Category: Communication

The Unknown Future.

The latest essay from Tom Engelhardt!

You all know that for a great percentage of my time I write about dogs and republish other articles about dogs.

For dogs are precious. Dogs are sensitive. Dogs read us humans. Dogs play. They sleep. And much more!

Pharaoh enjoying Bummer Creek, March 20th, 2013. He was born on June 3rd., 2003 and died on June 19th., 2017.

But just occasionally I like to republish an essay from Tom Engelhardt.

Maybe because years ago he gave me blanket permission to republish his essays. Maybe because he and I are more or less the same age. Maybe because in my more quieter, introspective moments I wonder where the hell we are going. And Tom seems to agree.

Have a read of this.

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Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Unexpected Past, the Unknown Future

Posted by Tom Engelhardt at 3:50pm, August 9, 2020.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch.

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Even in this terrible moment, TD does its best to continue offering an alternate view of this increasingly strange planet of ours. And I can only do so because of the ongoing support of readers. (I just wish I could actually thank each of you individually!) If you have the urge to continue to lend a hand in keeping TomDispatch afloat, then do check out our donation page. For a donation of $100 ($125 if you live outside the U.S.), I usually offer a signed, personalized book from one of a number of TD authors listed on that page and you can certainly ask, but no guarantees in this pandemic moment. Still, you really do make all the difference and I can’t thank you enough for that! Tom]

It Could Have Been Different

My World and (Unfortunately) Welcome to It
By Tom Engelhardt

Let me be blunt. This wasn’t the world I imagined for my denouement. Not faintly. Of course, I can’t claim I ever really imagined such a place. Who, in their youth, considers their death and the world that might accompany it, the one you might leave behind for younger generations? I’m 76 now. True, if I were lucky (or perhaps unlucky), I could live another 20 years and see yet a newer world born. But for the moment at least, it seems logical enough to consider this pandemic nightmare of a place as the country of my old age, the one that I and my generation (including a guy named Donald J. Trump) will pass on to our children and grandchildren.

Back in 2001, after the 9/11 attacks, I knew it was going to be bad. I felt it deep in my gut almost immediately and, because of that, stumbled into creating TomDispatch.com, the website I still run. But did I ever think it would be this bad? Not a chance.

I focused back then on what already looked to me like a nightmarish American imperial adventure to come, the response to the 9/11 attacks that the administration of President George W. Bush quickly launched under the rubric of “the Global War on Terror.” And that name (though the word “global” would soon be dropped for the more anodyne “war on terror”) would prove anything but inaccurate. After all, in those first post-9/11 moments, the top officials of that administration were thinking as globally as possible when it came to war. At the damaged Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld almost immediately turned to an aide and told him, “Go massive — sweep it all up, things related and not.” From then on, the emphasis would always be on the more the merrier.

Bush’s top officials were eager to take out not just Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, whose 19 mostly Saudi hijackers had indeed attacked this country in the most provocative manner possible (at a cost of only $400,000-$500,000), but the Taliban, too, which then controlled much of Afghanistan. And an invasion of that country was seen as but the initial step in a larger, deeply desired project reportedly meant to target more than 60 countries! Above all, George W. Bush and his top officials dreamed of taking down Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein, occupying his oil-rich land, and making the United States, already the unipolar power of the twenty-first century, the overseer of the Greater Middle East and, in the end, perhaps even of a global Pax Americana. Such was the oil-fueled imperial dreamscape of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and crew (including that charmer and now bestselling anti-Trump author John Bolton).

Who Woulda Guessed?

In the years that followed, I would post endless TomDispatch pieces, often by ex-military men, focused on the ongoing nightmare of our country’s soon-to-become forever wars (without a “pax” in sight) and the dangers such spreading conflicts posed to our world and even to us. Still, did I imagine those wars coming home in quite this way? Police forces in American cities and towns thoroughly militarized right down to bayonets, MRAPs, night-vision goggles, and helicopters, thanks to a Pentagon program delivering equipment to police departments nationwide more or less directly off the battlefields of Washington’s never-ending wars? Not for a moment.

Who doesn’t remember those 2014 photos of what looked like an occupying army on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, after the police killing of a Black teenager and the protests that followed? And keep in mind that, to this day, the Republican Senate and the Trump administration have shown not the slightest desire to rein in that Pentagon program to militarize police departments nationwide. Such equipment (and the mentality that goes with it) showed up strikingly on the streets of American cities and towns during the recent Black Lives Matter protests.

Even in 2014, however, I couldn’t have imagined federal agents by the hundreds, dressed as if for a forever-war battlefield, flooding onto those same streets (at least in cities run by Democratic mayors), ready to treat protesters as if they were indeed al-Qaeda (“VIOLENT ANTIFA ANARCHISTS”), or that it would all be part of an election ploy by a needy president. Not a chance.

Or put another way, a president with his own “goon squad” or “stormtroopers” outfitted to look as if they were shipping out for Afghanistan or Iraq but heading for Portland, Albuquerque, Chicago, Seattle, and other American cities? Give me a break! How un-American could you get? A military surveillance drone overhead in at least one of those cities as if this were someone else’s war zone? Give me a break again. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d live to witness anything quite like it or a president — and we’ve had a few doozies — even faintly like the man a minority of deeply disgruntled Americans but a majority of electors put in the White House in 2016 to preside over a failing empire.

How about an American president in the year 2020 as a straightforward, no-punches-pulled racist, the sort of guy a newspaper could compare to former segregationist Alabama governor and presidential candidate George Wallace without even blinking? Admittedly, in itself, presidential racism has hardly been unique to this moment in America, despite Joe Biden’s initial claim to the contrary. That couldn’t be the case in the country in which Woodrow Wilson made D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, the infamous silent movie in which the Ku Klux Klan rides to the rescue, the first film ever to be shown in the White House; nor the one in which Richard Nixon used his “Southern strategy” — Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater had earlier labeled it even more redolently “Operation Dixie” — to appeal to the racist fears of Southern whites and so begin to turn that region from a Democratic stronghold into a Republican bastion; nor in the land where Ronald Reagan launched his election campaign of 1980 with a “states’ rights” speech (then still a code phrase for segregation) near Philadelphia, Mississippi, just miles from the earthen dam where three murdered civil rights workers had been found buried in 1964.

Still, an openly racist president (don’t take that knee!) as an autocrat-in-the-making (or at least in-the-dreaming), one who first descended that Trump Tower escalator in 2015 denouncing Mexican “rapists,” ran for president rabidly on a Muslim ban, and for whom Black lives, including John Lewis’s, have always been immaterial, a president now defending every Confederate monument and military base named after a slave-owning general in sight, while trying to launch a Nixon-style “law and (dis)order” campaign? I mean, who woulda thunk it?

And add to that the once unimaginable: a man without an ounce of empathy in the White House, a figure focused only on himself and his electoral and pecuniary fate (and perhaps those of his billionaire confederates); a man filling his hated “deep state” with congressionally unapproved lackies, flacks, and ass-kissers, many of them previously flacks (aka lobbyists) for major corporations. (Note, by the way, that while The Donald has a distinctly autocratic urge, I don’t describe him as an incipient fascist because, as far as I can see, his sole desire — as in those now-disappeared rallies of his — is to have fans, not lead an actual social movement of any sort. Think of him as Mussolini right down to the look and style with a “base” of cheering MAGA chumps but no urge for an actual fascist movement to lead.)

And who ever imagined that an American president might actually bring up the possibility of delaying an election he fears losing, while denouncing mail-in ballots (“the scandal of our time”) as electoral fraud and doing his damnedest to undermine the Post Office which would deliver them amid an economic downturn that rivals the Great Depression? Who, before this moment, ever imagined that a president might consider refusing to leave the White House even if he did lose his reelection bid? Tell me this doesn’t qualify as something new under the American sun. True, it wasn’t Donald Trump who turned this country’s elections into 1% affairs or made contributions by the staggeringly wealthy and corporations a matter of free speech (thank you, Supreme Court!), but it is Donald Trump who is threatening, in his own unique way, to make elections themselves a thing of the past. And that, believe me, I didn’t count on.

Nor did I conceive of an all-American world of inequality almost beyond imagining. A country in which only the truly wealthy (think tax cuts) and the national security state (think budgets eternally in the stratosphere) are assured of generous funding in the worst of times.

The World to Come?

Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned the pandemic yet, have I? The one that should bring to mind the Black Death of the fourteenth century and the devastating Spanish Flu of a century ago, the one that’s killing Americans in remarkable numbers daily and going wild in this country, aided and abetted in every imaginable way (and some previously unimaginable ones) by the federal government and the president. Who could have dreamed of such a disease running riot, month after month, in the wealthiest, most powerful country on the planet without a national plan for dealing with it? Who could have dreamed of the planet’s most exceptional, indispensable country (as its leaders once loved to call it) being unable to take even the most modest steps to rein in Covid-19, thanks to a president, Republican governors, and Republican congressional representatives who consider science the equivalent of alien DNA? Honestly, who ever imagined such an American world? Think of it not as The Decameron, that fourteenth century tale of 10 people in flight from a pandemic, but the Trumpcameron or perhaps simply Trumpmageddon.

And keep in mind, when assessing this world I’m going to leave behind to those I hold near and dear, that Covid-19 is hardly the worst of it. Behind that pandemic, possibly even linked to it in complex ways, is something so much worse. Yes, the coronavirus and the president’s response to it may seem like the worst of all news as American deaths crest 160,000 with no end in sight, but it isn’t. Not faintly on a planet that’s being heated to the boiling point and whose most powerful country is now run by a crew of pyromaniacs.

It’s hard even to fully conceptualize climate change since it operates on a time scale that’s anything but human. Still, one way to think of it is as a slow-burn planetary version of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And by the way, if you’ll excuse a brief digression, in these years, our president and his men have been intent on ripping up every Cold War nuclear pact in sight, while the tensions between two nuclear-armed powers, the U.S. and China, only intensify and Washington invests staggering sums in “modernizing” its nuclear arsenal. (I mean, how exactly do you “modernize” the already-achieved ability to put an almost instant end to the world as we’ve known it?)

But to return to climate change, remember that 2020 is already threatening to be the warmest year in recorded history, while the five hottest years so far occurred from 2015 to 2019. That should tell you something, no?

The never-ending release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere has been transforming this planet in ways that have now become obvious. My own hometown, New York City, for instance, has officially become part of the humid subtropical climate zone and that’s only a beginning. Everywhere temperatures are rising. They hit 100 degrees this June in, of all places, Siberia. (The Arctic is warming at twice the rate of much of the rest of the planet.) Sea ice is melting fast, while floods and mega-droughts intensify and forests burn in a previously unknown fashion.

And as a recent heat wave across the Middle East — Baghdad hit a record 125 degrees — showed, it’s only going to get hotter. Much hotter and, given how humanity has handled the latest pandemic, how will it handle the chaos that goes with rising sea levels drowning coastlines but also affecting inland populations, ever fiercer storms, and flooding (in recent weeks, the summer monsoon has, for instance, put one third of Bangladesh underwater), not to speak of the migration of refugees from the hardest-hit areas? The answer is likely to be: not well.

And I could go on, but you get the point. This is not the world I either imagined or would ever have dreamed of leaving to those far younger than me. That the men (and they are largely men) who are essentially promoting the pandemicizing and over-heating of this planet will be the greatest criminals in history matters little.

Let’s just hope that, when it comes to creating a better world out of such a god-awful mess, the generations that follow us prove better at it than mine did. If I were a religious man, those would be my prayers.

And here’s my odd hope. As should be obvious from this piece, the recent past, when still the future, was surprisingly unimaginable. There’s no reason to believe that the future — the coming decades — will prove any easier to imagine. No matter the bad news of this moment, who knows what our world might really look like 20 years from now? I only hope, for the sake of my children and grandchildren, that it surprises us all.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Copyright 2020 Tom Engelhardt

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This is such a powerful essay written from the heart of a good man.

I, too, wonder and worry about the next twenty years. Indeed, there are the stirrings of a book in my head. How that younger generation are reacting to the present and, more importantly, how they will react and respond to the next few years?

I’m 75 and really hope to live for quite a few more years. Jean is just a few years younger.

But much more importantly I have a son, Alex, who is 49, and a daughter, Maija, who is 48, and a grandson, Morten, of my daughter and her husband, who is 9.

They cannot escape the future!

A chimney inspection, and more

A couple of videos from Rik Cristiansen.

I find this fascinating. Apart from the value to the construction and home repair industries there is a beauty in the following video; well there is to my eyes!

(I suspect the music is also from Rik. I checked; it is!)

And the next one is a look at Rik getting ready to film a cellist. Or in his own words:

This film gives a look behind the scenes of a recent drone shoot we did for a music video. Additional footage and editing by Jazz Thorn, Music performed by Mateusz Holc.

But it also includes an explanation of the business of getting a drone ready for flight.

And the dogs will have to wait for next Sunday’s Picture Parade! Sorry!

Droning on!

With thanks to Monika for the title of today’s post!

My father was born in 1901. He had two wives. Me and my sister, Elizabeth, are the result of the relationship between our father and his second wife; Betty. Our father died in 1956; December 20th.

My father first was married to Maud and they had two daughters, Rhona and Corinne. Rhona died in 2003 and Corinne died in 2014. Although Rhona and Corinne were half-sisters I prefer to think of them as sisters!

Both had children. But I want to concentrate on Rhona. She and Reider, Norwegian by birth, had four children: Rolv; Greta; Rikard; Marit.

As is the way in this modern world, Rikky who lives near Torquay in South Devon, recently called in to see my brother-in-law, John, and John remarked to me that Rikky’s new wife, Jazz, was gorgeous. I asked Greta for a telephone number and, hey presto, Rikky and I were in contact with each other.

This is a little bit from Rik’s bio.

So you may remember I was with Amanda at the time of Mother’s passing, seems a long time ago now. Well that ultimately came to nothing and I ended up living alone with a couple of huskies in a small flat in Torquay. I had invested a large chunk of Mother’s inheritance into a PA system and set up and ran a sound engineering business for years as well as running quite a successful tribute band to ‘The Doors’. The PA company eventually ended after going into a partnership with a friend who also invested a chunk of cash allowing major upgrades to the kit.

Unfortunately I soon found out he was more interested in holidays to Spain than actual PA work, the problem being I had now sold vital parts of my rig which was replaced by his. We went separate ways and he took his gear with him leaving me without a full system, BIG lesson learnt.

At that point I went back to employment as an engineer for a company servicing and repairing lifting hoists to the health care industry. Four years in and the company went into administration.

Later Rikky says:

Back to work again this time to DPD as a delivery driver for a couple of years following in Rolv’s (Ed: brother) tyre tracks. This was when I also met Jazz on a random night out with friends. We immediately realised that we had many mutual friends and had actually met before many years ago when I was playing in her Dad’s Jazz band! This was around 19 years ago when I was 30 and Jazz was only 16. I only have a vague memory of her then sitting in a corner of the rehearsal room furiously scribbling in a sketch book.

Not much has changed there except she now holds a degree in Art and Design. She is also a Holistic Therapist and has trained in many holistic therapies including Reilki, Reflexology and Massage and is a very talented and beautiful woman. I feel incredibly blessed. She has two daughters Sanije and Latoja (nine and eleven) who I consider as mine; their father left the country last year and went back to Albania which actually has been a blessing for the girls as he is a difficult man to say the least.
So the driving job became another engineering position this time with a company specialising in fire alarms, a couple of years in and the contract I was working on was TUPED over to LiveWest which is one of the largest social housing companies in the South West. Two years after that and the company merged with another housing company, the role changed slightly so I was offered voluntary redundancy which I took giving me the financial opportunity to retrain as a commercial drone pilot and so here we are today.

Thus Rik became a commercial drone pilot and as the home page of his website declares:

We can accommodate all your aerial requirements from photography to cinematography, inspections to 3d mapping.

The name of Rik’s website is Ahead4Heights which strikes me as apt. And from the About page of that website, one reads:

Here at Ahead4Heights we have a passion for flying drones and creating visually stunning aerial films and photography. We are PfCO certified by the Civil Aviation Authority and hold full public liability insurance giving you complete confidence in us to provide the service you require.
With our post production studio facility we are able to add voice overs and original music written to your brief if required as we have our own in house composer and audio recording engineer.
Our UAV fleet consists of a variety of drones from the market leading DJI Inspire 2, capable of filming in incredible  5.2k resolution and producing the RAW file format standard for the film industry to our Pixhawk based quadcopter (equipt with a 4k camera) which we use for autonomous flight taking photos used to generate 3d mapping of locations useful for the construction industry.
Finally we have a heavy lift Tarot 680 hexacopter which is used as a backup drone and also for specialised  payloads such as thermal cameras and high power lighting.
If you simply want aerial photos for property sales, photos and footage for weddings and events we will be happy to offer our services to you.
We can also carry out inspection work on roofs, tower masts and bridges etc where specialised safety equipment and scaffolding would otherwise be required. Utilizing both the high resolution and thermal imaging cameras we are able to identify problems with the insulation of properties, stress points in structures and damage to roofs and guttering.
Ahead4Heights also holds certificates in the building and setting up of drones so if you require a drone built to your special requirements we would be happy to discuss. We would also offer a full maintenance package with any build projects.

A couple more photographs.

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And, of course, one more of the dogs! That is Storm and Tia.

More tomorrow!

Picture Parade Three Hundred and Forty-Eight

I won’t explain more until tomorrow!

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There’s quite a story behind this!

And behind this one!

Out of this world!

A fascinating journey about our Sun (and welcome Bruce).

The sun gives us everything. It is life!

I don’t know about you but there is something beautiful, something therapeutic, about thinking about stuff outside the day-to-day run of things. I came across this video recently, luckily on YouTube so I can share it with you. It is about the sun.

Here’s the introduction to the video:

The Copernican Principle has been with us for centuries. It broadly states that “we are typical” but increasingly we are beginning to question this doctrine. One famous push back is the Rare Earth hypothesis, but testing this idea will take generations. What about our Sun? Surely here we should have a better understanding as to whether our star is typical or not.

Join us as we discuss why the Sun might be more special than Copernicus ever imagined. Written and presented by Prof Kipping, this video is based on research conducted at the Cool Worlds Lab at Columbia University, New York.

The video starts immediately with some outstanding statements and one is drawn straightaway into Professor Kipping’s voice. The voyage is fantastic and truly out of this world.

Here it is:

It makes for a most intriguing thought about our planet and how we are, or are not, caring for it.

The theft of dogs.

A guest post from Gabby!

Not that long ago I was contacted by Gabriella Coppolecchia, or Gabby for short, about writing a guest post. Of course that was alright especially as Gabby comes from the U.K.. In fact, as her bio explains:

Gabriella Coppolecchia is a young dog trainer and dog walker in Chelmsford, Essex. During her studies she realised that there is a lot of misinformation around the world of dogs and she vowed to help people overcome the confusion. Her fiancé suggested she would write a blog since she can’t stop talking about dogs anyway. So along with her day business, she created Cinofilo.

Indeed, the blog site is now available and the address is https://cinofilo.wordpress.com/

This is a photograph of Gabby:

So let’s welcome her to this world of blogging and her first guest post on Learning from Dogs. (And, hopefully, not her last!)

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HOW TO AVOID DOG THEFT

All-focus

Dog theft is a phenomenon always on the rise. Here in the UK, I’m seeing missing dog posts on Facebook everyday. Most people believe it’s confined to a bad neighbourhood but it’s not. It can happen anywhere and almost to anyone. There are a few dogs that are the perfect target for dog theft and these despicable people will steal your dog to make an easy buck.

Why Dogs get stolen

1. Purebred dogs

With the cost of purebred dogs on the rise and the creation of always new breeds (such as labradoodle and cockapoo), more and more people are attracted to this huge market. If not neutered or spayed, stolen dogs could end up in the hands of other dog breeders that will use them as the studs or the bitches that will produce the new generations. These people might also steal puppies and disguise themselves (or have someone else doing so) as hobby breeders with one last puppy left and sell these dogs again for half of their original value. Or they might claim to be someone that wants to sell their own pet because they can no longer take care of him. They will justify the dog’s price by saying that they don’t want to lose the money they have spent when they bought “their” dog. To unsuspecting and uninformed first time buyers these could all look like legitimate trades. These people might look like regular neighbours, with regular jobs and regular families.

2. Weak, young and small dogs

The illegal world of dog-fighting always requires some new dogs to sacrifice for training. This training needs to be pretty safe and easy for the dogs that will be enlisted in the matches. Weak, young and small dogs are considered the best choice because they have slim to none chances of survival against their opponent and because they will not be able to injure him. Bigger and strong dogs will sometimes be used but only with their mouth taped shut. This training is effective because winning all the fights during training will boost the winner’s confidence. In turn, when the real match happens, the dog will think that winning will be easy and he will not recognise the danger. Not even when it’s charging right at him, jaws open. The dogs for the training are often acquired by online ads of dogs that need re-homing and that are given away for free. But when this source starts to become scarce, these people will start stealing.

3. Fila Brasileiro, Dogo Argentino, Tosa Inu, Presa Canario and Pitt Bulls

These dogs might also be stolen for the dog-fighting world. If not neutered or spayed these dogs could become breeders that will supply new champions. Or they end up being the ones that will be trained to fight for the entertainment of horrible people.

In general

There are also dogs that are not targeted for a specific feature. These dogs might be stolen because these thieves will wait for a large ransom to be put out and then will return the dog claiming to have found him. Another reason is to sell dogs to research, veterinary and medical facilities that need them for testing and experiments. These facilities will not do a thorough research on the animal’s past, especially because they often use a third party to get the dogs.This makes it easy for the thieves to sell stolen pets to them.

Once your dog is stolen, he will likely be quickly moved many miles away and it will become very difficult to trace the bad guy’s steps. So the best course of action is to try and prevent this from happening.

How targets get chosen

To steal your pet, there are a number of tactics that they can use. Simply put, anytime your dog is out of your sight, he can become a target. But there are a few everyday situations that often occur that might make things easier for these thieves.

1. shops

We have all done it. We need to pop in a shop for a second and we think it’s easier to leave our dog tied outside. We think it’s going to be fine. We’ll only take a minute and that moment it’s enough for a thief. Especially if we end up taking longer than expected or if we can’t really keep an eye on our dog from inside the shop.

2. back gardens 

We might think that the fence of our back garden is high enough and we think that if we are home we will be able to keep an eye on our dog. But we are often wrong. These thieves will usually study their targets for a while. They will monitor the times your dogs spends outside and find the right time to strike.

3. car

A dog should never be left in a car unattended but this is not just for the risk of heatstroke. A car is not a secure place. The only thing in the way of those thieves is your car window and that’s pretty easy to break. Another problem is that when we leave our dog in a car, we feel like he is more safe than tied outside. Overestimating his safety means that we feel comfortable going farther and leaving him alone for longer.

4. off-leash walks

When on walks, your dog might be used to spend some time off leash. This often happens when you are in a park and you want to give your dog more freedom to explore in a car free space. While exploring it could be easy for a dog to go too far and out of sight for a while. This is often enough for a thief to snatch your dog right under your supervision.

How to keep them safe

There are a few things that you can do to help your pet be safer and keep your mind more at ease.

1. less information

It’s always nice, when people that we meet on a walk, stop us to compliment our dog. This can happen at every walk and often several times during the same walk. Although most people will only ask a couple of questions out of curiosity, you never know when you have a thief right in front of you. These people will often ask more information and you might start suddenly seeing them often, even when you never used to see them before. They will ask questions like your dog’s name, if he is friendly, if you can let him off, if you walk around the area around the same times, if you live close by. These are all informations that can help the bad guy see a pattern in your routine and that can uncover an opportunity for him to act. So if faced with all these questions try to remain very vague or lie about some details. You could say that you don’t always walk at the same times. Or maybe you can say that you like the area for walks but you live quite far and you actually have to drive there.

2. vary your routes

I’m sure you and your dog have a favourite route. Maybe you like the pond he can swim in or maybe you like the dogs you meet. But going to the same routes everyday might give the bad guys the opportunity to study you and gain information that they can use to put their plan into motion. Instead choose 3-4 different routes and try to alternate them in an unpredictable way.

3. keep a close eye

As I said, basically, every time you keep your eyes off your dog he could get stolen. So if you are out and you need to pop in a shop, try asking someone that works there if they can wait outside with your dog as you are shopping. This might not always be possible but it’s worth a shot. Moreover most people will happily take a break from work to pet your dog as they wait. If your dog, when off leash, tends to go so far he is often out of sight, you could try a different spot, such as a big clearing, where your dog will hardly ever be out of sight. If, instead, you are worried your dog might get stolen from your garden, try a higher fence and don’t take the habit of leaving your back door open at all times. Only let your dog out when he asks.

4. security system

Installing cameras and an alarm system around your house and your garden might be a real weapon against burglars and bad guys in general. As well as protecting your dog, they are optimal for keeping your family safe. These can be a powerful deterrent for anyone looking for an easy target, and can be an even more powerful source of information in case someone should still decide to break in.There are all sorts of pet friendly security systems that will not be accidentally activated from your dog.

5. identification

By law a dog should be microchipped and should be wearing a collar with name tag at all times. Thieves can easily remove the collar and it’s even possible for them to go to a vet and change the ownership to them, no questions asked. This is becoming more rare but it still can happen. If the vet checks the owner the dog is registered to and contacts the registered number, you could be contacted by the vets that will have your dog at that time. Something what could also happen is that your dog might be abandoned once the bad guys no longer need him. Someone could then find him and take him to a vet where he would be identified.

6. GPS tracking collars

This kind of technology is more useful for a lost pet than a stolen one, mostly because a thief can easily remove the collar and dump it somewhere. There are however collars that have an hidden GPS tracker. This can make it look like a regular collar and a thief might not feel the need to remove the collar until later. This can give an idea of where your pet is or has been and give an indication of who might be responsible. It might not be much but it can mean a higher chance of finding your beloved pet.

What to do if your dog gets stolen

If you believe your dog has been stolen there are a few things that you can do:

1. report

Report your dog missing to the microchip databases (petlog, PETtrack and Identibase). They can contact you if your dog’s microchip gets scanned and the guardianship details checked. Report to the police, making sure to give all the informations that come to mind. Even the ones that you don’t redeem relevant can help. Be sure to tell them when you last saw your pet and when and how you think he has been stolen. Tell them if you met someone suspicious during your walk or if you saw someone suspicious walking around your house. Tell them the routes you use during your walks and be sure to describe any special feature that your dog might have.

2. tell everyone

Put up posters in your local area. If your dog is still in town someone might see him. Post about your missing dog on social media and ask for help from the community. Register your pet on social media groups or on dedicated websites that help people reunite with missing dogs. Start locally but then widen your range.

Now that you have more information I hope you’ll start feeling safer. But if you are here because your pet has been stolen, here some links to websites that can help. There are a lot more but these are a start:

-https://www.petfinder.com/dogs/lost-and-found-dogs/find-lost-dog/

-https://www.doglost.co.uk/

-https://www.facebook.com/FindMissingDogsUK/

-https://www.pawmaw.com/

-https://www.rspca.org.uk/adviceandwelfare/pets/dogs/straydogs

-https://www.petsreunited.com/

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I think this is a terrific post and I’m delighted that Gabby contacted me and went on to post this. All over the world readers will be aware of the issue and Gabby has done a fine job in describing what one can do.

More please!

Origins of the Dog, a repeat!

Dogs and humans go back a very long way.

I wrote in my post of the 23rd: “In fact tomorrow I shall republish a post I wrote in 2015 about the origins of the dog!”

Well tomorrow wasn’t possible with the sad news of the loss of our cat.

But it is today! It was originally published on the 13th July, 2015 – my how 5 years have sped by!

So here it is again. I suspect many of you have not read it!

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The Origins of the Dog.

Dogs and humans go back even further than previously thought.

Humans and dogs were constant companions well before our ancestors settled in villages and started growing crops 10,000 years ago …

I have no doubt that thousands of dog owners all around the world must be enthralled by the way that dogs relate to us and, in turn, how we humans relate to dogs. More than once a day, one of our dogs will do something that has me and Jean marvelling at their way of living so close to us.

Then when one starts to reflect on how long dogs and humans have been together, perhaps it could be seen as the direct result of that length of relationship.

Now there’s nothing new in me writing this, after all the home page of Learning from Dogs states:

Yet they have been part of man’s world for an unimaginable time, at least 30,000 years. That makes the domesticated dog the longest animal companion to man, by far!

Back in May the website Livescience published an article that revealed more about the length of our relationship with dogs. This is how it opened:

Ancient Wolf DNA Could Solve Dog Origin Mystery

by Becky Oskin, Senior Writer

Humans and dogs were constant companions well before our ancestors settled in villages and started growing crops 10,000 years ago, a new study suggests.

Genetic evidence from an ancient wolf bone discovered lying on the tundra in Siberia’s Taimyr Peninsula reveals that wolves and dogs split from their common ancestor at least 27,000 years ago. “Although separation isn’t the same as domestication, this opens up the possibility that domestication occurred much earlier than we thought before,” said lead study author Pontus Skoglund, who studies ancient DNA at Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute in Massachusetts. Previously, scientists had pegged the wolf-dog split at no earlier than 16,000 years ago.

The Livescience article referred to results that were published in the journal Current Biology on May 21st this year. One needs a subscription to read the full report but here is their summary:

The origin of domestic dogs is poorly understood [ 1–15 ], with suggested evidence of dog-like features in fossils that predate the Last Glacial Maximum [ 6, 9, 10, 14, 16 ] conflicting with genetic estimates of a more recent divergence between dogs and worldwide wolf populations [ 13, 15, 17–19 ]. Here, we present a draft genome sequence from a 35,000-year-old wolf from the Taimyr Peninsula in northern Siberia. We find that this individual belonged to a population that diverged from the common ancestor of present-day wolves and dogs very close in time to the appearance of the domestic dog lineage. We use the directly dated ancient wolf genome to recalibrate the molecular timescale of wolves and dogs and find that the mutation rate is substantially slower than assumed by most previous studies, suggesting that the ancestors of dogs were separated from present-day wolves before the Last Glacial Maximum. We also find evidence of introgression from the archaic Taimyr wolf lineage into present-day dog breeds from northeast Siberia and Greenland, contributing between 1.4% and 27.3% of their ancestry. This demonstrates that the ancestry of present-day dogs is derived from multiple regional wolf populations.

That summary page also includes the following Graphical Abstract:

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I don’t have permission to republish the Livescience article in full but would like to offer the closing paragraphs of this fascinating report.

“It is a very well-done paper,” Perry [George Perry, an expert in ancient DNA at Pennsylvania State University] told Live Science. “This topic is a critical one for our understanding of human evolution and human-environment interactions in the Paleolithic. Partnership with early dogs may have facilitated more efficient hunting strategies.”

If dogs first befriended hunter-gatherers, rather than farmers, then perhaps the animals helped with hunting or keeping other carnivores away. For instance, an author of a new book claims humans and dogs teamed up to drive Neanderthals to extinction. Skoglund also suggested the Siberian husky followed nomads across the Bering Land Bridge, picking up wolf DNA along the way.

“It might have been beneficial for them to absorb genes that were adapted to this high Arctic environment,” Skoglund said.

This is the first wolf genome from the Pleistocene, and more ancient DNA from prehistoric fossils could provide further insights into the relationship between wolves, dogs and humans, the researchers said.

Yes, our dogs have been part of man’s world for an unimaginable time – and Jean and I, as with tens of thousands of others, can’t imagine a world without dogs.

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They are our supreme companions. They don’t judge. They don’t lie. They are …. well let me repeat what I wrote right at the beginning of the blog.

Dogs are part of the Canidae, a family including wolves, coyotes and foxes, thought to have evolved 60 million years ago.  There is no hard evidence about when dogs and man came together but dogs were certainly around when man developed speech and set out from Africa, about 50,000 years ago.  See an interesting article by Dr. George Johnson.

Because of this closeness between dogs and man, we (as in man!) have the ability to observe the way they live.  Now I’m sure that scientists would cringe with the idea that the way that a dog lives his life sets an example for us humans, well cringe in the scientific sense.  But man seems to be at one of those defining stages in mankind’s evolution where the forces bearing down on the species homo sapiens have the potential to cause very great harm.  If the example of dogs can provide a beacon of hope, an incentive to change at a deep cultural level, then the quicker we ‘get the message’, the better it will be.

Dogs:

  • are integrous ( a score of 210) according to Dr David Hawkins
  • don’t cheat or lie
  • don’t have hidden agendas
  • are loyal and faithful
  • forgive
  • love unconditionally
  • value and cherish the ‘present’ in a way that humans can only dream of achieving
  • are, by eons of time, a more successful species than man.

There! Nothing more to say!

Our last cat has died!

She hadn’t been eating for a couple of days.

A Mexican cat similar to Aranlla

Yesterday morning we took our last cat to the vet. Her name was Aranlla, which is clearly a Mexican name. She was born in the Summer of 2006 and Jean found the baby kitten all on her own in the Mexican dirt. Jean took the kitten home immediately.

So all these years later we were down to a single cat: Aranlla.

Then a couple of days ago she went off her food and nothing would coax her to eat.

A fitting image from home.

We left her at the vet and later on, about 2pm, the vet called and said that there was a long list of issues and what was our decision. Jean reluctantly said to let her go.

We went back to collect the body and she will be buried in our fields tomorrow (today!).

Within a few hours yesterday it already felt very strange. Thank goodness for our lovely, beautiful dogs.

P.S. The cat has now been buried! It looked so quiet. Of course, it was, by definition. But lying there in the bottom of the hole – so sad!

A budding young photographer!

This photograph is from a twelve-year-old!

For some time I have followed Ugly Hedgehog, (UHH) a photographic forum; I joined in July 2017. It is a terrific forum and I encourage all who have an interest in photography who don’t know of the forum to drop in and take a look.

For example, I chose my camera based on advice from UHH. I chose my photo-editing software, DxO Photolab, likewise. I am growing in confidence at using the camera based on UHH advice, and more.

The other day, Dennis posted a photograph that his granddaughter took. I asked for permission to republish it and Dennis kindly said “Yes”.

First some background:

My 12 year old granddaughter took this photo of her dog recently. She used her dad’s iPhone in portrait mode. I complimented her in getting down low to take the image. And I thought it was interesting how she only captured the dog’s head. I am trying to encourage her to learn photography

And now the photograph!

Of course it’s a dog, that’s what caught my eye.

But it is also wonderful, don’t you think?

Unbridled love!

The great thing about going away is the home-coming!

I’m speaking of coming back to one’s dogs. This theme of coming home to your dogs was prompted by something I read the other day on The Dodo newsletter. It was an article … well you read it rather than me explain it.

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Dogs Are So Excited When Mom Finally Comes Home From 8-Month Deployment

Photo Credit: Taryn Dennison

Bauer first met his mom when he was just a puppy, and ever since then they’ve been basically attached at the hip. Bauer follows his mom everywhere she goes and loves hanging out with her no matter what they’re doing.

“Bauer isn’t your typical husky, he doesn’t bark and he rarely howls,” Taryn Dennison, Bauer’s mom, told The Dodo. “He loves sleeping and when he’s awake he’s right next to you trying to get all the cuddles and pets he can or to get you to throw his toys.”

When Dennison found out she was going to be deployed, she knew it was going to be hard to leave Bauer behind. He stayed with her roommate and her roommate’s dog, Macie, and was cared for and loved so well, but everyone could tell that he missed his mom so much.

Photo Credit: Taryn Dennison

“Bauer didn’t understand why I was gone,” Dennison said. “I FaceTimed him a few times and he would run around my house trying to find me and then later he would end up laying down and falling asleep in front of my door.”

Finally, after eight long months apart, Dennison arrived home…and as soon as she walked in the door, Bauer completely lost it.

He was overwhelmed with joy and so thrilled that his mom was finally home, and couldn’t stop licking her and jumping all over her.

“I honestly thought he was going to pee on me because he was so excited,” Dennison said.

Photo Credit: Taryn Dennison

Even Macie was excited, especially when she saw how happy Bauer was, and both dogs jumped around Dennison as she sat on the floor with them. After so much time apart, she was so happy to finally be home with Bauer and the rest of her loved ones.

“Since I got home he’s been attached to my hip,” Dennison said. “I can’t even get up to go to the kitchen or the bathroom without him being right next to me. I wouldn’t change it for the world!”

Bauer missed his mom so much, but now that she’s home, he’s making sure he doesn’t take a single minute of being with her for granted.

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To keep up the theme for a little longer, here is a YouTube video of dogs and their returning owners.

I hope you enjoyed it.

 

Finally, Jean and I just need to go the shops in Grants Pass, about 20 minutes away, and when we return home, perhaps 1 or 2 hours later, we are greeted by all our dogs in a similar fashion. The vast majority of dogs offer unconditional, unbridled love! 😍