avram davidson treasury

Phoebe Davis · 22 Jul 2003, 13:37 · from urth-v0307.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Phoebe Davis <meezer_gal at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) avram davidson treasury
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 06:37:56 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <urth-v0307-3716 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0307/3716.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

The American Heritage Dictionary says a freemartin is a sterile or otherwis=
e sexually
imperfect female calf born as the twin of a bull calf.  Several sources say=
 that
freemartinism is recognized as one of the most severe forms of sexual abnor=
mality among
cattle, found references to horses as well. This condition causes infertili=
ty in the
female cattle born twin to a male.=20

Perhaps more detail than necessary:
Although the male twin in this case is only affected by reduced fertility, =
in over ninety
percent of the cases, the female twin is completely infertile.  Because of =
a transfer of
hormones or a transfer of cells, the heifer's reproductive tract is severely
underdeveloped and sometimes even contains some elements of a bull's reprod=
uctive tract.
A freemartin is genetically female, but has many characteristics of a male.=
  The ovaries
of the freemartin do not develop correctly, and they remain very small.  Al=
so, the
ovaries of a freemartin do not produce the hormones necessary to induce the=
 behavioral
signs of heat. The external vulvar region can range from a very normal look=
ing female to
a female that appears to be male.   =20

It would appear that freemartins can't breed but are sterile females who ca=
n resemble
males.  Does this make sense to the story?  I didn't look it up before post=
ing this.

Phoebe

--- MBS 808 <mbs808 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>=20
> I'm slowly working my way through this book, that
> certainly earns the title treasury.
>=20
> I forget who introduces "The House The Blakeneys
> Built"
> but they mention the freemartins breeding and what is
> "really" going on in the story ...
>=20
> Um, how do freemartins breed?
>=20
> PS - The story reminded me (sorta) of that XFiles
> episode entitled Home ..
>=20
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
> http://sbc.yahoo.com
>=20
> --=20

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com

--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net