"Dr. Bob!  Dr. Bob!"

OK.  Enough.  Sani's doing better with the alprazolam.  I think.  We saw him visit one of his favorite spraying locations, yester-evening and not spray it.  This is a good sign.  On the other hand, Nicole found him urinating in the guest bathroom.  The good news is that he was crouching.  He hasn't crouched to pee since he was a kitten.  Again, a good sign.  The bad news is that he was doing in the bathtub, not a litterbox.  (We later discovered the litterbox in that room had been used extensively.  He may have just needed a place to go, discovered the box was full, and used the closest alternate.)

Nicole put some cleaner in the tub, then returned to the laundry.  Minutes later, I heard Sani flailing in the tub, but thought nothing of it.  When he approached me in the dining room, I noticed he was wet, and smelled like Lysol.  He'd either fallen into the tub, or jumped into it and experienced difficulty exiting.  Regardless, he had to be rinsed before he ingested any of the cleaner.  So Nicole held him down while I used the sprayer.

Piper seems to be handling the alprazolam's side effects better.  Although he does have trouble negotiating the sharp left turn at the bottom of his stair, if he runs down them.  But his behavior is weird.  He's been hanging-out, just the other side of the door to his basement.  Not something he does frequently, or for long periods when he does do it.  Normally, when we open the door, he flees to the basement.  The last day-or-so, he's run through the door into the kitchen.  The last time he did this, the other 3 cats were in the room.  Rather than crouch & hiss at them, he ignored them -- and went walkabout, until we grabbed him and carried him back downstairs.  (He didn't encounter the dog, though.)  We started to think that this may go well enough that we can re-integrate him into the household.  Although, frankly, that remains really unlikely.

Sani continues, as before.  Stumbling, affectionate, hungry.  Piper seems to have fewer side effects.  He's larger, and that probably accounts for it.

After the dog took herself for a walk, I was on the porch calling for her.  Four sandhill cranes flew over.  They're cool.

Went out to call the dog again, a little later.  Some sort of small raptor flew past, being urged (at a careful distance) by Redwings, to depart their nesting area around the pond.  Couldn't see what species, because I don't know raptors and it was backlit, but the silhouette is distinctive.

Later, after the dog returned, I replaced the cat's window ledge in the master bedroom (old one broke after years of "reverse-diving-board" landings).  Looking out the window, I notice a good sized something moving in pond's east-end.  With the binoculars I keep next to the window (I am not a birder.  I just happen to like watching them.  And have a few convenient tools.  And books.  And write blog entries about them.  But I'm not a birder.  Mostly.) I could see that it was a spectacular Great Blue Heron.  Brilliant yellow beak, black & white head, black plume, blue-grey body -- and enormous legs and feet.

It's not the best, or most relevant, picture of Sani.  But I had to use it.

For anyone who might not know it, 2 of the 4 titular cats are male.  Most people don't know it, but 90% of male cats who are neutered at a young age don't spray.  Of the few that do, minor behavior modification (e.g., aerosol hormones) or environment modification (e.g., putting his food next to where he sprays) is an effective treatment.  For the very few remaining, drugs (anti-depressant or anti-anxiety), or major behavior modification (e.g. restriction to cage for 30 days and thorough cleaning of sprayed locations) are usually effective.  Of the 2 male cats, Piper required everything on that list, but seems to be under control, so long as he remains in the basement, and has no contact with the other animals.  Sani has, more or less, undergone all the same treatments but is not under control.  This could be because we don't have another basement in which to confine him.  He must be exposed to the other animals.

He's already destroyed parts of the house.  Some doors, base & trim moldings, and more than one room's carpet, must be replaced.  Clearly, there's no reason to replace them as long as Sani continues spraying.  Worse, Sani's spraying has recently become worse.  We need to do something.

Some internet research revealed a possibility.  Sani's current drug, and for the last 7-or-so years, is amitriptyline.  That's an anti-depressant.  In retrospect, he probably started on that drug because it was the least expensive option, and then stayed on it.  More recently, the drug-of-choice has become alprazolam (a Valium derivative), an anti-anxiety.  Sani's being weaned from amitriptyline and started alprazolam this morning.  He has most of the common side-effects: loss of motor-control (staggering & poor jumping ability), hyperactivity, increased vocalization & friendliness.  Happily, he doesn't exhibit the disinhibition of aggression, which was my biggest fear.  I don't need him taking on the dog.

Read as a list, those side-effects are no big deal.  In reality, he's driving me up the wall.  He's walked across my keyboard a half-dozen times this morning.  He's thrown himself at me like the proverbial drunken prom date, and missed, then let me brush him.  When I pick him up, he's limp (scary, given his normal wiry muscle-tone).  He's talking more than Tabby.  He staggers like his legs "went to sleep," struggles to land a jump (up or down), and can't run really straight.  (all of which catch the dog's attention)  Perhaps worst, and not a common side-effect, he's got the munchies -- bad.  I finally fed him an extra meal.  He was staggering around the kitchen counters, rummaging in the sink, perilously near to knocking glassware to the floor, pillaging the still-warm, just-used breakfast pans.  Doubtless, the dog's having taken herself for a 3-hour walk this morning contributed to my irritation, as well.  I hoped I was done with major fence work.

Well, here's hoping it works.  We'll know in a month, or so.

I put away the Scrub.  It was time to pick up the Jack.

There are 2 science-oriented podcasts that I really enjoy.  One is The Naked Scientists(BBC) and the other is Quirks & Quarks(CBC).  Both covered a study by a PhD-candidate at Duke, recently.  The research concerned the influence of biology on risk-assessment.

Imagine this scenario: Monte Hall gives you $40.  Then he tells you you can trade the $40 for a box.  There's a 50% chance the box contains $70 (you gain $30).  There's a 50% chance the box contains $10 (you lose $30).  Risk is calculated as (probability of an outcome) x (value of the outcome).  So, whatcha got he-yeh is:
1 x $40 vs [(.5 x $70) + (.5 x $10)]
$40 vs [$35 + $5]
$40 vs $40
in other words, the risk is equivalent.  You can't make a rational choice between them.

So, this Duke researcher, Sarah Heilbronner, rounded-up some Chimpanzees and some Bonobos.  Genetically, evolutionarily, taxonomically, whatever you call it, these are our closest relatives.  She put her test-subjects into the scenario described above (1, 4, and 7 grapes, instead of 1, 4, and 7 10-dollar bills -- both species love grapes).  She found that Bonobos choose the guaranteed 4 grapes, almost always (3 of 4 times).  Chimps are almost as predictable, but in the opposite direction.  Chimps prefer the gamble and big pay-off, Bonobos prefer the certain but lesser pay-off.

Of course, people try to understand from whence arises this difference.  The best-received idea involves how each species obtains food.  Bonobos have a very reliable food source.  The fruit trees from which they eat occur regularly, both in space and time.  Chimpanzees don't have that stability.  For example, Chimps are hunters.  Hunting, unless you have a shotgun, a bait-pile, and a deer population that isn't accustomed to predation, is a big risk.  Chimps hunt Colobus monkeys in large packs.  That means, if the pack doesn't find a monkey to kill, they all go hungry.  They might go a long time without finding a monkey in a situation that allows them to kill & eat it.  The thinking is that Chimps have a go-for-broke attitude.  Having found a potential big meal, they'll go for it because their biology makes them suspect the small meal might not be enough to get them to the next meal.  Bonobos' biology makes them think it's not worth risking a small meal to get a really big one -- after all, there'll be another decent-size meal along tomorrow.

Humans make the same choice as Bonobos, in almost exactly the same proportions -- almost 3/4 times.  This is interesting.  But, really, what it made me think about is Jared Diamond's work.  (Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse).

One of his ideas is that humans didn't switch from hunting-and-gathering to farming because it was (as we tend to think) on obviously brilliant strategy for our species' survival.  In fact, hunter-gatherers spent less effort acquiring food, ate a more diverse diet, and starved far less frequently than early farmers.  But, according to the Duke research, we're less like the hunter-gather Chimps, than we are the Bonobos.  This is strange, given that we're, bar none, the most successful hunter-gathers of all time.  If you accept Jared Diamond's arguments, we only became farmers because we were so successful as hunters that we literally exterminated our large-mammal food sources.  So how come we don't assess risks like Chimps do?  Seems to me that risk assessment is fundamental to the switch from hunter-gatherer to farmer.  It revolves around the question, "Do I eat what I can find today, or do I work for a lot of food next month?"  That's purely risk assessment, if you ask me.

Chimps almost always choose the potential big pay-off.  But that's just another way of saying that some Chimps choose the sure-thing.  I suspect the answer to my question is that some humans were also more likely to take the sure-thing.  Those humans became farmers.  Evolution working how it does, their offspring were more likely to be accepting of the sure-thing than the general population.  Eventually, as the number of farmers vastly exceeded the number of hunter-gatherers, accepting the sure-thing became normal.

So why am I writing about this?  Well, if you accept this chain of suppositions (and I don't blame you if you don't) then you arrive at the idea that human biology (Sarah Heilbronner's research indicates that there is a biological component to risk assessment) was influenced by a choice.  Humans evolved into Bonobo-like sure-thing-acceptors because some of us, the ones from whom we're mostly descended, chose a non-standard risk assessment.  That's amazing.  It's not self-directed evolution (no human chose to alter human risk assessment, just his own personal strategy for survival).  But it is a case of a species' evolutionary path being influenced by the species, rather than a response to the surrounding environment.

I finished Anne & Daniel's compost bin.