Fox Hunting

The Reuters news agency reported that in the Republic of Belarus, a wounded fox shot its would-be killer. The man tried to finish off the fox by beating it with the butt of his rifle, but the fox managed to pull the trigger, wounding the man in the leg. The hunter was hospitalized. No word on whether the fox sought treatment.

(Belarus is a country bordered by Russia, Ukraine, and Poland.)

The Born Free Legacy

If you have any interest at all in PBS's "Elsa's Legacy" (part of their "Nature" series), then you owe it to yourself to forget all about it and watch the BBC version of the same show, which is titled "The BORN FREE Legacy". The difference is beyond belief. Fortunately, some very nice person has placed the BBC version on YouTube, and I have placed all 4 parts of it below. The BBC got it right, and they even live up to the "legacy" aspect of the title. So far, only 339 people have watched it all the way through on YouTube; but this is the version of the show we should have been shown on PBS. Please watch and recommend this BBC show to everyone you know.

Part 1:



Part 2:



Part 3:



Part 4:

Elsa's Legacy

PBS is running a show this week (the exact day depends on where you live) called "Elsa's Legacy", Elsa being the lion made famous by "Born Free".

I can't go on without giving a too-brief critique of the show. I have serious doubts about whether whoever wrote the script of the show (there is no writer credit given) ever saw the movie or read the book. Over and over, "Born Free" is referred to as a "fairy tale" and a "myth". Why? The writer seems to be of the opinion that "Born Free" presented some phony view of Elsa and the whole process she and the Adamsons went through in teaching her how to live in the African bush. The examples used to illustrate this point were, in actuality, all dealt with in both book and movie. I don't understand the cluelessness of the narration. (And very laughable was the picture used to illustrate the dangers of wild lions when they encounter an intruder: two lions mating.) They also mixed pictures of the lion Christian (ca. 1971) in with the recounting of the making of the movie "Born Free" (ca. 1965)--but I suppose one lion is interchangeable with any other to most people. This is all the more a shame since one of the points they hammer home is that "Born Free" was the first time anyone considered that animals were all individuals with unique personalities.

Naturally, it wasn't the first time anyone had that idea, but it may be that the movie "Born Free" brought that idea to more people than anything that came before. The show ends by asking the question, can we rekindle the passion for lions that the movie instilled in people?

Strangely, given the show's title, they never really explore Elsa's legacy. And it is a great legacy. Not merely the Born Free Foundation but also the George Adamson Wild Animal Protection Trust (which was not mentioned). Many people are carrying on George Adamson's work in rehabilitating animals to a natural life, and not just lions. And there is the story of Christian the lion, which set the world on fire just a couple of years ago, and which would have turned out very, very differently had it not been for Elsa.

Elsa and the Adamsons have made a change in the world, and all for the better. The reaction to Christian's story shows that people can get passionate about lions, and "wild" animals, thus continuing the good that Elsa started.

People need more opportunities to see more animals as they actually are, and observe their natures for themselves. I believe the passions will then arise naturally.

Life, and Consciousness, and Equivalency

I got to thinking about the physical sciences and our ingrained worldviews.

Physical sciences tell us that all there is is matter and energy (and Einstein told us that the two are actually the same).

Take carbon: Coal - Graphite - Diamonds - Whatever its appearance, no one will tell you that it is alive. Nor is oxygen. Carbon and oxygen do not willfully combine to form carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide, or anything else. The same things can be said for hydrogen, nitrogen, or whatever element you choose.

These elements are not alive, but put them together in the right combination and you get Life.

How does Life happen? There is no physical answer for that. But we know what Life is; we recognize when something is alive. Alive means consuming, growing, reacting, reproducing. And we have no problem allowing that a butterfly is just as alive as a human.

We also know what "consciousness" is (never mind philosophical attempts to obfuscate the idea). You know you are conscious, or else you wouldn't be translating the pixels on your screen into words and those words into concepts that I'm trying to communicate.

But for some reason society, and science, and religions all want to put a fence around consciousness, and not allow it to any other life, just humans. All those defining forces of our lives constantly beat this idea into our heads, that only humans have conscious intellect.

Yet, those people who have first-hand experience with animals know differently. They know that the animals they interact with are just as capable of thinking, feeling, and loving as they are. And yet the concept of a barrier between conscious and non-conscious life is so ingrained that it doesn't usually disappear completely, even for such people. The barrier gets stretched, pushed outward, to allow some animals in, but not all of them.

In his book Kinship with All Life, J. Allen Boone describes how he established a relationship with a house fly. He and the fly had a real responsive relationship. No one can reasonably deny that this is true--to do so would be to deny this man his own experiences when he gives no evidence of being other than intelligent, reasonable, and articulate. So to deny what he says about the fly and its ability to have a relationship with him would be to say that you know more about his life than he himself did, which is simply ridiculous.

So if the barrier that allows consciousness can be stretched so far as to allow house flies into the exalted realm, surely by that point it must be stretched so thin as to fall apart completely.

In the light of all the experiential evidence that exists, would it not be more logical to assume that all forms of life have consciousness than to assume they don't?

Then why is the idea of the separateness of humans from the rest of nature so very difficult to shed?

A Most Divisive Animal

Name anything in the world, and you can find people that like it, and people that don't, but passions generally wouldn't run high. Not so with pigeons, however. For every person that is devoted to them, there seems to one who hates them with a passion, and such people seem to feel perfectly righteous in their hatred.

Probably the reason for such strong reactions is that pigeons are so very intelligent. And their intelligence allows them to adapt well to life in close proximity to humans.

Scientists are discovering just how intelligent pigeons are. Thanks to miniature GPS equipment, they can track the actions of a homing pigeon. The ability of a pigeon to find its way home has long been attributed to that magical catch-all, "instinct". But it has been observed that pigeons "scope out" the area in which they are released, so as to get their bearings and form a mental map. They find their way home by navigating according to landmarks, and if they are sent between the same two points repeatedly, they refine their route into the most efficient path home.

This explanation of pigeons mapping out their route is supported by tests that show that pigeons have a very good and long visual memory. Other senses are surely involved as well, but those are more difficult to measure. But it is obvious that real intelligence is involved, not some mythical "instinct".

Pigeons also have demonstrated real problem solving ability:



What I don't understand is the blind hatred of them. There's even a Facebook page for people who actively hate pigeons. It makes no sense.

A Merry Christmas to All

I hope you had as much fun this holiday season as these guys did:

A Lioness and Her Cubs, and Their Friend

Time for another look in at Kevin Richardson, this time with some really tiny lion cubs:



This video is a joy from beginning to end. Not only are the cubs adorable:

but you can see how touchy-feely lions are. They love physical contact.

For the benefit of the cubs, mama comes with a toy: the tuft on the end of her tail:

And there's more scenes of happy quiet times together:


Happy is the lion family that snoozes together:

This is higher learning?

The media were abuzz this week with the "news" that a new study from Oxford University "proved" that dogs are smarter than cats.

But what is the truth of the matter?

Let's start with the actual abstract of the article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America:

Encephalization is not a universal macroevolutionary phenomenon in mammals but is associated with sociality
by Susanne Shultz and Robin Dunbar
Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Evolutionary encephalization, or increasing brain size relative to body size, is assumed to be a general phenomenon in mammals. However, despite extensive evidence for variation in both absolute and relative brain size in extant species, there have been no explicit tests of patterns of brain size change over evolutionary time. Instead, allometric relationships between brain size and body size have been used as a proxy for evolutionary change, despite the validity of this approach being widely questioned. Here we relate brain size to appearance time for 511 fossil and extant mammalian species to test for temporal changes in relative brain size over time. We show that there is wide variation across groups in encephalization slopes across groups and that encephalization is not universal in mammals. We also find that temporal changes in brain size are not associated with allometric relationships between brain and body size. Furthermore, encephalization trends are associated with sociality in extant species. These findings test a major underlying assumption about the pattern and process of mammalian brain evolution and highlight the role sociality may play in driving the evolution of large brains.

Now, let's analyze this.

The Oxford University web site clarifies the fact that the research team "examined the growth rates of the brain size relative to body size to see if there were any changes in the proportions over time. The growth rates of each mammal group were compared with other mammal groups to see what patterns emerged."

Thus, the study perpetuates the concept of measuring intelligence by "brain size relative to body size". My question is, how in the world would the relative sizes correspond to actual intelligence? How is that supposed to mean anything? Does it mean that a tall or fat human is not as intelligent as a short or thin human?

(If you want a physical measure to "prove" intelligence, what about the fact that cats have 300 million neurons in their cerebral cortex [the "thinking" part of the brain] and dogs have only 160 million neurons? Not that I'm about to support the idea that actual intelligence derives from such physical measures, but scientists do it all the time, so maybe one of them could try to explain why "brain size relative to body size" could be a better measure of intelligence than the number of actual neurons in the brain.)

This study also tracks relative increases in brain size in various species on an evolutionary time scale. At Care2.com, Jake Richardson makes a good point:

For this study, the focus on physical brain measurements depends upon the assumption that an increase in brain size on a evolutionary time scale indicates dogs are smarter than cats. However, there is another assumption involved — that dogs and cats started off with equal intelligence, and dogs increased. Even if dogs and cats millions of years ago had the same size brains, does that mean they were of equal intelligence? It’s possible cats were smarter then, and still smarter now, but have smaller, more efficient brains. What is more likely given that evolution seems to reward creatures with adaptability and diverse skill sets, is that dog and cat intelligences are different, and comparing them is much more complex than simply measuring physical brain size.

There's another factor that needs to be questioned in this study. The study correlates increase in brain size over centuries with "sociality", which is defined in a somewhat circular manner as 'The state or quality of being sociable'. The trouble here is double: how do you define 'being sociable' in terms of behavior in different species, and how do you objectively measure it?

There is no question that dogs have social interactions in ways that are compatible with human perceptions. Cats behave differently, and people are societally trained to believe that cats are aloof, independent, and loners. But careful observation of cats will reveal that they are very sociable animals. Any veterinarian should be able to tell you that in multi-cat households, the cats form their own societal structure. They can be very affectionate toward each other as well as toward humans. I have observed cats comfort a sick cat, and mourn the death of another cat. I have two cats who will each bring me a toy to initiate a game of fetch or some other game.

No one will ever convince me that cats are not social animals, because that would require me to deny years of experience. Just as no one will ever convince me that intelligence is dependent on brain size.

I'm with Mr. Richardson on this one: each species has its own unique way of expressing its intelligence. Unfortunately, the mass media like the easy headline. It's a shame the easy headline has to originate from an institution of higher learning.

The Search for Intelligent Life...

In today's Washington Post we learn that 19 radio telescope observatories and other facilities in 13 countries worked in coordination with each other to search for intelligent life on other planets.

They didn't find it and they won't find it.

I'm not saying that there can't be life on other planets. Simple mathematic probability says there must be. But it's not going to be more humans, or even humans with cute cosmetic differences like pointy ears or walnut shells on their foreheads. They will be completely different forms of life, with completely different forms of communication that will go completely unrecognized.

Much like the communication methods of the numerous animal societies that share our own planet with us.

I know, I have reported on breakthroughs in recognizing animal languages in past posts. But research in this area is still in its primitive stages. Considering how long we've had to observe our fellow creatures, this state of affairs is... well, discouraging, but promising, even if progress seems too slow.

There are even many in the "scientific" community that actively resist the notions of animal intelligence and languages.

And at the same time millions of dollars are wasted looking for human communication coming from unattainable other planets.

Does this make sense to anyone?

If We Could Talk to the Animals...

A little music for a Thursday...



Something interesting about that song is that it consistently refers to talking in each animal's own language: "Can you speak rhinocerous? Of courcerous!" It's pretty cool that a song writer would have that perspective when so often researchers aim to get animals speaking in a human language.

One well-documented example of the latter was the project involving Vicki, "the talking chimp". After much training, the researchers were able to get Vicki to approximate three words: Mama, Papa, and Cup. She did this with great difficulty and signs of stress, and had to use her hands to help her mouth form the "p" sound. The results were akin to getting a dog to say "I love you" or "mama"--you could imagine that the words were being said, but it does take imagination.

The failure to get the chimp to talk led to the myth of the "language instinct", that supposedly only humans have. But while a chimp can't speak English, it is plain that chimps can comprehend a spoken human language. This comprehension reveals that the animals do have language abilities. The inability to speak in a human language is the result of different physical aspects of their bodies, not underdeveloped minds.

More enlightened researchers, such as primatologist Dr Katja Liebal, believe that chimps have their own complex system of communication, and it is up to us to try to understand. Liebal is compiling a dictionary of the chimpanzee language, which uses gestures, facial expressions, and physical displays. She says that chimpanzees have a complex communicative system--even though they can't speak English.

Still, people prefer sameness. Earlier this year, much was made of a short film showing a bonobo chimp shaking her head to indicate "no". I was surprised at this, because I didn't think this was a great revelation. Even my cats will shake their heads to indicate "no". I suppose I should set up a camera and send a video of the cats to the BBC...