Dog Population & Dog Sheltering Trends in the United States of America

The pet overpopulation problem in the United States has changed significantly since the 1970s. The purpose of this review is to document these changes and propose factors that have been and are currently driving the dog population dynamics in the US. In the 1960s, about one quarter of the dog population was still roaming the streets (whether owned or not) and 10 to 20-fold more dogs were euthanized in shelters compared to the present. We present data from across the United States which support the idea that, along with increased responsible pet ownership behaviors, sterilization efforts in shelters and private veterinary hospitals have played a role driving and sustaining the decline in unwanted animals entering shelters (and being euthanized). Additionally, data shows that adoption numbers are rising slowly across the US and have become an additional driver of declining euthanasia numbers in the last decade. We conclude that the cultural shift in how society and pet owners relate to dogs has produced positive shelter trends beyond the decline in intake. The increased level of control and care dog owners provide to their dogs, as well as the increasing perception of dogs as family members, are all indicators of the changing human-dog relationship in the US.

Dog management in the United States has evolved considerably over the last 40 years. This review analyzes available data from the last 30 to 40 years to identify national and local trends. In 1973, The Humane Society of the US (The HSUS) estimated that about 13.5 million animals (64 dogs and cats per 1000 people) were euthanized in the US (about 20% of the pet population) and about 25% of the dog population was still roaming the streets. Intake and euthanasia numbers (national and state level) declined rapidly in the 1970s due to a number of factors, including the implementation of shelter sterilization policies, changes in sterilization practices by private veterinarians and the passage of local ordinances implementing differential licensing fees for intact and sterilized pets. By the mid-1980s, shelter intake had declined by about 50% (The HSUS estimated 7.6–10 million animals euthanized in 1985). Data collected by PetPoint over the past eight years indicate that adoptions increased in the last decade and may have become an additional driver affecting recent euthanasia declines across the US. We suspect that sterilizations, now part of the standard veterinary care, and the level of control of pet dogs exercised by pet owners (roaming dogs are now mostly absent in many US communities) played an important part in the cultural shift in the US, in which a larger proportion of families now regard their pet dogs as “family members”.

- Full paper here and it great news if the data is reliable. 

Happy Birthday Fluffy!

Montaigne's inspiration and mine as well -  Fluffy turned 6 today!!

Thanks my girl for teaching me everyday the lessons on how to live. 

Freya The Adorable Walrus Was Killed Because Humans (Tourists) Wouldn't Leave Her Alone...

Another example of the insanity of omnipresent and perpetual travel addiction of humans causing pain and suffering.  Most people would say I don't do that - It doesn't matter as long as you are freaking addicted to travel sans self reflection. 

In this case both the travelers and local authorities are to be blamed: 

A popular walrus that attracted tourists has been put down by Norwegian authorities because they said she posed a danger to the public.1

Freya was a 1,320-pound (600 kilograms) female walrus who became popular in the Oslo Fjord, an inlet in Norway, for socializing with humans. She was filmed climbing aboard several boats to sunbathe—and then sinking them.2

Recently, Norwegian authorities warned people to stay away from her after sharing a photo with her alongside a large crowd. There were reports of people swimming with her, throwing things at her, and getting close for photos.3

“The decision to euthanize the walrus was made based on an overall assessment of the continued threat to human safety,” Frank Bakke-Jensen, director general of the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries, said in a statement.1

People still got too close, despite warnings to stay away.

“Through on-site observations the past week it was made clear that the public has disregarded the current recommendation to keep a clear distance to the walrus,” Bakke-Jensen said.

To be clear if you are a travel addict, Freya didn't do anything to harm any human and she was only friendly with sapiens. But yet, they killed her, imagining (premonition/precognition a.k.a minority report movie) she might harm someone because tourists were getting close to her. 

I am sorry Freya. 

 

What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity - Justin Gregg

New book by Justin Gregg, If Nietzsche were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity has reminiscence of Yuval Harari's writings but it looks niche and funny. 

Good review here:

“If Nietzsche had been born a narwhal,” Gregg writes, “the world might never have had to endure the horrors of the Second World War or the Holocaust.” Say what? This seems to be a sterling example of what Gregg calls our species-specific penchant for “unexpected ludicrousness.”

Such rhetorical contortions are probably the consequence of what he derides as our obsession with causal inference. Nonhuman animals get by just fine on “learned associations.” They link actions with results, without having to understand why something is happening. Humans, though, are “why specialists.” We need to look for causal connections — leading to some incredible achievements but also to some bizarre practices. Gregg points to the old medieval remedy of rubbing a rooster’s keister on a snakebite wound.

Gregg studies animal behavior and is an expert in dolphin communication. He shows how human cognition is extraordinarily complex, allowing us to paint pictures and write symphonies. We can share ideas with one another so that we don’t have to rely only on gut instinct or direct experience in order to learn.

But this compulsion to learn can be superfluous, he says. We accumulate what the philosopher Ruth Garrett Millikan calls “dead facts” — knowledge about the world that is useless for daily living, like the distance to the moon, or what happened in the latest episode of “Succession.” Our collections of dead facts, Gregg writes, “help us to imagine an infinite number of solutions to whatever problems we encounter — for good or ill.”

[---]

Leave it to a human to ask a question about justice, which has nothing to say about natural selection, or what Gregg calls “the great arbiter of usefulness.” Humans can agitate for change and even revolution because they can imagine a reality that doesn’t exist. 

World’s Oldest Pot Plant - 250 Years Old!

It is a giant cycad or Encephalartos altensteinii, native to the Eastern Cape province of South Africa and brought to the UK in 1775 by the botanist Francis Masson. In 1848, the Palm House was completed at Kew Gardens and this giant cycad was moved there.

He is toxic all the way through: very spiky, very stoic. We see him as a gentle giant, really – he just gets on with life. When you get to know a person very well, you can tell instantly if they look a little off colour. Caring for plants is the same. As I walk through the Palm House, I’m looking out for how the different plants seem, their colour, texture, the angles of their leaves, and I’m also paying attention to the quality of the air – is it too dry, or too hot?

Some plants are very dramatic, and will droop significantly or start to yellow as soon as something is wrong, but the giant cycad isn’t one of those. He’s more like a grumpy grandfather, who sits by the fire and doesn’t say much except, “Leave me be; I’ll be fine.” He just keeps on growing, slowly, approximately 2.5cm a year. Today, he’s about 4 metres long, and held up by a series of metal supports so his trunk doesn’t break.

Over the winter we probably water him once a week, and in the summer months he’ll get a little bit more. We’ll water him all the way through his pot, give him a good soak, which is a useful tip for most pot plants – give them a good soak through the pot rather than sprinkling a bit of water on top. Apart from that, he gets sprayed with water every morning like all the other plants, and is fed every week with fertiliser. It is sometimes seaweed-based but we like to change it up so the plants get all their minerals. Though generally we just leave him to do his thing.

It’s unavoidable in this line of work to personify plants and begin to feel for them. I think that’s something that humans always do. You might remember that one plant flowered fantastically one year, but then the next year it doesn’t do so well, and you think, “Oh god, what’s wrong?” So there is some anxiety. But equally in horticulture there’s a requirement to be detached – because something will always go wrong. Plants will decide whether or not they want to grow. And there’s nothing we can do about it. We just have to get over it.

- More Here

Happy Birthday Garph!

My little buddha turned five today! 

10 Great Reasons to Let Bivalves (Oysters, Clams, Scallops, & Mussels) Live

• If eyes are windows to the soul, then scallops are very soulful. They have eyes all over their bodies to help them see and escape from predators.
• We don’t know yet if bivalves can feel pain, but if they do, an order of oysters by the dozen means a lot of suffering on one plate. Wouldn’t it be worth bypassing bivalves?
• Clams can live to be 35 years old, but most are harvested at just 2 years of age.
• All we are saying is give seas a chance. As oysters, clams, and mussels suck in ocean water to feed on bacteria and phytoplankton, they also ingest pollutants and other harmful chemicals and send the clean, filtered water back into the sea. One oyster can filter 50 gallons of water a day.

Like every other animal, oysters, clams, mussels, and scallops play a vital role in the ecosystem, and eating them has damaging consequences. So, let’s protect these little ocean do-gooders instead of being shellfish!

- More Here

Soft Fascination

Soft fascination is a key but underexamined element of Attention Restoration Theory (ART). According to ART, attending to softly fascinating stimuli not only requires little effort but also leaves mental space for reflection. We propose that soft fascination can be characterized as the interaction of both attentional effort and mental bandwidth and hypothesize that the restorative potential of everyday activities can be categorized based on this interaction. In an online survey, 398 adults rated four activities on Mental Bandwidth (MB), Perceived Restorativeness (PR), and preference. Supporting the hypothesis, the results showed that walking in nature was perceived as softly fascinating, whereas watching television was a source of hard fascination. Furthermore, PR, but not MB, was highly correlated with preference. Findings are discussed in the context of developing a measure to help people better anticipate activities that may or may not be restorative.

- Full paper, Attention Restoration Theory: Exploring the Role of Soft Fascination and Mental Bandwidth

Can We Think Without Using Language?

This is huge! 

Thank goodness, Indirectly, it's a small step towards elimination of animal suffering.  

I was never a fan of Noam Chomsky; he is one of the paragon of what Taleb  calls "intellectuals yet idiot" and elitists like him are bound to be suckers in time. 

Good news here:

Humans have been expressing thoughts with language for tens (or perhaps hundreds) of thousands of years. It's a hallmark of our species — so much so that scientists once speculated that the capacity for language was the key difference between us and other animals. And we've been wondering about each other's thoughts for as long as we could talk about them.

"The 'penny for your thoughts' kind of question is, I think, as old as humanity," Russell Hurlburt, a research psychologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who studies how people formulate thoughts, told Live Science. But how do scientists study the relationship between thought and language? And is it possible to think without words?

The answer, surprisingly, is yes, several decades of research has found. Hurlburt’s studies, for instance, have shown that some people do not have an inner monologue — meaning they don't talk to themselves in their heads, Live Science previously reported. And other research shows that people don't use the language regions of their brain when working on wordless logic problems.

For decades, however, scientists thought the answer was no — that intelligent thought was intertwined with our ability to form sentences.

"One prominent claim is that language basically came about to allow us to think more complex thoughts," Evelina Fedorenko, a neuroscientist and researcher at MIT's McGovern Institute, told Live Science. This idea was championed by legendary linguists like Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor in the mid-20th century, but it has begun to fall out of favor in more recent years, Scientific American reported.