Category: Communication

Out of this world!

Literally!

I noticed the other day a series of photographs of the moon and Venus that were included in an item on EarthSky News. All I am going to do is to republish a selection of the photographs so if you would like to read the full item, including all the photographs, then here is the link.

Mohamed Laaïfat Photographies in Normandy, France caught the little planet Mercury, too, along with the moon and Venus, on January 21.

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João Pedro Marques caught bright Venus and the waxing moon on the evening of January 22, 2015, from Portugal. The reddish “star” above and to the left of the moon is Mars.

In the above image, Mars may only be seen by viewing a bigger image here.

One Horse Media in Lolo, Montana wrote: “What a cool moon and view of Venus this evening! I was happy to have just enough time to take a few photos as soon as I got home!”

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Hecktor Barrios in Hermosillo, Mexico wrote: “Venus, Moon and Mercury, the latter barely visible." — Hecktor Barrios in Hermosillo, Mexico wrote: “Venus, Moon and Mercury, the latter barely visible.”

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Planet Venus and young moon on January 21, 2015, as captured by Cathy Emmett Palmer in Panama City Beach, Florida.

Won’t add any more thoughts from me because each and every one of you will have your own feelings and responses to these photographs. Don’t want my ideas to get in the way of your own thoughts.

Just all of you have a wonderful and peaceful weekend.

Making sense of who we are?

The psychology of self.

One of the huge differences between humans and our beloved dogs is that dogs live entirely in the present and do not engage in abstract thinking. Indeed, one of the most glorious aspects of owning a dog is being able to lose oneself in those moments of intimacy between yourself and your dog. Here’s a wonderful example of that when Bridget from Oregon Wild visited us recently and enjoyed a moment of bliss with Hazel.

So with that in mind, I am now going to be very un-dog-like and very human by offering an essay that is most abstract in manner. Not my essay, I should hasten to add, but a recent essay from George Monbiot, republished here with his kind permission. Then tomorrow, I want to stay with the abstract theme and include a recent essay from Terry Hershey.

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A Small and Shuffling Life

Why, in this age of freedom, are we so confined? And what can we do to reclaim our lives?

By George Monbiot, published in the New York Times, 19th January 2015

Live free or die: this is the maxim of our age. But the freedoms we celebrate are particular and limited. We fetishise the freedom of business from state control; the freedom not to pay taxes; the freedom to carry guns and speak our minds and worship whom we will. But despite – in some cases because of – this respect for particular freedoms, every day the scope of our lives appears to contract.

Half a century ago, we were promised that rising wealth would mean less work, longer vacations and more choice. But our working hours rise in line with economic growth, and they are now governed by a corporate culture of snooping and quantification, of infantilizing dictats and impossible demands, which smothers autonomy and creativity. Technologies that promised to save time and free us from drudgery (such as email and smartphones) fill our heads with a clatter so persistent it stifles the ability to think.

Public spaces in our cities are reduced to pasteurised piazzas, in which loitering without intent to shop is treated as suspicious. Protest is muted by dozens of constraining laws. Young people, who have no place in this dead-eyed, sanitised landscape, scarcely venture from their bedrooms. Political freedom now means choosing between alternative versions of market fundamentalism.

Even the freedoms we do possess we tend not to exercise. We spend hours every day watching other people doing what we might otherwise be doing: dancing, singing, playing sport, even cooking. We venture outdoors to seek marginally different varieties of stuff we already possess. “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers / Little we see in Nature that is ours,” wrote William Wordsworth (1), and it is truer today than it was then.

We entertain the illusion that we have chosen our lives. Why, if this is the case, do our apparent choices differ so little from those of other people? Why do we live and work and travel and eat and dress and entertain ourselves in almost identical fashion? It’s no wonder, when we possess and use it so little, that we make a fetish out of freedom.

Perhaps we have forgotten the bitter complaint made by Benjamin Franklin in 1753. “When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return.”(2) But when European Americans “have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life … and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.” In 1785 Hector de Crèvecoeur asked two European refuseniks why they would not come home. “The reasons they gave me would greatly surprise you: the most perfect freedom, the ease of living, the absence of those cares and corroding solicitudes which so often prevail with us.”(3)

We arose in a thrilling, terrible world. The African savannahs on which the first hominims evolved were dominated by sabretooth and false sabretooth cats, giant hyaenas and bear dogs. When human beings arrived in the Americas, 14,000 years ago, they found ground sloths the weight of elephants; a beaver eight feet from nose to tail; armadillos like small cars; giant lions and sabretooths; short-faced bears whose shocking armoury of teeth and claws suggests they drove giant lions and sabretooths off their prey. A bird in Argentina had a wingspan of 26 feet. Fanged salmon nine feet long migrated inland from the Pacific coast.

We carry with us the psychological equipment, rich in instinct and emotion, required to navigate that world. But our survival in the modern economy requires the use of few of the mental and physical capacities we possess. Sometimes it feels like a small and shuffling life. Our humdrum, humiliating lives leave us, I believe, ecologically bored.

At times this sensation has overwhelmed me. It happened in a newly-discovered bone cave in southern England. The walls and floor were encrusted with calcite crystals, that glittered in the torchlight. One of the archaeologists with whom I was exploring it handed me the atlas vertebra of a Bronze Age cow. Then he picked up another bone, this time with both hands: another atlas vertebra, but monstrous. “It’s the same species as the first one. But this is the wild version. The aurochs.” As I turned it over in my hands, feeling its great weight, I experienced what seemed like an electric jolt of recognition. It felt raw, feral, pungent, thrilling. The colour seemed to drain from modern life.

I felt it again when stalking up a tidal channel with a trident, trying to spear flounders. After two hours scanning the sand intently for signs of the fish, I was suddenly transported by the fierce conviction that I had done it a thousand times before. I felt it most keenly when I stumbled across the fresh corpse of a deer in a wood. I hoisted it onto my shoulders. As soon as I felt its warmth on my back, my skin flushed, my hair stood on end and I wanted to roar. Civilisation slid off like a bathrobe. I believe that in these cases I accidentally unlocked a lumber room in the mind, in which vestigial faculties shaped by our evolutionary past are stored. These experiences ignited in me a smouldering longing for a richer and rawer life than the one I lead.

Unless we are prepared to reject civilization altogether and live in the woods, there is no complete answer to this predicament. But I think there is a partial one. Across many rich nations, especially the United States, global competition is causing the abandonment of farming on less fertile land. Rather than trying to tame and hold back the encroaching wilds, I believe we should help to accelerate the process of reclamation, removing redundant roads and fences, helping to re-establish missing species, such as wolves and cougars and bears, building bridges between recovering habitats to create continental-scale wildlife corridors, such as those promoted by the Rewilding Institute(4).

This rewilding of the land permits, if we choose, a partial rewilding of our own lives. It allows us to step into a world that is not ordered and controlled and regulated, to imagine ourselves back into the rawer life from which we came, to discover, perhaps, the ecstasy I experienced when I picked up that deer. We don’t have to give up our washing machines and computers and spectacles and longevity to shed our ecological boredom and recover some measure of the freedom that has been denied to us. Perhaps we do need to remember who we are.

George Monbiot’s book Feral: rewilding the land, the sea and human life is published this month by the University of Chicago Press.

References:

1. http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww317.html

2. Benjamin Franklin, 9th May 1753. The Support of the Poor. Letter to Peter Collinson.

http://www.historycarper.com/1753/05/09/the-support-of-the-poor/

3. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, 1785. Letters from an American Farmer and Other Essays. Letter 12. Edited by Dennis D. Moore. Harvard University Press.

4. http://rewilding.org/rewildit/

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So tomorrow, the second part with Terry Hershey and a short talk by Professor Dan Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at Havard University.

A wonderful insight into dogs.

The republication of a wonderful post about a dog that rides a bus!

I’m in the middle of reading Jean Donaldson’s book The Culture Clash. Here’s a summary of what the book is about from the Dogwise website.

Summary: The book that has shaped modern thinking about canine behavior and the relationship between dogs and humans has been revised. Dogs are not humans. Dogs are clever and complex creatures that humans need to take the time to understand in order to live together successfully. You must read this book… because your dog sure can’t!

Here’s an extract from page 13 of the first chapter: Getting the dog’s perspective.

We crave anecdotes about genius dogs and these abound. Everyone knows a story that illustrates how smart dogs are. But a fundamental question has never been answered by proponents of reasoning in dogs: if dogs are capable of these feats of brain power at all, why are they not performing them all the time? Why never in controlled conditions? What is the most upsetting about these claims is the lack of rigour in evaluating them.

You get the picture of where Jean Donaldson is coming from! (And I’m still only just into the book myself.)

So with those words echoing around your mind, just hold your breath while you read this article from author Deborah Taylor-French‘s blog: Dog Leader Mysteries.

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Bus riding dog: Photo Friday

JANUARY 16, 2015 ~ DOGLEADERMYSTERIES

Can your dog do this?

Have you read about this dog? A friend shared a news clipping on this dog’s unusual behavior in Seattle, Washington. Eclipse, as an independent city dog, seems to know to walk only on the sidewalk, get on the bus, take a seat and look out the window, all without assistance from his person. Eclipse even knows, which bus stop to get off at for the dog park. “Bus riders report she hops onto seats next to strangers, and watches out the window for her stop. Says commuter Tiona Rainwater, “All the bus drivers know her … she makes everybody happy.”

A Metro Transit spokesman said the agency loves that a dog appreciates public transit. The City of Seattle representative suggested that it would be safer for Eclipse to wear a leash and be with her human when she rides the bus, but with a dog this smart, is it a problem? I don’t know the answer. Black lab rides bus alone to dog park USA Today Network Associated Press 1:01 p.m. EST January 14, 2015.

What do you think, can dogs take the bus without their human families?

We know that big dogs differ in temperament and dog to dog communication from little lap dogs. But what makes a dog mature and experienced enough to take on full independence in the confusion and untranslated rules of human life? Yes, free-roaming dogs ride trains in organized and peaceful groups in Russia. Yes, often those who live with dogs, like we do, find they understand far more of our human lives than we think possible. After watching dozens of dogs off leash on city streets of Baja California Sur, Mexico. No dog seemed homeless and all but one stayed on the sidewalk.

Do dogs ever become 100% street-smart?

What do dogs know? What do dogs remember? We know dogs learn. We know some dogs show exceptional learning abilities, much greater than other dogs. Somewhere I read that the average dog has the intelligence of a human toddler. Now, none of us would let a toddler walk city streets, get on and off a bus alone. But what of special cases? History shows exceptions to rules and to the “average.” Clearly, Eclipse breaks the rule, the average and reshapes our expectations of what dogs can and should be able to do.

“The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” Mahatma Gandhi

Have you read Merle’s Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog by Ted Kerasote? Of book talks, life and books by Kerasote can be found on his Website his 2014 Pukka’s Promise: The Quest for Longer-Lived Dogs, in paperback, looks to be interesting to those of us who want our dogs to live the longest, healthiest lives possible. Find more about this top creative nonfiction author on his Website Kerasote.com.

True dog story (tearjerker ahead)

A Marin County ethical keeshond breeder shared this true story of their longtime and favorite dog. For years and years, the behavior of their family dog and top champion male looked totally stable. His nature showed pure calm and obedience. They all got into a pattern of allowing this canine patriarch time to lay on the front lawn in their neighborhood circle street. He always remained serene, watching, never chasing, barking or moving.

On afternoon as the kinglike keeshond patriarch lay on his grassy lawn – the unthinkable happened – he ran in front of car. Now fortunately, this big keeshond did not die. But he suffered, ever after with epileptic fits. Makes me wonder if we fool ourselves in imagining that dogs can navigate city streets safely.

Please share, comment and sign up for my blog updates. Thanks, Deborah Taylor-French

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So leave it up to you to assess the brain power of dogs, especially that bus-riding black Labrador dog. To help you make your mind up, take a look at the video.

Published on Jan 14, 2015

Seattle’s public transit system has had a ruff go of things lately, and that has riders smiling.

You see, of the 120 million riders who used the system last year, one of them is actually a dog. Seattle’s KOMO-TV reports the 2-year-old black Labrador mix, named Eclipse, has become a regular fixture on the city’s D-Line after she figured out how to ride the bus alone to the dog park.

“All the bus drivers know her. She sits here just like a person does,” fellow rider Tiona Rainwater told KOMO. “She makes everybody happy. How could you not love this thing?”

The dog’s owner, Jeff Young, lives next to the stop. He said Eclipse sometimes hops on board without him if he’s not yet finished smoking his cigarette when the bus arrives. The pup has become a regular on the route, riding three or four stops before exiting at her destination of choice. “I catch up with her at the dog park,” Young explained.
Miles Montgomery, a Seattle radio host and D-Line commuter, was taken by surprise when Eclipse hopped into the seat next to him on a ride last Friday, looked out the window, then got off at her stop. Montgomery snapped a bemused selfie with the commuting canine, adding the caption, “Bus is full this morning:”

A Metro Transit spokesperson told the AP they’re happy a dog can appreciate public transit, though Eclipse should really be on a leash. King County says dogs are allowed to ride buses at the discretion of the driver, provided the animal isn’t a hazard and doesn’t create a disturbance.

Seattle isn’t alone in having a streetwise dog. Stray dogs in Moscow, Russia, have learned to commute in and out of the city from the suburbs by riding the subway, even watching out for other dogs to make sure they exit at the correct stop.

Get along, little doggies.

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Golly, I have just seen how long I have spent getting this post written. Poor old Shelby must be wondering if I really did want to play with him; should have made my next move simply ages ago!

Mind you, I so rarely win against him!

Public trust and Oregon

The Children’s Climate Crusade.

But first some thoughts for the newer followers of this blog.

Being the author of this blog I have no idea how people find this place, and more importantly, what they make of it! It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if it is as a result of a web search associated with dogs. Let’s face it, the blog is called Learning from Dogs!

It also wouldn’t surprise me if many don’t drop in to the About this blog page and read:

The underlying theme of Learning from Dogs is about truth, integrity, honesty and trust in every way. We use the life of dogs as a metaphor. The first Post was published on the 15th July 2009.

Here is our Vision and what we are trying to achieve.

Be part of this yourself in whatever way you would like.

All of which is my way of explaining why, more often than not, the daily post has nothing to do with our beautiful canines. But I do hope if a post is not about dogs then it is about “truth, integrity, honesty and trust in every way.”

So with that off my chest, let me use the rest of this post to republish in full the final broadcast from Bill Moyers, the link to which was kindly sent to me by friend John Hurlburt. Thanks John.

The Bill Moyers programme is less than 30-minutes long. It is extraordinarily fine viewing, especially for the younger viewer. Do share it widely.

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Full Show: The Children’s Climate Crusade

January 1, 2015

The very agencies created to protect our environment have been hijacked by the polluting industries they were meant to regulate. It may just turn out that the judicial system, our children and their children will save us from ourselves.

The new legal framework for this crusade against global warming is called atmospheric trust litigation. It takes the fate of the Earth into the courts, arguing that the planet’s atmosphere – its air, water, land, plants and animals — are the responsibility of government, held in its trust to insure the survival of all generations to come. It’s the strategy being used by Bill’s recent guest, Kelsey Juliana, a co-plaintiff in a major lawsuit spearheaded by Our Children’s Trust, that could force the state of Oregon to take a more aggressive stance against the carbon emissions.

It’s the brainchild of Mary Christina Wood, a legal scholar who wrote the book, Nature’s Trust, tracing this public trust doctrine all the way back to ancient Rome.

Wood tells Bill: “If this nation relies on a stable climate system, and the very habitability of this nation and all of the liberties of young people and their survival interests are at stake, the courts need to force the agencies and the legislatures to simply do their job.”

Producer: Robert Booth. Editor: Rob Kuhns.

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So having explained why dogs often aren’t featured in posts, there’s only one way to close today. That’s with a picture of young Ollie, our latest member of the family, taken last June.

Thank you for 2014

Amazing how quickly a year flows by.

When, yesterday, I was wondering what to post today, I was curious as to what I had posted a year ago to the day: January 15th., 2014.

To my surprise it was the WordPress summary of my year in blogging; for 2013. I’m not going to prattle on with all the figures, just offer the following: Learning from Dogs was viewed about 93,000 times in 2014. The busiest day of the year was April 16th with 879 views. The most popular post that day was The night sky above.

I dropped in to that post, to refresh my memory of what it was, and saw that it was just delightful. As there have been a great number of new followers in the last twelve months, it seemed worthy of being repeated. Trust me, it’s not what one might expect from the title.

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The night sky above.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto went camping in the desert.

After they got their tent all set up, both men fell sound asleep. Some hours later, Tonto wakes the Lone Ranger and says,

“Kemo Sabe, look towards sky, what you see?“

The Lone Ranger replies,

“I see millions of stars.“

Tonto then responded,

“What that tell you?“

The Lone Ranger ponders for a minute then says,

“Astronomically speaking, it tells me there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets.

However, astrologically, it tells me that Saturn is in Leo.

Then again, thinking about the time just now, it appears to be approximately a quarter past three in the morning.

From a theologically perspective, it’s evident the Lord is all-powerful and we are small and insignificant.

Finally, meteorologically, it seems we will have a beautiful day tomorrow.

What’s it tell you, Tonto?”

Tonto is silent for a moment, then says,

“Kemo Sabe, you dumber then buffalo chip. Someone has stolen tent.”

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So returning to the theme of blogging for 2014, all I want to add is this: Thank you all for taking an interest in Learning from Dogs.

Mid-week maps!

Just too good not to share with you.

The following were sent to me from Dan Gomez. They offer a fascinating insight into the power of graphically representing any number of ideas. Hope you find them as fascinating as I did!

This map shows the world divided into 7 sections (each with a distinct color) with each section containing 1 billion people.

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This map shows (in white) where 98 percent of Australia's population lives. — This map shows (in white) where 98 percent of Australia’s population lives.

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It may not come as a surprise but more people live inside the circle than outside of it.

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This map shows what is on the other side of the world from where you are standing. For the most part it will probably be water.

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Apparently you can't get Big Macs everywhere. This map shows (in red) the countries that have McDonalds. — Apparently you can’t get Big Macs everywhere. This map shows (in red) the countries that have McDonalds.

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This map shows the countries (in blue) where people drive on the left side of the road.

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This map shows countries (in white) that England has never invaded. There are only 22 of them.

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The line in this map shows all of the world's Internet connections in 1969. — The line in this map shows all of the world’s Internet connections in 1969.

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This map shows the countries that heavily restricted Internet access in 2013.

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This map shows (in red) countries that were all Communist at one point in time.

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his map shows (in red) the countries that don't use the metric system. — This map shows (in red) the countries that don’t use the metric system.

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This map shows (in blue) places where Google street view is available.

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This map shows (in green) all the landlocked countries of the world.

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And this is what the world would look like if all the countries with coast lines sank.

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This is a map of the all the rivers in the United States.

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And these are all the rivers that feed into the Mississippi River.

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This is a map of the highest paid public employees in the United States.

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This map shows how much space the United States would occupy on the moon.

Would love to hear which of the maps you found most interesting, and why?

Yet life is what we make of it!

Events!

Perhaps the fundamental reason why I am so hooked on this world of blogging is because there are always wonderful surprises. What do I mean by this?

Yesterday’s post, Sometimes the world seems very strange was a rather bleak affair. I had been affected by, and reported, a couple of items read elsewhere that seemed to me, in a rather dark and miserable way, to highlight what is wrong with our so-called modern society. Perhaps, no more clearly expressed than in my reply to a comment left by Sue Dreamwalker.

Here is what Sue said, and how I replied.

I agree with what Alex has to say… The super rich live in a totally different reality… Have no clues on the real structure of how their wealth is being created often on the backs of the poor. Who are squeezed ever tighter at every conceivable way of extracting more in the form of taxes, both on incomes and on everything else..

Change will come but what frightens you Paul is that when it does come it will come swiftly.. We have seen the social unrest in other nations… What is happening in many countries is the injustices and discriminations which are getting ordinary peoples backs up..

Stupid Gun Laws to teach children how to handle weapons..

Yes Paul sometimes the world is very Strange.. and also Very Stupid!..

Thank you and wishing you and Jean a lovely week
Sue

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Sue, a wonderful reply from you. Thank you. What I find so strange is this. That here I am, turned 70-years-old, having enjoyed a fabulously interesting life, full of variety and opportunities. That, to some small degree, I believe I have a better, albeit still partial, sense of how we humans tick than, say, 20 years ago. How our lives fundamentally revolve around our relationships, with the most important one being our relationship with ourself and, flowing from that, some understanding of who we are!

Yet, (and you knew there was a ‘yet’ coming, didn’t you!) beyond the very small world of loved ones, family and close friends (and I count blogging friends in that last category) the world around me becomes more strange, more remote, more alien almost on a week-by-week basis.

I was born in the middle of London six months to the day of the end of the Second World War in Europe. Those first six months would have been unrecognisable to the later world I grew up in, and got to know. My fear is that I will spend the last six months of my life in a world that is similarly unrecognisable from the world I thought I knew.

Thank my lucky stars for a wonderful, loving woman in my life and for so many fabulous doggie friends.

Sue, apologies, I went on a tad – nay, a tad and a half!

Fondest love to you and your Hubby.

Paul

I think that makes it pretty clear what my mood was like yesterday morning.

Jean and I were out from 9am until 12:30 pm and it was coming up to 3pm when I sat down in front of my PC. Frankly, I didn’t have a clue as to what to write and still felt pretty miserable about the ‘strange world’.

However, one of the first things that I saw in my ‘in-box’ was the weekly email from the Rev. Terry Hershey. Here is how his email opened up:

Live deeply and deliberately

January 12, 2015

“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” Eleanor Roosevelt

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.” Pema Chodron

“On his right hand Billy tattooed the word love,
and on his left hand was the word fear,
And in which hand he held his fate was never clear.”
Bruce Springsteen: “Cautious Man“

“To live is to be willing to die over and over again.” Wow! Did that ‘speak’ to me or what!

Then the very next item in my ‘in-box’ was a note that “Deaf Duke is now following Learning from Dogs“. I try and make it across to every new follower of this blog and thank them for their support. Seems the least I should do.

So it was with ‘Deaf Duke’. But I have to quietly admit that before clicking on the link I found myself wondering just what Deaf Duke was.

Then I went across to their place and was uplifted; hugely so! Because Deaf Duke is the name of a blog that … well in their words ….

About

Deaf Duke is an American Bulldog mix that my boyfriend (Tyler) and I got just after the Fourth of July this year. He was only 6.5 weeks old when we got him so he had some issues to begin with. When he was about 6 months old we decided to take him to a trainer, we thought he was a bad dog because he would never listen to us, we soon found out that he was becoming deaf. He wasn’t a bad dog he just couldn’t hear us. Our lives changed a lot from that moment on. Everyone says that training a deaf dog is no harder than training a dog that can hear, which is true on so many levels but they never talk about how difficult it can be for the owners who are primarily vocal beings. This blog is about the upbringing and stories about Duke and his life.

Here’s a post from Deaf Duke from last December.

Skinny Boy

When we got Duke at 6.5 weeks old he was very under weight. Finding out that he was deaf could explain why he was. Deaf dogs generally don’t wake up for feedings because they cannot hear when the other puppies in the litter are eating. Duke is now a healthy and happy 7 month old boy learning just like his parents are to train him and us.

So thank you Terry, and thank you Duke and your Mum and Dad, for reminding me that life is utterly and whole-heartedly what we make of it!

Onwards and upwards!

Truly out of this world.

Just puts everything back into perspective.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has revisited one of its most iconic and popular images: the Eagle Nebula’s Pillars of Creation. This image shows the pillars as seen in visible light, capturing the multi-coloured glow of gas clouds, wispy tendrils of dark cosmic dust, and the rust-coloured elephants’ trunks of the nebula’s famous pillars. The dust and gas in the pillars is seared by the intense radiation from young stars and eroded by strong winds from massive nearby stars. With these new images comes better contrast and a clearer view for astronomers to study how the structure of the pillars is changing over time.

I subscribe to EarthSky and the link to this image and background information was in yesterday’s daily summary. The mind-blowing facts are that the Eagle Nebula is found in the constellation Serpens and is 6,500 light-years away from our dear planet. To put that into context, that is 38,210 trillion miles from us. The star cluster associated with the nebula is about 5.5 million years old.

EarthSky has the very interesting text of the NASA Press Release regarding this new, high-resolution image.

For me, I just want to let that image wash over me. Not least because it reminds me that I am a very lucky person to be living at a time when one can lose oneself in such sights.

Here’s the image again, this time without the explanation.

The history of the wolf and dog

A return to a theme previously presented in this place.

The primary motivation for today’s post was to continue the theme in my post last Wednesday: Canada – Ellesmere Island, that featured the most beautiful film from the BBC about the wolves on Ellesmere: Snow Wolf Family and Me.

Now it struck me that in writing a blog called Learning from Dogs there was a fair chance that the history of dogs had been featured before. I ran a quick search through previous posts using the search term ‘history of dogs’. There were a number of returns. Such as the republication of an article by Mark Derr: The Wolf Who Stayed last November. Then there was a post called Dogs and Wolves: Fascinating Research in February, 2014. Back in 2013, a post Dogs and Man: An eternity of a relationship.

Yet, all these and more didn’t quite offer what I am presenting today. (Well, that’s my story!)

First up was the chance finding of a blog called Bioventures. On the 11th September, 2013 there was a post published by D.K. Taylor under the title of: The Science of Dogs: Dogs Vs. Wolves. Here’s how it started:

While watching The Science of Dogs, one portion of the documentary that interested me was the comparison of domestic dogs verses wolves. I knew beforehand that dogs and wolves behaved differently, but it was not until now that I knew much about these differences. Wolves depend upon their pack only, while dogs have been taught to rely on humans to meet many of their needs. The difference must be extreme for it to have been so obvious in the demonstration with the meat and rope from the documentary! (For anyone in the class that watched the other documentary: A piece of meat was tied to a rope, and a wolf kept pulling at it and trying to solve the problem for itself while the dog almost immediately looked to the nearby human for help.)

Then, and I forget how, I came upon a news blog, for want of a better description, called The Examiner. More precisely, I came across an article published on The Examiner back in January, 2013 called: How wolves became dogs explained in groundbreaking study.

A study by a team of American and Swedish researchers published on Jan. 23 in the Journal of Nature, shows that dogs have more genes involved in starch metabolism than wolves.

The finding suggests that this was a major factor in the evolution process of the wolf. No one knows exactly when or how our ancestors began to be so closely linked to dogs, but archaeological evidence indicates that it was thousands of years ago.

One theory suggests that modern behavior of the dogs came from the hunters that used wolves as guards or fellow hunters.

But another theory – that underpins the study – suggests that domestication began when the wolves began to approach the villages in search of food, stealing the remains left by people.

This practice became increasingly common and as a result, wolves began to live around humans. According to this second hypothesis, when we became sedentary and dependent on agriculture, waste dumps created around our settlements soon became the power source of many wolves, explains Erik Axelsson, of the University of Uppsala.

You will need to go here to read the full article, but I will offer this further piece:

Dr. Axelsson and colleagues examined the DNA of more than 50 modern breeds – from the Cocker Spaniel to the German Shepherd.

They then compared their genetic information with 12 wolves from around the world. They scanned DNA sequences of the two canids in areas with large differences. They assumed that these areas contained genes that could help explain the domestication of dogs. Axelsson’s team identified 36 regions, with more than one hundred genes.

The analysis detected the presence of two major functional categories – genes involved in brain development and starch metabolism.

The latter suggests that dogs have many more genes encoding enzymes needed to break down starch, a feature that could have been advantageous to the ancestors who rummaged among the wheat and corn of the farmers.

“The wolves also have these genes, but not used as efficiently as dogs,” said Dr. Axelsson.

“When we look at the wolf genome, we only see one copy of the gene [for the amylase enzyme] on each chromosome. When we look at the dog genome, we see a range from two to fifteen copies; and on average a dog carries seven copies more than the wolf.”

“That means the dog is a lot more efficient at making use of the nutrition in starch than the wolf.”

As for the genes related to brain development, these probably reflect some of the behavioral differences we now see in the two canids.

The dog is an animal that is much more docile, which is probably due to the past humans preferring to work with animals that were easier to tame.

“Previous experiments have indicated that when you select for a reduction in aggressiveness, you obviously get a tamer animal but you also get an animal that retains juvenile characteristics much longer during development, sometimes into adulthood,” said Dr. Axelsson.

This may help explain why it is said that dogs act like puppies throughout their lives.

The study of the origin of dogs is still, in many ways, a puzzle.

Fossil evidence suggests that some populations have been around for tens of thousands of years, long before the advent of agriculture. One reason why it is so difficult to determine the time of this change of behavior is that domestication may have occurred more than once.

Over on YouTube, there are many videos about the subject of ‘the science of dogs’, albeit many of them lengthy. But so what!

I have gone for a 2013 Documentary film that has found its way on to YouTube: Wolf and Human – The Creation of The Dog (Full Nature Documentary). It is 90-minutes long and, at the time of writing this post, Jean and I haven’t watched it. We will this evening. But it comes highly rated and I very much hope it is a good film. The title of the film is perfectly aligned with the theme of today’s post. (N.B. We had bandwidth issues last night and gave up the struggle after just eleven minutes. Despite the poor resolution of the video, it still looked like an interesting video to watch in full.)

From Canada to Cute.

“The best laid plans of mice and men.”

Following yesterday’s post about Ellesmere Island and the white wolves, I had plans to write more about the history of the wolf and the dog. (Oh, and thank you so much for the great way you all reacted to yesterday’s post.)

But events transpired to get in the way.

We were longer in Grants Pass in the morning than anticipated, then it was time for a quick lunch, get the fire going again, go through a rather bulging inbox, and then I was in the mood to start the post. I stood up to stretch and noticed that the deer that we feed most days were waiting impatiently.

So outside to put down some feed for the deer, then hover around, just captivated by them, decide to grab the camera from indoors and take a picture,

then, while I was outside realised that I ought to bring some logs in for the fire, and …… you get the scene, I’m sure.

I sat down at my PC to start the post and knew that I was stressing about there not being enough time to do it justice.

Gave myself a talking to about writing a blog was not something to stress about and looked for a ‘fill-in’ for today.

Opened an email recently sent to me from long-time UK friend, Neil Kelly, and discovered Neil had included in the email the most wonderful, evocative, serenely beautiful photograph of a rambler from calmer, more peaceful times. It really had to be shared with you.

Continue reading “From Canada to Cute.” →

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Live deeply and deliberately

About

Skinny Boy

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