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tracking snow
i collect weather wisdom. today i heard a new one. on the first day it snows enough where you can see your tracks whatever the day thats how many snowfalls you get that winter. here in como its 30, oh for a day of delay and that one on christmas. personally i look at the squirrels. if there skinny and frisky and not to concerned with impending winter i try not to as well. if they chunk up and stay busy stocking it away i look for a bad one. this year they started out skinny and lazy and i predicted a light one. they’ve chunked up some this fall so i’m changing it to a moderate winter with hopefully more snow than ice. most folks have been calling for a bad winter because we had a mild summer. these folks i think just feel we have to suffer sometime. myrtle, the popster’s dog i share a home with, had her first snow. she liked it. i shouldn’t have been surprised, she’s a skinny little dog with big grizzly bear feet and little beady eyes, she’s made for the snow. it was fun watching her play. i was also relieved she liked the snow. i was afraid she just might prefer to shit in the house until spring. but the fall crops are in, garlic and spinach, and most of the leaves are raked, so let it snow. thats what 1000 piece puzzles were invented four.
yawning dogs
Within the last month or so i heard a story on NPR about dogs. It covered a study proving what i had already observed that yawning, which is known to be contagious, is so between dogs and our own naked primates. It also pointed out that yawning is not contagious with folks with autism, theorized to be a lack of empathy. Therefore dogs have empathy. I already knew all of the facts of the story but had not put those things together, though i am not surprised. Dogs are very emotion based. We know from other studies that dogs are more able to identify human emotions than even our close cousins the chimpanzee. To the extent that dogs have consciousness, not being able to pass the Mirror Test they presumably lack self-consciousness, i believe it is built emergently out of emotional processes unlike our forebrain centered consciousness that is presumably built out of administrative functions. Consciousness is an information process and is not to be confused with the biological processes that support it. “When the finger points to the stars the dog looks at the finger”. Self consciousness is more heavily clustered in mammals with fore brains, us, the great apes and elephants(?). But dolphins, and presumably whales though yet to be tested, pass the mirror test and demonstrate other traits of personhood (tool use for ex.- wild-dolphins put sponges on the tips of their noses to root for food in corral). A self-consciouss built out of the mammalian brain is possible. And what of bird self-consiousness? some can pass the mirror test. Consciousness built out of reptilian survival drive. Our consciousnesses, information processes, than probably carry theses subustructures of emotion and drive information systems that have the potential to achieve self consciousness. I welcome any correction on my musings on neruo-science, socio-biology, and philosophy.
Driving Miss Daisy to the Pet Hospital
Recently, my friend Eric asked me to watch his dog Daisy while he went to Puerto Rico. Daisy has often come over to stay when Eric is out of town and I rather enjoy her company. She is a mid-sized black dog, of the type I describe as “default”, where mongrelization has removed any trace of breed type and they just become a dog (they seem to come in black and yellow and their owners always describe them as a lab mix). She has been a farm dog for most of her life and never wore a collar or had been on a leash until she came to stay with us for the winter last year when Eric was experimenting with town living. For all that she is surprisingly well behaved. She sits, which is nice, and knows how to “go lay down”. If a dog is only going to know one trick it ought to be “go lay down”. She’s not much of a winker though. Have I ever mentioned I like to wink at dogs, cats too for that matter, and occasionally birds, although they never wink back. Cats and dogs do surprisingly and once it gets established they will often spontaneously wink at you as a gesture of connection and affection. I learned this from my Mom who used to wink at me as a kid, usually in a group of adults when i was sitting off by myself in a corner feeling like an outsider and a little lonely, as has always been my wont to do. Well when i was away travelling and settling down in Cali for the first time she had taught Tiger (a mongrel of the Benjy type) to wink. It freaked me out when i returned full blown crazy and the dog started winking at me, but a lot of freeky shit was happening then. To pile an aside upon aside one thing i have noticed is that when your crazy its not just in your head, the whole world goes crazy and you are just unfortunate enough to notice. So anyway Daisy was coming to stay for 10 days or so and I was looking forward to it as I have been trying to get going on walking (i’m as big as a house if you haven’t seen me lately) and thought she would help me make my miles. I thought she was a little sickly on arrival with her ribs more pronounced (she’s a trim thing her own bad self). Sarah and I had talked about trying to fatten her up during her stay and if she didn’t put on some pounds suggesting Eric get her checked for worms. A couple of days into her stay she stopped pooping, and spent a lot of time squatting without results. When she puked up her dinner and wouldn’t eat her breakfast I knew their was trouble. I tried Eric’s cell and left a voicemail, unsure of how semi-internation cell phone coverage works. Sarah, Eric’s ex and my housemate, couldn’t track down his parent’s #, so I made an appointment at his usual vet, and Sarah and I speculated on how much Eric would want to spend on Daisy. Eric obviously has some love and a since of obligation to the Daismeister but he got her as a farm dog, a watch animal, a farm implement you have to feed every day or so and pat on the head on occasion. When Eric moved into town with Daisy its become this whole other deal, a big fat hassle. Eric’s not the town dog type, Daisy never went to Puppy School and her Kong is never filled. He seems uncomfortable with poop scooping and even having the dog in the house. As a farm boy myself I understand, its a whole different type of dog lover than the type that sends out pictures of their dog in antlers for a christmas card (no offence intended John the card was lovely, I’m just painting a picture of contrast here). So I said would Eric want to spend $1,000? “Um I don’t know.” What about $500. “Oh yeah, he’d want to spend that”. So I took Daisy to the vet. X-rays showed her distended tummy was filled with trash (she is a notorious trash eating hound). They then did a barium thing to see if their was blockage and sure enough their was. She said Daisy needed surgery or the tissue would die from lack of oxygen and she would die. She said the surgery would be $400, and I agreed. She talked some more explaining the procedure and then said the grand total would be $800. We were already in for $400, and i debated which would be easier to tell Eric, that I wound up an $800 bill or I had his dog killed, and opted on the bill (he could always kill her later and not pay the bill but bringing the dog back from the great beyond seems a little out of his power). So I reluctantly agreed and I reflected on “the bait and switch”, which i understand is under consideration for replacing e pluribus unum on our coinage. A couple of days I picked her up (I didn’t visit her at the hospital she’s just a dog). She had a ridiculous cone on her head which I enjoyed teasing her about and had a case of expensive vet pet food. I also got the bill which was over $1,000. Now missing her estimate by 25% is outrageous. There was no complications or unexpected expenses and this is a super-common procedure so it was bald deception, because she could sense i would have taken the $100 dead dog option had she been straightforward. And this is why i hate veterinarians and our greed driven capitalist enterprise of a society. She is the expert, I am just a nice guy trying to do the right thing. She uses her special knowledge to paint a picture that makes her the most money. I had the same issue when i had a cat (a good winker that i lost in the divorce) and our vet was always going for the add on sale. The final straw was after jacking us for 3 canine leukemia vaccinations (unnecessary for indoor cats i believe, but they guilted us into it) they tried to sell me a test for canine leukemia. I asked: “Is their a cure?” knowing from their previous sales pitch their wasn’t, and they said no. “Then we’d rather not know”. Now, i’m not saying we need a “truth in veterinary care” law or a government ombudsperson to do personal consultations. I’m just saying we as individuals have a sacred duty to honesty, integrity, and fairplay, especially when their is wild disparities in power, and knowledge is power my friend. There are more important things than the bottem line, and quarterly profits be damned, because this sales methodology creates doubt and confusion and these are not good things. Its the same reason I don’t go to the dentist. I just don’t trust them to tell me the truth. No matter what the condition of my teeth i know they are going to hard sell me a procedure i may or may not need. I’ll take my chances with nature taking its course. She can be a harsh mistress but she at least knows how to tell the truth and can give a flying fuck for the bottem line.
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