This podcast is the first of a series of meanderings about what affect the choice of veterinary medicine to pattern itself on human medicine has had on animal health, behavior, and the human-animal bond.
Read more →Have no idea what contranyms, the subject of this week’s podcast, are? Here are three hints to help you: All of these words share a special property. More likely than not you’re familiar with such words, but didn’t realize they rated a special name. Some non-behavioral examples include second-guess, impregnate, and secrete. Now that you know what contranyms are, can you think of any terms related to our interactions with animals that could fall into that category?
Read more →I suppose that some and even many might consider the subject of this podcast ludicrous. However how the quality of the learning opportunities we offer more intelligent than average animals, and especially dogs, has practical repercussions for our society today.
Read more →Until I came across this article I never really gave the human-Bigfoot bond much thought. But one of the advantages of being an independent scholar is that I’m free to think about things that it might be imprudent to ponder in more formal settings.
Read more →When I read the studies regarding the effects of free-roaming cats and the far fewer and less publicized studies regarding the effects of artificial bird food supplies, i.e. feeders, on the wild bird population, I see so many variables it makes my brain ache.
Read more →Here’s the article about gorilla surrogate moms that triggered these meanderings. Relative to what this teaches us about the way we treat the young of species we claim to cherish as members of our families… What can I say? The old saying, “Familiarity breeds contempt.” kept floating through my mind. And in that serendipitous way things sometimes cross my desk, here’s a video of another human attempt to raise orphan domestic animals that arrived about the same time as the gorilla article. I wonder how this solution would stack up against what we typically offer orphan puppies and kittens.
Read more →The intersection of two superficially unrelated events triggered this podcast. One was a series of stories involving animals engaged in various forms of human therapy or salvation and the responses of some in the animal care community about these. The second involved the development of robots for military use that attempt to mimic the movement of horses…
Read more →This podcast is about what these have in common: Can you guess what it is?
Read more →Moving with animals poses some of the same challenges as moving with kids. And as with moving with kids, the same caveats hold. The more thoroughly we do our homework before the move, the more pleasant the move and the new home will be for us and our animals Here’s a favorite picture of Lumpy, my favorite lovable lump who just made yet another major move like a trooper.
Read more →The subject of this podcast causes me to ask the obvious question: Which one of us—ghost or human—would adapt the most in response to the other’s presence?
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