Archive for February, 2012

The Ick and Wow Factors This is one of those podcasts that I think of as belonging to my “Can of Worm” Series. I so categorized it because the more I thought about this particular subject, the more I realized that as usual this wasn’t just about science. In addition to science, it was  about [...]

Barking Up the Wrong Tree I edited this podcast this podcast the day after the 2012 SuperBowl and noticed yet another negative effect of a simplistic winner-loser system. The Boston team lost so there were people in the area who were very upset this morning, probably for three reasons: they felt like losers, they probably [...]

Keeping in Touch In keeping with the theme of this podcast, I’d like to add that one of the reasons that our dogs and cats may be attracted to our expensive leather shoes, purses, jackets or briefcases  isn’t because they know how much we value those items and want to punish us for not paying [...]

Dead Zones and the Subconscious Mind Young human and nonhuman animals possess less experience and, as a result, possess less data in their subconscious data bases. Or nonhuman animals do if you believe they have a subconscious mind which means believing that they also posses conscious one. Some people do, some don’t. But regardless which [...]

Apparently the cybergods think play is an important subject too, because this link just showed up in a veterinary news service I receive. Enjoy. Play. Smile.

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 [...]

 Animal Laughter You can see what I consider a likely example of a laughing dog here and read an article about the increased scientific interest in ticklish animals here. As always when it comes to the subject of animal emotion, some of us are more open to the idea than others. Naturally I felt obligated [...]