How lady luck brought joy for a ‘down-and-out’ Londoner and a cat called Bob!
I was chatting with my son yesterday and he happened to mention that perhaps I should write about a cat for a change! Alex mentioned a book recently published in the UK called A Street Cat Named Bob: How One Man and His Cat Found Hope on the Streets.
This is how the book is described on Amazon (UK site),
When James Bowen found an injured, ginger street cat curled up in the hallway of his sheltered accommodation, he had no idea just how much his life was about to change. James was living hand to mouth on the streets of London and the last thing he needed was a pet. Yet James couldn’t resist helping the strikingly intelligent tom cat, whom he quickly christened Bob. He slowly nursed Bob back to health and then sent the cat on his way, imagining he would never see him again. But Bob had other ideas. Soon the two were inseparable and their diverse, comic and occasionally dangerous adventures would transform both their lives, slowly healing the scars of each other’s troubled pasts. A Street Cat Named Bob is a moving and uplifting story that will touch the heart of anyone who reads it.
A quick web search found volumes of material, so let’s start with this video,
The local London newspaper the Islington Tribune wrote this back in 2010,
Two cool cats… the Big Issue seller and a stray called Bob
Inseparable: musician James Bowen with Bob
Down-on-his-luck musician teams up with ‘wonderful loyal friend’ he rescued from streets
Published: 24 September, 2010
by PETER GRUNER
NOT since the legendary Dick Whittington has a man and his cat become such unlikely celebrities on the streets of Islington.
Big Issue seller James Bowen and his docile ginger cat Bob, who go everywhere together, have been attracting comments since they first appeared outside Angel Tube station.
The story of how they met – widely reported in blogs on the internet – is one of such extraordinary pathos that it seems only a matter of time before we get a Hollywood film.
James, 31, who lives off Seven Sisters Road, Holloway, is a musician who has fallen on hard times.
He ekes out a basic living selling the homeless people’s magazine Big Issue at Angel and Covent Garden.
Bob was a stray discovered by James outside his accommodation one day.
The cat was limping after apparently being attacked by another animal, possibly a fox.
After failing to discover the cat’s owner, James took him to the RSPCA hospital at Finsbury Park, which prescribed a course of antibiotics.
“I kept him for two weeks until he was well enough to go on his way,” said James. “But when I opened the front door to let him out Bob wouldn’t move. He seemed to me to be saying: ‘I want to stay with you.’
“Now we go everywhere together. I even have a cat harness when we go out and Bob gets really excited when I show it to him.”
Read the rest of the article here and if you want more information, a web search on Bob the Cat will finds loads more.
It’s a fabulous story with a great message of hope for not just for James and Bob but for all of us that find ourselves ‘up a creek without a paddle’ at points in our lives.
Here’s how the newspaper The Daily Mail wrote about it on their website,
[last half of the story]
But then Bob started following him and it became increasingly difficult to shoo him away, especially as there were dangerous roads to be crossed. One day there was nothing for it but to put Bob on a makeshift lead and take him along. Bob travelled sitting on James’s shoulders.
The trouble was, so many cat-mad passers-by stopped him to stroke the animal that James arrived late at his pitch, secretly cursing Bob for thereby costing him some of his usual £25-a-day takings. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
Within minutes, people who would normally have walked by without giving James a second glance were lingering to make a fuss of the cat sitting sedately in his guitar case, and most made a donation. By the end of the day, he’d racked up more than £60.
It was the beginning of a phenomenon as tourists and commuters befriended Bob and James, many bringing titbits for the cat. People were amazed at how placidly Bob would sit all day, quite happily watching the world go by while James earned a living. Not that it was always without a hitch; on a couple of occasions Bob bolted when startled, leading to a frantic chase through the crowded streets.
Bob’s popularity continued when James switched from busking to selling the Big Issue, the magazine produced and sold by homeless people. This change in direction was part of James’s growing sense of a need to get his life in order, which he puts down to the responsibility of looking after Bob, and the example the cat offered of the possibility of a second chance.
It enabled James to make the final push to end his drug dependency, going through the necessary cold turkey to get off heroin substitutes, and to mend broken contacts with his family. The final result of Bob’s influence came when a literary agent who passed the duo every day and had seen them on YouTube suggested James tell their story in a book. The result is this heart-warming tale with a message of hope that will appeal especially to the many cat obsessives out there.
The Western Arctic Reserve, also known as the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, is the largest tract of unprotected, relatively pristine public land in the United States. But Big Oil has the reserve in its sights and will not hesitate to turn this vast wilderness into a sprawling industrial complex to drum up massive profits.
The 23.5 million-acre reserve is home to imperiled polar bears, seabirds and one of the densest populations of nesting raptors in the world. Its shores and lagoons harbor beluga whales, seals, walruses and other marine mammals.
In the rapidly warming Arctic, short-sighted oil and gas development will further stress the remarkable wildlife that lives and breeds there.The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is now collecting comments on a planning document that will set the stage for oil and gas leasing in the western Arctic for decades to come.
You can help save this national treasure: Take action to tell the BLM to protect the Western Arctic Reserve from dirty fossil fuel development.
The action that is requested is to email or mail the following to the BLM (the link is here.) The email address for Bob Abbey, taken from the relevant BLM webpage is Director: Bob Abbey E-mail: Director@blm.gov
Director Bob Abbey
Bureau of Land Management
NPR-A IAP/EIS Comments, AECOM Project Office
1835 South Bragaw Street, Suite 490
Anchorage, AK 99508
US
Subject: Comments Regarding the BLM’s National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska Integrated Activity, DEIS
The National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, or Western Arctic Reserve, comprises the largest unprotected tract of public land in the United States. It provides habitat for a wide variety of Arctic species, and its wilderness values are second to none. While the most environmentally protective alternative analyzed by the Bureau of Land Management (Alternative B) is an improvement over previous plans, it still allows over 11 million acres of ecologically intact wilderness-quality lands to be leased for oil development. As the BLM develops the “integrated activity plan” and “final environmental impact statement” for the reserve, I urge you to provide maximum protection for areas with high-value habitats by designating all of the Special Area contained in Alternative B, and to create additional protections for all other areas in the reserve that contain ecologically intact and/or wilderness-quality lands.
The BLM must also consider the long-term impacts of greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas development, and any future impacts of climate change on the low-lying western Arctic. Arctic animals are already stressed by a melting and warming Arctic, and none of the alternatives considered go far enough to protect these species from the wide array of impacts from oil and gas development.
Among other things, the BLM must account for sea-level rise due to ice melt, permafrost collapse, coastal erosion and increased high-energy storm events that will degrade, or wipe out, critical coastal habitat, including the Teshekpuk Lake area. The BLM must also consider the impacts of ocean acidification, changes in circulation, increased freshening due to sea ice melt, and shifts in productivity to the marine environment and to marine species, including polar bears, ice seals, walruses, bowhead whales, and beluga whales.
Congress has required that “maximum protection” be given to Special Areas in the reserve. I encourage the BLM to adopt an alternative that provides protections for these areas, which include Teshekpuk Lake, the Colville River, Kasegaluk Lagoon, and the Utukok River Uplands. The BLM must also protect the Dease Inlet-Meade River area, Peard Bay and adjacent wetlands, and the Ikpikpuk River and adjacent wetlands.
I implore the BLM to adopt a management alternative that includes the strongest possible protections for the Western Arctic Reserve. This means designating Alternative B as the preferred alternative, and adding additional protective measures for important wildlife habitat and wilderness areas so they are not destroyed by ecologically devastating oil and gas development, or from the long-term impacts of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.
Thank you.
But if that doesn’t work then there is a full webpage offering detailed information and which also has links relevant to letting the BLM know your views. That webpage starts,
ARCTIC OIL DEVELOPMENT
Alaska’s north coast and ocean waters are teeming with species found in few other places, and many of them are now under threat. The Western Arctic Reserve and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge provide critical denning areas for polar bears, support vast caribou herds and are essential nesting grounds for thousands of bird species, including threatened eiders and yellow-billed loons. The sea ice of the Arctic Ocean is hunting and denning habitat for polar bears and a foraging platform for Pacific walrus and numerous Arctic ice seal species. Under the sea ice, endangeredbowhead whales and other whale species live off the biological richness of the Arctic Ocean.
Nearly all Arctic species are at risk from global warming. But that’s not the only problem: In a drastically changing environment, Arctic species must now contend with dirty, industrial fossil fuel development.
Please go here, read the the full information and do your little bit. It all makes a difference.
Professor Nicole Darnall, ASU, outlines what can be done.
At home, we subscribe to the Payson Roundup, our local newspaper, and in the April 10th edition there was a full back-page article written by Pete Ayleshire, Editor, about …. well let me quote from the on-line copy,
ASU professor Nicole Darnall taught a session on living a sustainable lifestyle at the Women’s Wellness Forum. Photo by Pete Aleshire.
Save money.
Get healthy.
Save the planet.
Why wait?
That’s the message Arizona State University professor Nicole Darnall delivered recently to a roomful of savvy planet
Prof. Nicole Darnall
huggers at the Women’s Wellness Forum. The daylong event drew about 240 women to listen to speakers on an array of topics.
Darnall offered a gripping presentation that started with global disaster, but ended with a reassuringly doable list of steps individuals can take to solve the seemingly overwhelming problems.
As I wrote at the end of last Friday’s article on Autism and bees, “I hope to publish a summary of a fascinating presentation given to a local women’s group here in Payson that shows the many obvious and easy steps we can all take to revert back to a resilient life on this planet.”
It’s so easy to be overwhelmed by the barrage of ‘doom and gloom’ stories that abound and, make no mistake, if each of us do nothing, the future does look ‘interesting’!
I don’t know about you but the degree of awareness of the changes we all need to make is huge and growing. So Prof. Darnall was right on the button when she spoke to that women’s forum. For instance,
“Livestock generates more greenhouse gases than all the planes, trains and automobiles on the planet,” said Darnall. In part, that’s because the methane from, well, the other end of cows, has 21 times the greenhouse gas warming effect as carbon dioxide.
Darnall’s solution? Meatless Mondays — to start curving that scary trend line.
A few paragraphs later,
The average person generates 4.5 pounds of trash daily. Of that, 75 percent can be recycled — but less than 30 percent actually ends up recycled.
Worse yet, we discard half of the food we produce, which works out to 474 pounds of wasted food per person.
Once again: The answer lies surprisingly close to home.
Start a composting bin: That would reduce discarded trash by about one-third — while increasing the health of your garden, not to mention averting the production of chemical fertilizers.
Then there’s this …..
Quit buying the plastic water bottles that add 25 million items to the waste stream every day. After all, tap water must meet higher health and purity standards than bottled water.
And not forgetting …..
Worried about all the bleach and other chemicals used in household cleaning products? No problem, said Darnall — before offering up a recipe for environmentally friendly scouring involving vinegar and baking soda. You can also ditch the ammonia in the window cleaner, with a mixture of corn starch — great for smudged mirrors and spots in the carpet.
Then this touched the spot for this part of Arizona with this year’s rainfall already far below the 30-year average.
Worried about the reckless use of fresh water, with predictions of longer deeper droughts well established?
Shorter showers can save 150 gallons each time — and a low-flow shower head can save 175 gallons a month. Get rid of the lawn, cut the water bill by 60 percent.
Rounding off by …..
But here’s the kicker, she said — you can save your wallet by saving the planet.
Make your cleaning products and you not only protect streams you also save money.
Change over to LED lights, you not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions — you save money.
Install solar tubes and you reduce greenhouse gases — and save money.
Eat less meat and reduce global warming — and also lose weight.
And heck: You might even make the cows happy.
Delightful close to the article that is Pete Ayleshire all over. (Pete teaches the creative writing class at the local extension college that Jean and I have been attending for two terms.)
It seems to me that one of the many lucky aspects of living in Payson is having the Arizona State University (ASU) School of Sustainability in the area and being able to draw on the expertise of people such as Prof. Darnall.
So look around and see what small steps you can take to make a difference, and start those small changes. As in the words of an old saying from my England days, ‘By the inch, it’s a cinch, by the yard it’s hard!‘
If you eat food, and hope to do so in the future, read this!
I subscribe to Food Freedom News and often read their articles when they appear in my ‘in-box’. Especially so yesterday morning when the headline jumped off the ‘page’ at me: Autism and Disappearing Bees: A Common Denominator?
So, in a sense, hand-in-hand with the article in yesterday’s Learning from DogsFood, glorious food! Because if trying to feed 9 billion people living on a planet where ‘farmers holding seeds that won’t sprout‘ means the even greater use of chemicals then ….. then, I don’t know what!
The Food Freedom website showed that the article came from Brian Moench of the Common Dreams website. Not a website I had come across before but one that quickly impressed me!
A few days ago the Salt Lake Tribune’s front page headline declared, “Highest rate in the nation, 1 in 32 Utah boys has autism.” This is a national public health emergency, whose epicenter is Utah, Gov. Herbert. A more obscure story on the same day read: “New pesticides linked to bee population collapse.” If you eat food, and hope to do so in the future, this is another national emergency, Pres. Obama. A common denominator may underlie both headlines.
A honeybee pollinates a flower in a citrus grove just coming into blossom. (Photograph: David Silverman/Getty Images)
A Stanford University study with 192 pairs of twins, with one twin autistic and one not, found that genetics accounts for 38% of the risk of autism, and environmental factors account for 62%.
Supporting an environmental/genetic tag team are other studies showing autistic children and their mothers have a high rate of a genetic deficiency in the production of glutathione, an anti-oxidant and the body’s primary means of detoxifying heavy metals. High levels of toxic metals in children are strongly correlated with the severity of autism. Low levels of glutathione, coupled with high production of another chemical, homocysteine, increase the chance of a mother having an autistic child to one in three. That autism is four times more common among boys than girls is likely related to a defect in the single male X chromosome contributing to anti-oxidant deficiency. There is no such thing as a genetic disease epidemic because genes don’t change that quickly. So the alarming rise in autism must be the result of increased environmental exposures that exploit these genetic defects.
During the critical first three months of gestation a human embryo adds 250,000 brain cells per minute reaching 200 billion by the fifth month. There is no chemical elixir that improves this biologic miracle, but thousands of toxic substances can cross the placenta and impair that process, leaving brain cells stressed, inflamed, less well developed, fewer in number and with fewer connections with each other all of which diminish brain function. The opportunity to repair the resulting deficits later on is limited.
The list of autism’s environmental suspects is long and comes from many studies that show higher rates of autism with greater exposure to flame retardants, plasticizers like BPA, pesticides, endocrine disruptors in personal care products, heavy metals in air pollution, mercury, and pharmaceuticals like anti-depressants. [my emphasis] (Utah’s highest in the nation autism rates are matched by the highest rates of anti-depressant use and the highest mercury levels in the country in the Great Salt Lake).
Doctors have long advised women during pregnancy to avoid any unnecessary consumption of drugs or chemicals. But as participants in modern society we are all now exposed to over 83,000 chemicals from the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe and the consumer products we use. Pregnant women and their children have 100 times more chemical exposures today than 50 years ago. The average newborn has over 200 different chemicals and heavy metals contaminating its blood when it takes its first breath. 158 of them are toxic to the brain. Little wonder that rates of autism, attention deficit and behavioral disorders are all on the rise.
How does this relate to vanishing bees and our food supply? Two new studies, published simultaneously in the journal Science, show that the rapid rise in use of insecticides is likely responsible for the mass disappearance of bee populations. The world’s food chain hangs in the balance because 90% of native plants require pollinators to survive.
The brain of insects is the intended target of these insecticides. They disrupt the bees homing behavior and their ability to return to the hive, kind of like “bee autism.” But insects are different than humans, right? Human and insect nerve cells share the same basic biologic infrastructure. Chemicals that interrupt electrical impulses in insect nerves will do the same to humans. But humans are much bigger than insects and the doses to humans are miniscule, right?
During critical first trimester development a human is no bigger than an insect so there is every reason to believe that pesticides could wreak havoc with the developing brain of a human embryo. But human embryos aren’t out in corn fields being sprayed with insecticides, are they? A recent study showed that every human tested had the world’s best selling pesticide, Roundup, detectable in their urine at concentrations between five and twenty times the level considered safe for drinking water.
The autism epidemic and disappearing bees are real public health emergencies created by allowing our world to be overwhelmed by environmental toxins. Environmental protection is human protection, especially for the smallest and most vulnerable among us.
Please bring this to the notice of any couples who you know are planning for a family!
If all this sort of information makes you want to curl up and kiss your backside goodnight, then hold on. Next week I hope to publish a summary of a fascinating presentation given to a local women’s group here in Payson that shows the many obvious and easy steps we can all take to revert back to a resilient life on this planet.
This Post includes the details of a live broadcast of an important event Feeding the World While the Earth Cooks from Washington D.C. If you would like to watch that broadcast then it starts at:
6am US Mountain Time Zone
9am US Eastern Daylight Time
13:00 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT/UTC)
2pm British Summer Time
Full details below.
H’mm, maybe the days of Oliver are well and truly numbered!
A quick ‘search’ found the lyrics of the famous song from the musical Oliver. Here’s a part of the chorus:
Food, glorious food!
Don’t care what it looks like —
Burned!
Underdone!
Crude!
Don’t care what the cook’s like.
Just thinking of growing fat —
Our senses go reeling
One moment of knowing that
Full-up feeling!
Not to be taken for granted.
However, a recent announcement from Arizona State University quite rightly points out the challenges that lay ahead in terms of feeding the world’s population. Here are the details of that ASU announcement.
The future of food: feeding the world while the Earth cooks
Editor’s Note: This event is presented by Future Tense, a partnership between Arizona State University, the New America Foundation and Slate, that examines emerging technologies, public policy and society.
The event considers the agricultural crisis that may ensue when today’s toddlers are parents themselves – a time when the world population will reach 9 billion. “A growing global middle class will demand more food. And climate change will leave farmers holding seeds that won’t sprout. By 2050, will our global appetite outgrow our agricultural capacity?”
Tune in to find out how everyone – growers, technologists, governments, business leaders, and carbon-conscious consumers – will be part of the solution.
Speakers include Nina Fedoroff, special advisor on science and technology to the Secretary of State; Fred Kirschenmann, Distinguished Fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture and President of Stone Barnes Center; Debra Eschmeyer, founder and program director of FoodCorps; and Bill Hohenstein, director of the USDA Global Change Program Office.
Let me highlight that the event is being carried live and is available to view.
The link you need to that ASUtv programme is here. From where you will see that:
Arizona State University, the New America Foundation , and Slate present “Feeding the World While the Earth Cooks” live from Washington, D.C., this April 12 from 6:00 am to 12:15 pm. The program will air in it’s entirety onASUtv.
(From the New America Foundation): When today’s toddlers are parents themselves, they will face an agricultural crisis. The world population will reach 9 billion. A growing global middle class will demand more food. And climate change will leave farmers holding seeds that won’t sprout. By 2050, will our global appetite outgrow our agricultural capacity?
Join us to find out how everyone—growers, technologists, governments, business leaders, and carbon-conscious consumers—will be part of the solution.
The day’s speakers include Dr. Nina Fedoroff, Special Advisor on Science and Technology to the Secretary of State; Dr. Fred Kirschenmann, Distinguished Fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture and President of Stone Barnes Center; Debra Eschmeyer, Founder and Program Director of FoodCorps; Bill Hohenstein, Director of the USDA Global Change Program Office; and many more.
So if you want to watch that event then here are the UTC times.
April 12 from 6:00 am to 12:15 pm US Mountain Time equates to 13:00 – 19:15 UTC (2 pm to 8:15 pm British Summer Time)
Brilliant mathematics without the need for a calculator!
Thanks to the bottomless resources of the Internet, I could quickly find a relevant quote or two to open up today’s Post. Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was reputed to have said, “Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare.”
Sorry, couldn’t resist that! It wasn’t the quote relevant to this essay but it was too good to miss. (Descartes was also the person who coined the phrase: I think therefore I am!)
The quote that I thought was relevant was this one from Descartes, “With me everything turns into mathematics.” Well until I read something recently on the Big Think website I would have been certain that the emotions, such as happiness, were well beyond reach of the logical power of mathematics. I was wrong!
….. argues (against Einstein, as it happens), that everything that counts can and ought to be counted. A hotelier by trade, he says that GDP and the bottom line are blunt instruments for measuring the health of a society or a business. After the dot.com crash of 2001, and a visit to the Buddhist nation of Bhutan, which has a “Gross National Happiness” index, Conley and his team decided to create indices for measuring the well-being of their employees and customers.
And a paragraph later continues,
In Emotional Equations, Conley takes the mathematics of human happiness a step further, creating simple formulas like anxiety = uncertainty x powerlessness, which, when used systematically, he says, can give individuals and organizations a concrete method for addressing the human needs that drive them.
The description of the book on the Amazon website is thus,
Mr Chip Conley
Using brilliantly simple math that illuminates universal emotional truths, Emotional Equations crystallizes some of life’s toughest challenges into manageable facets that readers can see clearly—and bits they can control. Popular motivational speaker and bestselling author Chip Conley has created an exciting, new, immediately accessible visual lexicon for mastering the age of uncertainty. Making mathematics out of emotions may seem a counterintuitive idea, but it’s an inspiring and incredibly effective one in Chip Conley’s hands. When Conley, dynamic author of the bestselling Peak, suffered a series of tragedies, he began using what he came to call “Emotional Equations” (like Joy = Love – Fear) to help him focus on the variables in life that he could deal with, rather than ruminating on the unchangeable constants he couldn’t, like the bad economy, death, and taxes. Now this award-winning entrepreneur shares his amazing new self-help paradigm with the rest of us. Emotional Equations offers an immediately understandable means of identifying the elements in our lives that we can change, those we can’t, and how they interact to create the emotions that define us and can help or hurt our progress through life. Equations like “Despair = Suffering – Meaning” and “Happiness = Wanting What You Have/Having What You Want” (Which Chip presented at the prestigious TED conference) have been reviewed for mathematical and psychological accuracy by experts. Conley shows how to solve them through life examples and stories of inspiring people and role models who have worked them through in their own lives. In these turbulent times, when so many are trying to become “superhuman” to deal with our own and the world’s problems, Emotional Equations arms readers with effective formulas for becoming super human beings.
So it all seems not quite so daft as one might initially guess. Indeed, settle down for twenty minutes and watch Chip eloquently explain his ideas captured at that TED Conference referred to above.
There’s also an audio conversation with Mr. Conley that you can download free from here.
Finally, let me close with yet another quote from Rene Descartes, “It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.” Amen to that!
The arrival of Cleo brings us back to eleven dogs.
Way back in 2003 when I became the proud ‘Dad’ of Pharaoh, my German Shepherd dog that you see on the home page of Learning from Dogs, Sandra Tucker who ran the GSD Breeders Jutone, where Pharaoh was born, gave me some advice. Sandra said that when Pharaoh was getting on in life, then bring in a German Shepherd puppy. Apparently, there were two solid reasons why this made sense. The first was that Pharaoh would teach the new puppy many of the skills and disciplines that Pharaoh had learnt as a young dog and, secondly, the puppy would keep Pharaoh active.
Now we know this to be true because years later when Pharaoh had his own mini pack here in Payson, we introduced a new ‘rescue’ puppy called Sweeny. Pharaoh took an instant like to him and became very tolerant to Sweeny’s ‘games’.
Hi! I'm Pharaoh, going to be my buddy? (February, 2011)
But as adorable as Sweeny is, Jean understood the deep reasons why I always wanted a German Shepherd in our lives. So when a chance encounter in Payson Feed Store between Jean and Brendon S. revealed that Brendon had a litter of German Shepherd puppies for sale, just a couple of miles outside Payson, the temptation was irresistible!
Thus a few days ago, Jean and I went round to Brendon’s home and spent a couple of hours mingling with the puppies and their GSD mother. They all looked excellent dogs and a review of their blood lines showed that their genetic background included German stock not too far back. It was difficult to select any one pup as they were all wonderful animals. But one youngster seemed to catch Jean’s eye.
Little bit of bonding going on!
Then the next test was to introduce Pharaoh to the puppies. That took place last Friday and it was wonderful to see how well he coped with the onslaught of puppies!
More puppies that one could shake a stick at!
In the end, we ran out of reasons not to follow Sandra’s advice from all those years ago and we agreed terms on a young female GSD that, inevitably, was christened Cleopatra (Cleo) by Jean!
Cleo meet your new Mum!
Then yesterday, Saturday, we went back round to collect young Cleo, meeting Brendan’s wife Ebony in the process. The following photographs record some of the key moments.
Homeward bound to a new life!Next step is to meet the gang!Welcome, young lady. I'm the boss around here!It's my pool but you can use it!Hey Sweeny, fancy having one's own woods to play in!She'll do! Nice addition to my family!
So there we are. Back up to eleven dogs, five chickens, six cats, and a fish!
Finally, a big thanks to Sandra of Jutone for her guidance in the last few days.
It’s been a while since Sue of Dreamwalker’s Sanctuary and I started following each other’s Blogs and from time to time Sue sends me an email with something for Learning from Dogs. On the 20th March, I published a guest post from Sue called the Winds of Change. If you didn’t read her wonderful poem then do go there and read it.
Anyway, just a couple of days ago Sue sent me an email with a link to a YouTube video. Put aside a few minutes and be entranced.
So you have just watched the video. How do you feel? I bet that your feelings are not a million miles from the realisation that, like Fiona the dog, being ‘lost‘ is an uncomfortable, unsettling but necessary step along the journey of being ‘found‘. As I wrote in the concluding part of my story Night messages, “The message from the night, as clear as the rays of this new day’s sun, the message to pass to all those he loved. If you don’t get lost, there’s a chance you may never be found.”
When the bond between a human and a dog is expressed as deep love, as it so often is, we relearn the most important lesson of all creation. That mankind’s only hope for the future comes from the pool of love.
No better portrayed than by the photograph below that I presented in a Post on the 17th March, Change out of Hope.
The power of love.
“The one absolutely unselfish friend that man can have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts him, the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous, is his dog.“ Samuel Coleridge
An interesting reflection on the rearing of cattle and an ‘Anti-Meat pill! No kidding!
I was vaguely aware of the contribution of cattle towards the overall rise in greenhouse gases. A very quick web search found this news item from the United Nations which included,
29 November 2006 – Cattle-rearing generates more global warming greenhouse gases, as measured in CO2 equivalent, than transportation, and smarter production methods, including improved animal diets to reduce enteric fermentation and consequent methane emissions, are urgently needed, according to a new United Nations report released today.
“Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems,” senior UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) official Henning Steinfeld said. “Urgent action is required to remedy the situation.”
But what prompted me to look a little closer at this was a recent article on the Big Think website that was entitled, The Anti-Meat Pill: Human Engineering to Combat Climate Change.
Let me quote a little from the article, presented on the Big Think website by Daniel Honan.
NYU Bio-ethicist Matthew Liao has caused a stir recently with a forthcoming paper that explores the biomedical modification of humans in order to stop us from consuming red meat.
and a paragraph later continued with,
In a forthcoming paper to be published in Ethics, Policy and the Environment, Liao suggests that humans might take pills to bring about mild nausea to rid ourselves of our appetite for red meat. This would have a mitigating effect on climate change, he argues.
Liao refers to studies such as a widely-sited UN report that estimates 18 percent of greenhouse emissions come from livestock, which is a higher share than transportation. Another report, from 2009, estimates livestock emissions are significantly higher, at 50 percent. Fact of life: cows fart. Other negative impacts of increased livestock farming includes deforestation and a drain on water supplies.
The Internet rapidly found Matthew Liao’s website and from there the paper referred to above, which is introduced thus,
Professor Matthew Liao of New York University
Anthropogenic climate change is arguably one of the biggest problems that confront us today. There is ample evidence that climate change is likely to affect adversely many aspects of life for all people around the world, and that existing solutions such as geoengineering might be too risky and ordinary behavioural and market solutions might not be sufficient to mitigate climate change. In this paper, we consider a new kind of solution to climate change, what we call human engineering, which involves biomedical modifications of humans so that they can mitigate and/or adapt to climate change. We argue that human engineering is potentially less risky than geoengineering and that it could help behavioural and market solutions succeed in mitigating climate change. We also consider some possible ethical concerns regarding human engineering such as its safety, the implications of human engineering for our children and for the society, and we argue that these concerns can be addressed. Our upshot is that human engineering deserves further consideration in the debate about climate change.
Now if we go back to that UN article, we can see that emissions from cattle and livestock in general is not a minor issue.
When emissions from land use and land use change are included, the livestock sector accounts for 9 per cent of CO2 deriving from human-related activities, but produces a much larger share of even more harmful greenhouse gases. It generates 65 per cent of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO2. Most of this comes from manure.
And it accounts for respectively 37 per cent of all human-induced methane (23 times as warming as CO2), which is largely produced by the digestive system of ruminants, and 64 per cent of ammonia, which contributes significantly to acid rain.
With increased prosperity, people are consuming more meat and dairy products every year, the report notes. Global meat production is projected to more than double from 229 million tonnes in 1999/2001 to 465 million tonnes in 2050, while milk output is set to climb from 580 to 1043 million tonnes.
But modifying humans, frankly, misses the point.
That is unless we wholeheartedly embrace the need to change, to sustain the only planet we can call home, and do it because we care, Planet Earth will do the bioengineering for us – engineering us into extinction. For example, just cut back on eating meat! And if you don’t want to do it for the planet, do it for the health of your children as this Health Petition underlines in spades.
So I’m sorry Professor Liao but this seems like a step too far – by a long way.
Learning from Dogs 