Category: Technology

The Reno Gun Show

A delightful story from Lynda Demsher.

I have referred previously to AIM, the authors’ group based in nearby Grants Pass, OR. Lynda is a published author who is one of the AIM members. The other day, Lynda sent me the following:

Paul, I know you’ve been busy so I sent you this if you need something for your blog if it’s the kind of thing you use. Might be timely as well given the latest talk about guns. It is somewhat about my dog and how I ended up at one of the biggest gun shows in the west while looking for dog training equipment. This was published in “Invisible Memoirs,” a Bay Area journal.

So with no further ado, here is Lynda’s story. It is about dogs!

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The Gun Show

If not for my youngest hunting dog, the one my husband calls “the idiot,” I might have missed it. Instead, I put on my best leather vest and dressiest black jeans (known as “wedding jeans” where I lived in Modoc County) and joined the hundreds of people streaming into the Reno Gun Show set up in the basement of the Grand Sierra Resort and Casino. The entrance yawned like a dim and secretive man-cave, beckoning lines of mostly men to enter, after forking over a $10 fee of course. I wondered if I needed a password or a special handshake as well. The furtive restlessness of the crowd suggested this was a place with protocols. I was in line with my husband and two of his hunting buddies so I asked what they were. I got the look men give when they think a woman asks a stupid question. Women are allowed of course, when the show opens for its three-day run in November, but few attend. Women whisper that gun shows are the equivalent of hanging out at your brother’s scout meeting. No one tells you to leave but they wish you would.

The Idiot happens to be an odd little bird dog I rescued from the pound who needed some work for this year’s hunting season, so I decided to tag along with my husband and his friends, even though the trip was their annual guy-getaway. They made the mistake of telling me the show had “all kinds of hunting stuff” so I decided to see for myself. My young German wirehaired pointer was the laughing stock of my husband’s hunting group last season when he insisted on carrying his favorite toy into the field. He’s a bit gun-sensitive and feels more secure with something in his mouth. He does hunt when the excitement kicks in, but a dog pointing a bird with a big red Frisbee in his mouth isn’t taken all that seriously where I lived until recently. In that rural high-desert county, way out in the northeast corner of California, bordering both Nevada and Oregon, you don’t escape a good razzing if your hunting dog is a clown.

I was certain a place featuring guns would have the latest in gun dog supplies too, since guns and dogs go together like soda and pop. I have to admit though, curiosity was also a motivation. My husband has attended these shows for years even though the guns in his safe far outnumber his annual critter kill. He rarely purchases anything, but he always brings back entertaining observations about the characters floating around in the gun galaxy.

I had a camera in my vest and was anxious to record some of these characters, or possibly the appearance of a film star or political figure also known to attend. But when the guys and I inched forward toward the ticket booth I noticed a large sign with bold black letters saying photographs were prohibited. A stern-looking armed guard wearing combat fatigues stood nearby. Darn. I really did want to sneak a picture of the woman just ahead of us. Her general appearance suggested biology had advanced to the point where it was possible to mix warthog and human DNA. Dressed in baggy camouflage sweats, she rolled toward the entrance like an Abrams tank. Completing her ensemble was a large red button with black letters pinned to her chest. As I got a closer to her, I realized it said “Obama Scares Me.” Now I knew what to do in case she decided to have me for lunch. I could just wave my arms over my head and yell “Obama!”

My husband, tall and thin, with wire-rimmed glasses, was wearing a v-neck sweater over a button-down shirt and tan khakis. He looked more like a college professor emeritus than a gun enthusiast in this crowd. I could tell where he was in the room while his stockier friends, wearing the more standard uniform of white t-shirt, forest-green down vest and sagging blue jeans, quickly melted into the browsing crowd.

Left alone, I felt like a migrant in an alien universe, even though guns are not alien to me. I lived within walking distance of a duck blind and my house was full of shabby hunting lodge décor, including 30 or 40 antique duck decoys, old shotguns, ammunition boxes, and deer horns, while back issues of Gun Dog and other hunting magazines littered my end tables. Outdoor supply catalogues were required bathroom reading. Hunting season in the fall is my favorite time of year, but I don’t shoot much anymore. Shooting is a precise sport, requiring hours of ear-blowing, shoulder-banging practice. Without a lot of practice, you could end up killing your brother-in-law. Since hunters are morally obligated to eat what they kill, I do most of my shooting with a camera now. I have yet to come across a good brother-in-law marinade.

My role in hunting is mainly working the dogs and I’ve trained a couple of generations of them. From my point of view, hunting isn’t really about the guns, or even the game, it’s primarily about the dogs. Guns are tools to get the game, which requires a gourmet cooking degree to render edible. And unless you hunt on a club, or hunt ducks down on the river, finding wild upland game birds usually requires a before-dawn trip out into nowhere land and then a bone-rattling drive over 30 miles of volcanic rock followed by a shin-bruising hike up a steep brushy hill. The dogs, however, make it all worthwhile. Upland game birds, such as mountain grouse, quail and chucker seldom welcome a hunting party so it’s the dogs’ job to find their hiding places. The pointers put on a field ballet in their pursuit, leap-flying over rocks and brush, dancing across icy streams and twirling to follow a backtracked scent that says “bird this way.” The dog locating the flock stretches into a steady point with foreleg curled and tail straight out. Others in the hunting pack quietly honor his point by staying slightly behind and perfectly still. The dogs stay motionless because the birds, having bird brains, think no one can see them in the bushes if they stay perfectly still. On command the dog leans in slightly, setting off a whirring explosion of blurred brown wings. Guns go off and the dogs track falling birds with their internal geometry, then race to find them in the brush. Some bird dogs are trained to bring the game back to hand, some drop it in front of their hunter, but all prance back with their birds, undeniably proud.

My little wirehair was on the verge being left out of the next hunt because of his eccentricities, but I had hope of finding him some help, possibly in the form of new training technology, realistic training birds and game scent for saturating them, or even a field rope that wouldn’t tangle up on itself. Something, anything, that would get him past the silly juvenile stage in the field.

After browsing the floor for a while and getting blank stares when inquiring if anyone in the room had dog gear, I realized this was not a hunters’ expo but a raw display of powerful arms, some just happening to be for wild game. Rows and rows of gunmetal under florescent light made everything look eerily green and iridescent. Gun hammers clicked empty threats throughout the chamber as vendors demonstrated the bolt action, trigger sensitivity, and firing pin mechanisms of their wares. From the hum of the hype, I’d swear testosterone was being dispersed through the air conditioning to mingle with the ambient odor of sweaty socks.

The room I was in could have housed the first floor of a department store in the mall nearby where the wives of my husband’s friends were enjoying a shopping spree. I counted at least 50 gun sellers with their wares spread neatly on folding metal tables. “Cowboys” in western dress had a row of tables along one wall, where they leaned their folding chairs back as far as they could, trying their best to look like they’d just come in from ropin’ and wranglin’ on the range These vendors also displayed saddles and horse tack along with some rusty cast iron cookware for effect. Other tables had a few duck decoys, old metal signs, antique weaponry and Native American artifacts made in China mixed in for color. One vendor had a nice selection of silver and turquoise jewelry, indicating some purchases here would require softening up the wife back home.

Toward the rear of the area was a cordoned off space stacked with cases of ammunition. Men with hand-trucks stood patiently in line, waiting their turn to purchase as much as they could pile onto their rolling devices. I stood near the line for a while, admiring the craftsmanship of some wooden boxes housing the more expensive ammo. The men around me weren’t there for the boxes though. They were convinced the government was trying to make ammunition scarce as a form of gun control. That’s why they were stocking up. The ammo sellers loudly agreed, while their cash registers sang a money song.

After wandering around and getting bored by the monotony of gun metal and noise, I almost ditched the place for the mall. But then I remembered the woman I saw at the entrance and decided I couldn’t leave without at least one story about a gun-show character. I didn’t see her anywhere, but I did notice a stream of people heading toward a big double-door at the back of the room. I decided to explore.

Turns out, there was a second room of vendors, nearly as large as the first. That room was accessible only through the Refreshment Station where three men in black from their hats to their boots, resembling worn out old villains from a 1948 John Wayne movie, leaned against a bar drinking beer with whisky shooters. Each of them had a scruffy beard and a long-barreled pistol in a holster strapped to a leg. While I have a strong appreciation for the peculiar, I’m very wary of guns in the vicinity of alcohol, so I hoped these guys were just for show. When they caught me looking at them though, none cracked a smile. I felt like a Martian at a rodeo. I quickly ducked between a passing group of men in big hats and entered an arsenal that would put a Syrian rebel in a jealous rage.

It wasn’t just an arsenal though. It was an education. If I hadn’t stumbled in here I never would have learned about Apocalyptic Zombies.

Only one vendor in the room had guns actually meant for shooting animals, probably a last-minute booking, and there was no sign of anything related to hunting dogs. The rest of the 30 or 40 vendors seemed to display an unsettling urgency to scare up business, literally. The place looked like a war zone Wal-Mart. There were a few women in this room but they hardly fit the description of the one I saw at the entrance. One was a tall blond in a low-cut blouse with a holstered gun strapped to a bare leg. Not to be outdone, another vendor had his own buxom blond parading around in a Daisy Mae outfit, showing off AK-47s. The third woman was a tired-looking grandmother playing a game on a tablet computer. She seemed to be in charge of a cash box.

Even though Christmas decorated the outside world this time of year, in here it was Fourth of July. American flags along with red, white and blue streamers were everywhere. It all seemed very patriotic until a closer look revealed the joyful colors swirling into stacks of T-shirts, bumper-stickers, posters and even baby bibs featuring clownish pictures and boorish sayings about the President of the United States. Although I usually keep myself in observation mode in jarring places, my curiosity gnawed. Finally, I asked one vendor why he had so much Obama stuff for sale, since the President had won a second term and election season was over.

“I just like the humor, it’s just humorous,” he said with a hiss. I looked for the lemon he must have been sucking on just before I got there. Of course, his tone made it irresistible for me to ask my next question:

“Aren’t you afraid of losing business by offending someone who might actually like the President?”

He shot me a definite NO! and said he didn’t have anything more to say.

Two booths past the gun-show humorist I came across a display of Nazi paraphernalia for sale under a large poster warning “What worked for Hitler will work for Obama!!” I wondered what would work for both Hitler and Obama. Obviously not a twitter account. The table under the sign had a full-length glass case displaying a collection of what appeared to be old Nazi war souvenirs. Almost everything had a swastika on it. There were tattered leather wallets, worn pistol holsters, moth-eaten wool gloves, yellowed ID cards, heavy gold watches, pistols, money clips, buttons, key chains, belt buckles, helmets, worn but well-polished boots, , ammunition holders, cups, silverware and unidentifiables with wires sticking out. The black velvet lining of the cases made the rather creepy items look important. Some did not look like original Nazi war items though, especially the cell phone cases. I walked over to the vendor, hoping to ask him where this stuff came from. He was bent over something in his lap, looking like the kind of old, green-aproned shoemaker you see in foreign films. He did not look up at me. Was he trying to sell this stuff, or just make a statement? I didn’t find out what would work for both Hitler and Obama until I browsed the next display down.

Six long tables, three on each side, were shoved together and piled with books. I picked up one with a swastika on it. Skimming through it I quickly learned the perils of a “gun-less society” and how disarming citizens would allow government to “go wild” and start hauling off defenseless people to be enslaved in work camps or tortured in some hideous way before being thrown in a ditch and shot. Hitler had taken everyone’s guns away before the Holocaust, the book noted, and signs that the U.S. government was headed in that direction were becoming evident. Gun control was part of a bigger plan by our sneaky president and his socialist supporters to abolish the Constitution and end Democracy. The book was published in 2011. I hid that book under the pile it came from.

Then, from other books in the selection, I learned the world is on the verge of destruction, society is about to break down, and we’ll all have to defend ourselves against those who did not have the foresight to prepare for the Apocalypse. So much for the return of Hitler. These books indicated I had bigger things to worry about. The word “Apocalypse,” always capitalized, peppered these publications, but few foretold much of a cause beyond some vague hint of world-wide economic collapse caused by Obamacare. One book mentioned we might be hit by a giant meteorite and had the distinction of being the only one I skimmed that didn’t blame the impending disaster on the President, although I didn’t read the whole thing.

Selecting another book, I discovered that preparing for “The Apocalypse” not only involves stockpiling long-lasting packs of food and water, conveniently for sale at the gun show, but learning to kill, gut and skin your pets for food, and how to harvest and cook weeds and certain kinds of dirt (the kind with animal poop in it) in case the Apocalypse lasts longer than your supplies. I imagined how someone reading that book might just double or triple his order of archival food buckets being sold at the booth down the aisle to avoid eating his beagle or the equivalent of cat litter during dire circumstances.

For city dwellers there were books on how to fix up your car so you could escape to the wilderness and live in it when you run out of gas. In the back of these books were web sites where you could order overpriced canning jars, all kinds of knives, and archery equipment, as you don’t really want to run into people you know while stockpiling at a local shopping center. The books tell you not to let on you’re prepared for survival, or you might be overrun by your starving friends and neighbors, referred to as the Apocalyptic Zombies, who will be desperate and not above killing you for your stash. And, of course, to complete your survival package, readers were advised to get at least one high-powered assault weapon and teach every member of the family to shoot after accumulating enough ammunition to hold off three battalions of U.S. Marines.

Moving on from the dire warnings, I noticed more signs, posters and even targets picturing the dreaded Apocalyptic Zombies tacked up behind the assault weapons vendors. These warned that I would be at the mercy of monsters unless I owned a big black gun. Who knew the awful Zombies coming to get me would look exactly like the walking dead from old horror movies, complete with purple skin and bloody faces. I thought they’d look more like the lady I saw at the entrance, the one with the Obama button.

Emerging from the book table I wondered if they had a psychiatrist’s booth around where I could pay a dollar to have my paranoia removed. Looking up at the whole of the room, my world was suddenly full of glistening gun barrels jutting in the air like millennial symbols of manhood. I expected a worship dance to begin anytime. The air felt thick and smelled of gun oil and the ever-present dirty socks. I looked for something to hide behind until someone I knew came along. I picked the biggest gun in the show. This gun was a cannon-like affair on a shooting stand, set up on a sturdy table with an ammunition clip flowing to the floor. It was outfitted with a computerized night-vision contraption advertised as something the military uses to find terrorists in Afghanistan. The whole package cost more than $6,000. I hadn’t seen anything like it anywhere else at the show. I thought about sneaking a picture of it.

“What do you use it for?” I asked, after actually admiring the technology on the thing.

A very serious dark-haired man in his early 30s who was seated at the table directed his icy blue eyes toward me, squinted, and said flatly “chicken-stealing coyotes.” I started to laugh but held back when the man continued to stare at me like a vampire who senses his favorite blood type. The guy even had a widow’s peak. Had he seen my camera? I slowly took my hand off it in my pocket and pulled away, saying “nice gun, nice gun.”

To catch my breath and get a better sense of perspective, I continued exploring from there, stopping to have a chat with a grandfatherly-type who made ink pens out of spent bullet casings, and a wiry old codger who tried to sell me a leather purse featuring an opening along the back seam for my handgun, so it would be within easy reach if I suddenly needed to shoot a mugger. I don’t think he realized the featured convenience on the shoulder bag would also put the gun within easy reach of a nosy little kid who’s exploring hands might find Grandma’s toy while standing in line with her at the bank. After politely refusing the purse offer, I stopped at a booth where a vendor assured me his “miracle” canvas bag, which resembled a diaper for a three-legged toddler, would keep food frozen for two weeks. Then, at a booth selling pistols, I watched with growing anxiety as a salesman pitched a pocket-sized weapon to a short, baggy-eyed man with bed-hair who seemed to be contributing most of the dirty-sock smell. The guy looked like he could really use a psychiatric booth, but that didn’t seem to concern the enthusiastic salesman telling him he was running a special that day – free membership in the National Rifle Association (NRA) for a year with every purchase. That was odd because the NRA table out front was hawking free memberships to anyone who’d fill out a form.

Finally, I ran into a pair of vendors violating an apparent rule against having fun at a gun show. They were the only non-Caucasian sellers, young men of Asian descent, who were happily booking “Full Auto Shoots” for “that special occasion.” They had a couple of M-16s on display, but they weren’t selling them. They were “renting” them at a gun club so people could shoot their hearts out at steel targets. Why steel? “People like to hear the pling,” one of the men told me with a wink. These two guys beamed with their clever idea. For $50 a clip you could unleash your inner killer without harming anyone, they explained. I asked him who the typical customer might be. He showed me a video on his smart phone of a bachelor party and said he gets a lot of requests for these.

“You can film these kinds of bachelor parties,” he said, “and the brides-to-be love it because the men can have fun without getting drunk with naked women!”

He also said they did birthday parties. “Eleven-year-olds love to shoot, and we have special padding on the guns for them,” he said. “Moms love it because it’s something different!”

About that time my husband caught up with me, and became very interested in the rent-a-machine-gun idea. Might bring tourists out to our economically challenged community, he remarked. I told him I was ready to ditch this place as the only thing I found here having any connection to dogs was a book that gave instructions on how to skin and eat them. He said he was ready for lunch but I couldn’t think of eating until I got the image of dog snout stew out of my head. We left, but not before I finally spotted the woman with the Obama button on our way out. She was examining a nice little AR-15. When she looked up at us with that gun in her hands I knew we were all doomed. The Apocalyptic Zombies were buying guns here as well.

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Will leave it there as have a host of things to do before leaving to go to Medford Airport and welcome Jean back from her trip to Mexico. (As of yesterday afternoon!)

The power of hope!

It really is about good people refusing to let evil dominate our world.

The response to yesterday’s post was incredible and very gratifying.

For I was conscious that many would simply reject the proposition that I saw in John Zande’s book, namely that, “there was an evil origin to the universe and, more directly, that the deep, and growing, suffering of the pinnacle of evolution, us humans, can be traced back to that evil origin.”

The emotional challenge, of which I am acutely aware, is recognising that core proposition, that as we humans evolve so too does the capacity for human suffering, yet not wanting to give up on my personal core belief that better times ahead are possible, given sufficient people sharing that power of hope. Echoing what Sue wrote as a response to yesterday’s post that motivated me to reply, in part, thus:

If there was one sentence of yours that struck me as spot on, it was your declaration that what we think is what we create. Or as I often reflect, we are what we think.

Jean and I last night watched the latest BBC Panorama report about the migrant/refugee crisis in Europe. It was profoundly upsetting for reasons that many will understand.

George Monbiot’s essay that follows shortly is also profoundly upsetting.

But if hope is to be translated into a determination to make a difference, then it demands that we don’t ignore the pain but use our anger to fuel our passion to behave appropriately: We are what we think! Or in the much more eloquent words of Albert Einstein:

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.

George Monbiot is to be saluted for his commitment to questioning and I am privileged to have his permission to republish the following.

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Inhospitable Planet

29th September 2015

There may be water on Mars. But is there intelligent life on Earth?

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 30th September 2015

Evidence for flowing water on Mars – this opens up the possibility of life; of wonders we cannot begin to imagine. Its discovery is an astonishing achievement. Meanwhile, Martian scientists continue their search for intelligent life on Earth.

We might be captivated by the thought of organisms on another planet, but we seem to have lost interest in our own. The Oxford Junior Dictionary has been excising the waymarks of the living world. Adders, blackberries, bluebells, conkers, holly, magpies, minnows, otters, primroses, thrushes, weasels and wrens are now surplus to requirements.

In the past four decades, the world has lost 50% of its vertebrate wildlife. But across the latter half of this period, there has been a steep decline in coverage. In 2014, according to a study at Cardiff University, there were as many news stories broadcast by the BBC and ITV about Madeline McCann (who went missing in 2007) as there were about the entire range of environmental issues.

Think of what would change if we valued terrestrial water as much as we value the possibility of water on Mars. Only three percent of the water on this planet is fresh, and of that two-thirds is frozen. Yet we lay waste to the accessible portion. Sixty percent of the water used in farming is needlessly piddled away by careless irrigation. Rivers, lakes and aquifers are sucked dry, while what remains is often so contaminated that it threatens the lives of those who drink it. In the UK, domestic demand is such that the upper reaches of many rivers disappear during the summer. Yet still we install clunky old toilets and showers that gush like waterfalls.

As for salty water of the kind that enthralls us when apparently detected on Mars, on Earth we express our appreciation with a frenzy of destruction. A new report suggests that fish numbers have halved since 1970. Pacific bluefin tuna, that once roamed the seas in untold millions, have been reduced to an estimated 40,000, yet still they are pursued. Coral reefs are under such pressure that most could be gone by 2050. And in our own deep space, our desire for exotic fish rips through a world scarcely better known to us than the red planet’s surface. Trawlers are now working at depths of 2000 metres. We can only guess at what they might be destroying.

A few hours before the Martian discovery was announced, Shell terminated its Arctic oil prospecting in the Chukchi Sea. For the company’s shareholders, it’s a minor disaster: the loss of $4 billion. For those who love the planet and the life it sustains, it is a stroke of great fortune: it happened only because the company failed to find sufficient reserves. Had Shell succeeded, it would have exposed one of the most vulnerable places on Earth to spills that are almost inevitable, where containment is almost impossible. Are we to leave such matters to chance?

At the beginning of September, two weeks after he granted Shell permission to drill in the Chukchi Sea, Barack Obama travelled to Alaska to warn Americans about the devastating effects that climate change, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, might catalyse in the Arctic. “It’s not enough just to talk the talk”, he told them. “We’ve got to walk the walk.” We should “embrace the human ingenuity that can do something about it.” Human ingenuity is on abundant display at Nasa, which released those astounding images. But when it comes to policy, the search for intelligent life goes on.

Let the market decide: this is the way in which governments seek to resolve planetary destruction. Leave it to the conscience of consumers, while that conscience is muted and confused by advertising and corporate lies. In a near-vacuum of information, we are each left to decide what we should take from other species and other people; what we should allocate to ourselves or leave to succeeding generations. Surely there are some resources and some places – such as the Arctic and the deep sea – whose exploitation should simply stop?

All this drilling and digging and trawling and dumping and poisoning – what is it for anyway? Does it enrich human experience, or stifle it? A couple of weeks ago, I launched the hashtag #extremecivilisation, and invited suggestions. They have flooded in. Here are just a few of the products my correspondents have found. All of them, as far as I can tell, are real.

An egg tray for your fridge, that syncs with your phone to let you know how many eggs are left. A gadget for scrambling them – inside the shell. Wigs for babies, to allow “baby girls with little or no hair at all the opportunity to have a beautifully realistic hair style”. The iPotty, that permits toddlers to keep playing on their iPads while toilet training. A £2000 spider-proof shed. A snow sauna, on sale in the United Arab Emirates, in which you can create a winter wonderland with the flick of a switch. A refrigerated watermelon case on wheels: indispensable for picnics. Or perhaps not, as it weighs more than the melon. Anal bleaching cream, for … to be honest, I don’t want to know. An “automatic watch rotator” that saves you the bother of winding your luxury wrist candy. A smart phone for dogs, with which they can take pictures of themselves. Pre-peeled bananas, in polystyrene trays covered in clingfilm. Just peel back the packaging …

Every year, clever new ways of wasting stuff are devised, and every year we become more inured to the pointless consumption of the world’s precious resources. With each subtle intensification, the baseline of normality shifts. It should not be surprising to discover that the richer a country becomes, the less its people care about their impacts on the living planet.

Our alienation from the world of wonders with which we evolved has only intensified since David Bowie described a girl stumbling through a “sunken dream”, on her way to be “hooked to the silver screen”, where a long series of distractions diverts her from life’s great questions. The song, of course, was Life on Mars.

www.monbiot.com

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David Bowie’s track Life on Mars from the album Hunky Dory was released in 1971. Courtesy of YouTube, here it is again:

Never stop fighting for a better world.

Protecting our right to breathe good, clean air.

robertgreeningersoll118442

Fundamentally, today’s post is not about dogs. But it is about the qualities that we can see in our dogs: trust, honesty, openness, and the core quality that inspires my writings about dogs: integrity.

I’m speaking of the disgusting news that has been headlined in the world’s media in recent days, no better summarised than by this extract from a current (1pm PDT yesterday)) BBC news report:

Volkswagen chief executive Martin Winterkorn has resigned following the revelation that the firm manipulated US diesel car emissions tests.

Mr Winterkorn said he was “shocked” by recent events and that the firm needed a “fresh start”.

He added that he was “not aware of any wrongdoing on my part” but was acting in the interest of the company.

VW has already said that it is setting aside €6.5bn (£4.7bn) to cover the costs of the scandal.

The world’s biggest carmaker admitted last week that it deceived US regulators in exhaust emissions tests by installing a device to give more positive results.

The company said later that it affected 11 million vehicles worldwide.

As ever, the voice of George Monbiot speaks a little clearer than most, and I am referring to his recent essay published both on his blog and in The Guardian newspaper.  I am very pleased to have Monbiot’s permission to republish his essay here on Learning from Dogs.

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Smoke and Mirrors

22nd September 2015

Pollution, as scandals on both sides of the Atlantic show, is a physical manifestation of corruption.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 23 September 2015

In London, the latest figures suggest, it now kills more people than smoking. Worldwide, a new study estimates, it causes more deaths than malaria and HIV-Aids together. I’m talking about the neglected health crisis of this age, that we seldom discuss or even acknowledge. Air pollution.

Heart attacks, strokes, asthma, lung and bladder cancers, low birth weight, low verbal IQ, poor memory and attention among children, faster cognitive decline in older people and – recent studies suggest – a link with the earlier onset of dementia: all these are among the impacts of a problem that, many still believe, we solved decades ago. The smokestacks may have moved to China, but other sources, whose fumes are less visible, have taken their place. Among the worst are diesel engines, sold, even today, as the eco-friendly option, on the grounds that their greenhouse gas emissions tend to be lower than those of petrol engines. You begin to wonder whether any such claims can still be trusted.

Volkswagen’s rigging of its pollution tests is an assault on our lungs, our hearts, our brains. It is a classic example of externalisation: the dumping of costs that businesses should carry onto other people. The air that should have been filtered by its engines is filtered by our lungs instead. We have become the scrubbing devices it failed to install.

Who knows how many people have paid for this crime already, with their health or with their lives? In the USA, 200,000 deaths a year are attributed to air pollution. For how many of those might Volkswagen be responsible? Where else was the fraud perpetrated? Of what proportion of our health budgets has this company robbed us?

The fraud involves the detection of nitrogen oxides (NOx), of which diesel engines are the major source in many places. This month, for the first time in our history, the UK government estimated the impact of NOx emissions on public health, and discovered that they are likely almost to double the number of deaths from air pollution, adding 23,000 to the 29,000 attributed to particulates (tiny particles of soot).

The government released this discovery, alongside its useless proposals for dealing with the problem, on Saturday 12 September, a few minutes before Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader was announced. How many government press releases are published on a Saturday? How many are published on a Saturday during an event on which everyone is focused? In other words, as a Labour press officer once notoriously advised, this was “a good day to bury bad news”. Not only was the number of deaths buried by this means, but so was the government’s consultation on its feeble plans for reducing this pollution: a consultation to which it evidently wanted as few respondents as possible. Liz Truss, the environment secretary, has some explaining to do.

She has her reasons for keeping us in the dark. In April, the Supreme Court ruled that the UK is in breach of the European air quality directive, and insisted that the government draw up a plan for compliance by the end of this year. Instead, Truss produced a plan to shed responsibility. Local authorities, her consultation suggests, should create clean air zones in at least eight cities, in which diesel engines are restricted or banned. But she has given them neither new money nor new powers. Nor has she offered an explanation of how this non-plan is going to address the issue in the rest of the country, as the ruling demands.

Already, the UK has missed the European deadline by six years. Under Truss’s proposals, some places are likely still to be in breach by 2025: 16 years after the original deadline. I urge you to respond to the consultation she wanted you to miss, which closes on November 6.

The only concrete plan the government has produced so far is to intensify the problem, through a new programme of airport expansion. This means more nitrous oxides, more particulates, more greenhouse gas emissions.

Paradoxically, the Volkswagen scandal may succeed where all else has failed, by obliging the government to take the only action that will make a difference: legislating for a great reduction in the use of diesel engines. By the time this article is published, we might know whether the company’s scam has been perpetrated in Europe as well as North America: new revelations are dripping by the hour. But whether or not this particular deception was deployed here, plenty of others have been.

Last week the Guardian reported that nine out of ten new diesel cars break European limits on nitrous oxides – not by a little but by an average of sevenfold. Every manufacturer whose emissions were tested had cars in breach of the legal limit. They used a number of tricks to hotwire the tests: “stripping components from the car to reduce weight, using special lubricants, over-inflating tyres and using super-smooth test tracks.” In other words, the emissions scandal is not confined to Volkswagen, not confined to a single algorithm and not confined to North America: it looks, in all its clever variants, like a compound global swindle.

There are echoes here of the ploys used by the tobacco industry: grand deceptions smuggled past the public with the help of sophisticated marketing. Volkswagen sites advertising the virtues of “clean diesel” have been dropping offline all day. In 2009, the year in which its scam began, the TDI engine at the centre of the scandal won the Volkswagen Jetta 2.0 the green car of the year award. In 2010, it did the same for the Audi A3.

There’s plenty that’s wrong with corporate regulation in the United States, but at least the fines, when they occur, are big enough to make a corporation pause, and there’s a possibility of guilty executives ending up in prison. Here, where corruption, like pollution, is both omnipresent and invisible, major corporations can commit almost any white-collar crime and get away with it. Schemes of the kind that have scandalised America are, in this country, both commonplace and unremarked. How can such governments be trusted to defend our health?

www.monbiot.com

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I found myself having two emotional reactions to Monbiot’s essay. The first was that for many years, when I was living and working in England, I drove diesel-powered cars on the (now false) belief that they were better for the environment.

My second reaction was to Monbiot listing the likely impacts from air pollution,”Heart attacks, strokes, asthma, lung and bladder cancers, low birth weight, low verbal IQ, poor memory and attention among children, faster cognitive decline in older people and – recent studies suggest – a link with the earlier onset of dementia. . . “, for the reason that at the age of 70, I am already noticing the creeping onset of reduced verbal IQ, cognitive decline, and worry about the onset of dementia. To think that my earlier decisions about what cars to drive might be a factor in this is disturbing.

I am going to close this post by highlighting how fighting for what we want is important, critically so. By republishing an item that was posted on AmericaBlog just over a year ago, that fortuitously is a reward for living in the State of Oregon.

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Climate win: Appeals court in Oregon rules state court must decide if atmosphere is a “public trust”

6/16/14 10:00am by Gaius Publius

Two teenagers from Eugene, Ore. filed suit against Governor Kitzhaber and the State of Oregon for failing to protect the “atmosphere, state waters, and coast lines, as required under the public trust doctrine.”

They lost the first round, where the state court said that climate relief was not a judicial matter. But they won on appeal. The case goes back to the original court, which now has orders to decide the case on its merits and not defer to the executive or legislature.

The gist of the appeals court decision:

Their lawsuit asked the State to take action in restoring the atmosphere to 350 ppm of CO2 by the end of the century. The Oregon Court of Appeals rejected the defenses raised by the State, finding that the youth could obtain meaningful judicial relief in this case.

That’s quite a nice victory. Here’s the full story, from the Western Environmental Law Center (my emphasis throughout):

Keeling-curve_CO2_ppm_Mauna_Loa_Carbon_Dioxide_Apr2013.svg_-300x201

In a nationally significant decision in the case Chernaik v. Kitzhaber, the Oregon Court of Appeals ruled a trial court must decide whether the atmosphere is a public trust resource that the state of Oregon, as a trustee, has a duty to protect. Two youth plaintiffs were initially told they could not bring the case by the Lane County Circuit Court. The trial court had ruled that climate change should be left only to the legislative and executive branches. Today, the Oregon Court of Appeals overturned that decision.

Two teenagers from Eugene, Kelsey Juliana and Olivia Chernaik, filed the climate change lawsuit against Governor Kitzhaber and the State of Oregon for failing to protect essential natural resources, including the atmosphere, state waters, and coast lines, as required under the public trust doctrine. Their lawsuit asked the State to take action in restoring the atmosphere to 350 ppm of CO2 by the end of the century. The Oregon Court of Appeals rejected the defenses raised by the State, finding that the youth could obtain meaningful judicial relief in this case. …

In reversing the Lane County trial court, the Oregon Court of Appeals remanded the case ordering the trial court to make the judicial declaration it previously refused to make as to whether the State, as trustee, has a fiduciary obligation to protect the youth from the impacts of climate change, and if so, what the State must do to protect the atmosphere and other public trust resources.

The implications of this are broad, and similar cases are pending in other states, as the article describes.

Make no mistake; decisions like this matter. It places the court squarely in the mix as a power player in the climate war, the fight for “intergenerational justice” as James Hansen puts it — or the war against intergenerational betrayal, as I put it.

This is a cornerstone decision from the Oregon Court of Appeals in climate change jurisprudence. The court definitively ruled that the question of whether government has an obligation to protect the atmosphere from degradation leading to climate change is a question for the judiciary, and not for the legislative or executive branches. The Court did not opine as to how that question should be answered, only that it should be answered by the judiciary.

We can win this; it’s not over. If we reach 450 ppm and we’re still not stopping with the CO2, then it’s over and I become a novelist full-time. But we’re not there yet, and please don’t surrender as if we were.

The courts are now a powerful tool, as is divestment. James Hansen has a way to restore the atmosphere to 350 ppm CO2 in time to stop slow feedbacks from kicking in. It’s a doable plan, but we’ll need to use force. Using the courts, as with using divestment campaigns, counts as force. Stay tuned.

(Want to use force at the national level? Find a way to challenge Obama publicly to stop leasing federal land to coal companies. He’s a hypocrite until he stops federal coal from being mined and sold abroad. A simple and obvious challenge for him. You too can be the activist.)

GP

Twitter: @Gaius_Publius
Facebook: Gaius Publi

(Facebook note: To get the most from a Facebook recommendation, be sure to Share what you also Like. Thanks.)

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 Never forget that you, me and every other good-minded person on this planet can make a positive difference. Need inspiration? Gain it from our dogs! Let’s use the liberty we enjoy to make a difference.

Spaceship Earth

Home to everything, including humans and dogs!

This is a TED video presented by Will Marshall. A quick web search reveals that Will Marshall is:

Co-founder & CEO of Planet Labs.

Planet Labs is helping share near-real-time images of our planet, from a constellation of earth-observing satellites.

In his Twitter bio, William Marshall calls himself a “quantum physicist cum space scientist in search of world peace and harmony.” And when you hear about his job, it falls into place: he and his cofounders at Planet Labs want to show the earth what it looks like, almost real time, via a new network of compact, capable satellites. They hope that up-to-date images will inform future humanitarian and commercial projects all over our planet; it will enable people to make decisions that enable us to take care of our dearest spaceship, spaceship earth.

Before co-founding Planet Labs, Marshall was a scientist at NASA/USRA, where he helped to formulate the Small Spacecraft Office at NASA Ames Research Center. He worked on lunar orbiter mission LADEE, lunar impactor mission LCROSS and the groundbreaking PhoneSat project, building satellites out of consumer parts.

It was only a couple of mouse clicks to find the website for Planet Labs.

All of which is my way of introducing the TED video but not before thanking next door neighbour Larry Little who emailed me the link to the video.

Published on Nov 18, 2014
Satellite imaging has revolutionized our knowledge of the Earth, with detailed images of nearly every street corner readily available online. But Planet Labs’ Will Marshall says we can do better and go faster — by getting smaller. He introduces his tiny satellites — no bigger than 10 by 10 by 30 centimeters — that, when launched in a cluster, provide high-res images of the entire planet, updated daily.

You all have a lovely weekend.

More on those happy dogs.

Indebted, again, to Chris Gomez.

Jean and I were out for much of yesterday resulting in me not sitting down to compose today’s post until nearly 5pm (PDT) in the afternoon. I must admit I didn’t have a clue as to what to write about. Then sitting in my email inbox was another email from Chris Gomez with this short but valuable sentence, “Love is real….Check this out! (via ABC7 Los Angeles local news iOS app) Study reveals scientific reason your dog is happy to see you.” Chris included a link to the ABC7 news item. I’m republishing it here.

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STUDY REVEALS SCIENTIFIC REASON YOUR DOG IS HAPPY TO SEE YOU

A new study explains why your dog gets so happy to see you. (Shutterstock)
A new study explains why your dog gets so happy to see you. (Shutterstock)

Tuesday, August 11, 2015 11:04AM

Is your dog overwhelmed with joy anytime you walk through the door? There’s a scientific reason behind their excitement, a new study shows, and it’s not just because you feed them.

Researchers at Emory University used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan dogs’ brains for activity when they were shown images of dog faces, human faces and ordinary objects.

The dogs’ temporal lobes lit up “significantly more” when presented with the faces than with the objects. These findings suggest that dogs may recognize both human and dog faces.

Facial recognition causes dog brains to activate in the same areas as in monkey and human brains, the study found. This is separate from the “reward areas” that would be triggered by anticipation of food.

“What we’re finding with the imaging work is that dogs love their humans-and not just for food,” researcher Gregory Berns told io9. “They love the company of humans simply for its own sake.”

“The existence of a face-selective region in the temporal dog cortex opens up a whole range of new questions to be answered about their social intelligence,” the researchers explained, such as whether dogs can understand different facial expressions and whether they can read body language.

This isn’t the first time scientists have explored what makes dogs’ tails wag with excitement when reunited with their owners. A January study that Berns was also involved in found that dogs have a positive reaction to the scent of familiar humans compared with other smells, even those of other dogs.

The results of that study “suggested that not only did the dogs discriminate that scent [of familiar humans] from the others, they had a positive association with it.”

A 2013 behavioral study found that dogs can show when they’re happy to see their owners by lifting their eyebrows. Their left eyebrow went up when they saw their respective owners, the study found. They didn’t have this reaction for other things that may excite them, such as attractive toys.

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Granted there was some overlap with Monday’s post but there was more than enough in the ABC7 article to warrant sharing it with you.

Thanks again, Chris.

 

The happiness of dogs

Why are dogs so very happy to see us?

When I first started writing this blog, more than six years ago now, I had no idea whatsoever that the community of friends who read and follow Learning from Dogs would develop to the point where the volume of ideas and suggestions sent in are, are by far, the biggest source of creative posts.

Take today’s for example. The link to the article was sent to me by Chris Gomez a little over a week ago and yesterday was the first time that I read the article in full.

It’s a fascinating and incredibly interesting piece.

So with no further ado, besides thanking Chris so much for sending it on, here is: Why Are Dogs So Insanely Happy to See Us When We Get Home?

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Why Are Dogs So Insanely Happy to See Us When We Get Home?

By George Dvorsky

Unlike a certain companion animal that will go unnamed, dogs lose their minds when reunited with their owners. But it’s not immediately obvious why our canine companions should grant us such an over-the-top greeting—especially considering the power imbalance that exists between the two species. We spoke to the experts to find out why.

Call of the Wild

In order to gain an appreciation for dog behavior, it’s important to understand that dogs are descended from wolves (or at least a common wolf-like ancestor). Clearly, the two species, separated by about 10,000 to 15,000 years, share a lot in common.

Like dogs, wolves greet each other with vigorous face licking (Credit: Sander van der Wel CC A-SA 2.0)
Like dogs, wolves greet each other with vigorous face licking (Credit: Sander van der Wel CC A-SA 2.0)

But there’s only so much we can extrapolate from wolves; dogs are categorically different by virtue of the fact that their ancestors actively sought out the company of humans. Making matters even more complicated is the realization that Paleolithic era wolves are not the same as the ones around today. Consequently, any inferences we make about dog behavior and how it relates to wolves is pure speculation.

Neuroscientist Gregory Berns, author of How Dogs Love Us, says there’s a fundamental difference between modern wolves and those that lived long ago.

“The most social of those ancestral dogs who were hanging around humans had to have been the most social of those wolves,” he told io9. “They joined humans and eventually evolved to become dogs. The remainder of the wolf population were among the most antisocial of those animals, and did not want to have anything to do with humans.”

That said, however, Berns says we can clearly see behaviors in wolves that are similar to those expressed by dogs. For instance, wolves greet each other by licking each others’ faces. For these pack animals, this licking behavior serves as an important social greeting, but also as a way to check out and determine what the other wolves have brought home in terms of food.

Wolves, says University of Trento neuroscientist Giorgio Vallortigara, greet each other in different ways depending on the type of individual relationships they’ve forged. Feral dogs, he says, behave in similar ways. But the big change in terms of adaptive sociality has been the ability of domesticated dogs to interact with humans using our own communicative signals, such as gazes and gestures.

Dog expert Jessica Hekman, who blogs at DogZombie, has witnessed greeting behaviors among wolves first hand.

“When I’m at Wolf Park in Battle Ground, Indiana, I am always struck by how much some of the specific wolf behaviors resemble behaviors I see in dogs—but so much more ritualized, and sort of writ large,” she told io9. “I witnessed one behavioral study there in which wolves who knew each other well had been separated for a few days and were put back together. The greeting rituals were fascinating, with lots of crouching and chin-licking from the subordinate wolves. You do see these behaviors in dogs, but more sporadically, without such intensity.”

At the same time, dogs exhibit behaviors that are markedly different from wolves. As Hekman explained to me, one of the most dramatic differences between dogs and wolves is the ability of dogs to accept novelty. Simply put, dogs are less fearful than wolves.

“It may sound a little odd to say that a wolf, who can easily kill you, is afraid of you, but that is precisely why they can be dangerous: because they may choose to take proactive measures to protect themselves, using their teeth,” says Hekman. “Dogs are a lot less likely to do this.”

Indeed, given their wolf ancestry, it’s remarkable that dogs get along with humans so well. But as Berns pointed out to me, sociability has turned out to be a rather powerful adaptation, one that has worked a lot better for dogs than it has wolves.

“I mean, look around the world and see how many dogs there are,” he says. “With dogs, it’s proven to be a highly effective evolutionary strategy. There are in the order of tens of millions of dogs in the world, so in many ways, dogs have out-evolved wolves.”

Berns says that whatever the sociality that dogs have evolved, one of the defining traits of a dog is the degree to which they will interact with humans as well as other animals.

How Dogs See Humans

A key aspect of Berns’ brain imaging research is to study how dogs perceive us. We humans know that dogs are a separate species, but are dogs cognizant of this as well? Or do they see us as members of their pack, or as some kind of weird dog?

Callie gets outfitted with ear protection prior to entering the noisy fMRI machine. The research team includes, from left, Andrew Brooks, Gregory Berns and Mark Spivak. (Credit: Bryan Meltz, Emory University)
Callie gets outfitted with ear protection prior to entering the noisy fMRI machine. The research team includes, from left, Andrew Brooks, Gregory Berns and Mark Spivak. (Credit: Bryan Meltz, Emory University)

According to Berns’ research, dogs that are presented with certain smells in scanners can clearly tell the difference between dogs and humans, and also discern and recognize familiar and strange odors. In particular, the scent of a familiar human evokes a reward response in the brain.

“No other scent did that, not even that of a familiar dog,” Berns told io9. “It’s not the case that they see us as ‘part of their pack as dogs,’ they know that we’re something different— there’s a special place in the brain just for us.”

Berns stresses that dogs are social with us not just because of their scavenging tendencies.

“What we’re finding with the imaging work is that dogs love their humans—and not just for food,” he says. “They love the company of humans simply for its own sake.”

Hekman says it’s hard to know what dogs are thinking, but she suspects they understand that we’re not quite like them. As evidence, she points to aggressiveness in dogs as it’s directed to other dogs and humans—differences that aren’t correlated. She says it’s quite common for a dog to have a problem with one and not the other. In other words, dogs appear to perceive other dogs as one group, and humans as a separate group. What’s more, dogs will seek the help of humans and not other dogs—a possible sign that dogs understand that humans have resources that dogs do not, and are thus a different kind of social entity.

But do dogs see us as part of the pack?

“It’s important to note that a pack of wolves is a family—literally, usually mom, dad, puppies, and some young offspring from previous years who haven’t gone off on their own yet,” says Hekman. “Do dogs see us as part of their family? I think they do.”

So Happy to See Us

Virtually all experts agree that the happiness dogs feel is comparable to what humans experience, and that it’s similar to how humans feel towards each other.

One happy dog (Credit: Lars Curfs/CC-A-SA 3.0)
One happy dog (Credit: Lars Curfs/CC-A-SA 3.0)

“All the things that we’ve done with the brain imaging—where we present certain things to the dogs and map their reward responses—we see analogous brain responses in humans,” says Berns. “Seeing a person that’s a friend or someone you like, these feelings are exactly analogous to what a dog experiences.”

Berns says that dogs don’t have the same language capacities as humans, and that they’re not capable of representing things in their memory like we can. Because dogs don’t have labels or names for people, he suspects that they have an even purer emotional response; their minds aren’t filled with all sorts of abstract concepts.

It’s also important to consider the dog-human bond and the degree of attachment each feels toward each other. When used with dogs, the “Strange Situation Test” devised by developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth, suggests that during absence and then at the rejoining with the owners, a dog’s behavior is very similar to that observed in children and mothers in similar situations. As Vallortigara pointed out to me, it’s appropriate and correct to speak of the dyad dog/owner in terms of “attachment.”

A dog’s particular greeting, however, is dependent on several factors, such as the dog’s temperament, the personality of the owner, the nature of their relationship, the level of stress and anxiety, and the dog’s tendency/capacity for self-control.

It’s important to note, however, that stress manifests differently in dogs than it does in humans.

“The separation from the owner for the dog is not voluntary,” says Vallortigara. “It is always unnatural for a dog to detach and abandon the pack.”

Dogs will sometimes go solo on a temporary basis if they’re sufficiently motivated to do so, but they do it knowing that social contact can be resumed at virtually any time.

“The exaggerated level of greeting that can be observed in some dogs is likely due to the fact that they have not yet learned to accept the possibility of non-voluntary detachment,” says Vallortigara.

When trying to appreciate a dog’s over-the-top greeting, Hekman says we need to imagine what it was like for a dog to be alone all day while we were gone.

So bored. (Credit: Pixabay/Pinger/10 images/CC0 Public Domain)
So bored. (Credit: Pixabay/Pinger/10 images/CC0 Public Domain)

“This dog probably had a pretty boring day without much enrichment, and moreover may have been alone all day, which is unpleasant for a social animal,” she told io9. “So in addition to being glad to see us, they are probably feeling some relief that they will get to do something interesting, like go for a walk, and have someone else around. Some people are able to have a dog walker come in or send their dogs to daycare—this is a great solution to what can otherwise be a difficult lifestyle for a dog.”

And as Berns points out, the greeting ritual is a social bonding mechanism—but it’s also a function of curiosity.

“When they jump up, they’re trying to lick you in the face,” says Berns. “Part of that is a social greeting, but they’re also trying to taste and smell you to figure out where you’ve been and what you’ve done during the day. So some of it is curiosity. If I’ve been with other dogs, for instance, my dogs know it, and they resort to sniffing intensely.”

How to Greet Your Dog Back

It’s obviously important to respond to your dog when you get home, but according to Marcello Siniscalchi, a veterinary physician from the University of Bari, how you should react will depend on the context of the situation and the needs of the dog itself.

“The greeting ritual will vary from dog to dog because any individual dog perceives and reacts to detachment from the owner in a very personal way,” he told io9. “Some dogs need to be greeted, in others it is better to avoid any escalation in the level of excitation, others need to learn strategies for coping with the stress associated with detachment.”

Hekman says there’s definitely a tension between our buttoned-down greeting rituals (“Hi, honey, I’m home!”) and theirs (“I want to lick you on the face repeatedly!”).

happydogs5

“My dog Jenny is a very enthusiastic greeter, and I hate having her jump all over me in her efforts to get at my face,” she says. “So I have taught her to get on a couch when I come home. I generally have to remind her to ‘get on your couch,’ but now she does with great enthusiasm, and waits for me to come over. The couch puts her more on my level, so she doesn’t have to jump, and I can bend forward and let her lick my cheek, which is a very important part of the ritual for her.”

Hekman stresses that, for any dog, it’s important for us not to tell them what not to do (e.g. “don’t jump on me!”), but to tell them what to do.

“Many is the retriever owner who has taught their dog to get a toy when they come home to channel their excitement,” she added.

The main point, she says, is that it’s important for dogs to have the greeting ritual, but it can be redirected in ways to make it easier on the owners such that everyone enjoys it.

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So a huge thank you to all of you that send in remarkable items for Learning from Dogs.

Fly like a bird.

The power and freedom of the air.

Yesterday was heading to be a very hot day in Merlin, Oregon with top temperatures forecasted to be around the mid-90’s, or 34-36 deg. C in ‘new money’. The light westerly wind must have been generating some up currents, aided and abetted by the rising hot air, for there were a number of black ravens soaring in a thermal. Watching the birds circle and climb in the thermal current without needing to flap their wings took me back too many years.

It took me back to a June day in 1981 where I experienced my first glider flight (sailplane in American speak) at the Rattlesden Gliding Club in Suffolk, East Anglia. I’m delighted to see that the Club is still an active one, as their website confirms. Although I subsequently went on to gain my private pilot’s licence (PPL) there are still times when I miss the magic, the pure magic, of gaining altitude in a glider in a beautiful thermal.

Modern fibreglass glider coming into land at Rattlesden G.C.
Modern fibreglass glider coming into land at Rattlesden G.C.

So what prompted this flood of flying nostalgia!! An item that was published on the BBC website earlier in the year.

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Fly like a bird: The V formation finally explained

By Victoria Gill, Science reporter, BBC News

The mystery of why so many birds fly in a V formation may have been solved.

Scientists from the Royal Veterinary College fitted data loggers to a flock of rare birds that were being trained to migrate by following a microlight. This revealed that the birds flew in the optimal position – gaining lift from the bird in front by remaining close to its wingtip.

The study, published in the journal Nature, also showed that the birds timed their wing beats.

A previous experiment in pelicans was the first real clue to the energy-saving purpose of V formations. It revealed that birds’ heart rates went down when they were flying together in V.

But this latest study tracked and monitored the flight of every bird in the flock – recording its position, speed and heading as well as every wing flap.

This was possible thanks to a unique conservation project by the Waldarappteam in Austria, which has raised flocks of northern bald ibises and trained them to migrate behind a microlight.

The aim of this unusual project is to bring the northern bald ibis back to Europe; the birds were wiped out by hunting, so the team is retraining the birds to navigate a migration route that has now been lost.

Fitting tiny data loggers to these critically endangered ibises showed that the birds often changed position and altered the timing of their wing beats to give them an aerodynamic advantage.

Lead researcher Dr Steven Portugal explained: “They’re seemingly very aware of where the other birds are in the flock and they put themselves in the best possible position.”

This makes the most of upward-moving air generated by the bird in front. This so-called “upwash” is created as a bird flies forward; whether it is gliding or flapping, it pushes air downward beneath its wings.

“Downwash is bad,” explained Dr Portugal. “Birds don’t want to be in another bird’s downwash as it’s pushing them down.” But as the air squeezes around the outside of the wings, it creates upwash at the wingtips.

“This can give a bit of a free ride for the bird that’s following,” said Dr Portugal. “So the other bird wants to put its own wingtip in the upwash from the bird in front.”

 The other really surprising result, the researchers said, was that the birds also “timed their wing beats perfectly to match the good air off the bird in front”.

“Each bird [kept] its wingtip in the upwash throughout the flap cycle,” Dr Portugal explained.

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In a sidebar to that BBC article there is this explanation about Flapping and Flying:

As a bird’s wings move through the air, they are held at a slight angle, which deflects the air downward. This deflection means the air flows faster over the wing than underneath, causing air pressure to build up beneath the wings, while the pressure above the wings is reduced. It is this difference in pressure that produces lift.

Flapping creates an additional forward and upward force known as thrust, which counteracts the weight and the “drag” of air resistance. The downstroke of the flap is also called the “power stroke”, as it provides the majority of the thrust. During this, the wing is angled downwards even more steeply.

You can imagine this stroke as a very brief downward dive through the air – it momentarily uses the animal’s own weight in order to move forward. But because the wings continue to generate lift, the creature remains airborne. In each upstroke, the wing is slightly folded inwards to reduce resistance.

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The BBC piece also included this wonderful short video:

This piece has nothing to do with dogs unless one extends the mindset to the magic of the complete natural world.

UPDATE

This is a photograph of George Ball hang-gliding – see his reply below.

hanggliding

Understanding animals and pain.

Do animals feel pain in the way that we humans do?

Last week, shortly after Paloma had been let out for a ‘call of nature’, she emitted the most terrible of screams. No other dog had gone near her and there was no immediate explanation for the heart-rending cry.

While this was not the first time that Paloma had suddenly cried out for no apparent reason this was by far the worst cry that Paloma had made so Jean and I thought that an immediate visit to our local vet practice was sensible, that being Lincoln Road Veterinary Clinic. We were seen by Dr. Goodbrod and he came to the conclusion that she had a spinal disc problem: Paloma is thirteen years old.

Paloma, December 29th 2011

All of which serves as a relevant introduction to a recent essay over on The Conversation blogsite. The essay was written by Professor Andrea Nolan, who became Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Edinburgh Napier University in July 2013. (Andrea graduated as a veterinary surgeon from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.)  Her essay is called Do animals feel pain like we do? and is republished here within the terms of The Conversation blogsite.

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Do animals feel pain like we do?

July 7, 2015 6.35am EDT

Not hard to read. Eddy Van 3000, CC BY-SA
Not hard to read. Eddy Van 3000, CC BY-SA

Pain is a complex experience involving sensory and emotional components: it is not just about how it feels, but also how it makes you feel. And it is these unpleasant feelings that cause the suffering we humans associate with pain.

The science of suffering is well documented in the book of the same name by Patrick Wall. We know that animals certainly feel physical pain, but what is less clear is whether this emotional suffering that we feel can be said to be true of animals. And if it is, how we go about measuring it.

As a subjective emotion, pain can be experienced even in the absence of physical tissue damage, and the level of feeling can be modified by other emotions including fear, memory and stress. Pain also has different dimensions – it is often described in terms of intensity but it also has “character”, for example the pain of a pin-prick is very different from that of a toothache, a slipped disc or labour pain. Nearly all of us have experienced pain in our lives, but for each person, the experience is uniquely individual.

To understand or appreciate others’ pain we mostly rely on what they report. But there are many who either cannot communicate their pain verbally, babies for example, or effectively, like those with dementia or learning disabilities. In these situations, others must use a range of factors to judge the presence of pain and its impact on the individual.

Pain is not all bad – it serves a protective function, to keep us away from further danger, to help us heal, for example by stopping us from putting weight on a sprained ankle. But if it isn’t managed effectively it can have a major negative impact on our lives inducing fear, anger, anxiety or depression – all emotions which may in turn exacerbate it. And chronic pain is a major concern to millions of individuals and to our societies around the world.

Pain in animals

The nature of pain is perhaps even more complex in animals. How pain is sensed and the physical processes behind this are remarkably similar and well conserved across mammals and humans. There are also many similarities in pain behaviours across the species, for example they may stop socialising with people and/or other animals, they may eat less, they may vocalise more and their heart rate may rise. The capacity of animals to suffer as sentient creatures is well established and enshrined in law in many countries, however we don’t understand well how they actually experience pain.

Some aspects of the experience and expression of pain are not likely to be the same as in humans. First, animals cannot verbally communicate their pain. Dogs may yelp and you may notice behaviour change but what about your pet rabbit, cat, tortoise or horse? Animals rely on human observers to recognise pain and to evaluate its severity and impact. Without the ability to understand soothing words that explain that following surgery to repair a bone fracture, their pain will be managed (hopefully) and will subside, animals may also suffer more when in pain than we do.

Loud and clear. William Heron, CC BY-SA
Loud and clear. William Heron, CC BY-SA

The debate around animals’ capacity to experience pain and suffer raged in the 20th century, but as we developed a greater understanding of pain, and studied its impact on the aspects of animal life that we could measure, we veterinary surgeons, along with many behavioural and animal scientists, recognised the significant impact of untreated pain, and we now believe this experience causes them to suffer.

For example, we know that animals and indeed birds with clinical signs of pain (limping) will choose to eat food containing pain-killing drugs (analgesics) over untreated food, and by measures of behaviour, they will improve.

Similarly many studies in a range of domestic animals have indicated that animals who have had surgery but not had adequate pain relief demonstrate behaviours reflective of pain which are alleviated when they are treated with analgesics such as morphine.

We also know that it is not just our dogs and cats that can suffer pain – there is an equally strong evidence base for the presence and negative impact of pain in sheep, cattle, pigs and horses among other species. But recognising pain in these different species is part of the complexity associated with animal pain. Managing it in animals that we rear for food and those that we keep as companions is equally challenging.

Behavioural disturbances have long been recognised as potential indicators of the presence of pain in animals. However it is important to recognise that each species manifests its own sometimes unique pain-related behaviours or behavioural disturbances in different ways, often rooted in the evolutionary process, so prey species, for example, are less likely to “advertise” an increased vulnerability to predators. Dogs may become aggressive, or quiet, or may stop socialising with “their” humans and other dogs. Sheep, on the other hand, may appear largely the same when casually observed.

Some expressions of pain however may be conserved. A recent paper suggested commonality in some features of facial expression during acute pain experiences in several animal species and humans.

These findings and much other work are being incorporated into tools to evaluate animal pain, because in the words of Lord Kelvin, the great Glaswegian scientist behind the Kelvin temperature scale, said: “When you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in number … you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be”.

So in order to treat and manage pain effectively we must measure it.

And there is a huge demand for these tools. The Glasgow Composite Pain Scale, a simple tool to measure acute pain in dogs and first published in 2007, has been translated into six languages. It is used in veterinary practices to measure pain to treat it effectively. It has also been used to evaluate the effectiveness of new analgesic drugs that are being developed by animal health companies. Tools to measure the impact of chronic pain, such as osteoarthritis, on the quality of life of dogs are now available and are a significant advance in managing chronic conditions.

There is now a global effort to raise awareness of pain in animals. Recently the World Small Animal Veterinary Association launched the Global Pain Council and published a treatise for vets and animal keepers worldwide to promote pain recognition, measurement and treatment. Dogs may be man’s best friend, but for all those who work with, care for and enjoy the company of animals, understanding how their pain feels is essential to improving the quality of their lives.

ooOOoo

Back to Paloma. Dr. Goodbrod prescribed muscle relaxers and a mild pain killer.

Dear, sweet Paloma. Found by Jean on a Mexican street in Guaymas in 2005 with her eight puppies. Jean found homes for all the eight puppies in the USA and adopted Paloma because she was very wild.

Paloma, Oregon, January 26th, 2014.
Paloma, Oregon, January 26th, 2014.

Just doing one thing at a time.

The way a dog focuses on the immediate task holds a very important lesson for us.

It’s a safe bet to claim that any dog owner has, from time to time, envied the way a dog so perfectly lives in the present. Then let’s not even go to the comparison between dogs and humans when it comes to relaxing!

Hazel taking a mid-morning break yesterday.
Hazel taking a mid-morning break on Tuesday.

These opening thoughts were prompted by a recent article that was published on The Conversation. The article criticised, rightly in my opinion, the madness (my word) of how many of us live these days, and with particular respect to ‘multi-tasking’. It’s a sobering reminder of the value of letting go and is republished here within the terms of essays published on The Conversation.

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The value of unplugging in the Age of Distraction

July 7, 2015 4.59am EDT

Author: John Rennie Short – Professor, School of Public Policy at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Small device, but very demanding. aciej_ie/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND
Small device, but very demanding. aciej_ie/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

A common experience: you are walking down the street and someone is walking in the opposite direction toward you. You see him but he does not see you. He is texting or looking at his cellphone. He is distracted, trying to do two things at the same time, walking and communicating.

There is also the telltale recognition of a car driver on a phone; she’s driving either too slowly or too fast for the surrounding conditions, only partly connected to what is going on around her. Connected to someone else in another place, she is not present in the here and now.

These types of occurrences are now common enough that we can label our time as the age of distraction.

A dangerous condition

The age of distraction is dangerous. A recent report by the National Safety Council showed that walking while texting increases the risk of accidents. More than 11,000 people were injured last year while walking and talking on their phones.

Really bad idea: texting while driving. Paul Oka/flickr, CC BY-NC
Really bad idea: texting while driving. Paul Oka/flickr, CC BY-NC

Even more dangerous is the distracted car driver. Distracted drivers have more fluctuating speed, change lanes fewer times than is necessary and in general make driving for everyone less safe and less efficient.

Texting while driving resulted in 16,000 additional road fatalities from 2001 to 2007. More than 21% of vehicle accidents are now attributable to drivers talking on cellphones and another 5% were text messaging.

Cognitive impairment

Multitasking relatively complex functions, such as operating handheld devices to communicate while walking or driving, is not so much an efficient use of our time as a suboptimal use of our skills.

We are more efficient users of information when we concentrate on one task at a time. When we try to do more than one thing, we suffer from inattention blindness, which is failing to recognize other things, such as people walking toward us or other road users.

Digital devices, which are proliferating in our lives, encourage multitasking, but does this really help our performance? Thomas Hawk/flickr, CC BY-NC-SA
Digital devices, which are proliferating in our lives, encourage multitasking, but does this really help our performance? Thomas Hawk/flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

Multitaskers do worse on standard tests of pattern recognition and memory recall. In a now classic study, researchers at Stanford University found that multitaskers were less efficient because they were more susceptible to using irrelevant information and drawing on inappropriate memories.

Multitasking may not be all that good for you either. A 2010 survey of over 2,000 8- to 12-year-old girls in the US and Canada found that media multitasking was associated with negative social indicators, while face-to-face contact was associated with more positive social indicators such as social success, feelings of normalcy and hours of sleep (vital for young people).

Although the causal mechanism has yet to be fully understood – that is, what causes what – the conclusion is that media multitasking is not a source of happiness.

Distraction-seeking creatures?

There are a number of reasons behind this growing distraction.

One often-cited reason is the pressure of time. There is less time to accomplish all that we need to do. Multitasking then is the result of the pressure to do more things in the same limited time. But numerous studies point to the discretionary use of time among the more affluent, and especially more affluent men. The crunch of time varies by gender and class. And, paradoxically, it is less of an objective constraint for those who often articulate it most.

Although the time crunch is a reality, especially for many women and lower-income groups, the age of distraction is not simply a result of a time crunch. It may also reflect another form of being. We need to reconsider what it means to be human, not as continuous thought-bearing and task-completing beings but as distraction-seeking creatures that want to escape the bonds of the here-and-nowness with the constant allure of someone and somewhere else.

Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff asserts that our sense of time has been warped into a frenzied present tense of what he calls “digiphrenia,” the social media-created effect of being in multiple places and more than one self all at once.

There is also something sadder at work. The constant messaging, emailing and cellphoning, especially in public places, may be less about communicating with the people on the other end as about signaling to those around that you are so busy or so important, so connected, that you exist in more than just the here and now, clearly a diminished state of just being.

There’s greater status in being highly connected and constantly communicating. This may explain why many people speak so loudly on their cellphones in public places.

Reactions

The age of distraction is so recent we have yet to fully grasp it. Sometimes art is a good mediator of the very new.

A video art installation by Siebren Verstag is entitled Neither There nor There. It consists of two screens. On one side a man sits looking at his phone; slowly his form loosens as pixels move to the adjacent screen and back again. The man’s form moves from screen to screen, in two places at one time but not fully in either.

One study that looked at the effect of banning cellphones in schools found that student achievement improved when cellphones were banned, with the greatest improvements accruing to lower-achieving students, who gained the equivalent of an additional hour of learning a week.

On many college campuses, faculty now have a closed-laptop policy after finding students would use their open laptops to skim their emails, surf the web and distract their neighbors. This was confirmed by studies that showed that students with open laptops learned less and could recall less than students with their laptops closed.

We are witnessing a cultural shift occurring with the banning of devices, cellphone usage being curtailed in certain public places and policies banning texting while driving. This is reactive. We also need a new proactive civic etiquette so that the distracted walker, driver and talker have to navigate new codes of public behaviors.

Many coffee stores in Australia, for example, do not allow people to order at the counter when they are on the cellphone, more golf clubs are banning the use of cellphones while on the course and it is illegal in 38 states in the US for novice drivers to use a cellphone while driving.

There is also the personal decision available to us all, one foreshadowed by writer and social critic Siegfried Kracauer, who lived from 1889 to 1966. In a newspaper article on the impact of modernity, first published in 1924, he complained of the constant stimulation, the advertising and the mass media that all conspired to create a “permanent receptivity” that prefigures our own predicament in a world of constant texting, messaging and cellphones.

One response, argued Kracauer, is to surrender yourself to the sofa and do nothing, in order to achieve a “kind of bliss that is almost unearthly.”

One radical response is to unplug and disconnect, live in the moment and concentrate on doing one important thing at a time. Try it for an hour, then for a day. You can even call your friends to tell them about your success – just not while walking or driving, or working on your computer screen or speaking loudly in a public place.

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Oh, did someone mention unplugging and disconnecting?

P1150708
Cleo – unplugged and disconnected.

No post for today.

My connection is so unreliable I am only able to post this – and this took several attempts before it went through!

Not even sure when the service is going to be restored! 😦

Sorry folks!