I’m seventy-one years old and aware that the ageing process is “alive and well” within me. It primarily is revealed by a degree of brain atrophy that is evidenced by very poor recall. There is no question that it worries Jean and, at times, worries me as well. Adding to the recognition that these are my “senior” years is the awareness that the people that one knows all tend to be a similar sort of age and, inevitably, you don’t have to go far to hear of someone who is very ill, or has recently died.
So the motivation is very strong to stay as fit and healthy; both in body and mind.
Thus a recent article over on the Care2 site about the world’s oldest dog seemed more than a tad relevant to yours truly and will hopefully connect with others who know they are never going to see twenty-one again!
It’s often said that happiness is the key to a long life, but is the same true in the lives of dogs?
Let’s take a look at the world’s oldest living dog. His name was Bluey and he lived to be an astounding 29 1/2 years old. As a puppy in 1910, Bluey joined the household of Les Hall in Victoria, Australia.
Every morning, Bluey went to work among the cattle and sheep. He enjoyed the great outdoors and had constant companionship. He ate a diet that largely consisted of wild kangaroo and emu (not unhealthy animals raised in factory farms). Retiring from his official ‘job’ several years before his death, Bluey remained valued and respected even though he was no longer “useful.”
Ask Yourself These Three Questions
So what about your dog? Are you providing the essential building blocks for a long life? It all boils down to these three questions. Answer honestly, and if you don’t like what you find, today may be the day to turn over a new “leash.”
1. Am I Listening to My Dog?
No, your dog can’t speak in full sentences but how hard is it to understand his needs? Chances are, it’s pretty easy. Is your dog full of anxiety because you’ve worked a 10 hour day leaving him alone in the house, or worse yet, locked in a cage? When your dog greets you with excitement at the door, do you take the time to grab the leash and go for a long walk or do you scold him for bothering you? Is your dog getting up very, very slowly from painful joints?
Try listening, really listening, to the things your dog is telling you over and over again. Try this exercise. Think of two memories of times when your dog was happiest. Chances are that you were being active outdoors together. Could you re-create those experiences, even on a small scale, each week?
2. Do I Break My Promises?
Are you guilty of breaking promises to yourself and to your dog? Do you procrastinate? Make a dedicated practice of fulfilling your promises to your dog, the same way as you would care for your own needs. It’s just like brushing your teeth. Schedule in items like these:
A 20 minute walk in the morning before you leave for work.
A neighbor to come and let your dog outside at lunchtime.
Adhering to a schedule of six month veterinary check-ups, especially for mature dogs.
Washing food and water bowls daily.
A long walk at the end of the day.
And most of all, doing those things you know your dog loves most.
3. Am I Putting My Stress Onto My Dog?
If you’ve had a bad day, do you let it spill over? Can you check your troubles at the front door or do you bring them with you and spread your grief? Although it is difficult, take a few deep breaths and remind yourself that your truest friend in the world is not the one you want to hurt today.
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This business of learning from our dogs just goes on and on!
Ice caves are temporary structures that appear at the edge of glaciers. They look amazingly beautiful from the inside. This particular cave is located on the frozen lagoon of the Svínafellsjökull glacier in Skaftafell, Iceland. The centuries old ice coming down the slopes of Öræfajökull via Svínafellsjökull glacier has metamorphosed into highly pressurized glacier ice that contains almost no air bubbles. The lack of air means that it absorbs almost all visible light, apart from the blue fraction which is then visible to the naked eye. However, this blue ice can be seen only under certain circumstances. It can be seen in winter after long periods of rain when the surface layer of the glacier has been washed away. It can be seen in ice-caves like this one and on floating icebergs that have recently rolled over.
This cave in the glacier ice is the result of glacial mill, or Moulin where rain and melt water on the glacier surface are channeled into streams that enter the glacier at crevices. The waterfall melts a hole into the glacier while the ponded water drains towards lower elevations by forming long ice caves with an outlet at the terminus of the glacier. The fine grained sediments in the water along with wind blown sediments cause the frozen meltwater stream to appear in a muddy colour while the top of the cave exhibits the deep blue colour. Due to the fast movement of the glacier of about 1 m per day over uneven terrain, this ice cave cracked up at its end into a deep vertical crevice, called cerrac. This causes the indirect daylight to enter the ice cave from both ends resulting in homogeneous lighting of the ice tunnel.
There are many beautiful photographs available if you conduct a web search. Here are some examples.
We crawl slowly on hands & knees into a long frozen chamber, under a brilliant cathedral of crystal blue waves. Superman would feel right at home in this ice cave.
When the Man of Steel wants to get away from the hustle & bustle of Metropolis, he flies to his “Fortress of Solitude” hidden in the Arctic. A magnificent crystal castle built using Krypton alien technology.
What if I told you Superman’s crystal fortress is real?
Deep under Iceland’s massive Vatnajökull Glacier, beautiful caves of ice are formed by rivers of meltwater.
Too dangerous to visit in the spring & summer due to a threat of collapse, cold winter temperatures strengthen the ice and make exploration possible.
A fellow photographer convinced me to go during my Iceland road trip.
So many who devote so much time and energy, and money no doubt!
Let me state quite clearly my position with regard to hunting wild animals – I abhor it! Technically speaking if someone’s only means of feeding themselves, as in staying alive, is through hunting then I guess that is acceptable. But hunting for any other purposes is beyond the pale. I know that many people, including friends, who live in this part of America would heartedly disagree with my position on hunting. So be it.
Thus when Jean and I look at those who work so hard to protect, sustain and support wild animals we are almost speachless with our admiration for them.
So what’s brought all this on today?
For a long time I have been a follower of the blogsite Canis Lupus 101. On the home page of Canis Lupus 101, on the left-hand sidebar, one can read a plea from Maggie Caldwell, Press Secretary for @Earthjustice, that, in part, says:
For centuries, wolves have been viewed with suspicion and hostility, based in humankind’s deep-rooted fear of the unknown and need to control the natural world.
The film offers an abbreviated history of the relationship between wolves and people—told from the wolf’s perspective—from a time when they coexisted to an era in which people began to fear and exterminate the wolves.
The return of wolves to the northern Rocky Mountains has been called one of America’s greatest conservation stories. But wolves are facing new attacks by members of Congress who are gunning to remove Endangered Species Act protections before the species has recovered.
Our millions of magnificient and adorable dogs owe their place in today’s world to the wolf. The fact that those who care are still fighting hard to save the wild wolf shows how disgraceful it is for those that see no harm in hunting wolves. Hunting a wolf in my book is hardly any different than going out and hunting a dog!
So with all that out of me, now read about the following glorious efforts to save the wild Mexican wolf. Originally published over on Canis Lupus 101.
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Thursday, January 28, 2016
Poaching slows Mexican wolf population recovery (video)
Brandon Loomis, The Republic | January 27, 2016
The annual Mexican gray wolf population survey in Alpine, Ariz., shows that poaching is slowing the species’ recovery.
After the wild Mexican wolf population tops 100 for the first time, 15 illegal shootings may slow recovery.
(Photo: Mark Henle, Mark Henle/The Republic)
ALPINE — Biologists hauled a 60-pound Mexican gray wolf from the chopper on Monday, limp but healthy with a lush winter mane. They called it the wolf’s worst day in months — dazed from having been darted from above, still rapidly licking his nose through a blindfold muzzle — but the male wolf was one of the fortunate among a divisive and still-embattled breed that has weathered an especially perilousyear of poachings.
Unknown shooters have illegally killed at least 15 Mexican wolves since officials reported a year ago that a record 110 were roaming wild in eastern Arizona and western New Mexico, according to a lead state biologist on the recovery program.
The poaching losses tripled from 2014, and were likely unprecedented in the 18 years since the first captive-bred lobos brought their once-exiled howls back to the Blue Range spanning the Apache and Gila national forests.
Wolf-recovery specialists, like those in Alpine this week, are working to make sure the survivors flourish instead of backsliding to a more critically endangered status.
The team of federal and state biologists carried Wolf No. M1342 on a mesh sling. They brought the wolf inside their pine-ringed Alpine field station and slid him onto a slab wooden table for a checkup and shots to keep him robust for an important breeding season this spring. They injected a second sedative that would put the wolf out cold for about an hour.
The scientists gathered round the Elk Horn pack’s would-be alpha male, prodding veins for intravenous fluids and pushing an oxygen tube up his black nostrils.They were counting on the wolf to return healthy to his young mate on snowy Escudilla Mountain, and produce their first successful litter to help extend recent annual gains in a slow-recovering population.
AZCENTRAL
As recently as five years ago, there were an estimated 50 Mexican wolves in the wild, less than half of last year’s count. Whether this year’s survey finds the population continuing to grow will depend on the 40 or so pups observed since last spring. Historically, about half of pups have survived their first year.
Besides the wolves that were shot, about a dozen more adults are missing, “fate unknown.”
M1342 was lucky to have a dart dangling from his paw, and not a trail of lead fragments through his chest. Shootings have always been a key threat since the 1998 reintroduction.
The anti-wolf mentality commonly known as “shoot, shovel and shut up” is hard to combat. Bullets typically pass through a wolf’s body and leave little useful evidence, said Jeff Dolphin, Mexican wolf field supervisor for the Arizona Game and Fish Department. “You just can’t be everywhere at once,” Dolphin said.
Only a handful of what may be dozens of shooters have faced charges related to killing one of the protected wolves since 1998. Federal, state and non-governmental organizations offer a combined reward of up to $58,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of a wolf poacher.
A controversial task
Susan Dicks, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife veterinarian examines Wolf No. M1342. (Photo: Mark Henle/The Republic)
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service veterinarian Susan Dicks coached the team of biologists and field technicians tending to M1342: how to draw blood for DNA and other tests; where to inject a rabies vaccine; how to determine age by measuring teeth; how to increase fluids or pour cooling alcohol on the paws if his temperature rises past 103 or so.
Besides the preventive medicine and data collection, the prime objective for M1342’s capture during a yearly aerial wolf survey was to fit it with a new transmitter collar. The collar he had received in a similar operation last year hadn’t functioned, so biologists only knew the wolf’s whereabouts by occasional observation. Uncollared wolves are difficult to track to ensure they’re not getting into trouble, such as by attacking livestock.
Not every wild Mexican wolf is collared, but scientists like to have them on a wolf of every generation in a pack. Last year’s survey counted 19 packs, including eight known to have a breeding pair.
AZCENTRAL
Studies show that these free-ranging wolves eat elk upward of 80 percent of the time, but cows are also occasionally on the menu. A government and non-profit fund pays for the losses. So far, the wolf program has paid out $68,000 for 50 confirmed livestock losses in 2015, and another $25,000 in claims is awaiting action by a compensation council. “It’s such a controversial program, and (people) want us to manage these animals,” Dicks explained. “The way we manage is with that collar. It communicates and tells us what they’re doing.”
The latest in a string of political struggles over the lightweight cousin of more plentiful northern gray wolves involves where they should be allowed.
Wolf advocates say they need unoccupied territory such as the forests around the Grand Canyon to sustain a population large and dispersed enough to withstand sudden die-offs. The governors of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah recentlyco-signed a letter to the federal program opposing such a northern expansion into previously undocumented wolf territory and instead backing a push south into Mexico.
The number of wolves needed to ensure long-term survival also is in dispute. Some want to hold the line around today’s numbers, but others say at least a sevenfold increase is needed.
Mexican wolf biologist Julia Smith carries Wolf No. M1342 from the helicopter to the Alpine field station. He was darted from a helicopter to have his radio collar replaced.
Federal recovery effort
Mark Henle/The Republic Arizona is a partner in the federal recovery effort within a recovery zone that stretches from New Mexico and onto the Mogollon Rim. Officials say the state has spent $3 million since the recovery program began with captive animals in the 1980s.
This week, the team said one wolf had roamed west to within 35 miles of Payson, though it was unclear whether it was wandering alone. Others were prowling below the Rim, south of Alpine.
M1342’s gray-brown fur was thick, with no signs of mange or fleas, but Dicks squeezed an anti-parasite lotion onto the skin between the shoulders as an extra precaution. The team slid the wolf into a large dog crate and set the wolf outside to recover his senses for a truck ride back up the mountain to freedom. “We’re trying to help them out before breeding season,” Dicks said. “The population is so small.”
The subspecies had dropped to seven holdouts in Mexico during the late 20th century, survivors of private and government hunters who cleared the region of what had commonly been considered a menace. They were removed from the wild and stocked a captive breeding program that at last count fostered more than 250 wolves at 55 sites in the U.S. and Mexico.
AZCENTRAL
A few years ago, the population struggled to stay atop 50 from one year to the next, hindered not just by illegal shootings or natural causes, but by government agents shooting or removing to captivity wolves that attacked livestock. Since then, the program has focused its efforts on conflict-avoidance, said John Oakleaf, field coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
With help from partners such as Defenders of Wildlife, the government has enlisted ranchers who accept payment for the wolves’ presence but also get help from range riders protecting cattle. It may have kept the number of illegal shootings from climbing even higher. “In the end,” Oakleaf said, “the tolerance of humans for wolves is what allows them to persist or not persist in the wild. It’s what drove them to extinction, or near extinction, and it’s what’s driving them toward recovery now.”
Final numbers next month
The Fish and Wildlife Service will release the final numbers from this year’s count next month. Until then, total deaths aren’t officially tallied, but Oakleaf acknowledged the illegal shootings will be “as high as we’ve ever documented.”
Dolphin put the number at 15, and said he doubts the population estimate will remain above 100 this year. Still, he’s optimistic after years of bigger struggles to stabilize the population.
All of the wolves now in the wild were born out there, which may make them better adapted than their parents were to hunting and surviving on game. A recent experiment showed that it’s possible to drop a captive-bred pup or two in with newborn wild litters, and the wild packs will raise them as their own. “The urgent thing is to get more wolves with genetically diverse backgrounds on the ground as quickly as possible.”
Wolf advocates are also cautiously optimistic, though they believe the packs need more territory, and more of a boost from now-rare releases of captive pairs in new haunts. “If you put (captive-bred) pups in the dens of existing packs, you may be increasing the number of animals,” Center for Biological Diversity wolf specialist Michael Robinson said, “but you’re not increasing their distribution.”
A common complaint of wolf proponents is that Mexican wolves, coming from such a limited breeding stock, lack genetic diversity and pay for it with smaller litters than other wolves have. “The urgent thing is to get more wolves with genetically diverse backgrounds on the ground as quickly as possible,” Robinson said.
Returning groggily to the wild
Wolf No. M1342 is released at Escudilla Mountain. (Photo: Mark Henle/The Republic)
After M1342 had regained enough of his senses to lift his head and sit up in the crate, Arizona Game and Fish biologist Brent Wolf and two colleagues loaded the crate onto a four-wheel-drive pickup and drove him back up Escudilla Mountain.
They drove as far as the truck would take them without getting stuck in the snow, getting as near as possible to the spot where the helicopter crew had darted M1342 and then set down to take the male from his mate.The return crew set the crate down at the edge of a snowy alpine meadow surrounded by scraggly willows and fat ponderosa pines, many of them torched and left bare by the massive 2011 Wallow Fire.
The groggy wolf took a few minutes to crawl out, then sat in the snow for several more. His golden-brown eyes stared toward the crew inside the pickup, and he licked the dart wound while waiting for the sedation to free his hind legs. The wolf walked slowly across the meadow, likely to be reunited with his mate once he heard a howl.
The two are believed to have mated last year, but did not produce any surviving pups, Wolf said. That’s common among first-timers, he said, and their experience should help them when they try again. “I’d be shocked if they didn’t have pups this spring,” Wolf said while reversing and turning the truck to head back down the mountain.
GALLERY
Mexican wolf biologist Julia Smith carries Wolf No. M1342 from the helicopter to the Alpine field station. He was darted from a helicopter to have his radio collar replaced. Mark Henle/The RepublicJulia Smith holds Wolf No. M1342 on his way to the Alpine field station. Mark Henle/The RepublicMexican wolf biologist Brent Wolf weighs Wolf No. M1342 in the Alpine field office. Mark Henle/The RepublicWolf No. M1342’s teeth are measured. Mark Henle/The RepublicMeasurements are taken of Wolf No. M1342’s paws. Mark Henle/The RepublicWolf No. M1342 is 3 years old and a member of the Elk Horn Pack. Mark Henle/The RepublicWolf No. M1342 got a checkup and shots to keep him robust for the important breeding season this spring. Mark Henle/The RepublicFrom left, Dr. Susan Dicks and intern Rowan Converse carry Wolf No. M1342’s kennel. Mark Henle/The RepublicFrom left, interns Hannah Manninen and Becca Thomas-Kuzilik release Wolf No. M1342 at Escudilla Mountain. Mark Henle/The RepublicWolf No. M1342 walked slowly across the meadow, likely to be reunited with his mate once he heard a howl. Mark Henle/The RepublicWolf No. M1342 and his mate are believed to have mated last year, but did not produce any surviving pups. Researchers say their experience should help the wolves when they try again. Mark Henle/The Republic
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Golly, I so do admire the good people who undertake this caring work on behalf of the wolves. And great photographs Mark Henle of The Republic.
My sub-title comes from personal knowledge of what it feels like to set out on an ocean voyage into waters that one has not sailed before. In my case, leaving Gibraltar bound for The Azores on my yacht Songbird of Kent in the Autumn of 1969.
My home for five years – Tradewind 33: Songbird of Kent.
Despite me being very familiar with my boat, and with sailing in general, there was nonetheless a sense of trepidation as I headed out into a vast unfamiliar ocean.
Coming to matters closer to hand, there is a sense of trepidation felt by me and countless others as to what world we are heading into if we don’t take seriously the risks that are ‘tapping on our door’.
So hold that in your mind as you read a recent essay published by Patrice Ayme’; an essay that highlights very uncertain times ahead if we, as a global society, don’t get our act together pretty damn quick. Republished here on Learning from Dogs with Patrice’s kind permission.
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Record Heat 2015, Obama Cool
2014 was the warmest year ever recorded. 2015 was even warmer, and by far, by .16 degrees centigrade. The UK (Great Britain) meteorological office announced that the temperature rise is now a full degree C above the pre-industrial average. At this annual rate of increase, we will get to two degrees within six years (as I have predicted was a strong possibility).
What’s going on? Exponentiation. Just as wealth grows faster, the greater the wealth, mechanisms causing more heat are released, the greater the heat. Yes, it could go all the way to tsunamis caused by methane hydrates explosions. This happened in the North Atlantic during the Neolithic, leaving debris of enormous tsunamis all over Scotland.
2015: Not Only Record Heat, But Record Acceleration Of Heat
The Neolithic settlements over what is now the bottom of the North Sea and the Franco-English Channel (then a kind of garden of Eden), probably perished the hard way, under giant waves.
Explosions of methane hydrates have started on the land, in Siberia. No tsunami, so far. But it can, and will happen, any time. The recent North Easter on the East Coast of the USA was an example of the sort of events we will see ever more of: a huge warm, moist Atlantic born air mass, lifted up by a cold front.
Notice that, at the COP 21 in Paris all parties, 195 nations, agreed to try their best to limit warming to 1.5 degree Centigrade. At the present instantaneous rate, that’s less than 4 years away. Even with maximum switching out of fossil fuels, we are, at the minimum, on a three degrees centigrade target, pretty soon.
By the way, if all nations agree, how come the “climate deniers” are still heard of so loudly? Well, plutocrats control Main Stream Media. It’s not just that they want to burn more fossil fuels (as it brings them profit, they are the most established wealth). It’s also that they want to create debates about nothing significant, thus avoiding debates about significant things, such as how much the world is controlled by Dark Pools of money.
Meanwhile, dear Paul Krugman insists in “Bernie, Hillary, Barack, and Change“, that it would be pure evil to see him as a “corrupt crook“, because he believes everything Obama says about change and all that. Says Krugman: “President Obama, in his interview with Glenn Thrush of Politico, essentially supports the Hillary Clinton theory of change over the Bernie Sanders theory:
[Says Obama]: ‘I think that what Hillary presents is a recognition that translating values into governance and delivering the goods is ultimately the job of politics, making a real-life difference to people in their day-to-day lives.’”
This is all hogwash. We are not just in a civilization crisis. We are in a biosphere crisis, unequalled in 65 million years. “Real-life differences“, under Obama, have been going down in roughly all ways. His much vaunted “Obamacare” is a big nothing. All people in the know appraise that next year, it will turn to a much worse disaster than it already is (in spite of a few improvements, “co-pays” and other enormous “deductibles” make the ironically named, Affordable Care Act, ACA, unaffordable).
The climate crisis show that there is no more day-to-day routine. At Paris, the only administration which caused problem, at the last-minute, was Obama’s. How is that, for “change”? The USA is not just “leading from behind”, but pulling in the wrong direction. Really, sit down, and think about it: under France’s admirable guidance (!), 194 countries had agreed on a legally enforceable document. Saudi Arabia agreed. The Emirates agreed. Venezuela agreed. Nigeria agreed. Russia agreed. Byelorussia agreed. China, having just made a treaty with France about climate change, actually helped France pass the treaty. Brazil agreed. Zimbabwe agreed. Mongolia agreed. And so on. But, lo and behold, on the last day, Obama did not.
I know Obama’s excuses well; they are just that, excuses. Bill Clinton used exactly the exact same excuses, 20 years ago. Obama is all for Clinton, because, thanks to Clinton, he can just repeat like a parrot what Clinton said, twenty years ago. Who need thinkers, when we have parrots, and they screech?
I sent this (and, admirably, Krugman published it!):
“No doubt Obama wants to follow the Clintons in making a great fortune, 12 months from now. What is there, not to like?
Obama’s rather insignificant activities will just be viewed, in the future, as G. W. Bush third and fourth terms. A janitor cleaning the master’s mess. Complete with colored (“bronze”) apartheid health plan.
What Sanders’ supporters are asking is to break that spiral into ever greater plutocracy (as plutocrat Bloomberg just recognized).”
Several readers approved my sobering message, yet some troll made a comment, accusing me of “racist “slander”. Racist? Yes the “bronze” plan phraseology is racist. I did not make it up. And it is also racist to make a healthcare system which is explicitly dependent upon how much one can afford. Krugman is all for it, but he is not on a “bronze” plan. Introducing apartheid in healthcare? Obama’s signature achievement. So why should we consider Obama as the greatest authority on “progressive change”? Because we are gullible? Because we cannot learn, and we cannot see? Is not that similar to accepting that Hitler was a socialist, simply because he claimed to be one, it had got to be true, and that was proven because a few million deluded characters voted for him?
We are in extreme circumstances, unheard of in 65 million years, they require extreme solutions. They do not require, nor could they stand, Bill Clinton’s Third Term (or would that be G. W. Bush’s fifth term? The mind reels through the possibilities).
“Change we can believe in”: the new boss, same as the old boss, the same exponentiation towards inequality, global warming and catastrophe, the same warm rhetoric of feel-good lies.
As it is, there is a vicious circle of disinformation between the Main Stream Media, and no change in the trajectory towards Armageddon. Yes, Obama was no change. Yes, Obama was the mountain of rhetoric, who gave birth to a mouse. Yes, we need real change, and it requires to start somewhere. And that means, not by revisiting the past.
Patrice Ayme’
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Yes, we do need real change, and every day that we think that this change is the responsibility of someone else then that is another day lost forever. Or in the more proasic words of Mahatma Gandi, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”
The way we can reach out to others in these modern times.
A fellow local author, Constance Frankland, who has been mentioned previously here on Learning from Dogs followed up last Sunday’s Picture Parade with a comment on my Facebook page:
You might enjoy the site of Dr. Charles Bergman. I was privileged to take writing classes from him when his features were just breaking into Audubon and National Geographic. He was researching the thought-to-be-extinct Trumpeter Swan when survivors were found. (“Wild Echoes: Encounters With the Most Endangered Animals”) http://www.charlesbergman.com/
It was then the matter of a moment to hop across to that website address and read this on the home page:
Charles Bergman
A writer, photographer and speaker who lives in the beautiful Pacific Northwest and is a prof at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.
He’s twice been a Fulbright Scholar in Latin America–Mexico and Ecuador–traveled extensively around the world, especially in Latin America from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego. He writes and publishes extensively on animals, nature, and sustainability–with many cover stories in such magazines as Smithsonian, Audubon, All Animals (Humane Society),, Defenders, and many more. His photographs accompany his articles. He has written three books, and has won the Washington State Book Award, Southwest Book Award, and the Benjamin Franklin Book Award. He was a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award.
He loves animals and wildlife of all kinds, and has developed a new-found love for Antarctica and Africa.
There seemed to be many interesting articles & essays on his site and despite the fact that Mr. Bergman is currently in Uganda, his reply to my request for permission to republish some of his posts came through promptly:
Greetings from Uganda! I’m here working in the Uganda Wildlife Education Center, back shortly. Yes, you may certainly republish my materials. I’ll be very interested to follow the process.
Warmly,
Charles Bergman
You can count on me picking out some of Professor Bergman’s writings to share with you soon.
This reaching to others, friends and strangers, is a wonderful aspect of present times.
Yesterday, a wonderful number of readers ‘Liked’ my set of photographs on the theme of being a wildlife photographer. Thus it was providential, when deliberating on what to write for today’s post, to see that George Monbiot had published an article covering his recent interview with Sir David.
Before republishing that interview, let’s take a look at the man; Sir David that is!
Wikipedia has a comprehensive and fulsome description of him, that opens, thus:
He is best known for writing and presenting the nine Life series, in conjunction with the BBC Natural History Unit, which collectively form a comprehensive survey of animal and plant life on the planet. He is also a former senior manager at the BBC, having served as controller of BBC Two and director of programming for BBC Television in the 1960s and 1970s. He is the only person to have won BAFTAs for programmes in each of black and white, colour, HD, and 3D.
From across YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, we’ve taken your comments during #AttenboroughWeek and made this video as a thank you to everyone who got involved. Click on the annotations to see each of the clips in full.
Now on to the George Monbiot interview, republished here with Mr. Monbiot’s kind and generous permission.
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Rare Specimen
23rd January 2016
My interview, in his 90th year, with Sir David Attenborough
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 23rd January 2016
You cannot meet David Attenborough without reflecting on the lottery of life. He bounces into the room unaccompanied, a little stiff in the lower back perhaps, but otherwise breezy and lithe. He is sound in wind and limb, vision and hearing, his eyes sparkle, his face is scarcely rumpled by time. Yet in three months he will celebrate his 90th birthday.
While other people’s worlds tend to shrink with age, his seems to expand. His curiousity ranges as widely as ever. His ability to understand and assimilate new information seems unabated. “Oh, I forget things,” he claims. When I press him for examples, he tells me, “Well, where I put my glasses, I had them about three minutes ago and they have simply evaporated, they’ve dematerialised. Oh yeah, and I forget engagements.”
But these, surely, are afflictions suffered by anyone immersed in the world of ideas. He has no diffulty remembering the things that fascinate him. When I ask him about his new project, his body bundles up with excitement.
“Luminous earthworms! Did you know about luminous earthworms? Aaah, aaah, yes, very interesting. I’m doing a thing on bioluminescence … and with a little research we discovered that there are earthworms in France that are luminous – in the earth! Why? Yes, why?! Well at the moment I am just thinking about it. As you well know there’s a gene for luminosity and it’s very widespread, and so you would like to suppose that it has some antiquity. So maybe luminosity was a by-product of digestive processes or energy processes or something.
“And if it is, the exciting thing is – what about all those graptolites, what if they were luminous?! In which case, now you suddenly realise that trilobites have bloody good eyes, so maybe they were there too! Wow!” (Graptolites and trilobites are long-extinct marine animals).
I mention his latest film, which will air on Sunday, about the excavation and reconstruction of the skeletons of Titanosaurs, the biggest terrestrial animals known to have walked the Earth. Why, I ask, do dinosaurs exert such a grip, especially on the minds of children?
“Partly because nearly all the adults have got it wrong. It’s one of the easiest subjects for a kid – or it was when I was a kid – for you to expose your parents, because you had just read the new cigarette card and there was a name there, a polysyllabic name, your parents had never heard of.”
And there he still was, I realised, the boy with his cigarette cards, his excitement about creatures that lived many millions of years ago undimmed by the passage of mere decades.
So this is what must have happened. On one of his early expeditions through a remote tract of rainforest, he stumbled across the elixir of life. He has been hoarding it ever since and surreptitiously sipping a little every day. Either that, or he is simply the luckiest man alive: fit, bright, relevant, in love with life, the last man standing.
He has the decency to be aware of his luck. “People sitting in corners doing nothing aren’t there because they want to sit in the corner doing nothing. They would much rather be doing [things]. And I am lucky enough to be able to do them. It would be very ungrateful to have that facility and not use it.” He has, of course, no intention of retiring.
There is only one lifeform he is reluctant to discuss, the scientific curiosity known as Sir David Attenborough. He created a powerful sense, when talking, of intimacy and candour, leaning in, holding my gaze, twinkling and gurning, speaking in his confidential whisper. But when I came to read the transcript of our interview I found that what had felt like frank confession was nothing of the kind. What he said with his body bore no relation to what he said with his words.
I pressed him several times on an issue with which I have long been struggling. How do those of us who love the natural world cope with its loss? He must have seen more than his fair share of devastation.
“Oh yes, of course. You go to Borneo and see oil palms everywhere where there was forest. You see people everywhere where there weren’t people.”
“And how does it affect you, seeing those changes?”
“Well you feel apprehensive for the future, of course you do.”
“So how do you cope?”
“I don’t have a rosy view of life, of the future, I look at my grandchildren and think ‘what are they going to have to deal with?’, of course I do. How could you not?”
But what about the emotional impact? Does he not get depressed? Does he have a mechanism for avoiding depression? He answered by bouncing the issue onto someone else.
“I once asked exactly the same question of Peter Scott [the great British conservationist, who died in 1989]. And he said, ‘Well you can only do what you can do.’ So what I do is what I can, but I wish to goodness I had done a tenth of what Peter did.”
While his self-deprecation is charming, it also seems defensive. I pictured those two quintessentially English men stroking their chins and repeating “you can only do what you can do” to each other, and thought of a scene in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. An army captain pays a call on one of his men, who is lying in bed, nonchalently reading a book. “What’s all the trouble, then?”. “Bitten, sir. During the night”. “Hmm. Whole leg gone, eh … Any idea how it happened?”. “None whatsoever. Complete mystery to me. Woke up just now, one sock too many.” Monty Python made their television debut on BBC2, commissioned by the controller at the time, a certain David Attenborough.
When talking in general terms, he uses the word “I”. When asked to talk about his feelings, he says “you”. Some of this is perhaps generational: it was once considered vulgar to discuss such matters. But perhaps his great fame has also obliged him to develop a carapace. I asked whether his public life has blurred the boundaries of his private self.
“There has always been the private and the public thing in you, in everybody”, he replies. “You are different things to different people, to your children, to your television producer.”
Can he go anywhere in public without being mobbed?
“I have to confess the ubiquity of the selfie is, er – On occasion when they say ‘do you mind’, I say ‘well, I am off duty at the moment’, and they say ‘oh are you?’, by which time I’m three yards down the road. But I do have to remember that they are the people who … listen to me, you know, and so you try not to be rude.”
I asked him if he ever gets lonely. His wife, Jane Oriel, died almost 20 years ago.
“Hmm? Oh. My daughter lives in the same house as me now and has done for many years. So once a day I see her, she runs my business affairs and, you know, I’m very lucky.”
He is just as discreet about the politics surrounding his work. On the day I met him, the controller of BBC2 and BBC4, Kim Shillinglaw, lost her post. He was plainly delighted, chuckling and winking and grinning when he asked me whether I had read that morning’s news. But he was careful to say nothing quotable. Television producers I know expressed intense frustration at her instant and unexplained dismissal of programmes they proposed on environmental themes.
But the problem, as I perceive it, is much wider than that: has there not been a systemic failure by television to cover the great crisis of our age: the gradual collapse of the Earth’s living systems?
“I am absolutely certain that the general public at large is more aware of the natural world than it was even before the industrial revolution,” he replies, “and that people are well informed about not only what the world contains but the processes that go on. Television has made a contribution to that. … I greatly regret the fact that there are no or very few regular – ”
He stops himself, and plunges into a more general discussion of scheduling. Surely, I persist, there’s a real problem here? Entire years have passed without a single substantial programme on environmental issues.
“Well,” he says, more crisply than at any other time in the interview, “you’ll have to take that up with the controllers.”
I suggest that his own interest in the state of the world appears to have intensified in recent years.
“That’s not an interest. I wish I didn’t have it. I wish there was no need to have it. It’s not an interest, it’s an obligation.”
But he has surely been more prominent as an environmental voice in the past twenty years than he was before?
“Well yeah, and that is very simple in that I have been in the BBC all my working life, practically, and you knew very well … that if you said something, just because you are on the damn box people thought it was true and you’d better be bloody well sure that it is true.”
(I used to curse this reticence, willing him to get off the fence and denounce the destruction of all he loved.)
He explains that his views on climate change crystallised when he attended a lecture – he could tell me when it was if he had his diary to hand – by the president of the US National Academy of Sciences, Ralph Cicerone. After that, he made two programmes, called Are We Changing Planet Earth? and Can We Save Planet Earth?
Attenborough is not just a master of the art of television, but also one of the medium’s pioneers, producing programmes almost from its launch in this country, and guiding the development of some of its treasured strands, first as controller of BBC2 (from 1965 to 1969), and then as the BBC’s director of programmes (until 1973). Has he helped to create a monster?
“Well it depends how you define a monster. And are all monsters malign?”
Has it not encouraged us to be more sedentary, I ask: to spend less time engaging with the world about us? He laughs and winks: “And we gave up sitting in pubs for three or four hours a day! How awful!”. Would he lay any ills at the door of television? “Oh yes, of course. Adipose tissue.” Anything else? “What you might call visual chewing gum, in that it stops you thinking about anything else. But then I feel that about music. I mean I cannot understand how people want to go round with -” he mimes a pair of headphones and shifts the conversation onto a safer subject.
I was packing my things after saying goodbye when suddenly he sprang back into the room, this time wearing his glasses and holding a small leather filofax. “I’ve found the details of that lecture by Ralph Cicerone. I thought you’d want to know.” He showed me the address and the date: 2004. The old scientific habit – record your facts, check your facts – had not deserted him. As I marvelled at his recollection that he had left something hanging, and his determination to resolve it, this remarkable specimen of life on earth skipped away to his next appointment.
So let me continue on a little more by offering a short clip of Sir David as millions will have seen him from the wonderful animal partnerships BBC series.
Then it’s only natural for this blog to offer this item:
Then I am going to close today’s post by presenting a video that was first shown in this place back in September 2012.
If you need a reminder of how beautiful our planet is (and I’m sure the majority of LfD readers don’t require that reminder) then go back and watch David Attenborough’s video and voice-over to the song What a Wonderful World. This short but very compelling video shows why the planet is so worth protecting. Enjoy!
So make a diary note to celebrate Sir David’s 90th birthday on May 8th.
Why Being a Wildlife Photographer Is the Best Job in the World
These photographs were originally sent to me by Marg from Tasmania and they are just wonderful. Upon querying with Marg where they originally came from she found the source on a blog site called deMilked. That site explained:
You have to really love animals to go into nature photography. After all, it requires more patience to catch some deer in your lens than to photograph a mountain. Mountains don’t run away! Some animals don’t run either. In fact, some of them are really curious and come closer to check out the photographer. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Apparently, foxes and squirrels.
So here is the first batch of these gorgeous photographs.
There is no question that we are living in interesting times!
Back in the old country there was a popular saying: “There are liars, damn liars, and politicians.” I am insufficiently aware of politics in both my new home country, the US of A, and my new home state, Oregon, to know if that saying is equally pertinent to life in America as it was in Great Britain – I suspect that it is.
So what’s getting ‘my knickers in a twist’ today? Namely the state of the world economy.
There seems to be so much spin and counter-spin that getting to the truth of what is going on, economically speaking, is not straightforward.
Which is why a recent article posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijerover on The Automatic Earth jumped out at me. To my eyes, it really did cover the truth of what’s going on. And to double-check my analysis I shared it with Dan Gomez, no stranger to global finances, and he found it useful. Indeed, this was Dan’s reply: “That’s pretty much it. This should be the top of the world news every week until governments become accountable. All the other big issues of the day pale compare to the backlash from this sclerotic thinking. Good luck to all of us.”
Raúl has very kindly given me his permission to republish this. It’s not an easy read but that doesn’t detract from the value of the essay.
ooOOoo
Why This Slump Has Legs
January 18, 2016Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer
Berenice Abbott Columbus Circle, Manhattan 1936
We’ve only really been in two weeks of trading in the new year, things are looking pretty bad to say the least, so predictably the press are asking -and often answering- questions about when the slump will be over. Rebound, recovery, the usual terminology. When will we get back to growth?
For me personally, but that’s just me, that last question sounds a bit more stupid every single time I hear and read it. Just a bit, but there’s been a lot of those bits, more than I care to remember. Luckily, the answer is easy. The slump will not be over for a very long time, there will be no rebound or recovery, and please stop talking about a return to growth unless you can explain what you want to grow into.
I’m sorry, I know that’s not what you want to hear, but life’s a bitch and so’s the economy. You’ve lived on pink fumes for a long time, most of you for their whole lives, but reality dictates that real ‘growth’ stopped decades ago, and you never figured that out because, and I quote here (see below), you and the world you’re part of became “addicted to borrowing money, spending it, and passing this off as ‘growth’”.
That you believed this was actual growth, however, is on you. You fell for a scam and you’re going to have to pay the price. If there’s one single thing people are good at, it’s lying. It’s as old as human history, and it happens every day, so you’re no exception to any rule. You’re perhaps just not particularly clever.
How do we know a ‘recovery’ is so far off it’s really no use to even talk about it? As I said, it’s easy. Let me lead this in with a graph I saw just today, which deals with a topic the Automatic Earth has covered a lot: marginal debt, or more precisely, the productivity/growth gained from each additional dollar of debt.
Please note, this particular graph deals with private non-financial debt only, we’ll get to other kinds of added debt, but that restriction is actually quite illuminating.
Now of course, you have to wonder about the parameters the St. Louis Fed uses for its data and graphs, and whether ‘growth’ was all that solid in the run up to 2008. There’s plenty of very valid arguments that would say growth in the 1960’s was a whole lot more solid than that in the naughties, after the Glass-Steagall repeal, and after the dot.com blubber.
However, that’s not what I want to take away from this, I use this to show what has happened since 2008, more than before, when it comes to “passing debt off as ‘growth’”.
But it’s another thing that has happened since 2008, or rather not happened, that points out to us why this slump will have legs. That is, in 2008 a behemoth bubble started bursting, and it was by no means just US housing market. That bubble should have been allowed to fully deflate, because that is the only way to allow an economy to do a viable restart.
Instead, all that has been done since 2008, QE, ZIRP, the works, has been aimed at keeping a facade ‘alive’, and aimed at protecting the interests of the bankers and other rich parties. That facade, expressed most of all in rising stock markets, has allowed for societies to be gutted while people were busy watching the S&P rise to 2,100 and the Kardashians bare 2,100 body parts.
It was all paid for, apart from western QE, with $28 trillion and change of newfangled Chinese debt. The problem with this is that if you find yourself in a bubble and you don’t go through the inevitable deleveraging process that follows said bubble in a proper fashion, you’re not only going to kill economies, you’ll destroy entire societies.
And that is not just morally repugnant, it also works as much against the rich as it does against the poor. It’s just that that is a step too far for most people to understand. That even the rich need a functioning society, and that inequality as we see it today is a real threat to everyone.
Recognizing this simple fact, and the consequences that follow from it, is nothing new. It’s why in days of old, there were debt jubilees. It’s also why we still quote the following from Marriner Eccles, chairman of the Federal Reserve under FDR and Truman from 1934-1948, in his testimony to the Senate Committee on the Investigation of Economic Problems in 1933, which prompted FDR to make him chairman in the first place.
It is utterly impossible, as this country has demonstrated again and again, for the rich to save as much as they have been trying to save, and save anything that is worth saving. They can save idle factories and useless railroad coaches; they can save empty office buildings and closed banks; they can save paper evidences of foreign loans; but as a class they cannot save anything that is worth saving, above and beyond the amount that is made profitable by the increase of consumer buying.
It is for the interests of the well to do – to protect them from the results of their own folly – that we should take from them a sufficient amount of their surplus to enable consumers to consume and business to operate at a profit. This is not “soaking the rich”; it is saving the rich. Incidentally, it is the only way to assure them the serenity and security which they do not have at the present moment.
Everything would all be so much simpler if only more people understood this, that you need a – fleeting, ever-changing equilibrium- to prosper.
Instead, we’re falling into that same trap again. Or, more precisely, we already have. We have been fighting debt with more debt and built the facade put up by the Fed, the BoJ and the ECB, central banks that all face the same problems and all take the same approach: save the rich at the cost of the poor. Something Eccles said way back when could not possibly work.
Anyway, so here are the graphs that prove to us why the slump has legs. There’s been no deleveraging, the no. 1 requirement after a bubble bursts. There’s only been more leveraging, more debt has been issued, and while households have perhaps deleveraged a little bit, though that is likely strongly influenced by losses on homes etc. plus the fact that people were simply maxed out.
First, global debt and the opposite of deleveraging:
And global debt from a longer, 65 year, more historical perspective:
It’s a global debt graph, but it’s perhaps striking to note that big ‘growth’ spurts happened in the days when Reagan, Clinton and Obama were the respective US presidents. Not so much in the Bush era.
Next, China. What we’re looking at is what allowed the post 2008 global economic facade to have -fake- credibility, an insane rise in debt, largely spent on non-productive overinvestment, overcapacity highways to nowhere and many millions of empty apartments, in what could have been a cool story had not Beijing gone all-out on performance enhancing financial narcotics.
Today, the China Ponzi is on its last legs, and so is the global one, because China was the last ‘not-yet-conquered’ market large enough to provide the facade with -fleeting- credibility. Unless Elon Musk gets us to Mars very soon, there are no more such markets.
So US debt will have to come down too, belatedly, with China, and it will have to do that now. because there are no continents to conquer and hide the debt behind. We’re all going to regret engaging in the debt game, and not letting the bubble deflate in an orderly fashion when we still could, but all those thoughts are too late now.
What the facade has wrought is not just the idea that deleveraging was not needed (though it always is, after every single bubble), but that net US household worth rose by 55% in the 6-7 years since the bottom of the crisis, an artificial bottom fabricated with…more debt, with QE, and ZIRP.
Meanwhile, in today’s world, as stock markets go down at a rapid clip, China, having lost control of a market system it never had the control over that Politburos are ever willing to acknowledge they don’t have, plays a game of Ponzi whack-a-mole, with erratic ‘policies’ such as circuit breakers and CIA-style renditions of fund managers and the like.
And all the west can do is watch them fumble the ball, and another one, and another. And this whole thing is nowhere near the end.
China bad loans have now become a theme, but the theme doesn’t mean a thing without including the shadow banking system, which in China has been given the opportunity to grow like a tumor, on which Beijing’s grip is limited, and which has huge claims on local party officials forced by the Politburo to show overblown growth numbers. If you want to address bad loans, that’s where they are.
Chinese credit/debt graphs paint only a part of the picture if and when they don’t include shadow banks, but keeping their role hidden is one of Xi’s main goals, lest the people find out how bad things really are and start revolting. But they will anyway. That makes China a very unpredictable entity. And unpredictable means volatile, and that means even more money flowing out of, and being lost in, markets.
The ‘least worst’ place to be for what money will be left is US dollars, US treasuries and perhaps metals. But there’ll be a whole lot less left than just about anyone thinks. That’s the price of deleveraging.
The price of not deleveraging, on the other hand, is what we see in the markets today. And there is no cure. It must be done. The price for keeping up the facade rises sharply with each passing day, and the effort will in the end be futile. All bubbles have limited lifespans.
I’ll close this with a few recent words from Tim Morgan, who puts it so well I don’t feel the need to try and do it better.
In order to set the Ponzi economy into some context, let’s put some figures on it. In the United States, total “real economy” debt (which excludes inter-bank borrowing) increased by $19.4 trillion – in real, inflation-adjusted terms – between 2000 and 2014, whilst real GDP expanded by only $3.7 trillion. Britain, meanwhile, added £1.9 trillion of new debt for less than £400bn on “growth” over the same period. I spent part of the holiday period unearthing quite how much debt countries added for each dollar of “growth” over a period starting at the end of 2000 and ending in mid-2015.
Unsurprisingly, the league is topped by Portugal ($5.65 for each $1 of growth), Ireland ($5.42) and Greece ($5.39). Britain’s ratio ($3.46) is somewhat flattering, in that the UK has used asset sales as well as borrowing to sustain its consumption. The average for the Eurozone ($3.54) covers ratios as diverse as Germany (just $1.87) and France ($4.22).
China’s $2.56 looks unexceptional until you note that the more recent (post-2007) number is much worse. Economies which seem to have been growing without too much borrowing (such as Brazil and Russia) are now experiencing dramatic worsening in their ratios, generally in the wake of tumbling commodity prices.
In the proverbial nutshell, then, the world has become addicted to borrowing money, spending it, and passing this off as “growth”. This is a copybook example of a pyramid scheme, which in turn means that the world’s most influential economic mentor is neither Keynes nor Hayek, but Charles Ponzi.
[..] How, in the absence of growth, can inflated capital values be sustained? The answer, of course, is that they can’t. Like all Ponzi schemes, this ends with a bang, not a whimper. This is why I find forecasts of a ‘big fall’ or ‘sharp correction’ in markets hard to swallow. Ponzi schemes don’t end gradually, any more than someone can fall off a cliff gradually, or be “slightly pregnant”.
The Ponzi economy simply continues for as long as irrationality prevails, and then implodes. Capital markets, though, are the symptom, not the cause. The fundamental problem is an inability to escape from an addictive practice of manufacturing supposed “growth” on the basis of borrowed money.
There may be shallow lulls in the asset markets, nothing ever only falls down in a straight line in the real world, but that debt I’ve described here will and must come down and be deleveraged.
The process will in all likelihood lead to warfare, and to refugee movements the likes of which the world has never seen just because of the sheer numbers of people added in the past 50 years.
When your children reach your age, they will not live in a world that you ever thought was possible. But they will still have to live in it, and deal with it. They will no longer have the facade you’ve been staring at for so long now, to lull them into a complacent sleep. And the Kardashians will no longer be looking so attractive either.
ooOOoo
If you found your mind wandering somewhat as you tried to stay focussed on the essay, just go back and read the closing two paragraphs.
The process will in all likelihood lead to warfare, and to refugee movements the likes of which the world has never seen just because of the sheer numbers of people added in the past 50 years.
When your children reach your age, they will not live in a world that you ever thought was possible. But they will still have to live in it, and deal with it. They will no longer have the facade you’ve been staring at for so long now, to lull them into a complacent sleep. And the Kardashians will no longer be looking so attractive either.
As I said at the start: we are living in interesting times!
Showing how very easy it is to be drawn into poor advice.
A close friend, who for all the right reasons has to remain nameless, recently sent me the following:
Self-performed C P R
Because we care for you!!!
1. Let’s say it’s 7:25 pm and you’re going home (alone of course) after an unusually hard day on the job.
2. You’re really tired, upset and frustrated.
3. Suddenly you start experiencing severe pain in your chest that starts to drag out into your arm and up in to your jaw. You are only about five km from the hospital nearest your home.
4. Unfortunately, you don’t know if you’ll be able to make it that far.
5. You have been trained in CPR, but the guy that taught the course did not tell you how to perform it on yourself.
6. HOW TO SURVIVE A HEART ATTACK WHEN ALONE?
Since many people are alone when they suffer a heart attack without help, the person whose heart is beating improperly and who begins to feel faint, has only about 10 seconds left before losing consciousness.
7. However, these victims can help themselves by coughing repeatedly and very vigorously. A deep breath should be taken before each cough, and the cough must be deep and prolonged, as when producing sputum from deep inside the chest.
A breath and a cough must be repeated about every two seconds without let-up until help arrives, or until the heart is felt to be beating normally again.
8. Deep breaths get oxygen into the lungs, and coughing movements squeeze the heart and keep the blood circulating. The squeezing pressure on the heart also helps it regain normal rhythm. In this way, heart attack victims can get to a hospital.
9. Tell as many other people as possible about this. It could save their lives!
10. A cardiologist says if everyone who gets this mail, kindly sends it to 10 people, you can bet that we’ll save at least one life.
11. Rather than sending jokes, please..contribute by forwarding this mail which can save a person’s life!
12. If this message comes around to you more than once, please don’t get irritated. You should be happy that you have many friends who care about you and your well-being.
I thought that it would be good to pass this on to all you dear readers; a la Point 11. So I did a quick web search to find a reliable and authentic source for this advice. Very quickly I came to the American Heart Association’s website and read the following:
Cough CPR
Updated:Dec 10,2014
The American Heart Association does not endorse “cough CPR,” a coughing procedure widely publicized on the Internet. As noted in the 2010 American Heart Association Guidelines for Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and Emergency Cardiovascular Care, “cough CPR” is not useful for unresponsive victims and should not be taught to lay rescuers.During a sudden arrhythmia (abnormal heart rhythm), it may be possible for a conscious, responsive person to cough forcefully and repetitively to maintain enough blood flow to the brain to remain conscious for a few seconds until the arrhythmia is treated. Blood flow is maintained by increased pressure in the chest that occurs during forceful coughs. This has been mislabeled “cough CPR,” although it’s not a form of traditional resuscitation.
Why isn’t “cough CPR” appropriate in CPR training courses? “Cough CPR” should not be taught in lay-rescuer CPR courses because it is generally not useful in the prehospital setting. In virtually all lay-rescuer CPR courses, the finding that signals an emergency is the victim’s unresponsiveness. Unresponsive victims will not be able to perform “cough CPR.”
Are there situations when “cough CPR” is appropriate? “Cough” CPR may be considered in settings such as the cardiac catheterization laboratory where patients are conscious and constantly monitored (for example, with an ECG machine). A nurse or physician is also present who can instruct and coach the patients to cough forcefully every one to three seconds during the initial seconds of a sudden arrhythmia. However, as this is not effective in all patients, it should not delay definitive treatment.
This content was last reviewed on 11/14/2014.
AHA Recommendation
The best strategy is to be aware of the warning signs for cardiac arrest – sudden loss of responsiveness and no normal breathing – and respond to them by calling 9-1-1.
CoughCPR is the subject of a hoax email that began circulating in 1999.[citation needed] It is described as a “resuscitation technique” in which through prolonged coughing and deep breathing every 2 seconds, a person suffering a cardiac dysrhythmia immediately before cardiac arrest can keep conscious until help arrives (or until the person can get to the nearest hospital). Neither the American Heart Association nor the American Red Cross endorses cough CPR during a heart attack.[1].
This confusion appears to revolve primarily over the public’s failure to discriminate between a heart attack, cardiac arrest and cardiac dysrhythmias. A heart attack occurs when an occlusion (e.g. blood clot) of an artery in the heart slowly causes tissue to die. This can result in chest pain and discomfort, and requires immediate medical attention to resolve the occlusion by emergency surgery or cardiac clot-busting drugs. A cardiac dysrhythmia is primarily an electrical problem within the heart, and is sometimes treated with electrolytes, vagal maneuver, or electrical cardioversion. Many dysrhythmias may herald an impending heart attack.[medical citation needed]
So good people, be careful and make a note of the AHA’s recommendation above.
By: Laura S. January 24, 2016
Ask Yourself These Three Questions
No, your dog can’t speak in full sentences but how hard is it to understand his needs? Chances are, it’s pretty easy. Is your dog full of anxiety because you’ve worked a 10 hour day leaving him alone in the house, or worse yet, locked in a cage? When your dog greets you with excitement at the door, do you take the time to grab the leash and go for a long walk or do you scold him for bothering you? Is your dog getting up very, very slowly from painful joints?
Are you guilty of breaking promises to yourself and to your dog? Do you procrastinate? Make a dedicated practice of fulfilling your promises to your dog, the same way as you would care for your own needs. It’s just like brushing your teeth. Schedule in items like these:
If you’ve had a bad day, do you let it spill over? Can you check your troubles at the front door or do you bring them with you and spread your grief? Although it is difficult, take a few deep breaths and remind yourself that your truest friend in the world is not the one you want to hurt today.![Skaftafell-ice-cave-1[2]](https://learningfromdogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/skaftafell-ice-cave-12.jpg)
Learning from Dogs 