Some we love, some we hate, some we eat.

Here is a clear-headed article on the subject of horse slaughter for human consumption in the U.S.:

http://www.examiner.com/pet-rescue-in-national/dispelling-the-myths-and-the-facts-about-horse-slaughter-resuming-america

Sweetness

Without going into details, I am facing a very bad situation and I am in a very bad state, emotionally. But when I got up this morning, I saw that our bundle-of-boundless-energy cat had placed two of her favorite toys, including her favorite toy of all, in front of my chair. I recognized this for what it was, a very sweet and loving gesture and she was trying to cheer me up. It helped.

Anger

Dealing with the subject of human-animal interactions often inspires anger in me. I want to stay positive, but the examples of unspeakable callousness--such as, dogs thrown out of high-rise windows or Navy sonar experiments driving whales to suicide--seem to overwhelm the stories of a Christian or Zamba. I don't want to be an angry person, but I often feel lost in anger.

I found the following in the book "Animals in Spirit" by Penelope Smith. Ms. Smith relates the experience of fellow animal communicator Teresa Wagner, who received anger management counseling from a whale she was familiar with.

What follows is paraphrased from the book. I figure re-telling it in my own words will help me assimilate it.

Your anger is leading you down the wrong path. There is a better way, a way out of your outrage and grief, and a way to help everyone involved.

Take a deep breath and fill yourself with love. Get back in touch with that limitless love that you know is within you. Support your own broken heart.

Remember that you are never helpless to shower someone who is suffering with love, even when you cannot physically help. Send your love to the soul of the animal that has suffered. If he has died, ask for blessings for the journey of his soul through time and space.

Then send the same love and comfort to the ones who loved the animal. Whatever hurt you feel, they grieve even more. Surround them with love and compassion.

Then you must send the same love and compassion to those who caused the suffering or death. Anger at them gets you stuck in anger and does no good. Send love to those known or unknown to you who caused the suffering because it is only with love and compassion that their consciousness will expand to see the souls of animals and their hearts will understand and direct their actions. Compassion will help them to grow.

After this, you must tend to your own grief and sorrow. Honor your feelings even if they are dark and confusing. Ask for help to understand and release these feelings. There is always enough love and support for everyone. Reach out for help. Your own heart is as important as the suffering of others. Tend to yourself with great compassion and love.

This process is about acknowledging the overwhelming energy of your feelings and turning it into something positive for everyone, rather than allowing it to trap you.

It feels so good to be free...

This is a true story. Since the tiger I'm going to tell you about was not owned by me, I have changed her name here.

I met Kefira at a big cat sanctuary far from where I live. She was a wonderful, huge, perfectly gorgeous Siberian* tiger. I was told to walk slowly and quietly past her cage because she was "a real bitch" and would snarl, roar, and lunge and anyone who came close. But the way things were arranged, a person had to walk past her cage to get to other animals. There was a sign on her cage warning of her dangerous personality. When I saw that sign on her cage I just felt so very sorry for her, like everyone had given up hope for her.

But I watched this tiger as she performed as advertised and I was sure that her actions arose from fear, not meanness. For reasons unknown to me, she had a tremendous fear of people. Whenever anyone got near her cage, she got very actively defensive. And when a full-grown tiger gets defensive, she can be very scary. Poor thing, trapped in a world of fear...afraid of the people who were scared of her. And I decided I wanted to relieve her fear.

Later, when my escorted tour was over and I could visit whomever I chose, I went back to see Kefira. I approached slowly, determined not to upset her. I found the edge of her personal safe space, which was some 20 feet away from her. I stayed there, close enough that her attention was fixed on me, but she didn’t get defensive. Then I did something that may sound strange: I envisioned a 'bridge' extending from my mind to hers, to carry one thought--"I love you". In my visualization, the bridge slowly grew, from my mind to hers. At the exact moment I envisioned the bridge reaching her mind, she jumped back, like she had been physically hit in the head. I then chuffed at her, and she stood up and chuffed back at me. Having exchanged proper greetings, I knew that I could now approach her, and I did. She started to rub against the near wall of the cage. She paced around, looking intently at me and rubbing against the wall as we repeatedly exchanged greetings. I moved over to the door, where we would be separated by two layers of wire fencing--no contact was permitted with her--and she reared up, with her paws on the wire, and rubbed her face against it. I tried to put my hands opposite hers, but she wanted to sniff them. I moved close and she tried to rub her face against mine. More than just contact, I had made a friend. I never saw her scared and defensive side directed toward me at any time after that.

The next day, as soon as Kefira saw me [and the intensity of her look really sticks in my mind] she jumped up and started chuffing to me. Again she rubbed affectionately against the wall and came to the door to be close to me. I wished she could keep that attitude all the time, but she still snarled and hissed at others (there were many other people at the sanctuary that day).

Kefira pointed out to me that her water bowl was empty (tigers [and lions too] use a great deal of body language, including eye motions), and the sanctuary workers were glad to allow me to fill it, with a hose, from outside the cage--she was considered a very dangerous tiger. But she and I enjoyed each other's company on that day, and on the third day of my trip as well. At the end of my visit I made sure to go back to her to say goodbye, and she came up to the door for a face-to-face, close as possible sendoff.

My next visit was a year later, and I went straight to see Kefira. As I got near, she went into her defensive position, ready to try to frighten me away. I stopped, and said, "Kefira, it’s me." Right away she stood up and chuffed at me. I went to the door of her cage, and she stood up with her front paws on the wire, to look me in the face just like before. But this time, the extra layer of wire had been taken down, and we got to touch noses! She was such a sweetie! I called dibs on her at feeding time, and the workers were glad to let me take the "chore" of feeding her... and so was I.
As I said, this sanctuary is far from where I live, but I kept in email contact. Two years after I last saw her, Kefira developed severe medical problems; her back half became paralyzed, and no one knew why.

They did everything that could possibly be done for her, but from my distant position I felt I needed to do something, but there was nothing for me to do. All I could do was send my loving thoughts to her, putting as much energy as I could into healing rays.

Notes from the sanctuary were frustratingly brief, but seemed encouraging. Kefira’s spirits were up; now she could move her tail; now they had hopes for her recovery.

One night, as I was again concentrating on her, I saw her in my mind's eye. She was there with me. This had never happened before. And she was smiling. She was so very happy, practically bursting with energy and joy, and I was happy to see her. She told me how much my love meant to her, and how good it felt to be free from the sickness in her body. I should have known what that meant, but I wanted to interpret it as meaning she had made a sudden recovery.

In the morning, when I got my email, I read that Kefira had died during the night, put down by a vet after everyone had given up hope for her recovery.

I had been so focused on her recovering that I had not thought that's what she had told me about. But I will never forget that final meeting with her, a meeting of our minds.

This experience taught me the reality of what others have said: that our spirits live on, that death is a natural process, that we leave behind our pain and suffering but not our love. And should someone say that animals have no souls, I can try to correct them with the utmost confidence.

I have just started reading a book titled Animals in Spirit: Our faithful companions' transition to the afterlife written by animal communicator Penelope Smith, and already I have read several accounts of animals who had died or been put down and they all include the sentiment of how good it feels to be free of their illness. A lot of people don't believe in telepathic communication with animals, and so may not accept the idea of joy after passing, but I experienced the same sentiment from my tiger friend, spontaneously, without pre-conceived expectations, and I am convinced that it's true.

*Yes, I am aware of the term Amur tiger for this subspecies. Call me old-fashioned, but the name Siberian is more attractive to me. Just so long as you know that Siberian tigers are not white tigers...

A Tragic True Story

Making the limited-engagement rounds of select theaters is a movie called "Project Nim", a documentary that is also a tragedy, an indictment of academia, and a loud cry for people in general to wake up and think about how they treat other living beings.

Project Nim was supposed to be about raising a chimpanzee in a human-oriented environment to see if he could acquire skills in using human language; American Sign Language to be precise, since chimpanzees are physically incapable of speaking English words.

It is important to note that it is the learning of human language at the center of the project, since no one involved seemed to consider that animals can have languages of their own.

A chimpanzee was chosen as the subject since chimps are so much like Us. But the insanity of the researchers' unexamined preconceived notions about non-human animals is revealed right at the start: The days-old baby chimp is ripped away from his mother, after she had been paralyzed (but still conscious) with a tranquilizer dart.

So, are chimps like us, or are they not? Why is it so convenient to shut out any thought of chimps having an emotional life while contending that they are intellectually similar to humans? This isn't just insanity, it's wanton insanity.

As the high-profile experiment proceeds, it becomes clear that those in charge had no idea of how to proceed, and seemingly no desire to come up with an idea. The chimp is raised without structure or discipline, which does nothing to promote learning. At the end, the head of the project proclaims that the chimp did not really have language skills; all the chimp ever communicated was immediate wants. But the same thing would happen with a human child raised in the same way--a completely free-form upbringing induces a detachment from all others, and no desire to communicate anything except immediate wants. I've seen it happen.

What happened to the chimp after the conclusion of the project is horrifying at best. It's a real shame that there is a high-profile fictional movie about chimps in theaters at the same time. "Project Nim" needs to be seen, discussed, and taken to heart because it is true, and so revealing about our society and its detachment from all other forms of life.

Also this week is an article in the Washington Post about a possible end to medical research on chimpanzees. The United States is one of only two countries in the entire world that still allow such things (the other is Gabon). This change is, of course, a good thing, if too slow in coming about. The end of this legal torture is presumably the result of a growing recognition among some that chimps are like Us. It's also due to the fact that genetically-altered mice and rats are taking over from chimps in medical research projects.

We've got a long way to go before people start thinking that mice and rats might have enough of an intellectual and emotional life that they should be spared torture, too.

“We wouldn’t be having this meeting if ethics wasn’t an issue,” Frans de Waal told the Institute of Medicine committee. The Emory University researcher, whose pioneering studies with captive chimpanzees have revealed their human-like empathy, continued, “We don’t have this kind of meeting about rats.”

Reality... What a Concept

Have I gone in the wrong direction with my posts to this blog? I have tried to present socially-acceptable arguments to persuade people that all living things are intelligent, and it is our perception--or lack thereof--that causes us to imagine that they are not.

But is such constrained logic good enough? This is a highly emotional issue, after all. We have seemingly insurmountable cultural indoctrination to overcome if we are to expand our collective perceptions to embrace reality.

One of those problems is religion. Religion controls such a huge part of our society and shapes so much of the way we think--and that applies even to those who consider themselves outside of any religion. Now, I have to speak in generalities to keep this topic manageable, but religion doesn't make any allowance for considering animals to be different yet equal beings. The Christian Bible even contains a story of Jesus unnecessarily killing an entire herd of animals.

The scientific side of our society is another problem. In the name of learning and exploration, valid ideas are suppressed and valid observations denied in order to protect established dogma. Yes, I do believe it is correct to use the term, dogma. The concept of animals being "biological machines" lives on and is actively taught despite the fact that any reasonable attention paid to actual observations absolutely destroys the concept.

I have avoided writing about much of what I know to be true, because my experiences and my methods are not acceptable to either religion or science. But both of those are rigidly constructed to protect themselves from change, so maybe I've been too concerned about how my own experiences will be viewed by those with religious and scientific points of view.

After all, I knew in my heart that the Christian the Lion "Reunion Video" had the power to demonstrate the loving side of an animal to people. Some prefer it with the added emotional tug of the Whitney Houston song, others prefer it the way I first posted it back in 2002: silent, so that all attention can be focused on the very demonstrative body language, from the moment of first recognition that Christian's friends had returned after a year's absence, to the explosive joy of being in contact again. This is real, this actually happened.

And still some people argue that a lion can't feel love.

I can't be concerned anymore about those who refuse to see what's real.

Expect more personal, and maybe outrageous, articles here in the future.

Discussion, both pro and con, gratefully received via the comments box that accompanies each article.

They All Look the Same... To Us

An article at the Live Science site tells us that French researchers have come to the conclusion that feral, untrained pigeons can recognize human faces.

This is based on an experiment in which two similar people behaved differently toward pigeons, after which the pigeons avoided the person who had been antagonistic, even when the people exchanged clothing, thus changing most of their physical appearance.

While I don't wish to denigrate the pigeons' intelligence, the description in the article leaves the findings open to other interpretations, such as perhaps the pigeons may recognize people by their smell rather than their looks. I'm just saying it's a possibility.

Which reminds me of another, oft-repeated experiment, in which scientists try to prove whether an animal is self-aware, by using the mirror test: can an animal use a mirror to detect an unusual mark that has been added to its face? Many animals "fail" this test, leading scientists to conclude that they don't have self-awareness. But many animals are more scent-oriented than vision-oriented, and a mirror has its own scent that is clearly not the animal's own. So it's not a matter of not being self aware, it's a matter of the mirror not providing the proper cues.

I contend that any animal that stealthily stalks its prey, or that hides from a predator, demonstrates self-awareness. But somehow that bit of logic escapes the researchers.

Back to the pigeons. I won't say that they can't recognize human faces. A bird's life requires well-developed abilities to see and process visual cues. But it hasn't been proved that they don't use some other means to recognize people. Smell is only one possibility. It's even possible they use some other cues that we don't know about. We are limited by our own senses and our own views of the world. I am reminded that it is only recently that people became aware that elephants use infrasound to communicate (sounds pitched so low that we can't hear them).

Thought Provoking

One article that gets a lot of attention here is Are Insects Conscious?, so I thought I would highlight it again; click the link to go to the article.

And since I have a silly sense of humor, I thought I would add a little something you can hum for the rest of the day: Hymn to Cockroaches. There should be a little "Play" button there for you to play the song.

Is it real?

This short video has been getting a lot of attention. Taken at face value, it's pretty funny--a cat is barking like a dog until he realizes that he's being watched, then he reverts to meowing like a "normal" cat.



One of the most frequent comments people make is to question whether the sound has been altered--whether the cat could really make such barking sounds. In my opinion, the pitch of the barks sounds correct, and the transition from barking to meowing is convincing, but I don't know for sure.

There are other YouTube videos of "barking cats", but they merely show cats making the short staccato noises cats make when they see birds (that's a subject for another time). This cat appears to be truly imitating a dog.

What do you think?

A Tale of Two Kitties

I just read a new (it's to be released this coming Tuesday) book in which some Ph.D. goes to great lengths to explain how human brains are the most superior of all and no animal can possibly think or react with the same sophistication that humans can.

Rather than bore you with that nonsense, I'm going to tell you one of my favorite stories about my cat, Spike.

This incident involves a laser pointer. The fascination most cats have with the little red dot of light is well known. Spike was no exception, at first. He was a big cat, and seeing his eyes get big, his whiskers point forward and his ears go erect was a joy, as he chased the dot around. Then, one time, and I'm not sure what diverted his attention (maybe it was my laugh), he looked over and saw me holding the laser, saw the red light at the end, and realized that I was controlling the dot. The look on his face changed to one of hurt and dismay, as if he felt tricked and betrayed by me. He stopped chasing the dot immediately, and went into the next room and laid down. From that time on, he never chased the dot of light again. In fact, he would leave the room when I started playing with the other cats with the laser pointer.

Another cat, Arnie, has also made the connection between me holding the laser device and the fascinating dot of light. In fact, since the pointer is attached to a key ring that makes a distinctive sound when moved, no matter how quietly I try to pick it up, Arnie hears the sound and comes running, ready to play. He knows I am in control, but he doesn't mind that, he enjoys the fun of the chase.

As I said, I don't know what triggered Spike's reaction--I probably laughed particularly loud, and Spike never liked being laughed at--but he was obviously hurt by what he perceived as deviousness on my part and he never got over it; he never went back to playing that game. Arnie, whom I know keeps a mental catalog of past wrongs (that's a story for another time), knows the facts of the game and loves it anyway.

Conclusion? They're all individuals with their own personalities.