Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
LAURA: I don't like…seagulls.
ALICE: Well, they make a mess around here and we used to feed them/
IRENE: You can kill them, too/
ALICE: And they hate for us to feed them because they really mess up this building
and wherever else they are.
LAURA: I don't like…seagulls.
IRENE: Seagulls are bold birds!…
LAURA: I don't like…seagulls.
IRENE: [seagulls are] bold…
SUSAN: Yeah.
LAURA: I don't like them things…I wish I had a gun to shoot them suckers!
Seagulls emerged from this bit of discussion as both materially destructive (a pest,
vermin), as described by Alice, and labelled (in anthropomorphic fashion) with an
unattractive characteristic ('boldness') that signified an immediate, almost
confrontational, aspect of the animal. Laura, whose contempt for seagulls appeared
most intense (indeed, to the point of violence), unfortunately gave no qualification
for this feeling.
The normative attitudes concerning human—animal relations, as linked to the
spiritual value of animals, arose during talk about childhood memories of animal
stories, and religious ideas about animals. These attitudes were primarily expressed
by our Belizean participant Georgia, who raised the issue of animals as symbols of
bad luck that therefore needed to be removed from the home environs:
GEORGIA: …if for some reason a black cat would be born/
LAURA: It would be bad luck/
GEORGIA: It would be put…out of the yard. You would have to take it like maybe
a mile or two miles and just let it go in the woods…. Whatever would
happen to it we don't know but we would just get rid of it.
Other animals were never to be harmed, however, due to their role in human
salvation. Again, Georgia raised this point, which may have been related to her
syncretic religious training in Belize that appeared to blend Catholicism and
indigenous animist beliefs:
A dove in Belize…that's the only bird that you would…not [be] allowed to
play with, [or throw] stones, you know, because it was a dove that led us back
to life. So…they would have eggs, and…I'm tempt[ed] to want to go take the
eggs, but I mean, you would never do it cause it's like you were told ever since
you were little that, 'never touch the dove, never stone the dove'.
Both the notions that a black cat brings bad luck and doves are somehow a symbol
of life and peace are common in Western cosmology. Indeed, cats—especially black
ones—have a long history of connections with black magic, witchery and the devil,
a history that legitimised torture and death for untold unfortunate felines. Similarly,
