EVALUATING THE EFFECTS OF MONENSIN OVERDOSE IN DAIRY CATTLE

Monensin is approved as a feed additive by the FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine to increase milk production efficiency in lactating dairy cattle. To assess the effects of a gross error in mixing monensin into cattle feed, a 10-fold overdose was given for three consecutive days to naïve cows as well as cows previously dosed with monensin within the label range. Cows were evaluated during the overdose and for a subsequent 4 week observation period. Physiological variables were analyzed, including dry matter intake, body weight, body condition score, and serum chemistry profile. Production variables were analyzed, including milk yield and milk composition. Cows were blocked according to pre-treatment milk output, days in milk, and body condition. Results were analyzed using linear mixed model methodology with a baseline covariate. The study provided information for the veterinarian and the dairy farmer for determining whether an overdose may have occurred, for assessing the prognosis, and for deciding whether to continue feeding monensin immediately following an overdose

‘SILENCE BY MY NOISE'’: AN ECOCRITICAL AESTHETIC OF NOISE IN JAPANESE TRADITIONAL SOUND CULTURE AND THE SOUND ART OF AKITA MASAMI

Modernist musicological discourse is flush with talk of “the musical material,” a rhetorical figure which imbues sound with enigmatically self-inherent tendencies, while simultaneously prefiguring its subjugation to compositional agency. This trope echoes the broader Enlightenment cultural program of establishing mastery over the unruly energies of nature. The noise compositions of Masami Akita, better known as Merzbow, challenge such conceptions of meaningful musical experience as mastery over sound. Twisting the hum of electronic instruments into self-oscillating feedback loops, Merzbow unbinds the inherent momentum of sound, forestalling its subsumption into mere compositional material.  Such explorations of the 'natural right' of sound to be something other than music have important forebears in late 20th century Western aesthetic thought, most notably John Cage.  Despite his professed impartiality toward traditional Japanese music, Merzbow's ambivalent aesthetics also recall the much older classical Japanese poetic tradition, as exemplified by Tokugawa period philologist Motoori Norinaga's concept of mono no aware. In this paper, I interpret Norinaga's aesthetic thought as a riposte to Enlightenment nature-culture dualism, and listen for its echo in Akita's noise. In the final instance, however, I conclude that Akita eviscerates traditional Japanese assumptions of the mutual amenability of culture and nature, music and noise.  Following Akita's recent writings on ecology, I maintain that his compositions reflect a pained awareness of the deterioration of the natural sound-world before the onslaught of human culture and its sonic detritus, and advance a still more radical critique of the inability of either Western modernist or classical Japanese aesthetic thought to address the ballooning potential of humanly organized sound to do violence against human and non-human life