Affection from a Top Predator

The subject of Christian the lion came up when talking with folks this weekend, and we got to thinking about other shows of affection from lions that we've seen. I think I may make this a theme for this week.

So, assuming you've seen the fabulous reunion-after-a-year-in-Africa between Christian and his former owners John Rendall and Ace Bourke...

And assuming no one has yet turned up a copy of the film Jack Paar and His Lions, which features an after-a-year-apart reunion between the Marchesa Sieuwke Bisleti and her lions... (Anyone have a copy of this film? Please let me know!) ...

I turn to Jupiter the lion, and his benefactor, Ana Julia Torres.

This picture shows Jupiter reaching through the bars of his cage and clasping Ana Julia Torres in his huge paws to hug her and give her a kiss.

Ms. Torres earned the affection of this lion by nursing him back to health after rescuing him. He is one of nearly 800 rescue animals at her Villa Lorena animal shelter in a suburb of Cali, Columbia.

Ms. Torres is a teacher who began caring for abused animals about 10 years ago. She says that she takes in everything from limbless flamingos to blind monkeys.

Ms. Torres funds the sanctuary with her teaching salary along with donations. She will not open the sanctuary to the public. She says she wants the animals to live in peace.

This clip simply shows the lion and Ms. Torres:



This clip has more:

Thursday Lite

When seagulls go bad. Kids, don't be like this seagull. Those snacks are too salty.

Tiger Touch

Today's post is borrowed from some of the text at TigerTouch.org. I simply admire these people and agree with their philosophy so much, that I wanted to share their ideas in their own words with you.

The cats came here needing sanctuary. Yet it was the cats who extended sanctuary to us, inviting us out of mankind's self-imposed exile from nature. Their beauty is compelling, and their enthusiasm for life and spirit of fun is infectious. Each night they make strange music, the ancient calls that tell the world, "This is MY territory." What a joy it is to give these noble cats both the room and the reason to be proud of their own special kingdom.

The Problem: Even in today's enlightened world, the great carnivores and their habitat are being destroyed at an alarming rate. Conventional wisdom touts Species Survival Plans (SSPs) and the US Endangered Species Act (ESA) as the one-two combination punch to stop extinction. However the ESA cannot protect many critical habitats found in the world's poorest countries. Local governments are often powerless to do more than create preserves in name only. Furthermore, the majority of poached animal goods are sold outside the United States, making US laws far less effective at curtailing poaching. SSPs rely on leftover money from cash-strapped zoos and rarely accomplish more than impressing zoo visitors. The number of animals needed to preserve genetic diversity is higher than the shrinking wild can protect or zoos can house. Without a diverse network of responsible private owners allowed to operate unhindered by animal rights activism and ban laws, large carnivores will become victims of conventional wisdom.

Conflicting Ideals: Some well-intentioned people believe humans should enter a self-imposed exile from nature. At Tiger Touch we believe it is the nature of all living things, including man, to enter into vital relationships with other species. Severing our connection with nature wounds our spirits and limits our options in saving Earth's grandest treasures. We reject the charge that all forms of captive management are cruel. Large carnivores, like most animals, are held captive by territoriality and burdened by parasites, diseases, accidents, and starvation. The tradeoffs of enlightened captivity are outweighed by the benefits; kept with plenty of love, education and caution, exotic animals can live good lives in the human habitat while maintaining a reasonable degree of self-determination. Our work to improve animal husbandry can be read in detail in The Library.

Our Solution: By carefully re-examining conventional husbandry practices, we have identified a number of important lifestyle issues that go beyond the conventional wisdom approach often called "enrichment." To be happy and fit, animals need touch, not toys. They need a combination of proper diet (including often-overlooked micronutrients) and handling practices mandated by science and guided by Maslovian principles of psychological development that reduce aggression and deepen the human-animal bond. We recognize four forms of fitness:
Physical Fitness is more than basic life support; meeting animals' whole spectrum of needs makes their life longer and better.
Mental Fitness is as important in captivity as it is in the wild, promoting natural parenting and avoiding stereotyped, neurotic behaviors.
Emotional Fitness is the cornerstone of a compassionate, trusting partnership between humans and cats.
Moral Fitness is a clear understanding of rules and expectations that promote trust, minimize stress, reduce accidents and enhance cooperation.

Non-Verbal Communication

Do I need to comment on what's going on in this clip? Probably not. I do see more than "just a cute clip", though.

Learning a Foreign Language

Not too long ago, the scientific establishment was rocked by a border collie named Rico. Rico demonstrated knowledge of the meaning of 200 words, and the ability to rapidly learn new words. The remarkable things, according to the scientists, were that he showed "fast mapping", reasoning, and memory.

(Betsy, another border collie, has been shown to have a vocabulary of over 340 words, but we'll stay with Rico's story for now.)

Fast mapping, as referenced above, is the ability to immediately assign meaning to a word never heard before. Rico is the first animal that has passed that test, previously thought to be possible only by human toddlers. Fast mapping is not merely a function of memory, it shows logical thought as well.

"It's like he's saying to himself, 'I know the others have names, so this new word cannot refer to my familiar toys. It must refer to this new thing.' Or it goes the other way around, and he's thinking, 'I've never seen this one before, so this must be it.' He's actually thinking." --biologist Julia Fischer, quoted in the Washington Post

Studies done with Rico were specifically designed to eliminate the "Clever Hans" effect, and Rico passed without a problem. (Clever Hans was a horse who was supposed to be able to do arithmetic, but was actually picking up subconscious body language from his trainer. His story is always brought up whenever a new example of animal intelligence is discussed.)

Why does Rico have such a large vocabulary and an affinity for words? The reason is probably that his owners started to teach him the names of toys and various everyday items at the age of 10 months. At that time Rico was ill and unable to get exercise. They started the mental exercises to keep him from getting bored. Games were developed based on retrieving toys from a box or locations in other rooms. In other words, somebody took the time to pay attention to this dog and actively engage his mind. It obviously paid off.

In the same issue of Science magazine in which Rico's story was first published, Paul Bloom tries to disparage the dog's achivements. He writes:

Rico is 9 years old and knows about 200 words, whereas a human 9-year-old knows tens of thousands of words. And children can speak; Rico cannot.

That sounds like frantic desperation to cling to the erroneous notion that only humans have language. A human 9-year-old may know thousands of words in English, but how many does he know in dog-ish? I know I was all full of myself when I learned one word in tiger-ish--how brilliant does that make me in comparison with a tiger?

And to say that a dog cannot speak just means that Mr. Bloom isn't listening.

Of Course: Watch What You're Assuming

In his afterword to the book The Cognitive Animal, Donald R. Griffin spends several paragraphs trying to sound all scientific and neutral as he discusses the difficulties in fully understanding the consciousness of animals--The difficulty of knowing what they think, what they are aware of, and so on. He even allows that consciousness varies widely even among humans.

Then he says that animal consciousness "of course does not include the more complex levels of human thought". Of course? How can there be an "of course" kind of statement when you just explained so many reasons you can't make any conclusions?

"Of course [animal consciousness] does not include the more complex levels of human thought" merely says that even as this person is trying to be scientific, his mind is already made up. That statement is just a fractional level removed from "of course animals don't think", "of course animals aren't aware", or "of course animals don't feel pain".

While researching for today's post, I ran into a lot of people who cling desperately to the notion that only humans have language. Fortunately, we have real scientists reporting on prairie dog language, gray parrots and their use of spoken language, and the more famous Koko and Washoe and others. Now we need some open minds to go with the facts. These are real examples of real language usage, with complex thoughts behind them.

Griffin goes on to mention that human communication involves not only spoken language but body language as well. This is another barrier toward understanding animals, since their bodies are different from ours (as well as their societal influences being different). I was lucky (?) to notice that a lion was indicating, with body language, that humans standing up made him nervous. How many other people had seen that same body language and not recognized it? How many body language cues are being given to what animals think that no human ever notices?

Griffin concludes by saying "cautious scientists have a strong tendency to avoid this question [of animal consciousness], and some insist that such questions are inappropriate for scientific inquiry... But the tentative assumption that some animals experience simple levels of subjective awareness often enables us to make sense of their behavior."

My question is, Is it necessary to include the word "simple" in that last statement?

Cute Thursday

Thursday. Time for too much cuteness. This slide show was put together by a friend of mine and is perfect for a Thursday.

Bringing Back the Magic

I am going to quote Margaret T. Wright, publisher of the on-again, off-again magazine "Nature's Corner", and I am not going to comment on the quote. I hope that anyone reading this blog will leave a comment (click on the Comments link at the end of this post). I need to know what people think.

In Ms. Wright's book, Bringing Back the Magic, she talks about the worldwide reaction to the death of Alex, the African Gray parrot:

Why? Why were so many people so traumatized and saddened by the death of a parrot... a little bird that was no larger than a pigeon? His scientific accomplishments were astounding and he had been a trailblazer, proving beyond a doubt that animals are intelligent. But he represented something even more profound... something even more important. Alex was the "quintessential talking animal". He tapped into the primordial memory of our collective unconscious that remembers a time when animals physically talked to man... a time when man and animal lived together and shared mutual respect for one another. Some people may call that time the Garden of Eden when the animals talked to Adam and Eve, and others may call it the magical Land of Pan (Pangea). Whatever it is called, it did happen and it was real. Alex represented the possibility that we could get back in our hearts to that place of mutual love and respect, before evil and destruction separated us: Humankind from Nature. He was the archetypal talking animal that exuded unconditional love, and he captured our hearts and provided a loving place and a memory to which we could return within our own primordial souls.

What Do Animals Want?

Once, at an animal sanctuary, I met a very engaging lion. (That is him in the picture.) One thing this lion loved was to have his shoulders scratched. But the people who had been around him cautioned, watch out, he will turn and snarl at you. And sure enough, he did. But he did more than that. He also made a motion with his head, a significant motion. He was trying to tell people with this head motion that he felt nervous when people stood up close to him.

Now, conventional wisdom is that you should never get down at eye level with a lion. My own wisdom is that you need to pay attention to each animal as an individual and never assume one rule applies to everyone. So, I squatted down as I scratched his shoulders. And he never once turned and snarled at me.

This lion also had quite a reputation for spraying people. And sure enough, when I was paying attention to one of his lionesses, he assumed the position. I jumped up out of the way in time and I looked at him square in the eye. And he looked at me square in the eye and I will tell you his look was apologetic. He never tried his spraying trick with me again during the many happy hours I spent with him and his two lionesses.

I don't know how most people look at animals or what they see when they do. I believe that what the animal is hoping for is that you will see another person behind their eyes. If you can connect with them person to person, you will have a friend.

All the animals at that sanctuary were adults, and some had had hard lives when they were younger. Some of them had been hardened to never expect a one-to-one connection with a human. What made my lion friend special was that he was still open to trying, and receptive when he met someone who was also trying.

Those who saw just an animal, and not a personality, needed an umbrella.

Attack Animals

Animal attacks make news. Take the case of the police officer, merely escorting a teenager home, savagely attacked by several pets owned by the boy's family. These animals have been known to take on pit bulls, even hold their own against a mountain lion, and here this family had a pack of them, and they attacked a police officer, requiring his hospitalization, for no good reason.

After the chimpanzee attack that made the news recently, people are clamoring for new ban laws. NO ONE, they say, should be allowed to have such animals.

But what about the case of the attack on the police officer? Shouldn't we ban those animals, too?

Oh, wait--I haven't told you what kind of animals I'm talking about.

They're Chihuahuas. That's right, little Paris-Hilton-type dogs. They're also number 7 on the Texas Department of Health list of most dangerous breeds.

Now, just to be clear, I am NOT advocating banning Chihuahuas, even though they appear quite high in lists of "severe animal attacks". What I am advocating is that people think about things.

ONE animal attack is supposed to indicate that ALL such animals must be banned. This is pure and utter non-thinking nonsense.

The impetus behind such nonsense is that the chimpanzee is not a "common animal". Arguments for a ban are simply hide-under-the-Snuggly unthinking fear of something different.

And if we can turn ONE attack into a ban against ALL such animals, how long before statistics like these:

The most recent official survey, conducted more than a decade ago, determined there were 4.7 million dog bite victims annually in the USA. A more recent study showed that 1,000 Americans per day are treated in emergency rooms as a result of dog bites. In 2007 there were 33 fatal dog attacks in the USA. Most of the victims who receive medical attention are children, half of whom are bitten in the face. Dog bite losses exceed $1 billion per year, with over $300 million paid by homeowners insurance.

turn into the government taking away all our pets?

There are people that desperately want that.

You have to think about these things.

Update, from later the same day...
I see I'm already too late to ask people to THINK for a change; our lawmakers are too busy trying to look good to bother to think... Article in Scientific American.