An Irishman's Diary

REVELATIONS that Erwin Schrödinger had a dog during his Dublin years (Letters, Wednesday), and that it was a “nasty mongrel”, terrifying neighbours while offering no compensatory insights about quantum physics, has set me researching some of history’s other lesser-known animals. Here are a few you probably hadn’t heard of either.

Pavlov’s Cat

The great Russian physiologist is best known for his work on conditioned reflexes: causing dogs to salivate by ringing a bell they had come to associate with food. But his famous experiments took a toll at home, especially on Mrs Pavlov. A fastidious housekeeper, she complained constantly about “slobbering brutes, everywhere”, ruining her carpets.

So it was partly to appease her that, one day, Pavlov brought home a Persian kitten he had found wandering the streets of St Petersburg. In time, however, he himself grew very fond of the animal. He named it “Anastasia”, after the Tsar’s daughter, bought it a pink collar, and sometimes even dressed it up in pretty ribbons.

It was a double blow, therefore, when a year later, the cat’s owner turned up and, in the process of claiming his pet, revealed that its real name was “Boris”. Although he joked about it with colleagues – “How can you tell with a cat?” – the incident is said to have damaged Pavlov’s self-confidence for a period. He only fully recovered when winning the Nobel Prize (1904) for his work on dogs.

Holly the Sheep

Ever since 1996, rumours have persisted in Edinburgh that the ground-breaking clone, Dolly, had a troubled sister whose existence was covered up by the laboratory. Details of the story vary widely. But most suggest that “Holly” was unusually intelligent, for a sheep, and even more unusually violent.

According to some accounts, she escaped the Roslin Institute in 1998 by cutting through a wire fence with her teeth, and then embarked on a reign of terror against Border Collies in the area. The Roslin Institute has ridiculed all such suggestions.

Yet there continue to be reported sightings in Scotland of a rogue sheep, most recently in the hills around Loch Ness.

The Badger-keeper of Alcatraz

The fame of Robert Stroud, a convicted murderer who raised birds in his prison cell and eventually became a respected ornithologist, has tended to obscure the equally fascinating story of Jimmy Falcone, a recovering psychopath who was serving a life sentence in the same wing of the jail.

According to other inmates, Falcone’s love of badgers began one day in the prison yard, when he found an injured baby of the species and nursed it back to health. He later prevailed upon prison authorities to allow him buy a mate for the animal, after which he embarked on a breeding programme.

The authorities co-operated with his activities, partly because of the educational and rehabilitative effects: Falcone gave regular lectures to inmates and even involved them in his experiments. He also completed a PhD in prison – on the badger’s unique excavation powers – and later turned it into a book: Nature’s Greatest Digger (1941).

Around the same time, he developed a separate interest in the science of soil analysis: obsessively collecting samples and sending them to outside laboratories for tests. By some counts, he mailed more than 27,000 jars of earth from his cell during the war years. Prison spokesmen refused to comment on his sudden disappearance from the famously impregnable jail in 1946, except to say that, for unspecified reasons, he had been “transferred to the mainland”.

Mrs O’Leary’s Other Cow

When a fire destroyed Chicago in 1871, one newspaper report claimed the blaze had been started by a cow kicking over a lantern. The cow was quickly identified as belonging to Catherine O’Leary, an immigrant who, amid the growing anti-Irish sentiment of the period, was said to have been drunk at the time of the incident.

The journalist responsible later admitted his story was fiction, but not before a rival paper claimed that another O’Leary cow was involved in a racket that had driven up milk prices in the city.

With feelings running high, the second cow was kidnapped by an Italian lynch mob, which had fitted her with cement shoes and was in the process of lowering her into the Chicago River, by crane, when police intervened. Contemporary sociologists blamed the incident on an “anti-herd mentality”. Both Mrs O’Leary’s cows were later cleared of wrong-doing.

Snappy the Bush Crocodile

A very short-lived Australian television series from the early 1960s, this revolved around the adventures of a boy and his pet crocodile, who could communicate with humans by opening and closing his jaws rapidly. The series proved ruinously expensive, however: the production company reportedly losing an “arm and a leg” on the pilot programme alone. It was quickly shelved in favour of a broadly-similar idea involving a kangaroo.

The Salmon of Pure Ignorance According to Irish folk tradition, the Salmon of Knowledge was a mythical fish that ate nine hazelnuts, each of which had fallen from a different tree into the Well of Wisdom. By in turn eating the salmon, Fionn gained all the knowledge in the world, which he then passed on to his descendants.

Seeking to explain the state of modern Ireland, however, some recent commentators have suggested that the Well of Wisdom may have been at least one hazelnut short of the required quota, rendering the fish that Fionn ate completely stupid. Experts from both Bord Iascaigh Mhara and UCD’s Celtic Studies department believe that the Salmon of Knowledge may still be out there somewhere, and with it our hopes of recovery. Young people everywhere are urged to keep eating fish.