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 enough attention to them. It’s because leather is especially good at retaining scent.

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 side of this philosophical debate we come down on, most of us do accept that youngsters of any species posses a view of reality that’s more limited than those with more experience.

This explains why I’m way more leery of the teenagers who barrel down my road while using various electronic devices, handheld or not. They simply haven’t driven the road long enough to recognize the slight change in color just before the bridge that signals black ice rather than just wet. Nor do they realize that on certain kinds of days at certain times of the year, they may come around a certain corner and encounter a flock of wild turkeys crossing the road. Worse, these changes are so subtle and subjective that only observing a skilled driver plus experience (or a LOT more experience if such a role model isn’t available) can result in the kind of repository required to succeed in a certain environment while focusing on something else.

Similarly, I’m much more watchful of my young animals outdoors until I’m comfortable they know about the idiosyncrasies of my property. Mother Nature nicely handles this by keeping wild youngsters with their parents or other environmentally savvy adult animals  just long enough for this transfer of information to occur. Companion animals, on the other hand, may need to rely on us for the kind of input that will enable them to feel comfortable enough in their surroundings that they can negotiate them safely while doing something else. The challenge is to provide it, but then to stop fussing and back off so they can internalize the data.

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 young animal education/training that I’ve been pondering for years. Ironically just as the amount of research into the positive physical, mental, and emotional benefits of play for kids and animals of all species increases, there’s been a tendency to impose structured training on kids and domestic animals at a younger age.

Why does all work and no play make Jack and Jill dull academically as well as socially and undermine their chance for future success and happiness? And what does this have to do with animals anyhow?

To find out the answers to those questions, click here.

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 see if any of my animals were ticklish. Just for scientific reasons, of course.

Dognapping baboons? If you don’t believe me, check out this  video clip. Aside from being fascinating, this is the kind of clip that makes me glad I’m an independent scholar in the realm of the human-animal bond. That way I have access to academics like bond scholar Hal Herzog who pointed me to his blog about this interspecies incident. (Read Hal Herzog’s blog for the inside scoop on this event.)

But events such as these also make me relish my status as an independent scholar because it gives me the freedom to think the unthinkable, the weird or possibly just plain crazy thoughts about what might be going on here…and what it might say about us and our relationships with our dogs.

When you listen to this podcast, you’ll notice that there’s no mention of Bamboo the cat’s behavior during these intervals. This is because from the first instant that he made the connection between the woodstove, and warmth, and my clawably comfortable yoga mats, he decided that no interactive toy could compel him to budge from that location. I suspect this occurred because his idea of a good interactive toy is a rodent who dares venture into the basement through the dry stone foundation. Compared to that, even the most creative manmade toy lacks pizazz.

The meditative setting                        The clawed mat

Because of this, I’ve had to resort to devious tricks to keep him off the mat. Thus far my greatest successes come in cold weather because—great outdoor explorer though he is—he does not like to be cold in the house. To capitalize on this feline weakness, I immediately stoke up the woodstove first thing when I get up in the morning. My goal isn’t to warm the house so much as to warm the brick center chimney that serves as the flue for the stove. More importantly, said chimney runs through my office right behind the corner of my desk where Bam sleeps.

Upper half of chimney with Bam’ bed: 

If all goes well, by the time I download the day’s email and reply to the most pressing, the chimney’s warmth will have lulled him into that comatose sleep favored by felines. Then the dogs and I sneak downstairs and the day unfolds as described in the podcast.

What happens on a good day:

If the chimney fails to do its magic… well, let’s just say that yoga is apt to give way to aerobics as cat and human vie to maintain possession of the mat for the next hour. On a good day for me, it’s a draw.

Even though I recognize the need for rules in order for a society to function (regardless of species) I also recognize that, like all behavior their meaning depends on their context. In spite of what we may like to believe, nothing is written in stone.

This doesn’t mean that I’m one of those people who believes that rules were meant to be broken simply because they’re rules. Hardly. But I do believe that when new information makes it clear that rules that once held no longer do, then it’s time to let them go.

This podcast was triggered by a change in a once inviolate rule—that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light—that shocked the physics world in 2011. As it turns out, apparently a sub-atomic particle called a neutrino can. (You can read about the experiment in this article from the New York Times.) While few scientists want to publicly say that Einstein got it wrong, some already begin to speculate on what this might mean…

Which naturally got me thinking about what some consider those equally inviolate rules regarding animal cognition and emotion.

Under circumstances when long-established rules exist, how much proof is enough for a society to think the once unthinkable? How much would it take you to accept that something can travel faster than the speed of light? How about that animals are capable of cognition and emotion?

The answer to those questions results in an intellectual paradox in that sometimes the more we know about a subject, the more proof we need that existing rules no longer hold true. For those of us who can’t comprehend the complex rules of theoretical physics, the idea that a particle could move faster than the speed of light doesn’t seem that alien at all. Similarly when we’re not constrained by rules that limit cognition and emotion to  Home sapiens, we more readily accept evidence of that those same capacities exist in animals.

What we don’t know is how much evidence it takes from either “side” of these debates to trigger a society to either reassert or scrap a rule, to reaffirm the old view of reality or to adopt a new one.

Sometimes when I listen to these podcasts after I’ve recorded and edited them, it strikes me that I may have meandered a little bit more off the path than I usually do. This time, I could say that I detected an annoying clunk in the recording, the origin of which I couldn’t determine any more than I could completely eliminate it.

But the truth is that in my heart I know the events described in this podcast are related. But for some reason, my head apparently didn’t get the message. I will say that one possible explanation that I didn’t mention in the podcast because it didn’t occur to me until later, is that my dog did what she did because she made a connection between the words “pill” and “pillow.”  She’d have certainly heard my folks say both words often, plus research makes it clear that dogs are much better at understanding human speech than most of us are at understanding theirs.

There are many sayings and phenomena in human behavior that remind us that connections between fact and fiction, art and life, and perception exist even if we don’t notice them. Sometimes we may go for years and never notice them. Then one day something happens that suddenly catapults the connection into our awareness. At such times I, at least, feel torn between berating myself for missing it for so long and being fascinated by the existence of such a process.

That’s what happened to me recently…

(Read more…)

I have a love-hate relationship with New Year’s. Because I’m a morning person who doesn’t enjoy late night events during which people get louder and more inebriated and suffer from Football Fatigue Syndrome (FFS) after being inundated by it during 9 years in Ohio, few of the traditional holiday activities appeal to me. On the other hand, the fact that this is the case caused me to create a New Years tradition of my own a.k.a. a quiet day with the animals and a specifically chosen book accompanied by some personal favorite food and drink. Depending on the weather, the dogs, cat, and I also may do the walk-about. If the weather doesn’t cooperate, we enjoy the  coziness of the wood fire indoors. In either cases we enjoy each other’s company and the peace and quiet.

Just me and my other not-so-party animals.

Right after I recorded this, I heard a linguist talking about how often we forget the source of the words we use every day. One of the  examples given was creature which comes from the same root as create and creator. Not only do we rank as creatures among other creatures relative to the animals in the world around us, we also function as creators deliberately or inadvertently changing each other as we each strive to achieve balance. An awareness of the power of those interspecies connections is yet another miracle worth contemplating and celebrating this  holiday season.

For those who never heard of parahawking (which I’ve since discovered has been demoted to a sport), here’s a trailer for a film on the subject.

Frankly I much prefer the encounters that occur spontaneously. To me, there’s something extremely special about a close encounter with any wild animals in their natural environments. There’s also something about the encounters with powerful raptors that seem to have particularly potent affects. Once early in my veterinary career, a young man brought in an osprey who had been so seriously injured there was no way we could save him. But even though the bird’s bones were shattered and he was covered with dirt and blood, it didn’t matter. He was such a magnificent creature we were all in awe of him.

Right to the end, he was so determined to fight for his freedom that I couldn’t imagine how the young man ever managed to pick him up from the side of the road, let alone transport him the considerable distance to the clinic. Later one of the techs who had gone to high school with him said it was probably because he was higher than a kite. Evidently he was no stranger to drugs back in the age of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. And serving in Viet Nam had only made the problem—and life—worse for him.

I don’t know what went on between that man and that osprey. But I do knew that whatever it was was very special. They both held it together long enough for the man to get the bird to the clinic. Within days after the bird died, the young man launched himself from a railroad trestle that spanned the river far below. Someone who saw it said it looked like he was trying to fly.The medical examiner said he probably died on impact.

Even all of these years later, I still wonder what have happened if we’d been able to save the bird.

My guess is that once you listen to this podcast, you’ll be able to think of other trends that occur in physical health that have parallels in behavioral health and vice versa. Whether we seek to fulfill our animals’ physical or behavioral needs, we always need to beware of the Iago Effect. Never heard of this? That’s understandable because I just made it up.

Iago was a character immortalized by Shakespeare in Othello. He was a man who wanted to be remembered, not for loving unwisely but for loving too well. Poetic as that may be, it didn’t change the fact that the result of his loving Desdemona too well left her deader than a doornail…

which I suspect she would have considered unwise love had she lived to think about it.

Would it surprise you to learn that I was once an angel? For those considering renouncing your faith if the likes of me can achieve such status, permit to add that this occurred when I was in the second grade. And I’m sure it only happened because I happened to have access to a kick-butt angel costume.

It happened like this…

For those who have never read any of Edward O. Wilson’s groundbreaking books about nature and the environment, you can find them here. Although I mentioned Consilience in this podcast, Biophilia is another great one, but there are many others.

Wilson is one of those people about whom I can truly and humbly say that he has undoubtedly forgotten more about this planet and the life-forms who inhabit it than I can ever hope to know. But rather than that making me want to give up, his writing always inspires me to try harder.

Just a few meandering thoughts about my favorite holiday.This year I again get to lounge about while my treasured daughter-in-law does more than the lioness’s share of the work. All I have to do is enjoy myself and return home with lots of left-overs. Miraculous in it’s own way. At most, I arrive with one dish and return home with a feast.

Something else to be thankful for on this special holiday.

The other part of this subject that I’ll leave you to think about is whether animals do the same thing.  It’s seem they must. But how would it manifest, and how would we know it existed? Definitely something to ponder about while I’m cleaning house, working outdoors, or waiting in line somewhere…

The links mentioned in this podcast can be found here. The new book has working title and no cover, but here’s a picture of a group of animals, Bamboo and Ollie to be exact, engaging in some group behavior with each other and their own and each other’s images in a mirror.

I receive a fair number of video links, but living in the a dead zone with a dial-up connection prevents me from opening most of them. Either I can’t open a clip at all, or my connection crashes half-way through the download process. Because what others may consider a short clip can take me several hours to download, this is all very discouraging.

But evidently the universe wanted me to see this one, because it survived its early morning download ordeal intact. The Poop Detective’s CSI spin made me laugh for 2 reasons. One is because I’ve felt the urge to tackle a few lazy dog-owners and rub their noses in it myself. The second is because my son used to live in a complex that initiated a system of DNA testing several years ago. Samples from renters’ dogs were collected and then used to identify the source of any unscooped piles. Failure to clean up was considered a violation of the lease and miscreant owner and dog could find themselves looking for some other place to foul. 

On a more serious note and another good reason to become a religious scooper: the increased interstate transport of dogs combined with climate changes are resulting in the presence of various disease-causing microorganisms in areas where they never were before. Some of these can be spread in fecal matter and threaten the health of other animals and humans. While we may think our dogs’ waste is as pure as the driven snow, our failure to clean up after our own animals gives the go-ahead to the no-minds whose dogs are loaded with parasites and God-only-knows what else to do the same thing. Not a good thing to do!