Got late today, need to get to campus to lecture (on ethology of agricultural animals, love this topic; showing segments from an amazing video by Ginger Kathrens, Cloud: Wild Stallion of the Rockies--four years of phenomenal cinematography of a pale, white stallion born in the American Rockies through his maturity into a herd stallion). So much I want to write, will write soon about Darwin Day at UW last Saturday and a great new book on the adventures of Darwin, Wallace and Bates... will do tomorrow or Saturday. Meanwhile, life is pretty, uh, biological at the farm. The twin lambs have sore mouth, a yucky disease that causes cold sore like lesions on their mouths. Once you get it in the flock it's hard to get rid of, can't vaccinate to prevent it, is catching and serious in humans. Read More
Archives for February 2009
Horse and Dog Training–Similarities
I just finished reading a lovely novel, The Hearts of Horses, by Molly Gloss. It's about a young woman who strikes out to make her living "gentling" horses in 1917, when many of the men were off to war. She's more comfortable around animals than she is around people (a current topic of postings on my Feb. 4th '09 blog) and uses methods atypical of the time. Rather than "breaking" horses, Molly uses what people often now call "horse whisperer" techniques to teach horses to work with, rather than against, the people who ride them. In spite of my lack of fondness for the title "horse whisperer," I will never forget watching horse trainer Pat Parelli work an "uncatchable" horse in an arena in Madison, Wisconsin. The horse was so difficult to catch that the club who brought Parelli to Madison Read More
Why are some People more comfortable around animals?
There's an interesting discussion going on, on-line, in my university course right now. One of the students asked why some people like non-human animals more than they do members of their own species. There are some extremely interesting comments posted to that question, especially about animals being 'innocents' rather than moral agents who can choose to be cruel. The question, and other potential answers, reminded me of an essay I wrote in Dog is My Co-Pilot, titled "Love is Never Having to Say Anything at All." In it I argue that one of the reasons we love dogs so much is that, well, because they can't talk. As I write in the essay: "Words may be wonderful things, but they carry weight with them, and there's a great lightness of being when they are discarded." Of course, this Read More
Tool Use in Dogs or Cats?
On Tuesday I gave a lecture in my UW class about tool use and the cultural transmission of information in non-human animals. It's one of my favorite lectures; it does my heart good to ponder so many interesting examples of our connections with other animals. The list of discoveries of animals using tools is ever growing; ever since Jane Goodall discovered chimps using modified twigs to catch termites, researchers have observed crows in Australia manufacturing hooked tools to pry insects out of bark, dolphins carefully placing sponges over their rostrums to protect their tissues while foraging, chimpanzees using two tools (hammer and anvil) to crack nuts... the list goes on and on. Here's a truly great video of New Caledonian Crows figuring out how to combine a penchant for nuts and Read More