4A COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL January 27, 2016
O PINION
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Re: Pet fatality
We as a Humane Society Board
would like to have a follow-up sto-
ry on what happened to the person
who killed an innocent creature
(a small dog being walked on its
leash) and almost hit a pedestrian
in a crosswalk (who was crossing
when he was supposed to).
The person who did this, we
read, was “not licensed, not in-
sured and not documented”. Will
this person be only fi ned, or will
he serve time or be deported? Or
just let go with a warning to pos-
sibly kill again? Please follow
up on the outcome of this, as we
would like to know.
Janetta Overholser, Board Presi-
dent
Bev Martin Kelly,
Vice President
Genevieve Rowles
Alfred R. January
Toni Hutchison
Carla Williams
Sella Libby
Humane Society of Cottage
Grove Board of Directors
Editor’s Note: Interim Police
Chief Scott Shepherd told the
Sentinel on Monday that Ru-
ben Calmo-Perez, 42, of Cottage
Grove struck and killed a dog
being walked by its owner at the
Sixth Street/Main Street intersec-
tion at about 2:46 p.m. on Thurs-
day, Dec. 31. The dog and owner,
Pepper and Steve Thoemmes of
Cottage Grove, were taken to For-
est Valley Veterinary Clinic fol-
lowing the incident, though Shep-
herd said Pepper passed away en
route to the vet.
According to Shepherd, Calmo-
Perez received citations for Fail-
ure to Stop for a Pedestrian and
Operating Without Privilege or
Endorsement (operating a vehicle
without a valid Oregon Drivers
License.)
Greetings from
Illinois
The fourth-grade class at Avis-
ton Elementary, located in south-
ern Illinois, is learning about the
United States and the different
environments, climates, resources
and highlights found in each re-
gion. The kids in the class think it
would be fun to receive postcards,
souvenirs, resources or any infor-
mation about our great country
from each of the 50 states.
We hope that people who read
this letter will be interested in
mailing our class items pertaining
to their state.
Our address: 4th Grade at
Aviston Elementary, 350 S. Hull
St., Aviston, IL 62216
A sincere “thank you” to any-
one who is able to contribute! We
appreciate the excitement you will
add to our learning experience.
Mrs. Niemeyer
and all her students
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Offbeat Oregon History
Bizarre scientifi c dinosaur “bone wars”
barely touched Oregon
BY FINN J.D. JOHN
For the Sentinel
T
hroughout the 20-year personal
vendetta known jocosely today
as “The Bone Wars,” Oregon was never
more than a minor theater of operations.
For the most part, the two cowboy-pa-
leontologists whose mutual grudge
drove all the drama left the fi eldwork
and exploration in the Beaver State to
teams they’d hired, so that the Great
Men could concentrate on states with
actual dinosaur bones to fi nd.
One of the Bone Warriors did come
to Oregon with an exploratory team,
though, just a few months before hos-
tilities broke out. And by the time
he’d departed, he’d left enough of an
impression on local scientists that the
subsequent fi reworks probably came as
little surprise.
The Bone Warrior who came to Or-
egon did so on at the end of an expedi-
tion in the summer of 1871 at the head
of a team of scientists from Yale Uni-
versity. He was Othniel Charles Marsh,
a proud, taciturn man with a full beard
and intense, glaring eyes, referred to
reverently by the students in his party
as “Prof.” Marsh’s increasingly bitter
feud with colleague Edmund Drinker
Cope would not develop until some
time after his Oregon visit, but locals
did get a glimpse or two of the person-
ality traits that would drive Marsh’s
contribution to that feud.
The early beginnings of the Bone
Wars were already in place in 1871,
and although they hadn’t fl owered into
full hostility yet, they were well enough
along. Marsh and Cope had met in Ber-
lin in 1863. They’d gotten along rea-
sonably well together, but each subtly
looked down on the other from the start.
The 1860s were the time when science
was passing out of being something a
gentleman of leisure did to occupy his
time (as in the cases of patrician-scien-
tists like Charles Darwin and Benjamin
Franklin) to a calling one trained for
professionally at a university (as did
Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and pretty
much every other scientist since).
The well-born Cope came from the
older (and dying) tradition of “gentle-
man-scientists,” who saw university-
trained scientists like Marsh as a lesser
breed — not true gentlemen, but mere-
ly technicians who didn’t know their
places. Marsh, in turn, represented the
new university-trained cohort, which
saw the older generation as ignorant,
arrogant dabblers lacking the profes-
sional training to do good work.
This mutual contempt started fl ow-
ering into trouble almost immediately
after they came back to the U.S. Cope
had introduced Marsh to the owner of
a marl pit where a particularly interest-
ing dinosaur skeleton had been found;
Marsh then went behind Cope’s back
and made a deal with the pit’s owner
to send any future fossil fi nds directly
to him. Then Cope made a major er-
ror in assembling a dinosaur skeleton
— he put the head on the end of the di-
nosaur’s tail — and it was Marsh who
spotted and maliciously publicized the
mistake.
The really nasty part of the Bone
Wars would come later. Cope and
Marsh would spend the rest of their
lives — some 20 years — trying to
ruin each other, professionally and
socially. Both strove to get each other
fi red from jobs; sent spies and “bone
rustlers” to one another’s quarries; paid
lavish bribes; and — worst of all from
a modern scientist’s perspective — ac-
tually destroyed fossils and backfi lled
dig sites to keep fossils from each oth-
er. By the end of their careers in the late
1890s, their feud would ruin both of
them, professionally and socially, and
for decades American paleontology
was an international laughingstock as a
result of their unprofessional conduct.
But that was all in the future in 1871,
when a crew of Yale students crossed
the border from Idaho heading for the
John Day Fossil Beds. Marsh had heard
of the fossil beds, and had written to
Thomas Condon — the “father of Ore-
gon geology,” who would later become
one of the fi rst professors at the Uni-
versity of Oregon when it was founded
fi ve years later.
Condon responded immediately and
generously, sending a box of sample
fossils to Marsh with an invitation to
come to Oregon for more. It was that
invitation that Marsh’s crew was re-
sponding to now.
The Yale team spent a couple weeks
in Oregon — fi rst looking over Con-
don’s impressive collection of fossils in
The Dalles, and then doing fi eldwork
in the John Day Fossil Beds. A week
later, they’d amassed a collection of
some 11 boxes of bones of such crea-
tures as saber-toothed cats, mastodons
and primitive horses and camels.
While they were in the fi eld, Marsh
did some things that raised eyebrows
among the locals. First, when word
came to him that Professor George H.
Collier of Pacifi c University in For-
est Grove was on his way to a site
where some fossil horse bones had
been found, he became very agitated
and dispatched some of his students
“to head him off,” like a nervous gold
prospector trying to keep other miners
away from his diggin’s.
Then a little later, two of his stu-
dents, sent to secure some skulls from
a local collector, played an ill-advised
prank on him by sending word that
they planned to abscond with the skulls
and form their own fossil-collecting
party. Their prank succeeded beyond
their wildest imaginings, to the point
of likely having a negative impact on
their prospects at Yale; Marsh raged
about the ostensible betrayal all eve-
ning. “If this had been at the fi rst of
Please see OFFBEAT, Page 5A
The benefi ts of berries, cherries and pomegranates
BY JOEL FUHRMAN, MD
For the Sentinel
W
hat makes berries, cher-
ries and pomegranates
unique and benefi cial? Berries
and cherries
are high in
nutrients,
p h y t o -
chemicals,
and fi ber—
all of which
protect your
health. No-
tably, ber-
ries have the highest nutrient-
to-calorie ratio of all fruits.
Berries, cherries and pome-
granates are full of benefi cial
phytochemicals, many of which
act as antioxidants. Berries are
some of the highest antioxidant-
rich foods in existence and cher-
ries—which are not berries, but
rather a stone fruit (like peaches
and plums)—are also rich in fl a-
vonoid antioxidant compounds.
Antioxidants are critical for
your health as they protect
against oxidation and minimize
oxidative damage to your cells.
Oxidative damage ages the body
and catalyzes a host of chronic
diseases, including heart disease
and cancer.
Berries, cherries and pome-
granates are abundant in fl avo-
noid antioxidants, which are
concentrated in their skins and
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give rise to their deep hues of
red, blue and purple. Flavonoids
affect gene expression, detoxifi -
cation, inhibition of cancer cell
growth and proliferation and
inhibition of infl ammation and
other processes related to cancer
and heart disease.
Several studies have shown
that high fl avonoid intake lowers
the risk of heart disease by up to
45 percent. Flavonoids in ber-
ries, cherries and pomegranates
and other pomegranate poly-
phenols appear to act in several
different ways to maintain heart
health including by reducing
infl ammation, improving blood
lipid, blood pressure and blood
sugar levels, and by preventing
plaque formation.
The antioxidants in berries,
cherries and pomegranates help
to protect against cancers. In
the 1980s, ellagic acid, another
type of antioxidant abundant in
berries, blocked the formation
of tumors, providing the initial
evidence that these fruits were
anti-cancer foods. Flavonoids
have powerful anti-cancer ef-
fects including reducing infl am-
mation, preventing damage to
genetic material, preventing
cancer cells from multiplying,
slowing the growth of cancer
cells, preventing tumors from
acquiring a blood supply, and
stimulating the body’s own anti-
oxidant enzymes. Pomegranate
has anti-angiogenic properties
that prevent tumors from get-
ting nourishment and oxygen
via blood vessel support. Pome-
granate also can reduce breast
cancer risk with natural aroma-
tase inhibitors, which inhibit the
production of estrogen.
Berries are excellent foods for
the brain. Substances present
in blueberries can both reduce
oxidative stress and improve
communication between brain
cells. Blueberries, strawber-
ries, and blackberries have all
been shown to slow or reverse
age-related cognitive decline in
animal studies, and blueberries
have now been tested for their
effects on human memory. Old-
er adults with mildly impaired
memory were given wild blue-
berry juice as a supplement, and
after as little as 12 weeks, mea-
sures of learning and memory
had improved. The antioxidants
in cherries have also been shown
to protect brain cells against ox-
idative stress, implying that eat-
ing cherries may help to prevent
neurodegenerative diseases like
dementia. In people with mild
memory complaints, those who
drank pomegranate juice daily
performed better on memory
task compared to placebo and
displayed and increase in brain
activation measured by func-
tional MRI.
Cherries have a unique anti-
infl ammatory function that may
offer natural pain reduction by
inhibiting certain enzymes that
are part of the infl ammatory pro-
cess and the sensation of pain.
These are the same enzymes
that are inhibited by many com-
mon pain medications, such as
ibuprofen and naproxen. Cher-
ries and cherry juice have eased
symptoms of gout and arthri-
tis in human subjects and may
also help athletes reduce post-
workout muscle pain. Distance
runners training for a race who
drank tart cherry juice twice
daily for eight days (seven days
prior to race plus race day) ex-
perienced less post-race pain
than those who drank a placebo.
Similarly in strength training
workouts, those who drank tart
cherry juice experienced less
pain and strength loss over the
four following days, compared
to those in the placebo group.
Cherries may help you sleep.
Tart cherries are one of the few
food sources of the hormone and
antioxidant melatonin, which
regulates the sleep-wake cycle
in the human brain. Tart cherry
juice supplementation has been
associated with improvements
in sleep quality.
Evidence has emerged that
the anti-infl ammatory effects of
tart cherry juice could benefi t
those with gout. In this study,
overweight and obese people
consumed 8 ounces per day of
tart cherry juice or took a pla-
cebo for four weeks. Those in
the group who drank tart cherry
juice experienced reductions in
uric acid levels and infl amma-
tion markers.
In summary, berries, cherries
and pomegranates are important
components of a natural, high-
nutrient diet. I recommend eat-
ing them daily to provide the
body with protection against
free radicals, infl ammation,
heart disease, and cancers. In-
clude them as part of your va-
riety of fruits, in addition to a
bounty of vegetables, beans,
nuts and seeds, which together
can provide an abundant and
varied mix of antioxidants, fur-
ther protecting your health.
Dr. Fuhrman is a #1 New
York Times best-selling author
and a family physician special-
izing in lifestyle and nutritional
medicine. His newest book, The
End of Dieting, debunks the fake
“science” of popular fad diets
and offers an alternative to di-
eting that leads to permanent
weight loss and excellent health.
Visit his informative website at
DrFuhrman.com. Submit your
questions and comments about
this column directly to news-
questions@drfuhrman.com.
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