We all need a reminder of the many good things happening in our world!
It’s common knowledge that homo sapiens is wired to react to the threat of danger in a rapid manner. But while the danger of a bear or a lion jumping on us from out of the trees is much diminished in the 21st century, our fear-response circuits are still alive and active. One of the fundamental reasons why so much of the media ‘sells’ stories via alarmist headlines.
Thus it was a real delight to come across a magazine with the simple, yet powerful, brand name of YES!
Cover of the current issue of YES!
Even better than coming across YES! was receiving a complimentary subscription for Jean and me! (Thanks John H!) Jean and I took to the magazine immediately. Not only because of an active blog but also because of their support for sharing their content. I quote:
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The Buy Nothing Project began as an experimental hyper-local gift economy on Bainbridge Island, WA; in just 8 months, it has become a social movement, growing to over 25,000 members in 150 groups, in 4 countries. Our local groups form gift economies that are complementary and parallel to local cash economies; whether people join because they’d like to quickly get rid of things that are cluttering their lives, or simply to save money by getting things for free, they quickly discover that our groups are not just another free recycling platform. A gift economy’s real wealth is the people involved and the web of connections that forms to support them. Time and again, members of our groups find themselves spending more and more time interacting in our groups, finding new ways to give back to the community that has brought humor, entertainment, and yes, free stuff into their lives. The Buy Nothing Project is about setting the scarcity model of our cash economy aside in favor of creatively and collaboratively sharing the abundance around us.
How does the Buy Nothing Project work? Using the free platform provided by Facebook Groups, Buy Nothing Project members can easily participate with their local group. Our rules are simple: “Post anything you’d like to give away, lend, or share amongst neighbors. Ask for anything you’d like to receive for free or borrow. Keep it legal. Keep it civil. No buying or selling, no trades or bartering, we’re strictly a gift economy.” The transparency of Facebook groups’ design allows our members to see mutual friends they share with relative strangers, and to build trust based on real-life connections visible through personal profile information. This trust allows groups to grow quickly and encourages people to both give freely and ask for what they need; everything from toilet paper roll springs to rides home from the doctor; burial sites for beloved pets to freshly-baked bread and casseroles have been given freely; our members share things mundane and meaningful in equal measure, and throughout it all connect with each other by means of the shared personal stories and chatting encouraged by the platform. We rely on our co-founders’ daily guidance and direction for the development of our nascent culture, assisted by a team of volunteer local administrators who have on-the-ground knowledge of their communities.
Why the Buy Nothing Project? The Buy Nothing Project is brought to you by the creators of Trash Backwards (www.trashbackwards.com,) an app that helps you with the last of the 3 Rs, “Reusing” and “Recycling” the everyday things in your life. The Buy Nothing Project addresses the first of the 3 R’s, “Reduce” as well as the lesser-known Rs “Refuse” and “Rethink.” Participating in a local Buy Nothing Project group allows individuals and communities to reduce their own dependence on single-use and virgin materials by extending the life of existing items through gifting and sharing between group members. Rethinking consumption and refusing to buy new in favor of asking for an item from a neighbor may make an impact on the amount of goods manufactured in the first place, which in turn may put a dent in the overproduction of unnecessary goods that end up in our landfills, watersheds, and our seas. It most certainly creates connections between people who see each other in real life, not just online, leading to more robust communities that are better prepared to tackle both hard times and good by giving freely. The Trash Backwards app, blog articles, and Buy Nothing Project groups are diverting more materials from our landfills and oceans than we can possibly quantify as hundreds of items are rehomed each day.
The Buy Nothing Project Strengthens Communities.
Our Statistics:
With over 25,000 members and growing every day, we have a captive audience in each of our groups. Most members visit the group pages several times a day and many literally spend hours there, commenting, reading posts, while posting their own gifts and wants.
Our Trash Backwards blog, app, and the Buy Nothing Project website garner over 50,000 unique visitors per month. With 7,000 followers on Pinterest and 3,775 “likes” on our Facebook Pages, we have enough sway to bring significant traffic to our sites whenever we upload news or new blog posts.
Funding:
With funding to staff our core project, PR, legal help, design, and developers, the Buy Nothing movement will grow quickly, spreading the joys of gift economy giving and receiving. The world is ready for this experimental model of sharing our possessions and talents to help others, but the endeavor needs its basic operational costs covered to foster the movement even further.
Isn’t that a fabulous idea!
I’m determined to start a local group here in Merlin, Oregon.
My final item of good news, that I’m sure many others read about, was:
A declaration announced as part of a UN summit on climate change being held in New York also pledges to halve the rate of deforestation by the end of this decade and to restore hundreds of millions of acres of degraded land.
The Guardian newspaper released the news, as follows:
UN climate summit pledges to halt the loss of natural forests by 2030
New York declaration on forests could cut carbon emissions equivalent of taking all the world’s cars off the road
PEKANBARU, SUMATRA, INDONESIA – JULY 11: A forest activist inspects land clearing and drainage of peat natural forest located on the concession of PT RAPP (Riau Andalan Pulp and Paper), a subsidiary of APRIL group which is being developed for a pulp and paper plantation at Pulau Padang, Kepulauan Meranti district on July 11, 2014 in Riau province, Sumatra, Indonesia. The Nature Climate Change journal has reported that Indonesia lost 840,000 hectares of natural forest in 2012 compared to 460,000 hectares in Brazil despite their forest being a quarter of the size of the Amazon rainforest. According to Greenpeace, the destruction of forests is driven by the expansion of palm oil and pulp & paper has increased the greenhouse gas emissions, pushing animals such as sumatran tigers to the brink of extinction, and local communities to lose their source of life. (Photo by Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images)
Governments, multinational companies and campaigners are pledging to halt the loss of the world’s natural forests by 2030.
A declaration announced as part of a UN summit on climate change being held in New York also pledges to halve the rate of deforestation by the end of this decade and to restore hundreds of millions of acres of degraded land.
Backers of the New York declaration on forests claim their efforts could save between 4.5bn and 8.8bn tonnes of carbon emissions per year by 2030 – the equivalent of taking all the world’s cars off the road.
The UK, Germany and Norway have pledged to enter into up to 20 programmes over the next couple of years to pay countries for reducing their deforestation, which could be worth more than £700m.
Companies such as Kellogg’s, Marks & Spencer, Barclays, Nestle, the palm oil giant Cargill, Asia Pulp and Paper and charities including the RSPB, WWF and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) have signed the declaration.
The declaration’s supporters say ending the loss of the world’s natural forests will be an important part of limiting global temperature rises to 2C, beyond which the worst impacts of climate change are expected to be felt.
It comes after analysis suggests that land use change such as deforestation accounts for around 8% of the world’s carbon emissions, with carbon dioxide released when trees are felled and burned to free up land for agriculture or development.
“Forests represent one of the largest, most cost-effective climate solutions available today,” the declaration says.
“Action to conserve, sustainably manage and restore forests can contribute to economic growth, poverty alleviation, rule of law, food security, climate resilience and biodiversity conservation.”
Signatories to the declaration are committing to a number of steps to halt forest loss, including backing a private sector goal of eliminating deforestation from producing agricultural products such as palm oil, soy, paper and beef by no later than 2020.
They are also seeking to support alternatives to deforestation which is caused by subsistence farming and the need for wood fuel for energy and reward countries that reduce forest emissions.
Cargill promises to stop chopping down rainforests. This is huge.
By Nathanael Johnson
Everything I’ve been reading about the U.N. Climate Summit had been making me pretty gloomy, until I read about the New York Declaration on Forests.
The first notice was a press release from the Rainforest Action Network informing me that Cargill, the agribusiness giant, had pledged “to protect forests in all of Cargill’s agricultural supply chains and to endorse the New York Declaration on Forests.” Cargill has a big handprint — they have soy silos in Brazil and palm oil plants in Malaysia. So as of now, if you want to carve a farm out of the jungle, you’re going to get the cold shoulder from a company that is a prime connector to world markets.
And this isn’t limited to hot-button crops like soy and oil palm. Here’s what Cargill’s CEO Dave MacLennan said at the U.N.: “We understand that this sort of commitment cannot be limited to just select commodities or supply chains,” said MacLennan. “That’s why Cargill will take practical measures to protect forests across our agricultural supply chains around the world.”
It’s not just Cargill. Kellogg’s, Unilever, Nestle, Asia Pulp and Paper, General Mills, Danone, Walmart, McDonalds, and many other corporations have committed to the New York Declaration on Forests. But, here’s why Cargill is interesting: It’s making a concrete pledge, while the actual declaration is pretty mushy at this point. The declaration calls for ending forest loss by 2030. And, to quote a U.N. brief: “It also calls for restoring forests and croplands of an area larger than India. Meeting these goals would cut between 4.5 and 8.8 billion tons of carbon pollution every year — about as much as the current emissions of the United States.” Or about as much as taking all the cars in the world off the roads — that’s another comparison I’ve seen. The details are supposed to be hammered out in time for the 2015 convention in Paris.
So as much as you, I and hundreds of thousands of others get battered with ‘gloom and doom’ stories every single day, we do need to balance that out from time-to-time with the good things around us. Also every single day.
I guess that it would be difficult to find a greater change in topic than going from America’s relationship with war to the secret of happiness! But that’s what’s on offer today!
I don’t want to brag, but while I was on sabbatical I discovered the secret to happiness.
The crazy thing is, it was lying right there in the open. It’s been revealed dozens, hundreds of times over the course of human history. It’s revealed every day in ordinary human affairs, if you’re paying attention.
What is it? Let’s ask George Vaillant.
Vaillant is a Harvard psychologist who has been working for over 40 years on the Grant Study, one of the longest-running longitudinal studies in scientific history. It began tracking a set of 268 (white, physically and mentally healthy) men when they were sophomores at Harvard in 1939 and has been tracking them ever since, for 75 years, with exhaustive regular physical and psychological tests. It has followed them as they’ve grown, gone to war, married, divorced, worked, been fired, gotten sick, found God, and so on. (The ups and downs of the study’s history are recounted in this classic Atlantic piece, one of my favorite magazine stories ever.)
Vaillant has spent most of his adult life analyzing the data from the study, attempting to determine which factors most reliably correlate with well-being. He’s probably studied happiness longer, and in greater depth, than any other single human being. So what is it, George Vaillant? What’s the secret to a happy life?
“That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”
Wow. That’s pretty straightforward. But can you boil it down just a little more?
“Happiness is love. Full stop.”
All right then! There you have it. The secret to happiness, revealed. It’s love.
If you want to break it down a little more, there’s plenty of social science research on it. We live longer, healthier, happier lives when we are at the center of overlapping social networks, when we have a devoted life partner, close family and friends (and pets), extensive “weak ties” with acquaintances and colleagues, peer and professional networks that value our skills, and a sense of autonomy balanced with a sense of involvement in something larger than ourselves. We are happiest when we have a place in the world, when we love and are loved, when we make the most of our gifts.
This is all obvious, of course, and has been said a million times. But that’s the point. People want there to be a what of happiness, a secret, an epiphany that once you learn it changes you forever. But the what of happiness is banal. It’s been confirmed by research. It’s in a kajillion self-help books. It’s cliché.
The what of happiness is not the hard part. The how is the hard part. As a million deathbed testimonials have taught us, when we look back on our lives, we won’t wish we’d worked harder, maintained Inbox Zero, finished those reports on deadline, gotten more promotions, owned a nicer car. We’ll wish we’d spent more time appreciating the ones we love and who love us, that we’d done more meaningful work, that we’d traveled more and had more memorable experiences.
We all know this. But it is no easy matter to translate that knowledge into action. Why? Vaillant is insightful about that, too, as The Atlantic explains:
Vaillant [says] positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.
Gratitude and joy are emotions we can muster when we don’t feel threatened, when our lizard brain calms and our prefrontal cortex takes over. But it’s very difficult when our egos feel under siege. Relationships are more meaningful the more we open and extend ourselves (and are reciprocated), but our degree of openness is also our degree of vulnerability. Often we close off, deciding, consciously or not, that it’s not worth the risk of getting hurt; our lizard-brain fear overpowers us.
We cannot control this dynamic entirely. As the Atlantic piece explains, researchers believe that about 50 percent of our happiness is determined by our internal “set point,” which is shaped by genetics and early childhood and mostly fixed in place. About 10 percent is determined by circumstances. But that other 40 percent comes from how we react to circumstances, and over that we do have some control.
We can learn to detach from fear and anger, to let them go, to take deep breaths, return our focus to the present, and choose positive emotions. That, as I wrote yesterday, is what mindfulness is all about. It’s what the entire discipline of positive psychology (which counts Vaillant as a founding father) is about: strengthening the prefrontal cortex so that it’s more able to override instinctual fear and anger. The more inclement the circumstances we face, the more we need it. That’s why mindfulness training is catching on in low-income communities, the military, and elderly care.
So when people ask, as they have many times in the last week, “What did you learn over your break?” … the honest answer is, nothing. I already knew the what of happiness, just as you already know it. The break was about more consciously practicing the how, and on that score I’m afraid I have no grand epiphanies, only a few baby steps down a road I’ll be walking all my life.
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The original Grist article was headed with a picture of a group of happy dogs and it seemed almost an automatic response from me to close today’s post with a picture of happy dogs here in Oregon. But rather obvious, don’t you think!
Instead, I’m going to use a photograph of me being ‘loved’ by Ben so soon after he came to us in April; Ben being one of the two horses (Ben and Ranger) to come here that were rescued by Darla Clark, as explained here.
Now going to offer my own reflection on happiness.
Animals that are comfortable being around us readily display unconditional affection to humans. All that these dogs, cats, horses, and others, require is trust in us. The knowledge that we are there to care for them, to comfort them, to cuddle them, to love them for the majority of the interactions between the person and the creature. That doesn’t rule out chastisement, far from it, just that it comes from a heartfelt desire to care for the animal.
I now have a life surrounded by loving animals. It has been that way since I started living with Jean back in 2008. Yes, I had had Pharaoh in my life since 2003. Still have him; the precious animal. But the one-on-one bond that existed between Pharaoh and me hadn’t previously opened my heart in the way that all 14 dogs and 5 cats did that were living with Jean when I joined her.
The unconditional love shown by those animals in my life for the last six years has profoundly affected me. We are now ‘down’ to 9 dogs and 4 cats plus we have the 4 horses (2 rescue quarter-horses and 2 miniature horses). Still there are very few moments in the whole of my day, either day or night, where I am not in the company of, or in contact with, an animal that offers me unconditional love.
Recall earlier in the David Roberts article: “We are happiest when we have a place in the world, when we love and are loved, when we make the most of our gifts.“
Of course, I have ‘off’ days!
But down to my core, I know that being loved by Jean and all the animals and returning that love provides me with a deep happiness unimaginable prior to 2008.
“It is better to have a heart that makes love than a mind that makes sense.” Robert Keck
Way back in July 2012, I posted the following item.
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Dear Readers of Learning from Dogs.
Today, Jeannie and I are off on a trip to Oregon.
Oregon State
We expect to be away for about the next 10 or 11 days.
While there are a number of new posts that will come out during this period, rather than have quiet days with nothing being posted, some days I will be republishing posts from the last three years; hopefully most of them new to your eyes.
Inevitably, responding promptly to comments will be tough.
Which is why I am so grateful to Martin Lack of Lack of Environment who graciously agreed to keep an eye on things while we are away.
The Punch Bowl Falls, Columbia River, Oregon
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That was twenty-six months ago.
Yesterday morning, Jean and I took Reggie and Chris down to our creek area to feed some wild deer that have been congregating in recent days.
After Jean had sprinkled some cracked corn on the ground, one of the seven deer around us started feeding and when it looked up at me, I took the following picture.
We have family guests with us for the next seven days.
Jean’s brother, Reg, and his lady are arriving today so for a while blogging will be less of a priority than usual.
Although I have spoken to Reg over the telephone on numerous occasions, this will be the first time we have met and I am looking forward to better knowing him.
Thus, as in previous times when we have had friends and family staying with us, I will be reposting popular items from previous times on Learning from Dogs, or republishing things that have caught my eye in recent days.
As with today’s post.
Reg, shares the same birth year as me: 1944!
Thus we are staring over the edge of our eightieth decade!
So this short talk by Isabel Allende seems like a worthwhile topic for today!
Published on Sep 3, 2014
Author Isabel Allende is 71. Yes, she has a few wrinkles—but she has incredible perspective too. In this candid talk, meant for viewers of all ages, she talks about her fears as she gets older and shares how she plans to keep on living passionately.
Want to know more about Isabel Allende? Her website is here.
Yet another thing we can learn from dogs! Living passionately right up to the last days.
Pharaoh, age 88 in human equivalent years, passing on his wisdom to Oliver, age 3 in human terms. Makes being 70 look a doddle!
I’m voting with my feet and cancelling my Facebook account; here’s why.
Like tens of thousands of other people, I use social media: Facebook, Linked-In and Twitter. In my own case primarily for promoting my blog writings.
It was another blogger who drew my attention to something so terrible, so despicable, that it pains me to even think about it, let alone write about it.
For six months I have been experimenting with a Facebook account in order to stay in contact with the creative industry in my town of Colchester. This experiment came to an end today when I closed my Facebook account due to Facebook allowing content associated with the torture of animals.
The word torture, highlighted by me, included a link to an article in the UK Daily Mail newspaper. The link to that Daily Mail article is here. BUT PLEASE do not click on that link if you are not prepared to be hurt, shocked and made to feel VERY ANGRY! To reinforce my warning, the headline of that article reads thus:
Facebook refuses to remove video of kitten being doused in petrol and set on fire ‘because it doesn’t breach any rules’
I can’t even bring myself to include the two photographs of the poor, tortured kitten who was killed by the bastards concerned. However, I will reproduce one image carried by the Daily Mail:
Response: After reporting the video, which was not thought to have uploaded by either of the men in the video, and carries a warning message, Mr Dunwel was told the video would not be removed.
But frankly any standards that regard the burning to death of a kitten as not being ‘graphic violence’ are incorrect standards.
So this coming Friday, I shall be cancelling my Facebook account. Why not immediately? Because my blog posts are themselves promoted on Facebook and I hope other Facebook subscribers who read today’s post are motivated to do the same over the intervening three days.
If you are still uncertain of the merits of my action, and you have a very tough stomach, then the link to the video in question is here.
I have not watched the video for the simple reason that the details of the video were more than enough for me. These are those details:
Published on Sep 9, 2014 Cruel man douses kitten in full
Facebook has refused to take down a video of a kitten being covered in petrol and set on fire.
The web giant reportedly said the shocking footage does not breach any of its rules.
The footage shows two men pushing the animal into a bucket and pouring liquid on it.
The kitten is then set alight.
It can then be seen escaping from the bucket and running away still on fire.
The kitten rolls around in obvious distress but one of the men pours on more fuel as it burns.
When the flames are extinguished a plastic bag can be seen being placed over the animal.
The clip has caused disgust online, with thousands of Facebook commenting on it – but the social networking site has refused to take it down.
PLEASE, PLEASE if you are a Facebook user consider cancelling your account.
Our animals deserve our support.
I will close by asking Facebook to reconsider: Facebook you truly can do better than this.
The drought that this part of Oregon has been experiencing has had one obvious effect: the availability of good hay is rapidly diminishing. With four horses to feed and our own pasture just about eaten out, we need a few more tons before the rains arrive around the end of the year: fingers crossed! We have been frantically trying to find some.
What, you may ask, has this to do with Learning from Dogs? Only that by the time I sat down yesterday to write today’s post, I was squeezed in terms of writing a longer post, and had less than an hour to spare before driving up to Glendale to look at some second-cutting hay for sale.
Then a recent email from a long-term friend in Australia saved the day. It was from Amanda Smith and is reproduced just as she sent it to me; that in turn had been sent to Amanda from a friend of hers. It’s a delightful tale.
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Koalas Like the Beach As Well.
This occurred on a walk along Flinders Beach on North Stradbroke Island in Queensland a couple of days ago.
The Koalas seem fairly tame over here. We passed two sitting in she-oak trees each about two metres off the ground. They were not spooked at all by the attention we gave them.
Then, about half way along the beach, we saw this young fellow actually running up and down the beach and playing around the kids like a puppy.
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After the koala allowed itself to be stroked and petted by us humans, it decided to go for a swim!
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Then the little chap went about twenty metres into the sea, swam around for a good half-hour fascinating onlookers, before coming back to the beach.
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The little chap then took a while to recover from his swim.
We have never heard of or seen this behaviour before: a koala who likes to “play” with humans, and swim in the ocean.
Unbelievable stuff, something we will always remember.
Readers will recall that the first dog spot was published two weeks ago. I explained the background behind the idea:
Anyway, long before I came on the scene, Suzann and Jean had been working together caring for the countless feral street dogs that roam so many Mexican streets. In many cases that caring included finding new, loving homes for them in the USA. When Jean and I moved away from San Carlos in 2010, eventually ending up here in Southern Oregon almost 2 years ago, Suzann didn’t hesitate to continue caring for these Mexican dogs and, wherever possible, finding new homes for them.
Thus came the idea of promoting a wonderful dog ready for a new home here on Learning from Dogs. Who knows, maybe a reader somewhere may know of a family or a person looking for a dog and as a recent post highlighted, rescued dogs are life-savers.
So to the story behind these two dogs.
Please do everything you can to share this post as far and wide as possible, because the rescuing of dogs off the streets of Mexico can only be continued if loving homes are found for each and every one of them.
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L’il Bear Cruz and Blaze
by Suzann Reeve
What’s not to love with these two!
These two little darlings are the offspring of a half-coyote I have been feeding off and on for years out in the desert.
I named the half-coyote Luna and she is totally feral and has always lived at the base of the mountains in the desert 20 minutes outside of town.
Luna, the half-coyote mother dog.
Luna learned as a pup that if she came down to the sea she would be fed, and she has been for years by a whole string of people, the latest being myself. But she always returns to the desert at the bottom of the mountain.
I’m pretty certain that Luna is around 14-years-old. But she looks like she is 4. Luna has had a litter every year, only ever has 3 pups, never gains weight and her teats never show any milk, so it is difficult to understand how she even feeds them!
In the case of L’il Bear Cruz and Blaze, I had to take the pups after only two weeks because of threats to their continued existence due to vultures hovering over the young animals. Indeed, Luna had to chase the big birds away every day from her nest!
They are happy little creatures and I dearly love them.
The human eye needs the stimulation of sunlight and the outdoors to develop properly. The BBC [Ed: Massive rise in Asian eye damage] reports that a recent study of students in South Asian cities found 90% of the samples were short-sighted, a condition called myopia that needs glasses. Modern South Asian students spend a large part of their lives indoors studying or involved with electronic technology such as the internet. Young children in the UK are rapidly getting myopia as young as three because of being indoors and on computers for long periods of time according to the Daily Mail.
That got me thinking about both the ‘old’ and ‘new’ styles of social bonding. In defence of our digital world, there is no question that social media programs (apps?) such as Facebook, Linked-In and Twitter are incredible means of communicating with people that one doesn’t know directly. Even the funny old world of blogging delivers that. I would have stopped writing for Learning from Dogs years ago if it weren’t for the many ‘friends’ that have been made across the ‘blogosphere’!
But (and you knew there was a ‘but’ coming, didn’t you!), social intimacy, as in being able to rub shoulders with people, is the vital core to how we ‘wear’ the world around us.
That was brought home to me by a recent article on the Smithsonian website, an article that I am taking the liberty of republishing in this place. The article is about the contagious nature of yawning; not just for us humans but for wolves.
Note: there were many links to other content in the article making it almost impossible to replicate. So please go to the original to follow up those links.
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Yawning Spreads Like a Plague in Wolves
Evidence of contagious yawning in chimps, dogs and now wolves suggests that the behavior is linked to a mammalian sense of empathy
Chimps do it, birds do it, even you and I do it. Once you see someone yawn, you are compelled to do the same. Now it seems that wolves can be added to the list of animals known to spread yawns like a contagion.
Among humans, even thinking about yawning can trigger the reflex, leading some to suspect that catching a yawn is linked to our ability to empathize with other humans. For instance, contagious yawning activates the same parts of the brain that govern empathy and social know-how. And some studies have shown that humans with more fine-tuned social skills are more likely to catch a yawn.
Similarly, chimpanzees, baboons and bonobos often yawn when they see other members of their species yawning. Chimps (Pan troglodytes) can catch yawns from humans, even virtual ones, as seen in the video below. At least in primates, contagious yawning seems to require an emotional connection and may function as a demonstration of empathy. Beyond primates, though, the trends are less clear-cut. One study found evidence of contagious yawning in birds but didn’t connect it to empathy. A 2008 study showed that dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) could catch yawns from humans, and another showed that dogs were more likely to catch the yawn of a familiar human rather than a stranger. But efforts to see if dogs catch yawns from each other and to replicate the results with humans have so far had no luck.
Now a study published today in PLOS ONE reports the first evidence of contagious yawning in wolves (Canis lupus lupus). “We showed that the wolves were able to yawn contagiously, and this is affected by the emotional bond between individuals, which suggests that familiarity and social bonds matter in these animals the same way as it does in humans,” says study co-author Teresa Romero, who studies animal behavior at the University of Tokyo.
The prevalence of contagious yawning in primates and other mammals could give us some clues to the evolution of empathy—that’s in part what makes the phenomenon so interesting and so controversial. If dogs can catch yawns from humans, did they pick up the behavior because of domestication, or does the trait run deeper into evolutionary history?
The Tokyo team took a stab at those questions by looking at contagious yawning in dog’s closest relatives, wolves. For 254 hours over five months, they observed twelve wolves (six males and six females) at the Tama Zoological Park in Tokyo. They kept tabs on the who, what, when, where, how many and how long of every yawn, then separated out data for yawns in relaxed settings, to minimize the influence of external stimuli.
Next, they statistically analyzed the data and looked for trends. They found that wolves were much more likely to yawn in response to another’s yawn rather than not, which suggests that contagious yawning is at play.
In image A, an individual (right) yawned during a resting period, and a few seconds later, image B shows the subject (on the left) yawned contagiously. (Teresa Romero)
Wolves were more likely to catch the yawn if they were friends with the yawner. Females were also quicker on the yawn uptake when watching the yawns of those around them—possibly because they’re more attuned to social cues, but with such a small group it’s hard to say for sure.
The results seem to add to the case for empathy as the primary function of contagious yawning. “We have the strongest responses to our family, then our friends, then acquaintances, and so on and so forth,” says Matt Campbell, a psychologist at California State University, Channel Islands. “That contagious yawning works along the same social dimension supports the idea that the mechanism that allows us to copy the smiles, frowns and fear of others also allows us to copy their yawns.”
Empathy likely originated as an ancestral trait in mammals, and that’s why it emerges in such disparate species as wolves and humans. “More and more research is supporting this idea that basic forms of empathy are very ancient, and they are present in a wide number of species, at least in mammals,” says Romero. Elephants, for example, comfort their upset friends. Even rats exhibit a basic helping behavior toward other friendly rodents.
Why does contagious yawning between members of the same species show up in wolves and not dogs? The difference probably comes down to study design, not biology. “Most likely, dogs also catch yawns from [other dogs], as now shown for wolves,” says Elaine Madsen, a cognitive zoologist at Lund University in Sweden. Further studies might reveal the extent to which human interaction has affected present-day dogs’ susceptibility to catching another species’ yawns, she says.
It’s impossible to say what true function contagious yawning serves in wolves, but the researchers argue that such behavior could cultivate social bonds. “If an individual is not in sync with its group, it risks being left behind. That is not good,” says Campbell. Just watching wolves yawn can’t definitively prove that empathy drove the behavior, but it’s certainly compelling evidence that wolves might feel for their fellow lupines.
ooOOoo
Fascinating. As too is an article also on the Smithsonian website about dogs yawning. Going to republish that in a few days.
However, this post was prompted by the reminder that there is no substitute for social bonding with others who we meet physically. That is why the Smithsonian essay seemed such an important reminder. As was written (my emphasis):
Among humans, even thinking about yawning can trigger the reflex, leading some to suspect that catching a yawn is linked to our ability to empathize with other humans. For instance, contagious yawning activates the same parts of the brain that govern empathy and social know-how. And some studies have shown that humans with more fine-tuned social skills are more likely to catch a yawn.
Learning from Dogs 