March 19, 2012
by dave
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First Rights for Cats and Dogs: A Tale of Three Henrys

The three Henrys: Bergh, Bliss, and Ford. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

On September 13, 1899, a dour-looking Manhattan real estate salesman named Henry Bliss stepped off a streetcar near Central Park. As he turned back to the trolley to help his female companion disembark, an electric taxicab struck him. The carriage-like vehicle knocked Bliss to the pavement and ran over his head and body, crushing both. When he died the next morning, he became America’s first pedestrian killed by an automobile.

Bliss’s death signaled a new era for New York. The city’s streets had once been fluid with horses. Hundreds of thousands of the animals towed railroad cars and fire wagons, barges and slaughter carts. The metropolis ran on its horses—and it worked them to death. The animals were so plentiful that it was cheaper to buy new ones than to properly care for them. And so drivers starved them, whipped them bloody, and left them to die on the side of the road when they collapsed. Too heavy to move, their bodies were allowed to rot until they had decomposed enough for wagons (drawn by horses) to pick them up and dump them in the river—or ship them to factories that turned them into glue, grease, and fertilizer. Horses can live for more than 30 years; in mid-nineteenth-century New York, they were lucky to reach their second birthday.

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February 7, 2012
by dave
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Pets, Prisoners, and Personhood

A peek inside Cell Block B. (Credit: Sheriff Joe Pelle)

I never imagined that writing a book about cats and dogs would land me in the Boulder County Jail. But there I was on a Friday afternoon in late September, surrounded by 15 inmates in the middle of Cell Block B—and looking for the exit.

At that moment, I was more cold than afraid. The guards had cranked up the AC, and I stood shivering, my arms crossed tightly against my chest. The cell block was large and sterile, with a drab gray floor, chalky cinderblock walls, and round, convex mirrors hinged to every corner. The only color came from thirty dark orange doors that framed the room, each branded with a large white number and harboring two narrow glass slits for windows. At a signal from a guard a few moments earlier, the doors had swung open, and the prisoners emerged from their closet-sized cells, pouring into the middle of the space in which I was standing. One—heavily-tattooed with a bald head, tan skin, and a long, ragged goatee—headed straight for me. He had something in his hand.

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January 20, 2012
by dave
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All Dogs Go to Heaven?

In October of 1859, a white Maltese mix named Nero was run over by a cart on a West London street. The dog suffered for months before his owner, the notable Scottish letter writer Jane Welsh Carlyle, could bring herself to have him put to sleep. “I grieve for him as if he had been my little human child,” she wrote a friend. In her note, Carlyle spoke of her “belief in the immortality of animal life” and of her desire to know if she would see Nero again in the hereafter. “What is become of that little beautiful, graceful Life?”

That’s a question a lot of pet owners were beginning to ask at the time. For only if dogs and cats had souls could they evolve from mere companions to family members—a transformation that would eventually set them on the road to personhood.

Carlyle lived in the Victorian era, a period that marked a dramatic rebound in the status of cats and dogs. Though both pets had once been highly revered—cats in Ancient Egypt, dogs in Ancient Rome—the Middle Ages had taken its toll. Back then, the animals were blamed for spreading death and disease, and thousands were slaughtered. Cats in particular were vilified. In 1233, Pope Gregory IX issued his Vox in Rama proclamation, which linked felines with the devil, and for centuries cats were thrown into bonfires and tortured as allies of witches and incarnations of Satan. Dogs fared slightly better, though in the seventeenth century they became popular subjects of vivisection. Early practitioners, including the famed French philosopher Rene Descartes, had no compunction about dissecting them alive. Animals were mere machines, he said, devoid of thought and emotion. Once revered as gods, dogs and cats had been robbed of their souls.

By the mid 1800s, however, thanks to the Victorian era’s ideals of kindness and sentimentality, cats and dogs had clawed their way back into the human heart. More attention and love was lavished on them than ever before. In paintings and books, they featured as an indispensable part of domestic life. It’s perhaps no surprise then that people like Jane Welsh Carlyle began to wonder if they would see their pets again in heaven—speculation that set up a battle with the Bible.

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October 25, 2011
by dave
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Can Cats Count?

When I began writing the chapter in my book about how new scientific discoveries are blurring the line between pet and person, I knew it was going to be tough to find anyone studying the feline mind. As the owner of two cats, I’m aware that they probably don’t make the best research subjects. But even I was surprised by how few researchers study them. A canine revolution has been taking place in labs around the world for the past 15 years, but cats have been largely left in the dark.

After a few weeks of hunting, and more than a dozen e-mails, I finally found a researcher who studies cat cognition: Christian Agrillo of the University of Padova in Italy. When I got him on the phone, he confirmed my suspicions about why there aren’t more scientists like him out there. “I can assure you that it’s easier to work with fish than cats,” he laughed. “It’s incredible.”

Agrillo studies something called numerical competence. That’s essentially the ability to distinguish a small quantity from a larger one. To figure out how and when the skill evolved, he’s studied it in a number of animals, including monkeys, birds, and inch-long mosquitofish. And yes, he’s also looked at cats.

The test Agrillo uses is fairly simple. He places three black dots over a desirable object (like a plate of food or a door that fish can swim out to be with other fish), and two dots over an undesirable object (like an empty plate or a door that leads to an empty part of a fish tank). Agrillo and colleagues then look to see if, over multiple trials, the animals can distinguish between the two quantities. He’s published ten papers on fish, but only one on cats. Here’s why:

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September 30, 2011
by dave
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Canine Mind Readers

Credit: Evan MacLean

Napoleon is a doggy genius. The 3-year-old, 7-pound Yorkshire Terrier can do something even our closest relative, the chimpanzee, can’t. He can read our thoughts. And he isn’t alone. All dogs, it turns out, are human mind readers.

I met Napoleon during a recent visit to the Duke Canine Cognition Center in Durham, North Carolina. I was doing some research for a chapter in my book on how new scientific discoveries are blurring the line between pet and human, and the head of the center, biological anthropologist Brian Hare agreed to let me come down and observe some of his work. Hare is at the forefront of a canine revolution that began about 15 years ago; in a series of high-profile studies, researchers around the world have shown that dogs are capable of far more than we ever imagined.

Dogs weren’t always popular research subjects, however, at least when it came to probing the secrets of the mind. Though Charles Darwin was a dog lover—and a big believer in the powers of the canine intellect—dogs were canis non grata in the cognition laboratory for much of the 20th century. They aren’t a wild animal, and they’ve lived with us for thousands of years, so most scientists considered them artificial and even tainted. Researchers interested in the animal mind studied chimpanzees and rodents instead.

But things changed when Hare, Adam Miklosi, and other prominent scientists began to notice something remarkable about dogs. I had come to the Duke Canine Cognition Center to see what first piqued their interest. And that’s where I ran into Napoleon.

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September 5, 2011
by dave
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How to Turn HootSuite and TweetDeck into RSS Readers

When I began writing my new book, I knew I wanted to build an audience early, even a couple of years before the book came out.  So I launched into social media hot and heavy.  Knowing that it would be a pain to keep track of relevant Twitterers as well as maintain my own feed, I opted to organize my Twitter efforts on HootSuite.  I considered TweetDeck, but I found HootSuite to be more visually appealing and flexible.

HootSuite and TweetDeck have one major problem, however.  You can’t use them to follow RSS feeds.  Sure, you can feed RSS feeds into your Twitter profile, but HootSuite limits you to two feeds, and I didn’t want to bombard my followers with feeds they weren’t interested in.  I just wanted a way to follow my various feeds on HootSuite.  After much web searching, I realized there was no easy way to do this.  The closest I came was this site, which was quite helpful, but the strategy outlined there doesn’t allow you to follow multiple RSS feeds in multiple columns on HootSuite.  It just allows you to dump all of your RSS feeds into a single column.

So, using that site as a guide, I’ve created instructions on how to follow as many RSS feeds as you want in as many columns as you want on HootSuite. This strategy also works for TweetDeck.  There are a lot of steps here, and a lot of accounts to set up, but it works beautifully.  If you’ve come up with a simpler way to do things, please let me know in the comments section!

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July 21, 2011
by dave
3 Comments

Why Cats and Dogs?

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beagle_and_sleeping_black_and_white_kitty-01.jpg

Source: Wikimedia Commons

First of all, howdy, and welcome to my new website. Thanks to Martyn Green for his help and guidance setting things up. You’ll be hard pressed to find a better guy to work with.

As you follow me here and on Twitter, you’ll notice that I’ll be writing a lot about cats and dogs.  No, I won’t be posting cute pictures of puppies and kittens (though you will see pictures of my own cats from time to time, because, well, they’re adorable).  And no, I won’t be offering up any grooming tips or training advice (though I will say that a water pistol is your best friend if your cat has figured out how to turn on your alarm clock at 5 in the morning).

Instead, I’ll be writing about how cats and dogs are becoming people.

Sure, many of us treat our pets like family.  In the U.S., we spend billions on toys, food, and veterinarians.  We celebrate our pets’ birthdays.  We take them shopping.  We pamper them with kitty condos and doggy day care.

But that’s not what I’m interested in.  Or, at least, that’s just a small part of what I’m interested in.

What I really care about is how new scientific discoveries and legal movements are blurring the line between pet and person. Cats and dogs are beginning to acquire many of the rights once reserved solely for human beings.  And soon the animals we have lived with for thousands of years will no longer be animals.  They will be people.

Don’t believe me?  Consider the following:

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