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Show THE SAN JUAN RECORD Thursday June 18, 1981 r Page 24 - area. An estimated one million Belgian pigeons were captured or Blue Collar beasts do assorted chores and tasks Since mans prehistoric have hu- times, domesticated and trained animals to helpthem perform onerous chores. It started with cavemen training dogs to help in the hunt, and today people are still dreaming up new schemes to make animals do their dirty work, according to the current issue of National Wildlife magazine. Over the employed this technique during World War H. Their submarines would release large amounts of bread in the water, and gulls would flock to it. After a while, the birds gathered naturally at the sight of a long, dark underwater. sliding Spotters ashore alerted the authshadow orities. No one knows how many fell victim to a German flock of hungry gulls. has Positive reinforcement also been, used to train macaques, short -- tailed monkeys, to harvest coconuts from the tallest palms in the fields of southern Thailand. And in Boston, a capuchin monkey named Hellion does household chores ior a man who is paralyzed from the shoulders down as a result of a car accident. Hellion can turn on the lights, put cassettes into a tape recorder, retrieve food from the refrigerator and feed her owner. The military has a long history of putting animals to work. In one battle with the Romans, Hannibal set elephants in his front lines, ready to charge. Ilis plan backfired, however. Spooked by trumpets and irritated by the enemies darts, the elephants and turned stampeded into their own cavalry. Today, the U.S. Coast Guard is training pigeons to spot orange, the colors of yellow, and red life jackets, buoys, raits, and flags. The pigeons will be carried in a plexiglass bubble beneath a helicopter and will peck at an electrical switch when they see .these colored objects floating on the ocean below. The Nanv, meanwhile, has long used sea lions and other marine mammals to retrieve or diliver Apobjects at great depths. WildNational parently,-" says life, they work better thanhum-man- s, who require scuba gear, decompression chambers, medical personnel, good weather, and a few days to complete a years pigeons, workers. During Prussian siege of in Paris 1870, pigeons carried four-mon- th hundreds of thousands of official and private messages to and from the outside world. The messages were inserted in a small goose quill and attached by waxy silken thread to the strongest tail feather. During World War II British forces dropped pigeons in baskets from airplanes so that local recould retrieve them, sidents attach any information that might be of interest to allied forces and then release the birds. After circling the area once or twice the pigeons would head for home, perhaps hundreds of miles away. Researchers now think pigeons may have a future as assembly line inspectors for defects in drug capsules or electronic equipment, for example. Human inspectors tend to make errors about 15 percent of the time, whereas pigeons make errors only one percent of the time, one psychologist found. And they dont get bored," Studadds National Wildlife. ies have found that they can remain on the job for three, days -- straight without sacrificing accuracy. The birds do loaf on the job, though, so most pigeon projects call for three birds inspecting in tandem, each a check on the others. The technique used in training pigeons and other animals is called positive reinforcement, developed by B.I'. Skinner, the famed behaviorist. It involves when, using food as a reward for instance, a pigeon spots a defective drug capsule-- - and ignoring wrong behavior. Animals are not starved; the reward is part of a daily ration. British submarine eommand- - calories you get in an orange are better for your waistline than those you get in a glass The or orange juice, thanks to the fiber in the whole orange. It will mike you feel full longer. Apples and other fruits work the same wav. N, Broadway Cortez, Co, wceeoceeeoooQOOOQOosc trappy fothor pay 24-year- -old M &W ! sS0b ts mission' Navy porpoise has carried tools and messages to aquanauts in a lab 200 feet below, off the California coast. Sea lions have recovered antisubmarine test rockets at depths of 490 feet. And a killer whale has been A trained' to recover dummy v 1 T 445 ats especially have been found to be cooperative the ers killed in that war. Probably, the most famous was Cher Ami, a plucky British racing pigeon. When an American 'battalion advanced too far ahead of its lines, it was surrounded, and neither humans nor birds could get through heavy fire to report- the batallions location. The last hope was Cher Ami. Through the fusillade of fire, the little racing pigeon rose, heading for home carrying the vital information, recounts National Wildlife. Suddenly,, a of burst shrapnel ripped its leg. But it didnt stop. Gamely, it flew on, reaching the base in 25 minutes. The message, attached to the wounded leg, hung from a few shreds of sinew. Today, Cher Amis stuffed body is on display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. A real war hero, it serves as a reminder of the amazing feats animals can be trained to perform for humans. tor- pedoes from depths of 1,600 feet. During World War I, pigeons were commonly used as spies, carrying messages back and forth across enemy lines. 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