Acting Citizen: Sheep and Fish

Facebook is to blame for this

By James Knudsen

“A horse, a saddle, and land.” Those are the three things my maternal grandfather suggested I ask my father for when it came time for me to start making my way in life. My grandfather was born in the village of Doze Ribeiras on the island of Terceira, one of the major islands of the Azores archipelago. Born Laurentino Domingoes Cota on February 9, 1900, he came with his family to the United States at the age of seven. First by ship across the Atlantic and then by train crossing the American continent. One of earliest stories of his life is of him losing his hat when he stuck his head out the window of a train. He pleaded with the conductor to stop the train, but I suspect his lack of English and being only seven did little to advance his cause. The family settled in the San Joaquin Valley and joined the growing community of Portuguese immigrants whose families remain a significant part of the Central Valley today.
    Laurentino held a number of jobs throughout his life. Truck driver, bar and restaurant owner, and doing tasks for his brother-in-law who was the local supplier of alcohol during Prohibition. A few years ago I learned that his favorite job was sheepherding. My late aunt, his eldest child, related to me his explanation why it was the best job he ever had. All you had to do was find the sheep a suitable grazing area, and then find yourself a nice tree to take a nap under, because “the sheep take care of themselves.”

My mother once suggested that I ask my grandfather to name some of the places he had been to as a young man herding sheep. Mom was confident that her father and my father had trekked many of the same regions of the Sierra Nevada mountains. I never got around to asking, but recently I began researching that claim and, yes, Laurentino, Morris, and I likely did cover the same ground. California historians have written of sheep ranching operations of the 20th century, and most of the herders were of Portuguese and Basque extraction. The notable difference between my grandfather and myself is that sheep led him to high country while, for me and my father, it was fish.
    Trout specifically, and if at all possible Golden Trout, which were the preferred quarry. Three qualities make Golden Trout so desirable to fishermen. First, given the proper conditions, they are plentiful. Streams just several feet across can support schools of fish idling in the current. Second is their appearance. In 1905, Barton Warren Evermann wrote of the fish in Golden Trout Creek: “This is the most beautiful of all the trouts; the brilliancy and richness of its coloration is not equaled in any other known species.” And third and best of all, they’re dumb. You don’t need to be an expert fly-caster with pin-point presentation of your Royal Coachman, hand-tied on a barbless, number-16 hook, to catch a Golden. When they’re really hungry, they’ll leap for the artificial fly before it hits the water.

Sheep and fish. I’ve been thinking about these two creatures. And as is too often the case in this day and age, Facebook is the reason. Editor, can we put a sad-face emoji here? For reasons that I ponder daily, I have a number of Facebook friends with conservative views. Let me go on record that my view of conservatism has softened with age. And in the current climate, I am actually sympathetic toward those conservatives who feel they have no political party that represents them. I recently read Max Boot’s The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right. In it he details his life as an immigrant, his life as a conservative commentator, and his current alienation from the Republican Party under Donald Trump. Unfortunately, most of the conservatives in my Facebook feed have neither the vocabulary nor the discernment of Boot. And so, I find myself sloshing through a gutter of conspiracy theories, right-wing fever dreams, and outright lies about everyday life.

And often, either as part of the meme’s salutation or as part of its closing, appears the word “sheeple.”
    Now, I think if they were really clever, they’d spell it “sheople,” but that’s just me. The Urban Dictionary defines it as “a combination of the words ‘sheep’ and ‘people’,” meaning that the person or persons referred to are acting as a group or only do what is trending. It has gained enough legitimacy to be included in Merriam-Webster: “people who are docile, compliant, or easily influenced :people likened to sheep.” The pandemic has made it ever more fashionable to use the term, but I can’t help wondering if perhaps these drug-store biologists in red hats might have it wrong. I’ve begun to suspect that this invective is being hurled by people whose brains are working on a level closer to that of a trout.

Let us first consider sheep. Popular culture has not done them any favors. The 1991 film Silence of the Lambs presents our heroine, Clarice Starling, retelling the events of the night she lived through as a young girl, desperately trying to save lambs too docile and dumb to save themselves. Nature made sheep as prey animals that must be on constant alert against predators, and they developed herd behavior to provide protection for the young, with more noses, ears, and eyes scanning the horizon for danger. A sheep’s eyes has a field of vision as wide as 325 degrees. Researchers have found that sheep can recognize and remember faces for long periods of time, a feat our President struggles with daily. There are many more examples, but it is fair to say that the opinion of biologists is on target – sheep are not the brightest bulb in the barn. That honor goes to pigs, but they’re not the mindless followers that people have for centuries branded them as being. And sheep are certainly more intelligent than trout. Sheep are mammals.
    It is generally held that intelligence in animals increases as we go up the evolutionary tree. Fish are found between insects and reptiles. The reptilian brain is often referenced in pop culture, but trout didn’t get even that far. And personal experience has shown that dangling something shiny, with a hook attached to it, is all you need to do to pluck a fish from the water. In the case of trout fishing, you may need an artificial fly, but I’ve yet to see one that mimics an insect with what my mammalian brain considers accuracy.

    Apparently Golden Trout have lower standards. Drop a nymph on the water and they STRIKE! Their behavior is purely instinctual, devoid of thought or complex computation. And Facebook is an ocean of lower-life forms. Now, it would be easy to describe these denizens of the digital deep-end as bottom-feeders, but that’s like...what’s the metaphor I’m seeking? I think it involves a barrel, fish, and a firearm.
    As difficult as it may be – and the difficulty factor seems to increase with each passing day – I will resist the impulses that would otherwise emanate from the primitive structures of my brain. I will not post, nor re-post memes that are an insult to the intelligence of ectothermic organisms (exceptions will be made for purely juvenile humor). And I will continue to challenge the large-mouthed, but small-brained who are lured from the depths by memes in large fonts and all CAPS proclaiming liberty, rights, freedom – always preceded by my – and I will gently extricate the treble hook attached to a gaudy popper plug with a chartreuse hula skirt from their gnashing jaws, and return them to their stagnant pond.

Copyright © 2020 by James Knudsen