I was researching for a chapter on Communities for my book and came across a wonderful essay by an Erik Kennedy. It was so brimful of common-sense that I wanted to share it with you.
We may be the pinnacle of millions of years of evolution, but we’re throwing our birthright straight out the window of our comfortable suburban homes. In this essay, we’re going to discuss walking across our family-sized lawn, climbing over our questionably large picket fence, and retrieving that birthright.
Then a little later on, Mr Kennedy writes (my emphasis):
The Tribe
Human beings are no strangers to group living. Call it a family trait. Our closest animal relatives spend a good bulk of their time eating bugs off of their friends’ back. While I’m overjoyed we’re not social in that manner, I’m less pleased that we’re not social more to that degree. In study after study, having and spending time with close friends is consistently correlated with happiness and well-being. And yet, the last few decades in America have seen a remarkable decline in many things associated with being in a tight-knit social circle—things like family and household size, club participation, and number of close friends. Conversely, we’ve seen an increase in things associated with being alone—TV, commutes, and the internet, for example.
This trend is quite unhealthy. It’s no surprise that humans are social animals—but it may be surprising that we’re such social animals that merely joining a club halves your chance of death in the next year—or that living in a close-knit town of three-generation homes can almost singlehandedly keep you safe from heart disease.
Any of you that have a few dogs around you at home know what wonderful close-knit groups they make. Frequently highlighted here on Learning from Dogs.
Group of wild dogs from a photograph taken by George Lepp.
Dogs offer many beautiful examples of the benefits of community. For the reason that their ancient genes, long before they became domesticated animals, still guide their behaviours. When dogs lived in the wild, their natural pack size was around fifty animals. There were just three dogs that had pack status; the alpha, beta and omega dogs. Or more usefully described as the Mentor, Minder and Nanny dogs. (As is still the case in wild dog pack families.)
As has been explained previously in this place, all three dogs of status, wild or domesticated, are born into their respective roles, with their ‘duties’ in their pack being instinctive. There was no such thing as competition for that role as all the other dogs in that natural pack grouping would be equal participants with no ambitions to be anything else.
One doesn’t need to reflect for very long before the obvious question arises: If fifty dogs is the optimum number for a pack of dogs, is there a limit to the number of people we can have in the human equivalent of a pack?
Well, says anthropologist Robin Dunbar, that number is about 150 persons. Robin Dunbar achieved fame by drawing a graph that plotted primates’ social group size as a function of their brain sizes. He inputted the average human brain size into his model, and up came the number 150. Beyond that number is past the upper bounds for both hunter-gatherer tribes and Palaeolithic farming villages. More than that, it appears that everything from startup employee counts to online social networks show this number as a fairly consistent maximum for creating and maintaining close social ties.
Once more, a great lesson from our dogs – wrap the strength of a community around you.
Reinforcing the need to move personhood beyond the human person.
Yesterday, I wrote about the moves to have the concept of personhood extended to chimpanzees. Here’s a small extract:
The order to show cause on the issue of habeas corpus is the first step in a process which Steven Wise and the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) hope will secure Hercules and Leo’s bodily liberty and integrity. If the court were to find in their favour, the chimpanzees would no longer be kept for research and could be moved to a sanctuary in Florida.
Last Friday, George Monbiot published an essay that reinforced our need to regard our animals differently than hitherto; especially our larger animals. It is my pleasure to republish it with Mr. Monbiot’s permission.
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Megadeath
22nd May 2015
The destruction of some of the last of the huge animals that shaped us inflicts a great wound in our lives.
By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website 22nd May 2015
When I read about the attacks on the world’s remaining elephants and rhinos, the first thought that enters my head is: “these creatures used to be everywhere”. Almost every area of land and sea, in every region of the world, had a megafauna. Elephants lived throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and America until very recently in ecological time (30,000 years ago in Europe, 14,000 years ago in the Americas). Rhinos lived across Africa, Asia and Europe. Temperate forest rhinos lived in Britain during previous interglacials, and woolly rhinos lived here in colder periods. Russia was haunted by two gigantic species: humpbacked rhinos the size of elephants, eight feet to the crest, weighing perhaps five tonnes.
Lions were everywhere except Australasia (that had a marsupial equivalent); tigers ranged to the borders of Europe; hippos wallowed in British rivers; hyaenas survived into the early Mesolithic in Britain and northern Europe. All this is easily forgotten in a world afflicted by Shifting Baseline Syndrome: our habit of conceptualising as natural and normal the ecosystems that prevailed in our own youth, unaware that they were, even then, in an extremely degraded state.
The places in which monsters remain are the last tiny redoubts of what was once a global population. Of the 42 species of terrestrial mammals weighing more than a tonne that existed on Earth when modern humans left Africa, just eight are left: the African and Asian elephants, the larger of the two hippopotamus species and the black, white, Indian, Javan and Sumatran rhinos. Seven of them are threatened and four are critically endangered.
Even in the relatively recent past, the area of land over which these animals roamed has drastically declined. Maps published in a new paper in the journal Science Advances show that elephants, hippos and black rhinos occupied most of sub-Saharan Africa when their populations were first encountered by modern Europeans, but are now confined to a few tiny specks of land.
From William J. Ripple et al, 1st May 2015. Collapse of the world’s largest herbivores. Science Advances. 2015;1:e1400103
Why do the very large animals prove most susceptible to destruction? It’s partly because they reproduce slowly and partly because they require plenty of land and food for their survival, so the destruction of wild places tends to hit them sooner than it affects smaller species. But it’s also, I believe, because we have a deep-rooted urge to assert our status by killing them and owning their body parts. Even when people don’t do the killing themselves, possessing their skins, heads, tusks or horns has long been a means of acquiring bragging rights.
From the exquisite sculpture of two reindeer migrating across a river, carved from a piece of mammoth ivory 13,000 years ago and now housed in the British Museum, to the tiger skin rugs and heads of exotic beasts exhibited in stately homes today, bigging ourselves up by displaying our mastery of great beasts seems to be a fundamental human trait. Today’s aristocrats, some of whom are descendants of tribal chiefs, hang their ancestors on the wall to establish their genealogy and the heads of the animals they have killed beside them, to establish their prowess. Not much has changed in thousands of years.
Many of the world’s great sagas, tales of Ulysses, Sinbad, Sigurd, Beowulf, Cú Chulainn, St George, Arjuna, Lạc Long Quân and Glooskap, tell of struggles with megafauna real or imagined. Doubtless at least some of these stories originated in real battles with beasts whose true nature has been forgotten, as a result of their extinction. Think of Sinbad and the roc, which might be a garbled version of encounters with the elephant bird of Madagascar.
Today, some very rich people try to recreate these battles in ways that seem to me grotesque. They bid on the internet for the right to shoot a particular animal, sometimes paying tens of thousands of dollars, arrange a date, a time and a place, then fly over, in some cases with their taxidermists in tow, to bag the creature they have bought.
The animal is waiting for them – sometimes in an enclosure, sometimes just after being released from one, sometimes in the wild but already located by guides. There is no question about the outcome; otherwise the money would have to be repaid. I have heard that in some cases these people fly to a country for just a couple of days, during which they have booked the killing of several spectacular animals. Their diary secretaries arrange their schedules so that they can fit them all in. Once they have posed triumphantly with a foot on the beast they have just killed, they leave it for the taxidermist to process and move on to the next appointment with death.
This looks to me as dry and joyless as it is brutal and unsporting. Though I would struggle nowadays to bring myself to shoot a mammal or a bird (in my youth I killed and ate a few rabbits, squirrels and pigeons), I can understand the attraction of doing so in difficult circumstances, stalking and crawling and lying in wait much as a wild predator would. Canned, predetermined hunting of this kind seems empty of challenge and romance, bought rather than won. But such is the drive to establish dominion over the largest and most magnificent of beasts, and such is the obsession with conspicuous outcomes, that, for some people, none of this appears to matter.
Others are satisfied to remove themselves even further from contingency, by purchasing pieces of animals that have already been killed. My guess is that the use of rhino horn, tiger bones and other such body parts in traditional Chinese medicine, which are of course clinically useless, might be another manifestation of this deep-rooted drive, to make ourselves feel better by association with creatures larger or fiercer than ourselves.
You might have imagined that there were now plenty of alternative means of asserting our status and persuading ourselves of our own value, but traits that resonate with our evolutionary past – our ghost psyche – die hard.
So this great global tragedy continues. I know I should write about it more often. But I find it too upsetting.
Until 2008, conservationists, in some places at least, appeared to be winning. But in that year the number of rhinos killed in South Africa rose (from 13 in 2007) to 83. By 2011, the horrible tally had risen to 448. It climbed to 668 in 2012, 1004 in 2013 and 1215 in 2014. In the first four months of this year, 393 rhinos have been killed there, which is 18% more than in the same period last year.
The reasons for this acceleration in the Great Global Polishing are complex and not always easy to tease out. But they appear to be connected to rising prosperity in Vietnam, the exhaustion of illegal stocks held by Chinese doctors and, possibly, speculative investment in a scarce and tangible asset during the financial crisis. Corruption and judicial failure help to keep the trade alive.
Already, the western black rhino is extinct (the declaration was made in 2011). The northern white rhino has been reduced to five animals: a male at the end of its anticipated lifespan and four females, scattered between Kenya, the US and the Czech Republic.
Similar stories can be told about some populations of elephants – in particular the forest elephants of West and central Africa.
It’s not just these wonderful, enchanting creatures that are destroyed by poaching, but also many of the living processes of the places they inhabit. Elephants and rhinos are ecological engineers, creating conditions that hundreds of other species have evolved to exploit.
As the paper in Science Advances notes, the great beasts maintain a constantly shifting mosaic of habitats through a cycle of browsing and toppling and trampling, followed by the regrowth of the trees and the other plants they eat. They open up glades for other herbivores, and spaces in which predators can hunt. They spread the seeds of trees that have no other means of dispersal (other animals are too small to swallow the seeds whole, and grind them up). Many trees in Africa and Asia are distributed exclusively by megaherbivores.
They transport nutrients from rich places to poor ones and in some places reduce the likelihood of major bushfires, by creating firebreaks and eating twigs and leaves that would otherwise accumulate as potential fuel on the ground. Many animal species have co-evolved with them: the birds that eat their ectoparasites, the fish that feed on hippos’ fighting wounds (some of these species, I believe, are now used for fish pedicures), the wide range of life that depends on their dung for food and moisture, on their wallows for habitats, on the fissures they create in trees for nesting holes.
Who knows what ecological processes the world has already lost through the retreat of the megafauna? Everywhere on earth, living systems have been radically altered by the loss of the great beasts. (I’ll be discussing the impacts of the extinction of European elephants in next month’s edition of BBC Wildlife magazine).
The destruction of some of the last populations of the animals that shaped us, as well as the natural world, inflicts, I feel, a great wound in our lives, diminishing the wonderful planet on which we evolved, shrinking imagination, crushing experience. All of us should have an interest in supporting those who seek to save these wonderful creatures.
Dear Reader, I don’t intend to cast you in some dark mental place with the republication of this dark essay from Mr. Monbiot. Yet if you care about the world that we are leaving for the next generation, and I’m certain that the majority, the vast majority, of you readers do so care, then these terrible aspects of humanity must be highlighted. For if just one person is moved to make a difference then the mental pain is a necessary step on that journey of making a difference.
“Always search for the rainbow – it’s there somewhere. If
Loving the animals on this planet must be more than a romantic notion.
Before you read on, take a small break in your busy day and watch the following:
On December 8, 2013 Michael Mountain spoke on “”I Am Not an Animal” — The Signature Cry of our Species” at the Personhood Beyond the Human conference at Yale University.
Michael Mountain is Past President and one of the founders of Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, the nation’s largest sanctuary for abused and abandoned animals.
Abstract: The past 50 years have seen enormous growth in the animal protection movement. But the situation for nonhuman animals in every sphere, with the exception of homeless pets, continues to deteriorate. Any small advances remain incremental. Animal rights and welfare groups find themselves at a loss to explain their inability to influence the general public. But the work of Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death) and of psychologists in the field of Terror Management Theory (TMT) offer essential insight.
In this talk, we discuss how our need, as humans, to proclaim that “I am not an animal!” and to deny personhood to other animals affects our relationship with them at a fundamental level. We argue that to be effective, the animal protection movement needs to understand TMT and take it into account. And we conclude that a new kind of relationship to the world of nature in the 21st Century is not only essential to the mitigation of the catastrophic effects of the Sixth Great Extinction, but that it also holds the key to Becker’s still-unanswered question of how we can begin to relate positively to our own terror of personal mortality — and therefore our own future as a species.
Me spending time becoming better acquainted with the subject of rights for other animals besides us humans coincided with a recent item published over on The Conversation and republished here within their rights.
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May 19 2015, 4.05pm EDT
Climbing the tree: the case for chimpanzee ‘personhood’
Should primates such as chimpanzees be given rights normally reserved for humans? phil/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA
Hercules and Leo don’t know it, but a decision about their future has made history. In granting an order to show cause on whether Hercules and Leo (who just happen to be chimpanzees) are illegally imprisoned, a Supreme Court judge in Manhattan has kept open the possibility that some nonhuman animals will be granted legal rights under common law.
The plaintiffs are currently used for biomedical research at New York’s Stony Brook University. What the lawyers running the case hope to show is that Hercules and Leo shouldn’t be treated as if they were just things or property, but should instead be given the status of persons.
Showing that any animal has what is needed for legal personhood is a difficult task. But chimpanzees seem promising candidates as there is a wealth of scientific evidence showing they possess complex cognitive abilities, like self-awareness and autonomy.
The order to show cause on the issue of habeas corpus is the first step in a process which Steven Wise and the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) hope will secure Hercules and Leo’s bodily liberty and integrity.
If the court were to find in their favour, the chimpanzees would no longer be kept for research and could be moved to a sanctuary in Florida.
NhRP was founded by Wise in 2007 and after years of research it filed its first cases back in December 2013. To date it has brought three cases on behalf of chimpanzees held in captivity in the state of New York. But NhRP is ambitious, aiming to run as many cases on behalf of animals as it can fund.
If it can find suitable plaintiffs, NhPR hopes to mount cases for the personhood of elephants, whales and dolphins too.
Different perspectives on personhood for animals
Reactions to treating nonhuman animals as persons vary widely. Some people think it is ridiculous to even entertain the idea. Persons have to be human – end of story.
For philosophers, this is not very satisfactory. It tries to answer the question of whether animals can be persons by asserting a definition rather than offering an argument. It gets more interesting when people give reasons to support their view.
One approach to defending the idea that only humans are persons involves saying that persons need to participate in society. Society is founded on reciprocity; you can’t just take rights without also assuming responsibilities. And animals like chimpanzees can’t take on responsibilities, so they can’t have rights.
Another tactic is to suggest that there is a whole heap of criteria that one has to meet to be a person. And although humans meet these criteria, nonhuman animals don’t. These criteria could include things like being rational, self-aware, autonomous, having culture and being able to communicate.
The problem is neither of these kinds of arguments stand up to interrogation. There are lots of humans who get the benefit of rights without living up to reciprocal responsibilities, such as young children and people with certain physical or mental impairments.
There are similar difficulties when using a criteria based approach. Just as there are many humans who don’t meet certain criteria for personhood, there are some nonhuman animals who do.
This is known as the “problem of marginal cases”. Taking a consistent approach would mean treating some animals, but not all humans, as worthy of moral consideration.
This is known as the “problem of marginal cases”. Taking a consistent approach would mean treating some animals, but not all humans, as worthy of moral consideration.
There are other people who are sympathetic towards giving greater ethical consideration to animals, but who don’t think using personhood is the best approach. Utilitarians, for example, worry about the capacity to suffer. If a chimpanzee – or for that matter a dog, cat or rat – can experience pleasure and pain, then they matter regardless of whether they meet a test for personhood.
Implications of nonhuman animals as persons
If Wise and the NhRP win their case it will be a significant precedent and other cases will surely follow. Chimpanzees in jurisdictions where successful cases are mounted will no longer be permitted to be used in research or kept in zoos and circuses.
However, less charismatic animals – ones that don’t look like us or where it is not in our interests to grant them rights – won’t be so fortunate. Historically, there is a deep inconsistency in how we treat different types of animals that is not easily overturned, even in the face of compelling legal and ethical arguments.
The case of Hercules and Leo also has connections to Australia. Wise was inspired to practice animal law back in the 1980s after reading the work of Australian philosopher, Peter Singer. The hearing of the case in New York was actually interrupted due to Wise’s long-standing commitment to visit Australia and deliver the 2015 Voiceless Animal Law Lecture Series.
The hearing is now scheduled for 10:30am Wednesday May 27 at the New York County Supreme Court. Those interested in seeking rights for nonhuman animals keenly await the outcome.
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Towards the end of that piece, one sentence stood out. This one: “Historically, there is a deep inconsistency in how we treat different types of animals that is not easily overturned, even in the face of compelling legal and ethical arguments.“
Well it has to be overturned if mankind is to have any future on this planet!
Yet another aspect of our lives where taking a lesson from our dogs would do us no harm.
Pictured left to right are: “Toby”, a stray Lakeland dog; “Bramble”, orphaned roe deer; “Buster”, a stray Jack Russell; a dumped rabbit; “Sky”, an injured barn owl; and “Jasmine”. All told a mother’s heart doing best what a caring mother does.
Sent to me by dear friend, Dan Gomez, as a light-hearted diversion for the weekend. (But it did fit rather nicely as a sequel to my Lies, Damn Lies, and … from yesterday!)
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Say you are an older senior citizen and can no longer take care of yourself and the government says there is no Nursing Home care available for you. So, what do you do? You opt for Medicare Part G.
The plan gives anyone 75 or older a gun (Part G) and one bullet. You are allowed to shoot one worthless politician.
This means you will be sent to prison for the rest of your life where you will receive three meals a day, a roof over your head, central heating and air conditioning, cable TV, a library, and all the Health Care you need. Need new teeth? No problem. Need glasses? That’s great. Need a hearing aid, new hip, knees, kidney, lungs, sex change, or heart? They are all covered!
As an added bonus, your kids can come and visit you at least as often as they do now! And who will be paying for all of this? The same government that just told you they can’t afford for you to go into a nursing home. And you will get rid of a useless politician while you are at it. And now, because you are a prisoner, you don’t have to pay any more income taxes!
Is this a great country or what? Now that you have solved your senior financial plan, enjoy the rest of your week!
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I’ll leave the closing words to Dan: “Crazy world but compelling plan.”
Some aspects of our food that many of us would rather not know about!
Many readers will be used to me republishing the essays from George Monbiot. Admittedly, not every single one of them but especially those that seem to have a message that deserves a wider promulgation. Having Mr. Monbiot’s permission to so do is generous of him.
Yesterday, there was an essay written by him that was published both on his blog and in the UK’s Guardian Newspaper. At first reading, it seemed to apply predominantly to the United Kingdom. Then, upon a second reading, I was convinced that this was yet another ‘message’ that quite happily fits in here, on Learning from Dogs. Because it is another reminder that integrity is missing from so many aspects of our societies.
You be the judge!
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Fowl Deeds
19th May 2015
The astonishing, multiple crises caused by chicken farming.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 20th May 2015
It’s the insouciance that baffles me. To participate in the killing of an animal: this is a significant decision. It spreads like a fungal mycelium into the heartwood of our lives. Yet many people eat meat sometimes two or three times a day, casually and hurriedly, often without even marking the fact.
I don’t mean to blame. Billions are spent, through advertising and marketing, to distract and mollify, to trivialise the weighty decisions we make, to ensure we don’t connect. Even as we search for meaning and purpose, we want to be told that our actions are inconsequential. We seek reassurance that we are significant, but that what we do is not.
It’s not blind spots we suffer from. We have vision spots, tiny illuminated patches of perception, around which everything else is blanked out. How often have I seen environmentalists gather to bemoan the state of the world, then repair to a restaurant in which they gorge on beef or salmon? The Guardian and Observer urge us to go green, then publish recipes for fish whose capture rips apart the life of the sea.
The television chefs who bravely sought to break this spell might have been talking to the furniture. Giant chicken factories are springing up throughout the west of England, the Welsh Marches and the lowlands of the east. I say factories for this is what they are: you would picture something quite different if I said farm; they are hellish places. You might retch if you entered one, yet you eat what they produce without thinking.
Two huge broiler units are now being planned to sit close to where the River Dore rises, at the head of the Golden Valley in Herefordshire, one of the most gorgeous landscapes in Britain. Each shed at Bage Court Farm – warehouses 90 metres long – is likely to house about 40,000 birds, that will be cleared out, killed and replaced every 40 days or so. It remains to be seen how high the standards of welfare, employment and environment will be.
The UK now has some 2,000 of these factories, to meet a demand for chicken that has doubled in 40 years [1]. Because everything is automated, they employ few people, and those in hideous jobs: picking up and binning the birds that drop dead every day, catching chickens for slaughter in a flurry of shit and feathers, then scraping out the warehouses before the next batch arrives.
The dust such operations raise is an exquisite compound of aerialised faeces, chicken dander, mites, bacteria, fungal spores, mycotoxins, endotoxins, veterinary medicines, pesticides, ammonia and hydrogen sulphide. It is listed as a substance hazardous to health, and helps explain why 15% of poultry workers suffer from chronic bronchitis. Yet, uniquely in Europe, the British government classifies unfiltered roof vents on poultry sheds as the “best available technology”. If this were any other industry, it would be obliged to build a factory chimney to disperse the dust and the stink. But farming, as ever, is protected by deference and vested interest, excused from the regulations, planning conditions and taxes other business must observe. Already, Herefordshire County Council has approved chicken factories close to schools, without surveying the likely extent of the dust plumes either before or after the business opens. Bage Court Farm is just upwind of the village of Dorstone.
Inside chicken factories are scenes of cruelty practised on such a scale that they almost lose their ability to shock. Bred to grow at phenomenal speeds, many birds collapse under their own weight, and lie in the ammoniacal litter, acquiring burns on their feet and legs and lesions on their breasts. After slaughter they are graded. Those classified as grade A can be sold whole. The others must have parts of the body removed, as they are disfigured by bruising, burning and necrosis. The remaining sections are cut up and sold as portions. Hungry yet?
Plagues spread fast through such factories, so broiler businesses often dose their birds with antibiotics. These require prescriptions but – amazingly – the government keeps no record of how many are issued. The profligate use of antibiotics on farms endangers human health, as it makes bacterial resistance more likely.
But Herefordshire, like other county councils in the region, scarcely seems to care. How many broiler units has it approved? Who knows? Searches by local people suggest 42 in the past 12 months. But in December the council claimed it has authorised 21 developments since 2000. [2] This week it told me it has granted permission to 31 since 2010. It admits that it “has not produced any specific strategy for managing broiler unit development” [3]. Nor has it assessed the cumulative impact of these factories. At Bage Court Farm, as elsewhere, it has decided that no environmental impact assessment is needed [4].
So how should chicken be produced? The obvious answer is free range, but this exchanges one set of problems for another. Chicken dung is rich in soluble reactive phosphate. Large outdoor flocks lay down a scorching carpet of droppings, from which phosphate can leach or flash into the nearest stream. Rivers like the Ithon, in Powys, are said to run white with chicken faeces after rainstorms. The River Wye, a special area of conservation, is blighted by algal blooms: manure stimulates the growth of green murks and green slimes that kill fish and insects when they rot. Nor does free range solve the feed problem: the birds are usually fed on soya, for which rainforests and cerrado on the other side of the world are wrecked.
There is no sensible way of producing the amount of chicken we eat. Reducing the impact means eating less meat – much less. I know that most people are not prepared to stop altogether, but is it too much to ask that we should eat meat as our grandparents did, as something rare and special, rather than as something we happen to be stuffing into our faces while reading our emails? To recognise that an animal has been sacrificed to serve our appetites, to observe the fact of its death, is this not the least we owe it?
Knowing what we do and what we induce others to do is a prerequisite for a life that is honest and meaningful. We owe something to ourselves as well: to overcome our disavowal, and connect.
[1] Total purchases for household consumption (uncooked, pre-cooked and take-aways combined) rose from 126 grammes per person per week in 1974 to 259 grammes in 2013 (see the database marked UK – household purchases).
[2] BBC Hereford and Worcester, 15th December 2014
[3] Response to FoI request IAT 7856, 13th August 2014
[4] Herefordshire County Council, 22nd December 2014. Screening Determination of Bage Court Farm development, P143343/F
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Jean and I found a way to watch the BBC Panorama programme that was broadcast recently. It was screened under the title of Antibiotic Apocalypse. This is how the programme was introduced on the BBC website:
Panorama investigates the global advance of antibiotic-resistant superbugs and the threat they pose to modern medicine and millions of patients worldwide. Reporter Fergus Walsh travels to India and finds restricted, life-saving antibiotics on sale without prescription and talks to NHS patients whose recovery depends on them.
There is much in George Monbiot’s essay that resonates with the findings of that Panorama programme. Indeed, the Panorama programme showed the extent of the use of antibiotics in many animals over and beyond chickens.
It hardly needs to be said by me that the reason this is republished in a blog based in Southern Oregon, USA is because this is a problem that is not unique to the United Kingdom; far from it!
Like most young boys I was on a bicycle at a very young age. Then once sufficiently old to drive a motor car that was the end of bike riding for almost forever. Except that a few months ago the argument for anaerobic exercise as a means of delaying the worst of all the ailments that come with an ageing body (and mind!) convinced me to get back on a bike. That was made a lot easier because a small group of close neighbours ride three times a week and that seemed an opportunity not to be missed.
Those same neighbours supported, and recommended, a local bike shop in Grants Pass and I have ‘borrowed’ this picture of the store from their website.
Views of the interior of Don’s Bike Center, Grants Pass, Oregon.
Having now been riding an average of 35 miles a week for the last ten or twelve weeks, I can vouch for the benefits it is providing.
Logically, therefore, it was going to be much better if Jean could come with me, and the rest of the riding group, each week. But there was a small challenge: Jean had never ridden a bike in her life. Horses, yes! Bicycles, no!
Eric over at the bike centre lent Jean a two-wheeler to try but very quickly it was clear that Jean would not easily develop the confidence to ride on our local roads. The next suggestion from Erik was a tricycle! Not one that was designed in the days of Noah and his Arc but a modern model of the ‘recumbent’ design. In particular, one manufactured by Sun Bicycles. Here’s an image of the trike from the Sun’s website.
Sun EZ Tri Classic SX
Thus it came about that last Friday Jean and I went over to Don’s Bike Center to collect her new bike.
Eric at the store checking that the bike was properly set up for Jean.
Then once home it was time for Jean to learn a number of very new skills. At first just by riding around our turning circle in front of the house.
Then trying out our quarter-mile driveway that includes a couple of steep gradients; well steep for a cycle rider!
Another view of Jean getting to know her new bike here at home.
Then, deep breath, time to put on the safety helmet and go for a short ride on Hugo Road, our local road that runs past our property.
Slightly blurred image as I had the camera in my hand as I was riding behind Jean.
So all’s well that ends well!
Jean coming up the road towards the driveway entrance!
I will embarrass Jean by saying to my dear readers that Jean is already getting familiar with riding her trike and it won’t be too long before our riding group will be increased by one Mrs. Handover on her bike!
The things we do to stay healthy in our increasing years!
Just a simple post for today but one that inspires such love for our dogs.
Long-time follower of this place, Per Kuroski, himself a blogger, author of A view from the Radical Middle, recently emailed me a link to the website that is all about Medical Detection Dogs. Please do visit the website for their great work needs to be promoted widely.
Please buy your dog food and your dog products from a local pet store or a farm supply. Ask if the business owners or managers subscribe to daily updates on potentially harmful foods, treats and supplements. Ask if they track all lists of recalled pet products everyday they are open.
Use a trustworthy pet food store
A caring and knowledgeable store will pull all recall items each morning then ship them back to the sellers before the pet shop opens their doors to the public. They don’t want your dog getting sick from anything they sell. Naturally, they want to keep your business and have you refer friends and others to shop with them.
The old saying, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is certainly valuable in many ways to dog lovers. Be picky when it comes to buying and giving products to your dog for eating or chewing.
We shop at Western Farm because they assure us that they check all product recalls and pull them off the shelf to be returned to each company that produced any and all pet product recalls.
“The recalled Puppy Starter Kit consists of one lot of dog chews that were distributed nationwide, to Canada and through one domestic online mail order facility. The recalled product comes in a 1.69 ounce package marked with Lot #21935 and UPC 0-18214-81291-3 and with an expiration date of 3/22/18.”
A few responses on Dog Food Advisor
“Be so careful with chew bones, especially if your dog’s a fast eater. I lost a wonderful friend due to a blocked intestine. It was a large chunk of a “digestible” chew bone.”
“I just bought these for my puppy not too long ago. And he chewed up the dark bone and ate it! Next thing I know… He was throwing up for the next 24 hrs – 7 times! Took him to vet and they diagnosed him with an intestinal infection….. Wonder if it was because of the nylabone!”
“Same with my dog! Vomiting and peeing blood! He has a urinary tract infection they said. Same symptoms of salmonella. Call nylabone!! They should foot your vet bills!”
Read more on the Dog Food Advisor
Action, return & complaint
“Consumers who have purchased the affected product should discontinue use of the chews and may return the unused portion to the place of purchase for a full refund.
Those with questions may contact the company at 877-273-7527, Monday through Friday from 8 am – 5 pm Central time. After hours and weekend calls are covered by a third-party poison control center.
U.S. citizens can report complaints about FDA-regulated pet food products by calling the consumer complaint coordinator in your area. Or go to http://www.fda.gov/petfoodcomplaints.
Canadians can report any health or safety incidents related to the use of this product by filling out the Consumer Product Incident Report Form.” The Dog Food Advisor
“Consumers who have purchased 1.69 oz. packages of the Puppy Starter Kit from affected Lot 21935, UPC 0-18214-81291-3, Expiration date of 3/22/18, should discontinue use of the product and may return the unused portion to the place of purchase for a full refund. Consumers with questions may contact the company at 1-877-273-7527, Monday through Friday from 8:00 am – 5:00 pm Central time (after hours/weekends covered by third-party poison control center).” FDA.gov “Safety Recall”
Great alert to all dog owners and I am certain that Deborah, over at Dog Leader Mysteries, would have no problem in this being shared and circulated as far and wide as possible.
Only one way to close!
With a picture of a puppy!
Picture taken of puppy Cleo on the 13th April, 2012 when she was then aged 11 weeks.
The name Richard Williams is not an uncommon one. But that doesn’t devalue what one Richard Williams has put his name to. I am referring to the Mr. Richard Williams who will be better known to many by his stage name Prince Ea; an American rapper and activist.
Prince Ea was born as Richard Williams on September 16, 1988 in St. Louis, Missouri, the youngest of three children, and has resided there his whole life. The alias Prince Ea is derived from Sumerian mythology (“The prince of the Earth”). He has also graduated from the University of Missouri-St. Louis with an Anthropology degree and Latin honors.
So this particular Richard Williams is no slouch when it comes to what’s between his ears. Plus, he is of an age (27 this coming September) where the effects of what my generation has done, and is still doing, to Mother Earth will be unmissable.
Published on Apr 20, 2015
Activist and Artist Prince Ea Releases New Video on Earth Day supporting Stand for Trees campaign
Celebrity activist and spoken word artist Prince Ea launched his newest online video entitled “Dear Future Generations: Sorry” to motivate individuals to take immediate action to stop climate change by Standing for Trees.
Prince Ea was inspired to produce the video by the Stand for Trees campaign, an innovative new way for individuals to take real and effective action to protect threatened forests and help mitigate global climate change, all with the press of a button on their smart phones.
I sense so much angst inside me that it’s difficult to calm myself down and think rationally and calmly about what me and hundreds of thousands of others of my era must do.
But one thing is very clear: doing nothing is not an option!
Those who have watched the video will be aware that it serves as a promotion for an organisation Stand for Trees and for making donations in the form of Trees Certificates. The website’s How it works section explains:
Purchasing Stand For Trees Certificates is one of the most effective actions an individual can take to halt deforestation and combat climate change. Here’s how it works:
You buy a Stand For Trees Certificate — a unique, high-quality, verified carbon credit that protects a specific endangered forest and offsets a tonne of CO2 from entering the earth’s atmosphere. Because of your purchase, forests are left standing to do what they do best — store carbon, produce oxygen, provide habitat, and support local communities.
I strongly recommend you read everything that is available on that website including a helpful FAQs section.
It also needs to be said that neither Jean nor I have any connection with the organisation and, like many others, are considering how effective this is. But we are minded to purchase a number of Trees Certificates in addition to a number of things that we are already doing here at home. I was also comforted by coming across support for Stand For Trees Certificates from Richard Branson’s Virgin Group. Their web page includes this:
How does this work?
The second largest source of climate-changing CO2 emissions is the destructive clearing of the worlds’ forests. When you purchase a Stand For Trees Certificate, you prevent one tonne of CO2 from entering the atmosphere by supporting local and indigenous communities who are protecting that forest in a developing country. This creates new opportunities for communities that do not wish to choose between alleviating poverty or protecting their forests.
Each of these Certificates is verified to rigorous third-party standards for their climate, community, and biodiversity benefits. Independent auditors verify with satellite and ground data that each Certificate has indeed prevented one tonne of CO2 from reaching our atmosphere and that your money is reaching communities on the ground.
That second paragraph offers key information to my way of thinking.
Because if we don’t halt this destruction of our forests in the foreseeable future then it’s not just humans that will pay the price.
On Monday I published a post Hope Has A Place. It was based upon the hauntingly beautiful track of the same name from Enya. Then yesterday, serendipitously, came The watering hole. Both of those posts, although miles apart in terms of content, nonetheless seemed to subscribe to a common theme. That being that the more that everyday people, good common folk from all around the world, share their feelings, the more likely that those self-same people will make a difference. A positive difference!
Now don’t get me wrong! By presenting these recent posts I am not setting myself up to be anything other than just another everyday person and dog lover who just happens to enjoy sharing stuff via this blog.
Regular readers of this place will recall that a week ago I celebrated Earth Day with a post called Our beautiful, life-giving trees. It included this picture:
We must sing for our trees.
Then on the following day in a post called Now life-giving geese (by the way, the five baby goslings are doing really well!) I included this photograph:
And sing for them at all ages!
Yesterday morning I received the latest post from Sue Dreamwalker. It was an impassioned plea to do something and to stop the madness. Sue, in turn, had republished the post that had appeared on Endless Light and Love.
The theme that seems to be developing this week, unplanned I should hasten to add, is that it is all too easy to be overwhelmed by the scale of change that has to take place, must take place, if this generation (I’m a 1944 baby) can die knowing that it will be alright in the end. Because it is my generation that has been responsible, has created the circumstances, for the end of life as we have all known it if nothing is done, and done in the next decade or two.
So to trees.
Our trees are both a symbol for and an indicator of the overall health of our planet.
To close off this part of my two-day post, please watch this short video.
Uploaded on Apr 1, 2015
Trees give us beauty, shade, food, clean water, oxegen, medicine, housing, fresh air, habitat and happiness. For the cost of a craft beer, or a couple of cups of coffee you can protect a specific threatened forest. Each Stand for Trees certificate offsets 1 ton of carbon from the atmosphere while providing income to local forest communities. Income that supports education, healthcare, clean water and sustainable livelihoods. Trees stand for us, isn’t it time we stand for trees?
Tomorrow, I will return to hope. Perhaps better written, return with hope.
Learning from Dogs 