She then trained her dogs to recognize a person's smell at different times and under different conditions, making them ideal for tracking criminals and suspects. In a landmark 1930 paper, she demonstrated that with the right training, dogs could discern the individual scents of particular human beings. She also became fascinated with the dimensions of canine perception, particularly olfaction. She quickly mastered the burgeoning scientific field of cynology and designed an original, 16-year research study where she observed and recorded the daily behaviors of hundreds of boxers, taking note of which behavioral traits were genetic and how the environment shaped their temperament. Kahn details how and why Menzel transformed her love of dogs into a serious professional undertaking that enabled her to investigate scientific questions and solve societal problems. He gave the Menzels their first dog, a robust, brindle-colored boxer she named Mowgli. After she and her husband Rudolph settled in the northern Austrian city of Linz following World War I, Menzel met Austrian veterinarian and renowned dog breeder Joseph Bodingbauer. By the time she earned her doctorate in chemistry from the University of Vienna in 1914, she was also an ardent socialist. Menzel was born in 1891 to an upper-middle-class, assimilated Jewish Viennese family.ĭuring childhood, she chanced on a discarded copy of the Zionist newspaper Die Welt and developed what became a lifelong commitment to the cause. "She had to constantly negotiate a shifting kaleidoscope of political, scientific, and cultural considerations in order to realize her extraordinarily ambitious scientific goals and activist objectives." Becoming a Zionist and Scientist "Rudolphina's long, complicated, and eventful life was peppered with triumphs, marred by tragedies, and suffused with ideological tensions," Kahn writes. Kahn and published by Brandeis University Press, it details Menzel's role in training the dogs used by the German military and police in the 1920s and early 1930s - and how she helped the fledgling Zionist state secure its independence from Britain and win the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. A new book, " Canine Pioneer: The Extraordinary Life of Rudolphina Menzel," chronicles Menzel's life and career, exploring her seminal role in the development of cynology (the scientific study of the domestic dog) and modern Jewish, European, and Middle Eastern history. But in one of the more remarkable ironies of 20th-century history, Menzel also trained the dogs that helped create the state of Israel. "I suffered a lot knowing that my students in Austria and Germany were using the knowledge they acquired from me to use dogs to exterminate my people and other peoples," she said in an interview roughly 10 years before her death in 1973. Toward the end of her life, the Austrian-born Jewish scientist Rudolphina Menzel acknowledged a horrifying reality: the dog-training techniques she pioneered had been used by the Nazis to commit atrocities. Heller School for Social Policy and Management
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |