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Thursday, October 20, 2011

Trouble for a Mail-Order Dog

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Noble Beasts

Thursday, Oct 20, 2011 8:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time

The trouble with a mail-order dog

I'm a dog lover but would I buy one over the Internet? Maybe

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Anybody who knows me knows that I’m a fool for a dog. Not every dog that ever lived; rodent-size yappers leave me cold. However, to my wife and me, a house without tooth-marked chair legs and tumbleweeds of hair in the corners barely qualifies as a home.

That pungent odor that makes fastidious visitors wrinkle their noses on rainy days? That’s the smell of unconditional love.

Some years back, I phoned my veterinarian pal Randy about a newspaper article reporting that academic psychologists had decided that dogs feel emotions. I asked if he that found newsworthy. Never one to mince words, he said “A [bleeping] dog is emotions with a nose.”

Google “dogs greeting soldiers” and watch a few online videos of deliriously happy animals greeting their masters returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Anybody who remains dry-eyed must never have experienced canine devotion.

Almost as puzzling as dog haters are people who keep pets but have no earthly idea how the animals think and feel. Cesar Milan has made a handsome living off dog owners whose cluelessness makes “The Dog Whisperer” one of the funniest things on TV.

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Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com. More Gene Lyons

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Ideas for Defraying High Veterinary Costs for Pets

TRAVELS WITH MY DOG

OBSERVATIONS ON THE GLOBAL SCENE


Ideas for Defraying High Veterinary Costs for Pets

Posted by Raja on October 3rd, 2011 — Posted in Health

Tags: , , ,

Working hard looking for answers.

We promised we would research what pet owners can do in case of high costs and low funds for veterinary care. There is no magic solution, we discover. BUT there are lots of options and you must persist and follow through.

Small Charities: There are hundreds of small charities that offer grants for pet owners. If your pet is a pure breed dog or a service dog, there are charities associated with those specific categories and online research reveals your options pretty easily. But bear in mind, charities are not bottomless. Apply at the end of the fiscal year and you are scraping bottom. And applications take time.

Charitable Vets: Sometimes vets can discount care and even trade care for work such as cleaning facilities, walking dogs or doing painting and repairs. Do not feel shy to ask the primary vet in a businesslike and professional way. We keep in mind that each veterinary office is, at root, a business and vets need to pay lots of bills to keep the doors open; to negotiate work for care is not a right, but a wonderful blessing when it happens. Not all vets have the wiggle room to commit to care for work structures. If you get lucky, please follow through on all commitments so this kind of good faith can continue between some vets and some patients. If you have been seeing the same vet for years, the relationship should be well enough established that your vet can meet your request at some level.

Animal Shelters are always assisted by charitable vets. Your local shelter’s administrator may share the list. Most communities have several local shelters, civic and private.

Veterinary Schools: Some veterinary schools offer discounted care. Your pet’s care is always overseen by a supervisor who is an experienced vet. Your pet is not a lab animal, but a true patient in these situations. To find out if a veterinary college is near you, use an online search engine looking up veterinary programs by state. Contact information is often at the bottom of the home page. Call the program’s main number; ask to be connected to the specialist who can tell you about discounted veterinary care by supervised learners. If this situation works out for you, remember you are still the consumer and you still have rights and agency regarding your pet’s care. Assist the program by bringing copies of all previous medical records and list of current meds.

Clinical Trials: Eligible pets with a variety of conditions can participate in Clinical Drug and Treatment Trials, especially when existing treatment has been ineffective. The ACI, Animal Clinical Investigation, LLC in Washington, DC at http://www.animalci.com/about is a good resource to investigate opportunities.

Meds: If your pet’s prescriptions are too expensive, ask your vet to consider another manufacturer or a generic. You may also look on the box, read the name of the manufacturer, search engine the main office, and call to ask to whom you should speak to see if there are any donated meds for hardship cases. It never hurts to ask and veterinary medicine manufacturers indeed do donate thousands of prescriptions yearly for free. The skill here is to keep asking until you reach the administrator who can handle your request. Do not accept “no” from the receptionist ever!

Loans: Yes, your bank can issue small loans for veterinary care. Loans of 10,000 and under are not too difficult to negotiate if you have any collateral or credit at all. Getting a grant is much nicer, but getting a loan happens much more easily, and sometimes you do not have time to wait.

Save up: If your vet warns you that cataracts or kidney stones or liver trouble are on the horizon, now is the time to begin to scrimp and set cash aside. Every vet visit is an opportunity to hear the early warning and plan.

This post was not as cheerful as I hoped it would be. Our research reveals that being professional, proactive and persistent will help in your quest for easement of high vet costs.

Here’s wishing all of you health and happiness every day!

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

How did the dog become our master?

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A year ago, my wife and I bought a dog for our ten-year-old daughter, Olivia. We had tried to fob her off with fish, which died, and with a singing blue parakeet, which she named Skyler, but a Havanese puppy was what she wanted, and all she wanted. With the diligence of a renegade candidate pushing for a political post, she set about organizing a campaign: quietly mustering pro-dog friends as a pressure group; introducing persuasive literature (John Grogan’s “Marley & Me”); demonstrating reliability with bird care.

I was so ignorant about dogs that I thought what she wanted must be a Javanese, a little Indonesian dog, not a Havanese, named for the city in Cuba. When we discovered, with a pang, the long Google histories that she left on my wife’s computer—havanese puppies/havanese care/how to find a havanese/havanese, convincing your parints—I assumed she was misspelling the name. But in fact it was a Havanese she wanted, a small, sturdy breed that, in the past decade, has become a mainstay of New York apartment life. (It was recognized as a breed by the American Kennel Club only in the mid-nineties.) Shrewd enough to know that she would never get us out of the city to an approved breeder, she quietly decided that she could live with a Manhattan pet-store “puppy mill” dog if she could check its eyes for signs of illness and its temperament for symptoms of sweetness. Finally, she backed us into a nice pet store on Lexington Avenue and showed us a tiny bundle of caramel-colored fur with a comical black mask. “That’s my dog,” she said simply.

My wife and I looked at each other with a wild surmise: the moment parents become parints, creatures beyond convincing who exist to be convinced. When it came to dogs, we shared a distaste that touched the fringe of disgust and flirted with the edge of phobia. I was bitten by a nasty German-shepherd guard dog when I was about eight—not a terrible bite but traumatic all the same—and it led me ever after to cross streets and jump nervously at the sight of any of its kind. My wife’s objections were narrowly aesthetic: the smells, the slobber, the shit. We both disliked dog owners in their dog-owning character: the empty laughter as the dog jumped up on you; the relentless apologies for the dog’s bad behavior, along with the smiling assurance that it was all actually rather cute. Though I could read, and even blurb, friends’ books on dogs, I felt about them as if the same friends had written books on polar exploration: I could grasp it as a subject worthy of extended poetic description, but it was not a thing I had any plans to pursue myself. “Dogs are failed humans,” a witty friend said, and I agreed.

We were, however, doomed, and knew it. The constitution of parents and children may, like the British one, be unwritten, but, as the Brits point out, that doesn’t make it less enforceable or authoritative. The unwritten compact that governs family life says somewhere that children who have waited long enough for a dog and want one badly enough have a right to have one. I felt as the Queen must at meeting an unpleasant Socialist Prime Minister: it isn’t what you wanted, but it’s your constitutional duty to welcome, and pretend.

The pet-store people packed up the dog, a female, in a little crate and Olivia excitedly considered names. Willow? Daisy? Or maybe Honey? “Why not call her Butterscotch?” I suggested, prompted by a dim memory of one of those Dan Jenkins football novels from the seventies, where the running-back hero always uses that word when referring to the hair color of his leggy Texas girlfriends. Olivia nodded violently. Yes! That was her name. Butterscotch.

We took her home and put her in the back storage room to sleep. Tiny thing, we thought. Enormous eyes. My wife and I were terrified that it would be a repeat of the first year with a baby, up all night. But she was good. She slept right through the first night, and all subsequent nights, waiting in the morning for you past the point that a dog could decently be expected to wait, greeting you with a worried look, then racing across the apartment to her “papers”—the pads that you put out for a dog to pee and shit on. Her front legs were shorter than her rear ones, putting a distinctive hop in her stride. (“Breed trait,” Olivia said, knowingly.)

All the creature wanted was to please. Unlike a child, who pleases in spite of herself, Butterscotch wanted to know what she could do to make you happy, if only you kept her fed and let her play. She had none of the imperiousness of a human infant. A child starts walking away as soon as she starts to walk—on the way out, from the very first day. What makes kids so lovable is the tension between their helplessness and their drive to deny it. Butterscotch, though, was a born courtesan. She learned the tricks Olivia taught her with startling ease: sitting and rolling over and lying down and standing and shaking hands (or paws) and jumping over stacks of unsold books. The terms of the tricks were apparent: she did them for treats. But, if it was a basic bargain, she employed it with an avidity that made it the most touching thing I have seen. When a plate of steak appeared at the end of dinner, she would race through her repertory of stunts and then offer a paw to shake. Just tell me what you want, and I’ll do it!

She was a bit like one of Al Capp’s Shmoos, in “Li’l Abner,” designed to please people at any cost. (People who don’t like Havanese find them too eager to please, and lacking in proper doggie dignity and reserve.) The key to dogginess, I saw, is that, though dogs are pure creatures of sensation, they are also capable of shrewd short-term plans. Dogs don’t live, like mystics, in the moment; dogs live in the minute. They live in and for the immediate short-term exchange: tricks for food, kisses for a walk. When Butterscotch saw me come home with bags from the grocery store, she would leap with joy as her memory told her that something good was about to happen, just as she had learned that a cloud-nexus of making phone calls and getting the leash and taking elevators produced a chance to play with Lily and Cuba, the two Havanese who live upstairs. But she couldn’t grasp exactly how these chains of events work: some days when she heard the name “Lily” she rushed to the door, sometimes to her leash, sometimes to the elevator, and sometimes to the door on our floor that corresponds to the door on the eighth floor where Lily lives.

But she had another side, too. At the end of a long walk, or a prance around the block, she would come in with her usual happy hop, and then, let off her leash, she would growl and hiss and make Ewok-like noises that we never otherwise heard from her; it was a little scary at first, like the moment in “Gremlins” when the cute thing becomes a wild, toothy one. Then she would race madly from one end of the hall to the other, bang her head, and turn around and race back, still spitting and snorting and mumbling guttural consonants to herself, like a mad German monarch. Sometimes she would climax this rampage by pulling up hard and showing her canines and directing two sharp angry barks at Olivia, her owner, daring her to do something about it. Then, just as abruptly, Butterscotch would stop, sink to the floor, and once again become a sweet, smiling companion, trotting loyally behind whoever got up first. The wolf was out; and then was tucked away in a heart-drawer of prudence. This behavior, Olivia assured us, is a Havanese breed trait, called “run-like-hell,” though “Call of the Wild” might be a better name. (Olivia spent hours on the Havanese forum, a worldwide chat board composed mostly of older women who call themselves the small dogs’ “mommies,” and share a tone of slightly addled coziness, which Olivia expertly imitated. Being a dog owner pleased her almost more than owning a dog.)

But what could account for that odd double nature, that compelling sweetness and implicit wildness? I began to read as widely as I could about this strange, dear thing that I had so long been frightened of.

Darwinism begins with dogs. In the opening pages of “On the Origin of Species,” Darwin describes the way breeders can turn big dogs into small ones, through selective breeding, and he insists that all dogs descend from wolves. This was proof of the immense amount of inherited variation, and of the ability of inheritance, blended and directed, to take new directions. “Who will believe that animals closely resembling the Italian greyhound, the bloodhound, the bull-dog or Blenheim spaniel, etc.—so unlike all wild Canidae—ever existed freely in a state of nature?” Darwin wrote. Out of one, many.

Ever since, what we think Darwinism says has been structured in part by what we think it says about dogs. Darwin’s instinct was, as usual, right. Dogs do descend directly from wolves; the two species can still breed with one another (producing many scary-looking new back breeds). The vexed issue is how long ago they parted ways, and why. The biological evidence and the archeological evidence are at war: DNA analysis points to a very remote break between wolves and dogs, certainly no later than a hundred thousand years ago, while the earliest unequivocal archeological evidence for domesticated dogs dates to just fifteen thousand years ago or so.

One haunting scrap of evidence is a grave site in Israel, twelve thousand years old, where what is undoubtedly a dog is embraced in death by what is undoubtedly a woman. It suggests that the dog, completely doglike—smaller cuspids and shorter muzzle—was already the object of human affection at the dawn of the age of agriculture. The fullness of this early relation suggests the classic story of domestication, that of the master man and the willing dog. The historian of science Edmund Russell summarizes this story in his new book, “Evolutionary History”: “Some brave soul burrowed into a wolf den, captured cubs, brought the cubs back to camp, and trained them to hunt by command.” Before long, “people realized that tame wolves (dogs) could perform other tasks too. . . . Breeders manufactured each variety by imagining the traits required, picking males and females with those traits, and mating them.” If you needed to rid your camp of badgers, you bred one long, thin dog to another until you had a dachshund, which could go down a badger hole. The problem with this view, Russell explains, is that it implies a level of far-sightedness on the part of the first breeders that defies all evolutionary experience: “Wolves do not obey human commands, and it is hard to imagine that people persisted in raising dangerous animals for uncertain benefits far in the future.” To see a Butterscotch in a wolf would have required magical foresight, as if our Paleolithic fathers had started breeding leaping mice in the hope that they would someday fly.

And so countering this view comes a new view of dog history, more in keeping with our own ostentatiously less man-centered world view. Dogs, we are now told, by a sequence of scientists and speculators—beginning with the biologists Raymond and Lorna Coppinger, in their 2001 masterwork, “Dogs”—domesticated themselves. They chose us. A marginally calmer canid came close to the circle of human warmth—and, more important, human refuse—and was tolerated by the humans inside: let him eat the garbage. Then this scavenging wolf mated with another calm wolf, and soon a family of calmer wolves proliferated just outside the firelight. It wasn’t cub-snatching on the part of humans, but breaking and entering on the part of wolves, that gave us dogs. “Hey, you be ferocious and eat them when you can catch them,” the proto-dogs said, in evolutionary effect, to their wolf siblings. “We’ll just do what they like and have them feed us. Dignity? It’s a small price to pay for free food. Check with you in ten thousand years and we’ll see who’s had more kids.” (Estimated planetary dog population: one billion. Estimated planetary wild wolf population: three hundred thousand.)

The dog maven Mark Derr, in his forthcoming book “How the Dog Became the Dog,” offers a particularly ambitious and detailed version of how the wandering wolf became the drifting dog. He adds to the Coppingers’ story many epics and epicycles, including a central role for Neanderthal dog-lovers. Though Derr’s book, given the fragmentary nature of the evidence, is sometimes a little fantastical, his motive, only half-disclosed, is touching: Derr isn’t just a dog fancier, one realizes, but a kind of dog nationalist, a dog jingoist. He believes that what was an alliance of equals has, in very recent centuries, been debased to produce Stepin Fetchit dogs, like Butterscotch, conscripted into cuteness. Dogs began as allies, not pets, and friends, not dependents.

At a minimum, the theory of the drifting dog can point to some living proof, though not of a kind likely to bring joy to the dog-dignifiers. As the British anthrozoologist John Bradshaw points out in his new book, “Dog Sense,” even now most dogs drift—not as equals or allies but as waifs. In Third World towns, “village dogs” hang around, ownerless, eating garbage, fending for themselves, and getting beaten off only when they become nuisances. (There’s a reason that it’s called a dog’s life.) The usual condition of a dog is to be a pigeon.

The catch is that, from an evolutionary point of view, these village dogs are already dogs. They illuminate the problem. Since the domestication of the dog predates agriculture, dogs couldn’t have wandered into settlements; there were no settlements. They couldn’t have wandered with hunter-gatherers, because other wolf packs would have marked and owned the next territory. There just doesn’t seem to have been enough time for the slow development from wandering wolf to drifting proto-dog without the single decisive intervention of someone to nudge the wolf toward dogdom. “The scenario of self-domestication is very hard to envision if people were still wandering seminomadically, and the evidence says they were,” the anthropologist Pat Shipman says firmly in her book “The Animal Connection: A New Perspective on What Makes Us Human.” Anyway, why didn’t hyenas and foxes, which have been around for just as long, discover the same advantage in hanging close to people as wolves did?

One explanation, favored by Bradshaw, supposes a classic Darwinian mutation, a full-fledged “sport” of nature. At some point, a mutant wolf appeared, by chance, which was not just marginally tamer but far more biddable than any other creature. This sounds odd, but, as Bradshaw points out, dogs are odd, essentially unique—the only animal on earth that needs no taming to live with people while still happily breeding with its own. The ability of dogs to make a life with us isn’t a product of their being man-bred; it was the change that let men breed them.

More is at stake here than a speculation about the history of one pet species. If the new story is more or less right, and dogs chose to become dogs (meaning only that the tamer, man-friendly wolves produced more cubs than their wilder, man-hating cousins), then the line between artificial and natural selection seems far less solid, and the role of man at the center less fixed. Indeed, Russell suggests that even our distinct breeds may be more drifts than decisions: “Unconscious selection probably played a more important role than methodical selection because it was simpler and brought benefits in the present. . . . Keeping the dogs best at a certain task in each generation would have steadily enhanced the desired traits.” There may be a providence in the fall of a sparrow; but there is Darwinian contingency even in the hop of the Havanese.

What a dog owner, with the full authority of fourteen months of dog, suggests might be missing from these accounts is something simple: people love pets. Bradshaw, though he likes the drifting-dog theory, observes that we needn’t justify the existence of pet dogs in our early history by arguments about their value as food or tools. The norm even in the most “primitive” hunter-gatherer societies is to take a pet even though—as with the dingo pups that the Aborigines take in Australia—it always goes “bad” as an adult, and is of no help in any task at all. (The dingoes are feral descendants of domesticated Asian dogs, with their social genes somehow wrenched awry.) For that matter, people do live with modern wolves—presumably made more paranoid by millennia of persecution—even now. As Bradshaw writes, “Humans will keep puppies purely for their cuteness.” The most useful role a pet may play is to be there for the petting. The way dogs are used now might be the way we use dogs.

Another strange and haunting scrap of evidence about early dog and man is in the Chauvet cave, in southern France: a set of twinned footprints, twenty-six thousand years old, of an eight-year-old child walking side by side, deep into the cave, with what is evidently some kind of hound—a small wolf or a large dog. It may turn out that the tracks come from different times (though their paired strides seem well matched). But for the moment the evidence seems to show that the first dog in all the record was there as the companion of a small boy.

Or girl? Olivias have always wanted Butterscotches. The willing wolf may have wandered into the circle beyond the firelight, but the dog may well have first emerged on the safer side of the fire as the dream companion of a child.

The range of evolutionary just-so stories and speculations is itself proof of the way dogs have burrowed into our imaginations. Half the pleasure of having a dog, I could see, was storytelling about the dog: she was a screen on which we could all project a private preoccupation. In addition to the real dog, each child had a pretend version, a daemon dog, to speak to and about. Luke, our sixteen-year-old, imagined Butterscotch as an elderly, wise woman from the Deep South. “Lez not point the finger, childun,” he would have her say when she did something naughty. Olivia had her as a hyper-intense three-year-old, full of beans and naïveté. “Oh, and then they took me to the Park, and then we had little scraps of steak, and, oh, Skyler—it was the best day ever,” she would report the dog saying to the bird, with the breathlessness of a small child. Even the grownups had a fictive dog who lived alongside the real one: my wife’s dog was a year-old baby she had loved and missed (she especially loved the early-morning off-leash hours in Central Park, when the dawn belongs to charging dogs and coffee-sipping owners); mine was a genial companion who enjoyed long walks and listening to extended stretches of tentatively composed prose. Once, I was playing recordings of Erroll Garner on piano, that bright, bouncing, syncopated plaintive jazz sound, and Olivia said, “That’s the music Butterscotch hears in her head all day.”

What music does a dog hear in her head all day? Our dog was so much part of the family that we took human feelings and thoughts for granted and then would suddenly be reminded that she experienced the world very differently. Once, we saw her standing at the top of the steps leading to the sunken living room of our apartment. She began to whine and, as she rarely did, to bark—stepping forward to intimidate some creature we couldn’t see, then fearfully stepping back. We were sure from the intensity of her barking that there must be a rodent down by the baseboard that the brave little dog had spotted. Finally, one of us noticed that I had thrown a dark shirt over the back of the white sofa; I picked it up and came toward her with it. She whimpered and then began to staunchly defy her fear by barking again. That was it! She was terrified of a piece of empty brown material. When we tried the experiment again, she reacted again—not so strongly, but still.

So, what music? There is a new literature of dog psychology, to go along with and complement that on dog history. There are accounts of bad dogs cured, like “Bad Dog: A Love Story,” by Martin Kihn; of good dogs loved, as in Jill Abramson’s “The Puppy Diaries”; of strange dogs made whole and wild dogs made docile; of love lives altered by loving dogs, as in Justine van der Leun’s “Marcus of Umbria: What an Italian Dog Taught an American Girl About Love.” The most scientific-minded of the new crop is Alexandra Horowitz’s well-received “Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know.” (The title comes, winningly, from a fine Groucho joke.) Horowitz, a former fact checker in these halls, has gone on to become a professor of psychology at Barnard, and she’s written a terrifically intelligent and readable book, a study of the cognition of those who don’t quite have it. She details the dog’s sensorium. Dogs have a wildly fine nose for scent: we can detect molecules in parts in the million, dogs in parts in the billion. She explains why they sniff each other’s rear—there’s an anal gland peculiar to dogs, its secretions as different each from each as a voice—and why that behavior remains mysterious: dogs don’t seem to recognize the distinct smell of other dogs and always return to sniff again; yet no dog likes having it done to him.

On either side of the scientific dog writer, Horowitz or Bradshaw, one senses the phantoms of two alpha writers: Cesar Millan, television’s “dog whisperer,” and John Grogan, the “Marley & Me” memoirist—the pseudo-science of the dog as pack animal, on the one hand, and the sentimental fiction of the all-sympathetic dog, on the other. Horowitz tries to disabuse us dog owners of the Millanesque notion that dogs are really pack creatures looking for an alpha hound to submit to. Dogs, she explains, are domesticated animals, and to treat them as though they were still in a pack rather than long adapted to a subservient role in a human family is as absurd as treating a child as though it were “really” still a primate living in a tree.

Above all, Horowitz details the dog’s special kind of intelligence. When other intelligent animals are presented with a deduction or “object permanence” problem—a ball vanishes into one of two boxes; which box did it go into?—most of them solve the problem by watching where the ball goes. The dog solves the problem by watching where his owner looks. Dogs are hypersensitive to even the slightest favoring actions of the owner, and will cheerily search for the treat in the box the owner seems to favor even if they have seen the treat go into the other. This was the ancestral bet that dogs made thousands of years ago: give up trying to prey on the prey; try pleasing the people and let them get the prey. Dogs are the only creatures that have learned to gaze directly at people as people gaze at one another, and their connection with us is an essential and enduring one.

Yet Horowitz recognizes, too, the threat of the overly humanized view of the dog. She loves dogs in general—and her own mongrel hound, Finnegan, in particular—but throughout the book are rueful hints, perhaps partly inadvertent, that what the science shows is that the entire dog-man relation is essentially a scam, run by the dogs. Certainly, the qualities inherent in breeds—nobility, haughtiness, solidity, even the smiling happiness of the Havanese—are tricks of our mind, where we project primate expressions of inner mood into canine masks. The Havanese isn’t happy and the Shih Tzu isn’t angry and the bulldog isn’t especially stolid or stubborn; they are just stuck with the faces, smiling or snarling, we’ve pinned on them through breeding. And the virtues we credit them with—whether the big ones of bravery, loyalty, and love or the smaller ones of happiness, honesty, and guilt—are just as illusory. “Maxie looked so guilty when I found her chewing the treat box that it was just hilarious,” a “mom” will write on the Havanese forum—but these are illusions, projected onto creatures whose repertory of consciousness is very much smaller. Loyalty, longing, and even grief are, the evidence suggests, mere mimic emotions projected into two far simpler ones that dogs actually possess: adherence to the food-giver and anxiety about the unfamiliar.

We’ve all heard the accounts of dogs leaping to the rescue, pulling children from the water when the ice cracks, and so on, but Horowitz points out that, in staged situations of crisis, dogs don’t leap to the rescue or even try to get help. If a bookcase is made to fall (harmlessly, but they don’t know that) on their owner, they mostly just stand there, helpless and confused. The dog may bark when it sees its owner in distress, and the barking may summon help; the dog stays near its family, even when frightened, and that may be useful. But the dog has no particular plan or purpose, much less resolution or courage. This doesn’t mean that the recorded rescues haven’t happened; it’s just that the many more moments when the dog watches its owner slip beneath the ice don’t get recorded. The dog will bark at a burglar; but the dog will also bark at a shirt.

Maybe, though, Horowitz and Bradshaw are too quick to accept the notion that the dog is merely a creature of limited appetite and reinforced instinct. Not so many years ago, after all, people in white lab coats were saying exactly the same things abut human babies—that they were half blind, creatures of mere reflex and associative training, on whom their dottle-brained moms were projecting all kinds of cognition that they couldn’t actually process. Now psychologists tell us that babies are intellectually rich and curious and hypothesis-forming and goal-directed. One wonders if something similar isn’t about to happen with pets. The experts, Bradshaw especially, tell us that Butterscotch sits by the door all afternoon because she has been unconsciously trained to associate Olivia’s after-school homecoming with the delivery of treats. But what would be so different if we said that she sits by the door because she is waiting patiently for Olivia, has a keen inner sense of what time she’ll be home, and misses her because they play together and enjoy each other’s company, which, of course, includes the pleasures of good food? This is the same description, covering exactly the same behavior, only the first account puts the act in terms of mechanical reflexes and the other in terms of desires and hopes and affections. Our preference for the former kind of language may look as strange to our descendants, and to Butterscotch’s, as it would if we applied it to a child. (The language of behaviorism and instinct can be applied to anything, after all: we’re not really falling in love; we’re just anticipating sexual pleasure leading to a prudent genetic mix.)

But, if the reductive argument seems to cheat dogs of their true feelings, the opposite tendency, which credits dogs with feelings almost identical to those of humans and with making the same claims on our moral conscience, is equally unconvincing. In the forthcoming “Loving Animals: Toward a New Animal Advocacy,” Kathy Rudy, who teaches ethics at Duke, makes the case for dog equality just as strongly as Derr does in his more narrowly evolution-minded book. Rudy believes that dogs have been as oppressed and colonized as Third World peoples have, and that what they need is not empathy but liberation. She has a confused notion of something that she calls “capitalism,” and which is somehow held uniquely responsible for the oppression of animals, including dogs. Of course, only advanced capitalist societies have started movements for animal rights; precapitalist societies were far crueller to animals, as are non-capitalist modern ones. (Consider the state of zoos and animals in the Eastern bloc or in China.) But her love for dogs is evident throughout. She tells us that “it would not be an overstatement to say that most of the important and successful relationships I’ve had in my life have been with nonhuman animals,” and she makes a passionate case for treating animals as equals in rights, not as commodities to be cynically exploited for research or even, I suppose, for family bonding.

The trouble with arguments for treating animals as equals is that the language of rights and responsibility implies, above all, reciprocity. We believe it to be wrong for whites to take blacks as slaves, and wrong for blacks to enslave whites. Yet animals themselves are generally far crueller to other animals in the wild than we are to them in civilization; though we may believe it to be unethical for us to torment a lion, few would say it is unethical for the lion to torment the gazelle. To use the language of oppression on behalf of creatures that in their natures must be free to oppress others is surely to be using the wrong moral language. A language of compassion is the right one: we should not be cruel to lions because they suffer pain. We don’t prevent the lion from eating the gazelle because we recognize that he is, in the fine old-fashioned term, a dumb animal—not one capable of reasoning about effects, or really altering his behavior on ethical grounds, and therefore not rightly covered by the language of rights. Dogs, similarly, deserve protection from sadists, but not deference to their need for, say, sex. We can neuter them with a clear conscience, because abstinence is not one of their options.

This is why we feel uneasy with too much single-minded love directed toward dogs—with going canine, like Rudy in her dog-centered love life. It isn’t the misdirection so much as the inequality, the disequilibrium between the complex intensity of human love and the pragmatism of animal acceptance. Love is a two-way street. The woman who strokes and coos and holds her dog too much unnerves us, not on her behalf but on the dog’s. He’s just not that into you.

The deepest problem that dogs pose is what it would be like if all our virtues and emotions were experienced as instincts. The questions about what a dog is capable of doing—how it sees, smells, pees, explores—are, in principle, answerable. The question of what goes on in the mind of a dog—what it feels like to be a dog—is not. In this context, Horowitz cites a classic article by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, “What Does It Feel Like to Be a Bat?” Nagel’s point was that the only way to know what it is like to be a bat is to be one. He writes:


It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one’s feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.

Though we can know that dogs live by smells, not by words, we can’t really imagine what it would feel like to be a creature for which thoughts are smells. We, creatures of language who organize our experience in abstract concepts, can’t imagine what it’s like to be in the head of a being that has no language. To have the experiences while retaining our memory of humanness would make us a human in a dog suit, not a dog. We would have to become a dog, for real; then, reborn as a human, we couldn’t explain to ourselves, let alone someone else, what it’s like to be a dog, since the language of being-like isn’t part of what being a dog is like.

Yet, for all the seemingly unbridgeable distance between us and them, dogs have found a shortcut into our minds. They live, as Horowitz and Bradshaw and Rudy, too, all see, within our circle without belonging to it: they speak our language without actually speaking any, and share our concerns without really being able to understand them. The verbs tell some of the story: the dog shares, feels, engages, without being able to speak, plan, or (in some human sense) think. We may not be able to know what it’s like to be a dog; but, over all those thousands of years, Butterscotch has figured out, in some instrumental way, what it’s like to be a person. Without language, concepts, long-term causal thinking, she can still enter into the large part of our mind made up of appetites, longings, and loyalties. She does a better impersonation of a person than we do an approximation of a dog. That it is, from the evolutionary and philosophical point of view, an impersonation, produced and improved on by generations of dogs, because it pays, doesn’t alter its power. Dogs have little imagination about us and our inner lives but limitless intuition about them; we have false intuitions about their inner lives but limitless imagination about them. Our relationship meets in the middle.

One day, around Christmas, I got a mixed box of chocolates—milk for Olivia, darks for me—and noticed, in the evening, that some were missing, and that Butterscotch had brown around her muzzle. “She’s eaten chocolate!” Olivia cried. Chocolate is very bad for dogs. She went at once to the forum. “My hand trembles as I write this,” she typed, “but my baby has eaten chocolate!” Blessedly, we got an avalanche of counsel from Havanese-lovers all over the world: check her, watch her, weigh a chocolate, weigh the dog, keep an eye on her all night. Finally, I put her to bed in her back room, and promised Olivia I would monitor her. Olivia chewed her lip and went to bed, too.

It can’t really be dangerous, I thought; I mean, these creatures eat out of garbage cans. At four in the morning, I went in to check on her. She stirred at once, and we looked at each other, shared that automatic enigmatic gaze that is the glue of the man-dog relation. I stayed with her until the light came, annoyed beyond words at the hold she had put on our unwilling hearts. She made it through the night a lot better than I did.

Dogs aren’t the Uncle Toms of the animal world, I thought as dawn came; they’re the dignified dual citizens who plead the case for all of mute creation with their human owners. We are born trapped in our own selfish skins, and we open our eyes to the rings of existence around us. The ring right around us, of lovers and spouses and then kids, is easy to encircle, but that is a form of selfishness, too, since the lovers give us love and the kids extend our lives. A handful of saints “love out to the horizon,” circle after circle—but at the cost, almost always, of seeing past the circle near at hand, not really being able to love their intimates. Most of the time, we collapse the circles of compassion, don’t look at the ones beyond, in order to give the people we love their proper due; we open our eyes to see the wider circles only when new creatures come in, when we realize that we really sit at the center of a Saturn’s worth of circles, stretching out from our little campfire to the wolves who wait outside, and ever outward to the unknowable—toward, I don’t know, deep-sea fish that live on lava and then beyond toward all existence, where each parrot and every mosquito is, if we could only see it, an individual. What’s terrifying is the number of bad stories to which I was once inured, and which now claim my attention. A friend’s dog had leaped from a window in a thunderstorm and only now could I feel the horror of it: the poor terrified thing’s leap. Another friend’s dog had been paralyzed, and instead of a limping animal I saw a fouled friend, a small Hector. My circles of compassion have been pried open.

We can’t enter a dog’s mind, but, as on that dark-chocolate night, I saw that it isn’t that hard to enter a dog’s feelings: feelings of pain, fear, worry, need. And so the dog sits right at the edge of our circle, looking out toward all the others. She is ours, but she is other, too. A dog belongs to the world of wolves she comes from and to the circle of people she has joined. Another circle of existence, toward which we are capable of being compassionate, lies just beyond her, and her paw points toward it, even as her eyes scan ours for dinner. Cats and birds are wonderful, but they keep their own counsel and their own identity. They sit within their own circles, even in the house, and let us spy, occasionally, on what it’s like out there. Only the dog sits right at the edge of the first circle of caring, and points to the great unending circles of Otherness that we can barely begin to contemplate.

The deal that the dog has made to get here, as all the dog scientists point out, is brutal. I’ll act all, you know, like, loving and loyal, if you feed me. Yet don’t we make the same deal—courtship and gentle promises of devotion in exchange for sex, sex in exchange for status? Creatures of appetites and desires, who need to eat, and have not been spayed, we run the same scam on each other that Butterscotch runs on us. And a scam that goes on long enough, and works more or less to everyone’s benefit, is simply called a culture. What makes the dog deal moving is that you two, you and your dog, are less the willing renewers of it than just the living witnesses to a contract signed between man and wolf thirty thousand years ago. What’s in the fine print that you don’t read is that if you accept the terms it no longer feels like a deal.

Butterscotch, meanwhile, seems happy. She’s here, she’s there, a domestic ornament; she takes a place at the table, or under it, anyway, and remains an animal, with an animal’s mute confusions and narrow routines and appetites. She jumps up on visitors, sniffs friends, chews shoes, and, even as we laughingly apologize for her misbehavior and order her “Off!,” we secretly think her misbehavior is sweet. After all, where we are creatures of past and future, she lives in the minute’s joy: a little wolf, racing and snorting and scaring; and the small ingratiating spirit, doing anything to please. At times, I think that I can see her turn her head and look back at the ghost of the wolf mother she parted from long ago, saying, “See, it was a good bet after all; they’re nice to me, mostly.” Then she waits by the door for the next member of the circle she has insinuated herself into to come back to the hearth and seal the basic social contract common to all things that breathe and feel and gaze: love given for promises kept. How does anyone live without a dog? I can’t imagine.

ILLUSTRATION: JULES FEIFFE

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Do Some Circus and Zoo Animals Dream of Freedom and Revenge Against Their Masters? One Author Says Yes


AlterNet.org


ENVIRONMENT

Do Some Circus and Zoo Animals Dream of Freedom and Revenge Against Their Masters? One Author Says Yes


Translating the revolutionary consciousness of voiceless animals is no more silly than doing the same for human beings.


Reviewed: Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance, by Jason Hribal, CounterPunch/AK Press, 153 pages, $15.95

Jason Hribal’s Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance will be ignored, dismissed, and mocked. Published by the tiny and idiosyncratic AK Press and written by an obscure semi-academic, it proposes an argument that will make anyone other than the fiercest PETA activists smirk. Yet it should be required reading for all social scientists and political activists, because it perfectly demonstrates a central and enduring problem of modern left-wing political discourse: the tendency to speak on behalf of those who have not spoken.

Hribal argues that for more than two centuries, animals in zoos, circuses, and marine amusement parks not only have been “oppressed” and “exploited” but have been conscious of their oppression and exploitation, waging an intentional “struggle” for “control of production,” “autonomy,” “revenge,” and the “dream of freedom.”

It’s not difficult to dismiss Hribal as a Marxist Doctor Doolittle or his social science as cartoonish. After all, he ascribes political consciousness to creatures whose thoughts cannot be known. But his claims of knowing the thoughts of animals are no more arrogant or absurd than the claims countless academics and activists continue to make about the consciousness of people whose ideas are also inaccessible.

Most of Fear of the Animal Planet is an impressively thorough catalog of animals refusing to perform tricks, escaping their cages and enclosures, and attacking handlers and audiences. Unlike his descriptions of animals’ minds, which of course are impossible to substantiate, Hribal’s accounts of their behavior are supported with verifiable evidence (usually multiple eyewitness accounts). They certainly show that many animals have not done what they were trained to do.

We learn about the unruly behavior of Jumbo, a 19th-century African bush elephant who was the first animal celebrity. At the London Zoo in Regent’s Park, Jumbo frequently rammed the iron doors of his exhibition cage and slammed his trainer to the floor. After he was sold to P.T. Barnum’s circus in the United States, for several weeks Jumbo refused to enter the shipping container, despite numerous proddings and stabbings by trainers. These events are well-documented and difficult to dispute.

But in determining the meaning of events, Hribal, like most of the Marxist scholars who inspired him, becomes a ventriloquist. Jumbo “did not see himself as a machine,” Hribal writes, and “resistance was his new thought.” Another unruly circus elephant, named Janet, “hated” her trainers. Mary and Tory were not just pachyderms that walked out of a circus ring; they were “two disgruntled employees.” Writing as if he had read Tyke the elephant’s manifesto, Hribal claims this most infamous of circus animals crushed her trainer to death during a performance in Honolulu because she “was tired of being leased out to circuses and carnivals,” “sick of the dismal and dangerous working conditions,” and “through with the untreated injuries and wounds and the lack of basic healthcare.”

Not only does Hribal ascribe specific ideas to his elephant “rebels” but, like communitarians who speak on behalf of masses of people, he also casts them as a part of a collective, global, trans-historical consciousness. The behaviors of Jumbo in London in 1882, Janet in Florida in 1992, Tyke in Hawaii in 1994, and Mary and Tory in Wisconsin in 2002 were all “part of a larger struggle against oppression and exploitation.”

According to Hribal, the “larger struggle” crosses not just time and space but also species. Like their pachyderm comrades, the monkeys and apes that escape from zoos “know what freedom is and they want it.” Likewise, the sea lions, dolphins, and orcas in marine amusement parks share this “dream of freedom.” Their occasional refusals to obey commands from trainers are “strikes” that are part of “the battle over the control of production.” The Sea World orca named Tilikum who in 2010 dragged his trainer to the bottom of a tank and held her there until she drowned was actually presenting “a clear, pronounced demonstration of his dislike of captivity and all that it entails: from the absence of autonomy to the exploitative relations to the ever-increasing work-load.” Marine biologists do believe that orcas communicate with one another, but I doubt that any scientist has heard revolutionary jargon in their clicks and whistles.

Hribal does not merely make his finned and four-legged insurrectionists speak his political language. He has them stand in for all of their caged brethren, the vast majority of whom never tried to escape their confines or stomp a keeper. In this way, again, he is no different from many historians of human beings.

In 1988 the literary theorist Gayatri Spivak published an essay criticizing a new movement among scholars of South Asia known as “subaltern studies.” The movement was an attempt to replace colonialist histories of the subcontinent with “history from below,” an enterprise that had been under way among left-wing historians in Great Britain and the United States since the 1960s. What Spivak found in this new approach to South Asian history I find in the “new social history” of the United States: a widespread but largely unconscious effort to place explicitly political and collectivist ideas in the minds of historical subjects who left no record of their thoughts. Spivak argued that the objective of university academics to “establish true knowledge of the subaltern and its consciousness” was essentially a new form of imperialism —an attempt to remake the world in the image of oneself.

Try this for an exercise: Open any book written in the last 40 years on African-American history, women’s history, or labor history and count the number of times Hribal’s terms describing the consciousness of animals are used to describe the consciousness of people. Then look for evidence that the people themselves used those terms. Most often, you will find the self-appointed leaders of the “oppressed” and “exploited”—abolitionists, feminists, union leaders, civil rights leaders, and political radicals—standing in for their constituents and speaking the language that left-wing historians want to hear.

It is not a defense of slavery, segregation, the denial of rights to women, or poverty to acknowledge the fact that, according to the available evidence, only a tiny portion of their alleged victims clearly thought of themselves that way. Few historians mention that a majority of the ex-slaves who were interviewed held positive views of their days on the plantation (including those who were interviewed by African Americans) or, more important, that more than 99 percent of American slaves left not a single record of their thoughts. The implication of Spivak’s argument, which was applied to similar treatments of Indian peasants, is that to claim a status for all slaves as “victimized” or “oppressed” is to homogenize the attitudes, behaviors, and cultures of millions of people and to make them one’s sock puppet. Similarly, the total African-American participation in the organized civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s equaled roughly 1 percent of the total African-American population of the time. We also know that many African Americans, most notably black nationalists, attacked civil rights leaders for being sell-out “Uncle Toms” and cultural assimilationists. Yet in our textbooks Martin Luther King Jr. is presented as the voice of all 20 million black people alive during his lifetime.

The most egregious political ventriloquism can be found in U.S. labor history, where the socialists and social democrats who took control of some unions are used by historians to present the American working class as having a long tradition of collectivist aspirations. My 2001 book on Jimmy Hoffa, Out of the Jungle, was the first to note that anti-socialist, strictly bread-and-butter unions like the Teamsters dwarfed the combined membership of the socialist-led unions beloved by New Left labor historians.

And the views of how many women have been represented by feminist discourse since its origins in the 19th century? Jason Hribal does to dolphins what Hillary Clinton is doing to the women of Afghanistan, but with a far more consequential intention than the razing of Sea World. Clinton and a large swath of feminists are justifying the military occupation of Afghanistan by claiming that Afghan women are current or potential “victims” of Sharia law and the Taliban. Yet only a small fraction of Afghan women have been asked in polls whether they agree with this assessment of their own lives; a majority who have been asked endorse Sharia law, and a significant percentage even endorse the return to power of the Taliban. If we liberate the women of Afghanistan, we will do so against the wishes of many of the liberated.

Speaking for the subaltern is not exclusively a practice of the left. Recently two fetuses testified against reproductive rights during a hearing of the Ohio state legislature. Lying on gurneys in the hearing room, two pregnant women were scanned by an ultrasound machine as a video monitor broadcast the images and sounds of their fetuses’ beating hearts. The fetuses were there to contribute their unwitting support to the “heartbeat bill,” which would ban abortions in Ohio as soon as a heartbeat could be detected, except in medical emergencies.

So let us use the apparent absurdities of this book to question our own equally absurd but also imperialistic claims about the beliefs and aspirations of those we do not know.

Thaddeus Russell is the author of A Renegade History of the United States (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2010).

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

FELINE FACTS AND FALLACIES

MESSYBEAST.COM

FELINE FACTS AND FALLACIES

In ancient Egypt cats were worshipped. In Mediaeval Europe, they were persecuted. In Victorian England, cats were portrayed in human clothing doing human activities and drowned kittens were made into toys or ornaments. Today, cats are popular pets. They do not take up a great deal of room or need to be taken for walks and are not greatly expensive to keep. Despite their popularity, their basic needs are often obscured by common fallacies, leading to neglect or cruelty.

GENERAL CAT CARE MYTHS & MISCONCEPTIONS

'Cats fend for themselves'.

Some cats are good hunters and virtually self-sufficient. Others are clueless; their instincts blunted by domestication and selective breeding. Some cats have difficulty hunting because of their physique (e.g. the flattened face and small mouth of a Persian). Made to fend for themselves, cats may scavenge and eat bone splinters or stray a considerable distance seeking food. Strays picked up by animal control may be destroyed if unclaimed or unadopted after a period of time. If you choose to own a cat, you must be committed to providing food and care.

'Hungry cats hunt better'.

Some cats are kept as mousers and their owners believe that cats become 'soft' if fed. A hungry farm-cat hunts only enough to feed itself, while one that receives food hunts for 'sport' and catches prey more frequently. Many cats are hopeless hunters, hungry or not. If you don't want the cat to be a hunter, redirect its instincts into play. If you are choosing a kitten, choose one where the mother cat doesn't hunt - the kitten will probably inherit her non-hunting tendencies.

'Cats can live on dog food'.

Dog food doesn't contain the right vitamins for cats. Feeding a cat exclusively on dog food will eventually lead to ill-health, blindness and death. Cats may enjoy robbing the dog's bowl, but this should never form their staple diet.

'Cats can be vegetarian'.

Cats need the nutrients provided by meat. Dogs and humans can digest carbohydrates; cats get their nourishment from proteins. Feeding it vegetables will lead to stunted growth, blindness and death. There are commercially prepared 'balanced' vegetarian diets for cats, but it is cruel to impose human morals on cats. If you are not prepared to give your cat a meat-based diet you are denying its basic rights and a cat is not the right pet for you (get a house-rabbit instead - similar size, can be housetrained and is vegetarian).

'Cats need milk'.

After weaning, kittens may lose the ability to digest milk. Adult cats on a balanced diet don't need milk and it can cause diarrhoea. There are lactose-reduced 'Cat Milks' available, but most cats are content to drink water.

'Cats only feel cupboard love'.

Cats aren't always as demonstrative as dogs when it comes to showing their affections. Some do give cuddles a higher priority than the contents of their food bowl- proof that they do indeed love their owners and not just their owners' cupboards.

'Cats should be put outdoors at night'.

Nowadays it may not be safe to put cats out at night. Late night motorists may not see the cat or may deliberately harm it. It may fall victim to cat-snatchers. Even in areas not subject to a curfew, it may be safer for cat and wildlife to keep Puss in at night. Although cats are almost nocturnal, they often adopt a diurnal lifestyle to match that of their owners (cats are not truly nocturnal - they are mostly active at dusk and dawn; the term for this is crepuscular).

Countries that ban declawing, such as Britain and Australia, do so due to animal rights activists trying to decrease pet ownership or because cats are kept as barn cats.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Declawing is banned because it is unacceptable to the vast majority of cat owners. The cats maybe indoor-outdoor cats (needing claws as their main form of defence and for tree-climbing) or wholly indoor cats. Cat owners in these countries find it hard to comprehend how a "cosmetic" mutilation for the sake of the furniture can be considered humane in countries that permit it. Animal rights activists do not play any part in the anti-declaw sentiments. There is no strong lobby trying to decrease pet ownership in Britain where declawing is anathema to cat lovers. Indoor-outdoor cats are household pets, not barn-cats.

MYTHS & MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT SEX & REPRODUCTION

Cats breed through instinct not because they enjoy raising kittens. Unlike human parents, they don't sit down and plan pregnancies, nor do they carry prophylactics. With so many cats and kittens destroyed annually simply because there aren't enough homes to go round yet too many owners cling to the 'just one litter myth'.

'Having a litter will settle her down'.

There is no truth in the myth that a cat will be more settled or more fulfilled through having kittens. Ask harassed human mothers whether having children has settled them down. A spayed cat will be a more playful, people-oriented pet and won't miss what she has never had.

'She's not strong enough to be spayed'.

If the cat isn't strong enough to be operated on then she certainly isn't healthy enough to have kittens.

'I'd like the children to see her have kittens'.

Such owners should then take the children to animal shelters or vet surgeries to see unwanted kittens being destroyed. Out of every 5 kittens born, probably only one is likely to find a permanent home. If the children want to see kittens, get them to help at an animal shelter where they can learn the true facts of life.

'I always find good homes for all the kittens'.

Every kitten born means one less home for a cat. How many of those 'good homes' still have the cat 3 or 4 years later? How many are genuine good homes - or are the kittens destined for laboratory use, the fur trade or abuse?

'I can sell the kittens and use the money to pay for spaying'

It is more expensive to care for a pregnant cat and her kittens up to rehoming age than to pay for spay surgery. Pregnant and nursing cats need additional food. Kittens eat more than you may realise because they are growing fast. Moggy kittens are not profitable because they can be obtained for free from rescue shelters or as strays.

'There is profit in breeding cats'

Cat breeders make little or no profit. Most don't even cover their costs. Those $500 kittens may seem profitable, but the consider the how much is spent on getting the female tested (for disease), finding a suitable male cat, raising the kittens, registering the kittens with the breed society and screening potential buyers. Responsible breeding of purebred cats is an expensive hobby. Moggy kittens can be obtained free of charge from many sources.

'I don't want to spoil their fun'.

Mating is short and painful, not fun. It's no fun producing up to 20 kittens a year. Constant kittening is debilitating and can shorten her life. Nor is it fun to fight for the right to mate; tomcats risk catching killer diseases such Feline Leukaemia or Feline AIDS through bite wounds. Wandering tomcats may be injured or killed on the roads as instinct, not fun, sends them in search of a mate.

'I enjoy my sex life s/he enjoys hers/his'

Sex = kittens. Cats do not have recreational sex. Cats don't have voluntary contraception. Stop being anthropomorphic. Hundreds of thousands of healthy cats and kittens are destroyed each year because they can't find homes. Population control by birth prevention is better than population control by disease, starvation or destruction of healthy animals.

'Altered/desexed cats get fat and lazy'.

Altering/desexing may keep cats from wandering far afield, but only bored, overfed cats get fat and lazy.

'Kittens make delightful gifts'.

Kittens are not toys that can be forgotten when the novelty wears off. Most were never truly wanted by the recipient in the first place. Hundreds of ill-considered gift kittens are put out with the trash each year. A cat should be a companion, not a gift machine.

'Males are friendlier'.

If the cat is desexed, its gender makes no difference. It's how you treat a cat that makes the difference. Some are naturally friendlier than others, regardless of gender.

'My pedigree cat has mismated, she's ruined forever'.

Litter-mates may have different fathers and this is sometimes noticeable. The Victorians believed that mismated females would produce mongrel offspring forever after, despite mating with a pedigree stud for her later litters. If you have a breeding pedigree female, it is irresponsible to let her roam while calling. Mongrel kittens may be hard to home. If your pedigree cat was sold with an agreement to neuter the cat, honour that agreement. If you are truly interested in breeding cats, join the breed society and find out all about breeding and breeding stock before you start.

'Tortoiseshell cats are always female and ginger cats are always male.'

Tortoiseshell cats are mostly female. Ginger female cats are not as common as ginger males, but they are by no means rare. Tortoiseshell males are rare, but are not valuable in terms of money. Most, but not all, tortoiseshell males are sterile (See Mosaicism)

MYTHS AND FALLACIES ABOUT CATS & HUMAN HEALTH

The cat is often blamed for health problems - they cause Toxoplasmosis, smother babies, attack children and cause allergies. While cats are not entirely blameless, such tales are fuel for those who try to perpetuate a dislike of cats.

'Cats give you Toxoplasmosis'.

European studies suggest that more people get Toxoplasmosis from undercooked meat, unpasteurised milk and garden dirt than from their cats. Precautions are simple - wear rubber gloves when handling soiled cat litter or when gardening, cook meat well, wash vegetables thoroughly and keep cats off of kitchen worksurfaces. Cases of babies affected by Toxoplasmosis during pregnancy get media coverage because, like serial murderers, they are rare. If you've had a cat most of your life, you've probably already had Toxoplasmosis without knowing it and should be immune.

"My baby is due so the cat must go".

Despite tales of cats smothering babies, cats dislike the smell of human breath and will generally stay away from a baby's face. In spite of all the myths, there is only one verified case of a cat smothering a baby - far fewer than the number of babies murdered by their parents. Cats see cots as cosy beds and babies as warm things to snuggle against. Sometimes a cat becomes quite protective of its human's 'kitten'! To keep the cat out of the cot or pram, fit a net cover (a fly-shield). Later on, move the cat's food bowl and its litter tray to places where the baby or toddler can't get to them.

'It's vicious - it scratched the toddler'.

What did the child do to provoke the cat? Cats usually ignore young children (people-kittens!) and tolerate a certain amount of being pulled about, but will scratch in self-defence if continually mauled. Most children get the message. Punishing the cat teaches children that it's okay for them to annoy it. When my niece complained that the cat scratched her, she was sent to her room 'for annoying the cat'. She is now grown up with cats - and children - of her own! (See Cats and Babies Can Coexist).

'You can get AIDS from cats'.

Feline Immunodeficiency Virus (FIV or FAIDS) is spread from cat to cat by close contact such as mutual grooming and possibly by biting. Humans can't catch it any more than they can get Cat Flu. FIV has been cultivated in human cells in the laboratory - but it needed the help of scientists to do this. People who have HIV or poor immune systems are sometimes recommended not to keep cats or dogs because of other infection risks.

'I must be allergic to the cat'.

A surprising number of people (and their doctors) jump to this conclusion, rehoming the cat only to find that they are allergic to something else entirely. If possible, have tests to see if the cat really is the culprit. In the US, owners of indoor only cats can reduce their allergic reaction by giving the cat a monthly bath in distilled water to remove allergens from its coat. There are products available which can reduce allergic reaction if sprayed on the cat's coat.

'Asthma sufferers can't have cats'.

Severe asthma may be a barrier to cat ownership, though many sufferers of mild asthma own cats. Rather than using their inhaler when an asthma attack starts, they use the inhaler to prevent an attack. They also find it helpful to keep the cat out of the bedroom. Many children with childhood asthma will grow out of it because exposure to the cat strengthens their immune systems. Be careful of being over-protective of children, it causes problems in later life due to poor immune response.

MYTHS AND MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT PARTICULAR CAT BREEDS

'Bengal Cats are a cross between a cat and a leopard.'

Bengal cats are a cross between domestic cats and the Asian Leopard Cat (F bengalensis) which is a small spotted cat. Domestic cats and leopards cannot breed together (even through artificial insemination) because of their different sizes and different gestation (pregnancy) periods. Cats cannot be crossed with cougars, lions or tigers either.

'Hairless cats are hypo-allergenic.'

Relatively few people are allergic to cat hair itself. Most allergies are caused by proteins in cat dander (dandruff) which is made up of skin flakes and dried saliva from where a cat washes itself. Hairless cats and Rex cats (curly-haired cats) still produce dander which can trigger an allergic reaction. Some people have less symptoms with hairless cats or shorter haired cats (e.g. Siamese) because bare skin or short fur means less surface for dander to form on. Many other people are just as allergic to hairless or Rex cats as they are to cats with ordinary fur. Some people who are strongly allergic to longhaired cats but only mildly allergic to shorthaired cats because longhair traps more dander. Occasionally people are allergic to all cats except for one particular individual cat - either because that cat produces a different type of dander without the usual allergen or because the person has become desensitized to that particular cat's dander.

'Polydactyl Cats are a breed of cat and are only found in America'

Polydactyly (extra toes) is found around the world in non-pedigree cats and is fairly common in Britain. It can also occur in breeds and non-pedigree cats as random mutation. There are some breeds which feature polydactyly as a characteristic (e.g. PixieBob, American Polydactyl) but there is no single breed called "Polydactyl". They are found all over the world and come in all shapes and sizes. Polydactyl Cats

'Twisty Cats are bred from polydactyl cats.'

Twisty Cats are bred from cats with a condition called Radial Hypoplasia (RH). RH ranges from mild to severe; in the mild form it resembles polydactyly but in the severe form it causes major deformities of the paws and forelegs. Normal polydactyl cats have a harmless dominant mutation, but do not produce deformed (Twisty) kittens. The confusion occurs because mild RH resembles polydactyly. See Polydactyl Cats and Kangaroo Cats and Squittens Revealed for more information.

'Tabby cats are a breed.'

False: Tabby is a colour pattern and is seen in many different cat breeds and in non-pedigree cats (Striped and Spotted Cats). It is not a breed in its own right.

'Friends say my cat is half-Siamese and half-tortie.'

It is a common misconception that Siamese is a colour and tortie (tortoiseshell) is a breed. Tortie is a colour/pattern where red or cream is intermingled with black, grey or brown. A cat cannot be half-tortie - it either is tortie pattern or it isn't tortie pattern. The tortie pattern is found in breeds ranging from Persian to Burmese. Siamese is a breed of cat characterised by a long svelte body, long narrow face, large wide-set ears, blue eyes and a body paler than the face, tail and legs. The colour pattern of Siamese cats is called colourpoint. A random-bred cat with the colourpoint pattern is not necessarily half-Siamese. It may have inherited its colourpoint genes from any of the colourpoint breeds several generations back. To be half-Siamese, one of its parents would have to be a purebred Siamese.

'Miniature cats will stay like kittens all their life.'

Although miniature cats may stay the size of a large kitten, their body shape and behaviour will be that of a full-sized adult cat. In this respect they are the same as small-statured humans. Many miniature cats are larger than kitten-sized, but smaller (half to three quarters size) than normal sized domestic cats Dwarf and Midget Cats .

'Cabbits are a breed made from a cross between a cat and a rabbit.'
'Squittens are a cross between cats and squirrels.'
'Maine Coon cats are a cross between cats and racoons.'

Cats and rabbits are genetically very different and cannot produce offspring together. Animals identified as "cabbits" are often Manx cats, American Bobtail or Japanese Bobtail cats or even cats with spinal and leg deformities. See Cabbits - What are They? for a complete explanation. For the same reason, Squittens are not a cross between a cat and a squirrel Kangaroo Cats and Squittens Revealed and Maine Coons are not hybrids between cats and racoons Fanciful Feline Hybrids . Domestic cats can be hybridized with other small wild species of cat as these are genetically similar enough to give rise to offspring, but they can't be hybridised with other species of animal.

'Ancient Egyptians worshipped cats.'

Although cats were important because they protected granaries against mice, later on, the Egyptians worshipped them in more unpleasant ways. Most people are familiar with the grief when a family cat died or with people being punished for accidentally killing a cat, but fewer people are familiar with the cat-killing cult.

Some ancient Egyptians worshipped a cat goddess called Bastet or Pasht (Pakhet); this was a local cult, not a widespread religion. Priests raised hundred of cats in temples. When a person wanted to make an offering to the goddess, the person paid the priests to kill and mummify a cat. The hapless cat or, for those who couldn't afford much, the kitten, was killed by wringing its neck. Thousands of cats were bred solely to be used as sacrifices to the goddess. X-rays of the mummies show broken necks. Some are consistent with the cat being straightened out after death into an unnatural position, but other breaks are more consistent with being the cause of death. Regardless of whether they were all killed deliberately, so many cats were mummified that tons of cat mummies exported from Egypt ended up being ground up and used as fertilizer or even as fuel. To meet ancient mass market demand, many animal mummies, when x-rayed have turned out to be fakes, made of bones and twigs wrapped to resemble the animal.

MESSYBEAST.COM CAT RESOURCE ARCHIVE

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Sunday, April 10, 2011

Dogs Feel Sorry for Humans

Discovery News

Dogs Probably Feel Sorry For Us


Analysis by Jennifer Viegas
Fri Feb 18, 2011 07:01 PM ET
28 Comments | Leave a Comment

Dogs appear to empathize with us, to the point that some therapy dogs even seem to take on the emotions of their sick or distressed human charges, according to a new paper in the latest issue of Biology Letters.

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(Image: badrobot)

The matter is more complicated than you might think, because researchers need to tease apart true empathy from a phenomenon known as "emotional contagion."

Emotional contagion is more of a knee-jerk reaction to various behaviors and other cues. For example, if you yawn, others near you, including dogs, might start to yawn too. They're not necessarily empathizing with you, although areas of the brain tied to empathy are involved. In fact, the mimicry is primarily triggered at a subconscious level. No one is certain why this happens. Some scientists suspect it has to do with communicating levels of alertness and coordinating sleep schedules.

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(Image: karpati)

But dogs do more than just copy us, according to the study's authors Karine Silva and Liliana Sousa of the Abel Salazar Biomedical Sciences Institute.

"Indeed, a study showing that pets, namely dogs, behave as 'upset' as children when exposed to familiar people faking distress, strongly suggests 'sympathetic concern,'" Silva and Sousa write. "Also it has been reported that untrained dogs may be sensitive to human emergencies and may act appropriately to summon help, which, if true, suggests empathic perspective taking."

In experiments, dog owners feigned a heart attack or pretended to experience an accident in which a bookcase fell on them and pinned them to the floor. The dogs in these studies just looked confused and didn't do much, but the scientists think canines need to also smell and hear signals tied to actual stress in order to respond. In other words, you probably can't easily fool a dog when it comes to emergencies.

Another study found that therapy dogs are both emotionally and physically affected by their work, "needing massages and calming measures after the sessions," according to the authors.

Silva and Sousa argue that dogs have the capacity to empathize with humans for three main reasons:

  1. Dogs originated from wolves, which are highly social animals that engage in cooperative activities and are believed to have some ability to empathize with their fellow wolves.
  2. Biological changes produced during the domestication of dogs may have allowed them to synchronize their wolf-inherited empathic capacities with those of humans.
  3. Breed diversification and selection for canine intelligence may have increased the dog ability to empathize.

The scientists say further research is needed, with many questions remaining. If dogs do empathize with us, are some better able to do this than others? If so, is that ability at times tied to certain breeds more than others? If the ability is connected to genetics, are some dogs and people just born more empathetic than others? Can you train a dog or a person to be more understanding?

As the researchers point out, all of these related issues "should have considerable implications for education and society as a whole."