Smokescreens and Sureshine

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 901, 9 November 1956, Page 22

Smokescreens and Sureshine

by

SUNDOWNER

OCTOBER 13

three donkeys resting under a kowhai tree and putting up a cloud of smoke. A (who has just finished a cigarette and is now filling a pipe): I never heard of lung cancer till the King died, and even yet we don’t know that cancer killed him. B: We know that he died. C: Why he died, too. A: It has never been officially admitted. In any case, admissions prove us A and B and C-

nothing. A man was murdered the other day in America and

found afterwards to have been dead before the bludgeon crushed his skull. B: In that case even the murderer would find the fact pleasanter than the fiction. But we prefer the fiction. We refuse even to think of the fact. — A: Aided and abetted by tthe doctors themselves. If they believe in the danger they do nothing to avert it. C: They can’t. They are like us-vic-tims of a habit they are not strong enough to break. B: But they don’t urge others to break it. They don’t preach non-smoking any more actively than they practise it. C: Give the poor devils a chance. We don’t want them to be humbugs as well as weaklings. I swear. It is a deplorable habit. But I don’t preach nonswearing to my kids. A: I do. I tell them that if they don’t avoid bad habits when they are young they will not escape from them when they are old. C: Do they listen to you? A: That I will never know. All I know is that I don’t justify my own weaknesses, B: But this tobacco business. I think we all know that we would be safer if we did not smoke. No one risks his life by going without tobacco. A: Not directly. No. But many men, -and I think more women, need physical sedatives. I make no claim that smoking

is good for me. I decided long ago that it is good for my wife. C: Do you think she needed it ee she ever tried it? A: That is a tough one. But I sik she needed something. Civilisation deranges everybody; but it upsets some faster than it upsets others, and I think these are wise to defend themselves against it. B: With a puff of smoke? A: It is more than a puff of smo or why do we worry about it? It carries soothing and irritation in unpredictable degrees. Where the soothing is more marked than the irritation the habit seems to be justified. B: Who pays for the smoke in your house? A: That is a question I can’t answer off-hand. If smoking is a vice, we both pay. If it is harmless, I pay, because I don’t get much pleasure out of it and my wife gets a great deal. If it is good"Yes, thank you, we all take milk. Sugar for one, please." : % * %

OCTOBER 15

HAD an exciting letter yesterday from Mr. Barton, of Massey College. Though I am determined not to read more into it than Mr. Barton says, he has given me a hope-in fact a beliefthat sheep will be born without tails Before some farmers now living have died. The foundation of this hope is

an article contributed by Professor A. L. Rae, of Mas-

sey College to Advances in Genetics (Volume 8, Academic Press Incorporated, New York). Though I have not seen the article, or the publication in which it appeared, Mr. Barton has sent me "a few bits and pieces" from it which convince me that science is well on the way to sheep without tails, or (continued on next page)

with tails so short that it will not be necessary to cut them off. Here is an extract: Noung (1923) noted that crosses of fatrumped sheep (with rudimentary tails) with long-tailed sheep (16-24 vertebrae) gave broad-tailed sheep (with the same number of vertebrae as the long-tailed). Adametz (1917) found the broad tail of the Karakul to be incompletely dominant in crosses with the Rambouillet and postulated two a to explain the difference in tail orm. The short-tailed condition would appear to be dominant over the medium tail length of the British breeds, according to limited data from Roberts and Crew (1925). Wilson (1940) has reported on a "no tail" breed developed from _ crossing Shropshires, Cheviots, and Hampshires with Sibérian fat-rumped sheep. Adametz (1917) has studied the inheritance of the S-shaped tail of the Karakul. In crosses with the Rambouillet Fl generally had the curved tail at birth or developed it in later life. He postulated a single main gene and a modifier to explain the results. Serra (1948) found evidence of the presence of a main gene, but considers that more than one modifier is involved in crosses of the Karakul with Portuguese breeds. Though the experiments there are largely negative, they are as positive as a lamb’s first five minutes of experimental walking. It does walk, and in an hour or two runs, and I do not doubt that in ten, or twenty, or fifty years it is going to run without swinging a tail. | That I have long believed. Now I am a believer with reasons for my faith.

OCTOBER 16

bg By * ROM sheep to rabbits is not very far yet on most farms, but it is going to be farther next year. On April the first-a good day on which to embalm folly-it will become an offence to buy or sell a rabbit, or sell or attempt to sell a rabbit’s skin. That will not prevent rabbits from burrowing and

breeding, but 1t will make all men, and not merely | most

men, their mortal enemies. It will also, of course, make most of their present enemies more active enemies of small birds and poultry. The proof of the pudding is not only in the eating but the mixing, and if the process costs too much the eating loses some of its savour. So will it be with rabbits. If the price of their destruction includes such items as the disappearance of larks, a great reduction in finches and other low-nesting birds, constant attacks on chicken coops and perches-and, conceivably, danger to young lambs from the ground.as well as from the airthere will be some, but not many, who will sigh for the bad old days. There will, however, be none who will sigh sensibly. Rabbits have brought nothing to New Zealand but work and _ longrange waste. They are fascinating in themselves-as beautiful as blowflies and as tempting as the totalisator; but their tracks lead everywhere to disappointment and loss. However, I do not foresee a miracle on the first of April. I do not imagine that farmers will everywhere bestir themselves to stop a leak in their taps that in future will water no single blade of grass. If they could not persuade themselves to eradicate rabbits when these were costing them X-1 pounds every day, they will not suddenly wake up when the loss rises to X-0. But they will wake up sooner or later. Then the only problem remaining will be Mrs, Beeton’s: catching the rabbits. Catching the first ninety will be simple enough, since it will involve no more than adding a penny or two, or a shilling or two, to our rates, It is the last ten that will put up our blood pressures, since we will be paying then

for what some of us will suppose is nothing -a rate on what looks like clean ground. That is where the test — will come for us as well as for the rabbits, and I should like to be surer than I am that the rabbits will not win. Meanwhile, I wonder how many rabbits have died during the recent rain. In my own case I should think about a dozen in my estimated population of twenty. But winter is now over, and in spring the young buck’s fancy turns to multiplication. (To be continued)