Christmas has passed and I am very sure that many parents have given animals to their children. I won’t beat around the bush. If you have a pet and you treat it with affection and love, that animal is going to have a wonderful life, but if you consider it a gift and you get tired of it at the first change, reconsider giving animals for life and, Please don’t abandon them.
I have been living with animals all my life. Several parakeets, several dogs, several guinea pigs and… ferrets. Lots of ferrets lately. They are very peculiar animals, intelligent and, why not say it, bastards. Don’t let its friendly appearance fool you. They can be adorable, but they are very complicated to have at home if you don’t have any prior knowledge. Disney or Pixar romanticize the appearance and treatment of animals by making, for example, a tiger appear cuddly like a domestic cat; a bear as a big soft stuffed animal that you want to hug or a rat can move around a kitchen handling food and the diners agree because potatoes, never better said. The reality is harder, because a hungry tiger sees you as a rich-rich and well-founded steak; a bear with one paw can leave your face like a live-action from a Picasso painting, and the rat, well, it may cook better than you, I don’t deny it, but its stay in a kitchen is still ugly. In short, an animal should not be romanticized. For your sake and ours.
Using ferrets as an example, the domestication of these critters is complicated and the unconscious prejudices fostered by word of mouth are also there. That if they smell bad or very strong (because they are from the skunk family), that they can bite (because, surprise, they are animals) or that they are like rats (which is not the case because, as I said, they are a family of skunks), but They are actually very social animals, very intelligent. and, yes, they smell like a ferret, because it is a…ferret smell. The problem is when they release a gland from the special sac that they have in their anus because they have been scared or because they have had to defend themselves, like a skunk would do.
As a person who loves comics, I have read one that is very widespread and recognized among ferret lovers but not so well known among the general public. Bear sausage format tells the story of the author’s ferrets and their experiences. Things like ferret torpor, where they sleep an average of 18 hours a day (who could catch them); the tendency they have to “steal” socks or underwear from you because they consider them mini-treasures to take to a hidden place in the house as if it were their cave; that THEIR perianal glands DO NOT HAVE TO BE REMOVED, which, as I mentioned before, are small sacs on the sides of the anus that they use to mark their territory or as a defense against attack and that smell very bad… Or the point I want to get to, that hunters They used these animals as cable pullers between conduits because They are amazingly fast, elusive and sneak in where you wouldn’t imagine. The domestication of ferrets has helped humans a lot, so much so that at a certain point in the history of science, a ferret was used to advance the work of operating a particle accelerator.
Felicia, the ferret from Fermilab
Look, there are particular animals in the world of science. Dolly the sheep for cloning; Laika and her space travel or Schrödinger’s cat, which was not a real cat but is the most used example to explain quantum things. Very, very little is said about Felicia, the ferret who worked at Fermilab.
Fermilab (short for Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory) is the main physics laboratory in the United States since its foundation in 1967 where the Tevatronthe second most powerful particle accelerator after the hadron accelerator in Switzerland. In the early 70s they were building the particle accelerator in this laboratory, but In 1971 a series of failures interrupted the operation of the main ring. The device’s particle accelerator magnets had been installed in wet conditions, so each wet magnet needed about a liter of water removed. When physicists tried to get magnets going, many of them short-circuited. What was initially believed to be a problem due to humidity was not the case. It was something else and the scientists were stunned. The accelerator also suffered from power failures and the vacuum tube through which the particles had to move was full of debris. These residues posed a serious problem, since the particles had to move through the tube without obstacles; Otherwise, the magnets would not be able to hold the particles in place and the experiments would fail. The solution to this problem would come from the mind of Bob Sheldonwhose job was to be fixermeaning their responsibility was to look for items with a long delivery delay and try to find alternative sources. Commonly called in my environment “the apañapufos”.
At the same time, Bob had to be on the lookout for possible shortcuts and money-saving ideas. Such a process, carried out competently, could easily save enough money and time. Any engineer or physicist on the team who placed an order for raw materials, machines, or high-tech instrumentation first consulted Bob, who made some inquiries and he often found a solution that saved resources.
When asked by scientists, “How to find an obstruction in all those kilometers of tube?” Where Bob came from there was a more than plausible solution. In their part of Yorkshire, hunters used ferrets to navigate narrow enclosures. A ferret would not hesitate to run inside the stainless steel tubeeven if that meant a long journey into the unknown. Plus, it would be a kind of green solution to a technical problem, and everyone liked the idea.
The ferret arrived in a cage and they named her Felicia and, of course, she won everyone’s affection. With a rope attached to his special harness, She was trained to travel the 90 meters of the vacuum tube. Once Felicia had pulled the rope all the way through the tube, the scientists tied a swab with a cleaning solution to it and pulled it. This is the part of the animal treatment that is not very to my liking and surely not to ferret lovers either, but she was not hurt or mistreated at any time. This solution was short term until engineers created a new way to clean the tube, and the ferret got bored of going back and forth continuously. Although the engineers did not specify how they knew that Felicia was bored with her work, those of us who know ferrets can guess: she probably took naps in the tubes or rolled over when pushed. After several months and many hundreds of meters of pipe, he retired early and lived as a beloved household pet.
The main ring continued to suffer breakdowns and problems, but not because of Felicia, since her work contributed to reducing those failures. Cleaned many sections of tubes and saved Fermilab thousands of dollars and countless hours of downtime. And besides, there was actually no obstruction! You may think that discovering that there were no obstructions was a failure, but that is not the case. Ruling out a hypothesis of this caliber gives rise to thinking about other reasons for the technical failure.and sure enough, the mathematicians figured out why the particles had not circulated. It had something to do with the stability of the orbit and the particles crashing into the wall of the tube long before completing their circular journey.
It was a simple but effective job that will remain as a pleasant anecdote in the history of science. In addition, she was later welcomed into the team as a pet, something that many people can do by having animals in their homes without having to put them in a particle accelerator. Felicia lived well, and I hope all those animals in new homes are loved just as she was. Because particle physics is difficult for me to understand, but animal abandonment after Christmas… That, really, is something I will never understand.
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