![]() ![]() The film is loosely - and I mean looooooooosely - based on the book. And if you are like I was, hoping for 'Blade Runner' in book form, you're going to be disappointed. Dick wrote many great sci-fi novels in his life, but this is not one of them. But when I picked up and read 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' years later, I was like: I was completely blown away. I fell in love with this world:Īnd, of course, the film made me want to read the book it was based on. I first saw it when Ridley Scott's 'final cut' of the film was shown at the Ziegfeld Theater in Midtown a decade ago. Give that coat the Oscar right now! The original 'Blade Runner' is a beautiful movie, too, with its darkness, its Vangelis soundtrack and its overall weirdness. It was so well shot that I'd say it was beautiful. Particularly Ryan Gosling's coat. Real fast about the movie: It was slowly paced, and it kinda didn't make any sense, but I didn't hate it. So I saw 'Blade Runner 2049' with Heather this week, and it inspired me to deviate from my schedule and do a quick review of the sci-fi classic that inspired the original 'Blade Runner' and its sequel. Of greater interest to Dulude-de Broin and his fellow researchers than the odd nanny/bighorn faceoff? The general decline in the ridge's mountain-goat population: 164 in 2008, it's now at just 28 animals.This Sunday's book is 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' by Philip K. ![]() Such interspecies interactions are an example of the interesting observations that accrue over years of fieldwork by dedicated (and hardy) biologists in a long-term study such as the Caw Ridge Mountain Goat Research Project, which has been monitoring Caw Ridge goats since 1988. "I saw one of the most subordinate nannies of Caw Ridge easily displacing sheep," Dulude-de Broin recalls, "so even if they are careful they are clearly more dominant." He speculates the difference lies in the fact that goats are well acquainted with one another's social rankings, whereas they may feel compelled to more energetically show the less-familiar bighorns just who's boss. "In most interactions that I witnessed, they walked slowly towards the sheep in an aggressive manner (arching their back to appear bigger or displaying horns) and then waited for the sheep to flee," Dulude-de Broin explains. Goats approach other goats directly, whereas there's a bit more of a ritualised production involved when they confront bighorns. "It is as if they are not used to interacting with sheep so they are more careful." "They don't seem as willing to bed and appear more vigilant if sheep are amongst them," says Dulude-de Broin. He and his colleague Florent Déry both emphasise that goats often appear somewhat on edge when sheep are nearby. Nannies may be on the belligerent side among their own kind and in dealings with bighorns, but Dulude-de Broin has noticed they exercise that belligerence differently depending on its object. More: Angry mountain goat confronts a hiker on the snowy slopesĭulude-de Broin says he's never seen a nanny engage with a big, "full-curl" bighorn ram – as with mature billies, the older rams tend to utilise different geographies on the Caw Ridge summer range – but he notes the goats have been observed asserting themselves over younger male sheep. ![]() ![]() (Incidentally, the same advice applies to mountaineers of the two-legged category: goats can be aggressive towards people, and a billy killed a hiker in the Olympic Mountains of Washington in 2010.) "If I was a bighorn facing a nanny, I would get out of the way!" " can severely injure conspecifics and predators, so they could also be a serious threat to sheep," he adds. (Caw Ridge nannies have been seen ramming wolves in defence of their young.) And their daggered horns are much more formidable than a bighorn's blunter headgear. " have higher rates of intraspecific aggression than any other female ungulate for which it has been measured," he says. Female goats, aka nannies, are the ones most often seen sharing space with sheep – and sometimes muscling them around – in the Caw Ridge study area billies here tend to spend the summer fattening up for the rut in an area isolated from bighorns and other goats alike.Īs Dulude-de Broin notes, the mountaintop hierarchy isn't especially surprising. The pecking order, as it turns out, is pretty clear-cut: mountain goats reliably dominate bighorns. ![]()
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