MY MICE
We, a relatively small fraction of Mankind, selfnominated with pomposity Western Civilization, have been lately inventing so  much that now it is clear that we  may have gone too far.
If you tell me that Science is absolutely Neutral and has nothing to do with Ethics or the philosophical approach to the World, I would answer that even to decide that some phenomenon must have an occult ruling law of the Universe and that we “must” study it for our profit, is basically a philosophical or religious decision.
So if the “western civilization” had never existed, most probably the hinduists , and less the animists would never have invented our Famous Science.
One of the saddest aspects of this Science is that it is rather fascist.
Fascists, first simplify the World, and then try to impose their findings to everybody for their own wellbeing. If somebody needs to be eliminated, it is OK, even if they happen to be millions. That’s a very unfortunate fact for them.
Does it sound to you?.
Even the most pure of Ecologists or Bioenergysts, would like in the deepest of his heart to have a little red button, that when pushed, (Flash)¡- all the dirty oil guys would disappear.
My case is not so desperate. Though I rationally belong to the strongly Nordic western Science I am also strongly temperate by deep Mediterranean roots.
Here when somebody tells you that you have done everything in life except riding a balloon, you know what that means.
So my real problem is that I have done everything except ballooning.
For example: I had the good luck to work as a shepherd during my high school summer vacations in an absolutely splendid Mediterranean Forest.
In these forests I learned much more than later in the University and Engineering School.
So when I read about the latest findings about territoriality, male dominance, courtship behavior, etc. I could only consider them with hilarity.
These facts were known, probably much better, by the prehistoric People that had inhabited these same forests.
Precisely right in the middle of “my” forest there is a Cave not as famous as Altamira.  But probably as good.
Just by looking at the amazing wall paintings in “my” Cave you can tell how deep was the understanding of the World by these Cromagnonians.
Please excuse my “my”. But who can tell that I do not have a pint of blood from these guys?.
Our present situation in Mediterranean Countries is very funny.
For  Milennia we have been eating the Mediterranean Diet, but were so unfortunate not to be aware of it until the Americans discovered it and enlightened us about the fact.
I believe that the Western History during the last Centuries can be simplified to an elimination struggle between the North and the Mediterranean.
Well, now everybody knows that the victory of the North has been total, mostly through the unstoppable push of USA.
New Zealand may be a curious case. It is clearly a Nordic Country in the South. We are sure that when we stand up, our heads, and so our souls look to the North Pole.
Does a New Zealander look to the South Pole?. Or is this considered slightly degrading?.
But absolute victories are never good.
Ecology has been invented by Western (That is: Nordic) Science. and forced upon everybody in the Planet.
But here, we always had our own Ecology, from Egyptians and Sumerians to us.
Our tendency to urbanization has been, and is, enormous.
You can see this by visiting my small village in the South of Spain with narrow streets and wall to wall houses that gives a comfortable feeling of togetherness to a few thousand inhabitants and my previous village of Babylon N.Y.  USA where you could hardly tell where was the old village. One of the oldest in USA.
Also our tendency to tame the Wild was considerable. But we did it in what I think was an interesting way.
If you had carefully inspected “my” Forest, you probably had come to the conclusion that it was really wild.
False: the animals had been for so long in contact with Man that their conducts were not totally Natural. And the same with plants.
How were the forests of “my” Ancestors?. Most probably, considering the colder climate, deep forests at the mountains and what we call Dehesas in the valleys formed by large trees nearly touching at the tops and with short grass at the ground, created by the continuous grazing of the big herbivorous mammals
I may be making a horrible scientific mistake and, not being a Specialist I cannot care less, thinking that much before the Neolithic Revolution, Man did act in the Nature in subtle ways.
Acorns are the usual fruits in these forests.
Why are they so extremely large and nutritious here?.
Even more suspicious is the fact of the existence of extremely sweet acorns. I do not believe in their natural occurrence. They must be the result of some kind of artificial selection even in the deep of the Forest.
Here was a beautiful case of Man-Nature equilibrium.
But unfortunately I happened to be present the very first time the Government began the Modernization of all this by air dropping megatons of DDT.
Fine ¡. Now you do not see any imperial eagle, or linx or any of the previously immense amounts of small birds and insects.
The only survivors have been the cinegetic Species. This is why I am not totally against hunting, at least they got something positive.
It is hard to believe, but most of “my” Forest got uprooted and converted into a wheat field, you know, you must feed the People first.
But of course Nature took its vengeance and now all this is just an eroded Mountainside where nothing grows. Really Marvelous ¡.
I swear I wept the last time I was there.
Part of it has been converted into a National Reserve and, as I am as human as anybody else (That is; as primitive) I wish I had that little red button to make disappear all these bureaucrats and fat tourists who pay a ticket to see the “real” Nature, exactly as if they were in a circus.
It is funny, or tragic, that I can not visit “my Forest simply because I will never pay for the necessary identification card of Approved Visitor.
I hope you understand what I mean. Not that the Forest is mine. On the contrary: that I irreversibly belong to it.
What would you say of a Christchurcher who needs a card to enter “his” town because, due to its unbelievable beauty it had been declared Monument of Mankind?.
Presently I live in Paradas in the Gudalquivir Valley, whose olive trees yield the best olives in the Planet Earth as a result of Milennia of selection.
The olive tree fields are another rare case of Mediterranean taming of Nature.
Only a few years ago, they were not what you may call a plantation, but rather a rationalized forest that except the trees, which were strictly monitorized, had a great amount of diversity.
This is no longer true since the advent of the herbicides, pesticides and all this. Now, they are truly a dead Forest, or just a factory of olives.
My home is of course one of these wall to wall dwellings, but built in such a way that you can shout to death without your neighbors noticing anything. This does not have any social meaning because here most people spend over 75% of their time in the streets.
Needless to say that it is the perfect place for mice, cockroaches, crickets and all kind of household life, including animals as strange as salamanders.
As I already said, my mind is primitive, as everybody else’s, but my rational part tells me that with the tremendous advances of our technology, either we change our minds or we are lost. Or we change something else as I would explain later.
So I have started by declaring to myself that the Thou Shall Not Kill should be applied to all kinds of life and as a consequence signed a State of Nonbelligerance
to everything alive at Home.
The Judaeochristian “Propagate and Reign over the Plants and Animals” is probably ethically wrong, specially now that looks like we have changed from Sovereigns to Mad Dictators.
From where comes my Divine Right to kill a repulsive spider in my house, when she (In Spanish spiders are of course feminine) can tell that a monstrous being is trying to kill her in her House?. Of course I eliminate the webs and so they may die of hunger, but I do not see it happening.
The worst are my mice.
I spend a lot of my time in a narrow room sitting in front of my computer desk, where I also have the TV. the radio and the telephone, plus a work area for small experiments. Just behind me there is an enormous wardrobe for my books, gadgets and small tools.
Well, you guessed it: it is full of mice.
I can not tell how many are they.  But by the noises I would say that at least three.
They are usually either fighting or making love
By the vibrating noises I would say that more love than fighting.
Lately I am very scared. There are clear signs that they spend the nights playing on top of my desk and it looks like they have already put their eyes on the computer.
It would be extremely funny to have your mouse eaten by your mice. So I decided to do something about it.
First I got a newborn cat.
What happened is usually the subject of stories by the lovers of house pets. He (Male) grew with my little dog and they became the best friends this side of the Galaxy. They were always mockfighting.
There was a wonder to watch them. One fought as a feline and the other as a canine, so they did not match too well. The cat attacked sideways and used his hind members to tear the dog’s belly . The dog’s attack was always frontal and so there were a lot of misses.
I found my little dog  abandoned at a gas station; the usual case of the Christmas puppy left in the first refueling during the next Summer vacation.
Either he (Male) is a strange pure race or a total genetic horror. With his strangely outwards curved legs and falling ears is the perfect image of a clown.
Everybody utters that genetic diversity is great and then he happens to be a racist.  Not me, I hope.
My dog may look like a malformed stupid idiot but in fact is very efficient.
How does he always win over other dogs twenty times his size?. I guess he emits so strong sexual effluvia, than the other guys think they are fighting a lion.
Some  day he came back home with a wild rabbit bigger than him.
The cat was not efficient. As far as I know he only caught one mouse that I was able to save from death because cats do not kill mice at once but first they play with them for a long time and feel very disappointed when the mouse stops moving.
I do not know if my mice performed some Voodoo on the cat but he was soon run over by a truck.
Mice have been always the preferred subjects of the so called intelligence tests.
It may seem stupid to say that these tests are stupid.
The best test ever devised is the Turing test. You put a machine at one side of an opaque wall. At the other side you bring together as many intelligent people as you may find and ask them to talk to something at the opposite side.  At the very moment when the Savants can no longer decide if they are talking to one person or a machine, then the experimenter must conclude that the machine IS intelligent.
This is exactly my case.
The mice are behind the Wardrobe and I try to catch them to give them a lesson of good manners they could never forget. I do not see them so, as far as I know they could be little Martians.
This is a nearly perfect Turing test.
Well it is too bad to have to admit that either I am a moron or they are very clever. Mousetraps, even electronic ones  invented by me, are a big joke for them.
Can they teach their children about the principles of Mousetrapping Engineering and the proper countermeasures?.
As I hate any kind of chemical warfare, I decided to use the modern mousetrapping glue, that is a rather mechanical method.
Even so I had to use a lot of Mouseresque Psychology to catch my first mouse..
I had already named him Miguelito (Mickey).
He was absolutely adorable, so clean, so tiny. But he was deeply trapped in the glue.
The two hind and one front leg were strongly welded, so I took him from the piece of cardboard  put him on the floor and ran for some gasoline to free him. When I came back in seconds I had just the time to see him disappear running in one leg and the body under a heap of empty cans in the backyard.
I was sure that he had died but after two days I could hear that he was back at the wardrobe. Maybe  she was Miguelita (Minnie) and came to take care of the children.
After two days of noise or  noisy lovemaking, I went to the kitchen, in the middle of the night to the refrigerator and I saw him or her crouched in one corner and I do not know why he did not run away. Maybe he wanted us to be friends.
But I did something shameful. Suddenly the Primitive Man inside me got angry and I threw to him a large knife I had on my hand and nearly parted him in two.
I understand that this story is beginning to look too much like an old Western, where I am the bad guy, but I swear it is true.
I went for a towel to take the corpse, but alas ¡, it was gone. I looked in anger through the whole kitchen and when I found him under the refrigerator I could restrain my murderous impulses and caught him with the towel, not without receiving a deep bite in a finger, I understood this. A tiny bite is nothing as compared with what I did to him.
But astonishingly he did not seem to be fatally injured. I still do not understand this. Probably his spine is so flexible that it looked as if the knife had passed through the whole body leaving only the skin. But evidently this was only an optical illusion.
I put him inside a two liter Coca Cola bottle, for the next morning to decide what to do with him or her.
Probably by now you have guessed what happened.
The next morning he was gone. The bottle was still standing up, so this is hard to understand, but it did happen.
He came back to the wardrobe, but in a few days I found his true corpse in the kitchen. It was him or her by the remaining glue that he had been able to clean up except in the back of the ears.
I did not feel as investigating its true sex.  And also who did care? It was a heroic little being with a lot of balls.
And now, let me turn back into the rational coldheaded  fascistic scientist I believe I am.
A mouse’s brain weighs a few grams. Even admitting that they are much less intelligent than us, the difference is not so great as to explain the enormous differences in brain size.
So let me get to my point.
Could we decrease our size to that of a rat, without losing any of our beloved  characteristics?.
The answer is surely affirmative.
The situation, which is not Sci-Fi , but pure  not yet made hard science, would produce very funny situations. Can you imagine one hundred people in an automobile?.  And a couple of thousands in a train, with beds and everything?. And small villages with millions of inhabitants?.
It is strange that not too great attention has been brought upon the old Greek aphorism that Man is the Measure of all things. And the problem to the Planet is that we are too big.
The ridiculous solution I propose is philosophically correct though as far as I know it has been shown before by Defoe only.
One might think that the apparent size of the planet would increase in a terrible way, but I do not believe this to be true.
It is much easier to accelerate and decelerate a small living organism, without breaking bones and all these nuisances, and as this acceleration is an absolute figure, it becomes easy to imagine hypersonic travel with very little energy due to the small mass.
So the Planet would seem much smaller.
It is strange for Europeans, but Americans always measure distances in daily life, in minutes. I guess this is because they live in the World according to Mr.  Henry Ford.
We must admit that they are essentially correct.
No more pollution or any other ecological problem.
Notwithstanding our power to dominate the Planet would remain the same or bigger. we could make nuclear bombs to stop an incoming Planetoid or to kill each other as usual.
But if we admit that we would leave the Planet free to go its own way with no interferences and decline the supposed right to own it, we’ll still need some efficient defenses against large animals , although we could decide to decrease them too. This would be again a very unethical behavior.
Ethics is a dangerous philosophical ground for rational thinkers.
Do we have the right to eliminate our own Species? Most probably the expression “Right To” does not have a rational meaning. to have “Right To” presupposes something superior to you that concedes this Right, unless you accept that you give the Right to yourself, which will always be the weak point of Democracy