agreement with Britain; an agreement that could boost even further what we do together.

After all we already do so much. I have just met British engineers rebuilding Sydney Opera house. And I know only too well the debt of my own city, London, to Frank Lowy – now Sir Frank – a man who kept investing even in the darkest days of the 2008 crash, and who kept building even when pretty well every other crane had been removed.

We trade so much together – you sell us skateboards; we sell you boomerangs. We sell you marmite, you sell us vegemite – and I would not like to speculate on who does better on the deal.

You send us Patricia Hewitt and Lynton Crosby. We send you Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott.

Never in history has there been such a happy, swollen, distance-obliterating pipeline of people and ideas and goods and services, and as that flow increases in pace and volume let us remember that our success is made possible and guaranteed by the ideals we share. They are not unchallenged. They have their enemies and their detractors.

But they have stood us in good stead and we can be absolutely confident that they will succeed triumphantly in the years ahead.

Thank you very much.

Notes to Editor

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[readbookywooks]

The Pros and Cons

DURING THE PERIOD in which these developments were occurring, I had returned from a scientific undertaking organized to explore the Nebraska badlands in the United States. In my capacity as Assistant Professor at the Paris Museum of Natural History, I had been attached to this expedition by the French government. After spending six months in Nebraska, I arrived in New York laden with valuable collections near the end of March. My departure for France was set for early May. In the meantime, then, I was busy classifying my mineralogical, botanical, and zoological treasures when that incident took place with the Scotia. I was perfectly abreast of this question, which was the big news of the day, and how could I not have been? I had read and reread every American and European newspaper without being any farther along. This mystery puzzled me. Finding it impossible to form any views, I drifted from one extreme to the other. Something was out there, that much was certain, and any doubting Thomas was invited to place his finger on the Scotia's wound. When I arrived in New York, the question was at the boiling point. The hypothesis of a drifting islet or an elusive reef, put forward by people not quite in their right minds, was completely eliminated. And indeed, unless this reef had an engine in its belly, how could it move about with such prodigious speed? Also discredited was the idea of a floating hull or some other enormous wreckage, and again because of this speed of movement. So only two possible solutions to the question were left, creating two very distinct groups of supporters: on one side, those favoring a monster of colossal strength; on the other, those favoring an "underwater boat" of tremendous motor power. Now then, although the latter hypothesis was completely admissible, it couldn't stand up to inquiries conducted in both the New World and the Old. That a private individual had such a mechanism at his disposal was less than probable. Where and when had he built it, and how could he have built it in secret? Only some government could own such an engine of destruction, and in these disaster-filled times, when men tax their ingenuity to build increasingly powerful aggressive weapons, it was possible that, unknown to the rest of the world, some nation could have been testing such a fearsome machine. The Chassepot rifle led to the torpedo, and the torpedo has led to this underwater battering ram, which in turn will lead to the world putting its foot down. At least I hope it will. But this hypothesis of a war machine collapsed in the face of formal denials from the various governments. Since the public interest was at stake and transoceanic travel was suffering, the sincerity of these governments could not be doubted. Besides, how could the assembly of this underwater boat have escaped public notice? Keeping a secret under such circumstances would be difficult enough for an individual, and certainly impossible for a nation whose every move is under constant surveillance by rival powers. So, after inquiries conducted in England, France, Russia, Prussia, Spain, Italy, America, and even Turkey, the hypothesis of an underwater Monitor was ultimately rejected. And so the monster surfaced again, despite the endless witticisms heaped on it by the popular press, and the human imagination soon got caught up in the most ridiculous ichthyological fantasies. After I arrived in New York, several people did me the honor of consulting me on the phenomenon in question. In France I had published a two-volume work, in quarto, entitled The Mysteries of the Great Ocean Depths. Well received in scholarly circles, this book had established me as a specialist in this pretty obscure field of natural history. My views were in demand. As long as I could deny the reality of the business, I confined myself to a flat "no comment." But soon, pinned to the wall, I had to explain myself straight out. And in this vein, "the honorable Pierre Aronnax, Professor at the Paris Museum," was summoned by The New York Herald to formulate his views no matter what. I complied. Since I could no longer hold my tongue, I let it wag. I discussed the question in its every aspect, both political and scientific, and this is an excerpt from the well-padded article I published in the issue of April 30. "Therefore," I wrote, "after examining these different hypotheses one by one, we are forced, every other supposition having been refuted, to accept the existence of an extremely powerful marine animal. "The deepest parts of the ocean are totally unknown to us. No soundings have been able to reach them. What goes on in those distant depths? What creatures inhabit, or could inhabit, those regions twelve or fifteen miles beneath the surface of the water? What is the constitution of these animals? It's almost beyond conjecture. "However, the solution to this problem submitted to me can take the form of a choice between two alternatives. "Either we know every variety of creature populating our planet, or we do not. "If we do not know every one of them, if nature still keeps ichthyological secrets from us, nothing is more admissible than to accept the existence of fish or cetaceans of new species or even new genera, animals with a basically 'cast-iron' constitution that inhabit strata beyond the reach of our soundings, and which some development or other, an urge or a whim if you prefer, can bring to the upper level of the ocean for long intervals. "If, on the other hand, we do know every living species, we must look for the animal in question among those marine creatures already cataloged, and in this event I would be inclined to accept the existence of a giant narwhale. "The common narwhale, or sea unicorn, often reaches a length of sixty feet. Increase its dimensions fivefold or even tenfold, then give this cetacean a strength in proportion to its size while enlarging its offensive weapons, and you have the animal we're looking for. It would have the proportions determined by the officers of the Shannon, the instrument needed to perforate the Scotia, and the power to pierce a steamer's hull. "In essence, the narwhale is armed with a sort of ivory sword, or lance, as certain naturalists have expressed it. It's a king-sized tooth as hard as steel. Some of these teeth have been found buried in the bodies of baleen whales, which the narwhale attacks with invariable success. Others have been wrenched, not without difficulty, from the undersides of vessels that narwhales have pierced clean through, as a gimlet pierces a wine barrel. The museum at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris owns one of these tusks with a length of 2.25 meters and a width at its base of forty-eight centimeters! "All right then! Imagine this weapon to be ten times stronger and the animal ten times more powerful, launch it at a speed of twenty miles per hour, multiply its mass times its velocity, and you get just the collision we need to cause the specified catastrophe. "So, until information becomes more abundant, I plump for a sea unicorn of colossal dimensions, no longer armed with a mere lance but with an actual spur, like ironclad frigates or those warships called 'rams,' whose mass and motor power it would possess simultaneously. "This inexplicable phenomenon is thus explained away - unless it's something else entirely, which, despite everything that has been sighted, studied, explored and experienced, is still possible!" These last words were cowardly of me; but as far as I could, I wanted to protect my professorial dignity and not lay myself open to laughter from the Americans, who when they do laugh, laugh raucously. I had left myself a loophole. Yet deep down, I had accepted the existence of "the monster." My article was hotly debated, causing a fine old uproar. It rallied a number of supporters. Moreover, the solution it proposed allowed for free play of the imagination. The human mind enjoys impressive visions of unearthly creatures. Now then, the sea is precisely their best medium, the only setting suitable for the breeding and growing of such giants - next to which such land animals as elephants or rhinoceroses are mere dwarves. The liquid masses support the largest known species of mammals and perhaps conceal mollusks of incomparable size or crustaceans too frightful to contemplate, such as 100-meter lobsters or crabs weighing 200 metric tons! Why not? Formerly, in prehistoric days, land animals (quadrupeds, apes, reptiles, birds) were built on a gigantic scale. Our Creator cast them using a colossal mold that time has gradually made smaller. With its untold depths, couldn't the sea keep alive such huge specimens of life from another age, this sea that never changes while the land masses undergo almost continuous alteration? Couldn't the heart of the ocean hide the last-remaining varieties of these titanic species, for whom years are centuries and centuries millennia? But I mustn't let these fantasies run away with me! Enough of these fairy tales that time has changed for me into harsh realities. I repeat: opinion had crystallized as to the nature of this phenomenon, and the public accepted without argument the existence of a prodigious creature that had nothing in common with the fabled sea serpent. Yet if some saw it purely as a scientific problem to be solved, more practical people, especially in America and England, were determined to purge the ocean of this daunting monster, to insure the safety of transoceanic travel. The industrial and commercial newspapers dealt with the question chiefly from this viewpoint. The Shipping & Mercantile Gazette, the Lloyd's List, France's Packetboat and Maritime & Colonial Review, all the rags devoted to insurance companies - who threatened to raise their premium rates-were unanimous on this point. Public opinion being pronounced, the States of the Union were the first in the field. In New York preparations were under way for an expedition designed to chase this narwhale. A high-speed frigate, the Abraham Lincoln, was fitted out for putting to sea as soon as possible. The naval arsenals were unlocked for Commander Farragut, who pressed energetically forward with the arming of his frigate. But, as it always happens, just when a decision had been made to chase the monster, the monster put in no further appearances. For two months nobody heard a word about it. Not a single ship encountered it. Apparently the unicorn had gotten wise to these plots being woven around it. People were constantly babbling about the creature, even via the Atlantic Cable! Accordingly, the wags claimed that this slippery rascal had waylaid some passing telegram and was making the most of it. So the frigate was equipped for a far-off voyage and armed with fearsome fishing gear, but nobody knew where to steer it. And impatience grew until, on June 2, word came that the Tampico, a steamer on the San Francisco line sailing from California to Shanghai, had sighted the animal again, three weeks before in the northerly seas of the Pacific. This news caused intense excitement. Not even a 24-hour breather was granted to Commander Farragut. His provisions were loaded on board. His coal bunkers were overflowing. Not a crewman was missing from his post. To cast off, he needed only to fire and stoke his furnaces! Half a day's delay would have been unforgivable! But Commander Farragut wanted nothing more than to go forth. I received a letter three hours before the Abraham Lincoln left its Brooklyn pier;* the letter read as follows: *Author's Note: A pier is a type of wharf expressly set aside for an individual vessel. Pierre Aronnax Professor at the Paris Museum Fifth Avenue Hotel New York Sir: If you would like to join the expedition on the Abraham Lincoln, the government of the Union will be pleased to regard you as France's representative in this undertaking. Commander Farragut has a cabin at your disposal. Very cordially yours, J. B. HOBSON, Secretary of the Navy.