We covered yew extensively in toxicology class in vet school, but I didn't know about any animals that eat the berries. My favorite fact about yew is that the Iowa State Lloyd Veterinary Center is named after a toxicologist, yet has yew planted for decoration all around the building.

If they die within 30 minutes, you would never see the scat of those who crack the seeds.

There has to be a term for these very specific claims. 30 g in 30 minutes? Give me LD50 numbers.

Taxine alkaloids[0]

  The estimated lethal dose (LDmin) of taxine alkaloids is approximately 3.0 mg/kg body weight for humans.[27][28] Different studies show different toxicities; a major reason is the difficulty of measuring taxine alkaloids.[29]

It goes on to say that rats are ~20mg/kg, which would put a human at somewhere less than 1.4grams.

Which is close enough to, "any exposure at all will kill".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxine_alkaloids

> Which is close enough to, "any exposure at all will kill".

How much is in one seed?

I could only find a few sources saying that you would need to eat about 50g of the needles to reach the LD, and that's... A lot. There's no way a child would accidentally manage that, for example (even assuming LD for a child is much lower). But I couldn't find specific numbers for seeds.

Not being a killjoy here, I grew up around yew trees and I was always told to be careful of them, but not with any sense of panic that would suggest "any exposure at all will kill”. I think you'd have a bad time even with low exposure but death seems unlikely by accident.

A child might not need the whole 50g.

Not a good way to go, BTW: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4462509/

> There's no way a child would accidentally manage that, for example (even assuming LD for a child is much lower). But I couldn't find specific numbers for seeds.

My partner was worried when we moved into our current house that our then-18-month-old son would eat the poisonous cotoneaster berries on the bush in the garden.

But it turns out the LD50 is something like 50g/kg which means that even for a 12kg child they'd be eating huge heaping bowlfuls of them before anything happened.

As it turns out, he did eat one of the cotoneaster berries, spat it out, and went looking for some of the far nicer tasting alpine strawberries instead. The cotoneaster berries taste quite particularly horrible, and no-one is going to ever eat even close to the LD50 of them.

This reminds me of the old “bats use sonar and can fly super precisely without crashing into each other in pitch black” and then it turns out that they crash into each other all the time.

You have a source or observation for that? All I can find is the exact opposite, that they do just fine even in challenging conditions.

I often cycle a road with lots of bats hunting and one evening two slammed into my face and upper body (and one only avoided by ducking quickly). It's pretty obvious that they are not perfect navigators.

If you watch them fly it always looks more chaotic than birds.

They are planted in graveyards in the UK, it prevents grazing animals from entering and soiling up the place. The animals seem to know to keep away. They cant nibble the grass without getting a mouthful of the needles.

I hear Yew is uniquely poisonous to horses (I mean, they are especially susceptible to it)

The more I learn about horses the more they seem like a creature that’s continually trying to die - and humans get to try and stop them succeeding.

Perhaps that's how aliens would see humans. Perpetually trying to die except for a small group of humans fighting disease, monitoring and protecting climate, keeping order, etc.

Horses are especially susceptible to *everything*.

Millenia of selective breeding to try for the healthiest strongest animals we can, and they're still shit.

They'll get ill if they breathe wrong. They'll get ill if they eat a mouthful too much or too little of grass that's ever so slightly too green. They'll get ill if it's too rainy or not rainy enough.

How the hell did they even evolve?

Selective breeding for being useful to humans, not for being able to survive on their own.

The two are not in any sense mutually exclusive.

Sure, there is some overlap. But there are also certain traits that would mean instant elimination from the gene pool in the wild but don't matter much when a human takes care of the horse.

I'm sure that if you investigate feral horse populations like North American mustangs or Australian brambies, you will find out that they don't "get ill if they breathe wrong". Because all that did, died without leaving any offspring long time ago.

> But there are also certain traits that would mean instant elimination from the gene pool in the wild but don't matter much when a human takes care of the horse.

Yeah. They had that in the wild too.

> you will find out that they don't "get ill if they breathe wrong"

They very much do. If anything they're worse than domesticated horses.

I’ve heard a different reason for their presence in graveyards: because yew kills grazing mammals that eat it, it was cut down everywhere that people grazed animals, which excluded graveyards

My understanding is that churches were built next to yew trees, not yew trees planted next to churches.

Pre-Christian religions had many associations with yew trees (they live for a long time, give off mildly hallucinogenic gasses on hot days, discourage animals), and so built their holy sites around them. When Christianity came to Britain, churches were deliberately built on pagan holy sites to overrun the old religions, in the same way that early Christianity took over roman holy days (Saturnalia -> Christmas, Lemuria -> All Saint's Day). This led to churches being built next to sites with copious yew trees.

The Christmas/ Saturnalia link is a myth.

No, it isn’t:

https://www.academuseducation.co.uk/post/how-saturnalia-beca...

Yes, it is.

Look at your source — hardly authoritative! And the so-called evidence... Thin, entirely circumstantial, and in places actually wrong.

For example, Saturnalia went — at its longest - until the 23rd, not the 25th. Moreover, Christians likely got the 25th date based on religious calculation[1], not with reference to the one of the ancient festivals Victorian "historians" liked to speculate about.

The article attempts to link gifting verses to writing Christmas cards — a Christmas tradition not popularised until the 19th C and no older than the 17th.

Feasting and exchanging of gifts, much less the greeting "lo saturnalia" — literally the only other "evidence" presented here — need hardly be addressed, given how ubiquitous such things are with regard to festival, and how thin the apparent connection.

There is no positive evidence for this link, hence it not being taken seriously by any modern historian. It is no more than outdated speculation.

[1] https://poj.peeters-leuven.be/content.php?id=3007366&url=art...

> Look at your source — hardly authoritative!

Still better than the source you originally gave, which was non-existent, or the one you've given now, which is Catholic propaganda.

It might be true that Christmas was not a direct rip-off of Saturnalia per se (though we will probably never know for sure because the Church surely did not go out of its way to record this) but there can be no doubt that both Christmas and Saturnalia are solstice festivals, so at the very least they share a common motivational root. The exact provenance of the details doesn't really matter. What matters is that Jesus was almost certainly not born on December 25, and so whatever the motivation for that date was, Jesus's birth wasn't it.

I see — a blog written by an unknown librarian is a better source than an Oxford fellow writing for a journal with a hundred year pedigree. No further engagement necessary, I think.

When the journal in question is called "Studies in Liturgy", yeah, a blog post is better. At least the blog post isn't manifestly biased.

The Daily Mail has a 130 year pedigree.

  Untruthful! My nephew Algernon! Impossible! He is an Oxonian!

Here in the US the most common large wild grazing animals are deer, which can quite happily eat yew.

There was a yew bush on my walk to primary school. When berries were in season, I used to pick and squish the berry between my fingers because the shape was unique (berry with a seed that sticks out‽) ands its slimy feel. Thank goodness it never amounted to anything more, even through transdermal absorption.

Oh wow I think we had these on the way to school when I was a kid too. Everyone told us not to eat them so we used to put the berries in our mouth and spit them out to show how tough we were. Wow we were very very stupid kids.

I think one of the problems is people thinking kids are more stupid than they are, and blanket "don't do that" statements without explanations don't really work for kids.

If they had told you they were highly poisonous instead of just telling you "not to eat them" you might have taken them more seriously. And if they had given you a taste of the red berry around it (which is sweet but not that special either, and the texture is not great) you might just have thought it was not necessary to play with them at all.

But that requires education at all levels, around here (Belgium) I sometimes see parents who seem deadly afraid of anything nature, I tell my kids to eat blackberries and they softly tell their kids next to us not to do that. You end up with generations who just don't know anything about what's around them and will eventually do stupid things.

It takes longer than people tend to think before kids learn to infer things well at all, and so being explicit about causal chains tends to make kids more likely to take advice. E.g "put your coat on" might not lead the child to think it is cold, and even a "put your coat on, it's cold outside" might still not lead the child to realise that means they'll freeze without the coat. A lot of tantrums would be avoided if parents were more explicit about why they're giving certain advice.

Depends on the kid and their age.

Me to my 3.5-year-old boy after evening bath (winter here right now): Your feet are going to get cold, don't you want to put on your slippers to keep them warm?

Him: No!

And if I put them on he'll take them off as soon as I'm not stopping him from doing so.

For putting on warm enough jacket for school I try similar reasoning which has yet to work with any kind of consistency, still mostly lands up having a bit of a tantrum all the way until I hand him over to his teacher.

His two-year older sister was a lot less difficult at his age.

"If you don't put on your slippers, your toes will fall off and then you won't be able to walk like everybody else!"

Sometimes the old-world spook stories work.

I wouldn't recommend getting wrong things into their heads, because you (or someone else) will eventually have to teach them that it was not true, or they will discover it themselves, and that will undermine trust in the other things you said.

Sometimes you just need to let them experience that you are right first, as long they're just making themselves miserable for a bit.

Also, it works wonders to let them make a choice between two acceptable solutions instead of giving them space to say no.

"Do you want the slippers or the thick socks?"

It doesn't always work, but kids that age are learning to set boundaries, and giving them the illusion of agency often helps.

Have you tried asking your son if the slippers and/or the coat might be uncomfortable to him in some way? You seem to assume that he randomly throws tantrums just to annoy you, but maybe he has a reason.

I think tantrum comes when they are tired / disconnected from adult monologue. I have almost zero issues when I talk about interesting stuff instead of engaging in debate:

we will pick up that book about the monster, it is really scary (slippers on already) and we will sit on the sofa (already carrying the child). Are you cold? Let’s find that pink sweater…

> A lot of tantrums would be avoided if parents were more explicit about why they're giving certain advice.

For that, parents would need time. But if we have to spend half of our day with work or work-related tasks (commute, lunch break)...

Society (or let's be real, capitalism) forces us to work unhealthy amounts of hours and then wonders why there aren't enough children and of the children that remain, they dumb down every year...

It saved me a lot of time when my son was little because it meant he argued less with me over the necessity of things at the cost of an extra sentence here and there.

We had them in our yard growing up, I recall regularly playing with the berries for the exact same reason. Funny enough my dad did warn me not to eat it, but based on this post eating the berry itself would have been one of the few ways it’s not toxic. Had no idea about the rest of the plant being so toxic until today.

The fact that the inviting red part is mostly fine but the plant around it is deadly is very on-brand for nature

The amount of childhood survival that comes down to "thankfully I only poked it and didn't eat it" is kind of alarming in retrospect

It’s probably selected for. We’re pokers by natural selection.

> if just one seed has a crack in it and you swallow it it will stop your heart in about thirty minutes.

That is complete bullshit and you shouldn't be posting it this confidently.

Those seeds are very poisonous, yes, but not in that cartoonish way. It's not cyanide.

even cyanide isn't cartoonish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6hOVhQQ9hI

substance itself is not what kills you - it's the dose

> substance itself is not what kills you - it's the dose

Doesn’t that apply to every single thing that exists?

The old toxicology proverb is: "The dose makes the poison"

I like to extend it to: "the portion makes the poison." Beyond getting the alliteration, it also includes food, which I think is important. A glass of water won't kill you, two gallons of water will. An ice cream cone once in a while is nothing; one every day will make the doctor's eyes go wide.

Jesus. I had a colonoscopy. Don't tell me about drinking 2 gallons of water. I won't even get started on an ice cream cone a day.

Yes. IIRC Congress paid for a study in the early 20th century to try to nail a definition of the word "poison" by injecting mice with different quantities of bleach. The conclusion was that everything is a poison at the right dose. Most medicines are great at low doses, but then kill you when you take too much of them. Heck, even water is a poison.

There Is No Safe Dose of Prions: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3156228/

I don’t care if it is poison. Never gonna give yew up.

Yew gonna eat that?

Most plants evolved to have their fruit eaten whole and seeds simply pooped out because of the fertilizing effects of animal feces and the fact that the seeds end up dropped far away from the parent plant. That includes large fruit with massive seeds like mangos.