Why would somebody dedicate their professional life to studying and explaining cow patty bugs?
Why would somebody become an expert in mouse urine?
What possesses a person to commit countless hours to tracking down, documenting and proving the existence of cougars in rural Saskatchewan?
The quixotic intellectual obsessions of researchers are not easy to share. They aren’t the sort of passions that seize the souls of countless regular people, such as cheering for the Blue Jays.
But farmers benefit greatly from the commitment of many experts in odd fields, who work on their research obsessions for years and decades because they think the subjects are fascinating. Most may also believe we would all benefit from sharing their passions, not just for the sake of interest but also because they are useful to understand.
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A wonderful example of this sort of expert and proselytizer in a specific area is Kevin Floate, an Agriculture Canada researcher in Lethbridge who has just completed a guidebook to the insects who live, breathe and dine in and on cattle manure, entitled Cow Patty Critters.
Floate is a long-time advocate of the value of looking deeply into and beneath cow patties to see what’s living there.
There’s an elaborate ecosystem inside each patty, with communities of poop-beetle dwellers, tunnellers and rollers residing in the inner darkness, while dozens of fly and wasp varieties alight on fresh, steamy piles and hundreds of assorted wriggly things move inside the manure.
Beyond biological interest, the cow patty critters break down and redistribute nutrients and reveal much about the health of a pasture and its residents.
As a guy who always takes the opportunity to break apart cow patties whenever I visit a pasture, I understand Floate’s passion for the area. I love flipping over those things to see what skittles away and what secret residents are exposed when a dry-ish patty is cracked in half.
“Hello, Mr. Bug, I’m looking at you!”
Floate wrote his book, just released and free for download, to help farmers, university students, researchers and agronomists understand the complexities of coprophagic insects. It’s loaded with photographs to help readers do their own cow patty critter identifications, contains trivia in “Faecal Factoids” and neatly lays out the scientific complexity and confusions that attend this area of research.
Any producer who deals with pastures would benefit from this book, but its existence wasn’t inevitable. Floate composed this light tome because he wishes he’d had a guidebook like it when he was a student and young researcher, so he threw his passion into writing the book and giving it to us.
A couple of weeks ago I met a researcher in human genomics at Manitoba’s biggest hospital research complex. He took an interesting path into human genomics after getting a PhD in agriculture from an American university. He developed expertise in rodent pests, learned about mouse urine and what it reveals, and then found much of his knowledge and skills transferred perfectly to human medicine.
These paths led to cross-fertilization of knowledge, and each of these researchers followed a path of passion that few would think of treading.
I witnessed much of this as a child. In my basement was a dark room filled with boxes of plaster casts of potential cougar paw prints obtained from farms, wilderness areas, parks and Indigenous communities. On Sunday afternoons I could find my father in the Prairie History Room of the Regina Public Library, poring through volumes of forgotten lore that might contain references to cougars.
My father believed cougars existed in the Saskatchewan wilds and was determined to prove it. Most biologists of the time were adamant that there was no native population of cougars in the province, but ranchers, farmers, conservation officers, trappers and Indigenous people disagreed.
My dad was a British immigrant who found Saskatchewan fabulously exotic, so he committed himself to this bizarre passion and obsession, and visited hundreds of places, sometimes with a young Ed White in tow. After many years, he published a modest but comprehensive booklet called Saskatchewan Cougar: Elusive Cat, which proved his point.
It warmed my heart a couple of years ago to find that his work of passion hadn’t disappeared after his death in 1984. My friend and colleague, Canadian Cattlemen editor Lisa Guenther, jumped into the book while she was doing her own research on rural Saskatchewan, which is her native habitat and the area where many of her magazine’s readers live. It is also the setting for much of the fiction she writes.
How much of our knowledge is built upon the bizarre passions of researchers who commit countless hours to studying areas nobody else is likely to bother with? Almost every area of knowledge has examples.
When it comes to the quixotic, it’s worth considering Don Quixote, from whom the term comes. He was the fictional hero of Miguel de Cervantes’ 1605 comic novel, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha.
At the time the form of writing known as “the novel” didn’t yet exist, the Middle Ages had been recently left behind and publishing was a primitive business.
How Cervantes came to write a gigantic humorous novel about a delusional fallen nobleman committed to reviving the glories of chivalry can never be adequately explained. But fortunately for the readers of the world, Don Quixote is the most published novel in history, after an initial run of 400 copies, most of which were lost in a shipwreck.
Cervantes threw himself into imagining the inner world of his wistful knight and we can still laugh and sympathize with him, even as he charges at the windmills he believes are giants.
Some people do everything for money, fame or glory.
Others just want to do interesting things and share their passions.
Farmers and the rest of us around agriculture have been blessed by many in the latter camp, and we can only hope there are many more out there, working away quietly on passions that will one day inform and delight us.
Now, time for me to get out to a pasture and apply my newfound knowledge from Cow Patty Critters.
