Memories of 21, 42, 63 ... the 84th meandering

Vibrance is good Dan ~ our prayers thoughts for your Pattie and you too.

Dan, you're birthdays in a few days, and you're not old...(me neither - or the rest of our late sixty folk) just retired and moving a bit slower - another great thing - only challenge of retirement is added weight gain! Whats up with that??? sigh

Izzy girl! How ya doin'??? So good seeing you're happy face at the rainforest thread!

Sue, about those ants and their ability to chitchat with each other during reconnaissance missions from outside to indoors. I've been able to intercept messages using chalk that doesn't kill, just causes retreat. Yaaayy

Does anyone know beespeak???

Hi ya Beth!

Clickety click. Couple of good articles for your reading pleasure.

Of all things....hippos as an invasive species.

September 11, 2009
Doradal Journal
Colombia Confronts Drug Lord’s Legacy: Hippos
By SIMON ROMERO

DORADAL, Colombia " Even in Colombia, a country known for its paramilitary death squads, this hunting party stood out: more than a dozen soldiers from a Colombian Army battalion, two Porsche salesmen armed with long-range rifles, their assistant, and a taxidermist.

They stalked Pepe through the backlands of Colombia for three days in June before executing him in a clearing about 60 miles from here with shots to his head and heart. But after a snapshot emerged of soldiers posing over his carcass, the group suddenly found itself on the defensive.

As it turned out, Pepe " a hippopotamus who escaped from his birthplace near the pleasure palace built here by the slain drug lord Pablo Escobar " had a following of his own.

The meticulously organized operation to hunt Pepe down, carried out with the help of environmentalists, has become the focus of an unusually fierce debate over animal rights and the containment of invasive species in a country still struggling to address a broad range of rights violations during four decades of protracted war with guerrillas.

“In Colombia, there is no documented case of an attack against people or that they damaged any crops,” said Aníbal Vallejo, president of the Society for the Protection of Animals in Medellín, referring to the hippos. “No sufficient motive to sacrifice one of these animals has emerged in the 28 years since Pablo Escobar brought them to his hacienda.”

Sixteen years after the infamous Mr. Escobar was gunned down on a Medellín rooftop in a manhunt, Colombia is still wrestling with the mess he made.

Wildlife experts from Africa brought here to study Colombia’s growing numbers of hippos, a legacy of Mr. Escobar’s excesses, have in recent days bolstered the government’s plan to prevent them " by force, if necessary " from spreading into areas along the nation’s principal river. But some animal-rights activists are so opposed to the idea of killing them that they have called for the firing of President Álvaro Uribe’s environment minister.

Peter Morkel, a consultant for the Frankfurt Zoological Society in Tanzania, compared the potential for the hippos to disrupt Colombian ecosystems to the agitation caused by alien species elsewhere, like goats on the Galápagos Islands, cats on Marion Island between Antarctica and South Africa, or pythons in Florida.

“Colombia is absolute paradise for hippos, with its climate, vegetation and no natural predators,” Mr. Morkel said.

“But as much as I love hippos, they are an alien species and extremely dangerous to people who disrupt them,” he continued. “Since castration of the males is very difficult, the only realistic option is to shoot those found off the hacienda.”

The uproar has its roots in 1981, when Mr. Escobar was busy assembling a luxurious retreat here called Hacienda Nápoles that included a Mediterranean-style mansion, swimming pools, a 1,000-seat bull ring and an airstrip.

“He needed a tranquil place to unwind with his family,” said Fernando Montoya, 57, a sculptor from Medellín who built giant statues here of Tyrannosaurus rex and other dinosaurs for Mr. Escobar.

Hired by private administrators of the seized estate, part of which is now a theme park (imagine mixing “Jurassic Park” and “Scarface” into a theme), Mr. Montoya rebuilt the same statues after looters tore them apart searching for hidden booty.

But Mr. Escobar was not content with just fake dinosaurs and bullfights. In what ecologists describe as possibly the continent’s most ambitious effort to assemble a collection of species foreign to South America, he imported animals like zebras, giraffes, kangaroos, rhinoceroses and, of course, hippopotamuses.

Some of the animals died or were transferred to zoos around the time Mr. Escobar was killed. But the hippos largely stayed put, flourishing in the artificial lakes dug at Mr. Escobar’s behest.

Carlos Palacio, 54, head of animal husbandry at Nápoles, said Mr. Escobar started in 1981 with four hippos. Now, he said, at least 28 live on the estate. “With our current level of six births a year set to climb, we could easily have more than 100 hippos on this hacienda in a decade,” Mr. Palacio said.

“Some experts see this herd as a treasure of the natural world in case Africa’s hippo population suffers a sharp decline,” Mr. Palacio continued. “Others view our growth as a kind of time bomb.”

The number of hippos on the hacienda could have reached 31 had Pepe, the slain hippo, not clashed about three years ago with the herd’s dominant hippo, then left with a mate for other pastures. Once established near Puerto Berrío, the mate gave birth to a calf.

Faced with the possibility of a nascent colony away from Nápoles, Colombian authorities decided to act. After all, hippos, despite their docile appearance, are thought to kill more people in Africa than any other large animal.

Unable to find a zoo that would accept the three hippos in Puerto Berrío, officials in the department, or province, of Antioquia considered their options.

Capturing them was expensive, costing as much as $40,000 for each hippo, in a country where malnourishment among the poor remains a major problem, said Luis Alfonso Escobar " not related to Pablo Escobar " head of Corantioquia, a state environmental organization. Taking them to Africa was dangerous, in addition to being expensive, because of the new diseases they might introduce there.

So the officials opted for a hunt and hired a nonprofit conservation group, the Neotropical Wildlife Foundation, to help manage the operation.

The foundation brought in two experienced hunters, Federico Pfeil-Schneider and Christian Pfeil-Schneider, both of whom also represent the car manufacturer Porsche in Colombia. To ensure the hunting party’s safety, the environmentalists also secured an escort of soldiers.

All went as planned until the hunt’s details and the photo of the soldiers appeared in the news media. Outrage ensued. Newspapers speculated on the fate of Pepe’s severed head. (Luis Alfonso Escobar, of Corantioquia, rejected rumors that it went to the hunters.) A judge in Medellín issued a ruling suspending the hunt for Pepe’s mate and their offspring.

Meanwhile, other hippos may be on the loose. Mr. Palacio, the hippo caretaker here, said at least one was lurking in the waters of a neighboring ranch. Mr. Morkel, the veterinarian, said one or two others could have wandered off, according to local reports.

On the grounds of Hacienda Nápoles, a sign warns visitors to the theme park. “Stay in your vehicle after 6 p.m.,” it reads. “Hippopotamuses on the road.”

Jenny Carolina González contributed reporting from Bogotá.

We'll take encouraging news about wolves anyway we can.

September 11, 2009
Wolves Aren’t Making It Easy for Idaho Hunters
By WILLIAM YARDLEY

BOISE NATIONAL FOREST, Idaho " Hunting and killing are not the same thing. Even as Idaho has sold more than 14,000 wolf-hunting permits, the first 10 days of the first legal wolf hunt here in decades have yielded only three reported legal kills.

Such modest early results might seem surprising in a state that has tried for years to persuade the federal government to let it reduce the wolf population through hunting.

Idahoans, among the nation’s most passionate hunters, are learning that the wolf’s small numbers " about 850 were counted in the state at the end of last year " make it at once more vulnerable and more elusive.

“It’s clear it’s not going to be easy,” said Jon Rachael, the wildlife manager for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game.

The consensus among hunters and game officials is that wolf hunting will get better as the weather gets colder and snow falls, revealing wolves against white. The season runs through December. Most people believe their best chance of killing a wolf will come when they are pursuing something else, like deer or elk. Far more hunters are expected to be in the woods at that point.

“That’s the way hunting works,” J. D. Hagedorn, who participated in the first day of hunting on Sept. 1, said as a black bear ambled across the foothills of the Sawtooth Mountains that morning. “The thing you’re hunting for is the thing you don’t see.”

Once shot on sight for preying on sheep and cattle, gray wolves were largely eradicated from the Northern Rockies by the 1930s. They were listed as an endangered species in 1974. In 1995, they were reintroduced into the region by federal wildlife officials.

The program was such a success that the wolf population in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming " about 1,650 at the end of 2008 " is now five times the goal set for reintroduction. Ranchers and hunters complain once more that the animals are killing livestock as well as big game that hunters track, particularly elk.

After years of studies and lawsuits, wolves were removed from federal protection in Idaho and Montana in May. Environmentalists sought an injunction to prevent the hunt, but Judge Donald W. Molloy of Federal District Court in Montana refused to stop it and ruled Tuesday that the animals could withstand a controlled hunt of up to 30 percent of the population. The hunts, the judge said, can continue while the environmentalists pursue their challenge.

Judge Molloy did not, however, provide an instruction manual for finding a wolf.

Mr. Rachael, the state wildlife manager, said he thought it was unlikely that hunters would reach the quota of 220 wolves that Idaho game officials have said could be killed this season. He recalled talking to hunters who recently called looking for advice after spending a couple of days in futile pursuit: “You know,” the hunters confessed, “we don’t know how to hunt wolves.”

Neither did J. D. Hagedorn or his father, Marv, a Republican state representative. They did enjoy trying, though.

First light lined the Sawtooth Mountains as Marv Hagedorn, a 9 millimeter strapped to his thigh, a rifle ready, howled with hope into the foothills.

Nothing howled back.

He spotted an elk at ease on a ridge. A grouse ruffled. The sun rose. Canis lupus, if he was out there, kept quiet. He leaned toward his son, a 24-year-old Iraq war veteran, and whisper-giggled, “I don’t hear anything, but I don’t know if my howl’s worth anything.”

He added, “This has never been done.”

They worked through the heat of the day. They kept their eyes on the few elk they saw, thinking wolves might be nearby tracking their prey. In full camouflage, they tried to stay quiet and hidden, avoiding silhouetting themselves on ridgelines, keeping their scent out of the wind. Just before sunset, they scaled the steep ravine walls surrounding the Roaring River, hoping to see wolves that have killed sheep in the area.

And they explained that just being able to hunt " if not actually harvest, to use game officials’ phrase " was a success unto itself. The elder Mr. Hagedorn, a retired information warfare officer for the Navy who is serving his second term representing suburban Boise, said, “This is a new beginning.”

He is among many people who say the long, bitter fight over the wolf has really been a fight over the West and how to live in it. He said earlier settlers “came and ravaged everything,” from forests to fish, even wolves. Yet in an effort to restore balance, he said, the federal government took too much control away from states like Idaho.

“The federal government has come in and added this predator and thrown it all out of whack,” he said.

Mr. Hagedorn said part of his political message has been to tell people that elk and cattle and sheep are not all that have suffered from the wolf. Hunting stores, outfitters and guides, even hotels and restaurants have been hurt by a belief that wolves have made hunting less worthwhile.

J. D. Hagedorn, a sophomore at Boise State University, said he was more torn than his father and grandfather on some political and environmental issues. He said he had taken some classes on environmental topics.

“I understand the importance of a predator in an ecosystem,” he said, cradling a rifle at dusk.

But wolves must be managed, he said, “and I’m not going to lie, it’s a great hunt.”

This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.


Because of concerns about climate change, a lot of current environmentalist advocacy " including movies like “An Inconvenient Truth” " concentrates on the dire results of burning fossil fuels. Joe Berlinger’s “Crude,” a thorough and impassioned new documentary, focuses its gaze on production rather than consumption. The film, which follows the fitful progress of a class-action lawsuit undertaken on behalf of the people of the Ecuadorean Amazon, is not about the unintended consequences of using petroleum. Instead, it examines the terrible, frequently unacknowledged costs of extracting oil from the ground.

“Crude,” in other words, investigates the local manifestations " cancer, contaminated water, cultural degradation " of a global problem. It also, more by what it shows than what it says, suggests that such a distinction is no longer tenable.

Multinational corporations (like Chevron, this film’s designated villain) move money and commodities from one place to another, often with slight regard for the sovereignty or customs of any place in particular. And so the lawyers and activists who oppose these conglomerates have tried to become equally mobile and adaptable, moving continually in the zigzagging paths traced by transnational capitalism.

Even as “Crude” dwells on a single, relatively small slice of territory (about the size of Rhode Island), its action shifts from muddy villages in Amazonia to law offices and shareholders’ meetings in the steel-and-glass cities of North America, drawing into its purview a motley cast of scientists, human rights crusaders, civil servants and international celebrities.

Like almost every other recent documentary on a politically charged topic, “Crude” does not pretend to neutrality. Yet while Mr. Berlinger’s sympathies clearly lie with the oddly matched pair of lawyers " Steven Donziger, a big, outgoing American, and Pablo Fajardo, a wiry, diffident Ecuadorean " who are consumed by the now 16-year-old suit against Chevron, he is fair-minded enough to include rebuttals from the company’s executives and in-house environmental scientists.

And since this is, in part, a courtroom drama, both sides have a chance to be heard. The Ecuadorean practice of conducting parts of the trial in the field generates some oddly theatrical moments as lawyers deliver florid, impromptu speeches al fresco, in front of huts or at the edges of waste sites.

Too many filmmakers seem to think that a noble cause, a good heart and a digital video camera are all that is required for an effective documentary. Luckily, Mr. Berlinger has both a strong narrative instinct and a keen eye for incongruous, evocative and powerful images. His previous work includes the thoughtful true-crime stories “Brother’s Keeper” and “Paradise Lost” and also the superb heavy-metal psychodrama “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster.” What these films have in common with one another, and with “Crude,” which Mr. Berlinger worked on for three years, is a strong sense of character and an openness to the unexpected.

Even as this film presses its muckraking agenda, it does so with a welcome sense of human foible and contradiction. Mr. Fajardo, who worked in the oil fields as a young man, blames Chevron (current owner of Texaco, which opened up his home region to drilling) for many of the ills that have befallen his family and his people. In the course of “Crude” he becomes something of a star in the Western news and entertainment media, profiled in Vanity Fair, showered with awards and posing for pictures with Sting after a benefit concert.

Meanwhile, Chevron’s Ecuadorean lawyers portray the suit as a money-making scheme bankrolled by a Manhattan law firm, and base their defense simultaneously on appealing to national pride and blaming the state-run petroleum company, which took over from Texaco in the early 1990s. The case takes an interesting swerve when Rafael Correa, a young economist with populist tendencies, is elected Ecuador’s president and publicly supports the plaintiffs’ position.

But “Crude” presents no easy resolution, since the legal struggle " and the public relations war between big companies and those who feel preyed upon by them " is unlikely to end soon. Behind that conflict lies a long and complicated history, and ahead of us lie many more documentaries similar in tone and spirit to this one. We can hope that at least a few of them are as intelligently and artfully made.

Sarah the cheetah from captivity has been clocked as the world's fastest mammal.

Go to site for links to the videos.

http://buzz.yahoo.com/buzzlog/92995?fp=1

Cheetahs always win.

Usain Bolt may get his share of million-dollar jackpots for being a world champ sprinter, but he's got nothing on 8-year-old Sarah. The Cincinnati Zoo's cheetah ambassador just beat the 2001 land-speed world record for mammals.

A male cheetah in South Africa covered 100 meters in 6.19 seconds. Sarah didn't beat that just once, but twice: She first clocked in at 6.16 seconds and then 6.13 seconds"which, by the way, bested Bolt's August sprint by more than 3 seconds. And that's from a girl who has been in captivity pretty much her whole life.

Sarah's feat helped call attention to the species' endangered numbers. According to the zoo, the spotted felines' population has dropped from 100,000 back in 1900 to about one-tenth that number. Cincinnati has been doing its part to nurture more cubs than anywhere else. Not so coincidentally, the zoo was home to another record holder: Moya, who died this past January, held the title for a year before his brother Nyana (over in South Africa) snagged it. Now Sarah's got bragging rights.

She may not rest easy for long. Zaza, an 8-year-old female in South Africa, will be throwing down the gauntlet over in South Africa when the weather clears up, either later this month or in early October. Meanwhile, here are two videos of Sarah's sprint"a quickie AP version and the Cincinnati Zoo's longer one.

Earthjustice, an environmental group that is leading the legal case for continuing to protect the wolves, argues that renewed hunting could (likely will) disrupt the flow of wolf populations between Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.

Doug Honnold told the Idaho Statesman newspaper: "It's the endangered species that need to be protected, not the states' rights to kill wolves."


Court Finds Wolf Delisting is Likely Unlawful; Declines to Stop Wolf Hunts

http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2009/wolves-09-09-2009.html



http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

cl.i.c.k.ed

it's the weekend!

Izzzz - I thought you would probably catch that irregular flick of my click. Good going.....!! What a cathc.... those theings don't ahppen that oftne ya iknow...

Grin...........

ehBeth is right. My Patti is giving me a surprise vacation beginning tomroroww. hehehe We are flying to Albuquerque, NM and after a couple of nights rest from that trip - we go to Taos, NM - and will be spending the next five days in the same casas that O'Keefe, D H Lawrence and Kit Carson stayed at - at variously different times in history of course. Carson is still buried in the Kit Carson Cemetary there (what a coincidence!!). Then, back to Santa Fe for two nights - and on to Albuquerque again for the last two nights before returning. I will be getting my exercise - Patti is in a wheelchair now and this will probably be the last trip like this we do together. We will ride the longest tramway in the USA up the mountain at Sandia to have dinner at the restaurant on top of the mountain (that's where, in 1969, I had my very first taste of lobster)........... Wow!! what a start - and unusual place to taste lobster for the first time........

See ya'all in tha mornin.....

The trip sounds like it will be marvellous.

The story about lobster at the top of Sandia you were a courageous man!

I hope you and Patti have an extraordinarily happy trip.

Love ya both.

Sumac, I must be ready for a tombstone now - back in the early 1960's I worked as a Roughneck on an oilwell drilling rig. My job at that point was as the 'derrick' guy. That's the man up in the tower doing the right stuff to get the pipe in and out of the hole in the ground. One day as I was in the rig about 120 feet above ground level - I felt the rig start to shake - then heard what sounded like a freight train coming down the mainline tracks - then the oil started to shoot out of the hole and right past me on up and out the top of the rig. All the guys on the floor just jumped ship and ran. I was caught without an escape - so, I crawled to the upwind side of the gusher and crawled down the rig - finally, on the ground, totally soaked with oil, I went under the rig and started to turn the handle that would stop the oil from gushing out. Just about when I had it turned off another guy came back to help. That was a good thing because I was tired.

That was when I was young.

-----------------------

Fast back = thanks ehBeth. It was good lobster.

What a wonderful trip you and Patti are having. Wish I could be a mite on your jacket. We willl expect a detailed report, with photos.

By the by, did you know that : "In Bhutan, people are cutting down too many trees to make prayer flags " a problem that officials in the Himalayas' last Buddhist kingdom are saying is a threat to national happiness. Bhutan's constitution, which emphasizes the importance of Gross National Happiness over Gross Domestic Product, stipulates the country must have at least 60 percent forest cover."

Danon, your roughneck days sounded exciting.

For all dog lovers:

September 13, 2009
Grrr, Sniff, Arf
By CATHLEEN SCHINE
Skip to next paragraph

INSIDE OF A DOG

What Dogs See, Smell, and Know

By Alexandra Horowitz

353 pp. Scribner. $27

The literature about dogs is not quite the same as the literature about, say, Norwegian rats. Dogs get the literary respect: there are brilliant memoirs about dogs like J. R. Ackerley’s “My Dog Tulip” and Elizabeth von Arnim’s “All the Dogs of My Life”; there’s James Thurber and Virginia Woolf and Jack London; there’s Lassie and Clifford and, of course, Marley. White rats, on the other hand, get most of the scientific attention. Alexandra Horowitz’s “Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know” attempts to rectify that situation, exploring what science tells us about dogs without relegating our pets, emotionally, to lab rats. As a psychologist with a Ph.D. in cognitive science, as well as an ardent dogophile, Horowitz aims “to take an informed imaginative leap inside of a dog " to see what it is like to be a dog; what the world is like from a dog’s point of view.”

Her work draws on that of an early-20th-­century German biologist, Jakob von Uexküll, who proposed that “anyone who wants to understand the life of an animal must begin by considering what he called their umvelt . . . : their subjective or ‘self-world.’ ” Hard as we may try, a dog’s-eye view is not immediately accessible to us, however, for we reside within our own umwelt, our own self-world bubble, which clouds our vision.

Consider one of Horowitz’s examples: a rose. A human being experiences a rose as a lovely, familiar shape, a bright, beautiful color and a sublime scent. That is the very definition of a rose. But to a dog? Beauty has nothing to do with it; the color is irrelevant, barely visible, the flowery scent ignored. Only when it is adorned with some other important perfume " a recent spray of urine, perhaps " does the rose come alive for a dog. How about a more practical object? Say, a hammer? “To a dog,” Horowitz points out, “a hammer doesn’t exist. A dog doesn’t act with or on a hammer, and so it has no significance to a dog. At least, not unless it overlaps with some other, meaningful object: it is wielded by a loved person; it is urinated on by the cute dog down the street; its dense wooden handle can be chewed like a stick.” Dogs, it seems, are Aristotelians, but with their own doggy teleology. Their goals are not only radically different from ours; they are often invisible to us. To get a better view, Horowitz proposes that we humans get down intellectually on all fours and start sniffing.

Dogs, as anyone who has ever met one knows, sniff a lot. They are, says Horo­witz, “creatures of the nose.” To help us grasp the magnitude of the difference between the human and the canine olfactory umwelts, she details not only the physical makeup of a dog nose (a beagle nose has 300 million receptor sites, for example, compared with a human being’s six million), but also the mechanics of the canine snout. People have to exhale before we can inhale new air. Dogs do not. They breath in, then their nostrils quiver and pull the air deeper into the nose as well as out through side slits. Specialized photography reveals that the breeze generated by dog exhalation helps to pull more new scent in. In this way, dogs not only hold more scent in at once than we can, but also continuously refresh what they smell, without interruption, the way humans can keep “shifting their gaze to get another look.”

Dogs do not just detect odors better than we can. This sniffing “gaze” also gives them a very different experience of the world than our visual one gives us. One of Horowitz’s most startling insights, for me, was how even a dog’s sense of time differs from ours. For dogs, “smell tells time,” she writes. “Perspective, scale and distance are, after a fashion, in olfaction " but olfaction is fleeting. . . . Odors are less strong over time, so strength indicates newness; weakness, age. The future is smelled on the breeze that brings air from the place you’re headed.” While we mainly look at the present, the dog’s “olfactory window” onto the present is wider than our visual window, “including not just the scene currently happening, but also a snatch of the just-happened and the up-ahead. The present has a shadow of the past and a ring of the future about it.” Now that’s umwelt.

A dog’s vision affects its sense of time, too. Dogs have a higher “flicker fusion” rate than we do, which is the rate at which retinal cells can process incoming light, or “the number of snapshots of the world that the eye takes in every second.” This is one of the reasons dogs respond so well to subtle human facial reactions: “They pay attention to the slivers of time between our blinks.”) It also helps explain those ­eerily accurate balletic leaps after tennis balls and Frisbees, but Horowitz lets us see the implications beyond our human-centric fascination with our pets. This is more than a game of fetch; it is a profound, existential realization: “One could say that dogs see the world faster than we do, but what they really do is see just a bit more world in every second.”

Humans are good at seeing things right in front of us, Horowitz explains, because our photoreceptors are centrally located in an area of the retina called the fovea. Dogs do not have foveae and so are not as good at seeing things right in front of them. Those breeds, like pugs, that have retinas more like ours and can see close up, tend to be lap dogs that focus on their owners’ faces, making them seem “more companionable.” In dogs with long noses, often bred for hunting or herding, however, the photo­receptors cluster along a horizontal band spanning the middle of the eye. This is called a visual streak, and those dogs that have it “have better panoramic, high-quality ­vision, and much more peripheral vision than humans.”

As for their hearing, despite a talent for detecting those high-pitched whistles that are inaudible to us, dogs’ ability to “pinpoint where a sound is coming from is imprecise” compared with ours. Instead, their auditory sense serves to help them find the general direction of a sound, at which point their more acute sight and smell take over. As for dogs’ ability to respond to language, it has more to do with the “prosody” of our utterances than the words themselves. “High-pitched sounds mean something different than low sounds; rising sounds contrast with falling sounds,” Horowitz writes. Dogs respond to baby talk “partially because it distinguishes speech that is directed at them from the rest of the continuous yammering above their heads.”

Horowitz also discusses the natural history of dogs, their evolutionary descent from the wolves, but she cautions the reader to pay attention to those wolf traits dogs have discarded along the way. “Dogs do not form true packs,” she writes. “They scavenge or hunt small prey individually or in parallel,” rather than cooperatively, as wolves do. Countering the currently fashionable alpha dog “pack theories” of dog training, Horowitz notes that “in the wild, wolf packs consist almost entirely of related or mated animals. They are families, not groups of peers vying for the top spot. . . . Behaviors seen as ‘dominant’ or ‘submissive’ are used not in a scramble for power; they are used to maintain social unity.”

The idea that a dog owner must become the dominant member by using jerks or harsh words or other kinds of punishment, she writes, “is farther from what we know of the reality of wolf packs and closer to the timeworn fiction of the animal kingdom with humans at the pinnacle, exerting dominion over the rest. Wolves seem to learn from each other not by punishing each other but by observing each other. Dogs, too, are keen observers " of our reactions.”

In one enormously important variation from wolf behavior, dogs will look into our eyes. “Though they have inherited some aversion to staring too long at eyes, dogs seem to be predisposed to inspect our faces for information, for reassurance, for guidance.” They are staring, soulfully, into our umwelts. It seems only right that we try a little harder to reciprocate, and Horowitz’s book is a good step in that direction. But she can be a bit coy and overly stylish in her attempt not to sound too scientific, and to the particular choir to which she is preaching, much of her material will be familiar.

In that same vein, the tone of the book is sometimes baffling " an almost polemical insistence on the value of dogs, as if they’d long been neglected by world opinion. But then Horowitz will drop in some lovely observation, some unlikely study, some odd detail that causes one’s dog-loving heart to flutter with astonishment and gratitude. When researchers, she notes in one of these fine moments, studied the temporal patterns of dogs interacting with people, they found the patterns to be “similar to the timing patterns among mixed-sex strangers flirting.”

Morning all........

sumac, nice and interesting article. I learned recently that the act of passing through a door before the dog expresses dominance. If the dog goes first through the door - the dog feels dominant.

Well, we are off to see the Wizard - and other various parts of New Mexico.

Till later,

danon

as the great Gleason used to say

have a marvelous trip, Dan.

http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

A story from NPR.



t's harvest time for California's winemakers, and no one knows that better than starlings. The grape-loving birds can eat their way through a vineyard pretty quickly. Over the years, wine growers have tried a number of methods to scare the birds away, and some are now turning to an ancient art: falconry.

On one early morning in the Camatta Hills Vineyard, falconer Tom Savory and his crew are on the job.

"The birds, the dog and myself " we are a team," he says. Their small camper truck rolls slowly over the dusty dirt road. Sadie, his dog, sits up front. And behind them, sitting calmly on their own perches, are five falcons.

It's the falcons' job to scare off the starlings in this vineyard, where Savory stops his truck. Only one bird will fly at a time, and this is Fonzie's turn. The peregrine falcon will patrol these 640 acres in a very short time.

The bird knows he'll be in the air soon. His talons grab the falconer's worn leather glove. He adjusts his wings and his brown eyes, glistening gold in the sunlight, scan the surroundings.

"All right, just give him a chance to get his bearings a little bit." Savory waits while the bird adjusts. Then Fonzie launches into the air.

He circles, then lifts upward. Falcons can spot starlings from a half-mile away. Savory has clocked the birds at 150 miles an hour, and when starlings see the bird of prey in the sky, they leave fast. Savory's falcons have been on the job here a few days now, and the larger flocks of starlings have disappeared. Wine grower Hillary Graves says that's a testament to the effectiveness of the falcons.

"Here is a bird that's basically doing what it would do in nature anyways " but for our benefit," she says.

'You Have To Be Born With It'

To scare away starlings, winegrowers have tried everything from shotguns and loud noises to covering the individual rows of grapes with netting. Graves found netting too costly, so before hiring a falconer, she tried propane cannons. The neighbors didn't like that at all. And the smart, grape-loving starlings learned fast.

"They'd hear the sound, fly away, and when the gun went off, they came right back," she says.

Cost and sustainability are what's driving some prominent vineyards to use falconers for bird abatement " including E.&J. Gallo, one of the largest wine producers in the state.

But falconry is not an easy job. It takes five years to become a master falconer, including a two-year apprenticeship.

"As much as some people try, a lot of people don't make it," Savory says. "You have to be born with it."

'A One-Person Animal'

Savory's falcon is now a dot in the sky, along with a red-tailed hawk. Before a territory skirmish can begin, Savory calls Fonzie in by swinging a lure " a tennis ball with pigeon feathers " over his head. The falcon is now out of sight, but Fonzie can still see and hear Savory " and knows his whistle.

"They are generally a one-person animal," Savory remarks. With a whoosh, Fonzie swoops in and alights on Savory's shoulder. He feeds the falcon raw quail meat by hand.

During his 40 years as a falconer, Savory has developed a special relationship with the birds. "Flying the falcons, I feel I am the observer of something that is very grand," he says.

The sun is now directly overhead. Savory will return in the late afternoon to fly his birds again. And so it goes, every day " until the final harvest.

it premiered this week at the Toronto International Film Festival

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1212966/New-Charles-Darwin-film-controversial-American-audiences.html

I didn't realize that things were that bad. Living in the Bible Belt, I am used to such views but I can't believe that they couldn't find one distributor. I am ashamed of this state of affairs.