A Small Furry Prayer (26 page)

[8] Moving from left to right and back to front: Steven, Bella, Blue, Bucket, Damien, Turtle, Helgar, and Apple. 

[9] Hiking the crew. The snow capped mountain in the background is Truchas Peak. [Thaddeus Kostrubala]

[10] That's Joy reading the paper on the porch of the goat shack. The dogs: Flower in the upper right corner with the red collar and Dagmar, in purple, below her. Then going right to left: Squirt, Lux, Apple, and Gidget. Farrah is the blonde in the front, Damien is behind her, and Marco is on the far left. [Thaddeus Kostrubala]

[11] Steven and Blue. [Copyright © Gabriella Marks/triggerfinger.com]

[12] The Thumb. [Copyright © Gabriella Marks/triggerfinger.com]

Acknowledgments

Human:
Once again, I'm deeply grateful to my agent, Paul Bresnick, my editor, Kathy Belden, and everyone at Bloomsbury. For their tremendous help with the dogs: Elise Durant, Tiffanie Hauger, Madena Bennett, and Dr. Trina Hadden. For their tremendous help with the adventure: Joshua Lauber, Burk Sharpless, Rick Theis, Joe Donnelly, and Thaddeus Kortubala. A lot of very bright scientists were extremely patient with me along the way: Alan Beck, Lorri Greene, Marco Iacoboni, Marc Bekoff, Patricia McConnell, Patricia Wright, Steven Guerin, Jim Olds, Rick Granger, and Andrew Newberg. My thanks to Dr. Kathleen Ramsey for her unending generosity, to my parents and my brothers and their families for their support, and most of all to my amazing wife, without whom none of this would have been possible.

Canine:
Ahab, Otis, Corky, Igor, Vinnie, Jake, Gidget, Damien, Bella Chupacabra, Poppycock, Bucket, Smash, Squirt, Pony Girl, Maus, Elton, Rio, Shy-Shy, Hugo, Dagmar, Farrah, Helgar, Wookie, Leo, Chow Yun Fat, Zen Master Mishah the Terrible, Salty, Flower, Blue, Jeb, Julia, Foghat, Lux Diamond, Apple Lightspeed, Stilts, Rigel, Sprocket, Butch, Scarlett, Ziggy, Fig, Marco, Willi, Joey, Chispita, Turtle, Newton, Bug, Munchie, Elmo. Without all of you, I am most certainly lost.

ET CETERA

Rancho de Chihuahua is a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit. If you feel like making a donation, you can do so via our Web site:
www.ranchodechihuahua.org
.

Notes

PREFACE

viii
  Veterinarian suicide: see
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/105081.php
and
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/179796.php
.

viii
  A short note about music: most of this book was written while listening to one playlist. Here's that list. Thank you to all involved.

  1. “Space Travel Is Boring,” Sun Kil Moon

  2. “One,” U2

  3. “Karma Police,” Radiohead

  4. “Hey Pretty,” Poe

  5. “Watch Them,” Soldiers of Jah Army

  6. “Cold Desert,” Kings of Leon

  7. “Conquering Lion,” Yabba You

  8. “Who Was That Masked Man,” Van Morrison

  9. “Theory of the Crows,” The National

10. “Ladies and Gentleman We Are Floating in Space,” Spiritualized

11. “The Seventh Seal,” Groundation

12. “El Jugador,” South Park Mexican

13. “Speed Law,” Mos Def

14. “St. Petersburg,” Supergrass

15. “Sink, Florida, Sink,” Against Me

16. “Blind,” Gomez

17. “Let Live,” Midnite

18. “Peace, Love and Understanding,” Nick Lowe

19. “How's It Gonna Be,” Third Eye Blind

20. “Rocket Man,” My Morning Jacket

21. “Goin' to Acapulco,” Calexico and Jim James

22. “Fake Empire,” The National

23. “Prayer of St. Francis,” Sarah McLachlan

ix
T. H. Irwin,
Aristotle's First Principles
(Clarendon Press, 1988).

PART ONE

3
     A lot has been written about the Sixth Great Extinction, but Elizabeth Kolbert does a really nice job in the
New Yorker
, May 25, 2009, 53.

4
     June 23, 2007, John Burnett reporting for National Public Radio.

4
     For the DEA's official version of Operation Tar Pit, see
http://www.justice.gov/dea/major/tarpit.htm
. For a closer look at the bigger picture, try Chellis Glendinning's
Chiva: A Village Takes on the Global Heroin Trade
(New Society Publishers, 2005).

4
     “Lessons from New Mexico's War on Heroin.” Again, it's John Burnett reporting for NPR, August 18, 2005.

5
     The village is called Tesuque. The author, Cormac McCarthy, also lives there. He is on staff at the nearby complexity science think tank, the Santa Fe Institute (SFI). When asked about the nature of his job, McCarthy once told reporters: “I have two official duties, to eat lunch and attend afternoon tea.”

6
     For a good Griffith Park history, see
http://www.griffithobservatory.org/obshist.html
.

8
     Most feel that shelters underreport kill rates and the real number is 10 million dogs put down annually.

11
    T. S. Eliot,
Prufrock and Other Observations
(The Egoist, Ltd., 1917), line 51.

15
   
http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/book/nov16.html
.

19
    Check out
http://www.circuses.com
or PETA's circus fact sheet,
http://www.peta.org/MC/factsheet_display.asp?ID=66
, for examples.

20
    Stephen Jay Gould, “Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Times,” the Jerusalem-Harvard Lectures, 1987. That said, the most poetic account of deep time is probably found inside John McPhee's
Basin and Range
, though why stop there? McPhee's
Annals of the Former World
includes
Basin and Range
(it started out as four separate books, was then combined and republished, and won the Pulitzer) is by far the most dizzyingly wonderful look at geology that will most likely ever see print.

27
    If you read my last book, you probably have some understanding that musician Jim White is a vortex of weird. For example, when New York filmmaker Stephen Earnhardt went down to Pensacola, Florida, to shoot Jim White's first music video, at Jim's suggestion he hired folks living at a nearby trailer park to work as extras. After the shoot was over, these same folks convinced Earnhardt to stay in Florida and help them make a horror movie about a one-armed purple gorilla who haunts the swamp behind their trailer park. They said it would take two weeks. It took three years. The movie, by the way, is called
Mule Skinner Blues
and remains one of the best meditations on creativity and culture around. But the reason I mention this here is because it was Jim who first suggested I try to track down the legend of the Conductor. I took his advice and lost three years of my life to that little quest (see that aforementioned last book,
West of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origins of Belief
). It was also Jim who suggested I read James Carse's
Finite and Infinite Games
. Just like the last time, I took his advice and, well, it's three years later and you'd think I'd've learned by now.

28
    What I mean by “well spent” is that the last time I went to see the Pogues play, Shane MacGowan passed out halfway through their first song, then woke up and sang most of the rest of the show lying on his belly, with his head hung over the edge of the stage.

29
    I wish I could track down that original article. A friend sent it to me and I haven't seen it since moving to New Mexico. But here's a link to the
Independent
's coverage of those same suicides:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/spate-of-canine-suicides-from-bridge-baffles-animal-experts-527155.html
.

PART TWO

38
   
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=2510076&page=1
.

41
    For a good look at the science behind “animal whisperers” see the section on operant conditioning in Karen Pryor,
Don't Shoot the Dog: The New Art of Teaching and Training
(Bantam, 1984).

45
    For all things Wavy Gravy:
www.wavygravy.net
.

46
    Robber's Roost:
http://www.okmag.com/index.cfm?id=44&homepageid=35
.

47
    He truly is an exceptional photographer. See
www.wray-mccann.com
.

51
    Jennifer Dewey wrote a children's book about Doc,
Wildlife Rescue: The Work of Dr. Kathleen Ramsay
(Boyd Mill Press, 1994). Also, I did a Q&A with Doc for
National Geographic Adventure
that can be found here:
http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/2008/10/kathleen-ramsay-text
.

51
    Shevawn Lynam,
Humanity Dick Martin
(Lilliput Press, 1997).

51
    Mildren Mastin Pace, Daniel Miller, and Paul Brown,
Friend of Animals: The Story of Henry Bergh
(Jessie Stuart Foundation), 1995. For a full look at the history of American animal activism try
For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States
(Swallow Press, 2006).

52
    “Four paws and 140 years ago”: this is from the ASPCA's history page,
http://www.aspca.org/about-us/history.html
. They also do a nice summary of Henry Bergh's contribution.

52
    Katherine Grier,
Pets in America: A History
(Harvest Books, 2007).

52
    Most of this information came from personal interviews, though the Web has plenty of this information as well. The American Humane Society's Animal Shelter Euthanasia Fact Sheet (
http://www.americanhumane.org/about-us/newsroom/fact-sheets/animal-shelter-euthanasia.html
.) is a decent starting point.

55
   
http://www.blackpearldogs.com
; “Black Pups Face Doggie Discrimination,” MSNBC, March 5, 2008,
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23472518
.

55
    Konrad Lorenz,
Part and Parcel in Animal and Human Societies
, in
Studies in Animal and Human Behavior
, 2:115–95 (Harvard University Press, 1971 [1950]). Also, Stephen Jay Gould does a great job in
The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
(W. W. Norton, 1980).

55
    Natalie Angier, “The Cute Factor,”
New York Times
, January 3, 2006.

57
    James Serpell, ed.,
The Domestic Dog: Its Evolution, Behavior and Interactions with People
(Cambridge University Press, 1996), 258.

57
    Raymond Coppinger and Lorna Coppinger,
Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior and Evolution
(Scribner, 2001).

58
    Coppinger, in a roundtable discussion on PBS's
Nova
(February 3, 2004), put it this way: “The idea that Stone Age people could tame and then train and then domesticate a dog is just ludicrous, as far as I'm concerned. When I think of how much time it takes to train a dog, and think that those people back there, who had their own problems, and they've got to spend weeks, months, training wolves, and the wolves are going to put up with this kind of thing, and they're going to do it generation after generation, and I'm going to breed my wolf with your wolf? I mean, wolves have very strict rules about who they breed with, and when they breed, and so on. I mean, I don't see Stone Age people sitting out there with chain-link fences and all the things that are required for me to breed dogs. They just don't have the stuff to do it with.”

58
    In that same
Nova
show, Coppinger explained this as well: “Imagine fourteen thousand years ago when people first get the idea of living in a village. They settle down, they build permanent houses, and around … those permanent houses, all the waste products of their economies build up. You've got waste food; you've got waste materials of all kinds. Now there's a whole set of animals that move in on that. We know them now: we've got house mice, we've got cockroaches, we've got pigeons, we've got all kinds of animals that are living off the human waste. One of them is the wolf. The wolf moves into that kind of a setting, that new niche, that new foraging area, and it's great. You don't have to chase anything, you don't have to kill anything. You just wait; people dump it in front of you.”

58
    Again, Coppinger from
Nova
: “The ones that run away the first time anybody shows up, those are the ones that are going to be selected against, they're going to go out, have to make an honest living out in the wild. They're not going to be able to get enough out of that dump. So here's natural selection in action. Any one wolf that's a little tamer than the other, who can stay there longer, get more food, he's the one that's going to win that evolutionary battle.”

PART THREE

66
    For a great history of altruism (without which the opening to this chapter would have been impossible) try Daniel Charles Batson,
The Altruism Question: Toward a Social Psychological Answer
(Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991).

67
    There are a ton of choices if you're curious about biological altruism. Obviously, you can begin with Darwin's
Descent of Man
, but for a fast and dirty overview start with the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
entry on the topic:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/altruism-biological
. Also, a classic (though now somewhat dated) book on the subject is Kristen Monroe's
The Heart of Altruism: Perceptions of a Common Humanity
(Princeton University Press, 1996).

69
    Richard Dawkins,
The Selfish Gene
(Oxford University Press, 1976).

69
    There is very little written about cross-species altruism, so if you're curious about “reputation models” you're going to have to look in other directions. One place is David Rand and Martin Nowak's article “Name and Shame” from
New Scientist
, November 2009, which examines eco-friendliness and reputation. For a bigger look at reputation issues, try Robert Frank's
Choosing the Right Pond
(Oxford University Press, 1987), which examines the question of status in society.

75
    See the preface to Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce,
Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals
(University of Chicago Press, 2009).

80
    Paul Waldau and Kimberley Patton,
A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science and Ethics
(Columbia University Press, 2006), especially “Caught with Ourselves in the Net of Life and Time: Traditional Views of Animals in Religion,” 27–39.

80
    C. Vilà et al., “Multiple and Ancient Origins of the Domestic Dog,”
Science
276 (1997): 1687–89, or Robert McGhee, “Co-evolution: New Evidence Suggests That to Be Truly Human Is to Be Part Wolf,”
Alternatives Journal
28 (Winter 2002).

81
    W. M. Schleidt and M. D. Shalter, “Co-evolution of Humans and Canids: An Alternative View of Dog Domestication: Homo Homini Lupus?”
Evolution and Cognition
9, 1 (2003): 57–72.

82
    This question has lately seen much debate. Two things are worth considering. The first is that in recent years a number of prominent researchers interested in studying the evolution of ethics (Harvard's Marc Hauser is one example) have switched from studying primates to studying dogs for this very reason. That said, Rob Shumaker, a scientist with the Great Ape Trust, agrees that very little social learning took place between the great apes and humans, but he feel this may “have more to do with physical location than mental skill set.” Humans and primates tended to occupy the same niches and thus competed for the same resources. Competition is the reason we didn't see more social learning between our species, not because primates are somehow “less capable” than wolves.