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Deconstructing Slate's "Pepper" Series

Animal Person

For those who didn't read the five-part Slate series " Pepper, the stolen dog who changed American science " by Daniel Engber , I recommend it for the history, but also for the misconceptions and assumptions that you might want to discuss on the Facebook discussion about the series. Let's deconstruct: Part I: Where's Pepper?

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KwaZulu-Natal

10,000 Birds

At first the Zulu King Dingaan gained the upper hand by slaughtering a large contingent of Boers (including their leaders Piet Retief and Gert Maritz) but the infamous Battle of Blood River in 1838 lead to a division of the territory between what was later known as Natal to the south and Zululand to the north.

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Birding Tengchong, Yunnan, China in 2017

10,000 Birds

Fortunately, in science, there is often a way to turn a defeat into a victory – in this case via the author just coming up with a new hypothesis, “if black eagles use the frequency or intensity of mobbing as a clue to locate nests, a lack of seasonal difference in mobbing behavior by drongos may be an evolutionary adaptive strategy.”

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