Did you ever read something that made such infinitely good sense that you immediately incorporated it into your personal philosophy? That’s what happened to me years ago when I was reading Norman Cousin’sCelebration of Life: A Dialogue on Immortality and Infinity. (Harper and Row, 1974). In it he notes that, when we believe that the world is flat, the further apart two people move, the greater the distance between them. But once we realize that the world is round, the further apart they move, the closer they become. So it is with ideas, too, and there are many examples
Read more →For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by tipping points, those points at which something superficially appears to change instantly. When I founded an organization to explore the interaction of animal health, behavior, and the human-animal relationship, there was no doubt in my mind that I would call it TippingPoint because so many natural displays conform to this principle. Rather than always plodding along like tortoises or leaping like hares, changes often reflect a combination of the two. Changes within an individual, species, or environment progress linearly and predictably up to a point, but then
Read more →Periodically I’ll attend a meeting at which someone will passionately pronounce that we should forget about wolf, wild dog, small wildcat, and any other animal studies except those regarding dogs and cats because they’re irrelevant to what our pets do. According to them, we should focus all our energy on the behaviors displayed by companion animals right here and right now. I can understand the logic behind this approach, but I can’t accept it for one perhaps selfish, but also highly practical reason. To dispense with the selfish part first, few feelings delight me more than the realization that
Read more →Several groups of researchers currently conduct experiments in which chimpanzees and children of approximately the same age are asked to perform an identical task under identical conditions to compare their responses. Some who have interpreted the data thus far suggest that, at least under these circumstances, chimpanzees may be smarter than humans. However, when I read about the experiments, several other considerations occurred to me based on my work with companion animals and experience as the grandmother of an almost 3-year-old. First, a very abbreviated description of the experiment: An object is placed in a box and the researcher
Read more →In this season of peace and good will, the animosity between those who claim to speak for the animals and those who denigrate them seems more irritating and out of synch with reality than usual. In an attempt to clear the air of what often are more struggles for human power than any concern about animals, I offer the following, updated perspective of animal rights advocated by companion animal veterinarian Jacob Antelyes. He proposed these as the standard for all veterinarians for all animals, regardless of the animal’s commercial value and the wealth and status of their owners. I
Read more →Two months ago I wrote a commentary about spaying and neutering in which I quoted study results complied by one group that were misquoted by the author of another article. The legitimate confusion this generated as well as some of the highly emotional e-mails I received about that commentary has led me to think about the role emotions play in this issue. But first, the correction. I wrote that dogs younger than a year who were spayed or castrated have about a one in four lifetime risk of developing bone cancer and are significantly more likely to develop this
Read more →When Hurricane Katrina spun through the US in September, it stripped bear two concepts of great importance relative to the survival of companion animals. The first of these deals with leadership, the ideal relationship between human and companion animal, the core of which is the foresight and ability to initiate rather than react to events. I’ve long maintained that one reason it’s so difficult for many Americans to grasp this concept relative to their pets is because such a dearth of leadership examples exists in our society. Any doubts I had about the validity of that observation vanished following
Read more →Perhaps no aspect of pet ownership in the U.S. elicits as passionately supportive emotions as the subject of spay and neuter. In fact, this orientation is so well established that saying anything that questions the procedure is akin to blasphemy. However, just as women were routinely relieved of their reproductive organs with a “La de da, you’ll never miss ’em” attitude until studies exploring the nonreproductive effects of reproductive hormones made human physicians rethink this position, so veterinarians and other animal-care professionals are making tentative moves to rethink wholesale sterilization of companion animals, too. To understand what difference this
Read more →Preparation for a recently completed series of seminars and presentations that addressed the role human emotions play in animal relationships resulted in an affirmation of a long-held suspicion: the views and approaches that gain the most attention are far more likely to be those driven by emotion than solid knowledge. Granted, this isn’t something new. As the old saying reminds us, “Some people are like foghorns: the less they can see, the more noise they make.” Unfortunately, the louder the noise, the more media attention. Further enhancing this trend, we live in a world in which the number of
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Less Than Picture Perfect: When Our Beliefs About Health Undermine Our Pets’ Behavior
This month I want to explore two common beliefs about health that particularly complicate the resolution of behavioral-bond problems: the beliefs that animals with such problems are healthy, and, two, that these problems are like medical ones which, when treated with drugs, are cured in a relatively short time. Of all the issues that those seeking to resolve serious behavioral-bond problems must address before they can make the necessary consistent, meaningful changes, these two often create the biggest stumbling blocks. Perceiving an animal with serious behavioral-bond problems as healthy is an illusion (delusion?) more often attributed to animal-care professionals,
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