Showing posts with label biology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label biology. Show all posts
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Monday, October 3, 2011
Hero Dog Saves Another
Who says animals can't think and don't have compassion now? This not only shows amazing bravery, by the hero dog using his paws instead of his teeth to drag his fellow to safety, he showed great intelligence because his teeth could have hurt his fellow more. I dare call that sentience. It's certainly evidence of strategy, which only keen minds can produce. Hero pooch actually formulated a plan for helping his buddy - just like a human would!
Just because animals don't perceive their world the same way that we do doesn't meant that they are not as smart (or even smarter) than we are.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
A Late Happy Birthday...
...to Ki Chard or, as Keel would fanatically remind me "His name is Vininiska! Not that human name!"
(Ki's birthday is September 18th.)
This year, this gregarious, overwhelmingly adorable, endearing, curious little drakoon with a big heart and a feisty terrier temper complex blew my scientific perceptions sky high and out of the galaxy. Because of him, I got interested in the digestive biology of predatory animals and I questioned what is right and wrong in regards to all animals. I found out how human digestive systems work too and so, it is because of Ki, this perhaps insignificant imaginary character that I now know how to possibly heal myself. It's because of Ki that my outlook on the world has changed - and it all started with my wondering how it is scientifically that Ki gets sick. Well, thanks to him, I do know that now. I know what is right to feed what type of animal. I know that diet can either make or break your health. The Earth's immune system starts in the sea - ours starts in our digestional tracts.
So today, I hold up my proverbial glass (of cider) in homage to Ki, the little drakoon full of fire and spark who completely blew my world away.
Thank you Ki. I look forwards to understanding you more - and this crazy species called Homo sapiens - even further.
Domestic Versus Wild
There are a great many scientifically ignorant people in this world who would argue that there should not be a difference in how we treat our domestic pets versus our wild animals. These people, those who say that all animals should be in the wild, not in people's houses or in cages are unknowingly in the same herd as the people who think wild animals can be kept captive under guises of research and conservation, but such captivity has, for the most part, run its course of usefulness. While very few people in this world are truly free of the 'master race' analogy that we are taught to give ourselves - I cannot say even that I am, as I have been trained like every other human animal to follow the herd - there is something quite disturbing about anyone who says there is no difference between wild and domestic, that it is 'okay' to keep a wild animal in captivity under any circumstance. What about captive breeding, you may ask? Well, if it must be captive, let it be as far from human eyes as possible. Let it not be entertainment. Let those animals who are being bred for the survival of their kind have room to roam instead of being boxed up in a pretty temperature controlled terrarium which is supposed to look like their natural habitat.
A domestic animal is not the same as a wild one. Absolutely, positively, overwhelmingly, NOT THE SAME. Why? You may ask. They look mostly the same! They're of the same genus - a house cat is distantly related to a tiger isn't it? Well, I can't deny that. House cats are distantly related to tigers and both house cats and tigers are classed under Felidae, so they are both cats. However, just because they are both cats does not mean that they are the same animal and it especially doesn't mean that they have evolved the same strategies for survival. Several thousand years ago in Egypt, a little African Wild Cat saw opportunity in the rodent infested granaries of the Egyptians and this source of easy food was something she taught to her kittens. "Hey - the food's more plentiful over there. There's also less predators around - why don't I spend less energy by hunting over there, where those big stupid two legged beasts are?" Well, the big stupid two legged beasts weren't actually stupid and once the ancient Egyptians realized that the cats were protecting their very livelihoods by chasing the mice and their granaries, the cat became a sacred animal, protected, loved and yes, mummified, because humans are not really secretly just jumped up fancy herbivores who got a power-over-other-living-things complex somewhere down the evolutionary line, which other animals can only shake their heads at us for - proverbially of course, since they don't communicate like we do. In any case, in return for easy food and protection, cats and other domestic animals give us their services, services which we ourselves cannot - or rather could not - provide for ourselves.
The point is, 'domestic' animals - I'm talking pets, animals we do not typically eat such as cats, dogs and horses - have developed evolutionary strategies which include working for (with) us. What do we give a dog for his loyalty? He doesn't have to hunt for food. He doesn't have to worry about predators. He has protection against the weather and if he breaks a leg, we set it for him. Dogs have a good deal. So do cats and horses. What does a horse get for her draft services? She gets reliable food, medical, shelter and the thing which is most of all most important to a herbivorous animal, she gets protection from being eaten by predators. What is the most important thing for predatory animals like cats and dogs? Look at leopards, look at lions - they sleep most of the day, so the most important thing to a predator, is the conservation of their bodily energy. In modern times a cat doesn't have to use energy searching for food and neither does a dog. These animals have clearly evolved - or rather adapted or started to evolve - with us as their evolutionary advantage and we have benefited from their services too. Our society would not have been possible without them. The only time this synergy, this symbiosis between species fail is when we, humans, abuse the sanctity of the relationship and you would have to be quite stupid to say that we have not done this, nor that we are not doing that, right now.
Wild animals, tigers, wolves, parrots, birds, dolphins, whales, bears, what have you - they have not adapted for a symbiotic relationship with humans. That is not their survival strategy - their survival strategy is the same survival strategy is the same one which they have been using for thousands of years and they reason they are still using these strategies is because they work. The shark is (perhaps arguably, since everything in science appears to be arguable) the most successful species group to have ever lived. They have been around for over five million years and during that time, their strategy for survival has not changed. Sharks today are (again arguably) using the exact same strategy for survival which their ancestors were using several billion years before anything that looked even marginally like a human ever walked the earth. These animals, who have not adapted for life with humans and who would have adapted by now if they actually wanted to, should not EVER be kept in captivity.
You might again ask why. Why? Because they are intelligent. Only people who have not had a beloved pet or whom are brainwashed by institutions - our entire society can be called an institution - are stupid enough to question the intelligence of other species. It is rare that you find a human who has worked extensively with animals from another species who would tell you that that animal is stupid, if he or she has worked with that animal at least somewhat on that animal's own terms and not with unnatural predatory intentions of gain such as profit. Zoos and marine parks can be pooled in the same file as the ghastly gladiator exhibitions of Ancient Rome because they are all for the most part just a glorified show made up for entertainment value. Many people who run zoos, would agree with this and I salute those such venues such as the Cincinnati Zoo who actually do put their money into true conservation of the wild animals they feature as well as places such as Big Cat Rescue which rescues captive large cats from domestic confinement, places where these animals simply do not belong. You may point out that the animals at Big Cat Rescue are still in confinement there, if you are familiar with the program, but there is a difference - Big Cat Rescue is working hard to end put an end to the captivity of large cats and further, they are trying to conserve wild populations of these animals.
Ancient crowds thought it was amusing watching men fight to the death against each other and ferocious beasts. This, our society calls barbaric, yet this same society of ours calls it okay to capture wild animals from their habitats and put them into captivity. There is a wrongness to any wild animal being in captivity, even one which is captive bred, for a captive bred animal is like an Aboriginal child being denied their heritage. They are in confinement. They may want to escape but they cannot and it would cost them too much energy to try. Life is about preserving and keeping biological energy and creating new life. No matter how pretty a cage is, it's still a cage, to the point where I think of my own indoor cat Copernicus and find my captivity of him - as well as the captivity of hundreds of other cats as perhaps being fairly wrong. I don't mean him running in the wild. I mean that it maybe and probably is wrong that he has no opportunity to roam, to come and go as he pleases. If a domestic animal is unhappy with their situation, they will run away, but we are possessive animals. We love them, we hold them, but is it right, to keep them inside, to make them see the same walls, day after day? If trapped in a room for months, a human goes insane. If trapped in a pool for years, so does an orca or any other cetacean.
Copernicus is not a wild animal. He is domestic and his evolutionary strategy is to live beside me. He has proven himself to be extremely loyal over these past weeks and he has proven that he loves me. I don't want my cat to be hit by a car or eaten by a coyote, yet these same dangers are ones which I face regularly in my own life, as a human. As a human in our modern age, living in North America, I can almost definitely say that I fear no predator more than my own kind. Bears will not come in the night to force me. Tigers do not kill for fun - they kill for food or territory (resources needed to sustain personal life) or to get rid of competition, which really, are exactly the same reasons why humans kill, only we call it war, which we say we detest, yet usually still ends up being all fine and dandy. No matter what side you are in a war, somebody from that side will call themselves 'right' or 'better' so isn't it wrong that we critisize animals for doing exactly the same thing?
I'm getting off topic, but the essence of this all comes down to this: domestic animals are not wild animals. If I ever have a place where it is mostly safe to let Copernicus outside, I may let him, definitely if he has a streetwise companion to help him learn. It is a proven fact that cats teach each other - mothers train their babies how to hunt. Leopards do this and so do house cats. So too, do mother dogs teach their babies if given a chance and mother horses teach their foals how to run, as well as what plants are good to eat as well as which are not. Wild mustangs have been known to self medicate themselves with herbs and to avoid certain obstacles which have proven to cause harm, from dead fall to high ridges during storms when lightning might strike.
Before any reader gets too hyped up with self importance about any of these domestic species 'needing' us, remember this; any animal, including humans, can and will go wild again if forced to. We ourselves are domesticated, but if push comes to shove, we are just another herbivore who can survive in the wild perfectly fine without any modern aid or help.
I'll get to the herbivore thing soon, maybe in my next post. Thank you for reading.
For a change, here's some documentaries and articles I strongly recommend regarding the captivity of wild animals, because I'm not sure how credible most people find some crazy, opinionated little Canadian with no bachelor's degree in anything.
1. Lolita: Slave to Entertainment
2. The Killer in the Pool (article) by Tim Zimmermann
3.The Cove (you can watch it here)
For the record, if anyone strongly agrees with any of my posts regarding conservation or animal rights - such as this one, feel free to repost so long as proper credit is given to me and the repost is linked to the original post here. (However, reposting any of the other works, particularly the works of fiction - as in, manuscript excerpts - or blog posts as my personal life as a whole - are NOT allowed under any circumstances. Links are okay, but NO reposts and it would be better if you asked me first before reposting ANYTHING. Thank you!)
A domestic animal is not the same as a wild one. Absolutely, positively, overwhelmingly, NOT THE SAME. Why? You may ask. They look mostly the same! They're of the same genus - a house cat is distantly related to a tiger isn't it? Well, I can't deny that. House cats are distantly related to tigers and both house cats and tigers are classed under Felidae, so they are both cats. However, just because they are both cats does not mean that they are the same animal and it especially doesn't mean that they have evolved the same strategies for survival. Several thousand years ago in Egypt, a little African Wild Cat saw opportunity in the rodent infested granaries of the Egyptians and this source of easy food was something she taught to her kittens. "Hey - the food's more plentiful over there. There's also less predators around - why don't I spend less energy by hunting over there, where those big stupid two legged beasts are?" Well, the big stupid two legged beasts weren't actually stupid and once the ancient Egyptians realized that the cats were protecting their very livelihoods by chasing the mice and their granaries, the cat became a sacred animal, protected, loved and yes, mummified, because humans are not really secretly just jumped up fancy herbivores who got a power-over-other-living-things complex somewhere down the evolutionary line, which other animals can only shake their heads at us for - proverbially of course, since they don't communicate like we do. In any case, in return for easy food and protection, cats and other domestic animals give us their services, services which we ourselves cannot - or rather could not - provide for ourselves.
The point is, 'domestic' animals - I'm talking pets, animals we do not typically eat such as cats, dogs and horses - have developed evolutionary strategies which include working for (with) us. What do we give a dog for his loyalty? He doesn't have to hunt for food. He doesn't have to worry about predators. He has protection against the weather and if he breaks a leg, we set it for him. Dogs have a good deal. So do cats and horses. What does a horse get for her draft services? She gets reliable food, medical, shelter and the thing which is most of all most important to a herbivorous animal, she gets protection from being eaten by predators. What is the most important thing for predatory animals like cats and dogs? Look at leopards, look at lions - they sleep most of the day, so the most important thing to a predator, is the conservation of their bodily energy. In modern times a cat doesn't have to use energy searching for food and neither does a dog. These animals have clearly evolved - or rather adapted or started to evolve - with us as their evolutionary advantage and we have benefited from their services too. Our society would not have been possible without them. The only time this synergy, this symbiosis between species fail is when we, humans, abuse the sanctity of the relationship and you would have to be quite stupid to say that we have not done this, nor that we are not doing that, right now.
Wild animals, tigers, wolves, parrots, birds, dolphins, whales, bears, what have you - they have not adapted for a symbiotic relationship with humans. That is not their survival strategy - their survival strategy is the same survival strategy is the same one which they have been using for thousands of years and they reason they are still using these strategies is because they work. The shark is (perhaps arguably, since everything in science appears to be arguable) the most successful species group to have ever lived. They have been around for over five million years and during that time, their strategy for survival has not changed. Sharks today are (again arguably) using the exact same strategy for survival which their ancestors were using several billion years before anything that looked even marginally like a human ever walked the earth. These animals, who have not adapted for life with humans and who would have adapted by now if they actually wanted to, should not EVER be kept in captivity.
You might again ask why. Why? Because they are intelligent. Only people who have not had a beloved pet or whom are brainwashed by institutions - our entire society can be called an institution - are stupid enough to question the intelligence of other species. It is rare that you find a human who has worked extensively with animals from another species who would tell you that that animal is stupid, if he or she has worked with that animal at least somewhat on that animal's own terms and not with unnatural predatory intentions of gain such as profit. Zoos and marine parks can be pooled in the same file as the ghastly gladiator exhibitions of Ancient Rome because they are all for the most part just a glorified show made up for entertainment value. Many people who run zoos, would agree with this and I salute those such venues such as the Cincinnati Zoo who actually do put their money into true conservation of the wild animals they feature as well as places such as Big Cat Rescue which rescues captive large cats from domestic confinement, places where these animals simply do not belong. You may point out that the animals at Big Cat Rescue are still in confinement there, if you are familiar with the program, but there is a difference - Big Cat Rescue is working hard to end put an end to the captivity of large cats and further, they are trying to conserve wild populations of these animals.
Ancient crowds thought it was amusing watching men fight to the death against each other and ferocious beasts. This, our society calls barbaric, yet this same society of ours calls it okay to capture wild animals from their habitats and put them into captivity. There is a wrongness to any wild animal being in captivity, even one which is captive bred, for a captive bred animal is like an Aboriginal child being denied their heritage. They are in confinement. They may want to escape but they cannot and it would cost them too much energy to try. Life is about preserving and keeping biological energy and creating new life. No matter how pretty a cage is, it's still a cage, to the point where I think of my own indoor cat Copernicus and find my captivity of him - as well as the captivity of hundreds of other cats as perhaps being fairly wrong. I don't mean him running in the wild. I mean that it maybe and probably is wrong that he has no opportunity to roam, to come and go as he pleases. If a domestic animal is unhappy with their situation, they will run away, but we are possessive animals. We love them, we hold them, but is it right, to keep them inside, to make them see the same walls, day after day? If trapped in a room for months, a human goes insane. If trapped in a pool for years, so does an orca or any other cetacean.
Copernicus is not a wild animal. He is domestic and his evolutionary strategy is to live beside me. He has proven himself to be extremely loyal over these past weeks and he has proven that he loves me. I don't want my cat to be hit by a car or eaten by a coyote, yet these same dangers are ones which I face regularly in my own life, as a human. As a human in our modern age, living in North America, I can almost definitely say that I fear no predator more than my own kind. Bears will not come in the night to force me. Tigers do not kill for fun - they kill for food or territory (resources needed to sustain personal life) or to get rid of competition, which really, are exactly the same reasons why humans kill, only we call it war, which we say we detest, yet usually still ends up being all fine and dandy. No matter what side you are in a war, somebody from that side will call themselves 'right' or 'better' so isn't it wrong that we critisize animals for doing exactly the same thing?
I'm getting off topic, but the essence of this all comes down to this: domestic animals are not wild animals. If I ever have a place where it is mostly safe to let Copernicus outside, I may let him, definitely if he has a streetwise companion to help him learn. It is a proven fact that cats teach each other - mothers train their babies how to hunt. Leopards do this and so do house cats. So too, do mother dogs teach their babies if given a chance and mother horses teach their foals how to run, as well as what plants are good to eat as well as which are not. Wild mustangs have been known to self medicate themselves with herbs and to avoid certain obstacles which have proven to cause harm, from dead fall to high ridges during storms when lightning might strike.
Before any reader gets too hyped up with self importance about any of these domestic species 'needing' us, remember this; any animal, including humans, can and will go wild again if forced to. We ourselves are domesticated, but if push comes to shove, we are just another herbivore who can survive in the wild perfectly fine without any modern aid or help.
I'll get to the herbivore thing soon, maybe in my next post. Thank you for reading.
For a change, here's some documentaries and articles I strongly recommend regarding the captivity of wild animals, because I'm not sure how credible most people find some crazy, opinionated little Canadian with no bachelor's degree in anything.
1. Lolita: Slave to Entertainment
2. The Killer in the Pool (article) by Tim Zimmermann
3.The Cove (you can watch it here)
For the record, if anyone strongly agrees with any of my posts regarding conservation or animal rights - such as this one, feel free to repost so long as proper credit is given to me and the repost is linked to the original post here. (However, reposting any of the other works, particularly the works of fiction - as in, manuscript excerpts - or blog posts as my personal life as a whole - are NOT allowed under any circumstances. Links are okay, but NO reposts and it would be better if you asked me first before reposting ANYTHING. Thank you!)
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Wolf Studies - Confusion!
Having just finished re-watching 'Living with Wolves,' the account of Jim and Jamie Dutcher's Sawtooth Pack, and thinking about Shaun Ellis' book, 'Spirit of the Wolf' I find myself thinking that science, in particular biology and the study of wild animals is rather flawed. Here, in these two accounts we see two different sets of naturalists intimately studying wolves, living with them and seeing how they live, yet we see different things in each. In the Dutcher's wolf project, they felt sorrow for the omega Lakota for being at the bottom of the pack pecking order, but in 'Spirit of the Wolf' it would seem that while an omega is the diffuser of tension, they are still so important, but maybe, maybe it's the same. Perhaps Motzi in the Dutcher's study is the beta male in Shaun Ellis' study who protects the omega and keeps good meat for them. The Dutchers certainly never stuck their face in a kill like Mr. Ellis did to find out what each rank of wolf is eating. So, today I'm confused; who is right? I Know I'm not explaining very well at all what I am thinking about, so here:
Dutcher: Omega wolves are scapegoats, important members of the pack but scapegoats nonetheless. (Classic interpretation of an omega.)
Ellis: Omega wolves are not scapegoats, but are 'well paid' for their services by the betas, who save them some of the best meat from a kill, even though the omegas must still wait.
So, who's right? Or are they both right? I certainly cannot say that the Dutcher interpretation of wolf society as patriarchal sounds right, because no matter what, their wolves were still fenced in and were not hunting for themselves during their study, so the crucial element of hunting was missing significantly from their study. In Ellis' studies, we see that it is the alpha female, not the alpha male who leads the pack on hunts and decides what they hunt, so she is, in essence, the real leader, making wolf society matriarchal. Further, the Dutcher's wolves were raised by them, humans, not by other wild wolves, so the behaviour of their wolves cannot be trusted to be accurate and while Ellis' wolves were raised by him as well, he had also studied wild ones, but he had mimicked wolf behaviour by raising his wolves, soo.... I'm confused. I still have not actually read or watched the documentary of Ellis' study, I've only read the book 'Spirit of the Wolf' which he wrote with photographer Monty Sloan, which entails that the alpha female is boss and that wolf society is tremendously more complicated than most people believe.
Soo... confused. I guess I need to go watch Mr. Ellis' documentary - perhaps that will clear up some of my confusion!
I love science, and I love wolves... watching the Dutcher's excellent documentary, I remembered why I'm so head over heels in love with them and why they are so dear to my spirit (besides that one is one of my guides.) They are such tremendous movers, gliding through the forest without effort, with something in them that is just indescribable, from their large, beautiful paws to their round, curving ears and the feathery way their many coloured fur looks on their necks. Wolves are beautiful and I love them with all of my heart. It was so nice revisiting the Dutcher's documentary again and seeing these magnificent creatures once more. They are spectacular and I pity the wolves on Grouse Mountain who are stuck in a tiny little pen - that's no life for a wolf, a creature that so loves to lope - only the wide open wild is good enough for them.
I'm not sure if I will ever be able to accurately write these creatures. I'm pretty sure that no one can. Every book, every study, every documentary is regardless from a human's perspective on how these animals think... so how can we know if we are even coming close? We can't. I don't believe we ever can.
Wolves. <3
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Red Dog Blue Kat - Raw Diet Seminar
As a pet specialist, (I suppose that is my official professional title, since that is what I do for money) I often get to go learn about products which we sell. Usually, this ends up being a scenario of all of us specialists sitting on our butts while a marketing person from a given company tries to drill into our skulls the reasons for why their food is better than all the others and why we should recommend it. This sometimes, as you can imagine gets very tedious as we are told over and over again about factoids that we already know all the while blandly listening to the marketer dis all the other pet food brands (brands which are often better) whilst eating free food. It gets tedious and more than often than not, it's a struggle to keep from snorting in derision as these people try to convince you of some bull shit information that we know just isn't true or doesn't have a the slightest twinge of validity.
Red Dog Deli - or more commonly, Red Dog Blue Kat - was different.
First, they did not start by trying to convince us that raw diet was the best because we already know that raw diet is the best - it's just plain logic. Wolves and African Wildcats do NOT eat kibble. The argument that our pets may have 'evolved' to eat it in just a few decades is absolute bull shit! That's right- BULL SHIT! It takes THOUSANDS of years for evolution to take place, not a few measly decades. Eighty years ago, Fido was eating butcher scraps and Fido was a lot healthier than he is today. Eighty years ago, Missy the cat was doing her job catching and eating mice - she too, was healthier than today. That's because these animals are just plain not meant to eat kibble. It's dry. It's slathered in addictive flavours which the animal can't even digest like caramel. Kibble was created to be convenient, but the fact is, it was created so that big companies could make money off of the scraps of otherwise useless products from other industries using meat. Kibble is a money grab; nothing about it is for the health of the animal.
After Red Dog Blue Kat fed us some very good pizza from Deep Cove (three out of four of the pizzas were vegetarian - THIS is a company which has its nutrition priorities straight!) they took us on a tour of the factory, which was basically full of freezer rooms and a lot of temperature systems. It was very, very clean and sanitary and not really a place that I would want to work in, but I appreciated the lengths they took to keep things nice and cleanly, so that there was no possibility of cross contamination between the meats. (This is especially important for dogs, who are often allergic to a given type.) They even wash the walls and there are drains in every room. The entire place is sanitized every single day and veggies and meats are not mixed.
The factory was neat, but it didn't really impress me. Maybe it would have if some of the machines were actually running, but none of them were. What really impressed me, was how when we came back to the coffee room where the pizza was, there was an actual, honest-to-goodness holistic veterinarian sitting there waiting to talk to us! This lady, Dr. Julie was a real advocate of raw diet and she was ready and raring to tell us why raw is better - not just for our pets, but for all beings. I'm going to attempt to sum up what she told me, so that I might pass it on to you.
First of all, there's something known as free radicals which scavenge on living cells, aging us faster and basically making the body breakdown. To sum that - free radicals are evil. Bad. Get it? Good. The idea of these miniature things scavenging on my cells is frankly horrifying, so it's good that there's a knight in shining armour that can stop these demented little things, a knight in shining armour that you've probably heard of before in health blogs all out the wazoo - anti-oxidants. Now, I never really knew why the hell these things were important or healthy before today. Whenever somebody presented some case, like a miriad of wonder berries that contain these things, I shrugged my shoulders and thought "So? What's so special about them?" Well, what's so special? Anti-oxidants attack free radicals - thus slowing the aging process and keeping these nasty little beasties from causing problems in the body from their habit of scavenging our cells.
So that makes sense! The great news is that most food out there has anti-oxidants in it. The problem and the bad news is that once this food is cooked, such as when kibble is made or when we make a soup, those precious anti-oxidant super heroes are lost and so we lose the anti-aging advantage they would have given us. Now, keep in mind please - when I say anti-aging, I am NOT talking about skin - I'm talking about ALL OF YOU or ALL of your pet. Free radicals, when allowed to run rampant as they so often are in the modern processed diet, cause a whole host of nasty things from cancer to heart disease - probably all problems can be traced back to them. Wild animals do not have these problems because their diets are rich in raw foods containing anti-oxidants. It does not matter if you are a human, a cat, a dog or a horse or any other animal unfortunate enough to be domesticated - raw, unprocessed food is always better. Processing slaughters the anti-oxidants which so want to help us!
So, feed raw. But there's more to it than that!
Take a wolf or a lion - these are animals which everyone knows and accepts as obligate carnivores. These animals have very short intestional tracts which are extremely acidic - say, 1 or 2 molars of acidic strength, enough to melt pretty much anything. Since their digestive tracts are so amazingly acidic, they also have acidic saliva - so acidic that it's anti-bacterial which comes in handy when the animal gets a cut. By licking that cut, the animal is killing any bacteria in it, keeping themselves from getting an infected wound - amazing, isn't it? What's more amazing is that the acidic saliva also naturally kills the bacteria that causes plaque and other peridontal disease - why wild animals have such nice teeth and why they are seldom missing any! It's unnatural for any animal, including a human, to have to brush. Plain and simple.
What's also amazing is that the acid in a cat or dog's digestive tract has another super trick that it plays. For carnivores, by having a super acidic, short digestive tract, meat doesn't have a chance to spoil or ferment within the body like it does in a human's body. This means that a wild carnivore can eat bacteria ridden carrion and still be absolutely okay - whereas we humans would die from that.
So why don't cats and dogs have these remarkable super acidic properties that their wild counterparts do? It's simple - their food is low quality, processed junk. Raw meat has a higher acidity index than cooked meat and all meat in kibble as well as canned is cooked. Cooking kills anti-oxidants - I hope this is clear. Feed Fido or Missy raw and their conditions soon improve dramatically. Further, raw is especially important for cats, because they are desert animals and thus have not evolved to absorb water from drinking it - they can only get it from their prey, specifically from its blood. Because most domestic cats eat only dry food, they spend their lives in a state of clinical dehydration. Does that sound like fun?
No. I thought not.
Before going to this seminar (and in this I barely scratched the surface of what I learned - frankly I feel overwhelmed by all the new information) I was iffy about raw; mainly because I, as a modern human, am insufferably stuck in the mode of 'conveniance first' because this is what society has taught to me. Now though, I am seriously considering switching my cat to raw - and not just him. Lately I've suffered from intestional problems (diagnosed as Irritable Bowel Syndrome) and since everything I eat is processed in some way, even just by me cooking it, I feel that in the future (as in when I have my next paycheck future) I will be making a greater effort to eat raw food for myself. For instance, I liked daikon (Japanese Radish) much better raw than cooked, so I will eat that raw. I will also try to find other things that I can eat raw instead of cooked and my cat Copernicus will definitely get his first taste of Red Dog Blue Kat's raw products. (Speaking of Copernicus, he just pooped on the floor in front of his litter box, the little bastard! It's clean too!)
Here's a summery of things which raw diet can also help with your pet:
- It can eliminate hairballs and matting in the fur - healthier fur and a more acidic digestive tract. In the wild, carnivores like wolves and lynxes eat their prey fur, feathers and all - they never have any problems with all that hair because their digestive tracts are acidic enough to break it down, so they don't become impacted by it like our domestic kitties do. Also, with raw, the animal's hair is healthy, so it doesn't fray, causing matting.
- Bones - nature's tooth brush. Forget nylabone - give your dog (and cat!) a bone and see how it improves their teeth. Red Dog Blue Kat recommends chicken or turkey necks. If the pet turns its nose up at them, blanch them for thirty seconds in boiling water to make them more palatable to the animal.
- Eliminate disease and slow aging (anti-oxdidants!) Or better, feed raw to your pet to begin with and never worry about taking it to the vet again! A healthy animal should have no need to go to the vet - or a human to a doctor! In the wild, animals have no vets. They manage perfectly fine and predation/humans/serious injury are really their only enemies.
- Energy and enjoyment of food!
Remember, if you do decide to switch an animal to raw that in many cases it will be like you asking your grandmother who has always eaten cheeseburgers to suddenly eat a salad. Switching to raw takes time and patience. Unless your animal is a baby, don't expect it to happen instantly, because often times, your pet will be addicted to what it has already been eating, especially if it's been eating something especially terrible like Iams or Fancy Feast.
Please consider feeding raw if you have a pet and if you have access to it. (If not, you can always make it yourself!) Why? It's species appropriate and it's time this society started noticing that different species have different needs. Fido is not a human - he's a dog, a domesticated wolf. His DNA is 99.9% exactly the same as a wolf's. He's a WOLF and Missy the cat, as domestic as she might seem, is still an African wildcat also known as Felis libica. There's a reason that the scientific name for dog was recently changed to Canis lupis familiarus - dogs are a subspecies of wolf. Please remember that and please, if you ever get a pet or have pets - try to understand them for what they naturally are.
For more information on raw diets for pets, check out www.reddogdeli.com
I feel so much better after this seminar. I feel like in the future I will be better able to honestly recommend to my customers things which will truly help their pets. When a customer asks me what the best food for the puppy will be, I won't point to the Now or Orijin first anymore - I will point to the freezer and hopefully, their puppy, big or small, will be started off right. I want to help animals _ I don't want them to suffer for their human's societal concept of 'convenience.' Dogs are not humans and neither are cats. They should not have to suffer from our messed up ideas, especially when they have no power to protest them.
In the end, raw probably does not cost any more than the premium kibble that's on the market today. In many cases, if you make it yourself, it costs less. Hopefully, with this knowledge armed in hand, I can now go out and truly start making a difference - and you know - now I know a little bit better about how my favourite fictional carnivore, Ki works.
That's nice to know.
Red Dog Deli - or more commonly, Red Dog Blue Kat - was different.
First, they did not start by trying to convince us that raw diet was the best because we already know that raw diet is the best - it's just plain logic. Wolves and African Wildcats do NOT eat kibble. The argument that our pets may have 'evolved' to eat it in just a few decades is absolute bull shit! That's right- BULL SHIT! It takes THOUSANDS of years for evolution to take place, not a few measly decades. Eighty years ago, Fido was eating butcher scraps and Fido was a lot healthier than he is today. Eighty years ago, Missy the cat was doing her job catching and eating mice - she too, was healthier than today. That's because these animals are just plain not meant to eat kibble. It's dry. It's slathered in addictive flavours which the animal can't even digest like caramel. Kibble was created to be convenient, but the fact is, it was created so that big companies could make money off of the scraps of otherwise useless products from other industries using meat. Kibble is a money grab; nothing about it is for the health of the animal.
After Red Dog Blue Kat fed us some very good pizza from Deep Cove (three out of four of the pizzas were vegetarian - THIS is a company which has its nutrition priorities straight!) they took us on a tour of the factory, which was basically full of freezer rooms and a lot of temperature systems. It was very, very clean and sanitary and not really a place that I would want to work in, but I appreciated the lengths they took to keep things nice and cleanly, so that there was no possibility of cross contamination between the meats. (This is especially important for dogs, who are often allergic to a given type.) They even wash the walls and there are drains in every room. The entire place is sanitized every single day and veggies and meats are not mixed.
The factory was neat, but it didn't really impress me. Maybe it would have if some of the machines were actually running, but none of them were. What really impressed me, was how when we came back to the coffee room where the pizza was, there was an actual, honest-to-goodness holistic veterinarian sitting there waiting to talk to us! This lady, Dr. Julie was a real advocate of raw diet and she was ready and raring to tell us why raw is better - not just for our pets, but for all beings. I'm going to attempt to sum up what she told me, so that I might pass it on to you.
First of all, there's something known as free radicals which scavenge on living cells, aging us faster and basically making the body breakdown. To sum that - free radicals are evil. Bad. Get it? Good. The idea of these miniature things scavenging on my cells is frankly horrifying, so it's good that there's a knight in shining armour that can stop these demented little things, a knight in shining armour that you've probably heard of before in health blogs all out the wazoo - anti-oxidants. Now, I never really knew why the hell these things were important or healthy before today. Whenever somebody presented some case, like a miriad of wonder berries that contain these things, I shrugged my shoulders and thought "So? What's so special about them?" Well, what's so special? Anti-oxidants attack free radicals - thus slowing the aging process and keeping these nasty little beasties from causing problems in the body from their habit of scavenging our cells.
So that makes sense! The great news is that most food out there has anti-oxidants in it. The problem and the bad news is that once this food is cooked, such as when kibble is made or when we make a soup, those precious anti-oxidant super heroes are lost and so we lose the anti-aging advantage they would have given us. Now, keep in mind please - when I say anti-aging, I am NOT talking about skin - I'm talking about ALL OF YOU or ALL of your pet. Free radicals, when allowed to run rampant as they so often are in the modern processed diet, cause a whole host of nasty things from cancer to heart disease - probably all problems can be traced back to them. Wild animals do not have these problems because their diets are rich in raw foods containing anti-oxidants. It does not matter if you are a human, a cat, a dog or a horse or any other animal unfortunate enough to be domesticated - raw, unprocessed food is always better. Processing slaughters the anti-oxidants which so want to help us!
So, feed raw. But there's more to it than that!
Take a wolf or a lion - these are animals which everyone knows and accepts as obligate carnivores. These animals have very short intestional tracts which are extremely acidic - say, 1 or 2 molars of acidic strength, enough to melt pretty much anything. Since their digestive tracts are so amazingly acidic, they also have acidic saliva - so acidic that it's anti-bacterial which comes in handy when the animal gets a cut. By licking that cut, the animal is killing any bacteria in it, keeping themselves from getting an infected wound - amazing, isn't it? What's more amazing is that the acidic saliva also naturally kills the bacteria that causes plaque and other peridontal disease - why wild animals have such nice teeth and why they are seldom missing any! It's unnatural for any animal, including a human, to have to brush. Plain and simple.
What's also amazing is that the acid in a cat or dog's digestive tract has another super trick that it plays. For carnivores, by having a super acidic, short digestive tract, meat doesn't have a chance to spoil or ferment within the body like it does in a human's body. This means that a wild carnivore can eat bacteria ridden carrion and still be absolutely okay - whereas we humans would die from that.
So why don't cats and dogs have these remarkable super acidic properties that their wild counterparts do? It's simple - their food is low quality, processed junk. Raw meat has a higher acidity index than cooked meat and all meat in kibble as well as canned is cooked. Cooking kills anti-oxidants - I hope this is clear. Feed Fido or Missy raw and their conditions soon improve dramatically. Further, raw is especially important for cats, because they are desert animals and thus have not evolved to absorb water from drinking it - they can only get it from their prey, specifically from its blood. Because most domestic cats eat only dry food, they spend their lives in a state of clinical dehydration. Does that sound like fun?
No. I thought not.
Before going to this seminar (and in this I barely scratched the surface of what I learned - frankly I feel overwhelmed by all the new information) I was iffy about raw; mainly because I, as a modern human, am insufferably stuck in the mode of 'conveniance first' because this is what society has taught to me. Now though, I am seriously considering switching my cat to raw - and not just him. Lately I've suffered from intestional problems (diagnosed as Irritable Bowel Syndrome) and since everything I eat is processed in some way, even just by me cooking it, I feel that in the future (as in when I have my next paycheck future) I will be making a greater effort to eat raw food for myself. For instance, I liked daikon (Japanese Radish) much better raw than cooked, so I will eat that raw. I will also try to find other things that I can eat raw instead of cooked and my cat Copernicus will definitely get his first taste of Red Dog Blue Kat's raw products. (Speaking of Copernicus, he just pooped on the floor in front of his litter box, the little bastard! It's clean too!)
Here's a summery of things which raw diet can also help with your pet:
- It can eliminate hairballs and matting in the fur - healthier fur and a more acidic digestive tract. In the wild, carnivores like wolves and lynxes eat their prey fur, feathers and all - they never have any problems with all that hair because their digestive tracts are acidic enough to break it down, so they don't become impacted by it like our domestic kitties do. Also, with raw, the animal's hair is healthy, so it doesn't fray, causing matting.
- Bones - nature's tooth brush. Forget nylabone - give your dog (and cat!) a bone and see how it improves their teeth. Red Dog Blue Kat recommends chicken or turkey necks. If the pet turns its nose up at them, blanch them for thirty seconds in boiling water to make them more palatable to the animal.
- Eliminate disease and slow aging (anti-oxdidants!) Or better, feed raw to your pet to begin with and never worry about taking it to the vet again! A healthy animal should have no need to go to the vet - or a human to a doctor! In the wild, animals have no vets. They manage perfectly fine and predation/humans/serious injury are really their only enemies.
- Energy and enjoyment of food!
Remember, if you do decide to switch an animal to raw that in many cases it will be like you asking your grandmother who has always eaten cheeseburgers to suddenly eat a salad. Switching to raw takes time and patience. Unless your animal is a baby, don't expect it to happen instantly, because often times, your pet will be addicted to what it has already been eating, especially if it's been eating something especially terrible like Iams or Fancy Feast.
Please consider feeding raw if you have a pet and if you have access to it. (If not, you can always make it yourself!) Why? It's species appropriate and it's time this society started noticing that different species have different needs. Fido is not a human - he's a dog, a domesticated wolf. His DNA is 99.9% exactly the same as a wolf's. He's a WOLF and Missy the cat, as domestic as she might seem, is still an African wildcat also known as Felis libica. There's a reason that the scientific name for dog was recently changed to Canis lupis familiarus - dogs are a subspecies of wolf. Please remember that and please, if you ever get a pet or have pets - try to understand them for what they naturally are.
For more information on raw diets for pets, check out www.reddogdeli.com
I feel so much better after this seminar. I feel like in the future I will be better able to honestly recommend to my customers things which will truly help their pets. When a customer asks me what the best food for the puppy will be, I won't point to the Now or Orijin first anymore - I will point to the freezer and hopefully, their puppy, big or small, will be started off right. I want to help animals _ I don't want them to suffer for their human's societal concept of 'convenience.' Dogs are not humans and neither are cats. They should not have to suffer from our messed up ideas, especially when they have no power to protest them.
In the end, raw probably does not cost any more than the premium kibble that's on the market today. In many cases, if you make it yourself, it costs less. Hopefully, with this knowledge armed in hand, I can now go out and truly start making a difference - and you know - now I know a little bit better about how my favourite fictional carnivore, Ki works.
That's nice to know.
Saturday, June 4, 2011
The Human Species is Selfish
According to most people and probably the holy bible, being overly selfish is a form of sin - so, why is it, does modern society and several high profile, well known religions, preach that humans are better than animals, that they were created to serve us and that we are 'higher beings?'
You know what that sounds like to me?
Once upon a time, there was a boy in Austria who liked to draw swastikas on the outer wall of his school. He grew up, ran for power in a neighboring country and eventually got it. His name was Adolf Hitler. Because of him, millions of other humans were quite literally slaughtered in one of the most obscenely vile crimes ever committed against humanity, the Holocaust and one of the things Hitler preached was that there was a 'master race.'
Now, doesn't that sound familiar?
In general 'modern' humans are constantly preaching that they are better than animals, that we are a 'master species' - when in fact, despite science, I do not believe that we can truly say that we know how animals think. We simply can not. Why? Well, that's simple. Think of different species as different countries, with different beliefs and religions. A person in so-called '1st World' Florida living in a mansion cannot possibly even begin to relate to the poor, impoverished '3rd World' farmer in Tibet. In the same manner, a human cannot possibly begin to relate with a dog, because a dog's way of thinking is even further removed from the way the farmer thinks in comparison to the rich guy who lives in Florida who has five cars. Why? Because dogs and humans are entirely different things and thus, we have entirely different ways of thinking from each other.
Let's start with primary senses.
As you know, reading this, a human's primary sense is sight. We perceive our world with our eyes; in fact, in a natural situation - aka, primitive cave men circumstances - and we remain unchanged from our nomadic 'cave man' ancestors by the way, we are the same species - it would be almost impossible for a human to survive while blind without technology. Why? Think about it - while it has been proven that at the loss of one sense others will improve, a blind human still can't see that random tree coming up that his or her walking stick didn't tap or they wouldn't see the cougar sitting silently in said tree overhead of them. Mind you, sighted humans probably wouldn't even see the cougar, but the fact remains - in an environment of uneven terrain and shrubbery, where you cannot see much less smell or hear the food that you are attempting to forage for, you as a wild human would most certainly die without the help of sighted humans.
Of course, this is the main reason why humans hunt in packs. Indeed, we have an obsessive instinct to protect our frail, which may actually prove to be a detriment to the DNA of our species as a whole, because as much as I probably sound like Hitler saying this, there's very little natural selection going on in modern human society. Everybody is getting laid. It doesn't matter what you look like - there's so many damn many of us that if you're a human who really wants to reproduce, you can do it - in fact, you don't even need a mate for the act of reproduction anymore! See? No natural selection.
Okay, that was off topic - back to dogs and humans.
While humans are animals which obviously depend on their eyesight, dogs are an entirely different pot of coffee. No, really. Forget all your anthropomorphic ideas that dogs and other animals think in exactly the same way that we humans do - they don't. Think of different species as having different operating systems - humans, being so flawed, would be Windows. Animals would be something more like Macs. Oldschool, bullet proof macs. Why?
Dogs, you see, do not see the world persay. They smell it. A dog's nose is thousands of times more powerful than a human's - in fact, a wolf can smell a single drop of human sweat for up to a month. (Wolves are also a great deal smarter than Fido, but let's not get into that right now.) In any case, a dog's sense of smell and a wolf's is pretty much the same ball of wax. Dogs can detect minute amounts of drugs, food odours in luggage and even cancer, because they, unlike us, can actually smell what is happening inside a living body - how do you think a wolf can pick out a weak specimen in a herd without it showing any outward ague? Impressed yet by dogs and wolves? You should be. Now, think - if a dog is 'seeing' everything with her nose, then she is detecting probably millions of things in her world that we as humans are completely and utterly blind to. When a dog walks into the forest or even a pet food store, you might have noticed that it'll usually get pretty excited - that's because it's experiancing something of a sensory overload. While we humans walk the stagnant, dusty halls of the pet supply store, just seeing colours and symbols on bags, Fido is detecting the ingredients in every single bag. Fido is recognizing a plethora of smells he knows - and perhaps a larger plethora of smells he doesn't. He wants to find out what they all are - but will he get to? Doubtful. Fido isn't a wolf in the wild who can.
As a greater example, there is a test frequently employed by scientists to determine how self-aware an animal is. An adult human can usually always recognize them self in the mirror, because adult humans have a fully developed sense of sight and can deduct via their sense of space that that ugly bloke or handsome devil (depending on how they see themselves) staring back at them is themselves. However, human babies aren't so intelligent. In fact, they're pretty stupid until about the age of two and border collies (yes, a breed of dog) are smarter (by human standards) than most human toddlers. But, babies are babies. They aren't self aware - they have an excuse!
So what am I getting at?
The fact is, the mirror trick is obsolete when it comes to animals whose primary sense is not sight. Dogs have good eyesight - they can even see in muted colour - but when faced with a mirror, most dogs won't recognize their own reflection. Why? Are they stupid? Are we superior to them because we can?
Absolutely not!
A dog's primary sense, as before explained, is smell! Most people who have owned a dog or studied them out of curiousity can agree that dogs can recognize their own scent. In fact, most animals are scent driven and greet each other by politely breathing into each other's faces - 'sniffing noses.' They might think that another dog looks familiar, but the only way they'll know for sure is if they smell the other dog's breath. When an animal sniffs another animal's exhalations, they are smelling air that has passed through the other animal's lungs, close to its blood which is a baffling chemical stew of cells, nutrients, various biological chemicals and hormones. They can tell the other animal's age, sex, state of health and even emotional state. Further, because they are in a sense smelling another animal's blood, they're quite likely also able to smell subtle differences in its chemical make up that make it Charlie and pooch #2 Fido.
In short, you can't judge the intelligence of an animal by how it reacts to a mirror, because chances are sight isn't its primary sense and it's also probably not even paying attention because there's a bunch of freakish two-legged animals surrounding it with cameras, staring at it.
Staring is aggressive body language. If I was a dog being stared at by some stranger, I very likely would not be very interested in all in the stupid shiny thing in front of me. And the dogs who bark at their reflection? Well; remember - this is an animal that works by scent. He's probably freaked out by the strange dog that is copying him and apparently has no smell. If he could smell that strange dog, he'd relax, but he can't.
For the sake of the record, there are scent-orientated animals who are smart enough to recognize their own reflection. Dolphins navigate by echolocation, so sight is certainly not their favoured sense, seeing as they are often swimming through extremely murky water, but they can still recognize their own reflection - and so can some dogs in fact.
Yet, for the record, if you put the average joe human in a room and asked him to consciously recognize his own scent from many others, he probably wouldn't. In fact, he probably wouldn't even want to smell any of them, because we humans often seem to dislike the natural smell of our own species. It's often only through the use of various perfumes that we can consciously recognize specific humans. No human wants to smell anyone else's scent glands - armpits, breath, anus, feet - because we're as a general rule, just not scent orientated animals. Yes, there are humans with a stupendous sense of smell (for a human) but these are the exception, not the rule. Extraordinary humans like these are usually found in the food industry. Personally, I can vouch for the fact that while I am undoubtedly a strange example of humanity, I am extremely normal in the fact that my sense of smell is nigh non-existent and in fact, I don't like eating in the dark because I simply have to be able to see my food. See? I'm an animal that depends on eyesight for survival - I need to be able to see my food to make sure that nothing has contaminated it, that it's safe. It's the same reason most humans are not keen on sticking their arms down a dirty hole after a ring - because they can't see what else might be in that hole. It's survival instinct, hardwired around humanity's dependency on its eyes. Most humans become anxious if we cannot see a perceived threat to ourselves, just like the freaked out dog that barks at its reflection in confusion because it cannot smell it.
"So?" you ask - "Dogs don't have language. Animals don't talk to each other. Humans must be superior, because we can."
Such a selfish, human-like way to think - you have to put yourself outside of the human perspective! Forget that you're a human. Seriously. Do it. Mentally remove yourself from your human perceptions. Think outside the 'box,' if you will!
The statement that animals do not have language or culture is grotesquely wrong. Think about it - humans, from a sensory perspective, are rather pathetic creatures. Yes, it's true - we are. We have pretty good eyes - but we can't see in the dark, we have a great sense of touch - but pretty much all mammals have that, we have okay hearing - but we can only hear within a certain range of decibels - whereas most animals can hear a far wider scope and as a whole as a species, our sense of smell positively sucks. We're lucky if we can smell dinner cooking in another room. No seriously. We are. There's lots of humans who have no sense of smell at all, or who have lost it. This is pretty much unheard of in animals and because humans have such bad whiffers, there isn't even a common term for a human who can't smell. Blind in the nose? Deaf in the nose? What?!
As a species, a human's secondary sense for perceiving the world around them is most definitely hearing and because we have such a poor sense of smell, we depend on watching each other's body language combined with each other's vocalizations to communicate - truthfully, humans really don't make that many sounds either.
"What?!" you ask, "But what about our vast dictionaries? We make loads of sounds!"
Actually, we don't.
While different languages often have different sounds (making the learning of some near to impossible for outsiders, who will lack the ability to hear some sounds in languages that are very foreign to theirs) the truth is, in any human language there aren't many of these sounds. Each word that we make is really a conglomeration of a very small group of sounds, a group that is smaller than the 26 characters in the modern English alphabet. For example:
'K' makes a 'kuh' sound - but so does 'C' and 'Q' without a 'U.'
'S' makes a 'sss' sound - yet so can 'C!' (In fact, 'C' is a rather useless letter if you ask me.)
So, here are the actual sounds of an english speaking human:
'Ah' 'Beh' 'Deh' 'Ee' 'Fff' 'Geh' 'Hah' 'Ih' 'Jeh' 'Kuh' 'Ell' 'Mmm' 'Nnn' 'Ooo' 'Peh' 'Rrr' 'Sss' 'Teh' 'Veh' 'Wuh' 'Zzz'
Notice... some letters are missing. There's only about 21 distinct sounds made by the characters in the English Alphabet which we mix together to create words, adding in tonal inflections as the flavour to convey our points across better. Dogs only have about five distinct barks, but they also have growls and oh, yes, they can howl! So, they might seem to have less distinct sounds than us, but there's several things we humans have to take into account when judging other creatures for lingual skills:
1. Most animals can make sounds which are both below and above human decibel range of hearing.
2. Most animals can hear sounds which are both below and above human decibel range of hearing.
Personally, I think that dependency on body language in human societies versus animal societies is probably about equal and the amazing thing is, is that most humans - and animals - can read body language across special barriers - one has only to watch recent documentaries on dogs to know this fact. Further, domestic cats do this too and is it really that far of a stretch to say that wild animals do it with each other as well? Body language is fairly universal - perhaps another fact of thousands which supports evolution. Humans and all other animals share a common ancestor - somewhere way back in antiquity. But I'm not going to obsessively argue evolution right now. No. Don't even try it with me!
So, in short, animals have language. This is pretty much accepted in scientists studying cetaceans such as dolphins and whales - but I'd say that it's present in most other animal species too; after all, it's not how big your brain is that counts - it's how you use it and the typical human uses very little of its brain! What's not to say that animals don't use more eh? We can't firmly say, even with science what an animal thinks, because we are humans! We are a different species from a dog, a cat, a bison, a horse - granted, there are likely animals who do just survive off of simple instinct, like ants perhaps, but it is my theory that most animals are in fact very smart, just as smart as humans, just in a different way!
As for the question of if animals have culture? I believe that's a stupid thing to even ask. Of course they do - that's like saying that people in Britain don't have a different culture from people in a traditional Indian town. Frankly, it's racist of humans to propose that animals don't have culture - how do we know that they do not? How do we know that they do? Well, actually in some species there's some pretty good evidence for the latter; dogs and wolves are the same species after all - look how differently they live. Wolves in the desert and wolves in the forest also would have different cultures, as would a mustang opposed to a racehorse. Is animal culture rich? Hell yes it is. Want an example? Wolves mourn their dead. After her mother died, my cat Smokey searched and cried for her for days - clearly she was in mourning. When babies of any mammal species are taken from their dams they cry and the mothers get depressed - they want their baby back! Doesn't this denote intelligence? Doesn't this denote culture? An alpha female wolf will show her family what she wants them all to hunt by parading in front of them a piece of the targeted prey, like a cached leg. Hell, pretty much all pack animals use strategy when they hunt - is a leopard's ambushing spring from a tree upon an impala really that different from a human hunter loosing an arrow at a favoured buck? No!
Humans are animals, yet we like to pretend that we stand on a pinnacle above the rest of our earthly brethren, pretending that we are better. "We are the master race, because we can use tools! This is what makes us smarter than everyone else!" we say. "We have gods, so we are smarter!"
Um, really? No. We are not. Sorry human kind - but we're no more stupid or intelligent than Fido. We're a great deal more dangerous, but that does not make us better. That makes us worse - given a choice and removal from humans, dogs go feral. Natural selection takes place - they become wild things again, like the dingos of Australia. Who says dolphins don't have gods? Who says that deer don't? A human will go feral just the same as a dog if placed in 'the wild' for long enough.
So, why are humans selfish? We frequently run screw with the environment for our own 'self gain' - thus shooting ourselves in the foot. We breed incessantly and we are far worse than rabbits, because rabbits can't blow shit up with napalm, or worse, do things ala Hiroshima the nuclear way. Despite all our great technology, we humans are usually too stupid to realize until after the fact that doing certain things, like filling in wetlands or mowing down miles of pristine forests might be very bad. Also, despite our great technology, humans, an omnivorous species whose only claim to being able to eat other animals is the pepsin in our stomachs, are still eating meat, despite how unsustainable meat is. The fact is, we as omnivores-ranging-more-on-the-herbivorous side of the spectrum have a choice - we can survive perfectly fine without meat or we can eat it and wonder why things are getting so polluted. Meat eaters are selfish - we eat meat because we see it as a status symbol. 'Oh, we're better than the other herbivores, because look what we can do.' If we were better, we would recognize several facts:
1. We do not have digestive tracts that are tailored towards the digestion of meat. If we did, our intestines would be extremely short (carnivores digest things very fast), our stomachs would be far more acidic than they are (cats and dogs have a stomach acid acidity rating of 1-2 molars - the purpose of it is to fry harmful parasites and bacteria; thus true carnivores have the ability to eat carrion, aka rotten meat, which humans cannot - carrion would be extremely dangerous to us) and we do not have the proper teeth for eating meat. If we did, our canine teeth would be an inch long and the rest of our teeth would be a lot pointier! Carnivore teeth act like scissors and stabbing knives.
2. Anatomically, we are geared towards eating a chiefly herbivorous diet. In fact, of all the primates, humans probably have the shittiest teeth for meat consumption. Our teeth are like a cows - morter-and-pestle molars combined with scissoring, snipping incisors at the front. Our canines are pretty much non-existent. Further, we have a small stomach (carnivores have big stomachs for the purpose of storing meat) and a very long intestinal tract, ideal for the digestion of plant material. As well as that, our saliva has amylase in it, a digestive enzyme specifically geared for the breaking down of the carbohydrates that we depend on - carnivores, you should know, run off of fat, not carbohydrates for energy. When humans get fat we get fat, but for carnivorous animals like sled dogs, fat's the magic ingredient in their ability to run for what seems like almost forever.
Another thing that makes humans a pretty selfish lot is that we have a habit of imposing our ideas on other beings, whether they're an animal or even our own species. We have a decidedly bad superiority complex. One of the ways in which this is particularly bad, is when we go out and impose vegetarian or vegan diets upon cats and dogs - animals which are clearly carnivorous. This gets particularly disgusting when it comes to cats, because as obligate carnivores, animals which must eat meat to survive, who cannot digest anything else, this imposing of a herbivorous diet can have disasterous, life threatening consequences.
More things humans do which are selfish and vile to their fellow creature?
-Sport hunting - it's not predation, because you aren't depending on the death of that animal for food, you're killing it for fun, which is, you guessed it, murder.
-Being prey animals, we humans freak out the second one of us is killed by a predator. The only difference is, humans have guns and we're likely to blow the brains out of said predator, who was usually only looking for a meal, something we humans do ourselves, yet which we conveniently forget. No, I'm not going to get into this issue either, but the fact of the matter is, if we don't want to be eaten, we should try harder to be unappetizing. We're humans! We pretend we're the best damn thing on the planet most of the time, so why can't we be more responsible without resorting to violence? There are ways of dealing with predation without killing those predators - like using guardian dogs - we didn't become symbiotic partners with dogs just so that they could sit on our laps!
- We are grossly abusive to our symbiotic partner species, dogs, cats and horses. Every time we breed a dog with predisposed serious genetic problems, we are subtly torturing that dog's descendants, guaranteeing that at least some of them will have those serious genetic problems. First and foremost, because dogs cannot choose their own strong healthy mates via natural selection in our society, we must provide genetic selection services for them - starting with not allowing dogs with genetic problems to breed. We would do well to breed for soundness first.
If you want disturbing example, approximately 90% of today's thoroughbred racehorses in North America are direct descendants of the Canadian racehorse Northern Dancer. While it's fairly impressive for a male animal that Northern Dancer got laid so many times, the fact remains that with that many horses being descended from him, it means that there is a lot of inbreeding going on in the thoroughbred racing industry today with relatives being bred to each other, which is likely a cause of the many fatal breakdowns that are happening on the backstretch (ala Barbaro, anyone?) Most horses in domestic care do not have a choice about who they get to mate with - humans decide that for them and these animals receive no sexual education to understand what is happening to them as they would in the wild living with their herds, with the result being that when a domestic mare is covered, she usually has to be held against her will, her legs fettered while a stallion essentially rapes her. Meanwhile the stallion has no education to tell him that he's being too rough with her. In the wild, he would have that and the mare would absolutely have a choice in whether she gets covered or not - if she doesn't want it, a wild mare can quite easily send a good sharp kick to a stallion's nether regions to tell him off and he'll definitely get the point as he reels in agony! Probably more sad is that most domestic stallions never get to meet their babies - whereas their wild counterparts help their 'wives' raise their babies. (Wild mares are in fact often extremely loyal to their stallions. Horse harems are closely knit family groups.)
Compared to dogs and horses (I don't even want to venture into the vile world of how we treat livestock like cows and chickens) cats have it pretty easy in domestication. Dogs have it pretty easy too - unlike horses, they are still able to maintain natural culture of a sort under human care, living in surrogate packs quite happily with we their symbiotic partners - in return for their services, we feed, shelter and care for them. It's a sweet deal for dogs, cats and yes, horses too. Horses in captivity do somewhat get to live in herds, but they just usually don't have the culture that they would have in the wild. There's no ball kicking in the pasture, because humans gender segregate horses for the most part. Stallions are typically ill-socialized hooligans, because humans often keep them alone, without at least other male horses to play with. (This is for their own safety, but it still sucks for them.) The poor things probably feel overwhelmed whenever they meet a girl!
Anyway - cats. Cats have it pretty posh, most of the time. Why? Cats are probably the only one of these three typical symbiotic partners that decided to join humans on their own from the wild. Why did these small, easily spooked animals join us loud things? Well, cats are smart animals and they figured out that we, in contrast are extremely messy animals, thus attracting high numbers of a cat's favourite prey to our habitats - mice. Ancient Egyptians realized that their rodent problems disappeared with the little spotted wild cats roaming around, so they started trying to encourage cats to live near them and cats, who saw that we humans are perfect at attracting rodents, decided that living with us would probably be a pretty sweet deal. They were right. However, as humans become more sedentary, sometimes too lazy for dogs, will cats suffer as dogs have genetically? Hopefully not. There is hope in the cat world; some breeders of Persian cats are breeding for cats with less pushed in (bracheocephalic) faces, which means that they are breeding for healthier animals. (It is hard for bracheocephalic animals such as Persians, bull dogs and pugs to breathe and they frequently have health problems. English Bulldogs, because of their huge heads and tiny hips cannot be born naturally and must receive c-sections in order to give birth. Bulldogs are also top heavy and will drown if dropped in the water, because they are unable to hold their heads above the surface in it.)
There are many other reasons why humans are selfish, but you know what the nice thing is? It seems like we're slowly getting less selfish.
Which means there is hope - for both us, our planet and the billions of other animals living here. We can do this humans! We can save ourselves and our world!
All we have to do is be a little less selfish.
You know what that sounds like to me?
Once upon a time, there was a boy in Austria who liked to draw swastikas on the outer wall of his school. He grew up, ran for power in a neighboring country and eventually got it. His name was Adolf Hitler. Because of him, millions of other humans were quite literally slaughtered in one of the most obscenely vile crimes ever committed against humanity, the Holocaust and one of the things Hitler preached was that there was a 'master race.'
Now, doesn't that sound familiar?
In general 'modern' humans are constantly preaching that they are better than animals, that we are a 'master species' - when in fact, despite science, I do not believe that we can truly say that we know how animals think. We simply can not. Why? Well, that's simple. Think of different species as different countries, with different beliefs and religions. A person in so-called '1st World' Florida living in a mansion cannot possibly even begin to relate to the poor, impoverished '3rd World' farmer in Tibet. In the same manner, a human cannot possibly begin to relate with a dog, because a dog's way of thinking is even further removed from the way the farmer thinks in comparison to the rich guy who lives in Florida who has five cars. Why? Because dogs and humans are entirely different things and thus, we have entirely different ways of thinking from each other.
Let's start with primary senses.
As you know, reading this, a human's primary sense is sight. We perceive our world with our eyes; in fact, in a natural situation - aka, primitive cave men circumstances - and we remain unchanged from our nomadic 'cave man' ancestors by the way, we are the same species - it would be almost impossible for a human to survive while blind without technology. Why? Think about it - while it has been proven that at the loss of one sense others will improve, a blind human still can't see that random tree coming up that his or her walking stick didn't tap or they wouldn't see the cougar sitting silently in said tree overhead of them. Mind you, sighted humans probably wouldn't even see the cougar, but the fact remains - in an environment of uneven terrain and shrubbery, where you cannot see much less smell or hear the food that you are attempting to forage for, you as a wild human would most certainly die without the help of sighted humans.
Of course, this is the main reason why humans hunt in packs. Indeed, we have an obsessive instinct to protect our frail, which may actually prove to be a detriment to the DNA of our species as a whole, because as much as I probably sound like Hitler saying this, there's very little natural selection going on in modern human society. Everybody is getting laid. It doesn't matter what you look like - there's so many damn many of us that if you're a human who really wants to reproduce, you can do it - in fact, you don't even need a mate for the act of reproduction anymore! See? No natural selection.
Okay, that was off topic - back to dogs and humans.
While humans are animals which obviously depend on their eyesight, dogs are an entirely different pot of coffee. No, really. Forget all your anthropomorphic ideas that dogs and other animals think in exactly the same way that we humans do - they don't. Think of different species as having different operating systems - humans, being so flawed, would be Windows. Animals would be something more like Macs. Oldschool, bullet proof macs. Why?
Dogs, you see, do not see the world persay. They smell it. A dog's nose is thousands of times more powerful than a human's - in fact, a wolf can smell a single drop of human sweat for up to a month. (Wolves are also a great deal smarter than Fido, but let's not get into that right now.) In any case, a dog's sense of smell and a wolf's is pretty much the same ball of wax. Dogs can detect minute amounts of drugs, food odours in luggage and even cancer, because they, unlike us, can actually smell what is happening inside a living body - how do you think a wolf can pick out a weak specimen in a herd without it showing any outward ague? Impressed yet by dogs and wolves? You should be. Now, think - if a dog is 'seeing' everything with her nose, then she is detecting probably millions of things in her world that we as humans are completely and utterly blind to. When a dog walks into the forest or even a pet food store, you might have noticed that it'll usually get pretty excited - that's because it's experiancing something of a sensory overload. While we humans walk the stagnant, dusty halls of the pet supply store, just seeing colours and symbols on bags, Fido is detecting the ingredients in every single bag. Fido is recognizing a plethora of smells he knows - and perhaps a larger plethora of smells he doesn't. He wants to find out what they all are - but will he get to? Doubtful. Fido isn't a wolf in the wild who can.
As a greater example, there is a test frequently employed by scientists to determine how self-aware an animal is. An adult human can usually always recognize them self in the mirror, because adult humans have a fully developed sense of sight and can deduct via their sense of space that that ugly bloke or handsome devil (depending on how they see themselves) staring back at them is themselves. However, human babies aren't so intelligent. In fact, they're pretty stupid until about the age of two and border collies (yes, a breed of dog) are smarter (by human standards) than most human toddlers. But, babies are babies. They aren't self aware - they have an excuse!
So what am I getting at?
The fact is, the mirror trick is obsolete when it comes to animals whose primary sense is not sight. Dogs have good eyesight - they can even see in muted colour - but when faced with a mirror, most dogs won't recognize their own reflection. Why? Are they stupid? Are we superior to them because we can?
Absolutely not!
A dog's primary sense, as before explained, is smell! Most people who have owned a dog or studied them out of curiousity can agree that dogs can recognize their own scent. In fact, most animals are scent driven and greet each other by politely breathing into each other's faces - 'sniffing noses.' They might think that another dog looks familiar, but the only way they'll know for sure is if they smell the other dog's breath. When an animal sniffs another animal's exhalations, they are smelling air that has passed through the other animal's lungs, close to its blood which is a baffling chemical stew of cells, nutrients, various biological chemicals and hormones. They can tell the other animal's age, sex, state of health and even emotional state. Further, because they are in a sense smelling another animal's blood, they're quite likely also able to smell subtle differences in its chemical make up that make it Charlie and pooch #2 Fido.
In short, you can't judge the intelligence of an animal by how it reacts to a mirror, because chances are sight isn't its primary sense and it's also probably not even paying attention because there's a bunch of freakish two-legged animals surrounding it with cameras, staring at it.
Staring is aggressive body language. If I was a dog being stared at by some stranger, I very likely would not be very interested in all in the stupid shiny thing in front of me. And the dogs who bark at their reflection? Well; remember - this is an animal that works by scent. He's probably freaked out by the strange dog that is copying him and apparently has no smell. If he could smell that strange dog, he'd relax, but he can't.
For the sake of the record, there are scent-orientated animals who are smart enough to recognize their own reflection. Dolphins navigate by echolocation, so sight is certainly not their favoured sense, seeing as they are often swimming through extremely murky water, but they can still recognize their own reflection - and so can some dogs in fact.
Yet, for the record, if you put the average joe human in a room and asked him to consciously recognize his own scent from many others, he probably wouldn't. In fact, he probably wouldn't even want to smell any of them, because we humans often seem to dislike the natural smell of our own species. It's often only through the use of various perfumes that we can consciously recognize specific humans. No human wants to smell anyone else's scent glands - armpits, breath, anus, feet - because we're as a general rule, just not scent orientated animals. Yes, there are humans with a stupendous sense of smell (for a human) but these are the exception, not the rule. Extraordinary humans like these are usually found in the food industry. Personally, I can vouch for the fact that while I am undoubtedly a strange example of humanity, I am extremely normal in the fact that my sense of smell is nigh non-existent and in fact, I don't like eating in the dark because I simply have to be able to see my food. See? I'm an animal that depends on eyesight for survival - I need to be able to see my food to make sure that nothing has contaminated it, that it's safe. It's the same reason most humans are not keen on sticking their arms down a dirty hole after a ring - because they can't see what else might be in that hole. It's survival instinct, hardwired around humanity's dependency on its eyes. Most humans become anxious if we cannot see a perceived threat to ourselves, just like the freaked out dog that barks at its reflection in confusion because it cannot smell it.
"So?" you ask - "Dogs don't have language. Animals don't talk to each other. Humans must be superior, because we can."
Such a selfish, human-like way to think - you have to put yourself outside of the human perspective! Forget that you're a human. Seriously. Do it. Mentally remove yourself from your human perceptions. Think outside the 'box,' if you will!
The statement that animals do not have language or culture is grotesquely wrong. Think about it - humans, from a sensory perspective, are rather pathetic creatures. Yes, it's true - we are. We have pretty good eyes - but we can't see in the dark, we have a great sense of touch - but pretty much all mammals have that, we have okay hearing - but we can only hear within a certain range of decibels - whereas most animals can hear a far wider scope and as a whole as a species, our sense of smell positively sucks. We're lucky if we can smell dinner cooking in another room. No seriously. We are. There's lots of humans who have no sense of smell at all, or who have lost it. This is pretty much unheard of in animals and because humans have such bad whiffers, there isn't even a common term for a human who can't smell. Blind in the nose? Deaf in the nose? What?!
As a species, a human's secondary sense for perceiving the world around them is most definitely hearing and because we have such a poor sense of smell, we depend on watching each other's body language combined with each other's vocalizations to communicate - truthfully, humans really don't make that many sounds either.
"What?!" you ask, "But what about our vast dictionaries? We make loads of sounds!"
Actually, we don't.
While different languages often have different sounds (making the learning of some near to impossible for outsiders, who will lack the ability to hear some sounds in languages that are very foreign to theirs) the truth is, in any human language there aren't many of these sounds. Each word that we make is really a conglomeration of a very small group of sounds, a group that is smaller than the 26 characters in the modern English alphabet. For example:
'K' makes a 'kuh' sound - but so does 'C' and 'Q' without a 'U.'
'S' makes a 'sss' sound - yet so can 'C!' (In fact, 'C' is a rather useless letter if you ask me.)
So, here are the actual sounds of an english speaking human:
'Ah' 'Beh' 'Deh' 'Ee' 'Fff' 'Geh' 'Hah' 'Ih' 'Jeh' 'Kuh' 'Ell' 'Mmm' 'Nnn' 'Ooo' 'Peh' 'Rrr' 'Sss' 'Teh' 'Veh' 'Wuh' 'Zzz'
Notice... some letters are missing. There's only about 21 distinct sounds made by the characters in the English Alphabet which we mix together to create words, adding in tonal inflections as the flavour to convey our points across better. Dogs only have about five distinct barks, but they also have growls and oh, yes, they can howl! So, they might seem to have less distinct sounds than us, but there's several things we humans have to take into account when judging other creatures for lingual skills:
1. Most animals can make sounds which are both below and above human decibel range of hearing.
2. Most animals can hear sounds which are both below and above human decibel range of hearing.
Personally, I think that dependency on body language in human societies versus animal societies is probably about equal and the amazing thing is, is that most humans - and animals - can read body language across special barriers - one has only to watch recent documentaries on dogs to know this fact. Further, domestic cats do this too and is it really that far of a stretch to say that wild animals do it with each other as well? Body language is fairly universal - perhaps another fact of thousands which supports evolution. Humans and all other animals share a common ancestor - somewhere way back in antiquity. But I'm not going to obsessively argue evolution right now. No. Don't even try it with me!
So, in short, animals have language. This is pretty much accepted in scientists studying cetaceans such as dolphins and whales - but I'd say that it's present in most other animal species too; after all, it's not how big your brain is that counts - it's how you use it and the typical human uses very little of its brain! What's not to say that animals don't use more eh? We can't firmly say, even with science what an animal thinks, because we are humans! We are a different species from a dog, a cat, a bison, a horse - granted, there are likely animals who do just survive off of simple instinct, like ants perhaps, but it is my theory that most animals are in fact very smart, just as smart as humans, just in a different way!
As for the question of if animals have culture? I believe that's a stupid thing to even ask. Of course they do - that's like saying that people in Britain don't have a different culture from people in a traditional Indian town. Frankly, it's racist of humans to propose that animals don't have culture - how do we know that they do not? How do we know that they do? Well, actually in some species there's some pretty good evidence for the latter; dogs and wolves are the same species after all - look how differently they live. Wolves in the desert and wolves in the forest also would have different cultures, as would a mustang opposed to a racehorse. Is animal culture rich? Hell yes it is. Want an example? Wolves mourn their dead. After her mother died, my cat Smokey searched and cried for her for days - clearly she was in mourning. When babies of any mammal species are taken from their dams they cry and the mothers get depressed - they want their baby back! Doesn't this denote intelligence? Doesn't this denote culture? An alpha female wolf will show her family what she wants them all to hunt by parading in front of them a piece of the targeted prey, like a cached leg. Hell, pretty much all pack animals use strategy when they hunt - is a leopard's ambushing spring from a tree upon an impala really that different from a human hunter loosing an arrow at a favoured buck? No!
Humans are animals, yet we like to pretend that we stand on a pinnacle above the rest of our earthly brethren, pretending that we are better. "We are the master race, because we can use tools! This is what makes us smarter than everyone else!" we say. "We have gods, so we are smarter!"
Um, really? No. We are not. Sorry human kind - but we're no more stupid or intelligent than Fido. We're a great deal more dangerous, but that does not make us better. That makes us worse - given a choice and removal from humans, dogs go feral. Natural selection takes place - they become wild things again, like the dingos of Australia. Who says dolphins don't have gods? Who says that deer don't? A human will go feral just the same as a dog if placed in 'the wild' for long enough.
So, why are humans selfish? We frequently run screw with the environment for our own 'self gain' - thus shooting ourselves in the foot. We breed incessantly and we are far worse than rabbits, because rabbits can't blow shit up with napalm, or worse, do things ala Hiroshima the nuclear way. Despite all our great technology, we humans are usually too stupid to realize until after the fact that doing certain things, like filling in wetlands or mowing down miles of pristine forests might be very bad. Also, despite our great technology, humans, an omnivorous species whose only claim to being able to eat other animals is the pepsin in our stomachs, are still eating meat, despite how unsustainable meat is. The fact is, we as omnivores-ranging-more-on-the-herbivorous side of the spectrum have a choice - we can survive perfectly fine without meat or we can eat it and wonder why things are getting so polluted. Meat eaters are selfish - we eat meat because we see it as a status symbol. 'Oh, we're better than the other herbivores, because look what we can do.' If we were better, we would recognize several facts:
1. We do not have digestive tracts that are tailored towards the digestion of meat. If we did, our intestines would be extremely short (carnivores digest things very fast), our stomachs would be far more acidic than they are (cats and dogs have a stomach acid acidity rating of 1-2 molars - the purpose of it is to fry harmful parasites and bacteria; thus true carnivores have the ability to eat carrion, aka rotten meat, which humans cannot - carrion would be extremely dangerous to us) and we do not have the proper teeth for eating meat. If we did, our canine teeth would be an inch long and the rest of our teeth would be a lot pointier! Carnivore teeth act like scissors and stabbing knives.
2. Anatomically, we are geared towards eating a chiefly herbivorous diet. In fact, of all the primates, humans probably have the shittiest teeth for meat consumption. Our teeth are like a cows - morter-and-pestle molars combined with scissoring, snipping incisors at the front. Our canines are pretty much non-existent. Further, we have a small stomach (carnivores have big stomachs for the purpose of storing meat) and a very long intestinal tract, ideal for the digestion of plant material. As well as that, our saliva has amylase in it, a digestive enzyme specifically geared for the breaking down of the carbohydrates that we depend on - carnivores, you should know, run off of fat, not carbohydrates for energy. When humans get fat we get fat, but for carnivorous animals like sled dogs, fat's the magic ingredient in their ability to run for what seems like almost forever.
Another thing that makes humans a pretty selfish lot is that we have a habit of imposing our ideas on other beings, whether they're an animal or even our own species. We have a decidedly bad superiority complex. One of the ways in which this is particularly bad, is when we go out and impose vegetarian or vegan diets upon cats and dogs - animals which are clearly carnivorous. This gets particularly disgusting when it comes to cats, because as obligate carnivores, animals which must eat meat to survive, who cannot digest anything else, this imposing of a herbivorous diet can have disasterous, life threatening consequences.
More things humans do which are selfish and vile to their fellow creature?
-Sport hunting - it's not predation, because you aren't depending on the death of that animal for food, you're killing it for fun, which is, you guessed it, murder.
-Being prey animals, we humans freak out the second one of us is killed by a predator. The only difference is, humans have guns and we're likely to blow the brains out of said predator, who was usually only looking for a meal, something we humans do ourselves, yet which we conveniently forget. No, I'm not going to get into this issue either, but the fact of the matter is, if we don't want to be eaten, we should try harder to be unappetizing. We're humans! We pretend we're the best damn thing on the planet most of the time, so why can't we be more responsible without resorting to violence? There are ways of dealing with predation without killing those predators - like using guardian dogs - we didn't become symbiotic partners with dogs just so that they could sit on our laps!
- We are grossly abusive to our symbiotic partner species, dogs, cats and horses. Every time we breed a dog with predisposed serious genetic problems, we are subtly torturing that dog's descendants, guaranteeing that at least some of them will have those serious genetic problems. First and foremost, because dogs cannot choose their own strong healthy mates via natural selection in our society, we must provide genetic selection services for them - starting with not allowing dogs with genetic problems to breed. We would do well to breed for soundness first.
If you want disturbing example, approximately 90% of today's thoroughbred racehorses in North America are direct descendants of the Canadian racehorse Northern Dancer. While it's fairly impressive for a male animal that Northern Dancer got laid so many times, the fact remains that with that many horses being descended from him, it means that there is a lot of inbreeding going on in the thoroughbred racing industry today with relatives being bred to each other, which is likely a cause of the many fatal breakdowns that are happening on the backstretch (ala Barbaro, anyone?) Most horses in domestic care do not have a choice about who they get to mate with - humans decide that for them and these animals receive no sexual education to understand what is happening to them as they would in the wild living with their herds, with the result being that when a domestic mare is covered, she usually has to be held against her will, her legs fettered while a stallion essentially rapes her. Meanwhile the stallion has no education to tell him that he's being too rough with her. In the wild, he would have that and the mare would absolutely have a choice in whether she gets covered or not - if she doesn't want it, a wild mare can quite easily send a good sharp kick to a stallion's nether regions to tell him off and he'll definitely get the point as he reels in agony! Probably more sad is that most domestic stallions never get to meet their babies - whereas their wild counterparts help their 'wives' raise their babies. (Wild mares are in fact often extremely loyal to their stallions. Horse harems are closely knit family groups.)
Compared to dogs and horses (I don't even want to venture into the vile world of how we treat livestock like cows and chickens) cats have it pretty easy in domestication. Dogs have it pretty easy too - unlike horses, they are still able to maintain natural culture of a sort under human care, living in surrogate packs quite happily with we their symbiotic partners - in return for their services, we feed, shelter and care for them. It's a sweet deal for dogs, cats and yes, horses too. Horses in captivity do somewhat get to live in herds, but they just usually don't have the culture that they would have in the wild. There's no ball kicking in the pasture, because humans gender segregate horses for the most part. Stallions are typically ill-socialized hooligans, because humans often keep them alone, without at least other male horses to play with. (This is for their own safety, but it still sucks for them.) The poor things probably feel overwhelmed whenever they meet a girl!
Anyway - cats. Cats have it pretty posh, most of the time. Why? Cats are probably the only one of these three typical symbiotic partners that decided to join humans on their own from the wild. Why did these small, easily spooked animals join us loud things? Well, cats are smart animals and they figured out that we, in contrast are extremely messy animals, thus attracting high numbers of a cat's favourite prey to our habitats - mice. Ancient Egyptians realized that their rodent problems disappeared with the little spotted wild cats roaming around, so they started trying to encourage cats to live near them and cats, who saw that we humans are perfect at attracting rodents, decided that living with us would probably be a pretty sweet deal. They were right. However, as humans become more sedentary, sometimes too lazy for dogs, will cats suffer as dogs have genetically? Hopefully not. There is hope in the cat world; some breeders of Persian cats are breeding for cats with less pushed in (bracheocephalic) faces, which means that they are breeding for healthier animals. (It is hard for bracheocephalic animals such as Persians, bull dogs and pugs to breathe and they frequently have health problems. English Bulldogs, because of their huge heads and tiny hips cannot be born naturally and must receive c-sections in order to give birth. Bulldogs are also top heavy and will drown if dropped in the water, because they are unable to hold their heads above the surface in it.)
There are many other reasons why humans are selfish, but you know what the nice thing is? It seems like we're slowly getting less selfish.
Which means there is hope - for both us, our planet and the billions of other animals living here. We can do this humans! We can save ourselves and our world!
All we have to do is be a little less selfish.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
It's Biology Dear Watson
Time for some science!
Now, today in the shower, as I was washing my hair (something which occurs far less often for me than for majority of the population who seem to pretty much have a phobia of going without a shower every day - a phobia which is incredibly wasteful and unreasonable unless your job is filthy like my Dad's) I thought, not for the first time, that it really is freakin' weird that the only part of our bodies in which humans have long hair is on their skulls. Think about it. It is. Most animals have fur pretty much everywhere - my kitten Copernicus, who is a Turkish Angora, is a great example of this. He's one furry little bastard. Besides humans, there are very few animals in the world which run around mostly naked like us and most of them are domesticated dogs or Sphinx cats.
It's a fact that humans are extremely strange animals, but what I'm wondering here, is why we evolved to only have long hair on our heads. It is illogical to think that the use of clothes contributed at all to our shaggy heads, because human kind evolved in Africa, a very hot landscape where clothes aren't particularly needed except to maybe cover our nether regions. The invention of clothes probably only came when our ancestors started wandering north and realized that "oh crap, we have no fur like the animals, so we're freezing our willies off! We can't take this! We'll die if we don't do something quick! Somebody - invent clothes!" (The conversation, if there was one, probably did not go along those exact lines. Probably a bunch of our not-so-bright ancestors had to die by hypothermia before one came around and realized that it might be intelligent to think up a solution. Probably a woman; the men were all out doing manly stuff.)
Besides the vetoed theory that clothes have anything to do with it, our hair really is not particularly useful, even when it's long. I have a lot of experiance with this, because much like our cave man ancestors, I didn't have the greatest concept of hygiene as a child. (More so, I hated baths because they make me fall asleep.) The result of this of course, was that my hair tended to get greasy. Now, hair grease is something which a lot of humans seem to get. At some point, there was probably a purpose for it, but more often then not, I have experianced that hair grease is not at all useful. Not only does it make the human scalp itchy, if it gets cold, that grease is going to disable your hair's insulating properties, because it's basically sweat, which is the human body's version of coolant. When sweat dries on the skin and the temperature drops, the sweat, which was meant to keep you from overheating, suddenly becomes a double sided knife - it keeps making you feel colder, which is not at all a good thing when the mercury goes lower!
Further discouraging the point of human hair evolution is the fact that hair does almost absolutely nothing for keeping insects away from your body (like a horse's mane does,) because there's just not enough of it to protect your skin, unless you really grow it out. Furthermore, it's hard to even argue that it might be some sort of mating display thing to attract the opposite sex, because both genders have it and different cultures have it longer or shorter. Really the only way our hair would be useful, is if it was fur and insulated our entire bodies, but it doesn't.
Human hair is weird. Why do we have it? What is it's purpose? That's what I would love to know!
FACTS OF THE DAY
- Aspartame, a common sweetening agent in gum and soft drinks turns into formaldehyde at approximately 98 Degrees Fahrenheit which is the average temperature of the human body. Formaldehyde is commonly used to preserve corpses. In humans, ingesting formaldehyde can lead to vomiting, dizziness, abdominal pain and death. More disturbing, if possible, there is evidence that formaldehyde can have carcinogenic side effects - as in, this shit can cause cancer. Why is something which can turn into it in our sweets?
- Despite what most mistaken humans believe, humans are omnivores, not carnivores and besides possessing just one evolutionary trait geared towards the disgestion of meat (the pepsin in our stomachs,) humans, along with our ape relatives, aren't even members of the order Carnivora, a group which includes nearly all strictly carnivorous mammalian animals. Not even the argument that humans have canine teeth can be used, because horses, strict herbivores, often have them too. Take that meat eaters! (To be fair, I know humans need protein, but in this day and age and with our modern knowledge, it really doesn't have to come from animals. Beans in particular are a fantastic form of protein and have far less of an environmental impact than that top sirloin burger most people wish to saver!)
Sunday, December 19, 2010
360 in Life?
As some of you may know, I recently went through Capilano University's Commercial Animation program and trained to become an animator. However, despite my qualification, I have decided not to go into that field and in fact, I don't draw art for other people anymore unless I should so choose to. I just don't like it. When I draw something, I'm putting part of my soul onto paper. I can't sell my soul. It hurts, which is why I do not plan on going into the animation industry. Instead, I'm considering going back to where I started, the first dream I ever had, even before I became a writer and which for years, was my life's plan - until high school came and I chickened out because of terrible math skills.
My dream as a kid was to become a wildlife biologist and study wolves. As a kid, I likely watched more National Geographic and Kratt's Kreatures than I did cartoons, despite my aptitude for art and animation. I had and still do have, a passion for large predators. In late elementary school, I became a Chief Scout under the guidance of Scouter Dean Trumbley, a biologist who taught me pretty much everything I know about survival. Because of this man, this god of the forest, I learned to track, orienteer, avoid bears and I gained an understanding for survival in the wild. I loved it. I can rant for hours about how my life in 1st Pleasant Valley scout troop was perfection and to me because it was. It's very likely that those two years in 1st PV will always be the best ones of my life, just because I had such amazing people to work with. We were the perfect team. In fact, in Scouting competitions, my troop never lost. Whenever I put my uniform on, just in remembrance of those beautiful days, I feel like I'm touching something sacred or brushing a very happy past. I can still recall our decisive shout of "One, two, three - FIRST PV!" at Scoutvivor, which we won by a landslide. Running through the brush at Dean's heels enroute to the canoe lake and seeing Labrador Tea growing was one of the greatest things I have ever done. I felt powerful. I wonder if we all did.
In recollection, I think what killed my dream of being a biologist was simple stupid fear. I took an easy path, despite knowing somewhat that it probably wouldn't work. I remember sitting in animation, first day and wondering what the hell I was getting myself into. I have never told anyone this. It was not a waste though; I would not be the artist that I am now without animation. I grew in leaps and bounds creatively thanks to it and I will always be forever grateful to Capilano. It's the best animation school in North America. (And that's not an entirely bias opinion either.)
What was I afraid of? Well, here's the truth; the dead, true truth. I'm extremely stupid when it comes to math. Ask me to do a complicated math problem and I feel like I'm drowning in impossibly deep water with no surface in sight. Even if I do do the equation right, my answers often turn out to be wrong, no matter how hard I try. There has been many a math multiple choice quiz where I have simply picked at random the answers, because I had no idea how to actually come to them despite all training and assistance. Math leaves me helpless, foundering for salvation which is not there - and for some daft, definitely retarded reason, advanced math skills are required for a person to become a biologist.
I will never understand why educational systems insist so on having math in school lessons past Grade 8; since leaving high school, I have never done any math more complicated than basic elementary Grade 5 level. It is clear to me at least, that any math above Grade 8 is torturing children for no reason. I think math has its place. I think it should stay in the curriculum, but only as an elective past Grade 8. I will also never understand what math has to do with biology - science. Today, a marine biologist who had been a professor for 40 years at UBC came and told me that he has never used math at all in his studies. He said it was a shame I gave up my dream of becoming a biologist like him; he actually said I would have been good.
So, what I'm wondering now is if I should turn around and go back to my original dream. I probably can't make money off of my art and creative writing is still a hobby more than an occupation. Shall I dip my feet back into the water of Canada's educational system and get my proverbial paws wet again? At this point I don't know. The challenge of how I left math in 10th grade remains an obstacle as steep as Mt. Everest between me and this potential goal. I am stupid at math. It frustrates me and hurts me. I have rarely ever been happy doing math and have more often then not gotten extremely angry doing it, just because of my own helplessness. This is the truth, yet on the other hand, I know that my spirit is pointing me back to the wild. Wildlife biology may just be what I was always meant for, if the little girl watching National Geographic and the Chief Scout have anything to say about it. I excel at retaining knowledge pertaining to animals (my mother called my mind a 'sponge' for information) and as a scout, I was Patrol Leader, the alpha female of the pack. Biology, the science of living things, impregnates my writing. In the wilderness I have charisma. It is the only place where I ever stop being the bumbling omega kid with the mild speech impediment.
Shall I go back to where I started from? The road would be long and full of danger, both mathematical and otherwise. I might actually have to learn how to intelligently communicate, which I'm not altogether sure I can do. When I speak, words often get lost on the way to my mouth unless my brain is absolutely, passionately into what I am trying to say. I think far faster than I can speak.
I don't yet know what to do, but I can feel my future reforming itself. There is hope. I am only twenty and if there is anything I may be certain of in this life, is that I can hear the Call of the Wild. Perhaps not studying wolves, but any big predator, any interesting beast would do. I think I could do that. I think I could work to save the beasts that I love, which have been so prosecuted by our peculiar kind.
Just some thoughts.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
