Under the sign of the frog

Communication with new people is a powerful source of learning about life. For example, today I was asked if I have a totem animal. I answered with the honest truth: “no, I’m a biologist, I don’t like animals.” But then I thought about it and realized that there was clearly one candidate for this role. It's a frog, and most likely a dead frog. Or, at least, a test subject.

Dead frogs have haunted me my entire adult life. The fact is that for me, as for any biologist, a frog is the first experience of killing with my own hands. No matter how timid the future biologist may be, the teachers of the Department of Physiology will definitely put a heavy, mobile, breathing humanoid creature in his hands and make sure that the biologist learns how to kill it. Without anesthesia, because anesthesia distorts the results of further physiological experiments, and in two different ways: firstly, a needle into the spinal cord, and secondly, cutting off the upper jaw with scissors.

By and large, there is no educational meaning in this. Everything is much deeper. This is a sacrifice. The fact is that killing vertebrates is generally extremely unpleasant, scary, disgusting, and pathetic for a normal person. The tradition of fundamental academic university education includes this practice so that a person learns to separate his emotions from his activities - and also so that he ceases to harbor any illusions about his moral character and learns to live with it. I'm serious: killing a frog with your own hands is a very important experience in overcoming generally accepted values, and it allows you to treat yourself cynically and kindly in all subsequent situations of abandoning them.

After university, I only needed to kill a frog once - for filming, and this was also a valuable experience, it helped me finally set my priorities (“my work is more important than my subtle mental organization”). Then I came across frogs in the form of an artistic image. My first column in the Trinity Option, three years ago, was about dead frogs, and my last column is about them too. And the most recent impression related to dead frogs is a link that a colleague sent me this morning: “zombie frog ballet,” a video from Japan’s Kyushu University in which dissected frogs dance to music while receiving electric shocks. To make animal advocates less indignant, there is an inscription stating that this is a secondary use of frogs that died for the sake of science. The artistic value is questionable, because the rhythm of the music does not correlate well with the movement, but the picture is still fascinating. The person who sent me this link works as an editing engineer and television cameraman and therefore is also cynical, even though he is not a biologist. He knows the main law of frogs and television people: “The meaning is nothing, the picture is everything.”

The most important thing to know about living frogs is that their retina is connected by direct nerve connections to the muscles of the tongue. If a small moving object comes into the frog's field of vision, the frog swallows it. If it's a button on a thread, the frog will still swallow it - once, ten, a hundred times. She may realize that the buttons don't taste good, but she can't stop paying attention to the picture. The same thing happens with TV viewers. By and large, it doesn’t matter what you tell them: if the picture is good, then they will ignore any words, and if it’s bad, they won’t look at all. This is why I think that the recent NTV film about the opposition does not deserve any condemnation at all. What they said in the voice-over about cookies and extras - in two weeks no one will remember, but the picture will be remembered for a long time. The most beautiful shots in the entire film are, after all, the opposition rallies themselves, and not the dull line of fake white ribbon protesters posing for the cameras. So they will serve as bait on the string and make you want to meet a real live mosquito. I believe that the audience is still more like a living frog than a dead one dancing under the influence of an electric current.

Anastasia Kazantseva