This place gets so painfully frustrating sometimes, and today is one of those days. I made it a whole week before going crazy. That seems like a pretty major accomplishment. Today I ran into the first of many big cultural gaps. We are working with a 70-year old retired professor who is an "expert" in rodent biology. He's supposed to help us find the right field site and organize local people to collect the animals. So today we were discussing collecting animals, and I asked Shaoyuan to ask him about identifying burrows and digging up nests. I'd really like to be able to collect postnatal animals to look at elongation and fusion of foot bones. There is an extensively thorough paper from 1937 on this particular species that describes their ecology, burrow structure, behavior, etc, and I was asking him whether he thought in his experience that we would be able to go out in the early morning before the heat and sun smooth the sand to find the entrance to the burrows. This paper suggests the openings are easy to find because there's a mound of damp sand and footprints at the entrance. Whenever I asked Shaoyuan to translate my question, rather than ask the professor, he just responded that no, we can't find burrows that easily. I got frustrated thinking he was just getting uppity with me, and then later he told me that I pushed too hard with this professor and risked offending him. Apparently we aren't supposed to read and reference literature because citing references makes the senior faculty feel like the literature is more informative than what they have to say. What matters most is "field experience". Nevermind the fact that this paper was written by researchers who spent years studying this exact species. I do respect his experience, and my questions were phrased as "this is what I've read but how does it relate to what you have seen". I totally understand, but this was my first moment of feeling completely powerless - that I can't be part of these discussions because I'm supposed to just sit quietly, smile, and follow along hoping that this guy can help us, but I can't share any of what I've learned from reading or our own experiences and those of others. Oh, wait, no, the fact that we're still sitting in Urumqi until Sunday was my first moment of frustration.
Then there's the issue of euthanasia. I had a major head crushing desire this evening when I, once again for about the third time, asked for a canister of CO2 for euthanasia. It isn't Shaoyuan's priority, so he's been putting me off and forgetting. Today I find out they can't get a canister in Urumqi and don't know where to find one in the field location. The other chemical compound that we could use is considered a controlled substance and unaccessible in China. So Shaoyuan wants to teach a student to do cervical dislocation. Last year we had a great technician who could do it very efficiently and quickly, and he tried and failed to teach Shaoyuan. He kept having to finish off the animals for him. The problem is that doing a cervical dislocation in a mouse or rat isn't that hard, but the cervical vertebrae of a jerboa are fused by ossification. So you can imagine you can't just pull the tail and snap the neck. You have to get your thumb up under the skull and separate the atlas from the axis at the very top of the neck. The most frustrating thing is that I keep getting laughed at for caring whether or not the animals die quickly without suffering too much. He told me (which I already knew) that people in China don't care much about animal suffering. That's fine for them, but I don't want a bunch of kicking and gasping rodents on my hands.
But I'm starting to just not even care at this point. I want to be in the desert collecting animals, doing my dissections, and making progress. All of this sitting around talking and slowly collecting supplies and dancing around what are our expectations versus what our colleagues think they can accomplish is exhausting. I keep feeling like we risk the whole relationship by saying "we want as many animals as we can get" because they worry that it's too much pressure on them if they can't do it. I just want to scream "for gods sake, let's just *try* already!" I'm writing all of this to get it out, because it's raging inside of me, but on the outside I have to maintain a perfectly placid and zen-line approach in my interactions with everyone when I really just want to bash a few skulls...
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