August 29, 2025 • 23 mins
Holly talks about the arguments she found online about whether graffiti is art. Tracy talks about how the Dickin Medal impacted veterinary medicine.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I am Holly Fry
and I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Wilson.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
We talked about.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Spray paint this week.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Yep, I have a story about my own ding dongri
as usual, Okay good. I initially wrote a note at
the bottom of this to talk about where I was like,
Millet's life sounds sort of awful to me. I travel
a lot, but he traveled a lot and seemed to
never settle like m And I was telling my beloved
(00:41):
about this and he was like, it honestly doesn't sound
that different from your schedule, and I was like, shush.
But anyway, I played myself on that one, and I do.
I really sort of love Millet a little bit because
I see things in him that I recognize of myself.
I would never claim that I achieve anything near what
he achieved, but just that kind of I want to
(01:01):
work in a million different things. I want my hands
in a bunch of different pies.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Busy, busy bee.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Thing, I get it. I don't know that I'm done
with Frank Millett. There's a non zero chance will get
a more in depth version of his life on the
show in the future, because I do find him really interesting.
Now it's on to graffiti. Yeah, there is an article
that comes up a lot in the history of spray paint.
(01:26):
It was written in the New York Times like more
than a decade ago, and just as we have I
think referenced on the show. If you ever just want
to be like man humans will fight about anything, go
to like the New York Times cooking page or any
of their social sites and watch people argue about the recipes.
The same thing happened on this article about the history
(01:47):
of spray paint and the reference to graffiti art, because
a lot of people wanted to grouse and say you
cannot put those two words together, to which I say,
that is belogne. There is a lot of a amazing
art in graffiti art. Not all graffiti is art, but
graffiti art is a thing. But it was just fascinating
(02:07):
to watch people dig in and some of it did
boil down to is it just because the young people
do it that you don't perceive it as art? Well,
and there there are connections between graffiti and black culture also, right,
they're a racism element. Oh one.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
And like, I super get it.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
If you own a business and somebody is tagging your
door or your window or whatever and you don't want
them to be doing that. I understand that that would
be a very frustrating experience. But there are graffiti art
projects that are beautiful, and also, like, I think there
(02:50):
are people on a converse of that who will see
graffiti and think that means they are unsafe, and those
usings are unrelated. Yeah, I mean in some I mean
there's a whole thing to break open here, and I
(03:11):
part of me is like, should we do an episode
on the history of graffiti? And I don't know is
the answer, but like there are interesting discussions to have there,
some of which are you know, in the case of
graffiti art, there are instances to speak to your point
that some people see it and feel like they're in
an unsafe place or like it's a bad neighborhood. In
(03:33):
some cases, those are grassroots efforts to bring life and
some sort of beauty to the neighborhood. Yeah, obviously there
are tags that are not meant to be beautiful, and
that's fine, but there are a lot that are really
really cool.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
One of the places that I see graffiti the most
frequently is on commuter rail trains inbound to North Station
in Boston. And what I am seeing it painted on
is like derelict rolling stock, like train equipment that is
not serving a purpose anymore.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Yeah, and otherwise what would be.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
There is just a deteriorating piece of train machinery. And
now it's a deteriorating piece of train machinery with stuff
painted on it. Honestly, the stuff painted on it might
be holding it together in some cases. Yeah, yeah, I
mean the sometimes paint will reinforce things a little bit
in a way that yeah, like will prevent rust from
(04:36):
hitting a certain area. The other thing that all of
this made me think about, though, was sort of the
I don't know that it's irony, but that Frank Millett
invented a paint sprayer. Was an artist never thought about
its potential application for art, Like if you could travel
back in time and hand that man in airbrush, what
(04:57):
would his brain dom?
Speaker 2 (05:00):
What would he make? Something?
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Mmmm, something beautiful? And also talking about all of this
and looking at people arguing about graffiti art made me
think of my youth. Of course, there was a trestle
near where I grew up that like it was a
rite of passage for many people to go spray paint it.
But those weren't often like beautiful art. It was like
(05:21):
literally someone writing like Ginny was here. It was not
really you know, And it would get painted over periodically,
and sometimes people.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
In the community would complain that it.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Had gotten painted over, that it was part of like
the the you know, youth culture of the area. H listen,
I graffitied some not very much. Ye, not there incidentally,
but somewhere else. I of course picked a weirder place.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Earlier this summer, we've talked about how I spent a
couple of weeks away from my desk doing some family stuff,
and I was staying in a very rural part of
North Carolina. Just to give sort of an example of where, like,
there are two dollar generals between my parents' house and
(06:10):
where I was staying. Before you get to a grocery
store that is not a dollar general. That's sort of
like right, just to sort of set the stage of everywhere.
And I will say I did not feel I could
be myself in the environment where I was staying, not
in my parents' house. My parents are great, but like
out in public where I was staying, and afterward leaving,
(06:35):
I was flying out of Raleigh Durham and I met
up with some Raleigh Durham area friends for brunch before
heading out and seeing a bunch of like very affirming
graffiti in the bathroom at this restaurant, I was like,
I feel so relieved right now to be in a
(06:56):
place where even the things that people are writing on
the bathroom wall, I feel more at home with. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I saw some similar graffiti when we were in Rome.
The other thing that I just want to say in
all of this is that I am grateful for all
of these people that develop spray paint, because I sure
(07:16):
have used a lot of spray paint in my life.
Yeah yeah, I mean I do so many, you know,
artsy things, and I have made some big honk and
weird costumes that require spray paint, and I have spray
painted a lot of things for my house. We have
our little Star Wars canteena downstairs. It has a lot
of greenbleys in it that have required spray painting. At
(07:37):
some point. I feel like I have had spray paint
hand more times than I can count. Just when your
hand makes the claw because it's been spraying so long.
I love those little trigger nozzles. I was gonna say,
do you ever get a little trigger the trigger thing
to help I do? But then sometimes it just you know,
if you're doing it at scale, you're still gonna get paint.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
It's just a different flavor.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
I also feel like sometimes the little trigger thing affects
your control a little bit, and so depending on what
exactly you're trying to do, it can make it easier
to depress the thing, but more difficult to control what
you're aiming at. Yeah, sometimes some of them are pretty good,
but then like you just get the like palm grip
(08:19):
ache instead of the ouchy finger ache. Yeah, it's it's
very It's all fascinating to me, and I like the
idea that you know, many many minds had to come
together to get us to the point where we could
just run to the hardware store or the craft store.
I mean, when I think about how amazing it was
(08:39):
touted that there were twenty five different colors, and I'm like,
now there's like stuff that has you know, chroma shift
flakes in it that look different colors from different angles,
and like, yeah, every color of the rainbow and beyond.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
And I love that.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Spray paint the world. It's the best.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
I'm also I'm gonna I'm gonna draw iron. Okay, this
is such a contentious issue. I deeply dislike woodgrain. Okay,
so I want to paint things that are would I
know that many people get irate when they see, like
(09:19):
antique furniture that's been painted. Not me, paint right over it, baby,
make it pink, make it purple, whatever. If it were
a very finely finished piece, I wouldn't do that. But
I also wouldn't buy that for myself. Yeah, but I
will go into an antique store or a thrift store
and find a very old piece of wooden furniture and
just paint it some pretty color. Yeah. This is not
(09:41):
exactly the same thing, but it does connect to the
episode when you were talking about whitewashing the basement.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
I did not really know.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
And so seeing one of those historical reality shows where
people pretend to be back in time, and I think
this was one that was a the building of a castle,
and I did not refresh my memory about what the
title of this was. But one of the things that
they were talking about, was like, you would have the
castle with these like dark stone walls and sometimes not
(10:14):
very big windows because you wanted it to be defensible,
not have big open spaces that your siege. Your siege
could have people besieging you, just shooting.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
Arrows through there.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
And one of the things that they would do was
whitewash the walls. And I didn't really know that because
most historical sites that I have been to that have
had some kind of like castle element, the walls have
not been whitewashed. It's just been very dark on the inside. Yeah,
And the before and after difference of whitewashed versus non
whitewashed walls was incredible. I was like, I've always imagined
(10:50):
that this space would have been dark and gloomy and foreboding,
but with all the walls whitewashed, it's actually nice.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
And that also, you know events things like mildew growth
and yeah, bacterial yuck and all of the things that
would make people sick if they were hanging out in
a castle fortress for a long period of time. So
m h. Whitewashing used in a vernacular in a negative way,
but the actual act of had a perfect putting. Lime
(11:20):
was valuable, is still valuable. It still gets done anyway.
Spray paint, I sure love. It makes me want to
go make crafty things, but I don't have time yet.
We talked about the dick and Metal and some animals
(11:40):
that were awarded it. Yeah, I cried about the dick
and Metal a lot. I apologize, Holly. She thought it
was safe. Yeah, Well, often when I'm working on an episode,
I have a good sense of whether it's going to
make you cry. And I misjudged this one because I
intentionally leaned toward animals who some of them were posthumously
(12:05):
awarded the medal, but it wasn't because they died while
doing the thing that earned them the metal. And I
kind of try to keep the animal harm to a minimum,
and so I had thought that made it reasonably safe territory.
I was incorrect on this, So I apologize Holly, and
I apologize Casey. Are pretty serious. It was the audio
(12:28):
edit the episode. Well, I have to distract myself by
thinking about Star Wars so that I stopped crying. Yeah, yeah,
you know, yeah, about all the animal things.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
It makes sense.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Sometimes I will check with you ahead of time to
see if you think something is going to make you cry,
And sometimes I am right and sometimes I'm wrong. We
all have different things that cause the waterworks to happen.
I mean I cry at everything anyway. I was just
telling you on a kind of grueling schedule as of late,
and it's going to keep going for a little while,
(12:59):
and that makes me very weepy, even when I'm not
the last bit sad or emotional, Like, I just have
a physical response to being tired that is crying. Yeah. Yeah,
if I am sick at all. Oh, and it could
be like sick and actual illness or sick just feeling
kind of bad. Because like, for example, if I have
(13:20):
just gotten a vaccine and it's made me feel a
little achy, I might just cry over everything.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
I remember. I can't remember if I had like a.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Mild cold, I had something something that was causing me
to feel a little unwell, and I turned on my
Little Pony Friendship is Magic. Oh yeah, and just started
weeping over the theme song it happens. Yeah, I think
I've told I may have told you this story. After
(13:52):
my little surprise gallbladder surgery last year, which went great,
I came home and for the first few days I
did nothing but sit on the couch watching Blue and crying,
and I was even like, what is going on? And
then like that second day, I had like a late
lunch and after that I was like, oh, I'm fine,
and it was like literally like a window had opened
and the sun had come out. And then I read
(14:12):
that Delauded, which is a very heavy hitting pain management
drug that they would give you in the hospital, one
of the side effects is uncontrollable weeping, and it was like, oh,
I guess it just left my system because wow, aces
now okay, some of it initially was like that I
felt like garbage, and it's that thing of like is
(14:34):
this my life now? Where I don't feel like myself
and I feel like I am incapacitated in terms of
my vigor not being here and like not.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Being able to engage with the word.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
But that that had, you know, passed pretty quickly, and
then I still was like, why am I still crying?
And it was like, oh, it's it's literally chemical, Okay, yeah, cool, cool, yeah, fascinating.
One of the things that we talked about in this
episode was the influence that the People's Dispensary for Sick
(15:06):
Animals had on the world of veterinary medicine in the UK,
which we have a whole episode on, like a brief
History of Veterinary Medicine. I can't remember if that's already
been a Saturday Classic or not. Off the top of
my head, I don't remember either. Yeah, we talked some
about like the shift in focus from large farm animals,
(15:28):
especially horses, but also cattle and sheep two more of
a focus on companion animals. And there's a lot that
went into that. Some of it had to do with
how many people were living in rural areas and had
a cow or a horse or whatever, and how many
more people were living in urban areas and instead have pets.
(15:52):
It was connected to how people thought about animals like
dogs and cats and pets. It was also related to
the people's dispensary for sick animals, establishing this idea that yes,
these all these animals also deserve care, including veterinary care.
One thing that we didn't really get into, that was
(16:14):
discussed in a couple of the things that I read
for this episode was that at this point there was
a shift in some of the what goes under the
umbrella of animal rights advocacy, and how prior to this,
a lot of people, a lot of whom were women,
(16:35):
who were advocating for animal welfare. A lot of them
were advocating for like anti cruelty laws to you know,
outlaw people who used working horses in their in their
daily worlds, to you know, not allow cruelty to toward
those horses, and to not allow cruelty to smaller animals either. Right,
(16:59):
And at this point, a significant portion of like the
animal welfare advocacy shifted toward providing veterinary care for animals,
and that just sort of being a shift in the
mindset of what animal welfare and animal rights advocacy meant. Yeah,
(17:21):
and now we'll go to the emergency vet and stay
up all night with our creatures. Yeah. My last trip
to the emergency vet was very comedic in the end.
It was scary in the moment and then hilarious because,
(17:43):
as I've said, we adopted several new cats this year,
one of whom is very hard bonded to me, and
there was one night where she was just like breathing
really rapidly and it scared me and I, oh, I did.
I wasn't sure what was going on, I sent a
to the telehealth thing that I have through my veterinarian's office,
(18:04):
and the VAT that I spoke with was like, oh,
this does look troubling. You should take her to the
emergency VET. And we went and I hadn't you know,
I had had her like two months at that point,
so I didn't know all of her personality quirks. And
we went to the emergency VET. We ran a million
kajillion tests, we did X rays, we did all the things,
and it really came down to the fact that she
had kind of she had really bad gas and gave
(18:25):
herself a panic attack essentially because she was uncomfortable. Oh
she's a chip off the old block. But yeah, she's
a hoot, that cat. I love her. I love her. Yeah,
I love her. And I mean I'm sure, right, this
is the kind of story that I tell someone like
my dad and he's like, that is ridiculous, right, Why
(18:48):
did you spend all that money?
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Why did you get It's because it's.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
My my little smooky baby.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
Not to entrepremorphize animals.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
I don't need her to be a baby, I need
her to be a cat.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
Which I love.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Yeah, it's very funny. So this idea of the progression
of veterinary care being not initially part of having a
pet to where we are now just tickles me.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
Yeah, I have become sort of more aware of how
many people keep snakes as pets. Of course I have
known people have snakes as pets, Yeah, but how many
people have snakes as pets and also don't live in
a place where there is a veterinarian who treats snakes,
(19:34):
oh yeah, And so not having access to any kind
of like emergency or urgent care for their snake when
something is clearly wrong. And I see stories about this,
and it stresses me out a little bit, and I
have to remember, I don't I don't have to read this,
this person's forum post about what I don't have to
(19:55):
I don't have to read that. Are you into snakes
or are you scared of snakes or indifferent to snakes?
I find snakes interesting. I have never been really scared
of the I have for sure had experiences where like
a snake startled me. Yeah, I mean, my husband startles me.
Sometimes anything can startle me. So when I was a kid,
(20:19):
you know, being in the this would have been like
late eighties early nineties, and we had this idea of
the latch key kids who were coming home and letting
themselves in.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
Yeah, I had a key.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
To the basement door of the house, and there was
some logic for why I was entering the house after
school through the basement and not through the front door,
and I don't remember what that rationale was. But I
was making my way around the side of the house
and there was a flowerbed back there that had stopped
(20:56):
to be being actively maintained as a flowerbed, and I
only had a couple of things in it and was
otherwise just bare dirt.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
And there was a little like a garter.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Snake or a black rat snake, like some non venomous,
totally normal to have around snake. But I saw it
out of the corner of my eye and it startled
me enough that I leapt backwards like I was in
a cartoon. So anyway, I am not afraid of them.
(21:25):
I do find them interesting. I do also find some
of them unnerving enough that I like looking at them
to just sort of, you know, keep myself acclimated to
the fact that snakes are cool and they're good to
have around. But I get a little stressed out sometimes
that the number of people who's post about their snake
is like, my snake is sick and there's no vet
to take it too.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
Yeah, that would suck.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Yeah, which is just a thing to keep in mind
if you are bringing an animal into your life. Yeah,
is veterinary care accessible? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Uh, that's a biggie.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
Yeah. A lot of people focus on like being able
to afford veterinary care, especially when it comes to things
that are like expensive veterinary procedures. But there's also just
like is there a vet, yeah that you could take
it too.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
Yeah, both of these are factors.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Yeah. I enjoyed working on this episode. I had just
as like I said in the introduction to it, just
the longer I worked on Buck versus Bell, the angrier
I was. And then I was like, we're gonna do
some cute animal stories and yes, there's animal peril, but
(22:35):
also we're going to talk about some good dogs and
cats and pigeons and a horse. If you want to
learn more about pigeons, Rosemary Moscow has the Guide to
Pigeon Watching that we mentioned a number of other books,
so lots of stuff from her if you're interested. Whatever's
happening on your weekend. I hope it goes great. If
(22:57):
you have some animals in your life, I hope you're
able to love on those animals, if they liked to
be loved on, if they liked to be.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
Observed from Afar.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Have fun observing observing your animals from Afar. We will
be back with something brand new on Monday, but before that,
we will have a Saturday Classic tomorrow. Stuff you Missed
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
(23:28):
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I am Holly Fry
and I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Wilson.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
We talked about.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Spray paint this week.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Yep, I have a story about my own ding dongri
as usual, Okay good. I initially wrote a note at
the bottom of this to talk about where I was like,
Millet's life sounds sort of awful to me. I travel
a lot, but he traveled a lot and seemed to
never settle like m And I was telling my beloved
(00:41):
about this and he was like, it honestly doesn't sound
that different from your schedule, and I was like, shush.
But anyway, I played myself on that one, and I do.
I really sort of love Millet a little bit because
I see things in him that I recognize of myself.
I would never claim that I achieve anything near what
he achieved, but just that kind of I want to
(01:01):
work in a million different things. I want my hands
in a bunch of different pies.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Busy, busy bee.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Thing, I get it. I don't know that I'm done
with Frank Millett. There's a non zero chance will get
a more in depth version of his life on the
show in the future, because I do find him really interesting.
Now it's on to graffiti. Yeah, there is an article
that comes up a lot in the history of spray paint.
(01:26):
It was written in the New York Times like more
than a decade ago, and just as we have I
think referenced on the show. If you ever just want
to be like man humans will fight about anything, go
to like the New York Times cooking page or any
of their social sites and watch people argue about the recipes.
The same thing happened on this article about the history
(01:47):
of spray paint and the reference to graffiti art, because
a lot of people wanted to grouse and say you
cannot put those two words together, to which I say,
that is belogne. There is a lot of a amazing
art in graffiti art. Not all graffiti is art, but
graffiti art is a thing. But it was just fascinating
(02:07):
to watch people dig in and some of it did
boil down to is it just because the young people
do it that you don't perceive it as art? Well,
and there there are connections between graffiti and black culture also, right,
they're a racism element. Oh one.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
And like, I super get it.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
If you own a business and somebody is tagging your
door or your window or whatever and you don't want
them to be doing that. I understand that that would
be a very frustrating experience. But there are graffiti art
projects that are beautiful, and also, like, I think there
(02:50):
are people on a converse of that who will see
graffiti and think that means they are unsafe, and those
usings are unrelated. Yeah, I mean in some I mean
there's a whole thing to break open here, and I
(03:11):
part of me is like, should we do an episode
on the history of graffiti? And I don't know is
the answer, but like there are interesting discussions to have there,
some of which are you know, in the case of
graffiti art, there are instances to speak to your point
that some people see it and feel like they're in
an unsafe place or like it's a bad neighborhood. In
(03:33):
some cases, those are grassroots efforts to bring life and
some sort of beauty to the neighborhood. Yeah, obviously there
are tags that are not meant to be beautiful, and
that's fine, but there are a lot that are really
really cool.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
One of the places that I see graffiti the most
frequently is on commuter rail trains inbound to North Station
in Boston. And what I am seeing it painted on
is like derelict rolling stock, like train equipment that is
not serving a purpose anymore.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Yeah, and otherwise what would be.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
There is just a deteriorating piece of train machinery. And
now it's a deteriorating piece of train machinery with stuff
painted on it. Honestly, the stuff painted on it might
be holding it together in some cases. Yeah, yeah, I
mean the sometimes paint will reinforce things a little bit
in a way that yeah, like will prevent rust from
(04:36):
hitting a certain area. The other thing that all of
this made me think about, though, was sort of the
I don't know that it's irony, but that Frank Millett
invented a paint sprayer. Was an artist never thought about
its potential application for art, Like if you could travel
back in time and hand that man in airbrush, what
(04:57):
would his brain dom?
Speaker 2 (05:00):
What would he make? Something?
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Mmmm, something beautiful? And also talking about all of this
and looking at people arguing about graffiti art made me
think of my youth. Of course, there was a trestle
near where I grew up that like it was a
rite of passage for many people to go spray paint it.
But those weren't often like beautiful art. It was like
(05:21):
literally someone writing like Ginny was here. It was not
really you know, And it would get painted over periodically,
and sometimes people.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
In the community would complain that it.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Had gotten painted over, that it was part of like
the the you know, youth culture of the area. H listen,
I graffitied some not very much. Ye, not there incidentally,
but somewhere else. I of course picked a weirder place.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Earlier this summer, we've talked about how I spent a
couple of weeks away from my desk doing some family stuff,
and I was staying in a very rural part of
North Carolina. Just to give sort of an example of where, like,
there are two dollar generals between my parents' house and
(06:10):
where I was staying. Before you get to a grocery
store that is not a dollar general. That's sort of
like right, just to sort of set the stage of everywhere.
And I will say I did not feel I could
be myself in the environment where I was staying, not
in my parents' house. My parents are great, but like
out in public where I was staying, and afterward leaving,
(06:35):
I was flying out of Raleigh Durham and I met
up with some Raleigh Durham area friends for brunch before
heading out and seeing a bunch of like very affirming
graffiti in the bathroom at this restaurant, I was like,
I feel so relieved right now to be in a
(06:56):
place where even the things that people are writing on
the bathroom wall, I feel more at home with. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I saw some similar graffiti when we were in Rome.
The other thing that I just want to say in
all of this is that I am grateful for all
of these people that develop spray paint, because I sure
(07:16):
have used a lot of spray paint in my life.
Yeah yeah, I mean I do so many, you know,
artsy things, and I have made some big honk and
weird costumes that require spray paint, and I have spray
painted a lot of things for my house. We have
our little Star Wars canteena downstairs. It has a lot
of greenbleys in it that have required spray painting. At
(07:37):
some point. I feel like I have had spray paint
hand more times than I can count. Just when your
hand makes the claw because it's been spraying so long.
I love those little trigger nozzles. I was gonna say,
do you ever get a little trigger the trigger thing
to help I do? But then sometimes it just you know,
if you're doing it at scale, you're still gonna get paint.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
It's just a different flavor.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
I also feel like sometimes the little trigger thing affects
your control a little bit, and so depending on what
exactly you're trying to do, it can make it easier
to depress the thing, but more difficult to control what
you're aiming at. Yeah, sometimes some of them are pretty good,
but then like you just get the like palm grip
(08:19):
ache instead of the ouchy finger ache. Yeah, it's it's
very It's all fascinating to me, and I like the
idea that you know, many many minds had to come
together to get us to the point where we could
just run to the hardware store or the craft store.
I mean, when I think about how amazing it was
(08:39):
touted that there were twenty five different colors, and I'm like,
now there's like stuff that has you know, chroma shift
flakes in it that look different colors from different angles,
and like, yeah, every color of the rainbow and beyond.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
And I love that.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Spray paint the world. It's the best.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
I'm also I'm gonna I'm gonna draw iron. Okay, this
is such a contentious issue. I deeply dislike woodgrain. Okay,
so I want to paint things that are would I
know that many people get irate when they see, like
(09:19):
antique furniture that's been painted. Not me, paint right over it, baby,
make it pink, make it purple, whatever. If it were
a very finely finished piece, I wouldn't do that. But
I also wouldn't buy that for myself. Yeah, but I
will go into an antique store or a thrift store
and find a very old piece of wooden furniture and
just paint it some pretty color. Yeah. This is not
(09:41):
exactly the same thing, but it does connect to the
episode when you were talking about whitewashing the basement.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
I did not really know.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
And so seeing one of those historical reality shows where
people pretend to be back in time, and I think
this was one that was a the building of a castle,
and I did not refresh my memory about what the
title of this was. But one of the things that
they were talking about, was like, you would have the
castle with these like dark stone walls and sometimes not
(10:14):
very big windows because you wanted it to be defensible,
not have big open spaces that your siege. Your siege
could have people besieging you, just shooting.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
Arrows through there.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
And one of the things that they would do was
whitewash the walls. And I didn't really know that because
most historical sites that I have been to that have
had some kind of like castle element, the walls have
not been whitewashed. It's just been very dark on the inside. Yeah,
And the before and after difference of whitewashed versus non
whitewashed walls was incredible. I was like, I've always imagined
(10:50):
that this space would have been dark and gloomy and foreboding,
but with all the walls whitewashed, it's actually nice.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
And that also, you know events things like mildew growth
and yeah, bacterial yuck and all of the things that
would make people sick if they were hanging out in
a castle fortress for a long period of time. So
m h. Whitewashing used in a vernacular in a negative way,
but the actual act of had a perfect putting. Lime
(11:20):
was valuable, is still valuable. It still gets done anyway.
Spray paint, I sure love. It makes me want to
go make crafty things, but I don't have time yet.
We talked about the dick and Metal and some animals
(11:40):
that were awarded it. Yeah, I cried about the dick
and Metal a lot. I apologize, Holly. She thought it
was safe. Yeah, Well, often when I'm working on an episode,
I have a good sense of whether it's going to
make you cry. And I misjudged this one because I
intentionally leaned toward animals who some of them were posthumously
(12:05):
awarded the medal, but it wasn't because they died while
doing the thing that earned them the metal. And I
kind of try to keep the animal harm to a minimum,
and so I had thought that made it reasonably safe territory.
I was incorrect on this, So I apologize Holly, and
I apologize Casey. Are pretty serious. It was the audio
(12:28):
edit the episode. Well, I have to distract myself by
thinking about Star Wars so that I stopped crying. Yeah, yeah,
you know, yeah, about all the animal things.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
It makes sense.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Sometimes I will check with you ahead of time to
see if you think something is going to make you cry,
And sometimes I am right and sometimes I'm wrong. We
all have different things that cause the waterworks to happen.
I mean I cry at everything anyway. I was just
telling you on a kind of grueling schedule as of late,
and it's going to keep going for a little while,
(12:59):
and that makes me very weepy, even when I'm not
the last bit sad or emotional, Like, I just have
a physical response to being tired that is crying. Yeah. Yeah,
if I am sick at all. Oh, and it could
be like sick and actual illness or sick just feeling
kind of bad. Because like, for example, if I have
(13:20):
just gotten a vaccine and it's made me feel a
little achy, I might just cry over everything.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
I remember. I can't remember if I had like a.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Mild cold, I had something something that was causing me
to feel a little unwell, and I turned on my
Little Pony Friendship is Magic. Oh yeah, and just started
weeping over the theme song it happens. Yeah, I think
I've told I may have told you this story. After
(13:52):
my little surprise gallbladder surgery last year, which went great,
I came home and for the first few days I
did nothing but sit on the couch watching Blue and crying,
and I was even like, what is going on? And
then like that second day, I had like a late
lunch and after that I was like, oh, I'm fine,
and it was like literally like a window had opened
and the sun had come out. And then I read
(14:12):
that Delauded, which is a very heavy hitting pain management
drug that they would give you in the hospital, one
of the side effects is uncontrollable weeping, and it was like, oh,
I guess it just left my system because wow, aces
now okay, some of it initially was like that I
felt like garbage, and it's that thing of like is
(14:34):
this my life now? Where I don't feel like myself
and I feel like I am incapacitated in terms of
my vigor not being here and like not.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Being able to engage with the word.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
But that that had, you know, passed pretty quickly, and
then I still was like, why am I still crying?
And it was like, oh, it's it's literally chemical, Okay, yeah, cool, cool, yeah, fascinating.
One of the things that we talked about in this
episode was the influence that the People's Dispensary for Sick
(15:06):
Animals had on the world of veterinary medicine in the UK,
which we have a whole episode on, like a brief
History of Veterinary Medicine. I can't remember if that's already
been a Saturday Classic or not. Off the top of
my head, I don't remember either. Yeah, we talked some
about like the shift in focus from large farm animals,
(15:28):
especially horses, but also cattle and sheep two more of
a focus on companion animals. And there's a lot that
went into that. Some of it had to do with
how many people were living in rural areas and had
a cow or a horse or whatever, and how many
more people were living in urban areas and instead have pets.
(15:52):
It was connected to how people thought about animals like
dogs and cats and pets. It was also related to
the people's dispensary for sick animals, establishing this idea that yes,
these all these animals also deserve care, including veterinary care.
One thing that we didn't really get into, that was
(16:14):
discussed in a couple of the things that I read
for this episode was that at this point there was
a shift in some of the what goes under the
umbrella of animal rights advocacy, and how prior to this,
a lot of people, a lot of whom were women,
(16:35):
who were advocating for animal welfare. A lot of them
were advocating for like anti cruelty laws to you know,
outlaw people who used working horses in their in their
daily worlds, to you know, not allow cruelty to toward
those horses, and to not allow cruelty to smaller animals either. Right,
(16:59):
And at this point, a significant portion of like the
animal welfare advocacy shifted toward providing veterinary care for animals,
and that just sort of being a shift in the
mindset of what animal welfare and animal rights advocacy meant. Yeah,
(17:21):
and now we'll go to the emergency vet and stay
up all night with our creatures. Yeah. My last trip
to the emergency vet was very comedic in the end.
It was scary in the moment and then hilarious because,
(17:43):
as I've said, we adopted several new cats this year,
one of whom is very hard bonded to me, and
there was one night where she was just like breathing
really rapidly and it scared me and I, oh, I did.
I wasn't sure what was going on, I sent a
to the telehealth thing that I have through my veterinarian's office,
(18:04):
and the VAT that I spoke with was like, oh,
this does look troubling. You should take her to the
emergency VET. And we went and I hadn't you know,
I had had her like two months at that point,
so I didn't know all of her personality quirks. And
we went to the emergency VET. We ran a million
kajillion tests, we did X rays, we did all the things,
and it really came down to the fact that she
had kind of she had really bad gas and gave
(18:25):
herself a panic attack essentially because she was uncomfortable. Oh
she's a chip off the old block. But yeah, she's
a hoot, that cat. I love her. I love her. Yeah,
I love her. And I mean I'm sure, right, this
is the kind of story that I tell someone like
my dad and he's like, that is ridiculous, right, Why
(18:48):
did you spend all that money?
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Why did you get It's because it's.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
My my little smooky baby.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
Not to entrepremorphize animals.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
I don't need her to be a baby, I need
her to be a cat.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
Which I love.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Yeah, it's very funny. So this idea of the progression
of veterinary care being not initially part of having a
pet to where we are now just tickles me.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
Yeah, I have become sort of more aware of how
many people keep snakes as pets. Of course I have
known people have snakes as pets, Yeah, but how many
people have snakes as pets and also don't live in
a place where there is a veterinarian who treats snakes,
(19:34):
oh yeah, And so not having access to any kind
of like emergency or urgent care for their snake when
something is clearly wrong. And I see stories about this,
and it stresses me out a little bit, and I
have to remember, I don't I don't have to read this,
this person's forum post about what I don't have to
(19:55):
I don't have to read that. Are you into snakes
or are you scared of snakes or indifferent to snakes?
I find snakes interesting. I have never been really scared
of the I have for sure had experiences where like
a snake startled me. Yeah, I mean, my husband startles me.
Sometimes anything can startle me. So when I was a kid,
(20:19):
you know, being in the this would have been like
late eighties early nineties, and we had this idea of
the latch key kids who were coming home and letting
themselves in.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
Yeah, I had a key.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
To the basement door of the house, and there was
some logic for why I was entering the house after
school through the basement and not through the front door,
and I don't remember what that rationale was. But I
was making my way around the side of the house
and there was a flowerbed back there that had stopped
(20:56):
to be being actively maintained as a flowerbed, and I
only had a couple of things in it and was
otherwise just bare dirt.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
And there was a little like a garter.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Snake or a black rat snake, like some non venomous,
totally normal to have around snake. But I saw it
out of the corner of my eye and it startled
me enough that I leapt backwards like I was in
a cartoon. So anyway, I am not afraid of them.
(21:25):
I do find them interesting. I do also find some
of them unnerving enough that I like looking at them
to just sort of, you know, keep myself acclimated to
the fact that snakes are cool and they're good to
have around. But I get a little stressed out sometimes
that the number of people who's post about their snake
is like, my snake is sick and there's no vet
to take it too.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
Yeah, that would suck.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Yeah, which is just a thing to keep in mind
if you are bringing an animal into your life. Yeah,
is veterinary care accessible? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Uh, that's a biggie.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
Yeah. A lot of people focus on like being able
to afford veterinary care, especially when it comes to things
that are like expensive veterinary procedures. But there's also just
like is there a vet, yeah that you could take
it too.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
Yeah, both of these are factors.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Yeah. I enjoyed working on this episode. I had just
as like I said in the introduction to it, just
the longer I worked on Buck versus Bell, the angrier
I was. And then I was like, we're gonna do
some cute animal stories and yes, there's animal peril, but
(22:35):
also we're going to talk about some good dogs and
cats and pigeons and a horse. If you want to
learn more about pigeons, Rosemary Moscow has the Guide to
Pigeon Watching that we mentioned a number of other books,
so lots of stuff from her if you're interested. Whatever's
happening on your weekend. I hope it goes great. If
(22:57):
you have some animals in your life, I hope you're
able to love on those animals, if they liked to
be loved on, if they liked to be.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
Observed from Afar.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Have fun observing observing your animals from Afar. We will
be back with something brand new on Monday, but before that,
we will have a Saturday Classic tomorrow. Stuff you Missed
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
(23:28):
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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