Ernest Norbert Gumm was one of the original rebel avatars, so he had been allowed to stay among the eighteen other avatars when the rest of RDA was driven off after the Great Battle. He was a proud and free type, not quite himself until the research station was well out of sight. The Na'vi were impressed by how readily he absorbed their knowledge about the wildlife, and how quick a study he was when they explained him hunting rituals. Having been at ever so many long excursions in the few forests left at Earth, and in the moors and mountains, he wasn't easily tired but easily took to running, climbing etc. If on the other hand he for some reason couldn't go at his long hunting excursions, he became grumpy and mean-tempered – his nickname among humans "The Gun" was more than just a pun on his name.
He was xenozoologist by academic study, his research project was officially "classification and cataloguing of the Pandoran fauna", he was intended to be for the fauna of Pandora what Grace Augustine was for the flora. But he had a little pet project too: Might it be possible to domesticate some wild creature of Pandora, for the food supply of the base and later on the Na'vi too may be?
After careful studies for which animals he deemed suitable to try he settled at six kinds, approximate equivalents to domesticated animals at Earth. The sturmbeest could be a similar to bull and cow. Hexapede likewise for sheep and goat. Tapirus – for pigs. Jumprats might be suitable replacements for rabbits. And river serpents might work like salmon or carp. He made janitor Todd and Hal at the workshop set up some enclosures and ponds. He toyed with ideas of flying herders, using tamed viperwolves as herding dogs, but that would be projects for the future.
Jake and other na'vi were rather sceptic. "Ernie, you have studied these critters so you should know that they will not cut the mark as cattle etc.!" He retorted: "I understand what you are saying but I am looking for the exception to the rule, at least to create some exceptions. Remember, it took thousands of years to domesticate dogs and other animals at Earth, by systematic breeding it might turn out faster than that."
He knew that botanist Ella at the greenhouse was working with a similar project with plants from the flora, so he had a chat with her about her experiences. But to his dismay what she could tell him about her pet project was that it recently had come to its conclusion already, a fully negative one.
The banana fruit tree simply refused to grow from the seeds, no matter the soil, fertilizers, watering or other conditions she tried out. The swamp grass grew readily in hydroponic dams and she had hoped that it might form the rice of Pandora – but the grass had never produced any seeds. The tiz beets were easily grown and propagated – but the juice squeezed from the root was unusable for dressings and sauces. The brook fern root gave a red colour pigment from the root squeeze, a very costly pigment for the na'vi and easily turned into a whole array of other pigments by chemical reactions – but in the gardens it showed to be an intermediate host for a bug that gave the na'vi a heavy and lingering headache for a long time. The na'vi had long known about the connection between the colour and the headache – but to have it so eloquently proven, that was something else!
Finally she had hoped that the tama'l'a-liana the na'vi extracted fibers from for finer garment use would grow willingly. And it did – too willingly! With fertilizer and water it grew out of any bounds, also using the water and fertilizer stolen from the neighbouring flower beds… It very soon grew out of hand, climbing up the walls at the research station, so fast that she had little chance to curb it. When the shoots started to infest the intakes to the water and air purifiers and threatened to choke them Todd told her to put a period mark to her little botanical garden.
Not encouraging tips in other words… And "The Gun" was soon to get more reasons for his nickname.
The sturmbeest bulls of the herds were chronically hostile, he reasoned that they saw him as a competitor for the favours of the cows. He tried to solve the problem by removing the bulls, rendering the cows very skittish – until the most prominent of the cows started to grow horns and turned male. He found out that the sturmbeest cows had an ability to change sex in the absence of males. He could in other words not avoid the problem with aggressive bulls. No alternative but to give up the project of Pandoran cattle and let them loose.
The jumprats showed to be diggers as good as they were jumpers and climbers, and they were inveterate escape artists – they had a seemingly clairvoyant ability to detect places where the concrete was weak, they then urinated at the concrete to erode it and then gnawed through the now spongy and brittle concrete. Only cages with metal netting all around could contain them. Jake then gave him a dose of reality: "Na'vi are not in a thousand years going to gain any ability to produce steel wiring, so jumprats will forever be impossible for rearing!" He could only release them too – and came to regret that action later…
The hexapedes were known for their rapid breeding rate in the wild – but in captivity they simply didn't thrive and just pined away. So Jake killed the project with his uttering: "Then what is the use of domesticated ay'yerik who will not fatten and breed, when their wild cousins get both fat and numerous?" Out in the forest they ran.
And the tapirus? They showed to be not an animal for rearing in enclosed pens like pigs at Earth. Worse, the meat of the tame tapirus showed to be dry and tasteless, he simply couldn't find out which diet made their meat tasty and juicy. So Jake shook his head and told him: "For as long as there is lots of tapirus in the forest with good meat, there is bound to be no na'vi interest for this inferior meat."
Finally, what was it like in the river serpent ponds? Those fishes soon muddied the water and in no time they floated belly-up in the dirtied water. They were nomads by nature Ernie understood, moving to another part of the river once they had rooted up the bottom in their search for food. Herding an underwater animal around? Sounds like an ungainly affair…
The final end to the project came when some of the jumprats he had let loose from the cages turned their escape artistry into burglar artistry. They dug into the ground, put a hole in the foundation wall and invaded the greenhouse where much of the food for the staff of the station was grown by Ella and her assistant Tran Thi Dung, puncturing the air quality control of the station and making the staff need to wear exopacks indoors for more than a week until Todd and Hal had plugged the hole successfully. Once inside there they plundered the gardens, spread their feces all around and even gnawed over some vital electric cables. Todd, not normally a guy easily angered, now gave Ernie a comment red hot with anger: "May (him who should never be named) come and take that (deleted by the censor) project of yours!"
But Ernie's animal taming project had a useful side effect still. Years later, during the 2nd Human – Na'vi War, he put the experience he had gained with sturmbeests to good use, during the guerrilla war phase he repeatedly assembled herds of them, whipped the animals up to frenzy and then unleashed the stampede on the hapless RDA soldiers and their na'vi mercenaries. Afterwards the na'vi ikran-riders could hunt down the broken soldiers.