Yesterday, I offered the account of physicist Paul Dirac falling in love with Margit Wigner, the sister of a Hungarian physicist. It was my way of opening a window into the mind of one individual, albeit a very clever one, falling in love. However, the conclusion, that won’t surprise anyone, is that the state of love in us humans is more mystery than fact!
Dogs have no such problem in showing their state of love!
A few days ago, in comments to a recent post, the author, John Zande wrote:
We were so heartbroken after losing Arthur so unexpectedly (an astonishing dog we found with a massive tumor in his eye) in Sao Paulo we literally moved cities. I couldn’t stand being in the same neighbourhood. Too much reminded me of him.
Then in response to my reply went on to say:
They are amazing creatures. The dog across the street from us died almost a year ago to the day. Beautiful dog, not so good owners (never paid her any attention, fed her crap… we’d sneakily feed her mince and chicken and treats every night). She had many male visitors (they never neutered her), but one in particular, Hop-along, a crippled dog from a street over considered her his wife/girlfriend. When she died it was only us and Hop-along who grieved. It was amazing. He held vigil outside her house for 2 weeks solid after she died, day and night. He never left. He just stood there.
More than thirty-five years ago, when I was working in Colchester, Essex, England, I met Roger Davis. It was Roger that introduced me to gliding (sailplaning in American speak!) courtesy of Rattlesden Gliding Club. Roger and I have stayed in touch ever since including, of course, keeping in touch with Sheila, Roger’s wife, and much of the family.
Yesterday, in an exchange of emails, Roger sent this:
Just back from taking Ralph (now 89) to day surgery at Broomfields.His companion since Freda his wife died two years ago is Sasha, a blonde Alsatian. He always had Alsatians so no surprise when this one appeared.
The love and companionship offered by Sasha to Ralph.
I was moved equally by John’s love for Arthur, Hop-along’s love for his female canine love, and the love of Sasha for Ralph.
Today’s post is inspired by something I read that is very special.
The last time I published a post headed What is love?, back in 2012, I included this:
I would imagine that there are almost as many ideas about the meaning of love as there are people on this planet. Dictionary.com produces this in answer to the search on the word ‘love’.
love
[luhv] noun, verb, loved, lov·ing. noun
a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.
a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend.
sexual passion or desire.
a person toward whom love is felt; beloved person;sweetheart.
(used in direct address as a term of endearment, affection,or the like): Would you like to see a movie, love?
But, I don’t know about you, those definitions leave something missing for me. Here’s my take on what love is, and it’s only by having so many dogs in my life that I have found this clarity of thought.
“Love is trust, love is pure openness, love is knowing that you offer yourself without any barriers. Think how you dream of giving yourself outwardly in the total surrender of love. Reflect on that surrender that you experience when deeply connecting, nay loving, with your dog.“
One of the very special qualities of our dogs is their natural and instinctive ability to love, unconditionally, both us humans and other animals around them (with some notable exceptions; of course.)
Yet as much as we want to learn unconditional love from our dogs, there is something just too complex about us humans to manage that. Possibly rooted in our inability to really live in the present, another quality our dogs also demonstrate so perfectly.
“What is love” was the most searched phrase on Google in 2012, according to the company. In an attempt to get to the bottom of the question once and for all, the Guardian has gathered writers from the fields of science, psychotherapy, literature, religion and philosophy to give their definition of the much-pondered word.
So I sub-titled today’s post by saying that I was inspired by something.
Here it is, recently published over on The Conversation and republished within their terms. I think you are going to love it!
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The life-changing love of one of the 20th century’s greatest physicists
December 9, 2015
Author: Richard Underman, Chancellor’s Professor of Medicine, Liberal Arts, and Philanthropy, Indiana University
Love is for everyone. mawazeFL/Flickr, CC BY-NC
One of the great short stories of the 20th century is Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Spinoza of Market Street. It tells of an aged scholar who has devoted his life to the study of Spinoza’s great work, Ethics. Protagonist Dr Fischelson has lost his library job and, like his hero, been expelled from his religious community for his heretical views. Looking down from his garret with disdain at the crowded street below him, he devotes his days to solitary scholarship. At night he gazes up through his telescope at the heavens, where he finds verification of his master’s wisdom.
Then one day Dr Fischelson falls ill. A neighbor, an uneducated “old maid,” nurses him back to health. Eventually, though the good doctor never understands exactly how or why, they are married. On the night of the wedding, after the unlikeliest of passionate consummations, the old man gazes up at the stars and murmurs, “Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool.” He has learned that there is more to life than the theoretical speculations that have preoccupied him for decades.
The history of modern physics boasts its own version of Fischelson. His name was Paul Dirac. I first encountered Dirac in physics courses, but was moved to revisit his life and legacy through my service on the board of the Kinsey Institute for the Study of Human Sexuality and teaching an undergraduate course on sexuality and love.
A brilliant but very strange man
Born in Bristol, England, in 1902, Dirac became, after Einstein, the second most important theoretical physicist of the 20th century. He studied at Cambridge, where he wrote the first-ever dissertation on quantum mechanics. Shortly thereafter he produced one of physics’ most famous theories, the Dirac equation, which correctly predicted the existence of antimatter. Dirac did more than any other scientist to reconcile Einstein’s general theory of relativity to quantum mechanics. In 1933 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, the youngest theoretical physicist ever to do so.
At the time Dirac received the Nobel Prize, he was leading a remarkably drab and, to most eyes,
Paul Dirac in 1933. Nobel Foundation via Wikimedia Commons
unappealing existence. As detailed in Graham Farmelo’s wonderful biography, The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom, on which I rely heavily in this article, Dirac was an incredibly taciturn individual. Getting him to utter even a word could prove nearly impossible, leading his mischievous colleagues to introduce a new unit of measure for the rate of human speech, the Dirac, which amounted to one word per hour.
Dirac was the kind of man who would “never utter a word when no word would do.” Farmelo describes him as a human being completely absorbed in his work, with absolutely no interest in other people or their feelings, and utterly devoid of empathy. He attributes this in part to Dirac’s tyrannical upbringing. His father ruthlessly punished him for every error in speech, and the young Dirac adopted the strategy of saying as little as possible.
Dirac was socially awkward and showed no interest in the opposite sex. Some of his colleagues suspected that he might be utterly devoid of such feelings. Once, Farmelo recounts, Dirac found himself on a two-week cruise from California to Japan with the eminent physicist Werner Heisenberg. The gregarious Heisenberg made the most of the trip’s opportunities for fraternization with the opposite sex, dancing with the flapper girls. Dirac found Heisenberg’s conduct perplexing, asking him, “Why do you dance?” Heisenberg replied, “When there are nice girls, it is always a pleasure to dance.” Dirac pondered this for some minutes before responding, “But Heisenberg, how do you know beforehand that the girls are nice?”
Love finds the professor
Then one day, something remarkable entered Dirac’s life. Her name was Margit Wigner, the sister of a Hungarian physicist and recently divorced mother of two. She was visiting her brother at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where Dirac had just arrived.
Known to friends and family as “Manci,” one day she was dining with her brother when she observed a frail, lost-looking young man walk into the restaurant. “Who is that?” she asked. “Why that is Paul Dirac, one of last year’s Nobel laureates,” replied her brother. To which she replied, “Why don’t you ask him to join us?”
Thus began an acquaintance that eventually transformed Dirac’s life. Writes Farmelo:
His personality could scarcely have contrasted more with hers: to the same extent that he was reticent, measured, objective, and cold, she was talkative, impulsive, subjective, and passionate.”
A self-described “scientific zero,” Manci embodied many things that were missing in Dirac’s life. After their first meeting, the two dined together occasionally, but Dirac, whose office was two doors down from Einstein, remained largely focused on his work.
After Manci returned to Europe, they maintained a lopsided correspondence. Manci wrote letters that ran to multiple pages every few days, to which Dirac responded with a few sentences every few weeks. But Manci was far more attuned than Dirac to a “universally acknowledged truth” best expressed by Jane Austen: “A single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
She persisted despite stern warnings from Dirac:
I am afraid I cannot write such nice letters to you – perhaps because my feelings are so weak and my life is mainly concerned with facts and not feelings.
When she complained that many of her queries about his daily life and feelings were going unanswered, Dirac drew up a table, placing her questions in the left column, paired with his responses on the right. To her question, “Whom else should I love?” Dirac responded, “You should not expect me to answer this question. You would say I was cruel if I tried.” To her question, “Are there any feelings for me?” Dirac answered only, “Yes, some.”
Realizing that Dirac lacked the insight to see that many of her questions were rhetorical, she informed him that “most of them were not meant to be answered.” Eventually, exasperated by Dirac’s lack of feeling, Manci wrote to him that he should “get a second Nobel Prize in cruelty.” Dirac wrote back:
You should know that I am not in love with you. It would be wrong for me to pretend that I am, as I have never been in love I cannot understand fine feelings.
Yet with time, Dirac’s outlook began to change. After returning from a visit with her in Budapest, Dirac wrote, “I felt very sad leaving you and still feel that I miss you very much. I do not understand why this should be, as I do not usually miss people when I leave them.” The man whose mathematical brilliance had unlocked new truths about the fundamental nature of the universe was, through his relationship with Manci, discovering truths about human life that he had never before recognized.
Soon thereafter, when she returned for a visit, he asked her to marry him, and she accepted immediately. The couple went on two honeymoons little more than month apart. Later he wrote to her:
Manci, my darling, you are very dear to me. You have made a wonderful alteration in my life. You have made me human… I feel that life for me is worth living if I just make you happy and do nothing else.
A Soviet colleague of Dirac corroborated his friend’s self-assessment: “It is fun to see Dirac married, it makes him so much more human.”
In Dirac, a thoroughly theoretical existence acquired a surprisingly welcome practical dimension.
Paul and Manci in 1963. GFHund via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
A man who had been thoroughly engrossed in the life of the mind discovered the life of the heart. And a human being whose greatest contributions had been guided by the pursuit of mathematical beauty discovered something beautiful in humanity whose existence he had never before suspected.
In short, a brilliant but lonely man found something new and wonderful that had been missing his entire life: love. As my students and I discover in the course on sexuality and love, science can reveal a great deal, but there are some aspects of reality – among them, love – that remain largely outside its ambit.
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Picking up on that last sentence, “there are some aspects of reality – among them, love – that remain largely outside its ambit.” all I can offer is to introduce dogs to the students!
I struggled for ages wondering how to close today’s post. In the end, decided on the following:
At first, this may seem like a rather bizarre question.
Before plunging in to today’s post, can I just explain, especially to those who are new to this place, why there has been a preponderance of republished articles from other sources in recent times. (And that’s not to say that these articles aren’t fascinating reads; by the way.)
While my book is now available, I am still just over a week away from a formal launch, both here on Learning from Dogs, and locally in the town of Grants Pass. However, the level of demands upon me in connection with the launch is building rapidly. For example, on Friday a team from the local Daily Courier are coming here in connection with a feature article that they want to write. On Saturday, Jean and I have a stand at a local craft fair. Next Tuesday I have my fingers crossed that there will be a radio broadcast from local KAJO about the book on their local community slot. (More details will be published here once the time and day has been confirmed.)
I’m sure you get the picture!
So with all that out of the way, here’s a wonderful sequel to my recent posts on Stillness and Happiness. It is a fascinating essay from Val Boyco under the heading of W.A.I.T., republished with Val’s kind permission.
I love to work with people on becoming better communicators. The key, of course, is to learn to really listen – becoming engaged listeners and tuning into the other person, rather than letting our own thoughts take us away from the moment and distract us.
But before we even get to this step, there is one vital piece of wisdom to absorb.
When we are talking we are not listening.
So, the question to ask yourself is : Why Am I Talking?…
Have you ever considered why you are talking? It is usually more than sharing valuable information; that’s for sure!
Next time you notice you are talking, consider these questions:
Am I trying to release something that’s bottled up?
Am I trying to persuade someone to my point of view?
Is it a habit?
Am I trying to work through something out loud?
Do I have an unmet personal need that I am trying to get met? For example: a need for validation, attention, love, approval, recognition or to be right.
Do I find talking entertaining?
Am I uncomfortable with silence?
Do I believe that people really need all the information I am providing, that I am being helpful or teaching something?
To explore more, you may want to write W.A.I.T.? on a post-it note before your next meeting and notice what comes up for you.
When we become aware of our talking, we are in a better position to choose whether we want to continue or not. Enjoy tuning in to yourself this week.. and this video.
One of the classic lessons we can learn from our dearest dogs.
In yesterday’s post, towards the end of the essay by Russell McLendon was the following paragraph:
All this may seem like an esoteric quest for neuroscientists, but it’s about more than just academic curiosity. By knowing which parts of the human brain generate our sensation of happiness, we might develop more accurate ways to test methods of becoming happier, like travel, exercise or meditation.
I have written before on the subject of stillness and how important it is for us humans. That was a post back in August where I shared an interesting talk by Pico Iyer The Art of Stillness.
Anyway, back to yesterday’s post and the essay that was linked to from the word “meditation”. An essay that I am going to republish in full, within the terms of Mother Nature Network.
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Russell Simmons says meditation is the key to greater happiness
Business magnate shares the benefits and practice of daily meditation in his new book ‘Success Through Stillness.’
For those wondering if the daily practice of meditation really works, Russell Simmons has both a succinct response and a more in-depth answer totaling more than 220 pages.
“Today my new book ‘Success Through Stillness: Meditation Made Simple’ comes out,” he recently wrote in a blog post. “As the title suggests, it is a very straight-forward, easy-to-digest guide on how to get past whatever misconceptions or apprehensions you might have about meditation and learn how to use this simple yet incredibly effective tool.
“As I move around talking about the book, one question I seem to get asked over and over again is, ‘Does meditaion really work?’ And my answer is always an unequivocal ‘YES!'”
The 56-year-old vegan and healthy living guru, who has built a net worth estimated at more than $340 million, says he was skeptical at first that 40 minutes of daily meditation could do anything to stem the anxiety he was feeling.
“The idea of being still and operating from a calm place is one that I never would’ve thought would’ve suited my lifestyle or my goals or the way that I pursue life, ’cause I pursue everything with a vigor,” he told Yahoo! News.
Simmons explains that he practices mantra-based meditation, in which one repeats a word or sound for a period of 20 minutes. Simmons repeats the word “Rum” over and over, a process he says has led him to greater happiness.
“I come out of meditation, and sometimes I just start giggling, I feel so happy, right in the mornings,” he shares.
According to a study released earlier this year, while feelings of happiness may not necessarily occur for all practitioners of meditation, reductions in anxiety, depression and possibly pain are possible.
“Meditation helps young people and adults to get control of the noise,” says Simmons. “The noise is the cause of almost all sickness and sadness. If we can calm the noise, our relationship with the world benefits tremendously.”
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If you would like to buy a copy of Simmons’ book, in Kindle, Hardback or Paperback formats, then do click on the link below.
Chapter 8 of my book is entitled: Behaviours and Relationships. It opens thus:
“It is all to do with relationships.”
I heard this many years before the idea of writing this book came to me. Heard it from J, who was referred to in the previous chapter. J was speaking of what makes for happy people in all walks of life. It’s one of those remarks that initially comes over as such an obvious statement, akin to water being wet or the night being dark, that it is easy to miss the incredible depth of meaning behind those seven words.
Humans are fascinating. Every aspect of who we are can be seen in our relationships. How we relate to people around us, whether it be a thirty-second exchange with a stranger or a long natter with friends whom we have known for decades, including our partners and family relations. The core relationship, of course, the relationship that drives so many of our behaviours is the relationship that we have with ourself. That being rooted in our relationship experiences with the adults around us when we were young people.
When one looks at the performance of successful companies one often sees, nay one always sees, people being valued. The directors and managers of those companies understand that if people are valued then a myriad of benefits flow from that approach to relationships. Moving out of the workplace, the relationships that people have are always stronger and happier if those individual persons know they are valued. Moving beyond people, our dogs, and many other animals, are always stronger and happier if they feel valued. It’s the difference between empathy and sympathy.
Recently over on Mother Nature Network there was an essay presented by Russell McLendon who is science editor for MNN. It is about happiness.
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Happiness is all in your head
Scientists say they’ve found where happiness happens in the brain. What does that mean?
By: Russell McLendon, November 24, 2015
Understanding how our brains generate happiness could help make it less elusive, researchers say. (Photo: Andrew Vargas/Flickr)
Everyone wants to be happy. Yet despite all our efforts in pursuit of this prized emotion, it can be a surprisingly nebulous goal. What is “happiness,” exactly?
That question has puzzled philosophers for thousands of years, and it’s still tricky for anyone to tackle. But recent advances in neuroscience have finally begun to shed light on it, and now a new study claims to have found an answer. Being told happiness is “all in your head” may seem both obvious and dismissive, but in this case the specifics are also empowering. The more we know about how (and where) happiness happens, the less helpless we’ll be to summon it when we need it.
By comparing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with questionnaires about emotional states, researchers from Kyoto University in Japan say they’ve traced the experience of happiness to a specific part of the human brain. Overall happiness, they conclude, occurs when positive emotions combine with a sense of life satisfaction in the precuneus, a region of the medial parietal lobe that’s linked to important brain tasks like episodic memory, self-reflection and consciousness.
Psychologists already distinguish between broad life satisfaction and “subjective well-being,” since happiness often seems to fade during bad moods without necessarily plunging us into deeper existential despair. But by revealing the neural mechanics of how these feelings combine to create overall happiness, the authors of the new study hope to make it easier to objectively quantify this mysterious and elusive emotion.
“Over history, many eminent scholars like Aristotle have contemplated what happiness is,” lead author Wataru Sato says in a press release. “I’m very happy that we now know more about what it means to be happy.”
Scientists used MRI brain scans to identify happiness in a brain region known as the precuneus. (Photo: Kyoto University)
To pinpoint the location of happiness, Sato and his colleagues first used MRI to scan the brains of their study subjects. Those participants then took a survey, which asked about their general sense of happiness, the intensity of their emotions and the degree of their overall life satisfaction.
After analyzing the data, the researchers discovered that those who scored higher on the happiness survey also had more gray matter mass in the precuneus. That means this brain region is larger in people who feel happiness more intensely, feel sadness less intensely and who are better able to find meaning in life.
“To our knowledge, our study is the first to show that the precuneus is associated with subjective happiness,” the researchers write in the journal Scientific Reports.
Complex phenomena like happiness rarely boil down to a single brain region, but other recent research also points to an outsized role for the precuneus. A study published this month links impaired connectivity in the precuneus to depression, for example, and a 2014 study suggests the region is a “distinct hub” in the brain’s default-mode network, which is active during self-reflection and daydreaming.
All this may seem like an esoteric quest for neuroscientists, but it’s about more than just academic curiosity. By knowing which parts of the human brain generate our sensation of happiness, we might develop more accurate ways to test methods of becoming happier, like travel, exercise or meditation.
“Several studies have shown that meditation increases grey matter mass in the precuneus,” Sato says. “This new insight on where happiness happens in the brain will be useful for developing happiness programs based on scientific research.”
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It’s an unscientific opinion from me but I truly believe that humans have a bias towards happiness. And if there’s one animal that we can learn happiness from, it’s the dog!
Published on Nov 6, 2015
Another try at a slow motion video of Abbey shaking the water off after a bath
Published on Apr 24, 2014
Stunning, Perfection, Breathtaking – just a few words that describe this 3 minute surfing clip that shows Ian Walsh catching huge waves and making it look effortless.
Well over two million viewings.
Music: Versailles
Warner // Chappell Production Music
Published on Oct 22, 2014
This is a clip from our movie “THE SECRET LIFE OF TREES”.
More on www.homan.pl
Finally, back to slow animal shakes! (And I must acknowledge Mother Nature News for the idea for today’s picture parade.)
Published on Mar 21, 2013
Why do wet furry mammals shake? Si and Sam give some of their favourite animals a shower to uncover the science behind the ‘wet dog shake’. Sam caught up with Andrew Dickerson from Georgia Institute of Technology to find out more about the science… we’ll have the full interview for you soon.
When putting together yesterday’s post, based heavily on a recent article over on Mother Nature Network, I couldn’t help noticing a link on that MNN item to this: 13 photos of dogs that got invited to the wedding. Wanted to share some of the photographs with you for today’s picture parade.
Final picture for today is the one of Jean and me at our anniversary lunch taken at The Twisted Cork in Grants Pass on Friday. Not quite newly-weds but still not that long ago!
So if we are discussing feelings, as we are today, there is no better place to start than by me expressing my feelings of joy and love that I feel for, and still receive from, my gorgeous Jean. I know five years at our stage of life is far fewer than for many married couples but, nevertheless, they have been beautiful years and I wish for many more.
Diane Jackson, Bridesmaid, Jean and me, my mother and Dan Gomez, Best Man. November 20th, 2010
I had been pondering these last few days as to what I would write for today. For I wanted to celebrate our anniversary yet wanted a broader theme; so to speak.
There couldn’t have been a better answer to that ponder than a recent video that was presented by TED Talks. It was a talk by Carl Safina about what is going on inside the brains of animals: What are animals thinking and feeling? Or in the fuller words of that TED Talk page:
What’s going on inside the brains of animals? Can we know what, or if, they’re thinking and feeling? Carl Safina thinks we can. Using discoveries and anecdotes that span ecology, biology and behavioral science, he weaves together stories of whales, wolves, elephants and albatrosses to argue that just as we think, feel, use tools and express emotions, so too do the other creatures – and minds – that share the Earth with us.
Safina is very qualified to speak on the subject as his bio on that TED Talk page reveals. However, I couldn’t find a YouTube link for that TED Talk but could find two videos that are very good alternatives.
The first is a short video of Safina promoting his book Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel.
The second is a much longer video that is Safina’s presentation at the recent Ransom A. Myers Lecture. If you can spare the time, then do watch it. You will not be disappointed.
Published on Oct 9, 2015
8th Annual Ransom A. Myers Lecture in Science and Society. Thursday, October 1st 2015.
Title: Beyond Words: What animals think and feel
Presented by: Dr. Carl Safina, Marine Ecologist/Author, The Safina Centre
Finally, and please forgive my indulgences, I want to close today’s post with some photographs that for me have “feelings” stamped all over them!
Jeannie, Hazel and cat feeling trust for each other.
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One of our local wild deer trusting Jeannie.
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Oliver and Pedy adoring each other.
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Last but not least! A photograph taken two days ago by yours truly reflecting my feelings of wonder at being alive in this world!
Sometimes, one just has to hold one’s head in shame ….
… at the madness that we humans are capable of.
I included this sub-heading in the draft of this post last Thursday intending to make it Friday’s post then changed my mind. Hence the reason behind me writing in Friday’s post:
I was looking at a recent George Monbiot essay and getting myself all wound up about it, thinking that it should be today’s post. Then I thought, “Come on, Paul, end the week on a gentle tone.”
In the light of events in Paris last Friday, I had no idea how pertinent my sub-heading was!
What wound me up, so to speak, was a recent essay from George Monbiot about the damage being done to a Devon river; the River Culm. This river was known to me in the days that I lived in South Devon and had my Piper Super Cub based at Dunkeswell Airfield that was not far from the Culm.
Dunkeswell Airfield
So with no further ado, here is George Monbiot’s essay republished with Mr. Monbiot’s kind permission.
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Strategic Incompetence
12th November 2015
The agencies supposed to protect the living world have been neutered, and polluters and wildlife destroyers now have a free hand.
By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website 12th November 2015
It could scarcely have been a starker case. The river I came across in Devon six weeks ago, and described in the Guardian, was so polluted that I could smell it from 50 metres away. Farm slurry pouring into the water, from a pipe that I traced back to a dairy farm, had wiped out almost all the life in the stretch of River Culm I explored.
All that now grew on the riverbed were long, feathery growths of sewage fungus. An expert on freshwater pollution I consulted told me that the extent of these growths showed the poisoning of the river was “chronic and severe”.
Here, as a reminder of what I saw, are some of the pictures I took:
Sewage fungus covering the river bed.
Slurry pouring from a pipe cut into the riverbank:
Slurry outfall just above the river.
And mingling with the clear water of the river:
The slurry entering the river.
I reported the pollution to the Environment Agency’s hotline. It told me it was taking the matter seriously. So when I received its report on the outcome of its investigation, I nearly fell off my chair.
It had decided to take no action against the farmer, as “the long term ecological impacts on the environment were fortunately low”. How did it know? Because there was “no evidence of a fish kill”.
Why in the name of all that’s holy should there be evidence of a fish kill? This is a chronic pollution case, not an acute one. Fish kills are what you see when a sudden poisoning occurs, as pollutants are flushed into a healthy living system. Chronic pollution deprives fish of their habitats and prey, but no investigator in their right mind would expect to see them floating belly up in the river as a result. They are simply absent from places where you would otherwise have found them.
And if a riverbed covered in nothing but sewage fungus suggests a “low” ecological impact, I dread to think what a high one looks like.
The same inability to distinguish between an acute event and a chronic one was revealed by another of the agency’s statements: the pollution “had a short term impact”. The slurry had plainly been pouring out of the pipe for months, as the luxuriant growths of sewage fungus show. It would doubtless have continued, had I not reported it.
The Environment Agency also told me that it had inspected the farm, and found no problems with the infrastructure, as there was plenty of space for slurry storage under the floor of the barn where the cows were kept. But, the problem, as I had explained to them, had nothing to do with slurry storage in the barn. It was caused by leakage from the outdoor slurry lagoons, where I found cow manure pouring down the hill.
They could scarcely have made a bigger mess of their investigation if they had tried. The mistakes the agency made are so fundamental and so obvious that it makes me wonder whether they are mistakes at all. What does a farmer have to do to get prosecuted these days, detonate an atom bomb?
If this were an isolated case, you could put it down to ineptitude, albeit ineptitude raised to the status of an Olympic sport. But responses like this are now the norm at the Environment Agency. It has been so brutally disciplined by cuts and by ministers’ demands that it leave farms and other businesses alone that it is now almost incapable of enforcement.
Even when the fish kills it appears to see as the only real proof of pollution do occur, in the great majority of cases it doesn’t even bother to assess them, let alone investigate and prosecute. Freedom of information requests by the environmental group Fish Legal reveal that the agency sent its investigators to visit just 16% of reported fish kills.
There was massive regional variation. While in the Anglian Central region, covering parts of Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and surrounding counties, the agency inspected 61% of these events, in Devon they investigated only 3%. (I suspect that it was only because I’m a journalist for a national newspaper that they came out at all in the case I reported). In the fishery areas on either side of it – Cornwall and Wessex – the inspection rate was, er, 0%. If you want to pollute rivers in these regions, there’s nothing stopping you.
The Environment Agency no longer prosecutes even some of the most extreme pollution events. In 2013, a farmer in Somerset released what the agency called a “tsunami of slurry” into the Wellow Brook. One inspector said it was the worst pollution she had seen in 17 years. But the agency dithered for a year before striking a private agreement with the farmer, allowing him to avoid prosecution, a criminal record, a massive fine and court costs, by giving £5000 to a local charity.
New rules imposed by the government means that such under-the-counter deals, which now have a name of their own – enforcement undertakings – are likely to become more common. They are a parody of justice: arbitrary, opaque and wide open to influence-peddling, special pleading and corruption.
I see the agency’s farcical investigation of the pollution incident I reported as strategic incompetence, designed to avoid conflict with powerful landowners. Were it to follow any other strategy, it would run into trouble with the government.
These problems are likely to become even more severe, when the new cuts the environment department (Defra) has just agreed with the Treasury take effect. An analysis by the RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts reveals that, once the new reductions bite, the government’s spending on wildlife conservation, air quality and water pollution will have declined by nearly 80% in real terms since 2009/10.
It’s all up for grabs now: if you want to wreck the living world, the government is not going to stop you. Those who have power, agency, money or land can – metaphorically and literally – dump their crap on the rest of us.
Never mind that the government is now breaking European law left right and centre, spectacularly failing, for example, to ensure that all aquatic ecosystems are in good health by the end of this year, as it is supposed to do under the water framework directive. It no longer seems to care. It would rather use your tax money to pay fines to the European Commission than enforce the law against polluters.
I’ve heard the same description of Liz Truss, the secretary of state for environment, who oversees the work of the Environment Agency, from several people over the past few months. “Worse than Owen Paterson”. At first, I refused to take it seriously. It’s the kind of statement that is usually employed as hyperbole, such as “somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan”, or “more deluded than Tony Blair”. But in this case, they aren’t joking. Preposterous as the notion of any environment secretary being worse than Mr Paterson might seem, they mean it.
Nowhere, as far as I can discover, in Liz Truss’s speeches or writing before she was appointed, is there any sign of prior interest in the natural world or its protection. What we see instead is perhaps the most extreme manifestation of market fundamentalism on this side of the Atlantic. She founded the Conservative Free Enterprise Group, and was co-author of the book Britannia Unchained, that laid out a terrifying vision of a nation run by raw economic power, without effective social or environmental protection. Now she has a chance to put that vision into practice.
Those who have tried to engage with her describe her as indissolubly wedded to a set of theories about how the world should be, that are impervious to argument, facts or experience. She was among the first ministers to put her own department on the block in the latest spending review, volunteering massive cuts. She seems determined to dismantle the protections that secure our quality of life: the rules and agencies defending the places and wildlife we love.
Bureaucracy and regulation are concepts we have been taught to hate, through relentless propaganda in the media. But they are essential pillars of civilisation. They make the difference between a decent society and a barbarous one.
While this essay from Monbiot clearly concerns a river in the South-West of England and may therefore not relate to readers in other parts of the UK or the world, those closing sentences [my emphasis] do relate to all of us wherever we are on this planet.
Bureaucracy and regulation are concepts we have been taught to hate, through relentless propaganda in the media. But they are essential pillars of civilisation. They make the difference between a decent society and a barbarous one.
Tomorrow, I will return to Piper Cubs flying out of Dunkeswell!
With seventeen pets here at home Jean and I should live forever!
Another Saturday and another gentle post about the power of our wonderful pets. (Oh, and who, as I did, missed the fact that yesterday was not only a Friday the Thirteenth but the third one this year!)
Anyway, back to the plot!
Last Monday, Mother Nature Network published an item about how good pets are for our health. It seemed the perfect item to share with all of you this Saturday.
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11 studies that prove pets are good for your health
Check out the ways your 4-legged friends enhance your physical and emotional health.
By: Sidney Stevens, November 9, 2015.
Pets strengthen our hearts, calm our nerves and a whole lot more. (Photo: Juanedc.com /flickr)
If you have pets you already know the joy and love they bring to your life. Now science is confirming just how good they really are for you — both mentally and physically.
How do they help? One theory is that pets boost our oxytocin levels. Also known as the “bonding hormone” or “cuddle chemical,” oxytocin enhances social skills, decreases blood pressure and heart rate, boosts immune function and raises tolerance for pain. It also lowers stress, anger and depression.
No surprise then that keeping regular company with a dog or cat (or another beloved beast) appears to offer all these same benefits and more. Read on to discover the many impressive ways a pet can make you healthier, happier and more resilient.
1. Pets alleviate allergies and boost immune function
One of your immune system’s jobs is to identify potentially harmful substances and unleash antibodies to ward off the threat. But sometimes it overreacts and misidentifies harmless stuff as dangerous, causing an allergic reaction. Think red eyes, itchy skin, runny nose and wheezing. You’d think that having pets might trigger allergies by kicking up sneeze-and-wheeze-inducing dander and fur. But it turns out that living with a dog or cat during the first year of life not only cuts your chances of having pet allergies in childhood and later on but also revs up your immune system and lowers your risk of eczema and asthma. In fact, just a brief pet encounter can invigorate your disease-defense system. In one study, petting a dog for only 18 minutes raised immunoglobulin A (IgA) levels in college students’ saliva, a sign of robust immune function.
2. Pets up your fitness quotient
This one applies more to dog owners. If you like walking with your favorite canine, chances are you’re fitter and trimmer than your non-dog-walking counterparts and come closer to meeting recommended physical activity levels. One study of more than 2,000 adults found that regular dog walkers got more exercise and were less likely to be obese than those who didn’t walk a dog. In another study, older dog walkers (ages 71-82) walked faster and longer than non-pooch-walkers, plus they were more mobile at home.
Dog owners who take their canine companions on walks tend to be trimmer and fitter than their fellow dog-less peers. (Photo: AMatveev/Shutterstock)
3. Pets dial down stress
When stress comes your way, your body goes into fight-or-flight mode, releasing hormones like cortisol to crank out more energy-boosting blood sugar and epinephrine to get your heart and blood pumping. All well and good for our ancestors who needed quick bursts of speed to dodge predatory saber-toothed tigers and stampeding mastodons. But when we live in a constant state of fight-or-flight from ongoing stress at work and the frenetic pace of modern life, these physical changes take their toll on our bodies, including raising our risk of heart disease and other dangerous conditions. Contact with pets seem to counteract this stress response by lowering stress hormones and heart rate. They also lower anxiety and fear levels (psychological responses to stress) and elevate feelings of calmness.
4. Pets boost heart health
Pets shower us with love so it’s not surprising they have a big impact on our love organ: the heart. Turns out time spent with a cherished critter is linked to better cardiovascular health, possibly due to the stress-busting effect mentioned above. Studies show that dog owners have a lower risk of heart disease, including lower blood pressure and cholesterol. Dogs also benefit patients who already have cardiovascular disease. They’re not only four time more likely to be alive after a year if they own a dog, but they’re also more likely to survive a heart attack. And don’t worry, cat owners — feline affection confers a similar effect. One 10-year study found that current and former cat owners were 40 percent less likely to suffer a heart attack and 30 percent less likely to die of other cardiovascular diseases.
5. Make you a social — and date — magnet
Four-legged companions (particularly the canine variety that pull us out of the house for daily walks) help us make more friends and appear more approachable, trustworthy and date-worthy. In one study, people in wheelchairs who had a dog received more smiles and had more conversations with passersby than those without a dog. In another study, college students who were asked to watch videos of two psychotherapists (depicted once with a dog and once without) said they felt more positively toward them when they had a dog and more likely to disclose personal information. And good news for guys: research shows that women are more willing to give out their number to men with a canine buddy.
A dog can make you appear friendlier and more approachable to others. (Photo: CandyBox Images/Shutterstock)
6. Provides a social salve for Alzheimer’s patients
Just as non-human pals strengthen our social skills and connection, cats and dogs also offer furry, friendly comfort and social bonding to people suffering from Alzheimer’s and other forms of brain-destroying dementia. Several canine caregiver programs now exist to assist at-home dementia patients with day-to-day tasks, such as fetching medication, reminding them to eat and guiding them home if they’ve wandered off course. Many assisted-living facilities also keep resident pets or offer therapy animal visits to support and stimulate patients. Studies show creature companions can reduce behavioral issues among dementia patients by boosting their moods and raising their nutritional intake.
7. Enhances social skills in kids with autism
One in nearly 70 American kids has autism (also known as autism spectrum disorder, or ASD), a developmental disability that makes it tough to communicate and interact socially. Not surprisingly, animals can also help these kids connect better to others. One study found that youngsters with ASD talked and laughed more, whined and cried less and were more social with peers when guinea pigs were present. A multitude of ASD animal-assisted therapy programs have sprung up in recent years, featuring everything from dogs and dolphins to alpacas, horses and even chickens.
Animal-assisted therapy helps kids with autism and other developmental disabilities learn social skills. (Photo: UCI UC Irvine/flickr)
8. Dampens depression and boosts mood
Pets keep loneliness and isolation at bay and make us smile. In other words, their creature camaraderie and ability to keep us engaged in daily life (via endearing demands for food, attention and walks) are good recipes for warding off the blues. Research is ongoing, but animal-assisted therapy is proving particularly potent in deterring depression and other mood disorders. Studies show that everyone from older men in a veterans hospital who were exposed to an aviary filled with songbirds to depressed college students who spent time with dogs reported feeling more positive.
9. Defeats PTSD
People haunted by trauma like combat, assault and natural disasters are particularly vulnerable to a mental health condition called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Sure enough, studies show that the unconditional love — and oxytocin boost — of a pet can help remedy the flashbacks, emotional numbness and angry outbursts linked to PTSD. Even better, there are now several programs that pair specially trained service dogs and cats with veterans suffering from PTSD.
10. Fights cancer
Animal-assisted therapy helps cancer patients heal emotionally and physically. Preliminary findings of an on-going clinical trial by the American Humane Association shows that therapy dogs not only erase loneliness, depression and stress in kids fighting cancer, but canines can also motivate them to eat and follow treatment recommendations better — in other words participate more actively in their own healing. Likewise, new research reveals a similar lift in emotional well-being for adults undergoing the physical rigors of cancer treatment. Even more astounding, dogs (with their stellar smelling skills) are now being trained to literally sniff out cancer.
11. Puts the kibosh on pain
Millions live with chronic pain, but animals can soothe some of it away. In one study, 34 percent of patients with the pain disorder fibromyalgia reported pain relief (and a better mood and less fatigue) after visiting for 10-15 minutes with a therapy dog compared to only 4 percent of patients who just sat in a waiting room. In another study, those who had undergone total joint replacement surgery needed 28 percent less pain medication after daily visits from a therapy dog than those who got no canine contact.
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When I was setting this post up and copying across all the many links I was aware that there was a mountain of information out there. You may want to take some time and explore those links. For example, the link to HABRI- Human-Animal Research Initiative looks incredibly interesting. Then there was the link to the work being undertaken by the American Humane Association, that link being to this video that I am presenting here to close off today’s post.
Wherever you are in the world look after yourself and care for all those lovely pets out there. Love them so dearly!
I truly envy a dog’s ability to be still so easily!
Learning from Dogs 