Archive for the New Commentary Alert Category

When Words Can Kill Authors Barbara Natterson-Horwitz, MD and Kathryn Bowers open their book, Zoobiquity: The Astonishing Connection Between Human and Animal Health with an incident that will be familiar to many dog and cat folks. When faced with a kitten-sized emperor tamarin monkey  Dr. Horowitz immediately related to the animal as she would to [...]

The Placebo Effect and the Human-Animal Bond: When Nothing is Something In an interesting about face, researchers increasingly turn their attention to the placebo effect. Nor do they approach the subject as science-based myth-busters seeking to prove such responses reside all in the patient’s head. Or rather, they do hope to prove this by proving [...]

  Don’t Sell the Bond Short What do you think of when you hear or read the words, “human-animal bond”? For many people, images of animals involved in some sort of animal-assisted therapy that improves a disabled person’s quality of life immediately come to mind. Others think of coping with the pain of pet loss, [...]

Giving Scientists a Helping Hand Were you ever stuck at home because of lousy weather or an illness or injury grounded you and left you feeling utterly bored and useless? You didn’t want to watch yet another movie or play another video game; you had no desire to read another book, even one by your [...]

At a Snail’s Pace Some people prefer to read only specific kinds of books related to certain kinds of human and animal interactions. Perhaps only heady academic tomes. Or fiction, or only those involving dogs or cats and humans interacting with each other in specific ways. My tastes tend to be more eclectic. If I [...]

  That Restless Time of Year When late summer in the northern hemisphere rolls around, do you find you feel restless and even out of sorts for no reason? Does your cat seem edgier and your dog more watchful and whiney? In the old days, if you mentioned this to a human medical or behavioral [...]

Back-Engineering Mother’s Milk In a very small nutshell, back-engineering is the process of taking an object apart in order to learn how it was designed to do what it does. Increasingly scientists are taking this approach to substances and processes that occur in nature with the idea that the thousands of years of evolutionary tweaking [...]

Top Down and Bottom Up Leadership and the Inertia of Success There’s an old saying in New England (and many other parts of the country and the world) that if you don’t like the weather, just wait a minute. In some ways, the same is true of behavior. If the behavior of another doesn’t appeal [...]

Call of the Wild or Wrong Number? YouTube has become a goldmine of data for those who study animal and human behavior. Even someone like me whose access to it is highly limited because of a dial-up connection can explore its offerings on occasion. Such was the case when I babysat one of my grandkids [...]

Requiem for Companion Animal Play Wow! How’s that for a morose title for a dead-of-winter commentary? I could blame it on a fascinating article by Paul Tullis in the November-December 2011 Scientific American Mind entitled “The Death of Pre-School.” But all that article did was cause me to organize my thoughts regarding similar changes in [...]