Our minds work in mysterious ways

NZ Herald

13-06-2025

The news you need to know comes to find you, and the rest is titillation. As dear old Thoreau put it, 'if we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter - we need never read of another.'
Indeed so in theory, but human nature doesn't run on theory. We are inquisitive creatures. We want to know about the world around us, and we can't help asking questions.
Consider, for example, Thoreau's cow run over on the Western Railroad. One would have thought that the story wouldn't be about the cow but about the train.
For surely a cow run over would mean a train derailed, and a train derailed would mean disaster. Hence those strange metal devices like giant moustaches attached to the front of American steam trains, known, I believe, as cow-catchers.
Though therein lies another puzzle - see the mind at work - because surely the purpose of the device was not to catch the cow, but rather to strike it a blow at an angle that would fling it aside, no doubt with horrific injuries.
And with no prospect of the train stopping to render first aid, one has to feel sorry for those old-time cows.
A literal cow-catcher would have been both more humane and less wasteful.
If the front of the train could be engineered in such a way that it scooped the offending beast off the track and somehow transferred it to a cattle truck alive and well, the train could arrive eventually in New York or Los Angeles with a small herd of astonished cattle that the rail company could sell at a profit to the nearest abattoir.
Nevertheless, one has to wonder why a cow would ever stand in front of a train. The Western Railroad ran through the vast open prairies of the USA where the buffalo roamed until the white man shot them all. And given the narrowness of the railway and the vast breadth of the prairie, and given the inedibility of one and the magnificent grazing of the other, it seems improbable that any cow would ever choose to stand on the line. And even more improbable that it would continue to do so with the rails humming at the train's approach and Casey Jones a-tooting of the whistle to try and scare the thing off.
Which thoughts I record only to demonstrate that it is all very well for high-minded Thoreau to assert that we don't need to know the news, but it is human nature to do so and to become engrossed. As I am by the Italian Financial Police Force's alpine rescue dog.
Being a financial policeman in Italy would be no cake walk given the vigorous proclivities of the Mafia. Press a little too forcefully for a GST return and suddenly you're in bed with a horse's head.
As for the alpine division, what sort of financial crimes happen in the Alps? Fraudulent ski-field operators? Or maybe there's a stream of financial criminals who try to flee over the Alps to Switzerland, where they are famously uninquisitive about wealth so long as you stick it in their banks.
And could it be that because the pursuing officers are nerdish types, expert with the calculator and the spreadsheet but rather less expert with the crampons and the snowshoes, it is necessary for the force to retain a rescue dog to haul them out of the snowdrifts from time to time?
I ask these questions only to illustrate the restless nature of the mind, and I don't pretend to know the answers. Though I am confident about one thing, which is the breed of the rescue dog in question. It just has to be a ciao.