Category: Core thought

Dogs really are smarter!

Fascinating research coming out of Duke University

This Post was stimulated by a link sent to me by Chris Snuggs, who will be joining the author’s team at Learning from Dogs in due course.

The link was to an article published in Time Magazine on September 21st and is available in their online version.

Brian Hare of Duke
Brian Hare of Duke

The article is about the extraordinary social skills that have been developed by dogs over the millennia that they have been associated with man.  It featured Brain Hare (sort of seems an appropriate name!) Assistant Professor, Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke.

The article is also rather timely as only a few days ago, there was a Post on this Blog about the befriending of a man with a wild wolf, or was it the other way around!

Back to the Time magazine article,

“Understanding a pointed finger may seem easy, but consider this: while humans and canines can do it naturally, no other known species in the animal kingdom can. Consider too all the mental work that goes into figuring out what a pointed finger means: paying close attention to a person, recognizing that a gesture reflects a thought, that another animal can even have a thought.”

Read more about Dogs

Dogfighting

John Goodwin of HSUS teams up with an unlikely partner in the battle against dogfighting.

Thanks to Trish for pointing the Blog to this article in Yahoo Sports.  It concerns a surprising success.

Maybe it was one of the times John Goodwin found a more receptive audience while lobbying politicians

John Goodwin
John Goodwin

for stricter sentencing against dogfighting.

Maybe it was one of the times a law enforcement training session was packed with police.

Maybe it was while he was riding along on what is an increasing number of raids on dogfighting operations.

Whenever it was, there was a moment over the past two years that Goodwin, the anti-dog fighting expert at the Humane Society of the United States, realized that of all the unexpected things, a silver lining had formed in the ugly clouds of the Michael Vick scandal.

Read the full article here.  More on John Goodwin here.

By Paul Handover

What really matters – to you!

Sometimes we need to remind ourselves what is really important.

We went to a funeral last Monday. It was special in that a friend of ours had died and her husband had phoned to tell us.

They had emigrated to Spain 12 years before to become self sufficient in growing their own food, putting on workshops and working with ‘holistic management’ techniques. I have the feeling that it was quite tough as the climate was becoming more and more arid in the mountain area that had moved to.

She had decided to come home to Totnes (Devon, SW England) to die and had obviously planned the whole thing.
The service was lovely and relatives and friends had written poems and the vicar had been briefed on her life which was quite amazing. Born in Africa, boarding school in the UK, rose to be high up in a large company and then had decided with her husband to follow a completely different holistic route to self fulfilment.

The vicar had asked her how she wanted to prepare for her death and he she had answered that she wanted to saviour every moment whilst she was still alive and had asked him to recount this tale at the service.

A man who was being chased by a tiger and had fled up a tree to escape. He looked down to see the tiger pacing up and down, looking longingly up at him. After many hours, the man must have fallen to sleep and awoke as he found himself falling towards the tiger, waiting eagerly below. As he dropped, he noticed a beautiful fruit and grabbed at it focussing intently on every fine detail of it.

After the church service we retired to a nearby woodland where we all took it in turns to carry her wicker coffin up a hill, into the woods and after music and a blessing, we buried her.

It was a truly beautiful day and one that had echoes back through the millennium. It touched me deeply, not because of sadness but about putting things into perspective – what’s important and what isn’t.

By Jon Lavin

Wolf meets Man

An amazing true story of a relationship between a wild wolf and a man.

This is a story of a particular event in the life of Tim Woods told to me by his brother, DR.  It revolves around the coming together of a man sleeping rough, with his dog, on Mingus Mountain, and a fully grown female Gray or Grey Wolf. Mingus is in the Black Hills mountain range between Cottonwood and Prescott in Arizona, USA

DR and his brother, Tim, belong to a large family; there are 7 sons and 2 daughters.  Tim had a twin brother, Tom, and DR knew from an early age that Tim was different.

As DR explained,

Tim was much more enlightened than the rest of us.  I remember that Tim and Tom, as twin brothers, could feel each other in almost a mystical manner.  I witnessed Tom grabbing his hand in pain when Tim stuck the point of his knife into his (Tim’s) palm.  Stuff like that!  Tim just saw more of life than most other people.

Read more of this fascination story

Postscript to Luna, the wolf.

The story of Luna has some interesting connections.

The person taking the picture in the Post about Tim Woods was Willie Prescott.  He just happens to be the grandson of William H. Prescott from whom the town of Prescott is named.  Here’s that picture again.

Luna, the wild wolf, taken in 2006.
Luna, the wild wolf, taken in 2006.

Read more this postscript

The swimming pool, a story and a metaphor.

Most of us have been here but the ‘message’ is worth a ponder.

Last year as a friend and I were about to leave the heat of the United Arab Emirates, he announced that he was going to buy an above ground swimming pool to take back to England. I don’t know where he bought his, but I bought a similar

From this ...?
From this ...?

one which for some reason cost nearly twice as much.

What with one thing and another I never got round to erecting the pool, partly because the children seemed quite happy with the small plastic baby pool that they could jump in and out of.

This year I vowed to get the have the swimming pool up and running.

Read more of this Post

More on that ‘passion’ word!

Passion may be the key to many, many areas of success.

Following John’s Post on Sunday about passion, two other items passed my virtual desk that seemed to resonate with the theme.

The first was my regular Sunday ‘newsletter’ from Philip Humbert.  Sometime it comes across as a bit too good to be true but that may be a little bit of cultural mismatch from an Englishman’s eyes. Philip describes himself as a “Personal Success Coach!” and offers a free weekly newsletter that is worth trying out.

Anyway, to the point of this Post.

Read more about Passion

More on the meaning of integrity: wholeness

Integrity from the perspective of wholeness.

Having recently begun to contribute to this blog, I’d like to add my perspective on the meaning of “integrity”. In an earlier post, Paul referred to a meaning which relates to honesty and to adherence to a moral and ethical code or principles; this is generally accepted and commonly applied.

However the dictionary definitions also list additional meanings. The free dictionary definition, that Paul referred to, includes:

  • the quality or condition of being whole or undivided; completeness

Another online definition, at dictionary.com, agrees and includes:

  • the state of being whole, entire, or undiminished

It seems to me that this is probably a deeper issue which underpins the more generally used meaning. Read more on these two meanings

Sunday smile … and passion in business

First impressions, reliable or not?

This joke that I received recently might amuse you:

Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

That happens! In some cases, you might have preferred to retain the first impression and wish that they had never spoken!

But sometimes, this “don’t judge a book by its cover” effect can work in the opposite direction; as a result, I nearly missed out on enjoying a passionate presentation.
Read more about passion!

Patrice Ayme, 9/11 anniversary thought

This is not comfortable reading.

Patrice published a Post on his Blog last September 11th.  Not being an American it felt wrong to echo that publication by linking to the Post on the 11th as well.  No logic, just the way it felt!

But it is so deeply interesting, that not to highlight the Post would be wrong.  This Blog, after all, is about integrity.  In that process, if the truth is uncomfortable, so be it.  And if others think that Patrice doesn’t speak truthfully then they must speak otherwise.  You see, integrity is really the pursuit of truth.

Patrice’s subject title is: Why France Is Bad: Profits Define Goodness.

Read an extract from Patrice’s Post