Month: February 2019

Monday: Hili dialogue

February 25, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s Monday again, February 25, 2019.  It’s also National Chocolate Covered Peanuts Day, and meh. But yay!—it’s Meher Baba’s birthday (he was born on February 25, 1894).  Don’t worry—be happy! He will help you!

He isn’t helping us with the weather in Chicago, though, as it has gotten cold again: it was 7° F (-14° C) when I walked to work a short while ago.  While the weather was mild yesterday (close to the freezing point), the wind was dire: up to 60 mph during the day, and blowing my car around on the road. I could barely walk on the streets at some times. Here’s PROOF (h/t Grania and Matthew, who both found this):

Note to readers: Posting will be light until Sunday as I have visitors most of this week as well as a conciliatory lunch with Scott Aaronson, whose views I criticized on this site but who was nice about it and suggested that we chat when he next came to Chicago. Bear with me; perhaps you can read the science posts of last week.

I didn’t watch the Oscars last night (in years past I did, but they’re boring and too long), nor did I (to my eternal shame) see any of the nominated movies. I note only that The Woke are upset that “Green Book” won the Oscar for best picture. Here’s HuffPo’s huffy take (click on screenshot):

Not much happened on this day in history. On February 25, Samuel Colt was given a U.S patent on his famous Colt revolver. And here’s a new one on me: on this day in 1866, according to Wikipedia, “Miners in Calaveras County, California, discover what is now called the Calaveras Skull – human remains that supposedly indicated that man, mastodons, and elephants had co-existed.” Well, like Piltdown Man, it was a hoax, with the skull only about 1,000 years old.

On this day in 1919, Oregon became the first U.S. state to tax gasoline: one cent per gallon.  On February 25, 1932, Hitler obtained German citizenship, enabling him to run for Reichspräsident in the same year. He lost to Hindenburg, but became well known to the German people.

On February 25, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, gave a speech denouncing the “cult of personality” that had arisen around Joseph Stalin. The speech was called On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, and Wikipedia notes:

The speech was shocking in its day. There are reports that the audience reacted with applause and laughter at several points.There are also reports that some of those present suffered heart attacks, and others later committed suicide. The ensuing confusion among many Soviet citizens, bred on the panegyrics and permanent praise of the “genius” of Stalin, was especially apparent in Georgia, Stalin’s homeland, where the days of protests and rioting ended with the Soviet army crackdown on 9 March 1956. In the West, the speech politically devastated the organised left; the Communist Party USA alone lost more than 30,000 members within weeks of its publication

On this day in 1986, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos fled the country after ruling it for two decades, and Corazon Aquino took over as the nation’s first woman president.  Finally, on this day in 1994, a Jewish man, Baruch Goldstein, committed an act of terrorism, using an automatic weapon to fire on Palestinian worshippers in the Cave of the Patriarchs in the city of Hebron. After he killed 29 and wounded 125, he was beaten to death by those who survived. Some misguided people still hold him up as a Jewish icon, but he was just a murdering thug.

Notables born on this day include Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841), Karl May (1842), Enrico Caruso (1873), Meher Baba (1894, see above), Zeppo Marx (1901), Millicent Fenwick (1910), Anthony Burgess (1917), Sun Myung Moon (1920), George Harrison (1943), Téa Leoni (1966), Nancy O’Dell (1967), and Chelsea Handler (1975).

Those who died on February 25 include Paul Reuter (1899), Bugs Moran (1957), Mark Rothko (1970), Elijah Muhammad (1975), Tennessee Williams (1983), Glenn Seaborg (1999, Nobel Laureate), and Don Bradman (2001, the greatest cricket batsman of all time). Here’s part 1 of a video biography of the great Bradman:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s dialogue is a bit opaque. Malgorzata explains: “Hili, like her servants, has an aversion to philosophy. She happened to read a Wikipedia entry and decided that the concept of ‘absolute’ might be useful.”

Hili: I’ve achieved an absolute.
A: What of?
Hili: Skepticism.
In Polish:
Hili: Osiągnęłam absolut.
Ja: Czego?
Hili: Sceptycyzmu.

Here’s a swell cat cartoon from reader Merilee: the Cat Hall of Fame:

A tweet with a duck:

Reader Barry interprets this as affection from the owl, and why the hell not?

Tweets from Grania, with the first being a TRUEFACT:

A majestic lynx in the snow (note that it’s a video):

The subtitles suggest that the baitballs, like the one shown below, are maladaptive to the schooling fish. But overall, considering the life cycle of the fish, I doubt it. If they risked their lives more by tightly schooling this way, then the behavior would disappear. Of course the baitball may be a maladaptive byproduct of schooling that evolved under other circumstances, but I don’t think so.

https://twitter.com/LlFEUNDERWATER/status/1094178341576306688

A rare example of a cat being helpful. (“GOAT” = “greatest of all time”):

Tweets from Matthew. Does this first one show self-awareness?

Matthew says “Watch the whole video [below] to be convinced.” I am! This is the first case of mimicry I know of in which an organism evolves to look like a feather.

Whole video of the above:

And this gets Tweet of the Week: a night heron fishing using bait. It’s amazing how he retrieves the bait when the fish are too big. I can’t interpret this in any way other than it’s a bird who’s learned to fish with bait.

 

A grammar question

February 24, 2019 • 8:16 pm

So I was reading a book this evening that mentioned a Canadian hockey team, the Toronto Maple Leafs. Yes, I know that team, and always thought the name sounded curious, but then I thought, “Why isn’t it Maple Leaves?” After all, the plural of “leaf” is “leaves”.

Now you might say that the word “Leafs” is not a plural, but simply the name of the team. But that doesn’t make sense either, as there is no noun “leafs.” And suppose the team was named after an appropriate waterfowl, the Canada Goose. Would they call the team “The Canada Gooses”? No, they’d call it the “Canada Geese“.

Now I’m sure there’s an explanation for this, and that a Canadian reader will school me. But I’m still puzzled.

This is not right

Andrew Sullivan’s weekly trifecta. Part 2: Transgenderism in athletics and sexual attraction

February 24, 2019 • 2:15 pm

The second issue that Andrew Sullivan takes up in his New York Magazine column this week is that of transgender athletes and transphobia. The inspiration for his piece was the actions of Martina Navatilova, an openly gay ex-athlete who was a friend of the LGBTQ community. That is, until she recently declared that it was unfair in some instances for transwomen to compete in sports against biological women. That, as you know, is enough to brand someone as transphobic. The Guardian reports what happened to Navatilova:

The tennis player and gay rights campaigner first drew criticism from equalities activists and trans athletes when she tweeted in December: “You can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women. There must be some standards, and having a penis and competing as a woman would not fit that standard.”

Writing in the Sunday Times, Navratilova said she had subsequently promised to keep quiet on the subject until she had done some research on it. “Well, I’ve now done that and, if anything, my views have strengthened,” she wrote.

“To put the argument at its most basic: a man can decide to be female, take hormones if required by whatever sporting organisation is concerned, win everything in sight and perhaps earn a small fortune, and then reverse his decision and go back to making babies if he so desires.

“It’s insane and it’s cheating. I am happy to address a transgender woman in whatever form she prefers, but I would not be happy to compete against her. It would not be fair.”

Her comments attracted criticism across social media. “We’re pretty devastated to discover that Martina Navratilova is transphobic,” tweeted the rights group Trans Actual. “If trans women had an advantage in sport, why aren’t trans women winning gold medals left, right and centre?”

But I think Navratoliva has a point, for the issue is not at all clearcut. Some organizations, like the Olympics, require specific hormone titers for trans women to compete in women’s events, while other just require self-identification. Given the physical differences in upperbody strength and muscularity between biological men and women, self-identification clearly creates an unfair situation. And I’m not even sure that a specified hormone level is enough to level the playing field, for muscularity of your youth doesn’t just go away.

I’ve written about this before (see here and here), and, as always, I remain conflicted. Clearly transgender people should be able to participate in athletics, but what are good criteria for competing in “men’s” and “women’s” events?  Should there be a third category: “transgender women’s sports”? I don’t know.  But I do believe that simple self-identification that conflicts with biological sex is not sufficient to allow you to compete in a gendered event. In 2018 in a Connecticut state high school track meet, both first and second places in the women’s 100-meter dash went to transgender women (see the video here). As I wrote at the time:

 In Connecticut, where first and second place went to transgender women in the race above, “self identification” is the rule, so you can be a fully biological male, not having transitioned in any way, and enter a race if you say you identify as a women. Other states are more stringent: Texas, for instance, insists that you compete as the gender given on your birth certificate.

Both seem problematic.  Surely there is something unfair about the above: in which transgender women who are physically men, by virtue of greater strength, clean up in a women’s athletic event by “self-identifying” as women. That may well be true and not just a ploy, but the problem is not psychology but physicality. A liberal response would be “the civil rights of gender self-identification outweighs the disappointment of non-transgender losers.” But that answer doesn’t satisfy me. The unfairness is deep and pervasive, and “self-identification” seems a dubious solution.

And I raised some difficult questions:

  • Should there be any testing of athletes, or should they simply be allowed to compete based on self-identification of gender? (This would, of course, mostly affect women’s sports; some say it would destroy women’s sports.)
  • If not, how many categories of competition do we want? The traditional men’s and women’s sports, or an intermediate category? (The latter would, of course, cause huge problems.)
  • If we don’t accept self-identification and want to retain traditional “men’s” and “women’s” sports, how do we determine the category in which an athlete belongs?
  • If the identification is based on hormones, can we set limits, as the IOC has done, to demarcate the classes? If we don’t use hormones, how do we classify?

As transgenderism becomes more common in Western society—and it will—the issue of how it should be treated in sports will become more important. Of course, that’s a different issue from how transgender people should be treated in society, for all decent-thinking people agree that they should be treated the same as everyone else.  But there’s that annoying thing about biological difference—most prominently manifested as upper-body strength—that cannot be waved away as simply a “social construct.”

These questions remain, and Sullivan agrees that they’re not simple:

But this is the current orthodoxy according to the widely read digital-media publisher PinkNews: “Trans women are women. So trans women’s bodies are women’s bodies. So trans women’s penises are women’s penises.” Um. “Regardless [of] the biological makeup of the trans woman — she remains a woman with her biology, therefore defining her as a biological woman,” said Pose star Indya Moore. In pursuit of this vision, the LGBTQIA++ movement is rallying around the new Minnesota powerlifting state champion, a recently transitioned trans woman, who — somehow —managed to crush her nearest biological female rivals on her first attempt.

If you take this argument seriously — that biology is entirely a function of gender identity — then the whole notion of separate male and female sports events is in doubt. A trans woman should, in my view, be treated exactly as a woman — unless, as in this case, it clashes with biological reality. There aren’t many contexts in which this really counts, but sports is one of them. Yes, it sucks. But denying reality is stupid, can easily backfire, and will alienate countless otherwise sympathetic people. And note that if the Equality Act were to pass — a priority for Nancy Pelosi — it would be illegal to bar a trans woman from competing against biological females, as it is already in many states.

This is not going to go away, for sports is the one area—and the only one I can think of—where it’s problematic to accept someone’s self-designated gender identity. If you have a solution, by all means offer it in the comments.

But Sullivan, who will clearly be labeled a transphobe (so far I’ve avoided the label), does draw a firm line at one issue: he will not let transgender people tell him that he should be sleeping with transgender men, and he’s a transphobe if he won’t. There’s something deeply offensive about people telling you whom you should be attracted to and copulating with when that attraction is largely based on biology. Perhaps some people can overcome it, or even enjoy it, but if you can’t you shouldn’t be demonized. As Sullivan says, and I agree with him:

It is even transphobic, I am now informed, for a gay man not to want to sleep with a trans man who has a vagina. In response to my recent column on the subject, I was told by Sue Hyde, a woman who is at the very heart of the LGBTQIA++ movement, to, yes, give it a try: “Maybe Sullivan … would give [a handsome trans man with a vagina who uses a dildo as a penis] a toss in the hay and next day, be singing a different tune about category woman/girl >>> category man/boy persons’ capacities to uphold and expand the experiences and meanings of homosex.” Maybe. Or maybe I’ll sleep with whomever I want — you know, something we used to call sexual freedom.

But this is how deep the ideology runs. It wants to control not only the public discourse, and language, and rig sports contests, but also insinuate itself into the most intimate areas of an individual’s sex life. Once upon a time, the religious right would tell me that I should sleep with women because I might find the right one and finally be happy. Now the intersectional left is telling me something almost exactly the same. What has happened to this movement? Where on earth has it gone?

The last paragraph is powerful. Yes, perhaps in some cases sexual desire—or the lack of it—is based on bigotry. But I don’t think that’s generally true. Sue Hyde and her like-minded ideologues should leave Sullivan’s sex life alone.

 

Nudibranchs have single-use spiny penises that remove a rival’s sperm from its mating partner

February 24, 2019 • 11:15 am

Several species of animals, including damselflies, are known to remove sperm—presumably from previously-mating males—before they ejaculate their own sperm into a female. (Damselfly males have a “penis scoop” for this purpose; see photo at bottom.) This removal is a prime example of male-male competition, which is a form of sexual selection that doesn’t involve female preference.

It’s been known for a while that some species of nudibranchs, gorgeous marine molluscs that lack shells, also remove sperm with spiny penises during copulation. These species, also known as “sea slugs”, are simultaneous hermaphrodites, so when they copulate, each individual both donates sperm to its partner and receives sperm in its own female bits. (They do not fertilize themselves).

In a new paper in the Journal of Ethology (click on screenshot below to see the free paper, and get the pdf here), Ayami Skiezawa et al. did something new: they did DNA analysis on the removed sperm to see if it actually did come from males who mated previously. After all, it could be a male’s own sperm instead of sperm from a competitor.

But first, the system. The species studied was Chromodoris reticulata, a lovely nudibranch found in tropical and subtropical waters of the western Pacific Ocean.  It’s shown in the first photo below, which also shows how nudibranchs, which means “naked gills” get their name. (All photos and their captions are from a 2013 article by Ed Yong in National Geographic.)

Credit: Stephen Childs

Here’s copulation between two individuals; you can see that each one insinuates a thin penis into the female organs of the other:

Two mating Chromodoris reticulata. From Sekizawa et al., Biology Letters [JAC: reference and link to this paper at the bottom]
The penis is covered with backwards-pointing spines that are covered with entangled sperm after copulation. The odd bit about this species is that the penis is self-amputated (“autotomized”) about twenty minutes after mating, and it simply grows a new willy, ready for copulation within a day.

Left: Spines on a nudibranch’s penis. Right: Sperm entangled in the spines. From Sekizawa et al., Biology Letters

The new paper, below, went a step forward from the morphological observations in damselflies and in the earlier paper cited above: it did genetic analysis of the removed sperm.

It turns out that while earlier work showed clearly that penises like this one removed sperm after copulation, it wasn’t absolutely clear that this sperm was that of males who had mated previously. While such removal would clearly be advantageous, leading the remover to have more offspring than he (I’m referring to the male bits) would have had otherwise, the notion that this was what was happening was based on looking at the amount of sperm in the female parts before copulation versus after removal (presumably in these cases ejaculation was prevented). It would be better to actually look at the genes in the sperm itself to see if the nudibranch was removing sperm from other males.

And that’s what Sekizawa did, and that’s what they found. They put nudibranchs, captured off Okinawa, in tanks and then gave them each three successive mating partners over a series of days. Each partner’s genetic constitution was determined using six microsatellite markers (bits of DNA). And after each copulation, they removed the sperm mass adhering to the spiny penis and looked at the genes in that sperm. This is a simple idea, but it’s important to do this kind of analysis so you can see what’s really happening.

The results were crystal clear: in 36 sperm clumps taken from postcopulatory penises, 28 had genes from nudibranchs who had deposited sperm in the mating partner in an earlier mating. Indeed, in some individuals they found sperm that didn’t match any of the nudibranchs who had mated with the partner; this might have been from individuals who mated with the focal nudibranchs before they were taken from the wild. They also found some genes from the mating partner itself, probably from bits of tissue adhering to the spiny penis. And in some cases sperm from at least two previous mating partners was found.

This pretty much finalizes our understanding of this phenomenon, at least in this species of nudibranch. There’s little doubt of the selective advantage that accrues to an individual who removes sperm from a previous mating partner: you get more offspring than you would have had otherwise.

One question remains, though: why do these things self-amputate their penises after each mating? The authors suggest an answer (my emphasis):

C. reticulata autotomizes its penis after every copulation (Sekizawa et al. 2013) and it is thought that the autotomy of the penis evolved to remove allo-sperm from the mating partner efficiently. We clarified in this study that sperm donors removed allo-sperm already stored in the copulatory pouch(es) of sperm recipients with backward-pointing spines on the penis as the final process of their copulation. Though a long and thorny penis is advantageous in scraping out allo-sperm at copulation, such a penis is difficult to pull back into the body again after copulation. And the backward-pointing spines on the penis covered with sperm at copulation will not remove allo-sperm efficiently at the next copulation, like a  VelcroTM tape. Such morphological and functional inconveniency may have made C. reticulata develop a cheap and fragile penis and dispose of it, rather than a robust but expensive one and reuse it.

Just for fun, here’s how damselflies do it. This figure, showing the damselfly penis with a glop of sperm, presumably from a male who mated to the female previously, is from a paper by Jon Waage. “sm” refers to the sperm mass adhering to the penis, also bearing backward-pointing spines. This spiny morphology and its function are remarkable examples of convergent evolution in two distantly related groups, insects and molluscs.  This photo comes from Jon Waage’s Researchgate page; Waage, now a professor emeritus at Brown University, is the one who made this remarkable finding 35 years ago.

_________________

References:

Sekizawa, A. et al. 2013. 2013. Disposable penis and its replenishment in a simultaneous hermaphrodite. Biology Letters 9: 20121150. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2012.1150

Sekizawa, A., S. G. Goto, and Y. Nakashima. 2019. A nudibranch removes rival sperm with a disposable spiny penis. Journal of Ethology 37:21-29.

 

 

 

Andrew Sullivan’s weekly trifecta. Part 1: Homosexuality, hypocrisy and immorality in the Vatican

February 24, 2019 • 9:30 am

I have to say that I’m really enjoying Andrew Sullivan’s weekly columns in New York Magazine. This new one has three absorbing bits, all of which are worth reading. (I’ll post about all of them if I have time today.)

The first is about the homosexuality that’s rife in the Vatican. Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay, but the Vatican’s homosexuality is hypocritical in view of the Church’s stand on homosexuality, and it’s not only bred corruption, but also clearly promoted the pedophilia of many priests and led to the coverups at higher levels.

Read and weep.

Martel, the author of the book that Sullivan discusses below, is gay, and not only do the Catholics in the Vatican readily tell him about the sexual morass there, but hit on Martel himself. It’s astonishing how open they are.

Here’s an excerpt of the Vatican stuff, but read all of Sullivan’s column:

I spent much of this week reading and trying to absorb the new and devastating book by one Frédéric Martel on the gayness of the hierarchy at the top of the Catholic Church, In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy. It’s a bewildering and vast piece of reporting — Martel interviewed no fewer than “41 cardinals, 52 bishops and monsignori, 45 apostolic nuncios, secretaries of nunciatures or foreign ambassadors, 11 Swiss Guards and over 200 Catholic priests and seminarians.” He conducted more than 1,500 interviews over four years, is quite clear about his sources, and helps the reader weigh their credibility. He keeps the identity of many of the most egregiously hypocritical cardinals confidential, but is unsparing about the dead.

The picture Martel draws is jaw-dropping. Many of the Vatican gays — especially the most homophobic — treat their vows of celibacy with an insouciant contempt. Martel argues that many of these cardinals and officials have lively sex lives, operate within a “don’t ask, don’t tell” culture, constantly hit on young men, hire prostitutes, throw chem-sex parties, and even pay for sex with church money. How do we know this? Because, astonishingly, they tell us.

. . . Yes, there are times when Martel overdoes it a bit. But it’s completely understandable. As a secular gay journalist, not hostile to the church, he walked into the Vatican and was simply staggered by its obvious gayness. No gay neighborhood has existed like this in the West since the 1980s.

. . . The revelations keep coming, page after page. For example: Martel explains how two of John Paul II’s favorite cardinals — whose nicknames within the Vatican are Platinette (after a drag queen) and La Mongolfiera — set up an elaborate and elite prostitution service that continued through the papacy of Benedict XVI, and was financed from the Vatican coffers. We know this through police records from the eventual criminal proceedings, where the actual ringleaders remained anonymous and without charges, because of the Vatican’s diplomatic immunity.

Sullivan goes on to recount some of the incidents described in Martel’s book, and it’s pretty horrifying—even worse and more hypocritical than I ever suspected. And yet Sullivan is still a Catholic! Go figure. He agonizes, yet he still goes to Mass and prays. Why? What kind of God would allow this kind of behavior to take place in his very own church: the true religion, or so Sullivan thinks and professes?

To wit:

As for me, someone who has wrestled with the question of homosexuality and Catholicism for much of my adult life, this book has, to be honest, been gutting. All the painful, wounding Vatican documents on my “objective disorder” that I have tried to parse and sincerely engage … I find out they were written, in part, by tormented gay men, partly to deflect from their own nature. Everything I was taught growing up — to respect the priests and hierarchs, to trust them, to accept their moral authority — is in tatters. To realize that the gay closet played a part in enabling the terrible, unimaginable abuse of the most vulnerable is a twist my psyche is having a hard time absorbing. Reading this long book, I found myself falling asleep not because it was boring. Au contraire. In some way, my psyche just couldn’t take any more. My mind and body kept shutting down.

I went to Mass last Sunday to pray about this. . .

Mass? Prayer? I can understand Sullivan meditating and thinking about this, but why does he have to do it in a Catholic church? And, unless I miss my guess, in Mass you have to do more than just sit there and pray; you have to do genuflections and professions and sometimes nom a wafer.

I really cannot fathom why Sullivan not only remains a Catholic, but why he still believes in God. It no longer surprises me when a smart and thoughtful person believes in religious hooey, but to believe in religious hooey that makes a mockery of one’s own sexuality and of the Church itself, and leads to the sexual abuse of children? It makes no sense. It’s almost like a Jew remaining a member of the Nazi party after he discovers what it’s about. You may think that’s exaggerated, but Sullivan’s own Church has damned him to the Eternal Crematorium for practicing homosexual acts.

Perhaps Sullivan has explained his continuing Catholicism elsewhere, but I haven’t seen it. In truth, my emotions about this are not only uncomprehension, but deep pity. The man has wrestled with this issue for so long, and yet his god has not answered.

Andrew, if you’re reading this, please explain. You seem rational and I have a lot of respect for your intelligence, your critical analysis, and your writing. Yet you continue to adhere to a superstition that’s not only unevidenced, but positively malign. The god you believe in has allowed your church to behave this way, to demonize gays, and to molest children. Surely you don’t think that all this perfidy will be made right in heaven, do you? Isn’t it easier to give up belief in this malignant Catholic god and just embrace humanism? We will welcome you, and we’re not a den of pederasts—nor do we condemn homosexuality or consider gay sex a grave sin that will damn you forever. There will be nothing more for you to agonize about if you just let go of the Church.

 

I am not posting anonymous comments

February 24, 2019 • 9:18 am

Sadly, there are a fair amount of comments that arrive here, and are held in moderation, without either a name or an email address. They are innocuous comments that would be posted if they bore a name and an email address (the latter is never shown on the site). As I said before, I’ve started trashing these comments because we can never identify a specific commenter so long as he/she uses “anonymous”. If this site is to work, we have to have a person associated with each name, real or not, and you must stick with your name unless for some reason that’s impossible.

When you make a comment, PLEASE fill in your name and email address (they don’t have to be the right ones, though I’d appreciate a correct email address since I sometimes contact readers), and make sure it’s in there when you submit the comment. Otherwise your comment won’t show up.

Yes, I know WordPress is being wonky these days and I’m trying to do something about it. But until we can identify the issue and fix it, please fill in your name and email.

Wir haben einen Erfolg—we have a reading!

February 24, 2019 • 8:15 am

by Greg Mayer

Thanks to the many WEIT readers who have tried their hand (or eyes) at reading the German handwriting on the side of a deer’s jaw, we have arrived at what I believe is a correct reading. Special thanks to Aldo Matteucci, who immediately recognized the second word as “hirsch” (meaning deer), Michael Fisher who edited the images for easy comparison, and to Heidrun Wenisch, who made what I believe to be the correct reading of the first word. Michael Sternberg brought Heidrun’s reading to my attention, and suggested the key empirical test– what exactly did the deer’s antlers look like? They look like this:

Schadhirsch it is, sir

Heidrun wrote, “The 2 words of the first line are Schad Hirsch. The word Schadhirsch is hunters’ jargon only and is used when speaking of an older male red deer.” Michael Sternberg then asked me, “How do the associated antlers look that you mentioned in the article? Branched at several points like you’d expect given the age, or just a single spike (“Spieß”) with possibly short buds, thus “defective”, as the hunter’s jargon term translates?” As you can see, it’s definitely “Spieß”. Michael elaborated, “A 2-year old Hirsch with such antlers would be said Spießer, but if the higher age is correct for this specimen (as derived from the degree of tooth grinding as you mentioned), then Schadhirsch applies and explicitly calls out that the age is higher than a first glance at the antlers would indicate.”

Looking carefully at the writing, this reading is not, to my mind, ruled out by any features of the letters, and fits the specimen perfectly. Problem solved! Thanks again to all who took the time to study and comment on the photos.