It was a bitter pill for the families who were awaiting justice, as were the acquittals of Bagri and Malik. The Air India families still had no one to blame for the deliberate act of terrorism that had taken the lives of their loved ones 20 years earlier. Lata Pada was among those who’d made the trek to Vancouver to hear the verdict. On the air that night, she told us she was devastated.
As you can imagine, Mary Lou, this is really a dark day for all of us. It’s re-living the tragedy that befell us 20 years ago, and we’re feeling as though we’re experiencing another tragedy. It’s a travesty of justice. The verdict is an indictment against the justice system that we believed in.
Ms. Pada acknowledged that the case had had holes in it and that some of the witnesses were problematic, but she worried that the “not guilty” verdict would send a message to the world that terrorists could commit terrible acts and get away with them.
Vancouver Sun reporter Kim Bolan told us she was surprised, too; she’d hoped for at least one “guilty” verdict. But since the judge had made it clear that he didn’t find any of the key witnesses believable, there seemed to be little ground for appeal.
On our Talkback line, many others expressed their disappointment with the Air India verdict. Perhaps the most thoughtful response, though, came from Joe Young of Lance, Nova Scotia. He said that he’d nearly cried while listening to Lata Pada on the day the verdict was delivered, but all the same, he had never been prouder of our justice system. Judge Josephson, he thought, must have wanted as much as anyone to find someone responsible for the Air India outrage; he must have felt great pressure to deliver the outcome he knew everyone wanted. Other courts in other countries would have made sure to find someone guilty. The fact that Josephson could not was proof of his courage and steadfastness in upholding Canadian law, and we should be thankful for it.
For himself, Justice Josephson has never spoken publicly about the Air India case. He said what he needed to say in his judgment, he told me when I approached him—except for one talk he gave to Justice Department lawyers in Ottawa in 2007. In that address, he spoke about the level of security they’d had to install in the courtroom in Vancouver to make the hearing safe for its participants and about the use they’d made of modern technology in the handling and recording of testimony. The only mention he made of the pressure he might have felt came toward the end, and his words echoed those of our Talkback caller:
How essential judicial independence is to our judicial system was never made more clear to me. The pressures were significant, but I was free to do exactly what my judicial conscience led me to do.
Was justice done where Bagri and Malik were concerned? Who knows? Our system demands the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, and the Court said that the prosecution had failed to prove their case beyond reasonable doubt, so we have to give them the benefit of the doubt.
When I asked Anant Anantaraman for his reaction to the Air India verdict, he told me, “I don’t care. It doesn’t matter anymore. I don’t expect anything. I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to think about it.” Even with all he’d accomplished, 20 years after the death of his wife and daughters, the loss was still too painful to think about. But two years later, when I told him I wanted to write about this and about him, he agreed, and when Claire Heistek said that she believed the Air India story would not have been such a cock-up if the victims hadn’t been Indo-Canadian, he agreed with that, too. For all our sakes, I hope that we at least learned something from what happened in June 1985.
SIXTEEN
Mike the Headless Chicken
Radio for fur and fowl weather
If you want to talk about endurance, you’d be hard pressed to come up with a more illustrative case than Mike the Headless Chicken. It was Mark Ulster who noticed one day that the good people of Fruta, Colorado, were about to celebrate their second annual Mike the Headless Chicken Festival to honour the memory of a Wyandotte rooster who refused to die even after he’d had his head chopped off. He ran away instead. (Kind of puts old Ignacio Siberio in the shade, doesn’t it?)
As Sally Edginton of Fruta’s Chamber of Commerce tells the story, it was one Farmer Olsen who did the dirty deed (i.e., the chopping), and he was so impressed by Mike’s determination to go on, sans head, that he decided to help him stay alive. The Olsens, Mike’s would-be executioners, became his guardians and caterers instead, trying to keep him from bumping into things when he ran around and feeding little pellets directly down his—well, throat, I guess.
I know, I know; it’s tragic. But Mike pressed on and so did we.
ML: Why didn’t they put him out of his misery, if I can use the word?
SE: Well, apparently, Mike really wasn’t in that much misery, because he was trying to crow, and from the reports that I’ve read, he acted just like an ordinary rooster. I assume he thought he was blind.
ML: He didn’t know he didn’t have a head.
SE: No. He was fed and watered, and he was in the chicken yard and, basically, went on as a chicken.
ML: I know people have said unkind things about chickens’ brains, but don’t they need some brain to operate? To move?
SE: Well, that was my reaction when I heard about this chicken without a head, but they took him to Salt Lake City, and the University of Utah scientists there checked him out and determined that there was enough of his brain stem left for him to function.
ML: Enough in the neck.
SE: Right. The university tried to re-enact Mike with a chicken that they had put under anaesthesia, and it just didn’t work. So there was something unique to Mike.
ML: Mike was pretty special. Eighteen months he lived?
SE: Eighteen months.
ML: And he went on tour?
SE: He toured the west. I know there are reports out there that he toured all over the nation, but all that I can discover is Salt Lake City south to San Diego and to Long Beach. He travelled around with a two-headed calf.
ML: Oh my gosh.
SE: I know. But he would preen and crow—and sleep with his neck under his wing.
ML: Aw.
SE: I guess he gained weight. “He was a fine specimen of a rooster,” to quote Mr. Olsen. “He just didn’t happen to have his head.”
ML: What did he die of eventually?
SE: Mike choked to death on a kernel of corn [choking sounds heard—mine]. I know. Poor Mike.
Sally Edginton went on to talk about the festival, and I asked her what sort of events they had. She said they started off with a 5K run, which they dubbed “Run Like a Headless Chicken.” Then they had chicken dinner and chicken games—egg tosses, egg races—and “Pin the Head on the Chicken.”
ML: Ms. Edginton, is any of this true?
SE: Mike is true! He really is true. In fact, he was written up by Life magazine in the October 22nd issue, 1945. They have photos there, and if you’d like to see a photo of Mike, you can go to the Net.
ML: He won’t be standing on his head.
SE: No, as far as I know, he never stood on his head.
Sally assured us that the Mike the Headless Chicken Festival in Fruta was to celebrate Mike’s will to live, not his headlessness—and high time, too, I say. But, then, what about Louetta Mallard’s little dog Dosha, another unfortunate American animal? Doesn’t he deserve a festival or a laurel of some kind, too? Dosha, apparently, stepped out to pee one day and took it into his head to jump the fence and go on a spree instead. Sadly, he was hit by a car and left to die at the side of the road. Luckily, the police came along while Dosha was still alive. Sadly, again, instead of taking Dosha to the vet, they shot him. (Didn’t have no time to be going to the vet, apparently.) Then the police took the “carcass” to the Public Works yard, and the people there stuck him in a freezer until the Humane Society could come along and collect the remains. Luckily, the Humane Society folk noticed that Dosha, although well chilled, wasn’t actually, technically dead—more remaining than remaindered, in a manner of spea
king. They set to thawing him out and setting his broken bones, and Dosha and Louetta lived happily ever after.
Not everyone who’s hosted As It Happens is wild about what people have sometimes called our “stupid animal stories”—or so I’ve heard. But our four-and six-footed friends, and some with no feet at all, have provided us with hours of diversion, and the audience would seem to share our fondness for them, at home and abroad. Remember Bonnie and Clyde, our ham on the lam in Malmesbury? They developed such a following in England that the BBC made a movie about their escapade. In 2004 Lynn Horsford (not making this up) came on the show to tell us about The Legend of the Tamworth Two. She said they had several pigs playing the parts of the two original truants, partly so as not to tire them out and partly because they couldn’t find another two pigs that could master all the skills required to re-enact the jumping, running, swimming and so on that the originals had got up to. Bit of a porcine Olympics, really. I haven’t seen the final product, but I’m sure it will pop up one day on the Discovery Channel; at least, I hope so.
Probably Ms. Horsford had not then heard about Mouse the Talking Pig, or they might have found a role for her in the movie. We didn’t hear about her either until November 2005. That’s when we spoke to Mike Rees at his farm in Bridgend, Wales.
ML: Mr. Rees, I’m told you have a talking pig.
MR: That’s absolutely correct. Mouse is the world’s first talking pig.
ML: Is it a mouse or a pig?
MR: No, she’s called Mouse.
ML: Your pig is called Mouse.
MR: That’s right, the reason being she has a long, long snout, grey and black in colour, and has large ears.
ML: So does she object to her name? Is that why she started talking?
MR: No, no.
ML: What happened? How did you discover she talked?
MR: Oh, 10, 12 days ago, I came out of the shed to feed her—it was dark, quite early in the morning—and I heard someone say, “Hello.” In a French accent, believe it or not.
ML: “Hello” in a French accent.
MR: Exactly. And I look around—no one around. Look down—it was Mouse the Pig talking, saying “Hello.”
ML: And did you say “Hello” back?
MR: I speak to her every morning. “Hello.” So whether she’s picked it up that way, I’m not sure.
ML: Does she say anything else?
MR: We are working on that one.
ML: Are you.
MR: Yes.
ML: What words are you trying to—
MR: I can’t tell you that yet, can’t disclose that yet. That’s a farm secret until we perfect them—then we’ll get back.
ML: Does the “Hello” sound like a … grunt?
MR: Right. [He senses skepticism.] I’ve got TV—they’ve been up to us four times—and they captured it on TV every time. It’s brilliant. I recorded the footage. I can play it on the air for you.
ML: Okay.
MR: You can get the “Hello” quite clearly.
ML: Okay.
[British female voice]: So let’s hear it one last time. Mouse: Hello. Hello. [Or: Oink. Oink.]
MR: Whaddya think? Want to have that again?
ML: No, we got it.
MR: Clear enough?
ML: Yeah, that was good. Do you have cows and chickens and horses and things?
MR: We have 14 horses and 3 chickens.
ML: Does any of the horses speak?
MR: Neigh. Of course not.
ML: What about the chickens?
Well, the chickens didn’t speak either, but Mouse the Pig was just tremendous, Mr. Rees insisted. Plus, she’d just given birth to eight piglets: four of a cream-and-beige stripey hue and four that were a cross between Tamworth (See? She could’ve been in the pigs-on-the-lam movie!) and French wild boar—hence the French accent, he said. Of course.
A lot of the animal stories we’ve done on As It Happens have been in a more serious vein but no less interesting for that. A good many of them fell into the category of science or ecology. We reported on the plight of the endangered right whales on the east coast and on Luna, the overly friendly orca who lived in the waters off British Columbia—and, of course, on Willy of “Save Willy” fame, another killer whale. His “real name” was Keiko, and after he became world-famous for being rescued from an aquarium in Mexico, money was raised to have Keiko shipped back to his native waters near Iceland, where he would be free again to live the way whales are supposed to. That was the theory.
It took a while, but Keiko was eventually flown home—at huge expense and, no doubt, some discomfort to Keiko—but the whale did not thrive in his natural environment. Apparently, he didn’t want to swim around in icy water without friends or entertainment. In 2002, while he was still being watched over by human caretakers in a kind of large, open pen in Iceland, he gave his minders the slip and made off for Norway. In September he followed a fishing boat to the Norwegian town of Haka, where he seemed to be inviting people to play with him. He was hungry and had lost weight. He died of pneumonia the following year.
The marmot recovery people on Vancouver Island have been having a bit more luck in their attempts to prop up the population of the native marmot species. It was June 2002 when we first talked to Andrew Bryant, chief scientist of the Marmot Recovery Project in Nanaimo, British Columbia. You may wonder, as I did, whether the marmot really was an endangered species and why we would find it necessary to ensure its survival anyway. A marmot, after all, is just a sort of woodchuck or groundhog—in other words, a rodent.
Dr. Bryant had heard it all before. “There’s a popular notion out there,” he said, “that a marmot is a marmot is a marmot.” But nothing could be further from the truth, apparently. There are 14 species of marmots in the world, four of which live in Canada, and one of them is exclusive to Vancouver Island. This is the one on the verge of extinction; they’d counted only 30 marmots emerging from hibernation that year.
The problem, as Dr. Bryant outlined it, is that Vancouver Island marmots live on mountaintops: one family atop one mountain, another family on the next mountain and so on. To propagate in a healthy way (no incest among marmots), the teenagers need to wander off and find suitable mates on a neighbouring mountain, but clearcutting has interrupted this practice, and this is how: clearcut logging has removed the forest cover from the valleys between the mountains. Now, marmots don’t like forests, and they love clear, open spaces, so instead of tearing through the forest and rushing up the next mountain to find his soulmate, the errant teenager just settles down in this lovely open valley, where, presumably, he lives happily, albeit celibately, until a cougar comes along and eats him—cougars and wolves being the other elements in the marmot reduction scenario. Poor marmots.
Dr. Bryant’s plan for saving his groundhog friends was to breed them in captivity and then ferry them about from mountaintop to mountaintop, to join up with their wild cousins and engage in a little hanky-panky. When we caught up with him again in 2004, he was sad to report that they hadn’t made a lot of progress to date. Of the four marmots released by the Marmot Recovery Project the year before, three had immediately become lunch (see above) for bigger fauna. But they were pressing ahead. The marmot savers had been given something of a boost by the B.C. Natural Resources Minister Joyce Murray, who had publicly encouraged local huntsmen to take up arms against the neighbourhood cougars. This call for a cull caused a flurry of negative attention from the anti-hunting community until it was explained that there was no cull as such. The Honourable Ms. Murray was only hoping that hunters would take their full quota of cats and wolves in marmot areas.
Last time I checked with the marmot recovery people, Dr. Bryant’s associate Sean Pendergast was pleased to tell me that the marmots were coming along nicely. He said the captive breeding programme in particular was wildly successful; that is, marmots that had been born and raised in captivity were now happily producing many little marmots in captivity. This is occurring, by the way,
in zoos all over Canada. Yes, unbeknownst to you and me—until now—marmots are flying hither and yon across the country all the time courtesy of Air Canada (which doesn’t want to carry your pet schnauzer anymore, but that’s another story).
Anyway, the zoo-bred marmots have been released into the wild in ever-increasing numbers, and their survival rate has steadily improved—nearly half of them survived in 2006. And in 2006 two marmots that had been released a couple of years earlier bore litters—four pups each—and they all emerged successfully from hibernation. This was cause for great celebration in the marmot welfare community, who now see more reason to hope that they will eventually reach their goal of about three hundred wild marmots.
Our introduction to the marmot crisis came a year after we learned about snail sex. Ronald Chase of McGill University was the man who, in June 2001, enlightened us as to the antics snails get up to when mating—namely, shooting darts at each other. Now, in evolutionary terms, when you record a particular—not to say peculiar—behaviour on the part of a plant or animal, you ask yourself how it might promote the animal’s long-term survival. (Vancouver Island marmots, for example, might be well advised to become allergic to meadow valleys.) But when it came to snails’ arrows, Dr. Chase said, scientists had been distracted by their own species’ lore. Immersed as they were in Greek mythology and images of Eros, they thought the arrows might be a device to turn on the opposite sex in order to engage in … hanky-panky. As a result, they hadn’t bothered to investigate the snail darts business too closely, which left him a nice opening. What he discovered was that when a snail gets hit by a dart, he stores up more sperm; in other words, it may or may not be a turn-on, but it will make the dart receiver more likely to produce little snail babies when he mates.
The As It Happens Files Page 19