Tag: YouTube

End Puppy Mills!

Join the One In A Million Movement to End Puppy Mills!

Take another quick look at the emotions that dogs bring out in so many of us.  I’m referring to the piece I posted last Sunday under the title of The logic of dogs.  However, there’s a darker side to owning a dog, or more accurately, a puppy.

A quick search for ‘puppy mills’ on Google or YouTube will come up with more anguish than I suspect you can handle.  Here’s just one website that offers some facts about the commercial breeding of puppies.

Here’s a 2-minute video to underline the importance of this cause.

But thanks to an email sent to me from Diane M, here in Payson, there’s something that can be done.

Here’s the email that was sent.

Dear Friends and Family,

I’m sending this to you because of your concern for pets.  Dan Morrison, my friend and ex-husband, has been an advocate for years for animals. I received the information below regarding another way to protect those animals who cannot speak for themselves.

Please take a minute and read the important message below. Please know that  Dan Morrison along with Marlene Walsh are the co-founders of Pet Connections. Dan is also the President of the Board. Check out the website!

In addition, do you have friends who love animals and are understanding and empathize with the message below? If so, please take a couple minutes and forward this message to them. Dan, Marlene and I will greatly appreciate your effort.

Happy New Year, Everyone!

Diane

And now what follows is the information that Diane received and then circulated,

Sent: Friday, December 09, 2011 6:14 AM
Subject: Join the One In A Million Movement to End Puppy Mills!

There is a new movement underway to permanently put an end to the puppy mill industry by ending all demand for these puppies.  And Pet Connections, Inc. believes in the power of people to do this, one person at a time.

Just this week, the Pet Connections’ website (www.pet-connections.org) went live with its new “One In A Million” campaign, where the public is being asked to sign a pledge stating that they will not purchase or support the purchase of puppies, dogs, cats or kittens that come from “puppy mills” or indiscriminate breeders.

A puppy mill or kitten mill, sometimes known as a farm, is a commercial breeding facility that is operated with an emphasis upon profits above animal welfare and often hundreds of animals are kept in substandard conditions with little regard to the well-being of animals under their control.

Instead, the pledge asks the public to patronize animal shelters, humane societies, or “humane” pet stores who offer only shelter/rescue puppies, dogs, cats or kittens.  Pet Connections’ goal is to collect one million names to present to the governors and legislators of states who harbor puppy or kitten mills because of lax or unenforced laws and to our congressmen and senators telling them that the people have spoken! This cruel and inhumane industry must end.

Pet Connections will work with any pet store who believes that their only source of animals are mills or farms and “convert” them to using animal shelters, humane societies or rescue groups as a source for their animals.

I am hoping that you will go to our pledge page (www.pet-connections.org/pledge/pledge.php) and sign the pledge, and then share it with your family, friends, colleagues, other organizations, newsletters – everything you can think of to help us get the word out and make a big enough impact to make a difference.

Pet Connections believes people can make a difference . . . one person at a time.  I know that with your help we will make a difference.

Thank you!

Marlene

Marlene Walsh
Executive Director
Pet Connections, Inc.
marlene@pet-connections.org
Phone (920) 232-1357
Fax (920) 273-6059
Mobile (920) 216-4572
Mailing Address:  9777 Seaaca Street, Downey, CA  90241

So it’s just a moment to go here and sign the pledge – PLEASE!  Why?  Well, I can’t put it better than as conveyed in the thank-you email response you will receive,

Change will happen because you took the Pledge.  Thank you for becoming ONE IN A MILLION and supporting the efforts of Pet Connections, Inc.  We are dedicated to ending the practice of selling puppies bred in puppy mills and sold in pet shops.  This is an intolerable practice and must end.  By Pledging, you join a cause whereby numbers create the power for change.

Would you like to help Pet Connections, Inc., reach our goal of ONE IN A MILLION? Share the message by any means you can.  Tell your friends, family and neighbors about the importance of Pledging.  Convince your Facebook and Twitter friends to Pledge to become ONE IN A MILLION athttp://www.pet-connections.org/pledge/pledge.php. Watch the tote board change with each Pledge you influence.

Pet Connections, Inc., is grateful for contributions to help in our goal of ONE IN A MILLION.  It is up to each and every one of us to take responsibility to end the practice of breeding and selling puppy mill puppies.  It is the humane thing to do.

 

Now let me close with this video that shows the power that can flow from love as opposed to greed.

NEVER BUY A PUPPY FROM A PET STORE!!!

All three parts combined into one! Created in 2002, “I’m Alive For The Very First Time” tells the story of how two puppy mill rescue dogs forever changed the lives of their adoptive parents, Kathleen and Scottie.

What We Still Don’t Know? Part 3

The concluding part – Are We Real?

As I implied when I introduced Part 2 last Thursday, Why Are We Here?, these are deeply interesting films.  Do find time to watch them both (Part 1 Are We Alone is here ) if you can.  So here is the concluding part, Are We Real? You can either go to it via this link, or watch the YouTube elements below.

There is a fundamental chasm in our understanding of ourselves, the universe, and everything. To solve this, Sir Martin takes us on a mind-boggling journey through multiple universes to post-biological life.

On the way we learn of the disturbing possibility that we could be the product of someone else’s experiment.

I do hope you all found these three films as stimulating and thought-provoking as Jean and I did.

What We Still Don’t Know? Part 2

Why Are We Here?

On Tuesday, I introduced the first of three films hosted by Lord Martin Rees.  That was called Are We Alone.  I do hope many of you were able to watch that.  Film two is also from the website Top Documentary Films and the link is here.  But, again, the film is available in 5 parts from YouTube and follows below.

In total, just around an hour to watch and well worth while.  You will find, believer in God or not, that there are some deeply spiritual aspects to Martin Rees’ wonderful presentation.

Everything you thought you knew about the universe is wrong. It’s made of atoms, right?

Wrong. Atoms only account for a measly 15% of everything that exists!

The mass of the universe consists of something so mysterious and elusive that it has been dubbed ‘dark matter’.

The final film of the trilogy will be presented on Learning from Dogs next Tuesday, the 17th January.

German Shepherd dogs

Just a musing about this fabulous breed.

We had to put one of our dogs to sleep on Friday, not a GSD, but one of Jean’s rescued dogs from way back.  At this moment in time (11am US Mountain Time, Saturday) I’m writing a piece about this wonderful dog that will appear tomorrow.

Thus not in the mood to post my usual light-hearted item for a Sunday.  So I resorted to looking up an appropriate dog video on YouTube.

Came across this,

Of course, that reminded me of how precious our Pharaoh is and it only took a few moments to find a couple of earlier pics of him.

Here’s Pharaoh the day I collected him from GSD breeders Jutone‘s in Dartmoor, SW England.  That’s Sandra Tucker, the owner of Jutone, with Pharaoh; the date being 12th August 2003 when Pharaoh was then just over 8 weeks old.

Sandra Tucker holding young Pharaoh

The next photograph was taken on the 11th March, 2008 at London’s Heathrow Airport.  The occasion being the time that Jean came across to England from her home in Mexico.  Jean came to see if the romance that had blossomed between us at Christmas in 2007  in San Carlos, Mexico was alive and well.  Luckily, it was!

Jean meeting Pharaoh for the very first time!

Thus it came to pass that in September, 2008, Pharaoh and I travelled out from Devon, England to Mexico where we lived until February, 2010, when Jean and I, Pharaoh and 12 other dogs and 6 cats relocated to Payson, Arizona.

So I said to the dog ….

A conversation with your dog!

(For my regular readers, indeed, for all of you, just a reminder that I’m giving the Blog a small rest until later this week – just filling in with silly things!)

According to YouTube, over 78 million have viewed this.  But if you are like me and hadn’t seen it before, watch and be very amused.

(Thanks to Bob D. for the link.)

The only way to fly!

London Airport this isn’t!

(For my regular readers, indeed, for all of you, just a reminder that I’m giving the Blog a small rest until later this week – just filling in with silly things!)

Dear friend, senior airline Captain, Bob D., sent me this video to demonstrate that not all flying is from one enormous hub to another.

Background information on the aircraft is here.

‘Honey, just taking the dogs for a walk!’

Prepare to be amazed!

Big thanks to Ginger from our local Humane Centre, the Humane Society of Central Arizona, who sent me this YouTube link.

You all have a restful week-end, whatever you are doing!

Enjoy the ride

Two moving films.

I am indebted to Merci O. who regularly comments on Learning from Dogs for sending me the first film, see below.  In my efforts to find a YouTube link (there didn’t appear to be one) I came across the second film.  Both are good for the soul.

So click here to watch the first film.  The film is comprised of a series of slides melded together with a beautiful music track. Do watch and listen.

Then here is the YouTube video, Morcheeba’s Enjoy The Ride.

Have a peaceful day wherever you are in the world.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

Three very thought-provoking films

Over the last week we have watched all three 0ne-hour films made by the BBC, aired in 2011,  under the title of the heading of this post, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.  The films are available on the website Top Documentary Films, the direct link is here.  As that website explains,

A series of films about how humans have been colonized by the machines they have built. Although we don’t realize it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers. It claims that computers have failed to liberate us and instead have distorted and simplified our view of the world around us.

1. Love and Power. This is the story of the dream that rose up in the 1990s that computers could create a new kind of stable world. They would bring about a new kind global capitalism free of all risk and without the boom and bust of the past. They would also abolish political power and create a new kind of democracy through the Internet where millions of individuals would be connected as nodes in cybernetic systems – without hierarchy.

2. The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts. This is the story of how our modern scientific idea of nature, the self-regulating ecosystem, is actually a machine fantasy. It has little to do with the real complexity of nature. It is based on cybernetic ideas that were projected on to nature in the 1950s by ambitious scientists. A static machine theory of order that sees humans, and everything else on the planet, as components – cogs – in a system.

3. The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey. This episode looks at why we humans find this machine vision so beguiling. The film argues it is because all political dreams of changing the world for the better seem to have failed – so we have retreated into machine-fantasies that say we have no control over our actions because they excuse our failure.

Adam Curtis is a documentary film maker, whose work includes The Power of Nightmares,The Century of the Self, The Mayfair Set, Pandora’s Box, The Trap and The Living Dead.

As was eluded, the three films are deeply thought-provoking.  There is a ‘taster’ to the first film on YouTube, as below,

Adam Curtis, the film maker, has a blog site under the BBC Blogs umbrella.  The entry on that blog-site by Adam in connection with these films is here, and makes interesting reading.  It also includes a longer trailer than the one from YouTube, above.

Finally, there are comprehensive writings on all three films on the WikiPedia website here.  To give you a taste, here’s what was written about the third film,

The Monkey In The Machine and the Machine in the Monkey

This programme looked into the selfish gene theory which holds that humans are machines controlled by genes which was invented by William Hamilton. Adam Curtis also covered the source of ethnic conflict that was created by Belgian colonialism’s artificial creation of a racial divide and the ensuing slaughter that occurred in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is a source of raw materialfor computers and cell phones.

William Hamilton went to Kisangani in the Democratic Republic of the Congo while the Second Congo War was raging. He went there to collect Chimpanzee faeces to test his theory that HIV was due to a medical mistake. Unfortunately he caught malaria, for which he took aspirin, which caused a haemorrhage and he died. However his selfish gene theory lived on.

In 1960 Congo had become independent from Belgium, but governance promptly collapsed, and towns became battle grounds as soldiers fought for control of the mines. America and the Belgians organised a coup and the elected leader was assassinated, creating chaos. The Western mining operations were largely unaffected however.

Bill Hamilton was a solitary man, and he saw everything through the lens of Darwin’s theory of evolution. When he wanted to know why some ants and humans gave up their life for others, he went to Waterloo station and stared at humans for hours, and looked for patterns. In 1963 he realised that most of the behaviours of humans was due to genes, and looking at the humans from the genes’ point of view. Humans were machines that were only important for carrying genes, and that it made sense for a gene to sacrifice a human if it meant that another copy of the gene elsewhere would prosper.

In the 1930s Armand Denis made films that told the world about Africa. However, his documentary gave fanciful stories about Rwanda’s Tutsis being a noble ruling elite originally from Egypt, whereas the Hutus were a peasant race. In reality they were racially the same and the Belgian rulers had ruthlessly exploited the myth. But when it came to create independence, liberal Belgians felt guilty, and decided that the Hutus should overthrow the Tutsi rule. This led to a blood bath, as the Tutsis were then seen as aliens and were slaughtered.

So, all in all, this is a great personal recommendation and, it goes without saying, those of you that do watch the films and want to comment, would love to hear from you.