Happy................................

 

........................................Groundhog Day.

a desire for a desire..................

      One thing that distinguishes human beings from other animals is that we are evaluative creatures.  We can take a critical stance toward our own activities, and aspire to direct ourselves toward objects and projects that we judge to be more worthy than others that may be more immediately gratifying.  Animals are guided by appetites that are fixed, and so are we, but we can also form a second-order desire, "a desire for a desire," when we entertain some picture of the sort of person we would like to be—a person who is better not because she has more self-control, but because she is moved by worthier desires.

-Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

our repertoire............................

I now turn to another feature of the human condition that divides us from our simian relatives: the feature of responsibility.  We hold each other accountable for what we do, and as a result we understand the world in ways that have not parallel in the lives of other species.  Our world, unlike the environment of an animal, contains rights, deserts, and duties; it is a world of self-conscious subjects, in which events are divided into the free and the unfree, those that have reasons and those that are merely caused, those that stem from a rational subject, and those that erupt into the stream of objects with no conscious design.  Thinking of the world in this way, we respond to it with emotions that lie beyond the repertoire of other animals: indignation, resentment, and envy; admiration, commitment, and praise—all of which involve the thought of others as accountable subjects with rights and duties and a self-conscious vision of their future and their past.  Only responsible beings can feel these emotions, and in feeling them, they situate themselves in some way outside the natural order, standing back from it in judgment. 

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

The Wilds..................................

Not too long ago, my Sweetie and I took a day off and communed with the wild animals at the Wilds in Cumberland, Ohio.  Occupying more than 10,000 acres of reclaimed coal strip mines, The Wilds is a jewel worth visiting.  Just as a head's up: go after mid-May.  They keep the giraffes indoors until the weather gets into the 60's.

View from our Yurt's porch

Inside of "our" Yurt

Bactrian Camel

Persian Onager

A hillside of Sichuan Takins

Can't tell my rhinos apart

Sichuan Takin

Rhinos

More rhinos

some variety of deer

Simitar-Horned Oryx

Cheetahs

even more cheetahs

Grevy's Zebra

                                                                                             

Elands

African Painted Dogs

When we arrived home, the rookie camera operator shot these guys in the back yard:

this cacophonous profusion....................

      Corporeal life is indeed difficult.  To identify with the sheer physicality of one's flesh may well seem lunatic.  The body is an imperfect and breakable entity vulnerable to a thousand and one insults—to scars and the scorn of others, to disease, decay, and death.  And the material world that our body inhabits is hardly a gentle place.  The shuddering beauty of this biosphere is bristling with thorns: generosity and abundance often seem scant ingredients compared with prevalence of predation, sudden pain, and racking loss.  Carnally embedded in the depths of this cacophonous profusion of forms, we commonly can't even predict just what's lurking behind the near boulder, let alone get enough distance to fathom and figure out all the workings of this world.  We simply can't get it under our control. . . .Only by welcoming uncertainty from the get-go can we acclimate ourselves to the shattering wonder that enfolds us.  This animal body, for all its susceptibility and vertigo, remains the primary instrument of all our knowing, as the capricious earth remains our primary cosmos.

-David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

Bet on more winter.................................

 

Beer me.........................

the lion's roar........................

     Then, a beat of deep stillness followed by a lion roaring back.
     The sound of the lion's roar is the threshold telling me I have stepped from one world to another.  After so many nights abroad filled with artificial light and the hum of appliances, there is no truer sound of being home.  The timbre of the call, the way it rolls through the cold night air to find me.  Its powerful vibrations shudder the door on its hinges.  My heart instinctively skips with excitement.
     The renowned writer of the African wilderness Laurens van der Post said of the lion's roar that "it is to silence what the shooting star is to the night sky."

-Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life

Russell as an optimist..................?

    "We have also become, in certain respects, progressively less like animals.  I can think in particular of two respects:  first, that acquired, as opposed to congenital, skills play a continually increasing part in human life, and, secondly, that forethought more and more dominates impulse.  In these respects we have certainly become progressively less like animals."

-Bertrand Russell, as culled from here

Oh, the perils of speciesism........

Lots of fun to be had reading all the comments (including a phrase likely no one has ever said).  Enjoy.

Is this a great country, or what..........?

The good people at P.E.T.A. convinced the makers of Animal Crackers that caging those wild animals was a no-good thing.  Nabisco saw the error of their ways and redesigned the package, freeing the animals.   It didn't take long for the Internet to spring into action.........................

Before

After

Reality

Developing.......................

Grace under pressure....................

    via

Opening paragraphs.........................

     There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes.   One hundred ninety-two of them are covered with hair.  The exception is a naked ape self-named Homo Sapiens.  This unusual and highly successful species spends a great deal of time examining his higher motives and an equal amount of time studiously ignoring his fundamental ones.  He is proud that he has the biggest brain of all the primates, but also attempts to conceal the fact that he also has the biggest penis, preferring to accord this honor falsely to the mighty gorilla.  He is an intensely vocal, acutely exploratory, over-crowded ape, and it is high time we examined his basic behavior.


-Desmond Morris, from the Introduction to The Naked Ape:  A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal

One more reason..........................

..................why it is a good thing to learn from other's experience:

Say it ain't so...........................

THE circus, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey is closing up shop.  Story here.  Apparently it was all about the elephants.

I will confess to not being overly supportive - my last visit to the circus (three-ring variety) was in 1969.

via

I find my town endlessly interesting...............

Heart of a lion..................

I'd like these critters...................

..........better if they would just QUIT eating our flowers:

Brainy................................

     In Aesop's fable "The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse," two cousins exchange visits, during which the city mouse turns down his nose at humble country fare, and the country mouse discovers that city life, while richer, is unbearably dangerous.  I'd rather gnaw a bean that be gnawed by continual fear, he wisely opines.  But thanks to us, today's city mice are growing big brains to outwit the ambient dangers.  Not just mice.  According to researchers at the Bell Museum of Natural History at the University of Minnesota, we've caused at least ten urban species - including voles, bats, shrews, and gophers - to grow brains that are 6% larger than those of their county cousins.  Heavens, smarter rats!  That's a scary thought.  As we felled and planted over their woods and meadows, only the cleverest animals survived, by tailoring their diet and behavior to the human-dominated landscape.  Those who did passed  big-brained genes on to resourceful offspring.  And they were the lucky ones.  Not all plants and animals can evade us or evolve:  only the most flexible endure.

-Diane Ackerman,  The Human Age:  The World Shaped By Us