SkyWatch Magazine (Tamer publication)

[shmband]

Solitary Confinement may be the answer to Dragon Habilitation

By Owen Chadwick, writing for "Skywatch" Magazine

So you've managed to bring down a dragon. So you've managed to blind your conscience to the number of people who died in the process. So you've captured the beast and managed to keep it incapacitated for the time being.

What to do with it now? There's only a finite number of facilities on the continent big and secure enough to house an adult dragon, restraints don't keep them down for long, so you'd best have a plan in mind. People have tried all sorts of crazy psychological tricks to break down a dragons resolve and make them more receptive to human presence and interraction. All of them have failed of course, and people keep on pointing out the obvious reason; the tricks scientists are employing are methods known to work on humans, or at beast terrestrial animals. Dragons are a species not native to earth, and taxonomically they aren't even "animals" because they are not at all related to any member of the Kingdom Animalia. Not even reptiles.

But a group of scientists down in Arizona think they may have had a breakthrough. By throwing off the shackles of what we knew, they started from a blank sheet and employed radical new methods. In fact you might say they approached dragon taming in the same way John Cage approached music; that is, by doing nothing. They placed a dragon in a suitable containment unit (namely the Wells Fargo arena in Tempe), and simply left it there with little light and little food. They left it there for about six months without even looking in on it.

Such isolation has been tried before, but never for so long. Dragons, it seems, are patient creatures. But after six months a strange thing happened. The dragon seemed to enter a state of hibernation. It's vital signs all but disappeared, such that the project leaders worried that it had died. A team was sent in to wake the dragon, and found that the creature was in fact still alive. Using remote methods, they roused the beast, and discovered something quite extraordinary.

The hibernation state seemed to have, for want of a better term, 'reset' the creatures instincts and base understaging, rather like 'flashing the BIOS' in a silicone chip computer. Contested photographic evidence shows scientists walking, unarmed and unarmoured, directly in front of the dragon without incurring harm or threat.

But lest the tamers clap their hands together in a chorus of smug triumphalism, we should hasted to add that this is not a finished job.

For one thing, the process took six months. For one dragon to be 'reset'. It is estimated there are over eighty thousand dragons currently roaming the earth. If (and that's a pretty big 'if') we were even able to systematically capture every dragon and process them in this way using all known intact facilities capable of housing them, it would take well over two hundred years to tame them all.

For another thing, the dragon in question (named "Cuddles" by the science team) is still being carefully kept and observed in the stadium in Tempe. Nobody knows what will happen if and when he is released, and if and when he comes back into contact with other dragons. Will he go back to his old ways? Will he become a pariah among his own kind and simply be killed? Or is it possible he might set a good example for his friends?

Any answer to these questions is nothing more than conjecture, so essentially, with regards to the final solution to the dragon reign, we really are still at square one.