If you’re one of those who think (or hope) this podcast is going to be about hot animal sex, I fear you’re going to be disappointed. It’s been too hot to think about subjects like that. This podcast is about less torrid thoughts that a really hot, humid spell brings to mind. In fact, it was so hot when I recorded this that I forgot to mention another heat-related subject: the danger of having your hair cut by someone in the grips of the kind of wretched respiratory viruses this strange weather seems to attract. Let’s just say that
Read more →A fair amount has been written about all the different aspects of pet loss, but not nearly as much about what happens when our pets outlive us. Some thoughts about that are the subject of this podcast.
Read more →Living with companion animals is a lot like living with kids. Once they’re out of the puppy or kitten stage, they become so much a part of our lives and we get so used to being around that they take on a certain timeless quality. Then one day something seemingly insignificant happens to slap a timeframe around them…
Read more →The article discussed in this week’s podcast was published in the Spring 2011 edition of Yes! magazine. And as so often happens to me when I’m attuned to studies that challenge established beliefs about what animals can and cannot do, shortly after I recorded this I came across two news items about tool use in stingrays and tusk fish. It’s hard to believe that at one time people actually believed that only humans were capable of using tools. Does that make us more like animals or animals more like us? 🙂
Read more →What do you think of when you read the phrase “Putting on the dog?” Typically it’s an expression used to refer to someone who’s trying to impress others via some flashy display. Naturally I did a web search to determine the origins of the phrase and came up with multiple explanations. The most pertinent one relative to this podcast (which I admit could be completely wrong, but it’s probably no less credible than some of the others) claimed it referred to getting dressed up in one’s finest in the days of old when shoes were made of dog skin.
Read more →I’m one of those people who gets a kick out of scientific findings that raise the possibility that the old-timers who came up with those adages that make us giggle or roll our eyes may have known more than we thought. While some scientists willingly credit the old-timers with the discovery, others imply that they have discovered something nobody ever noticed… sort of like explorers “discovering” waterfalls, wild plants or animals that the local residents have known about for years. The idea of natural vaccines, i.e. those that evolved as part of the natural world, has intrigued me since
Read more →This seems like a strange topic for the middle of summer, doesn’t it? But even though the subject of this podcast might cause you to view the summer rain and those hail storms differently, my immediate response to the report that triggered my meandering took me back years ago to a report about comets. Oddly enough, shortly after I finished editing the podcast I heard a report about snow falling somewhere in Colorado. Hmmm. Maybe I’ll see some those precipitation changes that I thought would never happen in my lifetime after all.
Read more →Sometimes we get so caught up in the bigger-is-better thinking of our society that it’s easy to forget the little things. But when those little things live in our guts and are capable of altering our behavior, maybe that’s not such a good approach to take. The article from Scientific American that precipitated these meanderings my be found here.
Read more →What do melting polar ice caps and our own and our animals meltdowns have in common? As it turns out, even as we may argue that we’re far too stressed out with daily life to address problems in our animals let alone worry about climate change, in a way we’re all succumbing to the same basic mechanism. Aside from what this means about putting such events in perspective, it also serves as good reminder that we’re all in this together. More intriguing, it suggests that if we want to solve the larger problems, perhaps the first step is solving
Read more →Let me apologize upfront for an anthropomorphic lapse in this podcast. For some it would be bad enough that I attributed—gasp!—thought processes to a dog. To have the dog verbalize those thoughts is a lapse that must be recognized as the grievous sin it is. And so I do. BUT, and surely you knew there would be a but, the scenario I described and the outcome are legitimate. If we do communicate one message via our body language to our animals and prevent them from responding to that message the same way they would to a similar message that
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