From the Vault: Elfshot, Part 2

especially their livestock with supernatural weapons. Would you say that's fair Yeah?

one elf erroscript. We have multiple scripts and it ends up tying into folk medicine and so forth as well.

So in the last episode we did talk about some direct accounts of folk beliefs about elf shot, especially in Scotland, I think is where a lot of these accounts came from, and they included things like, okay, you'd have a story where a calf suddenly falls ill and dies with no apparent explanation, and then the farmer confirms that elf shot was the cause because he and his neighbor open up the cow's body and they find a hole in its heart, even though there was no hole in the hide, So

it must have been some kind of supernatural fairy weapon that can pierce through the hide without actually breaking it and strike only the internal organs. And then, of course, when it was believed that there was an injury of this kind caused by an elf for a fairy weapon, there were plenty of magical remedies, and rob, can you characterize what some of the main themes and these remedies were.

the site of the wounding, that sort of thing. But again, there are a number of different versions of this, and so various wrinkles get added depending on which tradition you're looking at, which account.

for non human animals? Of course, the placebo effect in humans is something that often comes up when we're talking about well, talking about medicine in any context, but it's especially important when you're talking about like the history of pre scientific medicine, Like why did people think that soaking a stone arrowhead in water and then pressing it to

their skin had actually healed them of a disease? Like if you have any a tumor or a bacterial infection or something, we can be relatively confident that this intervention does not actually shrink the tumor or kill the bacteria. And yet people often thought interventions like this had healed them. So what made them think that? I think some of that can be chalked up to a concept that we

did an episode about, I think last year. It was a statistical phenomenon called regression toward the mean or regression to the mean. But you can also think of this concept as returning to the baseline. So as a quick explainer, for that. Imagine you suddenly get a pain in your foot and you've never had that pain before, and you're like, ah, it really hurts. I don't know what to do, but your friend says, well, I know what to do. You have to sing a Gregorian chant and then you have

to lick the morning dew from a spider's web. So you try that out. You want your foot to stop hurting, and then what do you know, sometime after that, your foot does stop hurting. Now, in a situation like this, we really all have a tendency to think something has been proved here, like, ah, the spider doo did work, But actually, how do you know that your foot wouldn't have stopped hurting on its own just as soon if you didn't do any of that stuff. In fact, the

whole point is that your foot doesn't usually hurt. The state of pain is an outlier. That's an anomalous condition, So things going back to normal on a certain timescale is a totally expected outcome, all things being equal, and regression to the mean is especially important in medicine because it tends to be specifically when we're in an anomalous condition, a condition that is not normal. For us that we

seek medical interventions. So if you want to know if a medical intervention actually works or not, you have to compare its efficacy against a say, placebo control group, instead of just giving somebody a treatment and saying did you get better? If you do that, you don't know if they would have gotten better anyway, Having the comparison between

the two groups gives you confidence in the efficacy. But on top of just the regression to the mean as a baseline effect, you've also got psychological effects where if you actually compare people who receive an intervention like a medicine or a ritual or a doctor's visit versus people who don't receive any intervention, sometimes people who receive an intervention have better outcomes on average, even if there's no

way that intervention is actually doing anything. If it's like you know, pressing the arrowhead deer skin, this might be considered the pure placebo effect, improved outcomes associated with an intervention even though it's not doing anything mechanistically or chemically to solve the problem. And though the placebo effect shows up for a range of conditions and treatments, it seems to be especially powerful for conditions that are modulated by the brain, such as the perception of pain and other

types of discomfort. So, to bring it back to the question of elfshot cattle, could it be possible that a non human animal benefits from the placebo effect of a magical cure in some way, even though they can't understand the concept of medicine or develop expectations that the magical

cure would heal them. And you know, the thing I was wondering about with this is there's evidence that some placebo effects and humans are created not so much by the expectation that the treatment is efficacious, but by the reassurance felt in the presence of a doctor or a

nurse who has a good bedside manner. And I thought, well, maybe it's possible that animals could be calmed or soothed by certain kinds of human attention, even if they're not able to understand that it is for the intended purpose of healing. So anyway, I went looking this up and I found an interesting article by Emily Anthis who is also the author of a book we've talked about on the show before called The Great Indoors. It's all about

the effects of living and spending time indoors. But this was an article published in the Atlantic in twenty nineteen called a Crucial blind Spot in Veterinary Medicine. So the top line answer here is a clear yes, there is such a thing as the placebo effect in non human animals in veterinary medicine, but it probably works by different means than the human version of the placebo effect. So here's an example. Anthis begins by talking about a particular

study of treatments for canine epilepsy, epilepsy and dogs. This research was being carried out in the early two thousands. I think this was in the year two thousand and three, and the citation here is the Journal of Veterinary Medicine. The article was called Placebo Effect in Canine Epilepsy Trials and the authors were Munyana, Jong and Patterson, eventually published in twenty ten, and the story is that the researchers were testing an anti convulsant drug called levetaracetam and it

was intended to curtail epileptic seizures in dogs. So in the test group, the group that was actually getting the drug, eighty six percent of dogs of their owners reported a reduction in seizure frequency, which bodes very well for the drug. But then the study also happened to have a placebo control group, which we're receiving a dummy treatment that was supposed to do nothing, and in that group, seventy nine percent also saw it reduction in reported.

the drug that is making the difference. So at the time of this study, anthis notes that the double blind, placebo controlled trials were not all that common in veterinary medicine, which makes sense on one hand because again, like non human, animals are not thought to be able to develop expectations about a drug treatment or the efficacy of medicine, So how could you expect a placebo effect to exist in dogs.

But it's a good thing the study did use such a controlled design, because otherwise the medicine would have looked really good until you realize that fake medicine leads to results that look about the same or almost as good.

are discussed in this article. One is one we already talked about, regression to the mean, Right, People are more likely to enroll in a clinical trial for their dogs epilepsy if seizures have been especially bad lately, and conditions like epilepsy tend to sort of wax and weigan on their own anyway, So you could enroll the dog at a time when their seizures are bad, and then that would just tend to, by the law of averages, give way to a period where they return to the baseline

and have fewer seizures. So again, a good reason to have a placebo control group to compare your test group to. Second thing that I thought was interesting and this site's something called the Hawthorn effect, which is the idea that people often behave differently when they know they're being studied or observed. I think the name of this effect comes from some anecdote about industrial productivity research, which found all kinds of spurious effects for things like, oh, what would

happen if we change the lighting in this room? Are workers more productive? Oh, it turns out they are. But then one ex post facto explanation for all these spurious results is just that when employees know that they're part of an experiment, they are more productive because they know they're being closely scrutinized. This would not apply so much

to the dogs themselves, but probably to the owners. So in the case of the epilepsy study in dogs, Anti writes that all of the dogs in the study were already on at least one other anti seizure medication, and levetteractam was being studied as a supplemental drug, So one possibility is that once enrolled in a study, pet owners may have been more consistent about making sure their dogs got all doses of their pre existing, pre tested epilepsy

medication on time. Other possible explanations what about more attentive veterinary care. It's possible that while enrolled in the study, the animals were getting special attention from vets, and this would be partially in line with the explanation I was guessing about beforehand, something roughly parallel to the effect of a reassuring doctor or nurse. And I think it is a pre existing finding that some gentle affectionate attention from humans can help animals like dogs and horses show fewer

symptoms of discomfort or anxiety and things like that. In some cases you could actually have classical conditioning. Probably it's hard to see how it would apply to this case, but anthis writes quote. For example, rats that have regularly been getting insulin injections will still experience blood sugar changes if they suddenly start receiving saline injections instead. Again, I don't think this would apply directly to the epilepsy study,

but you could imagine it applying to other studies. But then the primary explanation favored by anthis in this article is something called the caregiver placebo effect or the placebo effect by proxy. And this one's pretty straightforward when you think about it. Animals can't report or explain their own symptoms.

Understanding the symptoms experienced by an animal, whether that's something like a seizure or whether it's something even more elusive like discomfort or pain, that requires human observation of some kind, usually reports by the pet owners, and the pet owner absolutely can form expectations about improvement based on believing that their pet is getting a treatment of some kind, even though their pet might actually be in the placebo arm

of the study. They don't know that if it's a good if it's a well designed study, so they think their pet might be receiving the actual drug. They form expectations that the pet will be getting better, and thus they interpret everything they see in light of those expectations. Because again, seizure frequency in the study in question was measured by owner reports, and you might imagine, well, okay, you know, it's pretty clear whether a dog is having

a seizure or not. Well, you might assume that, but in fact, pet owners are not always there to see a seizure take place. Sometimes you have to interpret ambiguous evidence. So the example given in the article is if there's a spot of saliva on the floor, is that a sign that the dog had a seizure unobserved and drooled on the floor or is that just nothing? Did the

dog just drip rool because they just dripped rule. If the owners believe their dogs are receiving a drug that will help reduce the seizures, does that actually make the owner less likely to interpret that evidence as evidence of a seizure.

our th that's pain in the limbs. And so the subjective measure was you would ask both pet owners and veterinarians to observe the dog and rate how much pain they seemed to be in. And then there were also objective measures, and this would be having the dog walk a on a complicated setup of digital scales to determine how much weight the dogs were putting on each limb while walking, because if the dog, if one of the dog's limbs is in pain, they will tend to put

less weight on that limb. And this study found conflicts between the subjective measures and the objective measures. So in the placebo group, owners and vets who thought the dog might be receiving the drug but actually they were just getting a placebo, reported improvements, but the objective measure, the scales did not show improvement. So in the placebo group,

they're getting a fake treatment. The owners and the veterinarians are like, yeah, we think the dog is doing better, but when you put them on the scales, they're still not putting weight on that limb. So the dog itself is not affected by receiving the placebo, but the human observers are interestingly even the veterinarians.

not seem to readily translate into the livestock world. But what we're looking at here these are examples that, if I'm not mistaken, would translate rather readily into the world of caring for livestock.

what they see through that lens. Another thing is that this article reports how sometimes animal pain is observable to one human onlooker but not to another. Again, just based on expectations, Like our emotional biases are very strong in this area. And one example given would be, you know, a pet owner brings an animal into the vet and it was in pain before, and the vet observes that the animal does still appear to be in pain, but the owner says, no, no, no, he's not he's he's

much better now. I've been giving him these homeopathic treatments I found. And you know, that's a mix of things. Like the pet owner, they love their pet, so they desire to believe that the beloved animal is doing better. And then on top of that, you could have like a choice supportive bias bias to you know, where you interpret reality in a way that supports the idea that what you have decided to do was the right decision. So the choice supportive bias says your selected intervention is working.

And that may be a magical treatment or a non science based intervention like homeopathy or something, and that can blind you to signs of distress that other unbiased onlookers could see.

So just a couple final notes on this article. One is just that a big takeaway is you should be careful when observing the symptoms of a non human animal, of a pet or whatever, not to let these kinds of biases prevent you from finding the most effective treatment or solution. You know, whenever possible, try to look for objective pieces of behavioral evidence that remove your subjective evaluation from things. And then the other thing is about these

standards of evidence within veterinary medicine. Unfortunately, the history of veterinary studies has included fewer double blind placebo controlled trials than human medicine, because again, for a long time, nobody really thought placebo effect would come into play in a major way in veterinary medicine. But it looks like, at least in some cases, it really does, especially when that

reported outcomes are based on owner's perceptions. And so this is changing and more evidentiary standards like this are being introduced into veterinary medicine. But it may mean that the evaluation of the true efficacy of veterinary medicine has in some cases, especially when the basis is older, maybe on a lower standard of evidence than in human drug trials.

But fortunately that that is changing. But anyway, so I'm bringing all this back to thoughts about how this could relate to like a Scottish farmer in the seventeenth century who believes that his cow is sick or his horse is sick because it has been elf shot, it has been hit by a fairy arrow and summon someone to provide a magical cure that maybe involves neolithic flints or egg mixed with gunpowder and healing their cow. I wonder

how it relates to that. I mean, I would guess that the specifically that last one, the caregiver placebo effect would be a major factor here.

Like what if, actually the cow is fine. The farmer just gets freaked out about the idea that, oh, no, something bad is happening to my cow for some reason, and that brings on the illusion of distress, which could then be treated by some kind of magical intervention, and then what do you know, the cow's fine afterwards.

better check on my cattle and see how they're doing. Uh, oh, this one's not doing too well.

inflicted directly by fairies or elves themselves. Davidson cites an author named Luied writing that there's a belief among some that fairies have to use humans as intermediaries in order to inflict these injuries, since the fairies have little power to cause direct physical injury to animal bodies themselves. So sometimes these stories say humans are like sucked up into the air by fairies and then given fairy weapons and then forced to shoot at men or cattle.

the sky that kills a speckled cow. And this actually connects with some of the critical stuff I was reading about the elfshot tradition, which says that actually, in a lot of these stories, it is being alleged that it's humans who are doing the inflicting, like witches or something who are inflicting damage with these weapons rather than elves directly.

into a dimple in the cow's skin. Then there's another one I have to share because it involves crabs and raises a mystery for me that I cannot solve. So maybe the listeners have some input on this. So this is from a source Davidson sites called Shetland Folklore. This is a book by Spence, and I'm going to read directly from Davidson's summary here. Oh sorry, this is still

about traditions in the Shetlands. Quote a variant prescription from the same area directs the wise woman to take tar, a needle, a bible, a firebrand, and some fairy crabs. Waving the burning brand, she walked three times wittershens round the cow. That means counterclockwise, three times around the cow, jabbing the animal with the needle, waving a leaf of

the Bible over its back, and muttering an incantation. The firebrand was placed in a pot of tar and set at the cow's head so the fumes would make her cough. She was then given the fairy crabs to eat alive. The ashes of the fire brand were later mixed with the tar into three pills, which were administered to the animal on three successive mornings. WHOA, what so involves eating the fairy crabs alive? It says she, And I'm sorry, I'm not sure if that means the cow or the

wise woman. I think that means the cow.

the coast of Australia and Indonesia. I think, so this is clearly not what they're talking about in the Shetlands, and I was trying to find more information and I just could not, So I wonder if this refers to I don't know, if this is a local Shetland name for a certain type of animal, like an actual crab or some type of insect or something. I really have no idea.

after an animal but is not itself an animal. It could be you know, you can imagine a situation where the fairy crab is actually some sort of a root something into that effect. So there's so many different directions that could go in not knowing exactly what this is referring to.

So you'll see a series of basically you know, lines where like you have a plot area and then like a sort of ridge of moved earth piled up in between them. And an interesting thing about a lot of these is they are created with so that the ridges and the furrows are not straight lines, but are curved or crooked or s shaped even and it is believed by some that the purpose of this is to confuse or quote wander the fairy, to maybe lead the ferry

off course or lead the elf off course. This is not the only system, by the way, that would use this. Like Davidson notes that a lot of amulets that are designed for protection against fairies have a rays of kind of spiral patterns or can you know, complex whirls within them, or labyrinths or something, and this is designed to confuse the evil spirits, to kind of send them on a maze like journey that will lead them astray and keep them from harming you.

come at you. You also see that with traditions of the evil eye in the Middle East, where there are various things like you should not do because this invisible ne faariaus force is out there in the world, and you do not want it aware of your presence or your fortune, so you don't get on its radar, don't have direct lines leading to you. Be that line something like you know, you shouting about how beautiful your child is.

You know. In the case of some of the evil eye traditions, and particularly in Judaism, I remember hearing about reading about or in this case, like a physical line through the altered landscape.

you play with a wija board. It's not so much something about the board as evil, but it it sort of like puts up a beacon to demons that says, hey, I'm available, you know, pay attention to me, and they will hone in on you because you have done that.

there's still practicing beliefs. They're still engaging in belief of the elves, but they're also incorporating in some of these Christian traditions like well, maybe we're you know, lought up a Bible page and stick it into that furrow in the cow. That'll help too.

magical beliefs. So I think that they're often curved just because of it was a sort of necessary consequence of the types of plow rigging and oxen pulling teams that they used at the time. They would lead to a furrow or a ridge being kind of like curved off at each end every time the team turned around to

make a new line. And that makes me wonder if something like twisting twisting in these rows could have originally been a totally mundane thing that somebody saw and then in trying to explain why it was like that without understanding it, they came up with this explanation about confusing the fairies, and then afterwards did it like that on purpose.

didn't think, so you're welcome. This, of course, also reminds me of on one hand, and this may well be connected the idea that vampires might be deterred by hanging some sort of a nodded item or or carefully woven item out for them like a complex pattern, then will draw their attention and they have to deal with and maybe get they'll either spend all their time doing that and leave you alone, or perhaps even get caught in

the sunlight the loose track of time. And then of course I can't help but think of crop circles as well, which again, as we've discussed I think we've discussed this in the show before. I mean crop crop circles a pretty much put to bed as a you know, is

the work of human actors. But thinking about like sort of the draw to do this to a field, like the human intention to do this, and there are several factors that can play into that someone which may actually come up in our next episode of so to blow your mind, But the idea of like just seeing that field, like I wonder if there's some sort of draw that like, no, the lines are too too perfect, everything is just too pristine like this this this, this land has been too

finely transformed. We got to get some swirls in there. We got to get some circles, you know.

old flint arrow in the dirt. So I guess it cuts both ways.

So this paper is mainly an attempt to critically re examine an Anglo Saxon text called Gift Horse of Scott and Sea, which is a passage from a medieval Anglo Saxon medical text that has been widely interpreted as being about elf shot. The title Gift Horse of Scott and Sea translates to if a horse be and then the word is off scotten. And the question is what does off scotton mean. It's been traditionally translated as elf shot

if a horse be elf shot. Hall argues that it should not be understood that way, and yet there are still references to elf attacks within the passage. So this is Hall's translation of this text, which is interesting in itself. If a horse be off scotten, take then a dagger whose halft is of fallow Ox's horn, and in which there are three brass nails. And then there's a term that every time is rendered as right slash. Inscribe. I'm just going to say, inscribe, inscribe on the horse on

the forehead, Christ's mark, so it bleeds. Inscribe then Christ's mark on the spine, and on each of the limbs which you can grasp. This, shall you do take a staff strike on the back. Then the horse will be well and inscribe on the dagger's handle. These words been a decetae omnia opera domini dominum, which means bless all the works of the Lord of Lords. Should it be alps which is on it, this will do as a

remedy for it. And so Hall makes the argument in this paper that the primary condition being described in this text under the word oafscotten should not be translated as elf shot as it traditionally has been, but it is something like badly pained. It's more more mundane condition that

is prompting this entire remedy. However, even if that's correct, the last line of the remedy does mention the idea of this word alf the ae combined vowel and then l fe, though this sentence is also kind of difficult to translate the one that's got the alph in it. I think the understanding that makes the most sense is this whole remedy is for regular bad pain in horses, and then there's an additional remedy, the one that's riding on the dagger's handle, the words bless all the works

of the Lord of Lords. That additional remedy is like a special extra dose of holiness that should be applied if the cause of the horse's pain is injury by an elf, though it doesn't explain how you tell the difference between normal bad pain and bad pain caused by an elf. You know, of course, the elf injury being even more unholy and requiring more holiness or or more piet in order to undo.

as we've mentioned already, we're talking about multiple areas. We're talking about locations throughout the British Isles and even outside of the British Isles. But just limiting the question of the British Isles, we're still looking at close to a million years of occupation by various human species, including Neanderthals. And as for the how they got there, the predominant theories involved land bridges between Europe and Britain that were

president at the time. And regarding Ireland, I've seen hypotheses that involve boats, land bridges and also ice bridges. But just to give a few examples that really sort of drive home the times we're talking about here, there are stone tool and footprints in Norfolk that date back and estimated nine hundred thousand years and these would be the work and or the footprints of Homo antecessor. Notable here are the Happisburg footprints in Norfolk, and also a black

flint hand axe was also found in this area. So Homo antecessor they were makers of simple stone tools, and it looks like many experts think that they might not

have had mastery of fire. By four thousand BCE, Neolithic culture was firmly established on the British Isles and lasted till roughly it's just you know, the rough time period of our histories two thousand, five hundred BCE and of course between three thousand BCE in two thousand BCE, we see the construction of Stonehinge, one of course the most famous,

if not the most famous testament to prehistoric Britain. And of course even Stone Hinge gets wrapped up into various folklore, traditions and folkloric interpretations and reinterpretations that involve at times the wizard Merlin, but also the Christian devil, and even during the Roman period which would have been roughly forty three CE to four ten CE, the Roman sky god Kalus.

More realistically, or more on the sort of realistic interpretation and reinterpretation standpoint, it was at one point thought to be credited to the work of Druidic culture, but this culture didn't exist till three hundred BCE, which would have been too late, so the stones were already ancient history to the Druids. Now, another example that I found really

interesting talking about found arrowheads in the British Isles. In twenty sixteen, archaeologists from the University of Reading discovered a four thy five hundred year old flint arrowhead a few miles from Stonehenge, and according to David Dawson, director of the Wiltshire Museum, this particular arrowhead is not only finally preserved, but incredibly fragile, suggesting that it was never actually intended for use in war or hunting, but it was rather

ceremonial or decorative and or decorative this was. You can look up images of this. There were some news articles of the time. The arrowhead was unearthed in two parts, two different digs, five years apart. And it is quite eloguant looking. It has like one it has barbs, but one really long barb and elongated barb on one side.

So I don't know about you, but I find that really interesting because I think it's easy to think of folkloric interpretation of found objects to be a luxury of later civilizations on the British Isles, to think supernaturally about about these about these items. But certainly, and certainly there was a lot we don't know about concerning pre Roman

and prehistoric Britain. But even forty five hundred years ago, this find would suggest that people here were already capable of sublime interpretations and perhaps mystical meanings for their own created artifacts. That you could have this sacred arrow that wasn't found, that was made, but some of the same energy that goes into the interpretation of these artifacts, you know, thousands of years later, was already present in the cultures that made their home here.

is the work of the elves. But also I think it's just yeah, it's just worth remembering the deep history of people on the British Isles. You know, it might not be as deep as some other areas, Like you know, you're looking at what in France. I think it's what one point fifty seven million years ago. We have some

of the earliest known evidence of human beings. But still you have human species on the British Isles as early as almost a million years ago, different species, different cultures, different waves of technology and arrivals in the subsequent centuries and millennium millennia, and of course different waves of interpretation and reinterpretation of what came before. All right, we're going to go ahead and close it out there, but obviously

we'd love to hear from everyone out there. We'd especially love to hear from folks listening to the show on the British Isles, or folks who have spent time on the British Isles. Perhaps you have some tidbits some local lore to share with us. If so, we'd love to hear from you. A reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a primarily a science podcast that publishes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed, but on Mondays we do a listener mail

episode where we read various missives from our listeners. On Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster fact. On Fridays we do Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film.