The Price of a Swift Pigeon

As a follow up to my post from yesterday, an example of the subjectivity of value, specifically for pigeons. 

I have spent much time examining and reflecting upon the human relationship to pigeons.  I came across this article in my research. How Pigeons Became Rats: The Cultural-Spatial Logic of Problem Animals “Such studies on the problematization of animals demonstrate how sociological insights gained by looking at human deviance (Becker 1963) and social problems (Best 1995) can be extended to animals.  There are issues of interests, authority, and power that go a long way in determining which animals become elevated to the status of a public problem (Hilgartner and Bosk 1988).” It is a dense article but definitely worth reading as it reminds me that our treatment and judgement of other creatures reveals more about us than it does them.  View high resolution

I have spent much time examining and reflecting upon the human relationship to pigeons.  I came across this article in my research.

How Pigeons Became Rats: The Cultural-Spatial Logic of Problem Animals

“Such studies on the problematization of animals demonstrate how sociological insights gained by looking at human deviance (Becker 1963) and social problems (Best 1995) can be extended to animals.  There are issues of interests, authority, and power that go a long way in determining which animals become elevated to the status of a public problem (Hilgartner and Bosk 1988).”

It is a dense article but definitely worth reading as it reminds me that our treatment and judgement of other creatures reveals more about us than it does them. 

Taken with instagram View high resolution

Taken with instagram

“No-one who looks at the evidence can doubt that animals in hand improve the quality of modern human life…”

- The Biophilia Hypothesis, S.R.Kellert & E.O.Wilson

I was excited to learn that there is a large amount of funding available for research in this area, as I believe the more we understand about the benefits of being around animals and nature, the more we will respect and take good care of it. 

There have been some preliminary studies that show interaction with a pet dog can decrease heart rate, increase levels of oxytocin (feel good hormone) for both dog and human but this is not shocking as research has also shown that in general, affection/love/care is a good thing for health with positive effects on the nervous system.  *A good book on this that I’ve mentioned before A General Theory of Love by THOMAS LEWIS, FARI AMINI and RICHARD LANNON

So I greatly support sharing your life with a pet, but I think pet ownership initiates several other discussions, including how the context of ownership impacts the relationship between human and animal. 

I think of the interaction I had with a cat while an artist in residence at Playa in Summer Lake, OR.  Having been separated from the two dogs that I know best for two months, I welcomed the visit from this animal.  She spent her day cruising the land and although she had a collar, her freedom was untethered.  And that made our interactions very special as they were voluntary.  No animals were allowed in the cabins or studios and so I would sit, play, pet and watch her for a while and then return to my work, not knowing if or when I would see her again. 

This is how many of my encounters with the wild creatures in the Oregon outback went (although I didn’t pet or play with the bear I saw!).  And as I am now immersed in city life, I notice how most of the animals I encounter are not free but instead chained to the whims of their owners without any say in the matter.  And of course, some animals don’t mind this, and those seem to be the ones that have undergone the domestication process more successfully.  But I wonder if companion animals can also teach us how to love and care for others while honoring their true beings.   If we can learn how to appreciate and coexist with the ones that don’t allow us to “own” them.  I don’t know if cities provide enough space for that, but I imagine that kind of relationship might have powerful effects as well. 

Sad to see this on my ride home yesterday.  The horses, the trees and the German Shepherd that took himself on walks are gone, replaced by a frozen “bobcat”

On Saturday I took a trip to Hamilton, NJ to visit Grounds for Sculpture, an outdoor park housing over 250 sculptures.  It is a peaceful place and walking around the grounds proved calming, despite the low temperatures.

Founded in 1992 by John Seward Johnson II (grandson of Robert Wood Johnson co- founder of Johnson and Johnson Company) the grounds feature work by both emerging and established artists and include several by Johnson himself, fabricated at the nearby Johnson Atelier Technical Institute of Sculpture, an educational, nonprofit casting and fabrication facility.

As to be expected, there are pieces I enjoyed and pieces I could’ve done without.  However, having a place like this nearby, where the landscaping seems to be as considered as some of the work, is lucky.  And thus I renewed my appreciation for sculpture, as art that can reside outdoors amongst the peacocks and trees will always inspire me. 

“A heart-wrenching but deeply funny and ultimately uplifting story of family, love, loyalty, and hope- a captivating look at the wonders and absurdities of human life…as only a dog could tell it.” I am skeptical of narratives told from a dog’s perspective because of the assumptions and inclination to anthropomorphize, so I approached this book with some hesitation.  But with passages like this: “Here’s why I will be a good person.  Because I listen.  I cannot speak, so I listen very well.  I never interrupt, I never deflect the course of the conversation with a comment of my own.  People, if you pay attention to them, change the direction of one another’s conversations constantly.  It’s like having a passenger in your car who suddenly grabs the steering wheel and turns you down a side street.  For instance, if we met at a party and I wanted to tell you a story about the time I needed to get a soccer ball in my neighbor’s yard but his dog chased me and I had to jump into a swimming pool to escape, and I began telling the story, you, hearing the words “soccer” and “neighbor” in the same sentence, might interrupt and mention that your childhood neighbor was Pelé, the famous soccer player, and I might be courteous and say, Didn’t he play for the Cosmos of New York? Did you grow up in New York? And you might reply that, no, you grew up in Brazil on the streets of Três Corações with Pelé and I might say, I thought you were from Tennessee, and you might say not originally, and then go on to outline your genealogy at length.  So my initial conversational gambit—that I had a funny story about being chased by my neighbor’s dog—would be totally lost, and only because you had to tell me all about Pelé.  Learn to listen!  I beg of you.  Pretend you are a dog like me and listen to other people rather than steal their stories.” and “So much of language is unspoken.  So much of language is comprised of looks and gestures and sounds that are not words.  People are ignorant of the vast complexity of their own communication.  Trish’s robotic repeating of the single word “until” revealed everything about her state of mind.” and “I marveled at them both, how difficult it must be to be a person.  To constantly subvert your desires.  To worry about doing the right thing, rather than doing what is most expedient.  At that moment, honestly, I had grave doubts about as to my ability to interact on such a level.  I wondered if I could ever become the human I hoped to be.” and “Who is Achilles without his tendon? Who is Samson without Delilah? Who is Oedipus without his clubfoot?  Mute by design, I have been able to study the art of rhetoric unfettered by ego and self-interest, and so I know the answers to these questions.  The true hero is flawed.  The true test of a champion is not whether he can triumph, but whether he can overcome obstacles-preferably of his own making-in order to triumph.  A hero without flaw is of no interest to an audience or to the universe, which after all is based on conflict and opposition, the irresistible force meeting the unmovable object.” In this way, Garth Stein uses the dog’s position in the family, as a silent observer, to comment on the human condition.  The author is less attempting to attribute human like qualities to the dog as he is revealing insights from a perspective the reader trusts as neutral because he is a dog.  Stein introduces the dog, Enzo, early on with: “I’ve always felt almost human.  I’ve always known that there’s something about me that’s different than other dogs.  Sure, I’m stuffed into a dog’s body, but that’s just the shell.  It’s what’s inside that’s important.  The soul.  And my soul is very human.”  Enzo has seen a documentary on Mongolia which explains that when a dog is finished living his lifetime as a dog, his next incarnation will be as a man and this ignites a dream of shedding his dog form and adopting a human one, so he can fully participate in the family he loves.   So I know, it might sound a little crazy, dogs are not human!  But, I looked at my own two dogs after reading this book and wondered even more what they could be thinking.  Unfortunately, they are not as cooperative and responsive as Enzo is, but still, I wonder if there isn’t a soul in there who is struggling as much as I am to figure this life out?  And that query inspires compassion in me.  So although I think it can be confusing and frustrating for humans (and dogs) to think dogs can understand English and be human, I found The Art of Racing in the Rain to successfully illustrate why we are lucky to share our lives with these creatures.  You just never know!

“A heart-wrenching but deeply funny and ultimately uplifting story of family, love, loyalty, and hope- a captivating look at the wonders and absurdities of human life…as only a dog could tell it.”

I am skeptical of narratives told from a dog’s perspective because of the assumptions and inclination to anthropomorphize, so I approached this book with some hesitation. 

But with passages like this:

“Here’s why I will be a good person.  Because I listen.  I cannot speak, so I listen very well.  I never interrupt, I never deflect the course of the conversation with a comment of my own.  People, if you pay attention to them, change the direction of one another’s conversations constantly.  It’s like having a passenger in your car who suddenly grabs the steering wheel and turns you down a side street.  For instance, if we met at a party and I wanted to tell you a story about the time I needed to get a soccer ball in my neighbor’s yard but his dog chased me and I had to jump into a swimming pool to escape, and I began telling the story, you, hearing the words “soccer” and “neighbor” in the same sentence, might interrupt and mention that your childhood neighbor was Pelé, the famous soccer player, and I might be courteous and say, Didn’t he play for the Cosmos of New York? Did you grow up in New York? And you might reply that, no, you grew up in Brazil on the streets of Três Corações with Pelé and I might say, I thought you were from Tennessee, and you might say not originally, and then go on to outline your genealogy at length.  So my initial conversational gambit—that I had a funny story about being chased by my neighbor’s dog—would be totally lost, and only because you had to tell me all about Pelé.  Learn to listen!  I beg of you.  Pretend you are a dog like me and listen to other people rather than steal their stories.”

and

“So much of language is unspoken.  So much of language is comprised of looks and gestures and sounds that are not words.  People are ignorant of the vast complexity of their own communication.  Trish’s robotic repeating of the single word “until” revealed everything about her state of mind.”

and

“I marveled at them both, how difficult it must be to be a person.  To constantly subvert your desires.  To worry about doing the right thing, rather than doing what is most expedient.  At that moment, honestly, I had grave doubts about as to my ability to interact on such a level.  I wondered if I could ever become the human I hoped to be.”

and

“Who is Achilles without his tendon? Who is Samson without Delilah? Who is Oedipus without his clubfoot?  Mute by design, I have been able to study the art of rhetoric unfettered by ego and self-interest, and so I know the answers to these questions. 

The true hero is flawed.  The true test of a champion is not whether he can triumph, but whether he can overcome obstacles-preferably of his own making-in order to triumph.  A hero without flaw is of no interest to an audience or to the universe, which after all is based on conflict and opposition, the irresistible force meeting the unmovable object.”

In this way, Garth Stein uses the dog’s position in the family, as a silent observer, to comment on the human condition.  The author is less attempting to attribute human like qualities to the dog as he is revealing insights from a perspective the reader trusts as neutral because he is a dog. 

Stein introduces the dog, Enzo, early on with:

“I’ve always felt almost human.  I’ve always known that there’s something about me that’s different than other dogs.  Sure, I’m stuffed into a dog’s body, but that’s just the shell.  It’s what’s inside that’s important.  The soul.  And my soul is very human.” 

Enzo has seen a documentary on Mongolia which explains that when a dog is finished living his lifetime as a dog, his next incarnation will be as a man and this ignites a dream of shedding his dog form and adopting a human one, so he can fully participate in the family he loves.  

So I know, it might sound a little crazy, dogs are not human!  But, I looked at my own two dogs after reading this book and wondered even more what they could be thinking.  Unfortunately, they are not as cooperative and responsive as Enzo is, but still, I wonder if there isn’t a soul in there who is struggling as much as I am to figure this life out?  And that query inspires compassion in me. 

So although I think it can be confusing and frustrating for humans (and dogs) to think dogs can understand English and be human, I found The Art of Racing in the Rain to successfully illustrate why we are lucky to share our lives with these creatures. 

You just never know!

As I walk the dogs past the masses of discarded packaging and Christmas trees that decorate the city’s streets, I am reminded of the darker side of this holiday season.

The following text is taken from an interview by Marty Moss-Coane with Princeton professor and author of Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves, Sheldon Garon.  Full interview can be found here.

“We are told that our economy depends on consumer spending, that if we spend, companies will hire people and that will get people back to work,” true but…..

“Households have to spend in a way that’s within their means, that doesn’t so destabilize their finances that they’re incapable of spending in the future, and that’s where we are right now, people are tapped out, they’re over indebted from housing, from credit card debt and they can’t really jump start the economy the way it needs to be now, because of an excess.”

As compared to the Germans, French and other central European countries, America has a much lower savings rate.  Why?

European governments “for the past 200 years have promoted small saving.  In other words, they set up a series of financal institutions called savings banks and post office savings banks, that make it very easy for lower income people, the small saver, to come in with very little money.  There are no fees, there are no minimum balances, so they have been very accessible to the entire population.”

In addition, these countries are “much more stringent on regulating credit, whether its consumer credit or housing credit than we have been. And they have policies to protect their citizens from what they call over indebtedness, a term that doesn’t even exist in our country.”

“Average debt in the USA is $16,000 for households $5,000 for individuals, which is dramatically different from European counterparts.”

The standard model in American economics departments is that generous welfare benefits should act to depress saving, but instead in Europe it seems to do the opposite.  Why?

“The welfare state in Europe does something that we really don’t do, it keeps most of its population from falling into poverty and distress. Simply by keeping people in stable middle class situations, you automatically increase your saving rate whereas in our country, so many people have fallen through the cracks that they find that whereas in Europe, if you are in trouble, you get welfare. In America, when you’re in trouble, we give you more credit so people get over their heads in this country in debt and therefore our saving rate goes down so I think actually a welfare state tends to promote saving rather than the other way around.”

So if Americans made more money and were able to get out of debt, would their spending habits change?  Would we see an increase in saving?

“Our institutions promote consumption and credit so heavily that if Americans made more money, they probably would spend all of it.” 

The 1980s was a turning point with massive deregulation of financial institutions, all of a sudden it became easy to get money, money that people didn’t have.  Credit becomes our welfare policy but with high interest rates and fees, it seems to sink people deeper into the abyss than to help them out of it.

These factors, compounded by the psychological implications of consumerism which Dan Gottlieb discusses in his radio program Greed present a challenge for the American citizen.  Can we face the existing structural and motivational obstacles and begin to act differently? Can we objectively examine our traditions and habits and make concessions based on a respect for one another and the Earth?

The piles of materials and objects that lay like corpses once a week on the sidewalk, waiting to be picked up and carted to some hidden location that will eventually be our backyard, serve for me not only as a reminder of the disrespect for our planet and its resources but as evidence of our role in its assault.

Last Friday I went with a new friend to visit her horse.  I had met six horses in Oregon and was arrested by their size, beauty and willingness to cooperate so I eagerly accepted an invitation to meet a horse here in Philadelphia. 

**I made sculptures in 2010 for an installation about connecting (Con-nect @ Grizzly Grizzly April 2010).  I am interested in the word’s meaning and especially fascinated by how the act occurs between members of different species. **

I was amazed at the collaboration between giant animal and human while watching my friend.  To skillfully ride implies a fluid connection between animal and rider, communication contingent upon both participants giving and receiving.  AND! Without spoken language!  The fact that a human can mount and direct an animal approximately 10 times its own weight is evidence of connection. Implicit in this is the mutual respect and trust necessary to ride smoothly and flawlessly. 

It can be difficult to communicate effectively with people; misinterpretations, assumptions and ego obstructing those deeper channels of knowing.  Perhaps this is what is so exciting about connecting to other creatures.  They meet you each time, in the moment, and if you’re receptive and paying attention, it feels like you’ve entered a whole other world.

After reading that “Federal sharpshooters are preparing to take to the skies of Northern Idaho in an ill-conceived attempt to kill as many as 75 wolves to artificially boost game populations”  I shared the Defender’s campaign on facebook with the hope of accumulating more signatures on the petition against such action.  The book by Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf, a book that I’ve mentioned on this blog before, came to mind yet again.  In the novel, Mowat is sent by Canada’s wildlife service to “investigate the cause of declining caribou populations and determine whether wolves are to blame for the shortage. Mowat discovers that rather than being killers of caribou, the wolves subsist quite heavily on small mammals such as rodents and hares, ‘even choosing them over caribou when available.’ He concludes that ‘We have doomed the wolf not for what it is, but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be — the mythological epitome of a savage, ruthless killer — which is, in reality, no more than the reflected image of ourself.’ “ Although the book was criticized for not being entirely factual, Mowat has illustrated a strong point: that we don’t always understand the relationships between all the parts in this amazing world.  Another relevant author: Tom Wessels, wrote the book The Myth of Progress.  In it he discusses a very important concept: carrying capacity and the limits to growth.  He uses an example of 29 reindeer being introduced in 1944 to St. Matthew Island in the middle of the Bering Sea as a means to supply fresh meat to operators at the LORAN (long-range aid to navigation) station there.  When the station was later closed, the reindeer herd was forgotten and twelve years later, a wildlife biologist counted 1,350 healthy animals, a forty-seven fold growth that can be attributed to good habitat with lots of lichen and a lack of any predators.  In the next visit seven years later, the biologist, David Klein, counted 6,000 animals, but this time, the creatures were noticeable malnourished, their food source havng been degraded.  Three years later, only 42 individuals remained, all were females with the exception of one deformed male.  At this point, the herd was no longer able to reproduce and the population became extinct within the next 24 years. I mention these two authors because they address issues that come up when I consider Idaho’s wildlife services’ choice to kill wolves.  Although I know it’s too late, I personally feel to manipulate populations and environments is to open Pandora’s Box.  I understand that our brains allow for complex thought and we’ve created so many ways to “live luxuriously” that living in balance is extremely difficult.  How do I celebrate gift giving without wrapping paper?  But I cast my vote for a simpler more harmonious way of being. It seems that our lives depend on it!!!!!! link to Wildlife Defenders website View high resolution

After reading that “Federal sharpshooters are preparing to take to the skies of Northern Idaho in an ill-conceived attempt to kill as many as 75 wolves to artificially boost game populations”  I shared the Defender’s campaign on facebook with the hope of accumulating more signatures on the petition against such action. 

The book by Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf, a book that I’ve mentioned on this blog before, came to mind yet again.  In the novel, Mowat is sent by Canada’s wildlife service to “investigate the cause of declining caribou populations and determine whether wolves are to blame for the shortage. Mowat discovers that rather than being killers of caribou, the wolves subsist quite heavily on small mammals such as rodents and hares, ‘even choosing them over caribou when available.’ He concludes that ‘We have doomed the wolf not for what it is, but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be — the mythological epitome of a savage, ruthless killer — which is, in reality, no more than the reflected image of ourself.’ “

Although the book was criticized for not being entirely factual, Mowat has illustrated a strong point: that we don’t always understand the relationships between all the parts in this amazing world. 

Another relevant author: Tom Wessels, wrote the book The Myth of Progress.  In it he discusses a very important concept: carrying capacity and the limits to growth.  He uses an example of 29 reindeer being introduced in 1944 to St. Matthew Island in the middle of the Bering Sea as a means to supply fresh meat to operators at the LORAN (long-range aid to navigation) station there.  When the station was later closed, the reindeer herd was forgotten and twelve years later, a wildlife biologist counted 1,350 healthy animals, a forty-seven fold growth that can be attributed to good habitat with lots of lichen and a lack of any predators. 

In the next visit seven years later, the biologist, David Klein, counted 6,000 animals, but this time, the creatures were noticeable malnourished, their food source havng been degraded.  Three years later, only 42 individuals remained, all were females with the exception of one deformed male.  At this point, the herd was no longer able to reproduce and the population became extinct within the next 24 years.

I mention these two authors because they address issues that come up when I consider Idaho’s wildlife services’ choice to kill wolves.  Although I know it’s too late, I personally feel to manipulate populations and environments is to open Pandora’s Box.  I understand that our brains allow for complex thought and we’ve created so many ways to “live luxuriously” that living in balance is extremely difficult.  How do I celebrate gift giving without wrapping paper?  But I cast my vote for a simpler more harmonious way of being. It seems that our lives depend on it!!!!!!

link to Wildlife Defenders website