In retrospect I realized that had the horse arrived, I would have felt far more inadequate than complete because I knew nothing of any practical value about horses and their care. But at that time, I perceived that animal as the universal antidote for all that ailed me in body, mind, and spirit. As I routinely discover in my work, such beliefs about animals are still alive and well, and they’re not only embraced by children.

May the coming year be filled with the very best for you and your loved ones of all species.

FRICA

OLLIE

BAMBOO

THE LITTLE HOUSE ON THE HILL

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” 

Now I realize that the same could be said about all the microorganisms  that make up our world too.

But the cat wasn’t really. It just seemed that way because she was an avid shopper as well as a highly social person. As a result, she often received deliveries of one sort or another and routinely invited new people to her home. So even though it seemed like nothing in her home was safe from baptism by cat pee, that wasn’t really the case. He only peed on the new arrivals.

This week’s podcast considers similar problem-behavior perceptual traps and how to avoid them.

In that case dogs of country or city breeding who wind up in the opposite environment may wind up feeling like ducks out of water.

If we accept that the human animal bond is a bilateral physiological and behavioral phenomenon, then it’s reasonable to assume that anything that changes our behavior is capable of changing theirs. But typically we speak of this in terms of active displays. How we relate to them when we’re happy, sad, or calm and relaxed—that kind of thing. But what kind of connection do we form with them when we sort of seem to be looking at them but sort of not? Could our clever lenses turn out to generate a technological version of the Clever Hans Effect?

For example, those who have the least knowledge regarding how science works are often the most awed by it; and those who routinely work within the research realm often put much more weight on their results and conclusions than any clinical observations. And vice versa. Those who are suspicious of science may base their beliefs on personal experience or those of a handful of others they personally know.  Meanwhile clinicians working in the field, and especially if they’ve worked there long enough to know the area intimately and their clients well,  may rely more heavily on their profession experience. But as life has a way of pointing out, the best approach is a combination of both.

Here’s the article that inspired this podcast if you’d like to read the whole thing.

And if you’re one of those who read the title of this podcast and thought it sounded vaguely familiar, here’s the song by the same name sung by the incomparable Cab Calloway that inspired it.

In this podcast I explore early dog-related memories as they may effect our relationships with similar animals and those animals’ behavior in the here and now.

And yet, if the circumstances were to change in response to climate change, habitat destruction, or the increased incidence of diseases transmissible between animals and humans, might we be forced to look at this option logically instead of emotionally? Perhaps not in my lifetime and not with rabies, but there’s a increasing number of other diseases on our doorsteps…

For those who missed the news coverage of this latest outbreak of rabies in China, you can read more about it here.

Photo by Matt Clark