The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Asses on Trial, The Brown Dog Riots, An Apple a Day…

Episode Date: March 20, 2019

The weirdest things we learned this week range from animals being put on trial to the origins of the phrase "An apple a day keeps the doctor away." Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepses Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton.com. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Yeah, hydra kids, hydra wife, there are surgeons everywhere. At popular science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the

weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of popular science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Claire Maldorelli. And I'm Eleanor Cummins. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease of some kind of story or fact that we picked up in the course of reading, writing, reporting, scrolling through Twitter, et cetera. And we decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then, once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide with the weirdest thing we learned this week. actually was. So, Elmer, why don't you start with your teas? I would like to talk about taking animals to court and suing them. Wow. Yes. That's really interesting. And bad. Because what I am going to

talk about is something called the Brown Dog Affair, which was a series of riots about a terrier. Animal controversy. Claire, what's your teeth? It's not about animals. do. Eating an apple a day used to be an act of rebellion. Whoa. Wow, I must know more. Please continue.

Carry on. I knew it. I was too good. Too good of a teasers. So as a health editor, I'm constantly obsessed with understanding what is actually healthy and what is just a health foods hype, a marketing term, or if food companies are just trying to sell us stuff that we don't need. So I was thinking about this recently a lot.

as I always do at night. And after you go through the list of diseases you have that you've just learned about. Yes, that would be correct. This is my nightly calming my mind down routine. And it made me wonder about the super old saying an apple a day keeps the doctor away. Where did that come from? Is it a marketing term? Should I stop eating apples?

It's far too catchy. It's up to no good. So when I did look this up, though, I actually found surprisingly little about the origins of the phrase. What I could find was that most articles and even a couple of PubMed journals cite an old proverb that dates back to the 1860s from Pembrokeshire in Wales. And it first appeared in a publication there in 1866 with the original saying, eat an apple on going to bed, and you'll keep the doctor from earning his bread. Wow. According to some historians, the phrase came about at a time when doctors didn't have an

incredibly great track record for curing patients. Back then, we still didn't fully understand what actually caused diseases, infections, and our surgeries and operations were still pretty gruesome. Not that we are that much better. I guess we are a lot better today. Well, there was no anesthesia, as we've talked about previously on weirdest thing in our episode about the deadliest surgery of all time, which killed three people in an operation on one patient. So yeah, that alone makes going to a doctor for medical treatment sound way worse. Yes, exactly. So it's no wonder that people were fearful of physicians.

So if I was living back then, I would definitely try anything and everything to not go to the doctor, which is kind of still true today. So the phrase actually came from the public. Eating an apple was a way to avoid going to the doctor. It was essentially saying doctors are terrible, eat apples to avoid them. From a jam of paper, medical practice in the 19th and 20th centuries was crude and the public sensibly sought to keep physicians and other health practitioners away. So between 1866 and the early 1900s, the saying evolved with a variety of phrases, including an apple a day, no doctor to pay. And an apple a day sends the doctor away. People really hated going to their doctors. It wasn't until in 1913 that the saying reemerged again in a far more catchy American.

style. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. But this didn't actually come from patients. It came from big health groups. And I feel weird saying this, Big Apple, which is weird to say, because we're actually in the literal Big Apple recording this. But Big Apple, I am referring to the U.S. Apple Association. So you are right. It's kind of a conspiracy. Correct. You are correct. Whoa. And it went from like, eat an apple so that those grubby doctors don't get your money. to like apples. Everybody loves them. Yes.

You both got it. Yes. The U.S. Apple Association promoted this phrase as a way to steer people towards good health. This time the tables had turned rather than the general public using the apple as a way to rebel against doctors, doctors and other public health groups are now using it as a way to tell people how to eat and live healthily. Wow. Yeah. How terrible. The question is, though, does it actually work?

So in 2015, a group of researchers actually looked into the scientific evidence of whether or not eating one apple a day for a long period of time really does make us healthier than those who don't eat one. Was this in the BMJ Christmas edition? It was not, but I can so see that. We should do an entire weirdest thing on BMJ Christmas edition case studies. So for weirdos listening, the British Medical Journal puts out a Christmas edition every year where studies, they're not fake, but they are like sillier. Some of them do make important pieces of commentary. Like there was one that was like there are fewer female surgeons than surgeons with the name John or something. I got that slightly wrong, but the idea is the same.

So BMJ Christmas articles are usually a real hoot. Yeah, they're great. Can't wait for Christmas. So going back to the study in 2015, they published their work in JAMA and the researchers studied around 8,000 people from a large longitudinal health study called the National. health and nutrition examination survey, which is also known in the medical world as N. Haynes. Their conclusion, evidence does not support that an apple a day keeps the doctor away. However, the small fraction of U.S. adults who actually do eat an apple a day do appear to use fewer prescription medications.

Okay. I can see that. Right. Because who actually commits to that, but like Chris Trigger of Parks and Rec. Right. Right. It's definitely like a correlation causation thing where if you're eating the same piece of fruit every day as like part of your routine, you're probably the kind of person who like has healthy routines. Like brushing their teeth for exactly two minutes a day. Exactly. Is that how long you're supposed to do it for?

That's another one of my theories that I'm going to fall out. Okay. The interesting thing about apples to me, and we have a piece on this, I think that Sarah wrote on Popside.com, we'll link to it in this week's weirdest thing post. But it's about how, like, in the U.S. at least, all apples are grown and harvested in the fall. So for the rest of the year, we're just eating old apples because they're really easy to, like, pick before they're ripe and then keep in these, like, super low oxygen rooms. And then they, like, trigger them to rip in. Not that there's anything, like, inherently wrong with that, but the nutrition of the apple does degrade, the longer it's sitting.

there being not right. I wonder, you know, whether eating an apple a day in October is way better for you than eating an apple a day in March, probably. That's a great idea for a study. Scientists take note. I don't eat apples ever. Ever. I'll say it. I, um, what a rebel. I, yeah, I don't find them appealing. They're actually, they're incredible. Whoa, that was an accidental part. Yeah, I did not mean that I'm so sorry. I agree with you, Eleanor. I also. I agree with you. Although I think that apples are, of course, really healthy. They have a lot of vitamin C and fiber, and that fiber helps us actually break down and use the sugar without, like, our blood sugar as spiking and whatnot. And so that does help us live healthier.

But the idea that eating one every single day is going to lead us to perfect health is completely unfounded. It takes more than just one fruit eaten daily to avoid getting sick, rather a balanced diet with many fruits and vegetables, which all have fiber. and other nutrients is far better than food companies and even doctors saying just eat an apple. There are no superfoods. Yes. So if we go back to the original phrase, eat an apple on going to bed and you'll keep the doctor from earning his bread. That is perhaps the best way to look at it. Eating healthy was a means of rebellion.

Let's all do that. Rebels are cool. Whoa. I love it. Okay, I'll start eating apple. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back. We're back. Eleanor, would you like to go next? Yeah, mine actually comes historically before your animal tail, so I think that this will be perfect.

Yeah, that's fair. Well, I got a tip. I got a hot tip from my boyfriend who would love to be mentioned. He was like, listen, they used to put animals on trial. And I think that that would be a great weirdest thing. And it turns out that he was totally right. Throughout history, there have been a lot of people who have promoted these, like, stories, like, 200 years after the fact where they talk about, you know, like a rat being. put on the stand or, you know, someone suing a plague of locust. And a lot of them, it turns out, are not real. For example, one that I would just have to share because it's so delightful,

but I couldn't necessarily verify, is that in 1474, a rooster was put on trial for, quote, the heinous and unnatural crime of laying an egg. Oh, my God. And so that was something that someone had written down in 1624, so like a long time later, and it makes for a great story. But it turns out there are quite a few cases that are actually very well demonstrated. So there's this 1906 book that listed 200 different cases of animals being put on trial that this person could verify. And it's sort of like the gold standard now in animal trial history. And it's where we all turn. It seems that throughout history, there has basically been like a big animal, small animal dichotomy in the way that like we take animals to court.

as the author of this 1906 book says they kind of put it as this technical distinction between the big and the small. So the former were capital punishments inflicted by secular tribunals upon pigs, cows, horses, and other domestic animals as penalty for homicide. So like if you got headbutted by a pig and it killed you, that pig could be sentenced to death. Wow. As opposed to all the other pigs that just got to live out their lives. Right, exactly. Yeah, bacon. And then, on the other hand, there were, quote, judicial proceedings instituted by ecclesiastical courts against rats, mice, locusts, weevils, and other vermin, in order to prevent them from devouring the crops and to expel them from orchards, vineyards, and cultivated fields by, this is where it gets crazy, means of exorcism and excommunication.

What? So basically what they're saying is that, well, you could sentence, you know, a horse to death for hurting a human being. smaller animals than were under the purview of the Catholic Church. And the Catholic Church really said that all of God's creation were Catholics, including animals and bugs. This is sort of like the origin of the term anathema, right, which today means going against something. It was like anathema to kill these animals.

And so instead what they did is they excommunicated them from the church. And there's this really great eyeless obscure article that sort of talks about this. And so reading from that, they say, you know, one such case in the 1480 saw the Cardinal Bishop of Aten in France rule against some slugs which were ruining estate grounds under his purview. He ordered three days of daily processions where the slugs were told to leave the area or be cursed, thus making them free game for extermination. So it was basically a song and dance that if you excommunicated them and they didn't listen, then you were actually free to kill a bunch of slugs or exterminate some rats from your property. So just like a very hilarious kind of rationale. That rationale continues throughout history. I think there's actually a lot that we can learn from it.

Why didn't you have to excommunicate a horse before you killed it? Well, because it had killed someone. Oh, I see. Like things that were just nuisances. Right. I see. I understand. Like it was a disproportionate response.

If a horse was just bugging you and you wanted it to leave, you would excommunicate it. Yeah, I think that that's a good rationale. Yeah. Yeah. And then kill it. It still all ends up in the same place. In that same book, they talk about some other quaint examples of things that were going on. So rats were often sent what's described as a friendly letter of advice.

Oh, my God. In order to induce them to quit the house in which they were living. And so it was sort of like an eviction notice, but a really polite one. In another case, this is from a wired article on the same topic. A sow and a she ass were kids. condemned to be hanged on appeal, and after a new trial, they were sentenced to be simply knocked on the head. Oh, my God. It's not exactly clear what that particular tribunal made that decision based on, but it is a very hilarious outcome.

And also, who did the appealing? That's a great question. Was it whoever was going to be in charge of hanging the donkey because they were like, please don't make me figure out how to do that? I wish. That would be amazing. Well, there were animal lawyers. Wow. Yes. Everyone needs a lawyer.

Yeah, everyone needs a lawyer. Everyone and everything has a right to an attorney, to have an attorney present. And in the film The Hour of the Pig, Colin Firth, The Love of My Life, plays the role of a real animal advocate. I'm going to get this so wrong. It's a hilarious name. It's Bartholome de Cheses Nuis or something similar. And so he was a French lawyer. and in that case in a tune, he was defending the rats who had, quote,

feloniously eaten up and wantingly destroyed the barley crop of that town in France. Apparently, you know, this place was just really like the epicenter of a lot of animal crimes. And so he was actually the one to defend them. And what he said was because, you know, the defendant has to appear in court, right? He apologized in what's described everywhere is a very crafty bit of lawyering. He apologized for the absence of his client. and said that they should be excused given how perilous the journey would be for them to come to court from the fields that they were ravaging. And he actually ended up winning that case and was very well known as like the go-to guy when you needed an animal defended.

Oh, my God. Later, and I couldn't really find any more information on this, but I just find this to be like a hilarious offshoot. This guy, de Ches Nues, is described as then making his career out of defending bugs. So he moved on. Yeah, very generous individual. Really thought a lot about the well-being of animals. And I feel like there is a lot of really interesting decisions, some things to think about. For example, there was an instance in 1750 of a bestiality case.

And the donkey was taken to court because the... What? Yeah. But then listen to this. The donkey was acquitted, quote, on the ground that she was the victim of violence. Thank God. Which is a better outcome than you could ever imagine for a donkey in a situation like this

and really makes me look back on this all with a little bit of fondness. It seemed like they were really trying to do. Justice was served. Yes. Absolutely. So obviously this has kind of fallen out of favor. You're not seeing like a lot of locust on the Supreme Court stand. But it is still kind of there in a way, right? like in the way that like people will still take animals' rights to court and bring up these court cases.

Or like recently, the city of Toledo, Ohio gave personhood to the Great Lakes in order to better represent their interests. I didn't hear about that one. Yeah. So this is kind of like this evolving history. And so while we're not necessarily putting, quote, she asses, I really love that term for a female donkey on the stand, there is still a vested interest in representing, you know, non-human animals and things. Wow. That's beautiful. Yeah. I did not think that this would warm my heart, but it kind of did in the end.

Yeah. Absolutely. Justice for the she asked. Justice for all. Yeah. Really. Wow. Heartwarming indeed. We are going to take one more quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Hey, weirdos. Looking for awesome popular science merch? We've got you covered at popsye.threadlist.com. Pick up T-shirts, notebooks, mugs, and other great swag with iconic vintage covers or modern designs. Plus, check out our podcast store and rep your favorite Popsie shows, like the weirdest thing I learned this week. All that and more at Popsi.threadlist.com. That's P-O-P-S-C-I.threadlist.com.

Okay, we're back, and I'm going to talk about another animal story, a very different one, because this one happened in the Victorian era, where as we frequently discuss, everything was wacky. Vivisection. What is it? How would you guys define vivisection? Cutting something open. Yeah. Right. So.

But it's not dead. Yes. It's the dissection. Like in vivo. Yeah. It's the dissection of a living animal. Okay. Whether it's with or without anesthesia.

So it's basically surgery where the point is not to cure something. Right. It is elective surgery where it is you, the person performing the surgery, electing to do it. Vivisection was used a lot. It's still used today because it technically. applies to most researched on animals, but in the sense that the word really evokes, which is like someone standing there in front of a crowd full of students cutting open an animal to show it to them. So that people ate apples in 1800s.

You know what? This story is really related to yours. We will get more into that in a minute. This was very common at the time because you have to think of it. We didn't have any imaging technology. I mean, like X-Rae started to be a thing, but up until then, there was nothing. And even with X-rays, you just stood for half an hour getting blasted. with radiation and they showed you some sort of pictures of your bones. So to understand how

living organs behaved, it is very fair to argue that we had no choice but to cut open living things and look at how their organs were behaving. So it is not as if there was no scientific merit. But they were becoming more common, possibly because the creation of anesthesia made it more palatable, or just because medicine was starting to figure out more stuff so they wanted to do more experiments. But in 1875, there were like 300 known experiments on animals in the UK. But by 1903, there were 19,084. Wauser. Into the late 1800s, there were organizations that were not into vivisection, understandably so. The British government actually set up a commission to investigate and found evidence of a lack of anesthesia used. And they suggested banning work on certain animals,

like dogs, cats, horses, donkeys, and mule. I guess those were the animals assumed to have Animals with rights. Right. With like higher intelligence than rats, for example. Which, of course, now we know that animal intelligence is, you know, so nuanced and intriguing. But at the time, they were just like, if we don't interact with it every day, it's probably dumb. If it does not serve a purpose to us outside of the lab, whatever. But instead, we got the cruelty to animals act, which said animals had to be put under unless that would interfere with the experiment.

They could only be used once unless the experiment required multiple surgeries. and they had to be killed afterward as like a sign of mercy, I guess, unless the experiment needed them to live for more time. So there were a lot of loopholes. Lots of homelessness. Right. And unsurprisingly, it seems like scientists and other medical professionals use those loopholes quite liberally.

There's this one quote from a physiologist, Claude Bernard, that I just love. He found it really distasteful. And he said the science of life was a superb and dazzlingly lighted hall, which may be reached only by passing through a long and ghastly kitchen. Wow. Which is pretty classist since Bernard had probably never been in a kitchen and just thought it was a long and ghastly place. Kitchen is not what I would jump to when I think of gasoline rooms and homes.

But anyway, you have to pass through a long and ghastly unscrubbed bathroom to understand the science of life, if you will. So that brings us to 1903. When these vivisections are incredibly common, considered necessary. necessary, if slightly distasteful by the medical community. And people, in general, a lot of the lay public does not like them. We have William Bayliss, who was an English physiologist, and he was actually part of the pair that first discovered and named hormones. So he was doing very valid, important work. And he wanted to find out whether the nervous system controlled pancreatic secretions and was doing a lot of animal research to try to figure this out, a lot of

just like poking around in living animals, pancreases, and seeing what happened. And so he was performing one of these such experiments and happened to be observed by these two Swedish feminists named Lizzie Lindath Hageby and Lisa Catherine Chartow. There were students at the London School of Medicine for Women, which was an anti-vivisection institution. They had visited the Pastor Institute in France and been in shock at the crueltyed animals they saw. And so they decided they were going to join an anti-vivisection school. A few of them did exist.

They had the intention of becoming medical students so that they could master the science of physiology and use that knowledge to expose and argue against vivisection. They wanted to use the same language and arguments as the doctors they were fighting against. They didn't want to be just another pair of weeping women begging men to stop cutting into animals. They wanted to actually understand why these men thought it was necessary, what they could actually do to make it more humane. And so that that would give them the power to fight against medical professionals that were doing this. really badly. The brown dog in question was a small terrier. It was a mongrel dog, and it had previously been operated on for pancreas research. Suffice to say, the men involved, including

William Bayliss did a pretty extensive and disturbing surgery, but they claimed that the animal was completely anesthetized and maybe twitched a little bit, but in like the normal way for an anesthetized animal to do. But the two women said that the dog had appeared conscious and tried to to escape his bindings in front of them. And they said they didn't hear or smell an anesthesia apparatus, which comes back to their whole mission of becoming learned in medical technology so that they could actually argue against this kind of thing. And they didn't go out with this story of this dog and say, look at this horrible thing that happened. They noted it in their journals, which they kept as most educated women did at the time, and ended up publishing those journals. And this was just

one chapter in that. But it caught the attention of some other people in the anti-vivisection movement, including men, because it involved discussion of the students laughing about the state of the dog. Apparently a student, a future Nobel laureate, in fact, Henry Dale, he removed the dog's pancreas and then kills him as was required with a knife through the heart instead of, you know, chloroform like you would expect. It was an example of just how rowdy and cruel. These medical professionals were acting when it came to dealing with animals. And so it really blew up. It got reported on in a couple of papers.

And Bayliss sued for libel after demanding an apology that never came. It seemed like a big deal for setting precedent because he was saying, this is libel, like, here's what I say happened during this procedure. And I'm the smart doctor man. So you should all take my word for it. And these women who were educated, and while they, you know, had some anti-vivisection bias had definitely been there, their testimony was very counter to that. So a lot of people thought that if this ruled in favor of the anti-vivisectionist, it would put lots of doctors in peril, that they could be accused of anything, prosecuted at any time. The Lord Chief Justice called the account's hysterical, which is shocking. Long story short, Bayless one.

What's really interesting is the way different papers reacted to it. The Daily News, which was like a working class publication, asked for donations to cover the award that the anti-vivisectionists were ordered to pay. Wow. And people sent the money in. And then we'll get to that in a second. Meanwhile, the Times, that is the London Times, not the New York Times, all these are British papers, as this was happening in the UK, declared itself satisfied with the verdict. Though it did say that the medical students had been guilty of medical hooliganism. According to this paper on the subject, I found by Coral Lansbury, who was a historian and academic who specialized in the Victorian era, it really was like a class division thing.

These papers that catered to wealthy people were like, thank God the rational man has won. And the working class papers were like, he killed a dog. Yeah, totally. Obviously, like I said, the two women involved at the start were feminists. and a lot of members of the anti-vivisection movement were indeed suffragettes. And in the UK, if listeners are not familiar, the suffragette movement was like riotous. They broke things. Not that U.S. suffragists didn't go to prison, but like the U.K. suffragists were wild.

Not all of them were anti-vivisection. Some of them were like, my best friends are withisectionists. But there were some prominent members who overlapped there. What's really interesting is that other people who became really. anti-vivisection after this case of the brown dog were like members of trade unions and working class people who historically had really loathed the suffragists because it was very much an elitist thing to be able to worry about having the vote and not working and feeding your kids. I don't think suffragists at the time were doing a very good job of looking after the needs of working class

women in their feminist efforts. So it was a new for a working class people to want anything to do with suffragettes, let alone agree on a cause. And in fact, actually, a lot of trade unions really disliked suffragits because they would like do the same work as men for less money. But yeah, they all hated medical students. And you may ask why. So from this paper by Lansbury, there's this line from her that I found so fascinating that there was always considerable tolerance of medical students' boisterous behavior because it was felt that the nature of their work made such outburst necessary. So they thought that because they had to like cut into human flesh that it was understandable

that they were like rude and loud and laughed at dying dogs. That holds true to today. Well, people talk about surgeons being like the jocks of the medical world. I'm sure there are many nice surgeons out there. But it's true that it's a pretty macho career historically. I learned anything from Gray's Anatomy. Right. Doctors are people, too.

But yeah, I was so interested by how this led me into this world of Victorian-era medical students. So the Brown Dog was memorialized using the extra money raised for the court case. They built this memorial in Battersea. It went up in 1906. And it had drinking fountains for humans, horses, and dogs, which historically actually, historically, working class men had hated those kinds of fountains. because they were often put up by members of the temperance movement. And they also, they were like, what, you're saying I should drink next to my horse because we're both work animals.

But working class people loved this fountain because they loved that brown dog. And it was this very proud terrier head held high and had this really melodramatic inscription. There were all of these people who decided that this was like the thing they should be really mad about and that it was an insult to the medical profession to have an anti-vivisection statue up. And so there were these violent protests. They would, like, go after it with crowbars. At one point, they tried to light a dog effigy on fire,

but failed and threw them to the Thames. They aspired to do this with the actual statue. They also started crashing feminist meetings, including one held by a woman who was, like, actually very pro-vivisection, and, like, started brawls, like broken furniture, fist fights. and they just felt very strongly that this was a suffragist issue and that they were going to make a lot of noise

anytime feminist came to town because how dare they not want them to kill dogs? I could talk more about the protests, but just suffice to say, there continued to be riots. But eventually Battersea decided this was not worth the trouble and they took the memorial down under the cover of night. And then 3,000 people showed up to protest that.

Good. Yeah. And in the 80s, it was replaced with, a very controversial statue where the dog, according to critics, looks more like it's begging for mercy than this proud working class terrier, which I think is a good point, having looked at the two statues. They have very different vibes. I love this question of why it touched so many feminists and so many working class men.

And in her paper, Lansbury, makes the point that the working class were used to being treated terribly and had all had pretty violent childhoods as a general demographic and saw these boisterous, rich medical students. And they were all terrified of their own bodies being dissected once they died, which we've talked about on weirdest thing before with the cadaver riots. So they all thought that doctors and medical students were like boogeymen who wanted to cut them open because they were poor. And so they really felt for this dog. that was put through what may have been a very painful procedure and all other dogs like it. Once they latched on to the brown dog in its story, it became shorthand for just like the

total disregard for other living creatures that rich people in the Victorian era had in the minds of the working class people. Lansbury makes the point that suffragists, probably a lot of them had been arrested by that point. A lot of them had gone through forced feedings or had friends who had and they'd been like tied up by police. And so she feels that they felt the cause was related because they could see these animals being grossly mistreated. It almost sounds kind of like the suffragettes were ignoring the working class and the working class hated the suffragettes, but then they were both so

scared of being treated like the dog that it became like this mutual rallying cry. And it's kind of tragic that they couldn't see each other, right? Like their fellow humans. Which is still often a problem today. Totally. I was doing this and I was like, wow, it's like hashtag white feminism. Definitely. That they were like, these poor dogs. And the working class were like, yeah, these poor dogs, also us.

And the suffragists were like, the poor dogs. Definitely. So yeah, animal research continues to this day. Obviously, you know, there are institutions and companies that totally disavow it. There are certainly more efforts to do it humanely. But it is very like murky. I was thinking about this last night. And I was like, I don't really know.

where I personally draw my line in terms of like this animal research was necessary. And I don't think most people think about that. I mean, certainly there are people who totally oppose it for humanitarian reasons, which I respect. Though I think we have a long way to go in making our artificial models for testing things like surgical procedures and drugs and figuring out how the body works. So it's kind of hard to justify totally disavowing it from like a scientific and medical standpoint. But I get it. It's just something that we all still need to do a lot of thinking about.

Luckily now, it's less socially acceptable for medical students to, like, go out and, like, break furniture and attack statues with crowbars. But I still think we have a big issue with, like, the perception of, like, machismo versus sentimentality. And in, like, you know, turning issues that we should all just, like, be talking about as, like, things that maybe could be improved or that have nuance, like, torturing a small dog. in the name of science, and instead making it like, no, they're trying to change our way of life. So they're bad, and we should throw this statue in the river. I don't know. There was a lot here. Okay, so what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? Animals on trial for me. Yeah, I agree. That one case with the she-ass just threw me for a loop. Thank you so much. I'd like to think not only the two of you, but also all of the animals who's

on trial. This one's for them. RIP and peace. Exactly. Hundreds of years ago. Thank you. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms. So subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on iTunes.

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