Dec. 21, 2008(CBS) Can you imagine an orphanage that's a happy place? 60 Minutes couldn't, but then we found one. The kids don't arrive here smiling. Like orphans all over the world, they've been abandoned. They're hungry, sad and desperate. But after a few years, they're healthy, well-fed and happy.

As correspondent Bob Simon reports, this orphanage is for elephants, located outside Nairobi, Kenya. They've been orphaned because their parents - their mothers mainly - have died, or more likely, been killed in the bush.

Poachers kill large elephants for their ivory. A young elephant can only survive a day or two without milk. So, the orphanage's first job is to find the orphans, fly them to the orphanage, and, before anything else, feed them.

The principal of the orphanage, head mistress, head nurse and CEO, is Dame Daphne Sheldrick. She founded the place and has been working with elephants for 50 years.

"This is little Saguta. This is the one that was in a coma," she told Simon. "When she arrived, was on a drip for 24 hours. We never thought she'd be alive in the morning. So she's our little miracle, this one."

But Daphne's problem is that she is caring for too many miracles: poachers are killing more and more elephants for their tusks, and in the process creating more and more orphans.

There are a record number of orphans at the orphanage right now because Daphne says the sale of ivory has been legalized for the first time in ten years. A few African countries have been given the right to sell their stockpiles - more than 100 tons of tusks to China and Japan - and conservationists point out that this is yet another blow to the elephants.

Asked if she sees any correlation between the decision to auction off the ivory and the number of orphans, Daphne said, "We do. Every time ivory is auctioned legally, there's a rise in poaching. And we also see the correlation in the price that's paid to the poacher for illegal ivory."

And that price has gone up. "It's gone from 300 shillings a kilo to 5,000," she explained.

That's about $1,000 a tusk here in Kenya, where the sale of any ivory is still prohibited. Yet the number of elephants killed by poachers this year has increased by 45 percent.

Daphne says it's a scary, frightening rise.

Poachers were behind the death of one elephant whose trunk was caught in one of their snares and she had no way of feeding herself or her six-week-old baby boy. He just couldn't accept the fact that his mother was dead, so he continued trying to suckle. Eventually the keepers got him to drink their milk. They called him Shimba. He was in such bad shape that nobody thought he would survive.

But then Shimba was brought to the orphanage and things started going his way. He's 27 months old now, and he's in very good shape. He's very strong, very muscular, and his tusks are beginning to grow. He never stops eating.

In fact, that is the first love of every one of Dame Daphne's orphans - eating.

The institution has a dining area and that's not all: as 60 Minutes found out when we first dropped by three years ago, it has everything you'd want in an orphanage. There are dormitories - each orphan has a private room. There is also a communal bath and a playground. The regimen at the orphanage is anything but Dickensian. Unlike Oliver Twist, when one of these orphans asks for more, that's what he gets - more.

Ultimately, Daphne finds elephants more sympathetic than people.

Asked what the most extraordinary things is she has learned about elephants, she told Simon, "Their tremendous capacity for caring is, I think, perhaps the most amazing thing about them, even at a very, very young age. Their sort of forgiveness, unselfishness. So you know, I often say as I think I've said before, they have all the best attributes of us humans and not very many of the bad."

Just about the best people you've ever met are the gentle men who work at the orphanage. Keepers, they're called, and they have extraordinary jobs. There's one keeper per elephant. He'll spend 24 hours a day with his charge, seven days a week. A keeper feeds his elephant every three hours, day and night, just like mom would. He keeps his elephant warm, not like mom would, but with a blanket. And when it's sleep time, he beds down right next to his elephant. If he leaves, if ever so briefly, the baby wakes up and broadcasts his displeasure.

The keepers are rotated now and then so that no elephant gets too terribly attached to any one of them. At dawn, the elephants are taken from their dorms out to the bush. They hang out for awhile, play some games; soccer is a favorite.

They days are pretty much the same there, but on Fridays the orphanage becomes a spa, when the keepers give the elephants a coconut oil massage.

"We can't do exactly what the mother can do but we can do something close to that," explained Edwin Lusichi, the head of the keepers. He is the chief elephant man.

"This one here is Lualeni. Lualeni is the oldest female we have, 16 months as well. The tiny one here is Makena," he told Simon. "Always want to be close with Lualeni."

"Yes. Well, they always want to be close to each other and to you, don't they? I'm afraid this interview with Edwin is getting rudely interrupted," Simon remarked.

"Yes," Lusichi replied.

"But there's really not that much to do. They may be little, they may be orphans, but trust me... they're not as little as they look. In fact, I feel like I'm in an elephant sandwich," Simon commented, standing between two elephants.

Perhaps the problem was Simon and the elephants had not been properly introduced. There's a protocol to meeting an elephant: he will offer up his trunk and he expects you to blow in it. That way, he will remember your scent forever. You will never be strangers again.

The orphanage gets distress calls from all over Kenya, from all over East Africa, that a baby elephant is on his own, often because his mother has been killed by a poacher. It is then a matter of great urgency. An orphaned elephant can only survive a few days without its mother. The baby elephant is loaded on to a plane and flown back to Daphne Sheldrick's orphanage, where he'll stay until he's strong enough to go back into the bush.

Dame Daphne has been running the orphanage for almost 30 years. She was born and raised in Kenya, and married David Sheldrick, Africa's leading crusader against poaching. When he died in 1977, she founded the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust.

Daphne saw her mission as saving as many elephants as possible. But she has never permitted herself too much hope. That's because she loses half the elephants that arrive at the orphanage - some from pneumonia, some from trauma. One of the elephants probably witnessed its mother's death and remembers everything.

That's the double-edged sword of having the memory of an elephant: They never forget. "You know, he's still grieving for his elephant family, he's in shock. He's distressed," she explained.

She also said a baby elephant can actually die of grief. "They're terribly, terribly fragile. You've got to try and turn the psyche around, duplicating what that elephant would have had in an elephant family. Touching them, talking to them gently."

"In other words, love?" Simon asked.

"Tender loving care. TLC, and a lot of it," she replied.

Daphne and the keepers may run this place officially, but it's the elephants who are really in charge. For example, when a new keeper is hired, he's on probation for three months. Then, if the elephants like him, he's got a job. If not, he's out.

Asked what he tries to teach one of the elephants, head keeper Edward Lusichi said, "Well, we have to teach them not to be naughty and not to push around with the others. To obey one another, just like you have to do with children, your own children, to respect the others."

And the keepers teach the elephants how to be elephants. There are wild elephant things these kids don't know how to do, since their mother wasn't around to teach them. It's things like covering themselves in dust to prevent sunburn; the keepers do it with shovels until the elephants pick it up themselves.

The orphanage has an infirmary and the doctor had a call to make when Simon visited. One of the elephants was not doing well at all. He had been on antibiotics for two days but could barely breathe.

The elephant's room looked like an intensive care unit. The doctor, Daphne and the keepers didn't leave him for a minute. They did everything they could, but it wasn't enough. By dawn, he was dead.

"How do you manage going through this all the time?" Simon asked.

"Well, you don't have much option, do you? There's another one to look after, and then another one coming, and, you know, you just have to turn the page," Daphne replied.

"And you get attached after one..." Simon commented.

"But I'm not very good at it," she admitted.

"And you're not going to get any better, are you?" Simon asked.

"No, not after 50 years," Daphne replied.

But when she goes out to the other orphans who are doing so well, Daphne did say it brings joy to her life.

It's actually a pretty lush life for these elephants at the orphanage, but it's nothing like a wild elephant. It's not their destiny. So like any good school, this place prepares its students to leave, to get ready for life in the real world, to go back to the wild from whence they came.

Ten years ago, one young female elephant left Daphne's orphanage to go live in the wild. Her name is Mpenzi, and a couple of years ago she became pregnant and decided to go off on her own to give birth, without the protection of her extended family. That was a mistake. Before the sun could set, Mpenzi and her baby were surrounded by a pride of 16 lions.

Keeper Joseph Sauni was called to the scene and captured the events on his still camera. "Mpenzi was standing there, trying to scare off lions with her trunk. But when they came, she tried to push them on this side. Others came from the back. So, she could not do anything," he recalled.

Sauni said Mpenzi didn't have a chance. Asked what was going through his mind while this was happening, he told Simon, "That was so sad. Everybody was crying."

And there was nothing they could do to save the baby. It was a brutal lesson for Mpenzi. Nature has its own laws, and they are a long way from the sheltered world of the orphanage. But this story has a happy ending: just days before 60 Minutes arrived, Mpenzi gave birth to another little girl. The keepers have all come out to cheer her on. They named her A Sante, which in Swahili means, "thank you."

Mpenzi has learned her lesson. This time she makes sure her bundle of joy is surrounded by other members of the family. They help her up when she falls down and rescue her when she tumbles into a mud hole.

So for the moment A Sante will be safe, at least until she grows tusks.





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By Raymond Thibodeaux
Mumbai

In much of India, compassion for animals, large and small, runs deep -- especially with many of Hindu deities taking on animal form. Last month's terror attack in Mumbai took a wrenching toll on human life. But less well-known is the collateral damage of the attack on many of the city's animals.

Many of Mumbai's stray dogs are brought to a kennel, at the city's Bai Sakarbai Dinshaw animal hospital, a charity hospital mainly for stray animals wounded by street fights with other dogs or hit by cars.

But, on the first night of the terror attack, one of the dogs shot by the attackers was brought there. It was a stray dog hit by a stray bullet as gunmen battled with police at the city's main railway station. As bystanders rushed in to carry out the dead and the wounded people, a local newspaper photographer, 28-year-old Shripat Naik, spotted the dog in the station's foyer, bleeding, dazed and shaking.

"Everybody was frightened by that time, so nobody was going to help him," he said. "Everyone was frightened. They just told me that he was long dead so why bother. So I just took him along with me and admitted him into the hospital."

Hospital workers here have named the beige-colored pooch "Sheru," Hindi for Lion-Heart. For them, Sheru has become a symbol of hope in this tragedy. His prognosis? He is expected to recover, the bullet having passed through his shoulder.

That is according to the hospital's lead veterinarian, Dr. J.C. Khanna, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Indian army.

Millions of stray animals, especially dogs and cats, but also cows, roam the streets of Mumbai, almost seamlessly woven into fabric of urban life in India.

Dr. Khanna says it is not surprising that some of these animals were killed, wounded and traumatized during the three-day siege in Mumbai, as the gunman rampaged through the city, spraying machine-gun fire and hurling grenades.

"You see, everyone is crying and worried for the human being, human life," said Dr. Khanna. "Nobody has yet thought about the animals, how much they have undergone trauma, physical and psychological.

In the assault, three trained rescue dogs were killed. The city's police and fire departments gave them funeral honors.

Of the hundreds of pigeons that have become scenic fixture in the square between the Gateway of India and the Taj Hotel, where the gunmen made their last stand, Dr. Khanna says at least 25 were killed and dozens more wounded as stray bullets, bomb blasts, shrapnel and thick black smoke filled the air. He says rescuers tried to save a fruit bat wounded in the attack.

"Ultimately, it is an ecosystem," said Dr. Khanna. "Everyone is connected to each other. If animals are not there, we are not there. So one must care for living creatures whether it is an animal or a human being."

By the end of the siege, the pigeons at the Taj had all but disappeared, adding to the anguish of many who saw them as a blessing. In India, pigeons are symbol of peace. Within three days after the attack ended, they had returned. That, along with Sheru's recovery, are hopeful signs for many here that Mumbai is returning to normal.

By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, December 20, 2008; A08

MUMBAI -- On a leafy hospital campus in this still-scarred city, one of the victims of last month's terrorist attacks is making a recovery. He's a chubby, cream-colored pooch whom workers have named Sheru -- the Hindi word meaning Lion Heart.

Sheru was a stray dog hit by an errant bullet when two gunmen opened fire in a crowded railway station during the first night of the assault. The survival of the aging Sheru, despite a gunshot wound to his left shoulder, has become an uplifting and soothing symbol of Mumbai's recovery to many of the city's anxious and angry citizens. In a three-day siege beginning Nov. 26, 10 gunmen killed more than 170 people and wounded at least 230. They attacked two luxury hotels, a restaurant, a train station, a Jewish outreach center and other sites.

"Some may ask why a dog is being saved when so many human lives were lost," said J.C. Khanna, a retired lieutenant colonel and head veterinarian in the Indian army. "But saving all creatures big and small shows the love and affection for all life that [Mumbai] has shown again and again. Sheru's life stands for something, for all of us getting back on our feet."

Plump, easygoing and almost 10 years old -- a senior citizen in dog years -- Sheru often slept near the pastry case of the Re-Fresh restaurant, a popular eatery in Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, one of the city's busiest train stations. Commuters would feed him leftover fried veggie puffs or sips of milk, workers said.

But on the night of the attacks, the wounded Sheru, hearing gunfire and people screaming, was too terrified to move, said Shripat Naik, 28, a local newspaper photographer who was at the scene and brought Sheru to the city's Bai Sakarbai Dinshaw animal hospital.

"I was clicking photographs when I saw the dog, bloody, dazed and looking so horribly afraid and traumatized," Naik recalled. "I myself was a dog owner. My dog died a year ago. My heart went out to this poor, quivering animal."

On a recent afternoon, Sheru's shoulder was bandaged and a patch of dried blood was visible through the white cloth. Still weak after surgery, he slept with his head resting on his paws.

With fresh water and antibiotics, he was slowly mending in this small, square-shaped kennel, which is housed in the hospital unit of the Bombay Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It's an expansive city campus, with birdcages, chicken coops and donkey stalls, as well as several surgery centers, all in the shade of sturdy banyan trees.

"The bullet had luckily cleared Sheru's shoulder and didn't puncture his heart or lungs. It was like a small miracle," said hospital manager Yuvraj R. Kaginkar.

The hospital is also treating dozens of pigeons whose wings were broken or who suffered shrapnel injuries when gunmen and police battled on the seaside square between the famed Gateway of India monument and the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel.

Some birds died from lack of oxygen after the hotel's historic dome caught fire. The square in front of the hotel is home to thousands of pigeons, who figure prominently in Mumbai postcards and are as much a part of the area's street life as food carts and balloon vendors.

"In India, pigeons are a symbol of peace," said Titoo Singh, a tour guide who often feeds snacks to the pigeons along the glistening waterfront. "When the pigeons came back and when we knew Sheru would be okay, it was a peaceful moment for many residents. It was like a certain normal life, a calm had returned."

In this rattled city, where children are receiving trauma counseling and the city's freshly painted black billboards warn: "Someone needs to protect the city: It all starts with you," Sheru's recovery has inspired residents to bring him dog treats and rubber toys. An anonymous donor has paid for his medical care.

India is home to one of the world's largest populations of stray dogs. Relatively few dogs are house pets here, and most are bone-thin, weak strays that hobble around city streets, sniffing out discarded food.

Recently, India has found a use for dogs in its counterterrorism efforts, putting them to work sniffing for bombs. The number of canine units has doubled in recent years, Khanna said, and three trained rescue dogs were killed during the attack on the Taj hotel. The city's fire departments gave them official funerals.

"Dogs go 100 meters ahead of humans in bomb blast situations. They track militants and have been a real lifeline for us. It shows how important they are," said Khanna, who worked with bomb-sniffing dogs in the disputed region of Kashmir before retiring.

"Ultimately, it is an ecosystem," he said. "Everyone is connected to each other. If animals are not there, we are not there. Sheru has made it. That was good news for all of us."

No one in the world can be unhappy in the presence of a happy dog.

Take Tessa, for instance. She is a big, goofy bundle of undiluted joy.

My wife, Susan, Wally the Dog and I met Tessa one rainy afternoon at Lemoine Point. Let me rephrase that: We met and were set upon by a wet, muddy and happy dog. Tessa was half poodle, half golden Lab and half yellow Lab. (Mathematically, that sounds like a George Bushism, but so what! George has a Scottie, and that makes him OK with me.)

God made puddles for Tessa. Between greetings, she would be sidetracked by every available body of muddy water along the pathway. In she'd splash, just for the heck of it. And, of course, she'd have to reintroduce herself to us with an aren't-I-adorable grin. This assumption was undoubtedly from her golden side. The instant sociability was her poodle lineage.

There Susan and I were, getting acquainted with our new friend-for-life, our hands now wet and gritty from petting Tessa. (Wally the Dog kept his distance; he finds young dogs so, well, immature.) Tessa's ownees tried to apologize for her exuberance and the newly acquired pawprints on our jeans. We tried to reassure them that pawprints on pants were badges of honour for true dog people.

Another friend, Tammy the border collie, was put on Earth to chase green tennis balls. She will fetch balls, sticks, rocks, whatever, until the cows -or, rather, the sheep -come home. A border collie will keep you too busy to get depressed. Who has time to get glum and grumpy?

Jupiter the big black poodle is totally engaging. What with his galloping self-esteem, a simple hello is not enough. "Am I, or am I not, just about the handsomest dog in three counties?" he would say if he could. A poodle's confidence is infectious to the point where if you're a little down in the dumps, you're in grave danger of greeting the next person you meet with the same million-dollar smile.

Natasha the pug is a special case. Here's a dog who's run into too many closed patio doors. With a pushed-in face, neck rolls, a waddling gait and a respiratory wheeze like an old locomotive, Natasha gives meaning to the saying "Beauty is skin deep." Beautiful she is not, except in her own eyes and in those of pug owners around the world -special breeds, both of them. If you feel you've put on a few pounds and have lost that lean and lithe athletic look, and if Natasha the pug deigns to give you the time of day, then you're bound to feel much better about yourself.

Howard the bassett has big brown eyes: so sad and world-wise. The long, floppy ears may be endearing and the stubby, wrinkly legs may be engineering marvels, being responsible as they are for moving and supporting considerable poundage, but those sad, sad eyes! But when Howard assumes that you came from o'er the sea to meet him and him alone, and when he stands on your left foot so as to keep you in petting mode, then you know you were put on this planet for a purpose.

The same with Ludwig the Great Dane. Having grown up with public adoration, and having heard himself being compared a million times to small horses, Ludwig, to his credit, has not let it all go to his canine head. Of course you're his long-lost friend. Why else would he lean his considerable body against you so you have no choice but to make a fuss?

Greta the dachshund, of similar cantilever architecture as Howard, is all business. Her Teutonic greeting will be correct and brief. But at least her acknowledgement of your almost-equality is bound to give your feelings of self-worth a little boost.

I hate to break the news to golden retriever owners. You know that goldens never grow up, don't you? They can't help it. Their two brain cells are both dedicated to happiness. Now I'm not saying goldens are dumb; it's just that their Perpetual Puppy Syndrome is locked in.

Every thesis has a glitch, a small fly in the ointment. Forgive me for saying it, but Yorkshire terriers -they come in pairs -may be that tiny flaw in my theory: namely, that you cannot be unhappy in the presence of a dog. I hasten to add that 99% of the Yorkies I've met have been adorable to the point of making me look silly in public. Though just a little bigger than a large chipmunk, their self-esteem puts them at Irish wolfhound height. The 99% just mentioned give heightened meaning to the word "perky." Like Ludwig the Great Dane, they know how to use their size to work a crowd. To humans, perhaps, the lesson to learn is that if a dog this small is ready, willing and able to take on all comers -to take on the world -then so can you.

That niggling 1% is reluctantly reserved for two yorkies -they come in pairs, like shoes or bookends -we encountered last week. They were a tag team, partners in crime, and ready to tear us limb from limb. But, in search of a positive spin, if you weighed two pounds soaking wet and were still prepared to take no prisoners, then maybe you could stand up to that office bully.

To dog people, I'm preaching to the choir. You know exactly who you are and what I'm talking about. We may not know each others' names but we do know our dogs' names -and that's perfectly OK. We have no qualms about saying, "Oh, look, there's Brandy's mommy" or "I saw Howard's daddy at Canadian Tire this morning."

If you see some weird guy in a parking lot baby-talking a bull mastiff sitting on the passenger seat of a parked truck, that's me. If you're a dog person, you'll understand. Saying "Aren't you just the sweetest widdle thing" to a jowly, salivating monster of a macho dawg is good for my mental health.

¦ Fraser Petrick is a Kingston freelance writer.

December 11, 2008 | Issue 44•50


SEDONA, AZ—After procrastinating for several hours by watching It's A Wonderful Life and old John Wayne movies, former Republican presidential nominee John McCain finally sat down at the computer to type his annual "Christmas Bulletin" to friends and family early this afternoon, but found himself completely blocked. "They say you're never too old to learn," McCain slowly typed before pausing, reading the sentence over, and tapping the backspace key until it was deleted. Forty-five minutes later, after two aborted attempts to compose the letter from the point of view of the family cat, Oreo, and another about what 2009 held in store for the McCain clan, the Arizona senator took a break to make a cup of hot cocoa and listen to the grandfather clock ticking in the background. "Jesus," McCain mumbled. "Jesus Christ." McCain returned to the den around 5:30 p.m., at which point he placed a fresh stack of candy-cane stationery in the printer, stared at the screen for another 10 minutes, and finally decided to go to sleep for a long, long time.

The canine versions of Jimmy Stewart and Rita Hayworth help a Santa Ana psychologist work with children.
LORI BASHEDA
The Orange County Register


There I sat on psychologist Amy Stark’s couch with her sidekick Jim sitting practically on top of me. I had only known Jim for a couple of minutes and already his face was so close to mine.

I could smell his breath as he stared hard into my eyes.

Longingly? Wistfully? Sadly? I couldn’t tell.

I wondered what he was thinking. That I was clearly in need of some counseling? Or was he just wondering if I had a can of Purina in my purse?

Jim is a giant poodle.

Standard poodle is the correct name. But Jim is 4-feet tall from his enormous toe pads to his curly head. That’s only a foot shorter than I am. So to me, he’s a giant poodle.

Rita is not as tall as Jim, and more high strung, but she is friendly.

Rita is also a giant poodle.

•••

It was Rita who greeted me when I walked into Stark’s waiting room the other day in Santa Ana.

On the wall hung framed head shots of Jim and Rita with the title: “Employees of the Month.”

And behind the counter, standing on her hind legs, peering out from behind that little window that doctors offices have, was a rather serious Rita, her front paws resting on the counter like she was about to collect a co-pay.

She was taller than me and her head was the size of a human’s. I laughed nervously, but she just stared at me, all business.

Jim and Rita followed me into Stark’s office, which is really too cold a word for what I found. It was more like someone’s cozy living room with sofas and lots of stuffed animals.

“I want this to be a calm place, because we have to talk about some hard stuff here,” Stark says.

A PhD clinical psychologist, Stark gives court-ordered therapy in family reunification and child custody cases. Most of her patients are kids; kids who have been through the wringer and have an easier time trusting giant poodles than humans.

In Stark’s office, the kids let Rita lick their ears and invite Jim to rest his head in their lap.

“Some of these kids come and lay on Jim if they’ve had a hard day,” she says.

Jim tends to go to whoever in the room is upset. If a different person becomes upset, he moves to that person. Basically, Stark says, “if Jim sleeps through a session, we know we’re doing better.”

When Stark’s young patients use puppets to role play, giving her a window into what might be going on in their lives, Rita and Jim are an attentive audience.

“My dogs love to watch puppet shows,” Stark says. “They cock their heads and get really involved. Sometimes they march behind the chair to see the kid and then go back and sit down and watch.”

By the end of a day, they’re exhausted.

•••

At Stark’s home, Jim and Rita unwind on leather recliners in the den. Stark had to teach them to stop reclining because she was afraid they might hurt themselves.

Jim likes to watch TV. “Oh, he loves the Westminster dog show,” she says. “Every year, he watches the whole thing.”

He also likes dramas. But sometimes they upset him. Once, Jim got so worked up over some actors fighting on TV that his baby sitter (Stark was having a garden tour that day) had to turn the station to the gardening channel.

“I gotta say, sometimes I think Jim is not even a dog. It’s like Jim’s a person and Rita is his dog. Like Goofy and Pluto.”

The dogs spend a few weekends a year with a trainer to brush up on their manners so they’re in control at the office. They also get groomed twice a month; the Park Avenue cut. And Stark brushes their teeth twice a week. To keep them healthy, she feeds them Himalayan berry juice, cranberry extract and vitamin supplements with their Purina.

Stark’s first dog was a Boston terrier she got as a child. His name was Princie. “He was a snarly little thing,” she says. And that might explain why she now gravitates to the large dog.

The first dog she bought as an adult was a black standard Poodle she named Greta Garbo. Stark had Greta trained as a therapy dog and together they would visit hospitals and senior homes.

When Greta died seven years ago, Stark drove to Northern California to look over two new litters of giant poodle pups and returned to her home in Floral Park, an English Tudor with English fairy gardens, with Jim and Rita.

•••

Stark initially gave Jim a different name: Spencer, after Spencer Tracy. But he wouldn’t answer to Spencer. So she switched it to Jimmy Stewart. “Plus he’s tall and lanky and very likable like Jimmy Stewart,” she says.

Rita is named after Rita Hayworth. Once while walking Rita in Laguna Beach, a woman overheard Stark call Rita’s name: “Rita Hayworth, come back here!” she shouted. The woman told Stark she had actually been an old friend of Rita Hayworth’s and that her old friend would have been pleased.

As soon as Stark finishes her book about ballroom dancing (she competes at the bronze level), she plans to write a book about Jim and Rita.

“When you think about it, they hear a lot of stuff,” she says.

The book will be stories about them, the kids they’ve helped and the letters and notes they’ve received, some of which are taped to the back of Stark’s office door. “Jim Rocks,” reads one tribute, in crayon.

It won’t be Stark’s first book. She had a book published in 1992 called “Because I said so.” It was about people taking their childhood dynamics into their work lives and the problems that causes. After the book came out, Oprah had Stark on her couch for a show called “Bosses wives who drive secretaries insane.”

Maybe Oprah can have Stark on again.

The show can be called “Giant poodles save the day.”

Contact the writer: dramystark.com714-932-1705 or lbasheda@ocregister.com

By Jimmy Orr | 12.17.08




Oops. Maybe a pound puppy wouldn’t have been so bad after all…

Everyone knows by now that Joe Biden’s got a new puppy - we talked about this a couple of days ago and it generated a big, heated discussion over whether the Veep-elect should have gone to an animal shelter rather than a breeder to get the Second Dog.

Adopt!

Not surprisingly, animal rights advocates are up in paws - arms about Biden. It’s not that they think the VP-elect would be a bad dog owner, they just don’t like where he got his dog.

Why go to a kennel or a puppy mill when there are plenty of needy dogs out there who don’t have owners, they ask? So many that some four million animals are euthanized every year.

Plus, the conditions at many of these businesses - horrendous.

Cited

Well it turns out the place where Biden got his dog was just cited for multiple violations including: unsatisfactory ventilation, inadequate maintenance and sanitation, and missing sale and vaccination records.

Here’s the kennel inspection report.

Read the rest of the article ...

Twin Cities actors versed in the 'Trek' tongue will perform 'Hamlet' scenes for a special disc
By Dominic P. Papatola
dpapatola@pioneerpress.com


Commedia Beauregard — the guys behind the local annual holiday staging of "A Klingon Christmas Carol" — will boldly go where no small St. Paul theater has gone before: to Hollywood.

More accurately, Hollywood is coming to the Twin Cities this month to film company members performing scenes from that other Klingon classic, "Hamlet."

The footage will be one of the extras in the release of the "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" on Blu-ray Disc. That unveiling is timed to coincide with the May opening of a new "Star Trek" prequel in theaters.

(Note to non-Trekkies: "Undiscovered Country" features Christopher Plummer as General Chang, the Bard-quoting bad guy, as well as the timeless quote: "You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.")

"I got an e-mail from Paramount about three weeks ago," Commedia Beauregard artistic director Christopher Kidder said. "And I delayed as long as I could responding, since I was positive it would be a cease-and-desist order telling us we couldn't do 'Klingon Christmas Carol.' "

But the studio behind "Star Trek" had something else in mind.

"It turns out," Kidder said, "that we are in the unique position of having a crew of actors that can pronounce the stuff."

Though the characters are imaginary, Klingon is, according to its proponents, a fully functioning language, created by linguist Marc Okrand in the 1980s. A translated version of the whole of "Hamlet" exists,but the Commedia Beauregard folks will only do a couple of scenes.

Local actor Garry Geiken will render the timeless "taH pagh, taHbe' " speech — sometimes known as the "to be or not to be" soliloquy. Then he, Kidder (as Horatio) and Matthew Glover will re-create the gravedigger scene.

"That's the one with 'Alas, poor Yorick,' " Kidder said. "They wanted that, because they wanted to use a Klingon skull."

Kidder said he couldn't discuss the particulars of Commedia Beauregard's financial arrangement with Paramount, except to say that for the small company, it is a "remarkably lucrative" deal that will pay the actors and significantly bolster the company's bottom line.

"Negotiating with Hollywood is not what I thought I would be doing when I started a small theater," he said. "And I don't want to be known as the company that just does Klingon stuff. But if it pays for the rest of the season, it pays for the rest of the season."


TOUGH TO TRANSLATE

As with any translation, working English into Klingon is not a precise process. Translating "A Christmas Carol" into the guttural warrior tongue was especially problematic for Commedia Beauregard, since the Klingons have no gods and no Christ, hence no Christmas. The title of the play translates roughly as "Feast of the Long Night Song" and could most closely be understood to be more of a winter solstice carol. Here are a few other translations from "A Klingon Christmas Carol":

A Christmas Carol: ram ni'tay bom

Tiny Tim: tImHom

Bah Humbug!: baQa'

Let it snow!: jupeDmoHpu'

Gift: nob

And in case you were wondering, the phonetic spelling of Christmas in Klingon is QIStmaS.

— Dominic P. Papatola

December 13, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
The Demise of Dating
By CHARLES M. BLOW

The paradigm has shifted. Dating is dated. Hooking up is here to stay.

(For those over 30 years old: hooking up is a casual sexual encounter with no expectation of future emotional commitment. Think of it as a one-night stand with someone you know.)

According to a report released this spring by Child Trends, a Washington research group, there are now more high school seniors saying that they never date than seniors who say that they date frequently. Apparently, it’s all about the hookup.

When I first heard about hooking up years ago, I figured that it was a fad that would soon fizzle. I was wrong. It seems to be becoming the norm.

I should point out that just because more young people seem to be hooking up instead of dating doesn’t mean that they’re having more sex (they’ve been having less, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) or having sex with strangers (they’re more likely to hook up with a friend, according to a 2006 paper in the Journal of Adolescent Research).

To help me understand this phenomenon, I called Kathleen Bogle, a professor at La Salle University in Philadelphia who has studied hooking up among college students and is the author of the 2008 book, “Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus.”

It turns out that everything is the opposite of what I remember. Under the old model, you dated a few times and, if you really liked the person, you might consider having sex. Under the new model, you hook up a few times and, if you really like the person, you might consider going on a date.

I asked her to explain the pros and cons of this strange culture. According to her, the pros are that hooking up emphasizes group friendships over the one-pair model of dating, and, therefore, removes the negative stigma from those who can’t get a date. As she put it, “It used to be that if you couldn’t get a date, you were a loser.” Now, she said, you just hang out with your friends and hope that something happens.

The cons center on the issues of gender inequity. Girls get tired of hooking up because they want it to lead to a relationship (the guys don’t), and, as they get older, they start to realize that it’s not a good way to find a spouse. Also, there’s an increased likelihood of sexual assaults because hooking up is often fueled by alcohol.

That’s not good. So why is there an increase in hooking up? According to Professor Bogle, it’s: the collapse of advanced planning, lopsided gender ratios on campus, delaying marriage, relaxing values and sheer momentum.

It used to be that “you were trained your whole life to date,” said Ms. Bogle. “Now we’ve lost that ability — the ability to just ask someone out and get to know them.”

Now that’s sad.

by Nell Greenfieldboyce




Morning Edition, December 9, 2008 · Dogs have an intuitive understanding of fair play and become resentful if they feel that another dog is getting a better deal, a new study has found.

The study, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looked at how dogs react when a buddy is rewarded for the same trick in an unequal way.

Friederike Range, a researcher at the University of Vienna in Austria, and her colleagues did a series of experiments with dogs who knew how to respond to the command "give the paw," or shake. The dogs were normally happy to repeatedly give the paw, whether they got a reward or not.

But that changed if they saw that another dog was being rewarded with a piece of food, while they received nothing.

"We found that the dogs hesitated significantly longer when obeying the command to give the paw," the researchers write. The unrewarded dogs eventually stopped cooperating.

Scientists have long known that humans pay close attention to inequity. Even little children are quick to yell "Not fair!" But researchers always assumed that animals didn't share this trait.

"The argument was that this is a uniquely human phenomenon," says Frans de Waal, a professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta and a researcher at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center.

That changed in 2003 when he and a colleague named Sarah Brosnan did a study on monkeys. Monkeys had to hand a small rock to researchers to get a piece of food in return. Monkeys were happy to do this to get a piece of cucumber. But the monkeys would suddenly act insulted to be offered cucumber if they saw that another monkey was getting a more delicious reward, a grape, for doing the same job.

"The one who got cucumber became very agitated, threw out the food, threw out the rock that we exchanged with them, and at some point just stopped performing," says de Waal.

In that experiment, the monkeys considered the fairness of two different types of payment. But when Range and her colleagues did a similar study with their trained dogs, testing to see if dogs would become upset if they only got dark bread when other dogs received sausage, they found that dogs did not make that kind of subtle distinction. As long as the dogs got some kind of food payment, even if it wasn't the yummiest kind, the animals would play along.

Dogs, like monkeys, live in cooperative societies, so de Waal was not surprised that they would have also some sense of fairness. He expects other animals do as well. For example, he says, lions hunt cooperatively, and he "would predict that lions would be sensitive to who has done what and what do they get for it."

Taking life seriously: How to preserve your mind, raise intellectual children, be a constructive citizen, and get laid more
By Stanton Peele on December 07, 2008 in Addiction in Society

Practice using your brain cells is now known to extend intellectual life, so that popular programs emphasize cognitive games and memory tasks (e.g., memorize your shopping lists) in order to avoid senioritis. But why seek artificial kinds of mental stimulation when everyday life presents so many opportunities? Here are five ways to not only keep your own mind sharp, but make your children (and grandchildren) keen and your and their lives interesting.

1. Discuss TV shows, movies, and plays. When you leave the movie theater, are your first words, "Where do we eat (get a drink)?" Instead, say the most obvious thing you noticed about the movie, and wait to gather the other person's (people's) reactions to your insight. You may even have to prompt them to speak - they're so unused to expressing their thoughts. You'll be amazed how often they disagree, or have a totally different read on the film. Don't shy away from differences - explore them with a smile. "Isn't it funny how people respond so differently?" And the discussion is on - what facts about the movie led you to your individual conclusions, what about your backgrounds sensitizes each of you to different facets of the film, and so on.

2. Talk about the world with your family. When you read about prominent, powerful people, it's remarkable how often they sharpened their intellectual talons discussing world events around the dinner table or at other family gatherings. This includes every recent president (yes, even George W.! - remember how sharp his brother Jeb is), along with their major critics. Okay, so you don't want your child to be president or a political commentator or columnist. But you do want them to be able to understand and cope with the world around them. And how hard is it to take a headline from the local paper to talk about? - look at all the money you'll save not paying for enrichment courses you send kids to when they should be roller-blading. Finally, it has the side effect of making you think about the world.

3. Practice asking questions. I know, you greet these recommendations as more opportunities for you to aerate your views. Wrong! They depend on your ability to actually carry out a discussion, which in turn requires you to elicit thoughts from your children, mate, and others you know. To do this, you must develop the ability to listen based on an actual eagerness to understand what's on their minds. Thinking, interacting, learning: all depend on how well - how sincerely - you receive thoughts and information from others.

4. Think about people. It's good if you can accept others - God bless humility and forgiveness. But these virtues are in addition to being aware of what your spouse, lover, children, friends are like - how they think, what concerns them, what they fear, what their goals are, how they are similar to or differ from you, what they are like as human beings. If you are lucky, you can discus these things with your significant other. You might want to write such thoughts down in an informal journal or word file (destroy them if you wish). No mental exercise is more challenging emotionally or intellectually - or more rewarding. Not only will it improve your home life, it will make you a better boss, employee, and co-worker and improve your business dealings. Just make sure when you figure something out about someone that you act in accordance with your insights.

5. Remember: thinking is fun. Reading this list may already be making you anxious. Maybe it reminds you of literature and psychology classes and organizational retreats you attended - and hated. But this is your life - you control the agenda, the pace, what you do as a result. Taking ownership of your mind is like following the maintenance procedures for your expensive new automobile or espresso machine. Only now you are dealing with the greatest gift life has given you - what makes you a sentient, constructive, immortal human being. And, oh yes, it'll improve your love life (picture the cartoon by Hardin of Rodin's The Thinker eyeing the lovers in Rodin's neighboring statue, The Kiss, and thinking, "So what's he got that I haven't got?"). Now that's worth thinking about!

November 29, 2008
Wal-Mart Employee Trampled to Death
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN and ANGELA MACROPOULOS


The throng of Wal-Mart shoppers had been building all night, filling sidewalks and stretching across a vast parking lot at the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream, N.Y. At 3:30 a.m., the Nassau County police had to be called in for crowd control, and an officer with a bullhorn pleaded for order.

Tension grew as the 5 a.m. opening neared. Someone taped up a crude poster: “Blitz Line Starts Here.”

By 4:55, with no police officers in sight, the crowd of more than 2,000 had become a rabble, and could be held back no longer. Fists banged and shoulders pressed on the sliding-glass double doors, which bowed in with the weight of the assault. Six to 10 workers inside tried to push back, but it was hopeless.

Suddenly, witnesses and the police said, the doors shattered, and the shrieking mob surged through in a blind rush for holiday bargains. One worker, Jdimytai Damour, 34, was thrown back onto the black linoleum tiles and trampled in the stampede that streamed over and around him. Others who had stood alongside Mr. Damour trying to hold the doors were also hurled back and run over, witnesses said.

Some workers who saw what was happening fought their way through the surge to get to Mr. Damour, but he had been fatally injured, the police said. Emergency workers tried to revive Mr. Damour, a temporary worker hired for the holiday season, at the scene, but he was pronounced dead an hour later at Franklin Hospital Medical Center in Valley Stream.

Four other people, including a 28-year-old woman who was described as eight months pregnant, were treated at the hospital for minor injuries.

Detective Lt. Michael Fleming, who is in charge of the investigation for the Nassau police, said the store lacked adequate security. He called the scene “utter chaos” and said the “crowd was out of control.” As for those who had run over the victim, criminal charges were possible, the lieutenant said. “I’ve heard other people call this an accident, but it is not,” he said. “Certainly it was a foreseeable act.”

But even with videos from the store’s surveillance cameras and the accounts of witnesses, Lieutenant Fleming and other officials acknowledged that it would be difficult to identify those responsible, let alone to prove culpability.

Some shoppers who had seen the stampede said they were shocked. One of them, Kimberly Cribbs of Queens, said the crowd had acted like “savages.” Shoppers behaved badly even as the store was being cleared, she recalled.

“When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, ‘I’ve been on line since yesterday morning,’ ” Ms. Cribbs told The Associated Press. “They kept shopping.”

Wal-Mart security officials and the police cleared the store, swept up the shattered glass and locked the doors until 1 p.m., when it reopened to a steady stream of calmer shoppers who passed through the missing doors and battered door jambs, apparently unaware that anything had happened.

Ugly shopping scenes, a few involving injuries, have become commonplace during the bargain-hunting ritual known as Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. The nation’s largest retail group, the National Retail Federation, said it had never heard of a worker being killed on Black Friday.

Wal-Mart declined to provide details of the stampede, but said in a statement that it had tried to prepare by adding staff members. Still, it was unclear how many security workers it had at the Valley Stream store for the opening on Friday. The Green Acres Mall provides its own security to supplement the staffs of some large stores, but it did not appear that Wal-Mart was one of them.

A Wal-Mart spokesman, Dan Folgleman, called it a “tragic situation,” and said the victim had been hired from a temporary staffing agency and assigned to maintenance work. Wal-Mart, in a statement issued at its headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., said: “The safety and security of our customers and associates is our top priority. Our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families at this tragic time.”

Wal-Mart has successfully resisted unionization of its employees. New York State’s largest grocery union, Local 1500 of the United Food and Commercial Workers, called the death of Mr. Damour “avoidable” and demanded investigations.

“Where were the safety barriers?” said Bruce Both, the union president. “Where was security? How did store management not see dangerous numbers of customers barreling down on the store in such an unsafe manner? This is not just tragic; it rises to a level of blatant irresponsibility by Wal-Mart.”

While other Wal-Mart stores dot the suburbs around the city, the outlet at Valley Stream, less than two miles from New York City’s southeastern border, draws customers from Queens, Brooklyn and the densely populated suburbs of Nassau County. And it was not the only store in the Green Acres Mall that attracted large crowds.

Witnesses said the crowd outside Wal-Mart began gathering at 9 p.m. on Thursday. The night was not bitterly cold, and the early mood was relaxed. By the early morning hours, the throngs had grown, and officers of the Fifth Precinct of the Nassau County Police Department, who patrol Valley Stream, were out in force, checking on crowds at the mall.

Mr. Damour, who lived in Queens, went into the store sometime during the night to stock shelves and perform maintenance work.

On Friday night, Mr. Damour’s father, Ogera Charles, 67, said his son had spent Thursday evening having Thanksgiving dinner at a half sister’s house in Queens before going directly to work. Mr. Charles said his son, known as Jimmy, was raised in Queens by his mother and worked at various stores in the area after graduating from high school.

Mr. Charles said he had not seen his son in three months, and heard about his death about 7 a.m. Friday, when a friend of Mr. Damour’s called him at home. He arrived at Franklin Hospital Medical Center an hour later to identify the body. Mr. Charles said he was angry that no one from Wal-Mart had contacted him or had explained how his son had died. Maria Damour, Mr. Damour’s mother, was in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, but was on her way back to the United States, Mr. Charles said.

About the time that Mr. Damour was killed, a shopper at a Wal-Mart in Farmingdale, 15 miles east of Valley Stream, said she was trampled by a crowd of overeager customers, the Suffolk County police reported. The woman sustained a cut on her leg, but finished her shopping before filing the police report, an officer said.

Anahad O’Connor contributed reporting.

By MOTOKO RICH


For the book industry the question for the forthcoming holiday shopping season may be whether more people are like Francisco Clough or like Jacqueline Belliveau. Both were browsing in the Barnes & Noble on Union Square in Manhattan late last week, but Mr. Clough only looked, while Ms. Belliveau bought her second book in two days.

Dressed in a black suit and carrying a zippered leather portfolio, Mr. Clough, 36, said he had quit his job at a small brokerage firm on Wall Street six months ago. Fresh from a job interview, he flipped through a “Green Lantern” graphic novel but didn’t buy it. “There were probably five books I would have bought if I were not unemployed,” he said.

Ms. Belliveau, on the other hand, bought Carole Walter’s “Great Cookies,” just a day after purchasing Michael Pollan’s “In Defense of Food.” An architect who was laid off recently, she has turned down invitations to travel and downgraded her gym membership. She has found another job, but Ms. Belliveau, 40, is still being careful about expenses — except books. “I like to have a collection of the history of what you read,” she said.

Like many businesses across the retail sector, the publishing industry has been hit by a raft of doom and gloom in the past few weeks. Leonard S. Riggio, chairman and largest shareholder of Barnes & Noble, said in an internal memorandum predicting a dreadful holiday shopping season, as first reported in The Wall Street Journal last week, that “never in all my years as a bookseller have I seen a retail climate as poor as the one we are in.”

Last week HarperCollins, the books division of the News Corporation, reported that fiscal first-quarter operating income had slid to $3 million from $36 million a year earlier, despite its publication of the Oprah Winfrey-anointed novel “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” by David Wroblewski. A week earlier Doubleday Publishing Group, a unit of Random House, laid off 16 people, a 10 percent cut in staff. At the time the company said the move did not presage further layoffs in other publishing divisions, but industry insiders said they would not be surprised to see more.

Also this month Rodale, the magazine and book publisher, laid off 14 people in its book division, a little more than 7 percent of the staff.

Long before the current financial crisis, Borders Group, struggling against online and big-box retailers, had announced it was looking at a potential sale of itself. Given current economic conditions, publishers are nervously watching to see what happens with the company.

Now, most everyone in publishing is bracing for a difficult holiday season while trying to remain optimistic about the enduring allure of books.

“A book is still this incredibly lovely, respectable gift,” said Jamie Raab, publisher of Grand Central Publishing, and is “a lot cheaper than the other luxury items that people tend to buy at Christmas.”

“So we could get lucky and see that it really works in our favor,” she added.

Grand Central is enjoying strong sales of titles by the novelists Nelson DeMille and Nicholas Sparks, as well as of “Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World,” but it also is waiting to see how Ted Turner’s “Call Me Ted,” for which it spent more than $5 million, will sell. Ms. Raab said the company had printed 625,000 copies and had shipped more than 500,000.

With several publishers reporting that booksellers were cutting orders for January, Ms. Raab acknowledged that she was concerned about a post-New Year’s downturn. “You know to a certain extent people will be in the stores during the holidays,” she said. “What will happen once there is no reason to be in the stores?”

Booksellers are trying new tactics to help ring up sales. At Book Passage, an independent bookseller in San Francisco and Corte Madera, Calif., Elaine Petrocelli, an owner, said she recently instituted a policy giving priority seating at book readings to those who purchase the book. Last month she sold 160 copies at a reading by Katherine Neville, author of “The Fire,” a thriller about a chess prodigy.

Still, Ms. Petrocelli said she had noticed an overall decline in foot traffic at her two stores compared with this time last year. As a result, she said, she has decided not to hire holiday-season help. Usually she hires three or four people part time.

Not surprisingly, publishers, too, are looking for ways to cut costs. Print runs are being scrutinized, and companies are trying to reduce the number of unsold copies that are returned by booksellers, a painful practice in the best of times.

Some publishers are also looking at their (famously generous) travel and entertainment budgets. Steve Ross, publisher of Collins, a division of HarperCollins, said he recently took a job candidate for a drink at a Midtown hotel and was shocked by the $22 price for cocktails. “I think it will be awhile before I will have the pleasure of meeting anybody there,” Mr. Ross said.

For now, both publishers and agents said the penny pinching was not yet sinking seven-figure book deals. Although some might be cautious about signing a debut novelist, most publishers said they were still aggressively pursuing deals for celebrity books and others with natural best-seller prospects. Last month Little, Brown & Company signed a deal with the comedian Tina Fey for a sum reported as more than $5 million, and Jerry Seinfeld was out with a book proposal this week that some publishers suggested could go for a high seven-figure advance.

“The paradox is we have to continue to acquire books and compete against each other in a tough marketplace,” said Jonathan Burnham, publisher of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins. “We’re trying to be fiscally responsible about royalty advances, and yet the big books are the books that everybody wants, so we’re still in this climate of having to pay large levels of money in these auctions. You can’t really step away from that.”

Christy Fletcher, a literary agent in Manhattan, said royalty advances for so-called midlist authors could come under pressure. “Something may sell for $50,000 that would have sold for $100,000 a year ago,” she said.

Publishers continue to plan for blockbuster sales of marquee-brand books. Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, for example, has shipped 1.25 million copies of “You: Being Beautiful — The Owner’s Manual to Inner and Outer Beauty,” Michael F. Roizen and Mehmet C. Oz’s next book in their best-selling series of advice titles, which goes on sale on Tuesday. HarperCollins has shipped more than 300,000 copies of “The Hour I First Believed,” the new novel by Wally Lamb. (In March that publisher had announced a first-print run of half a million, though these numbers tend to be exaggerated.)

One silver lining of the downturn: Because many books are not selling as well as they might have in a better economy, it does not take nearly as many copies to have bragging rights about being a best seller.

There still may be something to the theory, much circulated these days, that books can provide an escape from financial misery. When “Gone With the Wind” was published in 1936 during the Great Depression, it sold a million copies in its first year and stayed at No. 1 on best-seller lists for two straight years — before it was a movie tie-in.

Then again, they didn’t have the Internet or television back then. But some publishing insiders suggested that readers might be looking for a respite from the digital world.

“I think that people have not been reading for the past year because they’ve been checking political blogs every 20 minutes,” said Larry Weissman, a literary agent. “At some point I think people are going to say, ‘You know what, this is not nourishing.’ I think and I hope — and maybe it’s just blind hope — I think there is a yearning for authenticity out there, and people are going to go back to the things that really matter, and one of those things, I hope, will be reading books.”

By Jeremy Sherman, Ph.D. on November 25, 2008 in Ambigamy

This Thanksgiving I’m conscious of my gratitude for a great many things. My gratitude is deeply biased, however. I’m unconscious of the things I should be most grateful for. As I mentioned in a recent article, the things that are going most reliably well in my life, I’m not going to notice at all. (Search Declaration of Co-dependence ) My grocery store is the example I used. It cradles me so fully in the horn of plenty that I’m able to ignore it even though I’m wholly dependent upon it.

We know our gratitude by differences. We delight in windfalls. We obsess over intermittent reinforcements, the good things that we hope will be there but we know might not be.
We’re filled with appreciation for the things that we almost hold securely, not the things that are always there for us. Falling in love fills us with gratitude because we’re surprised by it and the differences it makes. We obsess. We wonder if they’ll still love us tomorrow. We fear that they’ll leave us. When they don’t, we’re thrilled and grateful. The passion in love songs is fueled by attention to the difference between having and not having: I’d be lost without you. Baby, never leave me. You’re the difference that makes my life worth living. It’s the tremulous tenuous difference that makes us notice and appreciate.

The poet Philip Larkin writes, “He married her to keep her from getting away; now she’s there all day.” What stands beside you steady as can be is what you’re most likely to take for granted. My parents died nearly two decades ago. To this day I dream more about my father than my mother. They both loved me, but my father’s love was less certain. There was more competition for his love. His love was harder to earn and more complicated by standards I had to meet.

My mother held me deep and steady in her affections. She was my free space on the Bingo board. And how do I repay her? With the ingratitude reserved for those who loved me most consistently.

Gratitude takes noticing. Noticing takes difference. We generate gratitude by positing a difference, by imagining the absence. Some absences loom present enough to make the gratitude obvious. Other absences require that we contrive a vision of life without. Where would I be without my mother, my grocery store? Notice the difference; discover your gratitude. In Frank Capra’s movie “It’s A Wonderful Life,” Jimmy Stewart comes to appreciate his life by imagining the world without it.

And I’m grateful for my ingratitude. Ironically, it’s one of those reliable things I take for granted. But really, where would I be without it? My ingratitude for what comes easily is a gift from mother nature. It’s a highly adaptive trait.

See, attention is finite, and so we invest it most in those things we can improve. If it ain’t broke, don’t waste attention on it. Ingratitude is a prioritizing mechanism. It’s how nature gets us to focus on improving things. We focus on the squeaky wheels, not the ones running smoothly. As a result we can concentrate on fixing the squeaky wheels.

from wikiHow:

You're on the road, and you breathe a sigh of relief when you see that your hotel room has a coffee maker waiting for you. But when you go to brew a cup to enjoy in the privacy of your room, the product is quite...disappointing. Before you speed down to the local coffee shop and squander another fraction of what could be your retirement fund on a latte, try these tips and tricks for better hotel coffee.

from ecorazzi:

So much has been said over the Obama family’s upcoming decision regarding the “first dog” — but long before his road to the White House was clear, the President-elect had already made up his mind to adopt.

Back in 2005, Jana Kohl reached out to Barack Obama regarding dog adoption and her larger campaign to end puppy mills. It was then that the Senator promised Kohl he would adopt if his family ever made the decision to get a dog. In addition, along with 40 other notables, Obama posed for a photo shoot for Kohl’s book A Rare Breed Of Love. His co-star in that photo was “Baby”, a hypoallergenic 3-legged rescue dog and puppy mill survivor. From the release,

Baby, who was rescued from a puppy-mill after nine years of confinement in a cage, cannot bark because her vocal chords were cut and also lost a limb due to maltreatment. Since being rescued and subsequently adopted by Dr. Kohl, Baby spends her time advocating for other abused dogs and animals. Baby’s plight also inspired a Congressional bill that would end the inhumane practice of lifetime confinement of breeding dogs. “Baby’s Bill” was proposed by bipartisan members of the House and Senate and will be voted upon in the next Congressional session.

Great shot of Barack and Baby, right? January 20th 2009 can’t come soon enough. To find out more about A Rare Breed Of Love, jump here.

Photo credit: PRNewsFoto/CBH Communications

By Steven Kotler on November 25, 2008 in The Playing Field

In the past twenty years or so there has been a major revolution in zoology. Older Cartesian notions about animal's being bereft of emotions have been supplanted by newer notions like Jaak Panksepp's groundbreaking work in neuroscience, in which he's found that the same pathways associated with the major human emotions are present in all mammals and birds and, as researchers are now discovering, even in in lizards and snakes.

Along the way, animal intelligence has also become a hot-top, with most researchers in agreement that once language barriers have been removed (as happens when chimps are taught to sign etc.)the difference too begin to melt away. Dogs-for example-are the intellectual rough equivalent of a smart three-year old, capable of skills such as fast-mapping, which is the term used to describe the ability to form quick and dirty hypothesis about the meaning of new words after only one exposure. Dogs have also shown the ability to develop vocabularies of over 400 words (which is roughly the same as a four year old child) and utilize deductive logic among other patterns of associative reasoning.

The Harvard researcher Marc Hauser has further looked into the question of morality in animals and has found "mind reading" capabilities and other basic moral structures present in all mammals and most birds. In fact, when it comes to morality, just about the only thing that seems to be consistently missing from animals is an excessive amount of patience-essentially the ability to delay rewards. In humans, delayed gratification in children is a solid predictor of ethical behavior in adults, but Hauser does point out, in his excellent book on the subject "Moral Minds," that this may have more to do with a lack of significant delayed-gratification events in the real world of wild animals than any fundamental difference in underlying neuronal structures.

I mention all of this because one-time Atlanta Falcon, Michael Vick, who is almost halfway through serving 23-months in Leavenworth for the federal crime of dog-fighting and animal cruelty, has begun lobbying for early parole and reinstatement in the NFL. If we now know that dogs share all the same attributes as three year old children, then it seems to me that Vick should be treated as any other person convicted of torturing and murdering small children.

Now, I understand this may seem a fairly radical stance to take when it comes to animal rights, but all the science that currently exists has done much to erase just about every wall separating one species from another (excluding, of course, the fundamental inability to mate and bear offspring) so it seems high time to revisit much of our animal-based morality and the barbaric Vick is a perfect place to start.

My feeling is that his 23 month sentence was far too lenient and the notion of this guy ever playing football again would do much to sully the mostly stellar reputation the NFL has strived to build. In short, let him rot.

Amelia Glynn for SFGate.com

Two weeks ago, I had an accident that left a series of first and second degree burns on my shins. (Ouch.) I had to elevate my legs for the first few days of my recovery, but as soon as I was mobile again I ditched my Vikodin and scheduled a Doone pickup from my ex. I knew some quality dog time was exactly what I needed to get out of my funk and start feeling better. I couldn't take The Doone on our usual long hikes, but just getting out into the sunshine and watching her do her sniff-prance-wigglebutt-tailwagging-run-around routine took my mind off of being hurt (and wallowing in self pity). I took deep gulps of fresh air, laughed out loud at her silliness and felt... happy.

Over the years, a plethora of data has been collected on the larger role dogs and other pets play in the health of people all over the world. According to a New York Times article, one Japanese study found pet parents made 30 percent fewer visits to doctors, while a Melbourne study showed that people with pets had lower cholesterol, blood pressure and heart attack risk compared with people without. Good health is clearly influenced by a number of variables, but many experts believe companion animals help improve our health at least in part by lowering our stress levels.

Dogs, in particular, have been shown to do remarkable things to boost the health of their people, including recognizing oncoming hypoglycemic episodes for diabetics and detecting impending seizures. For example, trained seizure alert dogs are paired with people with epilepsy so they can work together one-on-one. The dog will lick the person's face, block their path when walking, or bark to alert them to the onset of a seizure.


More recently, dogs have been touted as potential cancer detectors. In 2006, the medical journal Integrative Cancer Therapies reported how ordinary house dogs could identify breast and lung cancer patients by smelling their breath. A University of Maine study is currently testing dogs on their ability to sniff out ovarian cancer.

Here are five simple ways animals can positively affect our health and well-being:

* 1. They help stave off depression and loneliness.
* 2. They add levity to nearly any situation.
* 3. They are great cuddlers and love unconditionally.
* 4. They give us hope.
* 5. They keep us fit.

Have your pets helped you (or others, as in the case of animal-assisted therapy) overcome an injury or illness? How do they keep you healthy?

Posted By: Amelia Glynn (Email) | November 19 2008 at 09:05 AM

Ask the Experts - November 12, 2008
Is there really such a thing as a dog that won't cause allergies?

By Jordan Lite

Barack Obama has promised the future First Daughters a dog, and his eldest, 10-year-old Malia, has zeroed in on a so-called hypoallergenic breed to accommodate her allergies. Her top pick is a goldendoodle, a cross between a golden retriever and a poodle, though the future prez has hinted about adopting a rescue dog, noting that "a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me."

We asked Bernadine Cruz, a spokeswoman for the American Veterinary Medical Association, to explain the hypoallergenic concept. Cruz is a veterinarian in Laguna Hills, Calif., and in 2006 was also a paid spokeswoman for Allerca, a company that claimed to have bred a hypoallergenic cat. For an update on Allerca and its research, see this story in The Scientist.

This is an edited transcript.

Why are some people allergic to dogs?  

For many people, being allergic to dogs is a matter of having a sensitivity to a protein in their saliva which also exudes through their skin.

Would a hypoallergenic dog be a good option for people who are otherwise allergic to pooches?

There is no such thing as a hypoallergenic cat or dog. One cat has been bred that's considered hypoallergenic: A company called Allerca in San Diego found a line of cats considered hypoallergenic because of a naturally occurring divergence (mutation) of the protein Fel d 1. The protein is (normally) found in cat saliva, urine and exudes from their skin. I've found people who are extremely allergic to cats who are able to play with them and not have the sneezing. But in dogs, a mutation in any similar protein has not been found.

What types of dogs might be better for allergy suffers?

Every person will have his or her own degree of reactivity to certain dogs — their saliva and proteins in their bodies. Those dogs that are more universally less allergenic come from more specific breeds such as Poodles, Kerry Blue Terriers, Schnauzers, Bichons and Lhasa Apsos. [They] don’t shed a lot or they go to the groomer frequently and by getting their hair washed and trimmed, get the allergens off their skin. When those dogs mate purposely or accidentally with breeds outside of those breeds, their offspring may be less allergenic.

But some people can have allergies to a Poodle and then be playing with a German Shepherd and have no problem.

What about the Peruvian Hairless Dog, which that country has offered to the Obamas? Is it better for allergy sufferers?

They're not going to be shedding a lot, but (allergenic) proteins will exude through their skin so that’s not always going to be the answer.

Are purebred dogs healthier than other dogs?

There's no difference.

Are purebreds available at shelters, or only through breeders?

Many times you will find them in shelters. Going to shelters or breed rescues is a great way for the Obamas or anyone to get a pet.

By: Dr. Dawn Ruben

Overview

What is Reverse Sneezing?

Reverse sneezing, also known as the "mechanosensitive aspiration reflex" is a common phenomenon in dogs. In a regular sneeze, your dog pushes air out through the nose; however, in a reverse sneeze, air is pulled rapidly in through the nose producing a noisy inspiratory effort.

What a Reverse Sneeze Looks Like

During a reverse sneeze, your dog will make rapid inspirations, stand still with his elbows spread apart, extend his head, and his eyes may bulge. He'll make a loud snorting sound, which might make you think he has something caught in his throat. Many dog owners think their pet is suffocating during a reverse sneeze episode. Each reverse sneezing occurrence generally lasts for less than a minute up to two minutes.


Reverse Sneezing Video
Look at this video for an example


Reverse Sneezing Video
Look at this video for another example





Causes of Reverse Sneezing

The exact reason for these reverse sneezing episodes is unknown but may be related to allergies, nasal irritants, or nasal inflammation. Any age, breed or sex can be affected.
A reverse sneeze may look disturbing – many people fear that their dog is not breathing during these episodes – but it is not a harmful condition and there are no ill effects. Reverse sneezing attacks are generally quite brief and not life threatening. Between episodes, the dog acts normal.

In some situation when reverse sneezing is frequent, a more serious condition may be the underlying cause. In those situations, testing for nasal mites, nasal cancer should be done.

How to Stop a Reverse Sneezing Episode

An episode can be stopped if the dog is stimulated to swallow by either massaging the throat or briefly pinching off the nasal openings. Sometimes opening the dogs mouth and gently pulling on the dogs tongue or giving the dog something to eat and drink can also stop the reverse sneezing episode. Some dogs have reverse sneezing episodes so frequently that various medications may be needed to reduce their frequency.

What to Watch For

If the revere sneezing occurs frequently (daily or several times a day) and is associated with other clinical signs, then further evaluation should be completed by your veterinarian.
Watch for other abnormal signs that may suggest a more serious problem including nasal discharge, epistaxis (bloody nose), sneezing, difficulty breathing, abnormal facial deformity over the nose area, decreased appetite and/or lethargy.


Legal Disclaimer

If your pet is showing any signs of distress or you suspect your pet is seriously ill, CONTACT YOUR VETERINARIAN immediately.