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The AIH Transcript for February 19, 2018

Hosts: Carol Off and Jeff Douglas

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

CAROL OFF: Hello, I'm Carol Off.

JEFF DOUGLAS: Good evening. I'm Jeff Douglas. This is “As It Happens”.

[Music: Theme]

JD: Tonight:

CO: ALICE shatters wonderland. That's ALICE as is Alert. Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evaluate. And when our guest attended a training session on what that active shooter program teaches young kids, she was shocked.

JD: They got to the bottom of it, and fast. We wondered what it was like for Canada's two-man bobsled team to tie for gold at the Winter Olympics. So we called up another Canadian who did the same thing, nearly 20 years ago, to the day.

CO: Peak strength. a Navajo climber is using Facebook's check in function to give mountains back their Indigenous names — and to rewrite the already rewritten narrative of the great American outdoors.

JD: Primate numbers. We knew orangutans in Borneo were critically endangered, but we didn't know the half of it. New research shows the island's population has been cut in half in just 16 years.

CO: Curlers leave no stone unturned. Even so, everyone's shocked when a Russian Olympian tests positive for doping. But our guest says the use of banned substances is more common than you think.

JD: And… hoppy accident. A scientist accidentally discovers there's no truth to a long-held belief about when rabbits were first domesticated, which was the result of a game of broken telephone dating back to 600 A.D.

JD: As It Happens, the Monday edition. Radio that puts its bunnies where its mouth is.

[Music: Theme]

Back To Top »

Part one: Florida: ALICE training, curling doping, rabbit domestication

Florida ALICE training

Guest: Lisa Guthrie

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: A crowd chants about wanting safe schools]

JD: Under grey skies in Washington, DC, they gathered, and they laid down. Today, outside the White House, DC-area students held a "lie-in" to rally for gun control, after last week's shooting at a Florida high school that left seventeen dead. So far in 2018, there have been eight shootings in U.S. schools resulting in death or injury. And as such violence begins to feel chillingly familiar; many schools are training kids and parents on how to respond. One common training system is called ALICE: Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evaluate. Lisa Guthrie is a mother of four; she recently attended a session on ALICE, hosted by the PTA at her kindergartener's school. Her Facebook post about the experience has been shared thousands of times. We reached Ms. Guthrie in Redmond, Washington.

CO: Lisa, why did the PTA decide to bring in police officers to talk about active shooter training in your school?

LISA GUTHRIE: It actually was at our principal suggestion. She thought that it would be valuable for everyone to know about the procedures around an active shooter.

CO: This would be a plan for dealing with an active shooter in your daughter's school. It's already in place. Has she gone through training already in this?

LG: What they explained to us was that they do drills for a variety of situations. This can't be an active shooter, to a coyote on campus, or all sorts of other situations where they might need to have kids take special procedures to keep them safe. So yes, they've been through these drills already.

CO: What do they understand they’re to do? This is something called ALICE, isn’t it? This is what the police explained. Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, and Evaluate. What is your daughter in kindergarten what is she supposed to do?

LG: The big thing that they tell the kids from what I understood from the presentation was really to listen to the adults around them. And if the adults around them say around them say to run, they’re to run. If the adults around them say to hide, they’re to hide. If the adults around them say to throw books, they’re to throw books.

CO: So ALICE the first couple: Alert. If they are in a place where they can't get out there's Lockdown; that's the “L”. And then Inform, inform others what's going on. But it's this “C” — Counter — that you wrote a Facebook post about. What is it in the context of your daughter in kindergarten that alarms you about Counter?

LG: Counter is essentially that of all of those other procedures fail, that the kids, it's horrifying to think about with my kindergartner, but if she is in a classroom and there's an active shooter, rather than traditional procedures of hey, let's get all the kids in a corner. Let's have them just sit there quietly. The goal is just to create mayhem in the room. And that's just giving really everybody — everybody in that classroom and everybody throughout the school — a better chance of survival. Because again, it's horrifying to think about, and I hope my daughter is never in this situation or anywhere close to it. But it's easier to shoot at kids who are sitting quietly in a corner than it is to shoot at children who are all over the room. And that just makes the situation more unpredictable, and it increases the survival rate. It's just giving everybody in the school — the majority — the best chance of getting out of there safely.

CO: And a disturbing part of it is that what might happen if a child is in a class creating this disturbance that it may be enough that other kids elsewhere can get to the school before the shooter gets to them.

LG: That's a possibility yes.

CO: It would be an act of heroism that I would imagine you'd be challenged thinking if you want your child to take on?

LG: Yeah, that's a hard thing to think about is that there's a macro-level of the whole school and what's best for the whole school. And then there's what about for my individual child. And it's hard you hope that both of those things are in alignment and that what's best for my child is also best for the school. But if that's not possible, then I understand that as a community we want what's best for the majority. And hard to think about my kids being in the minority, but that's something I have to face.

CO: You don't live in a war zone. You don't live in a country that’s secure — supposedly a secure, safe, functioning place. What do you make of the fact that you are to contemplate those things —that your daughter is supposed to be prepared at the age of five to do these kinds of things? What do you think of that?

LG: I think what you said at first: I think that I'm not in a war zone. There's all sorts of emergencies that could happen. Here in the Pacific Northwest, something that gets talked about a lot too is the possibility of a devastating earthquake. And we prepare for that, even though I don't walk around in fear every day that there's going to be an earthquake. Similarly, I don't walk around in fear every day that I'm going to be shot at. But it's a possibility, and I think about the things that I can do to prepare and that I can do to prepare my family. But for the most part we live our lives.

CO: In most places that are earthquake-prone or where there might be a disaster of some kind, it is normal and expected that there be drills and expectations for what to do with natural disasters. I guess what I'm asking you is that somebody coming into your child's classroom with an AR 15 assault rifle and spraying it with bullets. That is not a natural thing. What does it mean to you to have to also be prepared for the possibility of something quite unnatural happening in your child's classroom?

LG: I hate it. I absolutely hate it. I think it's my responsibility as a parent — and a responsible member of American society — to do everything in my power to make sure that doesn't happen. I learned about the Moms Demand Action Group as part of this most recent shooting. And I personally committed to at a minimum donating whenever there's a mass shooting. And also I think part of that is speaking out like this. And helping people really understand the situation that we're in.

CO: What do you mean the situation we are in? What is that.

LG: Just the situation where people can get assault rifles and people can carry out these kinds of acts. I would like to live in a world where that doesn't happen — in a country where that doesn’t happen.

CO: We also know that security systems in the education sector is now a multibillion-dollar industry in the United States. There’s a lot of money to be made on putting in bulletproof glass and protective areas for students, lockdown equipment, metal detectors. How would you wish to see that money spent in the education system?

LG: Lots of different ways. It's funny: the shooting occurred just as we were getting result in our school district of a recent bond election that was to fund new schools in our districts, which are sorely needed; the classrooms are very overcrowded. And that bond measure failed, so we didn't get the money to build the new schools that we want. And now we have people talking about yeah, metal detectors in our schools. And I would much rather see that money spent on something that I know is going to impact my children every day, versus a catastrophic event that should never impact my children.

CO: Well, Lisa, I am sorry that you have to prepare for those things. And I appreciate you telling us what it's like in your daughter's school. Thank you.

LG: Yeah, thank you.

CO: Bye bye.

JD: We reached Lisa Guthrie in Redmond, Washington. For more on this story, and on ALICE active shooter training, go to our website: www.cbc.ca/aih. And here in Canada, incidentally, in 2016, the Manitoba Teachers' Society rejected a recommendation by the Winnipeg Police Service that city schools adopt ALICE training. The Society called it, quote, "quite a different philosophy than we have here in Canada." On Saturday, thousands of students, parents, teachers, and neighbours of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School showed up to a gun control rally in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Among the attendees was Emma Gonzalez, a survivor of last week's shooting. Here is a part of what she said.

SOUNDCLIP

EMMA GONZALEZ: We know that they are claiming that there are mental health issues, and I'm not a psychologist. But we need to pay attention to the fact that this isn't just a mental health issue. He wouldn’t have harmed that many students with a knife. How about we stop blaming the victims for something that was the shooter's fault? But. The fault of the people who let him buy the guns in the first place, those at the gun shows, the people who encouraged him to buy accessories for his guns to make them fully-automatic, the people who didn't take them away from him when they knew that he expressed homicidal tendencies. And I'm not talking about the FBI. I'm talking about the people that he lived with. I’m talking about the neighbours who saw him outside holding guns. If the president wants to come up to me and tell me to my face that it was a terrible tragedy, and how it should never have happened, and maintain telling us how nothing is going to be done about it. I'm going to happily ask him how much money he received from the National Rifle Association. Hey, hey, you want to know something? It doesn’t matter because I already know: thirty-million dollars. And divided by the number of gunshot victims in the United States in the one-and-one-half-months in 2018 alone that comes out to being fifty-eight hundred dollars. Is how much these people are worth to you, Trump? If you don’t do anything to prevent this from continuing to occur, that number of gunshot victims will go up, and the number that they are worth will go down. And we will be worthless to you. To every politician who is taking donations from the NRA: shame on you.

JD: Emma Gonzalez is a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. She was speaking at a gun control rally in Fort Lauderdale over the weekend. Ms. Gonzalez and her classmates are planning a march on Washington next month to call for stricter gun control legislation.

[Music: Folk rock]

Curling doping

Guest: George Karrys

JD: He is the first athlete from Russia to fail a doping test during these Winter Games in Pyeongchang. But Alexander Krushelnytsky is not a cross-country skier or a biathlete. He does not fly down steep hills on skis. Mr. Krushelnytsky is a curler. The news has his fellow Russian curlers and coaches stumped, and Canadian curlers, as well. George Karrys is an Olympic silver medallist in Canadian Men's Curling and the owner & publisher of The Curling News trade magazine. We reached Mr. Karrys in Toronto.

CO: George, I'm sure you know it's an joke in curling that a Rye and Ginger is a performance-enhancing drug in curling. But few of us have heard about drugs like this. What do you know about that?

GEORGE KARRYS: I know a fair bit actually. I know about a curler testing positive in 2005 after the Brier — the men's nationals — for cocaine metabolites, which led to a suspension. I know about a couple of years ago, a Danish women's curler was caught doing nothing to do with cheating in the sport; she was trying to take some drugs to enhance a pregnancy and fell afoul of one of the substances on the banned list, and that led to a suspension. And I'm also aware of some curlers that have been numbered if you will in the McLaren report from just over a year ago.

CO: This is a widespread study or a widespread review of doping among the Russian athletes who are competing in Sochi. It was a huge scandal. The McLaren report was this report on doping in Russia. Did it find that the curlers — the Russian curlers — were also doping?

GK: Yup, you can clearly see that a wheelchair curler blew over, and was protected by the system such as it were, which hid the positive result. You can see that a female curler on a women's team was also protected from a positive result. And you can even see an athlete from a mixed-doubles team. So the evidence is there. Just not a lot of people have actually trundled through thousands and thousands of documents to actually find the curlers in there, but I decided I should do that.

CO: Well, I'm glad you did. But it's surprising not just because curling is considered to be this sort of polite game that's played as fair as possible and everyone has a good time. But also because the assumption that curling is not part of that sort of faster, higher, stronger push that you have with elite athletes in Olympics. That you don't need to do that; it's a different kind of sport than that. So can you understand that people are rather surprised to hear that there will be doping and curling?

GK: I totally understand you know that people don't quite get it when it comes to curling. I find it frustrating on a personal level because we're 20 years in now of Olympic medal status, you know? And the stories of confounded and amazed Americans learning about the sport goes back to Nagano 1998, and in particular: Salt Lake City 2002 when they hosted curling at their home nation Olympic Games. But the truth of the matter is that this is a fully-athletic pursuit at the highest level. These athletes are getting injured; they're recovering game by game, they are exerting themselves in multiple athletic pursuits within the curling game itself.

CO: I guess that's not to suggest that the images a bunch of beer -swilling folks at the bonspiel. But that it's you can't imagine there would be a drug that would improve the performance. It’s a different kind of athleticism. Let’s just talk about the drug that Alexander Krushelnytsky is accused of having used for curling. What can you tell us about that?

GK: From what I understand about Meldonium, is that it was developed in Russia in the Baltic states. And it's originally a heart medication, and it's aimed to increase blood flow. You know in the athletic application — not for which it was meant — aids in the ability of the body to exert itself more in training and in competition. So that automatically is something that's necessary for a curler whether he or she is brushing 40 times in a game, 20 seconds each, etc., and also throwing the stone where you need to push aside all the exertion you've done — all the sweat and toil brushing a stone — and focus on your quiet time in the hack throwing the stone with all those mechanics intact. Think of a biathlete in some ways. These guys are skiing their brains out, the snot just flying, they're exerting themselves like crazy, and then they have to lie down with their weapon and suddenly calm themselves, and you know sharpshoot.

CO: The athlete has told Russian officials that he believes he has this drug in his system — it showed up in his urine — that his drink was spiked with the drug. How plausible is that do you think?

GK: I personally consider it implausible, but then again, I am really astounded that anything at these games — any doping violation — committed willingly by you know an OAR athlete given the spotlight — the white, hot glare of the spotlight — that's on these athletes in the last year, in particular, is astounding. If there's any time for something plausible to happen like direct sabotage, which is what he's inferring, then he would be here and now with this situation. But it's still pushing the realms of believability at the same time.

CO: And what would happen to his bronze medal that he won last week? Because I guess they're waiting to confirm the test. But what happens then?

GK: Yeah, they need to confirm the B sample. And if that is in fact what happens, the bronze medalists will be stripped of their medals. And bronze will be now awarded to Norway.

CO: So what do you think this doping scandal will do to people's view of curling as a sport?

GK: Well, anyone in curling looking for positives will say well you know maybe this will finally shut up the lunkheads who don't understand that it's a sport. And they in their warped way of thinking might feel well if these athletes are doping then they really are athletes; it really is a sport. I like what American curler Matt Hamilton said when he was asked about this. Overall, he felt that this looks bad on Russian curling as opposed to looking bad on the sport of curling. Curling is in the news a lot. There's always something going on it seems just in the last week at these games, and all the stories are positive. You know the gentleman nature of the sport, the handshakes before and after, sharing a drink with your opponent. You know the fact that umpires and officials are not hovering over the action and the athletes are calling some of the violations and stuff like that themselves. The whole athleticism of the curling athletes; the fact that you know some of them were built like linebackers and look like they could push a bobsled. These are all positive stories, and these, in my opinion, will overwhelm any negativity that comes out of a doping scandal.

CO: All right. We'll leave it there. George, thank you.

GK: Thank you.

CO: Bye bye.

GK: Cheers.

JD: George Karrys is an Olympic silver medallist in Canadian Men's Curling, and the owner and publisher of The Curling News trade magazine. We reached Mr. Karrys in Toronto.

[Music: Jazz]

Rabbits domestication

Guest: Greger Larson

JD: Quick — when were rabbits first domesticated? If you answered 600 A.D., because of an edict from Pope Gregory the Great declaring that fetal rabits could be eaten during Lent, you're wrong. But, if it's any consolation, you would have been right until very recently. For the longest time, that was, indeed, the story. And many people, both in and outside the scientific community took it for granted. Until Greger Larson came along to do some historical fact-checking. Mr. Larson is the director of the palaeo-genomics and bio-archaeology research network at the University of Oxford. We reached him at home in Oxford, England.

CO: Professor Larson, this is such a bizarre story, and we'll get to the real story in a moment. But, first of all, what was the original story about how rabbits were domesticated?

GREGER LARSON: The story that has been banging around for years but nobody ever bothered questioning. And it's in both the lay and academic literature, is that in about 600 A.D. there was Pope Gregory, and he made a Papal Decree which said that fetal rabbits could be eaten during Lent because they weren't considered meat. They were considered to be fish because the foetuses were in a watery environment. And as a result of that Decree, monks who were in France in monasteries and there were a whole bunch of wild rabbits running around on the outside thought well this is great. So they went out, grabbed some rabbits, brought them inside, put them into hutches, forced them to reproduce in the hutches, and then whenever they felt like it could go into those rabbits and eat the fetal ones during Lent when, otherwise, they were weren't allowed to eat meat of any kind.

CO: How much of that actually turns out to be true?

GL: None of it actually. Paul Gregory had nothing whatsoever to do with it. There was a gentleman called St Gregory of Tours who lived about the same time, and did write about rabbits. But never mentioned anything to do with Lent — that was added on to the story later on, and so the whole thing is just a house of cards of kind of accidentally mistaking people and translations and older references all that then got pieced together slowly. A bit like a Chinese Whispers or a game of telephone when you were a kid, and so the end result ends up being this kind of bizarre story involving the Vatican, which, of course, had nothing to do with anything.

CO: You mentioned Laurices — this is a name for fetal rabbits, isn't it?

GL: That’s right, yeah.

CO: Okay. Now, having grown up in a household that observed Lent, I don't recall ever getting served fetal rabbits on Lent instead of fish. But you believed this story enough that you actually went seeking the edict from Pope Gregory that declared this is the case?

GL: Well, the reason we believed it — and I think this is where it really gets interesting — is that I saw this presented at a scientific lecture at a conference. And I then thought it would be a great way to try and test what we call the molecular clock. So I thought that if we had genomes of wild rabbits and we had genomes of domestic rabbits, and we knew that they were domesticated at 600 A.D. because of this story. And we could then compare the differences in those two genomes if we could independently and for a domestication timing it 600 A.D. then that would prove that a molecular clock could be used to date domestication. So I asked a masters student to investigate this. And he started playing with the genomes, and we started doing some analyses on them. And just kind of as an aside I said you know just try and dig into the literature a little bit and get that reference about 600 A.D. — that Papal Edict or whatever it was. And he said yeah, that’s no problem. He went away and came back three weeks later and said yeah, it doesn't exist at all. So we were taking it for granted in the same way that every scientific paper that had been published about rabbit domestication had done so in the introductions of their papers. And everybody just cites this story very easily over and over again, until it becomes reified as a kind of fact.

CO: Well, when did it enter scientific lore?

GL: So that's the best part of it is that this story was never invented on a particular day either. Like I said before, it was a concoction that a guy who was writing in the 1930s mentioned something involving rabbits, but then later on, 30 years later, when that was being cited, it was mistranslated, and then the Lent thing got added onto it, and then Pope Gregory got added on more recently. So all of these little bits of it were just being kind of shelved onto a house that was being badly constructed with a lot of different materials, until you ended up with something that just made no sense whatsoever.

CO: Okay, so now we know that rabbits are not domesticated to take advantage of them during Lent in 600 A.D. How were they? And when were they domesticated?

GL: So that's a really good question, and I think what I found most interesting about this story. And I've been studying domestication for about 20 years or so. And what the rabbit story really revealed to me was the degree to which we don't question the things that fit into our worldview. So if I tell you something that you believe without me having to prove it, then you don't require a whole lot of evidence. So with rabbits, nobody questioned this because what it demonstrated was that everybody, myself included, just thought that this is kind of how domestication proceeds. And so if you tell me a story involving the Catholic Church and Lent, well that just provides the incentive. But really, on the backside of it, we know this to be true that humans will deliberately go out, grab wild animals, bring them in, and that's domestication. And that's absolutely fine. And what this rabbit story really demonstrated to me — and I've been reading a lot about a lot of early domestic animals — was that actually there is not a single case where we have any decent evidence where anyone has actually done that. And I think what it really shows us is that we don't have an appreciation at all for the way in which domestic animals and plants have come into this relationship with us. And now our entire civilization depends on this background or this substrate of domestic plants animals, and we don't have the first foggiest clue of how they came into our lives because we've always believed the myths without ever questioning them.

CO: So I suppose you're now going to tell us that the Easter Bunny is a myth?

GL: So you’re going to love this: we’re working on a project right now where it looks as though the first animals involved in Easter were actually hares. And that whole idea of the hare being involved as part of an Easter tradition predates anything to do with Easter as we know it or Catholicism. And then by the time, it reaches the UK, — at some point in time, but we're not even sure when — the rabbit replaces the hare. And then the chickens are added later, and the whole thing it's a bit like the myth that we were talking about before. These things are agglomerated onto an evolving tradition. And that now when we get to it, we just think oh, well rabbits have always been associated with Easter. And actually the very, very recent addition, and somehow the hare got replaced, even though the hare was part of it all along. So when and where that took place and what the motivations were and how it all happened we got no idea, but that's a project we've got going on. And what we're going to get to the bottom of that one.

CO: Okay, and it’ll probably predate chocolate Easter eggs too?

GL: Yes, perhaps.

CO: We’ll wait for that. Professor Larson, thank you.

GL: Thank you very much.

CO: Bye.

GL: Bye bye.

JD: Greger Larson is the director of the palaeo-genomics and bio-archaeology research network at the University of Oxford. And we reached him in Oxford.

Back To Top »

Part two: Canada bobsled victory, Navajo climber

Canada bobsled victory

Guest: Dave MacEachern

JD: Canadians Justin Kripps and Alexander Kopacz stood at the top of Pyeongchang's bobsled track this morning. They had one chance to clinch the gold medal. Here's what that nail-biting run sounded like.

SOUNDCLIP

ANNOUNCER: Let’s see this start here; it’s got to be close! 4.92.

ANNOUNCER TWO: That's a great start for them — the best they could do in this competition. Alex a shot-putter, Western University Ontario athlete, he’s from London.

ANNOUNCER: In the red right now, but that’s to be expected. And the speed a little slow there on that corner. Two-one-hundreds now, but that is nothing. It’s a virtual tie. In the red, we’ll see if he goes into the green here at the next interval.

BOTH: He does!

ANNOUNCER: Kripps is in front now. He's got to be smoth the rest of the way. Good speed coming out of there, but they’re still a virtual tie — a-hundredth-of-a-second.

ANNOUNCER TWO: And he had a get bend away. Three-hundreds, it’s going to maybe be enough. He still has the uphill section of the track to navigate.

ANNOUNCER: Doesn't have a 140 speed that the Germans had. Let's see. This is going to be so tight for Canada. Here he comes through! It’s a tie! Once again, 20 years ago, it was a tie between the Italians and the Canadians. Now, it's a tie between Canada and Germany for the gold medal. History has repeated itself 20 years on.

JD: That's the sound of Canada's Justin Kripps and Alexander Kopacz, tying and winning the gold medal in two-man bobsled this morning —tied with Germany, as you heard. Dave MacEachern was a part of the Canadian bobsled duo that last won gold — also, as you heard, in a tie — in Nagano, Japan in 1998. We reached Mr. MacEachern in Charlottetown, PEI.

CO: Dave, when you hear that moment — when you hear that again — I'm sure you heard it actually happened. What are your thoughts and feelings?

DAVE MACEACHERN: Magic. You know a very different experience being on this side of the camera. But just you know hearing Mark Connolly's voice you know it was quite haunting, to be honest. And you know Canada won their medal the opposite the way; Pierre and I were the team that had the super starts, and Italy would just would not go away. And I think we out-darted them by twenty-five-hundreds-of-a-second. And the Germans out-started the Canadians by twenty-seven-hundreds-of-a-second over the four runs. And so yeah, there were so many similarities; It was riveting.

CO: And similarities, I didn't know that Mark Connolly was also calling it when you were racing bobsled 20 years ago in Nagano.

DM: That was the magic of it all was to hear Mark calling it. Mark and I went on to do the commentary in the 2002 and the 2006 Olympics, so I was glued. I was in my house by myself, making a fair bit of noise, and I went back into what my buddies used to call beast mode. So I was with Dave the bobsledder, but I was by myself in my living room, and it was it was really special.

CO: What’s beast moment?

DM: Oh, just beast mode. When you look at a World Cup bobsleigh brakemen, you know they're pretty special dudes. You know they're extremely explosive, very strong, they can run like a bugger world-class to 40 yards at least. And yeah, they're the freakiest dudes at the Olympics. They're big, strong guys, and I love watching them unleash all that power.

CO: I'm just watching you bobsled your coach.

DM: No, I was not sitting. I was standing the whole time.

CO: This moment was, of course, as they said, history repeating itself — called an almost perfect run. What makes it perfect?

DM: You know two teams got to the top of the podium using two very different paths. You know Justin has come a long way as a pilot. They're world-class at 50 metres, which is absolutely imperative in modern bobsleigh. You know the Germans they had ridiculously good starts; they set the start record of 50 metres. Two very impressive athletes, but they were losing time at the top. But they had massive velocity at the bottom. And one of these times, they were going to get it right. And you know they really nailed it and made up that you know that deficit that was there after three runs. But we were that team — we were the Germans 20 years ago — because we were behind, despite starting Italy on every run. And so we had to sit there and wait. And finally, our starts kicked in, and we tied with a hundredth-of-a-second. It was reversed, but it was identical. And it was beautiful.

CO: For people to understand this, this is not one race, is it? There’s four heats, and it's a cumulative time of that. So the three-minute-sixteen-point-eight-six-seconds, what does that represent? That was the run this morning?

DM: That's run four. So what that cumulative time represents is four runs over two days; two runs per day — cumulative time, including the start. And really what it works out to is these two teams tied to the hundredth-of-a-second a race that is about fifty-six-hundred metres or five-point-six-kilometres long, and they tied to the hundredth-of-a-second travelling at 140 K, twisting and turning down one of the coolest bobsled tracks probably ever built, so it's really significant.

CO: And so when you tie — when end up sharing the podium — and both teams are winners. Does that put any tarnish on that gold at all?

DM: I mean you know some it bugs some people. You know we live in a country that's crazy for hockey, and always has to be a winner and. But you know I don't see it as a bad thing. I feel sorry for the person that wasn't for it. But you know there's two great teams. It certainly doesn't diminish the medal in my mind. But you know I spent ten years in the sport, and I'm sure the guys that you saw hugging and jumping and there’s no tarnish there. It was just perfect.

CO: We talk about all the different history repeating itself — all the connections between that run of yours and Pierre Lueders twenty years ago — all the other connections, including this one: that just Cripps — who is the pilot of the team that ran this morning — he was taught by your partner — by Pier Lueders, is that right?

DM: Absolutely. Yeah, it's very right. And he came over from British Columbia and was tested at bobsledders are. Like I said, you don't choose bobsled; they definitely choose you. And he came in one of those ID camps and you know learned to drive. But also was a tremendous brakeman as well.

CO: Pierre taught Justin Cripps. But Justin was saying that he didn't know if he was even allowed to go and give Pierre a hug because he's there, isn’t he? He's coaching the South Korean team. He doesn’t know if that would be a conflict of interest to actually go make contact with him. What do you think?

DM: Oh, I think he'd take a hug pretty quick; it's a pretty small world. You know there’s 16 tracks in the world. So yeah, I think he'd be feeling it. And I know he would be going through his head right now and just how special it was 20 years ago. But to be there 20 years later you know on the venue, it would just be tremendous. God, it was tremendous from me, and I was by myself in my living room, cheering like crazy. But it would be very special. And I'm sure it's already happened.

CO: Dave, thanks for speaking with us.

DM: Thank you so much. I love your show.

CO: Thank you. Bye bye.

JD: We reached Dave MacEachern in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. Mr. MacEachern was half of the two-man bobsled team that won gold for Canada at the Nagano Winter Games in 1998. You can listen to that interview again, see some photographs of Dave MacEachern's gold medal-winning bobsled run, on our website.

[Music: Indie]

Listener Response: Quiz answer

JD: "I need the answer to today's quiz question." That was an email we received from Jason Jefferson of Minneapolis. Jason, we hear you. And we have your answer...sort of. In case you missed it, last week we spoke with Paul Paquet. Mr. Paquet is a professional trivia writer from Ottawa. He is so good at a HQ Trivia that he landed a gig as its latest quizmaster. We asked Mr. Paquet to try out his quizmaster skills on us — meaning you — and this was his question.

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PP What war saw the only known battle between a submarine and a cavalry unit?

JD: That's a tough one. And we received a lot of responses. Most people guessed the Civil War; we had one Korean War guess. And Jason guessed the First World War. So we checked with Mr. Paquet and it turns out, it's a little more complicated than we thought. Because it could be a battle between a Turkish cavalry and a British Royal Navy submarine in 1915, which would make the answer World War One, or it could have happened in 1795. So we're looking into the 120-year discrepancy for you.

[Music: Pop rock]

Navajo climber

Guest: Len Necefer

JD: The "check-in" is likely one of the more ubiquitous Facebook functions. As you'd expect, people use it to "check in" at coffee shops and hockey arenas — let people know where they are at any given time. You can even check in on your own couch if you’d like. Well, a Colorado man is using that function not just to check in on the mountains he's climbed — but to change the narrative of the American outdoors, one mountain at a time. And he's changing the narrative by changing the names. Len Necefer is a climber and a member of the Navajo Nation. We reached him in Crested Butte, Colorado.

CO: Len, what was the first mountain you climbed and renamed for this project?

LEN NECEFER: I believe it was a mountain called Blanca Peak, which in Navajo is Tsisnaasjini, which means White Shell Mountian. They call them fourteeners here in Colorado — it's a 14,000 foot mountain, it's about 4,300 meters, and it's a sacred mountain to us Navajo. And so I went up the mountain, took some photos, I was there for some ceremonial purposes because it is a sacred mountain for us Navajo, and went back, uploaded it to Facebook, and saw that you know I can geo-tag the Indigenous names.

CO: was that the moment when you're on that summit that you decided that I'm going to find a way to change these names online?

LN: I think it's kind of been a thing that I've been thinking about for a while. I traveled to British Columbia a couple of years ago, and you know I saw that the provincial park names have the Indigenous names alongside the English name as well. And I think that kind of set the seed in thinking about oh, I could do this in my own community and where I'm from and where I live now.

CO: So what are some of the summits or peaks and mountains that you have been able to geo-locate differently with the Indigenous names?

LN: So I focused initially on the four sacred Navajo mountains that are in Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. Since moving to Colorado, I've pulled a lot from scholarly research and anthropological research that was done back in the early 1900s for Rocky Mountain National Park. And there was a professor at the University of Colorado who had put the names of these Arapaho places up on line back in 2004. And the site hadn't been updated. And so I just took it upon myself to start drawing from this list, and start visiting the places that had the Arapaho place name, and then creating the geo-tags for them.

CO: Can: you give us some examples.

LN: Longs Peak, for example, is I'm actually still working on the pronunciation. But it's a fairly large piece that can be seen from Denver, which is about 80 miles away, and it sits on the Front Range. And that that name is actually particularly unique because the Longs Peak and Mount Meeker are these two peaks that kind of adjoin each other. But they're named for generals and folks that didn't actually make the first summit. So that was one of the first that I've been working on. And then a lot of other sub-peaks and smaller valleys and regions throughout Rocky Mountain has been a place I've been working on a lot as well.

CO: These are wonderful names. I can't say them; maybe you know how to say?

LN: I don't speak Arapaho, so I have some friends that I'm talking with and trying to get the pronunciation. But before Navajo peaks are: Tsisnaasjini, Tsoodzil, Doko’oosliid, and Dibe Nitsaa. And those are the four major mountains that we consider as Navajos as part of our sort of important cosmology. And you know one of the important critical pieces of what I'm doing is I never share names that a community hasn't already given consent to sharing.

CO: You're not legally changing the names, but the geo-tagging means that somebody else who’s climbing that peak, will they be able to actually make to take a photo or say that they are there, register that they're there under the Indigenous name that you have cited?

LN: Exactly, it's kind of very soft way of beginning to change the conversation about the names of these peaks. Because I often feel that the education that we receive here in the United States about our Indigenous people is often incomplete and paints a rosy picture when there really wasn't, especially with that connection to land. You know many Native people’s cultures and history are written into the land. And when a non-Indigenous name is applied, it erases that history in many ways and kind of takes away the thousand years of human history that we have on this continent. You know, and in particular, I think about Mt Meeker and the Longs Peak. Meaker was an Indian agent out in western Colorado, and he tried to force an agricultural lifestyle, and forcibly Christianised the U.S. in this region. And that led to a big conflict. And as a result of that conflict, the youth were actually moved from Colorado and sent to Utah and different places. And so to have his name be associated with a mountain that he never climbed, and never was a part of, it actually can do a lot of damage to the history that exists in these regions.

CO: This idea of climbing mountains — conquering summits. It's a very European association with nature. It's not in the Indigenous culture, is it?

LN: No. You know, and that's kind of been one of the ways in relationship to nature that I've been trying to engage. They call it bagging a peak here in Colorado — that’s sort of is a colloquial term that's used. But yeah, conquering a mountain — bagging a peak — it is the sort of relics and ways of which sort of the westward expansion still exists in our culture today. A lot of times it's unquestioned. And so part of the intention of the work that I'm doing is to engage folks in a very soft way of beginning to explore deeper beyond you know the first claim defense in the 1870s. Or you know the fact that some of these areas are sacred to Native people. But I think given the context that we're now in the United States with the current fights over public lands and the Bears Ears National Monument, which is a National Monument that the five tribes of the Southwest actively work to protect. And it was recently rescinded by the Trump administration. So this is a way that I'm slowly starting to engage that conversation and change the narrative.

CO: All right. Well, we wish you luck with your project. It's really, really lovely and I appreciate speaking with you Len. Thank you.

L: Yeah, likewise. Thank you.

JD: Len Necefer is a climber and a member of the Navajo Nation. And he's the founder of an outdoor company called Natives Outdoors, started as an Instagram account. We reached Mr. Necefer in Crested Butte, Colorado.

[Music: Electronic]

Roman sacrifices

JD: Sometime in the first century A.D., the Greek philosopher Strabo visited the cave known as Pluto's Gate. He wrote, "This space is full of a vapour so misty and dense that one can scarcely see the ground. Any animal that passes inside meets instant death. I threw in sparrows and they immediately breathed their last and fell." Now, Strabo didn't just have a pocketful of sparrows he could chuck into weird vapours. People sold the sparrows on site to visitors wishing to test the deadly vapours of Pluto's Gate. That's "Pluto" as in the Roman god of the underworld. The vapours were apparently believed to be the breath of Pluto's dog — his three-headed dog — Cerberus. And the cavern itself was considered a "gate of hell," where castrated priests would sacrifice bulls by leading them into the Gate alive and then hauling them out dead, to much dramatic effect. The thing is though Pluto's Gate is real. It still exudes its dangerous halitosis from a site in modern Turkey. However, a new study suggests there's a simple explanation for how those priests pulled off their stunts. We already knew that "vapour so misty and dense" were actually volcanic carbon dioxide. Now, researchers from universities in Germany and Turkey have looked at the concentration of that CO2. And they found a couple of interesting things. First, the gas is most concentrated at night and at dawn. So that's likely when the priests performed the bull sacrifices. And the gas is also more concentrated closer to the ground. The researchers believe the priests knew that, and used it to their advantage, and to the bulls' disadvantage. As lead scientist Hardy Pfanz put it, "They knew that the deadly breath of Cerberus only reached a certain maximum height." So that's how the castrated priests strolled in and out of the cave alive, while the sacrificial animals went in alive and came out dead. It wasn't Pluto — not at all. It was exactly what the priests had to drag out after they did their ritual: a load of bull.

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Part three: Turkey prisoner coup, Orangutan study

Becca Schofield obit

JD: When Becca Schofield was told her disease was terminal, she took action. She urged others to perform random acts of kindness. And it didn't take long for her words to go viral, and spread across the world. Becca Schofield, creator of the #BeccaToldMe campaign, died Saturday from brain cancer. She was 18 years old. The Riverview, New Brunswick teen's movement spread as far away as Spain, Japan, and Australia. It even attracted the attention of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who praised her for her, quote "bravery, volunteerism, and inspiring commitment to community." Unquote. Last September, New Brunswick honoured Becca Schofield with an annual day in her name. At the time, she spoke with "Information Morning" host Jonna Brewer about the impact of her campaign.

SOUNDCLIP

BECCA SCHOFIELD: As a child, I remember Terry Fox Day. And always just, I’m going to sound a little bad here, but always thinking how boring it was, and I don't want to run, and just being you know like a little kid. I wanted to be lazy; I didn't want to do it. But as I grew older, like I understood the importance behind it more and more, and now I'm at the point in my life where he was an amazing man. And the fact that he did what he did in the face of his illness, that's part of what's kept me strong through mine. And that's part of what's motivated me. Just everything about him I thought was so amazing. And I'm so proud to be a fellow Canadian of someone that amazing. And to know that I'm making an impact anything remotely like that is life-changing; I can't explain it how good it feels. And it's not because of who I am, or where I was born, or anything. It's because of the actions that I have taken in my life. And I think that's really telling.

JD: That was Becca Schofield, speaking to Jonna Brewer, host of "Information Morning" in Moncton in September 2017. Becca Schofield died Saturday. She was 18-years-old.

[Music: Spanish guitar]

Turkey prisoner coup

Guest: Andrew Gardner

JD: "A dark day for press freedom." That's how Amnesty International characterized last week's sentencing in Turkey. Six people, including several prominent journalists, were given life sentences for their alleged involvement in 2016's failed coup. They deny all the charges. Amongst the prisoners were well-known brothers Ahmet and Mehmet Altan. Andrew Gardner is Amnesty's senior advisor on Turkey. We reached him in Istanbul.

CO: Mr. Gardner, what are these people convicted of doing that would get them life sentences?

ANDREW GARDNER: Well, the convictions are for attempting to overthrow the constitutional order, which is an offence, which is one of the most serious offenses in Turkey's penal code. It's basically you know the offence which people who are convicted of you know using force and violence against the state forces are charged with. And it gives a potential sentence of life without parole in very harsh prison conditions as well.

CO: As you mentioned, when you see people involved with attempted coup, you think of something violent. What were these people — five men and one woman — what role did they play in, or allegedly play, in this coup?

AG: Well, that's right. The charges are actually that they took part in the coup attempt. But the evidence against these six individuals is actually nothing of the sort, especially the three well-known journalists — the Alta brothers — actually well-known journalists, a commentator in Mehmet Altan’s case, and all the evidence against them is their writings as journalists.

CO: There was also the brothers as you mentioned. They were accused of sending subliminal messages in their TV and media reports. What's that about?

AG: Well, that's right. What the authorities have claimed is that they were sending subliminal messages supporting and encouraging the coup before it took place. So really there was no credible evidence against them whatsoever. And the fact that they've been convicted of any offense, let alone given such a serious sentence as life imprisonment, is really a huge miscarriage of justice. And really it just epitomizes what's going on in Turkey at the moment with you know constant attacks on journalists, other members of civil society, and really anyone who's criticizing the government.

CO: These journalists were in a group of about 73 journalists who are behind bars in Turkey. And that's in addition to tens of thousands of others who have been arrested in different occupations since the coup. But people very concerned because this is unprecedented numbers. The Committee to Protect Journalists regards this as the highest number of incarcerations of reporters anywhere at this point. What do you think these convictions are designed to do? Is to send a message in some way?

AG: Well, there are huge amounts of journalists in prison in Turkey as you say. But, by and large, these journalists have been held for months in pre-trial prison custody without you know any credible evidence against them. But what's happened now with these convictions is that people have actually been found guilty without any credible evidence either. And that really is a bad precedent. That you know has made people worried — not just the six individuals, but you know thousands of other people who languish in prisons in Turkey, including many others who worked within journalism or in other parts of civil society.

CO: Is there any recourse? Is there an appeal? Is there anything that these media workers can do?

AG: Well, actually, the Constitutional Court — Turkey's highest court — has ruled in favour of the release of Mehmet Altan who is one of the people who were convicted actually ruled that his detention violated his right to freedom of expression. It violated his rights and that he should be released immediately. But, unfortunately, the very politicized judiciary in Turkey — the lower court — not only refused to release him as required to do so under the Constitution when the Constitutional Court ruled. But then you know then a month later, even convicted him to life imprisonment. So you know the theoretical processes within Turkey's judiciary you know just aren't working. Of course, there's always the recourse to go to the European Court of Human Rights. And I'm sure that when this case finally is heard by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasburg, then you know this conviction will be overturned. But the question of when that is going to happen you know it is a very open question.

CO: It's extraordinary that Turkey is a member of NATO. And I know that the United Nations and others have condemned these convictions of these journalists and the others who are incarcerated. What about NATO members? Canada or the United States — both members fellow members of NATO — has there been any country — any capital — that has condemned the actions of these media workers?

AG: I mean I think the convictions have been roundly condemned all over the world. But you know it's up to each and every government in their bilateral relations with Turkey to make absolutely clear that this is not acceptable. And I'm afraid it's going to only be through pressure. Be it from you know the population in Turkey, but also from other governments around the world speaking with Turkey, and especially Turkey's allies such as Canada and the United States and states within the European Union to persuade the Turkish government to change course on this issue.

CO: We'll leave it there. Mr. Gardiner, I appreciate speaking with you. Thank you.

AG: Thank you.

JD: Andrew Gardiner is a senior researcher on Turkey with Amnesty International. We reached him in Istanbul.

[Music: Guitar]

Orangutan study

Guest: Serge Wich

JD: Scientists already knew that orangutans on the island of Borneo were in trouble. It turns out they're in more trouble than we thought. Two years ago, the orangutans were declared "critically endangered" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Now, in a new study, conservationists have discovered a loss of nearly 150,000 Bornean orangutans from 1999 to 2015. That's a decline of more than 50 per cent of the population in just 16 years. Serge Wich is an ecologist at the Liverpool John Moores University. He co-authored the study on the Bornean orangutan decline. We reached him in Liverpool, England.

CO: Professor Wich, what's causing this massive decline in orangutans on the island of Borneo?

SERGE WICH: So there two factors that really lead to this decline. The first one is a very well-known one and that's a forest loss. So forests are being converted into plantations, oil, palm, or pulp and paper, or into agricultural areas. The second one that drives this loss — and that's more surprising — is that orangutans are being lost from forests that remain standing. And the factor behind that is very likely killing for food or killing of orangutans during conflicts between humans and orangutans.

CO: And why would people be killing the orangutans?

SW: A main reason for that is food. Will people go into the forest, they look for deer, for pigs, for food. Then they see an orangutan, and they kill that as well. So it's not targeted, but they do hunt it as a by-product if you like. Secondly, when orangutans venture into agricultural areas for plantations and meat people, people are often afraid. An orangutan is a large animal and people do not know that they're actually not an aggressive animal. Or orangutans might be eating some of their crops or damaging them, and then people become upset, and they kill them.

CO: This conflict with humans though. I mean the orangutans and people have been cohabiting for a long time. The farmers who are there who are familiar with these animals and their behaviour. Have they changed their attitude towards the orangutans? Are there more than there were before, and hence more conflict over use of land with animals?

SW: Well, people have indeed been living with orangutans for thousands of years. And that has very likely led to their extinction through a large part of their range, and partially also on mainland Asia where they occurred in the past. So it hasn't been an exactly peaceful coexistence over the past thousands of years. But what we see now is that forests are being more and more fragmented, so there's more and more opportunity for edges of forests and agriculture. So there more surface area if you like where orangutans are exposed to humans, and so that leads to more conflicts as well around all those fragmented forest area where animals venture out of it because there's often not enough forest left for them.

CO: So it's not that their relationship with the orangutans has changed or become any more hostile. It’s that they're competing for smaller and smaller areas that remain in Borneo?

SW: Yes, I think that's mainly the case. I think also partially — in some cases at least — it's not local communities that have been living in these areas for hundreds of years. Very often now it is people working in a oil palm plantation or a pulp and paper plantation that are not from that area per se. So they are less familiar or not familiar at all with the animals that come from the forests into those plantations. So they don't know their behaviour, so they might be afraid when they don't need to be. And maybe where a farm or to live there over generations would not have the same reaction.

CO: Have you seen evidence of that? Of a violent reaction to encounters with orangutans and people?

SW: Yes, a couple of weeks ago, there was a case of news again where an orangutan was shot 130 times with pellets from their rifle.

CO: That would be way beyond what it needed if you wanted to kill the animal, so why would that be the case? What do you make of that?

SW: I think these were from what I gather from the news, four guys that took turns in shooting at the orangutan. It's hard to make any sensible thing from that. I don't know why maybe they thought it was enjoyable to shoot an animal? So there are extreme cases of violence towards these animals which are obviously not necessary at all.

CO: What are the laws that protect orangutans in Borneo at this point?

SW: It's illegal to kill them in both countries — in Malaysia and Indonesia. So the laws are very, very clear. But not everybody is aware of those, and certainly, not everybody is respecting your laws. Borneo is a vast island. There are certainly not enough rangers to cover all those areas. What really needs to happen is that awareness is raised with local communities, awareness is raised with the people that manage these plantations, and with all the workers in these plantations.

CO: Are the orangutans enough of a priority to see that happening? To see education programs or protection programs beyond what already exists?

SW: I hope so. I think if we don't manage to do this for an iconic species like the Borneo orangutan, then that offers very little hope for other species on that island. There is a growing group of Indonesian and Malaysian conservationists. More and more NGOs are nature clubs etc. So I think it's the opportunities to really create this awareness over a large scale are certainly there. And the orangutan is very well-known. And with clever social media campaigns, I think we should be able to at least try to achieve this rapidly. But it needs, first and foremost, an acknowledgement of all parties that hunting and killing is part of the problem. And that it's not only deforestation, so we need to work at really at both of these issues.

CO: And without some kind of educational campaign further to protecting them, do you predict further declines of orangutans?

SW: Yes, if there won't be any changes, then we predicted up until 2050, we'll see another 45,000 orangutans lost only due to deforestation. So that's not even taking hunting into account. And considering that we might only have somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 orangutans left on Borneo, that would absolutely be detrimental if that were to happen.

CO: All right. Very alarming study. Professor Wich, thank you for speaking with us.

SW: All right. My pleasure. Thank you very much.

JD: Serge Wich is an ecologist at the Liverpool John Moore University. And we reached him in Liverpool, England.

[Music: Sad piano]

Snow cave

JD: The saying goes a man's home is his castle. However, a man's frozen outdoor man cave is, apparently, just a safety hazard. Earlier this winter, Derek Parker built his own backyard man cave. It was a shrine to all things Habs. Except for the wooden roof, it was made entirely of ice. And we're not just talking about some hovel here: it had a working fireplace, a fully stocked bar, tons of hockey paraphernalia, and a TV to watch le Canadiens. Mr. Parker lives in the Montreal suburb of Brossard. And when his ice cave hit the news, the city inspector called to say he had to tear the roof off the sucker. And he didn’t mean that in a cool party way. Because based on photos he'd seen online, the inspector had deemed the roof dangerous. Derek Parker told CBC Montreal's Mike Finnerty what happened next.

SOUNDCLIP

DEREK PARKER: I thought it was a joke at the beginning. I called a couple of people thinking it was someone pulling a prank on me. And then I decide to call the city back directly to figure out if it was true or not? And finally tracked down the gentleman that had called me and he said no, unfortunately, it's not a joke. I need to take the roof apart. A friend of mine came over on Saturday morning at 8:00 o'clock, and it took us an hour-and-a-half to take the roof apart.

MIKE FINNERTY: If his concerns are legitimate and that he just wants to make sure that no one gets hurt. Is it such a bad thing for him to come round to have a look?

DP: No, I have no objections in him coming to take a look. But where I object basically is just getting a phone call saying hey, we see you know we see on social media and this and that, and you know we're worried about your roof. Well, how did you come inspect my roof rather than just telling me I havve to take it apart. Listen, I had my guests’ safety heart. The reason I didn't build the roof out of ice or snow. You know we’re all kids, and we built those snow forts you know when we're kids not realizing the danger the weight of a snow above us. So I used multiple pieces of wood. It was one-by-fours, so I stood on edge. You lean on one of those and try and break it; good luck and I had 30 of those things going across my roof. And I also used the snow rake. Every time it snowed, I would stand up on my fence and I would rake all the snow off. So again, I'm not looking to fight with the city of Broussard. I'm just looking for you know rules and regulations on building igloos in your backyard, whether me being 45-years-old or a kid that's ten, are There are rules and regulations that need to be followed?

JD: That was Derek Parker of Brossard, Quebec, in conversation with the CBC’s Mike Finnerty. In an email to CBC Montreal today, the city of Brossard said, quote, "Before starting this backyard project, Mr. Parker did not contact the City for information and to obtain the necessary permit. Residents planning on building or renovating are reminded to contact the City's Urbanism Department first, to ensure that their project meets the health, safety, and zoning standards and to obtain the proper permits." Unquote. On the upside, Geoff Molson, the owner of the Montreal Canadiens, heard about the shrine, and sent Derek Parker a Habs jersey signed by the entire team, to thank him for his support and "his creativity."

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February 19, 2018 episode transcript

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