Angels of Our Better Nature

A Native American legend tells tells how God walked everywhere throughout the world, creating all the animals and giving them their names. The story relates the creation of all the animals the tribe knew – except for the dog. God didn’t create the dog, his dog came down from heaven with him. God already had a dog.

There have always been dogs.

My grandmother told me another story, about the two dogs on Noah’s Ark. Every day the dogs patrolled the decks, keeping watch, nosing into everything like dogs do. One day, one of the dogs found a hole below the waterline. A leak had sprung, and it was getting bigger. Without hesitation, the dog thrust his nose into the hole, and the other dog ran off barking wildly to bring help. By the time Noah and his sons got back, the first dog was in great pain, but he kept his nose in the hole until the humans could reapair it, averting disaster. In honor of his courage, god gave all dogs a cold wet nose as a badge of honor.

There have always been dogs, and dogs have always been our truest friends.

I’m not a religious person, and though I try hard to be a supportive Democrat, I’ve never been able to be a true believer in anyone’s party line. I’m a skeptic about almost everything and something of a heretic in every group I’ve ever been part of. But there is one thing in this world I believe in without doubt or hesitation, one thing in which I have total faith: the pure, brave loyal goodness of dogs.

I believe in dogs.

The first archaeological evidence of domesticated dogs dates from about 14,000 years ago – before the creation of writing or the establishment of agriculture. But recent DNA evidence from the decoding of the canine genome is even more startling. All domestic dogs are descended from wolves, and they began to diverge from wolves between 100 and 130,000 years ago. Think about that time span: ten times the length of all recorded history. And for anyone who knows much about pre-history, that era,, around 100,000 years ago is very provocative – that’s the time when the first fully modern human beings – Homo sapiens sapiens – appeared on earth. Dogs and humans were born together. That’s something more than one species domesticating another – that’s co-evolution.

There have always been dogs

Its as if one night, as our ancestors sat around one of the first campfires, the parents of all dogs left their wofly wildness behind and came to sit on the edge of the light. “Feed us,” they might have said. “Feed us, care for us, and we will hunt with you and guard you while you sleep and keep you warm when the nights are cold and love you with all our hearts. Feed us, care for us and we will be your truest friends forever.”

And they always have been … even when we have not honored the covenant nearly so well.

The American Humane Society has estimated that over 9.6 million animals – mostly dogs and cats – are euthanized every year in shelters in the United States. The statistics they based those numbers on are several years old, and I would like to tell you that the numbers have gotten better. But I can’t.


About a year ago I became a volunteer dog walker at the Companion Animal Shelter run by PAWS out in Lynwood, Washington. Every Saturday afternoon I take the bus out from Seattle and spend a couple of hours walking and playing with the dogs waiting there for adoption. It sounds altruistic, but altruism probably wouldn’t have kept me going out there every Saturday, rain or shine, Christmas and New Year’s Day included. I’m not an unselfish person. The truth is, I can’t have a dog in the apartment where I live, and I need them at least as much as they need me. Those dogs are my therapy and a large part of my sanity. They have their paws planted firmly on the ground and they stick their noses in everything. Even at what looks like a very bleak time in their lives, all they really need or want is food, water, someone to play with and lots of love.

I mean, really, what more is there?

Not long after I started volunteering I met Pete, an adorable old Chow Chow with a face like a teddy bear. Pete was about ten years old and totally deaf. We took quite a few walks together. He wasn’t much into games, not even Frisbee but he liked to go out to the yard and run around. He seemed aloof, as Chows often are, but alone in his kennel, once he got to know me, Pete wanted to snuggle and be held. I fell in love with him very quickly, and I worried about him for many weeks. Old dogs are not easy to get adopted; most people want puppies. One person took Pete home and then brought him back, complaining that he slept too much. PAWS is a “low kill” shelter, meaning that they only euthanize dogs with serious medical conditions, or dogs whose behavior has become dangerously aggressive, making them too much of a liability to adopt out. But still I worried as Pete’s stay grew longer and longer. I sent out e-mails with photos of Pete to everyone I know – some of you probably received them. The shelter supervisors assured me that Pete was “one of the good ones” and they wouldn’t give up one him. They didn’t, and finally Pete found a family. I was there the day he left and got to say goodbye. I still have his photo on my computer desk top

A few months later, I met Redmond. He was a mix of Chow and Shar-pei, brought in one Saturday evening while I was there. The next week after everyone was walked I sat with him in his pen and brushed him and helped him feel less scared of the shelter, which is tough on most dogs, but especially on Redmond, who was shy of strangers. Redmond had been mistreated in his life, we didn’t know how, but it wasn’t hard to tell. He was an incredibly sweet dog … to people. But he was afraid of other dogs, and his fear made him aggressive. A non-profit shelter can’t afford to adopt out a dog who might hurt someone or even someone’s pet. The liability could wipe them out. The next week when I came back Redmond was gone. I have great respect for, and trust in, the staff at PAWS and I know they never make a decision like that lightly. But Redmond was an injured angel, and I still can’t think of him without crying. I wanted to get a picture of him to remember him by, but there were none.

There are loving dogs, and playful dogs; there are sad dogs and angry dogs; there are dogs who have been hurt and even dogs who have become mean. But there are no hateful dogs. Dogs are not capable of hate.

There are a lot of worthy and urgent causes in this world worth devoting one’s time to: disasters to meet, children to feed, wars to end or prevent. I choose dogs, and I’m here to urge all of you to as well. Adopt a dog, donate to a shelter, spay and neuter your pets, volunteer your time. From the death of rain forests to the agony of nations, it might not seem that a few lost and loving dogs rank very high on the scale of need.

But I believe in dogs.

A promise was made a long, long, long time ago. They have always kept it. And I, for my part, intend to see that we do too.

The International Speech Contest is Coming Up Again

I have competed in both the International Speech Contest (held in the Spring) and the Humorous Speech Contest (held in the fall) for several years now. And made it to the Division level (the third step) almost every time. I've worked hard on my speeches and done well, but I haven't been satisfied with the results. There are areas where I know I can do better, and areas -- i.e. the judging -- which I know are out of my control. But this year I want to do everthing I can to get past the Division Level.

See more progress on: Compete in the Toastmasters International Speech Contest and Progress Farther than Division Level

Brief Thoughts on Mind(you have to start somewhere)

I am a reluctant Jungian.

The truth is I like Freud better: as a human being, as a scientist -- and certainly as a writer of not just scientific but literary merit. Freud it seems to me was the more intellectually honest of the two men. Reading their personal letters only cemented my opinions.

But it seems that Jung better stands the test of time.

Jung's theory of archetypes seems more compatible with the emerging neurological and evolutionary evidence -- his ideas on religion and the personification of basic psychic forces continue to hold water. Freud almost certainly would have continued to revise his theories had he lived, and several times made comments that foresaw the current state of drug therapy, the ultimately physical basis of psychological processes, a view which Jung probably did not share-- but we are left with only Freud's system at the time of his death, and in most of it's details it seems destined to obsolescence. Freud's great gift to us is his method of psychological thought. Jung's legacy is his uncanny intimacy with the operations of his own psyche.

The problem I face with Jung is that his thought quickly places us on metaphysical quicksand, which for him was no problem. He raises problems about reality that cannot be sidestepped and cannot be easily laid to rest. For instance: synchronicity. Despite being picked up by occultists and new-agers as an explanation for just about any logically indefensible belief (much the way a hashed up version of quantum mechanics is used for the same purpose) it is damned hard to avoid the basic phenomenon if you have done any kind of intense work on yourself: as you change internally, your experience of the world changes. Bizarre coincidences and opportunities seem to arise. It is not something the rational mind wants to acknowledge.

But I believe in the rational mind.

It helps that Jung defines Synchronicity as an acausal meaningful pattern. "Acausual" frees us from the difficult idea that thought somehow influences the "outside" world -- the entire unsolvable tangle of the post-Descartes mind-body debate. In a modern scientific model we don't want to deal with those knots. "Mind" is the functioning of the brain and the body. Thought is a physical phenomenon which can be measured and mapped. As Buddha told us long ago, mind as an entity does not exist.

If we look at Synchronicity as a function of perception, it makes more sense. Perception is more than just my sensory intake, it is the way I order that data, the assumptions my brain makes in order to reconstruct a model of the world from that data. Obviously, changing the assumptions changes way the meaning of the information.

This is not the place to tackle the many problems of meaning. But on a very basic level, meaning is the function of attention. An organism's perceptual system is built around pattern recognition, the ability to pick out from the environment those events, objects or combinations that are significant to the goals of the organism. The most fundamental of these -- such as the deep assumptions that make visual perception possible at all: assumptions about distance, color, shade, how three dimensional objects behave, movement, etc. -- are hardwired into the brain. They can be demonstrated even in very small children, and without them, no complex organism could function in a real-world environment.

On a much higher level, acquired assumptions about the world -- how people behave, what we can expect in our social interactions, what the consequences of certain types of behavior will be -- can become so familiar over time that we cease to be conscious of them, but they can be changed by conscious effort, and changing these assumptions definitely changes our experience of the world, in ways that sometimes do seem almost magical. This is the basis of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, whose power I can attest to from personal experience. These underlying assumptions and associations are, to a large extent, the meaning of our experience.

If meaning is wholly a function of consciousness -- there is no inherent meaning in any event or object in the outside world -- then the mystery of Synchronicity at least partially dissolves.

When Jung talks about the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious we could begin by thinking about these two types of "assumptions" and how they might be instituted into he brain.

Consciousness is a feedback loop. Very similar to pointing a video camera at the monitor to which it is attached. Perceptual systems are organized around pattern recognition, and what happens in the higher animals is that the pattern recognition is increasingly focused not just at the outside world, but back on the behavior and thought of the organism itself. This allows for self-correction, but it also involves us in all the problems of self-perception: that it must always be incomplete, limited by significant blind-spots, and that it tends to distort. (Perhaps this is why this type of consciousness seems to be most effective in social animals, where other points of view are readily available for correction.) Our subjective experience of consciousness is the echo effect characteristic of feedback loops.

(more development and notes for these thoughts are coming)

Stop demonizing pit bulls!

Recently pit bulls have been back in the news -- a child in Florida was killed by two pit bulls that had been kept chained in the owner's yard. Now, people in the area want to ban pit bulls. I haven't heard anyone in the news suggest banning the practice of keeping dogs chained in your yard all the time as inhumane and likely to lead to territoriality and viciousness. It must be a problem with the dogs, right? Lets get rid of them and that will solve it. A man in South Carolina was recently given 30 years in prison for a variety of charges related to breeding dogs for dog fights. There aren't many things in the world that make me sadder or angrier. Every week I see wonderful dogs at the shelter -- many of them _pit bulls_. They are almost all wonderful, sweet, loving dogs, especially toward people. I've lost two of them, who had to be euthanized because they had become too aggressive toward other animals and would be a liability to adopt out. It breaks my heart every time.

(And by the way: _Pit bull_ is not even a recognized breed -- it encompasses several different types of dogs: Staffordshire Terriers, American Staffordshire Terriers, Bull Terriers, and others.)

(See more progress on "help the great apes, the polar bears and the pit bulls"...)

Beginnings