Archive for July, 2010

Minds, Animals, and Phones Ideas for my podcasts often come from strange places. The seed for this one was planted by several reports I read or heard about the ingenious way the Youth Safety Council of Vermont came up with to convince kids that driving while texting really isn’t a good idea.  (Click here for [...]

Something Completely Different, Part II Here’s the second vignette to test your powers of analysis. Also, think about how your responses to this story mesh (or not) with those to the first one.

I’m writing this from Colorado, the home of some of the country’s most breath-taking mountain vistas. But while I’ll never forget the time we spent enjoying those views, I’ve fallen head over hills in love with a relatively flat open space about a 5-minute walk from my son’s home. Looks pretty nondescript doesn’t it? It’s [...]

Something Completely Different, Part I For the next two podcasts and maybe longer depending on the response to it, I’m going to try something different. But first some background. Over the years I’ve spent a fair amount of time pondering how to best help people make the kinds of changes necessary to improve their animals’ [...]

Garden Alarms After my lackluster success with growing vegetables the past few years, this year I decided to focus on flowers, the sight and scent of which I consider food for the soul. Below is a picture of my first soul-food harvest that brightened my spirits in spite of the troubling event described in this [...]

Blind-Sided: The Dilemma of Contemporary Service Dogs Have you ever noticed that when we humans think about combining two different components we automatically assume that the result will be the best of each? There are multiple examples of this concept in the animal-related world, with the natural or artificial breeding of animals from two different [...]