Basenotes, howver, became concerned and strove to minimise and publicise this latest act of Nature-Terrorism.  The objective was to help our animal friends cope with the inevitable Non-Human Eclipse Induced Stress Syndrome (N-HEISS)which this event caused. 

The result of this campaign was a set of guidelines which mapped out the phases of this so-called "mind independent reality", the impact upon our non-human friends and instructions to volunteers designed to lessen the trauma of small animals everywhere.

N-HEISS Guidelines:

• Animals appear somewhat unconcerned due to lack of human effort to explain the required onset of N-HEISS.

• wear the brightest clothes possible.

• be sensitive to small irregularities in animal behavior and soothe and stroke where possible.

• Growing concern amongst chickens and increased protests from animal rights activists concerning increasingly sophisticated battery farming methods

• switch on all lights in public buildings.

• distribute specially designed animal 'glow-hats' to any cats or dogs which are showing signs of N-HEISS.

• Birds fall out of the sky and run around in circles.

• Cats wake up and eat birds on the ground. 

• Hamsters leap into their exercise wheels, misjudging the distance due sudden light shifts, trap their noses between the spokes. 

• rush into the nearest forest and shine touchlights into the trees. 

• thrust small animals into bags in which small pieces of 1980's florescent "Festival" necklaces have been placed

• Massive disorientation from animals who have gone to sleep only to find that they must wake up again.

• Cats deprived of additional protein and go back to sleep

• collect glow-hats from animals (failure to do so will encourage unnatural light-dependence).

• coax nervous animals away from artificial light sources

• note details of N-HEISS casualties for future compensation claims

• None

• begin working with the animals in order to understand how they experienced the unnatural-naturalness of the Eclipse.

• organise N-HEISS Support Groups (note: in order to comply with our proposed Animal Anti-Discrimination legislation these must be organised across species barriers).

Note : BaseNotes and at least 16 concerned others were showing solidarity in the Dolphin Inn, the Barbican, Plymouth during this event.

Full and graphic details can be found at the Thirsty Pirate Web Site.