Salt Glands Revisited. The tragic story of an early salt-gland researcher and his family

Fifty years ago the late Jim Linzell and I were writing our monograph, Salt Glands in Birds and Reptiles, for the Physiological Society's Monograph Series; it was published in May 1975. In this series I revisit some of the topics and people who followed up the discovery of salt glands in birds by Knut Schmidt-Nielsen.

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Larry Zane McFarland
from Find a Grave

As well as Hubert and Mable Frings and the albatrosses of Midway (here) others followed up the discovery of salt glands by seeing which other species had them and how they worked. One was Larry Zane McFarland of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy at the University of California at Davis. He had a series of short notes in Nature in the late 1950s and 1960s (when that journal published letters of wide-ranging and topical interest). Amongst them was one which confirmed and extended the finding in albatrosses that ‘excitement’ induced or enhanced secretion. He worked on gulls and when producing secretion in response to a salt load found that light or sound increased the rate. The rapidity of response to shining a light at the birds or playing ‘individual notes, chords or a melody’ suggests the involvement of higher centres in the brain modulating the secretory reflex. McFarland described the musical instrument he played to the birds as a ‘quittar’, an old English word still used apparently and particularly in the USA for ‘guitar’.

In 1964 McFarland also introduced use of the ‘minimal stimulatory load’, the quantity of salt that needs to be introduced into the blood circulation in order to turn the salt glands on. That enable me to investigate the short-term and medium-term stimulatory and inhibitory effects of hormones and drugs on salt-gland secretion. 

Only after publication of our Salt Glands in Birds and Reptiles did I hear what had happened. I was at a conference in the USA, talking to someone who had worked at the vet school at Davis. I casually mentioned that McFarland, whom I had been quoting in the book, worked there. I was taken aback by the response that he was a dreadful man who had killed his wife and family, and then himself. And that is all I knew until a couple of weeks ago.

from Peaker & Linzell 1975

Larry Zane McFarland was born on 16 December 1930 in Des Moines, Iowa. There he attended Roosevelt High School. Before the veterinary course at Davis he was a student at Berkeley. He was known as a very hard worker. To fund his studies he worked a 40-hour week on night shifts.

He was awarded the DVM degree in 1956 and a PhD in 1960. At Davis he worked his way up to become chairman of the veterinary anatomy department, where he was remembered as an excellent teacher, in addition to doing research on a variety of subjects.

Hard working as he was, a colleague noted: ‘He used to preach to us that he did not expect us to devote too much extra time at the university, that it should go to our families. His devotion to his family was complete and total’.

McFarland had bought a large house with land in Davis. And it was there on 8 April 1972, that firemen found the bodies of McFarland, his wife Sonia, and their three children, Michael (14), Kenneth (10) and Nina (9), in the burning building. The two boys and McFarland had been shot while Sonia and Nina had been bludgeoned to death. A note was found in his vehicle containing the statement, ‘I am taking the life of myself and my family in the belief that a family should remain together in life or in death”.

The proximate cause of his behaviour that night seems to have been a phone call from his wife earlier in the day (7 April). Unbeknownst to most of his colleagues Larry and Sonia had become estranged, with Larry having lived in a nearby apartment for several months. 

Although a colleague in the department described McFarland as outgoing in personality he said that McFarland, like his colleagues, ‘led a "lonely existence" because of a "peer contact-peer judgment system of promotion" on university campuses. This "lonely existence" prevented any of his associates from detecting that something was going wrong. He said the problems McFarland was experiencing may have been deliberately kept secret as "a factor of his life which might have affected our opinion of him and influenced our decisions regarding his possible advancement”. The work situation common to many campuses, he said, "prohibits human exchange of human concern of one man for another”’.

The physical ramifications of McFarland’s actions that night, were evident in Davis for decades. The house McFarland had bought was the 15-room Chiles Mansion, built in 1902, which also had a large barn and other outbuildings on five acres. The house was gutted by the fire which McFarland had started with petrol in four or five places.

After a legal battle, Sonia’s mother gained the right to go against Larry’s wishes for the family to be buried together and she also gained possession of the property. The remains of the house were left untouched until McFarland’s mother-in-law died in 2006, aged 98. The barn was used a livery stable and tales can be found on the internet of the place being haunted, with horse owners reporting mysterious movements of the animals and the sighting of ephemeral white figures. The estate was sold to developers for $4.2M in the late 2000s and is now the site of 90-odd new houses on ‘Chiles Ranch’.

Thus behind the bland list of references, McFarland (1964) etc, at the end our of book, and in other papers, there is nothing that prepares anybody for the utter horror of McFarland’s actions in April 1972. All we can do is remember that Michael would now have been 66, Kenneth 62, and Nina 61.

The Argus, Fremont, California