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Dog Are People, Too


Tommy Coyote
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you need pretty high value rewards to get a lurcher to do anything for you.

 

As I've recently learned to my great frustration! LOL

 

At 6 months old when I adopted her, Tansy looked like a BC puppy, albeit an unusual color (sable) and w/ funky ears (but BCs can have funky ears). So I was expecting BC trainability, even if she ended up being what people call a close mix.

 

Boy, was I wrong! She turned out to be a lurcher, though I don't know of what mix (I still think BC,but am clueless about the sighthound). She's a very sweet dog, but very different to train. She's just mostly got a FU attitude about a lot of things and is very demanding, making up her own rules to increase the odds of getting a treat or whatever else it is she wants. (Oh, I get a treat when I get down after jumping up on someone? OK, I'll jump up again (and again and again . . .) so I can get down to get another treat!)

 

She's as smart as any BC I've ever had, but there's definitely a very different thought process going on in that head of hers. :wacko:

 

But, lest I steer to far afield of the topic, I think the title of the article originally posted is insulting to dogs! As a species, I prefer canines any day over humans.

 

And Tommy Coyote's post #20 closest the closest to my own feelings of any I've seen. :)

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'They are different Nations, caught up in the travial of the earth'

 

Not an exact quote.

 

My Dogs and horses and even cattle have asked me why.......

 

And there is a balance in the world. All life helps all life.

 

What the scientists need to do is get dropped off in some remote place with my Great uncle and with a horse and a couple of dogs make their way for a month or 4 with only those creatures to help them.

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Is this the quote you're thinking of,Tea?

 

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves.

 

And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animals shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.

 

They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of earth. Henry Beston The Outermost House

 

(This was quoted on the Fearfuldogs' Blog. I'm guessing that the emphasis is added. <http://fearfuldogs.wordpress.com/2010/12/09/they-are-other-nations/>)

 

And, of course, Native American peoples regard animals animals as other types of people -- their for footed and winged brothers and sisters.

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One thing that I find interesting is that I think animals almost always stay in the present. Humans have a terrible time time trying to stay in the present. Our minds are all over the place but not normally in the present unless we have some emergency that calls for special attention. Or if we are consciously trying to maintain our thought process in the here and now.

 

I guess this is interesting to me because I have practiced Zen for about 40 years. That is a practice where you try to train the mind to stay in the present. It is very difficult for humans to do that. Just trying to stay there for a couple of minutes is difficult.

 

But our ability to remember the past and think about the future and just generally float all over the place has given us a huge advantage in our evolution. Along with our ability to think in the abstract. But we paid a pretty big price. Our everyday lives would probably be a lot less stressful and a lot more enjoyable if we could just stay in the present most of the time, too.

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Yep thats the quote! Thank you very much.

 

I think all people at one time maybe reguarded animals that way.

But also thought they were tasty as well.

 

sorry....;)

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Yes, tribal people ate animals, but AFAIK most of them paid sincere tribute to those animals and thanked them for the gift they'd received so that they could survive.

 

That's a huge difference from the callous and too often thoughtless ways most modern so-called civilized humans raise and consume the animals we eat and use for other purposes. <sigh>

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Native peoples needed to eat animals in order to survive the winter months. Their very survival depended on successful hunting. But their whole relationship to their world and to the creatures that lived in it was just so completely different than ours.

 

They would deem our absolutely horrific treatment of animals to be barbaric. And they would be right. Our treatment of animals is often barbaric. Our treatment of the earth is barbaric.

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Another quote one I live by.

 

'Live the changes you wish to see in the world.'

 

Not All Native folks are kind to animals, both in the old days and now.

 

Not all modern day folks of any ethnicity raise stock to be killed in a barbaric way.

 

however i was taught

All Life lives on Death.

 

 

Many times I have seen a field being harvested, and the little critters dying as tomatoes are harvested for vegans and ominivores alike. With no prayers offered. And no use made of them.

 

I look at my clothes and my truck and my computer and think where was this made? Who made it and how?

 

Often my answer is as barbaric as killing livestock the wrong way.

 

I cannot answer any of these problems except in how I live my own life.

 

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.

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

 

One day on the rez I had brought some of my interns from Europe.

 

An Elk Steak was slapped down on one girl's plate.

 

She grimaced and said bravely, 'I cannot eat this, I don't eat meat!'

 

Everyone at the table looked at each other and one old man said,

 

'Oh, I am sorry, bad hunter hum?'

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