Furry Critters

For regular readers of this journal, today I learned that my mother's "boyfriend" is named Tony.  She was gone again today when I got to Atria, but an aide found her and brought her to her apartment.  We visited for awhile and then she got up and went outside again.  I also invited her again to join us for dinner on Easter and she said she'd have to see how things go.

Tonight we watched a Nature special on beavers.  My heavens!  I had no idea what beavers did and how important they are to the environment.

They are incredibly industrious and as I watched them building a dam, I was taken back again to my Catholic grammar school training where we learned that humans are superior to animals because we have the ability to think and to use tool.  They chew through even big trees to fell them, they cut them up to manageable sizes and drag them to the water, they pile the sticks up, using moss and mud to hold it in place and then getting rocks to make sure the mud doesn't slide back into the water again.

  

Now if that isn't thinking and using tools, I sure don't know what is.  Also, when they build the dams in a location that is inconvenient for humans and the humans tear it down during the day, it will be back up the next morning, since the beavers work apparently 24/7.

They build underwater dens where they store food for winter and live with other rodent-types throughout the bad weather. 

Males and females mate for life and apparently mom stays home and keeps the nest while Dad and the kids keep the dam built and sturdy.

I found the whole thing endlessly fascinating, but then I do love me a good Nature special.

I don't know why I'm such an animal nut.  None of my kids inherited my love for animals.  They like animals and each has his or her pet, but none of them has the passion that I have.  Maybe it came from wanting a pet so much all my life and not being able to have one until Walt and I were married.

But if it has fur or feathers, I am fascinated.  I love watching the specials on TV, sitting and watching birds hopping around the garden at Atria, watching the squirrels playing in the trees in our back yard.

I'm not the kind of person who has to be touching a furry critter, though it's nice if they come up to me begging to be petted.  But I love being around any sort of animal and just watching it.  Noticing things about its behavior and interaction with other animals of its species.

I have mixed feelings about Zoos.  I know they do good work in preserving the species and allowing people to learn about animals, but when I see animals like big gorillas or elephants in small enclosures, on concrete, without the family that is such a big part of their lives in the wild, I just want to apologize to them for watching them.

When I was a kid and we drove to visit my maternal grandparents in the days before highways, we passed a paddock where there was a mare and her young foal.  We had to stop there every time and watch the baby grow up.  Naturally, because I am so good at picking names, I called him "Brownie."

One of the great thrills in my life was being able to walk around in the kangaroo enclosure of the animal park at Caversham park in Western Australia.  Having kangaroos literally hanging off of you begging for food was such fun.

I'm glad I love animals.  There is almost always something on TV about some animals somewhere.  Not too fond of the cold blooded ones, or insects (though those can be fascinating too), but the rest are just a delight.  Anybody ever watch Meercat Manor?

Cogito ergo Sum

News from New Zealand: 

New Zealand has just set a great example to the world by recognizing what animal lovers have known forever- that our furry friends are as sentient as we are, and (obviously, dur) they have feelings just like we do. It’s a theme we have covered time and again here at True Activist, but this landmark ruling by NZ is the first time this shift in perception and policy has been extended to all animals, not just chimpanzees, orangutans, or dolphins.

The Animal Welfare Amendment Bill, passed last month, aims to make it easier to prosecute people in animal cruelty cases, as well as banning animal testing and research.

Animal rights activists have celebrated the decision. “To say that animals are sentient is to state explicitly that they can experience both positive and negative emotions, including pain and distress,” said Dr Virginia Williams, chair of the National Animal Ethics Advisory Committee. “The explicitness is what is new and marks another step along the animal welfare journey.”

The sentient-ness of animals has been an interest of mine ever since I read that Alec Ramsey and The Black could communicate on a non-verbal level in "The Black Stallion" back in grammar school.

In Catholic school we were always taught that only humans could really think and feel.  We were the higher species because we could use tools.  But ever since Jane Goodall moved in with the chimps, we have learned that not only chimps but lots of other animals use tools.  No one watching movies of Goodall with her chimps or Dian Fosse with the mountain gorillas could deny that these were sentient beings.

I started following the tales of Koko the gorilla, originally the project of then-Stanford PhD candidate Penny Patterson in 1972.  It was to be the first ever project to study linguistic capabilities of gorillas.  Koko's story is incredible, her ability to learn sign language and to begin to communicate with humans, not only displaying, but expressing her feelings.  There is nothing sweeter than her desire for and her delight in getting a kitten she named "All Ball."  

The history of Koko is nothing short of amazing and she has made friends with countless celebrities in her life, including Robin Williams, who made her smile for the first time since the death of her partner, Michael, 6 months prior to her meeting Williams.  When the news of Williams arrived and Koko understood that he was gone, Koko cried.

It's no secret here of my love for and fascination with elephants and learning all about them.  I am presently reading "Elephant Memories, Thirteen years in the life of an Elephant Family" by Cynthia J. Moss.  It's not the first book about elephants I have read, nor will it be the last.  Moss's observations of elephants in Amboseli Natural Park leave no doubt about the intelligence of these animals, their ability to form close family connections, their feelings of joy and sadness.

And the latest book I read is called "Alex the Parrot" and details the 30+ relationship between an African grey parrot and the scientist, Dr. Irene Pepperberg, who chose to work with him  At the time of his death, Alex not only had a speaking knowledge of more than 100 words, but was able to express himself, to make up his own words for things (would not say "apple," for example because it tasted to him like a combination of a banana and a cherry, so he called it a "banerry").  He was labeled "the smartest bird in the world" and at the time of his death, there were obituaries world-wide, including a full page in the New York Times.

Reading the extraordinary reports such as those I mention here, but just looking at my dogs, who know when I am going to leave the house while I am still sitting at my computer typing shows that, really, there is no such thing as a "dumb animal."

And then I watch Republican television debates and wonder.....

Thursday Thirteen

Thirteen letter animals

1. A is for Appaloosa
2. B is for Blue Whale
3. C is for Capybara
4. D is for Dingo
5. E is for Elephant
6. F is for Ferret
7. G is for Giraffe
8. H is for Hedgehog
9. I is for Ibis
10. J is for Jackass
11. K is for Kangaroo
12. L is for Lorikeet
13. M is for Meerkat

Tools

Warning: Geeky stuff first, then more normal stuff after...

I made a video today with Adobe Premiere Elements. I bought the program a long time ago, inspired by the good stuff Ned's been doing with it. But the older I get, the more difficult it is for me to retain stuff and to "get" stuff and so I haven't really done a lot with it.

Ned came over and worked with me for a day and I thought I'd absorbed a lot, but after he left, I realized I hadn't. Things don't stick in my brain like they used to, which is very frustrating.

However, I have this new camera and it takes nice video, but I can't convert this high def video to a format where I can edit it in my very basic Windows Movie Maker. I knew I was going to have to learn Elements in order to be able to edit the videos.

Today I sat here and willed myself to do something with Elements--and I did. I managed to get a video put together, after great frustration, I was even able to add transitions (those soft fades that I use between scenes) and I was able to save the video into an .avi format.

But the .avi format was 962 MB in size (the hard drive on my first computer was 60 mb) and I am still of the era when compressing video down to a smaller size was very important. I was able to bring my Elements video into Movie Maker and got it compresssed down to about 11.8 MB. I don't know if compression is as important today as it was years ago when I first started posting videos, but old feelings die hard.

But I'm proud of myself for having taken the video tools available to me and figuring out how to make them work for what I wanted to do.

(I didn't post the video because it was the complete video of Ashley's going-away party and I posted the unedited, uncompressed short version a couple of weeks ago)

I am old enough that when I took biology classes in school--even in high school--we were taught that the thing that separated man from the animals was tool making. Human beings were the only animals who had figured out how to use tools.

Today we know better.

I'm not sure if Jane Goodall was the very first person to discover that chimpanzees use tools, but if she wasn't the first, she was probably the first person that people actually paid much attention to. On 60 Minutes Sunday night, they interviewed her, returned to her Gombi preserve, and showed early films she had made which showed chimpanzees using twigs to retrieve ants from a log.

She said that she had gone into her project originally intending to find out that chimpanzees are just like human, only kinder. But after watching chimps attack other chimps, and after being nearly killed by one of the groups she had been studying for a long time, she sadly realized that chimpanzees are just like us, warts and all.

After 60 Minutes we watched a Nature special called A Murder of Crows (according to James Lipton's book "An Exultation of Larks," a group of crows is called a "murder of crows).. If you can find it, watch it. You'll be amazed. Crows are incredibly intellligent birds. For example, they learned that the best way to crack a nut was to drop it from a height onto concrete. They learned exactly how high to fly so that it dropped by just cracking, not shattering the outer shell, so that the nut remained whole. More than that, in this particular place, the concrete was on a street and they learned to time their drops with the stoplight, so that when cars stopped for a red light, they could drop the nuts, fly down and get the meat out before the light changed.

There were several such examples, but the one that boggled our minds was a crow who learned how to use a stick to get a treat that was left in the back of a cage. He would pick up a stick that had been left some distance from the cage, take it to the cage, stick it in, pull the treat forward and eat it. They later made it harder. The stick he picked up was too small, but there was another cage that had a larger stick in it, so the crow used the small stick to get the larger stick, and then the larger stick to get the treat.

I just love stuff like that and you see over and over and over again how much more intelligent animals are than we thought they were.

Proof of how animals are far more intelligent than we dumb humans are is that you won't find a single animal running for public office or spending zillions of dollars trying to buy power and prestige and boring the heck out of other people who are forced to listen to their stupid messages over and over and over again.

Lucky animals.

Dominant Humans?

I love National Geographic specials and often record them to share with Peggy, who also loves them. Last night I finally got around to watching one on Elephants that I had recorded a few weeks ago, but had not yet watched.

This morning I watched a video on Kangaroos that Peggy sent to me.

Both videos deal with a year in the life of a herd of each respective breed of animal.

I can't watch these videos without thinking about the things that I was taught in Catholic school when I was growing up. Things about man's dominion over the animals, about how human beings are the only species who have mastered the use of tools. About how animals rely on instinct and have no real emotions.

Maybe it's because it was the 40s and wildlife photography had not yet come into its own, but I defy anybody watching any wildlife special to believe any of that stuff.

I have always stood in awe of elephant societies and how organized they are. Watching reports of rogue elephants or elephants rampaging through towns and destroying them make me angry because it is we humans who have eroded their lands, leaving them little choice by to try to find something to eat in places where they once roamed (and fed) freely. It is we humans who have "tamed" the elephants, put them in zoos where they stand on hard concrete for decades at a time, or put them in zoos where they are made to perform tricks.

When you study elephants (and I admit that I have not studied elephants extensively), you realize what social animals they are and how they learn from each other and help each other and to stick them away in some zoo with one or two other animals, or chain them for years at a time so they can't get into trouble is simply creating the problems that we see result.

One of the most poignant moments in the elephant video concerned the movement of the herd at a watering hole. It was night and the hyenas were looking to feed on whatever weak member of the group they could find. A new baby had been born the day before and all the elephants in the group surrounded her and protected her. But they came upon a newborn who had been abandoned by another group. The baby was crying and crying and the hyenas were getting ready. The elephant herd rejected the baby and chased it away and moved on. The baby's cries were so anguished that I was nearly in tears myself, when all of a sudden the entire herd turned around, came back and swept the baby into the herd, to be adopted by the matriarch, who had just given birth to her own baby.

Later in the video, one of the babies slips down the side of a riverbank and gets mired in the mud. It was during an uneasy standoff between the herd of elephants and a herd of water buffalo over who would have first crack at the water. When the plight of the baby became known, the elephants divided themselves into two teams, one of which held the buffalo at bay while the other team struggled to free the baby from the mud which was hold it fast. Two of the elephants wrapped their trunks around his body and tried to lift him upright while another one frantically dug away at the bank of the river, making a ramp so he could climb out. He was saved.

(And I hope you watched this video that I posted awhile ago, about a herd of water buffalo rescuing a baby from both the jaws of an aligator and an attacking pride of lions! One of the most amazing wildlife videos I've seen--and it was caught by some tourist who just happened to be filming at the time.)

At one point in the video an old bull elephant dies and immediately becomes lunch for the hyenas. When the others come upon his bones, they are handled lovingly, carried around, caressed and it is only after every member of the group has said his goodbye to the remains that they moves on again. Who says animals have no emotion?

There is even at the very least curiosity shown to a young buffalo calf who was injured and lies dying. The elephants who pass seem to pay their respects before moving past.

It seems that we humans have a lot to learn from the way that elephants live their lives, with grace and dignity and loyalty to their friends and family.

The kangaroo video was fascinating, watching how babies are born and trained to become adults. I knew that minuscule hairless babies are born and remain in the pouch for several months until they are large enough to get out, but I didn't realize that they had to crawl, unaided, from the birth canal up to the pouch without the mother's assistance.

There is one section where little Jaffa, whose mother was not exactly the best mother, is lost and becomes easy prey for dingos. He manages to survive a dingo attack and his mother finally finds him, but his wounds are too severe. I cried when the little joey died. The narrator said that his mother's cries could be heard in the area for days.

It was interesting watching the young males learn how to box, starting with lessons from their mothers, when they are very young, and then rough housing with peers, and finally lessons from older males who could easily do them serious harm, but don't because they seem to understand that they are teaching the young ones how to defend themselves. It's only when they get old enough to become a mating threat to the leader of the pack that the boxing matches become serious and potentially fatal. But there is a progression from infancy to adulthood and everyone seems to respect it.

I just find stuff like this endlessly fascinating and with each nature special my admiration for the diversity of nature, the intelligence of other species of animals, and especially for the skill of wildlife photographers grows immeasurably.

Everybody has a job

Sheila has an important job. It's her job to keep the guys in that big noisy truck from stealing our stuff that Walt keeps putting out on the sidewalk each Tuesday. She's very good at it. She stands at the window and barks and barks while the guys fiddle with our cans...OUR cans. The very nerve! But eventually they get scared and they drive away. Fortunately, they leave the cans behind and Sheila has done her job.

Every afternoon, she scares that guy with the big leather bag away. She can hear him fiddling with our mailbox and she knows this is a Bad Thing. So she stands on the table and barks and barks and he eventually goes away. Our mail box is secure, thanks to Sheila.

Lizzie has an important job too. It's her job to keep all dogs and people walking by the house from coming to bother us. Sometimes she barks. Sometimes she just leaps at them. One day she knows that glass won't be there and she'll be able to get to them. They look at her and scurry on by without approaching the house. Sometimes if it's a particularly scary dog, she will leap at the window, over and over again. "Go away! Go away!" she barks.

And they do. Lizzie is a good watch dog.

Both dogs work together and they keep all those big noisy machines in the yards around us from coming into our yard. They are very effective. There hasn't been a single lawn mower or leaf blower that has come through our back fence and into our yard (obviously).

Even the birds have their job.

If you leave the bedroom window open at night, there is no need to set an alarm clock because the trees around the house are filled with black crows. Around 5:30 or 6, they start waking up and the cacaphony starts. Such a racket! They are calling to each other, the mother birds are finding worms for the baby birds and calling papa birds to breakfast (at least this is how I imagine it).

Soon, you see rush hour start. In big groups, the birds begin flying out from the trees and out in the fields. They are going to work. The rest of the day the trees are empty of birds (and it's safe to park your car under one!)

If you drive out into the country througout the day, you see all the fields littered with black birds, all pecking energetically at the dirt.

At around 5 p.m., if you're out in the country, you see this swarm of birds suddenly lift off from the field and start flying toward town. If you're in town, you see the birds flying overhead and settling back in the trees, on lightposts, telephone wires, possibly the equivalent of a bird bar, where they go for after-work decompressing before heading home to the trees.

Once again, the racket can be deafening, as they call out to each other, settle in with their martinis and their copy of the evening paper, get the kids ready for sleep and eventually settle down for the night, until it's time to go to work once more.

Crows do not understand "weekends" or "holidays."

Or retirement.