The fact that all paternal males had higher T levels than non-paternal males supports the hypothesis that an increase in T levels would be involved in the neuroendocrine mechanisms that suppress
infanticidal behavior and promote the onset of parental behavior in the Mexican volcano mouse.
The portrayal of infanticide in popular film is itself a complex and expansive issue, and so for the moment, I will simply argue that the audience's surprising response to this scene and the director's choice to portray the killing off-screen may each be linked to a more widespread cultural resistance to acknowledging the sacrificial, and in this case
infanticidal, violence which is bound up with the sacred.
Because the mechanisms driving
infanticidal behaviour are not well understood, and adult male coatis show a range of behaviours from infanticide to highly affiliative interactions with juveniles, using coatis as a model system may elucidate mechanisms underlying infanticide.
Hoogland (1995) noted that resident adult male prairie dogs enhance juvenile prairie dog survivorship by chasing small predators away and defending the home coterie against
infanticidal male prairie dogs.
If this country is now in the hands of an electoral majority consisting of revanchist ethnic minorities, illiterates, criminals and mental defectives, irresponsible welfare dependents,
infanticidal women, and anti-American Marxists, it is no longer our fathers' United States.
(19) Nicholas Woodward, 'Infanticide in Wales', Welsh History Review, 23:3 (2007), 94-125; Lynn Abrams, 'From Demon to Victim: The
Infanticidal Mother in Shetland, 1699-1899', in Yvonne Galloway Brown and Rona Ferguson (eds), Twisted Sisters: Women, Crime, and Deviance in Scotland Since 1400 (East Linton, 2002), p.
Dawkins opens The God Delusion chapter two with, "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist,
infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." (6) Dawkins protests it is unfair to attack such an easy target, but urgently necessary because of widespread belief in the "Abrahamic God." (7) Dawkins devotes a full chapter of The God Delusion to "The 'Good' Book and the Moral Zeitgeist," since, "God, or some other Biblical character might serve as...a role model." (8)
The close relationship between truth and nakedness as antidotes to concealment, expressed repeatedly by Puritan divines, helps to explain the difficulty of making the
infanticidal woman a monument to truth, even as she served as the most useful monument to the spiritual ambivalence of the early modern soul.
She argues that only a small percentage of women fitted the stereotype of the
infanticidal woman as young, unmarried, seduced and abandoned, driven to infanticide by shame and desperation.
And this may cause a newly migrated male bear to become potentially
infanticidal towards their offspring.
