Do Dogs Think?

Do Dogs Think?  A gleaning from the excellent book “How Dogs Think” by Stanly Coren.  You own a dog?  Get it!

Smell: Dogs can separate scents in their Left and Right nostril.  This gives them insight into direction.

Dogs with pointy ears (like mine) do not scent as well as say, a Beagle with long flopping ears.  The latter lifts ground scent up to its nose!  The more the ears flop, the more air moves around its head.

Pheromone scent is present in humans (armpits; groin mostly) where a dog and most animals have these transmitters spread all over their bodies; at the base of every hair!  Yes, your dog will smell like a dog to you but to other dogs, it smells like a large personality book.  

Yet again, the Pheromone is carried in the dog’s urine and feces.  And the Dog’s fur leaves a lasting record of their presence at the spot when they have rubbed against a twig or branch or Chesterfield. This is why Dogs try to pee high on the post or rail or tree; to have the scent into the wind.  It is in every truth a mailbox for the animals.

These scents will ID male, female and what their status or physical state is. On your walk, let your dog use its nose!

Tests were done on tracking abilities based on scents.  Beagles, Bassett’s and Bloodhounds could locate a mouse in a minute in a maze.

Terriers, on the other hand, took 15 minutes!  That’s not shoddy considering the least of them can sense Odor at 1 in 2 million parts while the best of them can sense odors at 1/10 th of that!  That is detecting a specific odor in an area the size of a large city!

Sight: Dogs are not color blind. They see color but not as much as humans do.  Humans see rainbow colors as violet, blue, blue-green, green yellow, orange and red and dogs see it  as dark blue, light blue, gray, light yellow, darker yellow (sort of brown)

Right now one of the most popular toys for dogs is a bright fluorescence orange used for traffic cones and even hats for hunters. Yet when we throw this gaudy ball for the dog to fetch it runs right past it until it is found eventually with its nose. Reason?  For a dog, the bright orange is seen as nearly the same color as the grass!   

Shades of blue will work best when thrown on grass.  A toy that is blue and yellow with white strips would be perfect for a throw toy.

The dog that chases the orange Frisby can’t see the Frisby but can see the little logo on them. That is pretty clever to my mind.
No Segway into this one:  Dogs with a white coloring and black spots are prone to blindness!  Dalmatians with blue eyes have a 50% chance of going blind while those without the blue eyes range in the 40% - 30% range of being blind at least in one eye!  Dalmatians seem to be the most popular house pets due to the movie which doesn't mention their propensity for blindness.

So, do dogs think?  I choose to think so as their world is thousands of times larger than ours because of their acute hearing; acute sense of smell leaving vision as a bit of a bonus.

Carbon cap and trade the Conservative doomed plan.

#Carbon cap and trade allows one corporate identity to gain a smaller carbon footprint and give the credit for that footprint to its parent company who may be in the USA or China for that matter.  This financial dance is virtually un-auditable.  There is nothing here to trade!

It does, however, allow one corporate identity to transfer taxpayers money to a cross-border destination without any taxes and virtually no accountability.  Once across that border, it is likely the receiver won't have to declare the money as they will also be exempt on credit move to Canada.  Something, the conservatives seen to lean to in every situation.

This is serious stuff.  As the world, we are in deep, very deep trouble.  It should not be taken lightly.

Some insights to the US economy and looking closer at Trump’s blather.

Coal is a 19th-century technology on its way out being recently priced out of the market by natural gas.  In the Appalachians, coal mines have dropped from 580 to just over 300.  The biggest coal mines and generation plants are owned by companies on the west coast of the US, nowhere near the Appalachians in the central east.

The #Appalachians were/are run by the coal Barron’s who have managed to convince the courts they can keep the pension money set aside for their laid off workers.  These #pension grabs have left a million people desolate living in misery.

Unlike Alberta, the US has not tried to institute a #retraining program for these people who knew nothing but coal mining their entire life!   This abysmal political record is thought of as being “just American”

Putting coal miners back to work was an empty election promise.   The market pressures killed the coal jobs, not climate change regulations.  The latter at the forefront because the climate meetings in Paris which Trump is in full denial of, put forward the conclusion “If we do away with coal fired power we can curb the climate change”  This same group of 100 countries said NO to cap and trade as it was nothing more than a scam allowing for the movement of large sums of money across borders without taxation.  Instead, they endorsed a carbon tax.

There is no real Segway into the Galveston and Huston flooding in Texas but; here goes.

The Americans and Conservatives, in general, refuse to acknowledge climate change.  That could be why the link   https://albertathedetails.blogspot.ca/2017/01/climate-change-and-state-of-world-is.html has taken thousands of hits, mostly from the US.

The oceans have already risen 3”.  Doesn’t sound like much; However, it allows for a much greater wave action.  This same wave action brings about an earlier breakup in the Arctic caused by a thinner ice cover.   The cliffs of Herschel Island are falling into the water along with 1000 miles of Arctic coast line erosion.  This dirt into the water will make it darker and will escalate the whole warming thing,

Multiply the much greater wave action by several hundred times when the high and persisting winds swept the ocean into the flood plain of Galveston/Huston effectively blocking drainage of the rivers which had flow increased by heavy and ongoing rains.

This flood plain has been known for close to a hundred years yet; no one Government has stepped up to do anything about it.   By comparison, The Netherlands is more than 50% below sea level with the ocean engineered to stay out.

If the US had taken the problem in hand as the Netherlands did they would not have to be concerned as much about flooding!

Instead, the attitude is  “It is Un-American to engineer our country”   Storms?  No.  The Americans are authors of their own misfortunes including Trump.