leoparduscolocola
felidae enthusiast
header: transient killer whales T036A2, T036A, and T036A3 by the center for whale research pfp: artbulls cetaceanrights.org
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The Damage of Dog Whispering
This is an authorized repost of this article.
The full pdf can be found at this google drive link for more-professional-than-tumblr sharing purposes.
I wrote this paper four years ago, and it still stands as probably the most important and widely read piece of my work. It’s official posting is moving to this blog because it needs to be seen and referenced as part of a larger educational effort about animal behavior and welfare. It’s been reposted to a number of sites. Some credit me, some don’t - all have been messaged about it. Some insist on sharing it with the inflammatory photos of Millan flipping off the camera, which were added by a third party and are consistently the bane of my existence. I consider them highly unprofessional as part of an academic essay, but without them functioning as click-bait I think it would be much less widely read. They’re catchy and inflammatory, but they’re not my addition.
Share this link, share the google doc - but please don’t share the versions with those photos. If you see them posted on your friend’s timelines or other sites, please, tell them those photos aren’t part of the original educational effort and ask them to support and share this version.
The story I don’t often tell about this paper is that it came about as a result of a bet with one of my professors. I knew, as most people in the academic side of canine training do by now, that it was easy to disprove Millan’s theories as harmful using primary sources. I wanted to see if it was possible for someone who wasn’t a trainer, wasn’t an academic, to draw the same conclusions from a selection of well-cited books that could be pulled off a shelf. They had to be easy to read and accessible with very little background knowledge about behavioral science. I wanted to prove that with dedication and time literally any dog owner could draw the right conclusions about Millan’s work and do the right thing by their dog by switching away from it. She took me up on the bet, and I won.
If you care about animal welfare, please read this.
I’ve now been training dogs for a decade. I find Cesar Millan’s training theory and advice appalling. As a scientist, its obvious that his factual statements and derived conclusions are entirely wrong. As a trainer, I can tell how stressed and unhappy - not cured - the dogs portrayed on his show are. It’s covered up by rhetoric, the soundtrack and a voiceover. Tens of scientists, trainers and behavioral science organizations have spoken out against his theories. I’ve seen dogs mistreated by well-meaning owners who took his advice unquestioningly. Whether you’re an owner, a trainer or just someone who likes dogs, please read this. It’s important to be educated in the science behind training theories before espousing or applying them.
This paper has been written as a cumulative work for an intensive independent study [in 2012] on canine cognition and applied training theory. It aims only to represent logical conclusions as drawn from scientific sources and professionals in the field. You’ll notice the sources cited are credible books and web-sites - this is intentional. The goal was to write a paper with information taken from sources directly available to the common layperson. I’m happy to suggest scientific sources for more reading.
It has been pointed out to me that the mention of immigrant status in this is easily interpreted as discriminatory, and that was never the intent. I originally wrote this as a scientific paper, in which it was considered important to go into detail about his credentials. I included it in his background because it was something he emphasized in his own books as highly impacting his career trajectory.
THE DAMAGE OF DOG WHISPERING: A CRITIQUE OF CESAR MILLAN’S THEORY OF DOG PACK DYNAMICS
Rachel Garner 4/25/12
INTRODUCTION
Theories of canine psychology and training derived from legitimate behavioral science have progressed greatly in the last fifty years. Unfortunately, the public’s most beloved source of information – The Dog Whisperer by Cesar Millan - advocates a theory in direct opposition to this progress. For the last eight years, Cesar Millan has put forth an abusive training theory predicated on disproven science, fallacious logic, and incorrect assumptions. Described by a New York Times affiliate as a “one-man wrecking ball directed at 40 years of progress in understanding and shaping dog behavior,” Millan mixes an overly simplistic and incorrect view of canine social structures with a lack of scientific knowledge. His philosophy centers around two main theories; that canines have an innate and ingrained need to function according to a ‘wolf-pack’ social structure, and that dogs need to live ‘as they did in nature’, before human intervention. Because the concept of dominance theory is central to Millan’s training philosophy, many other crucial aspects of a dog’s environment and psyche that should be addressed when dealing with behavioral issues are completely ignored. As a result of the Dog Whisperer’s popularized methods, many dogs with simple issues are handled badly and likely abused in the name of ‘pack theory’. The worst part is that the entire situation could be avoided easily. It requires only a small amount of research into the social and psychological lives of the common canine to understand where Millan’s theory goes wrong.
Keep reading
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people who advocate for keeping cats indoors: have legitimate sources and compelling reasons for their position, along with ways to keep indoor cats happy
people who advocate for allowing their cats outdoors: my cat is somehow smarter than every other outdoor cat that has ever died horribly. birds don’t deserve to exist as much as my cat deserves to have fun.
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Some news stories, as well as social media users, have been treating this incident as a joke—but it's no laughing matter. Someone, including the elephant, could have been seriously injured or killed. Please don't support circuses or other forms of entertainment that use wild animals, and please support legislation in your community to ban this cruelty. Also, do your research before visiting any facility with elephants, whether it calls itself a zoo, sanctuary, or something else. Elephants are extremely difficult to provide for in captivity, and some facilities, even those that are members of the "gold standard" Association of Zoos and Aquariums, still capture elephants from the wild by calling the captures "rescues", which is an oversimplification at best and a full-blown lie at worst.
#elephant#elephants#asian elephant#asian elephants#african elephant#african elephants#african bush elephants#african bush elephant#african savanna elephant#animal welfare#zoology#circus#circuses#zoos#zoo#katherine speaks
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Birding in Spain: Bearded Vulture - Gypaete, Didier Buysse - Didbird
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Jim Pastrone
Pier 39, San Francisco
toB. S
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Sharks: Not Vicious, Just Mouthy and Inquisitive
In lieu of all of the sensationalist shark media occurring out there this summer, let’s talk about shark behavior and, in specific, shark attacks and white shark.
Some basic white shark facts (and yes, Carcharodon carcharias is often also officially called the great white, but that just exacerbates all the media attention, so white shark it is). Whites are huge pelagic (open water) sharks that get on average 4-5 meters long, and their only known predator as an adult are orcas. They’re one of the longest lived cartilaginous fish known with a lifespan that appears to extend into their 70′s. They have hella tons of teeth and lots of rows of them, so that when one pops out the next just pops into place as if on a conveyor belt. A white shark’s bite force is something like 4000 pounds per square inch from a six-foot-long animal. (Thanks to wiki for all the basic facts).
Have a white shark anatomical drawing from wiki, because while it’s nightmare-inducing, it’s the only thing about sharks that should be.
People love to talk about sharks as these horrible monsters of the deep, eating everything they come across with gruesome abandon. This is just ‘perfect’ for summer, when sharks start showing up on beaches in the US and scaring the bejeezus out of basically everyone.
Luckily, those people are making things up. You’re more likely to die because you shook a vending machine and it fell on top of you than you are to get bitten (note: not attacked) by a white shark. There’s a couple things you’re got to know about how sharks function to understand why worrying about getting nommed on by one at the beach is pretty silly.
To start, they’re not man-eaters. Sharks don’t even know what a human is. We’re not aquatic organisms and they’ve probably only rarely encountered humans before, so there’s no reason to assume they’re going to be like ‘omg tasty hooman’ and charge over for a snack We don’t fit into what sharks consider prey, so they’re not going to prey on us intentionally.
However, they do prey on seals. Tasty, blubbery, freaking-stupidly-clever-and-fast seals. And a human on a surfboard (which is when almost all shark encounters happen that result in injury) happens to look mightily like a seal if all you can see is a silhouette. More importantly, it’s a slow, stationary seal, which implies an easy meal. Most of the time, sharks ‘attack’ surfers thinking they’re seals. And guess what? Humans do not have all that tasty, energy-loaded blubber that seals do. We’re pretty bony and we’re on these weird plastic things that have got to taste nasty as hell. Most shark ‘attacks’ last for one bite, because the shark pretty quickly realizes that we’re not the pinniped it thought we were, and those bones aren’t worth the effort, and it leaves. Not great for the surfer who is now missing lots of bits, but hey, the shark isn’t purposefully being an asshole. It was a case of mistaken identity!
But there are lots of encounters where people don’t get hurt, right? They just get the shit scared out of them when a shark starts face-punching their arm, and panic, and call the media, and suddenly it’s an attack again. This is actually because most of a shark’s sensory organs are on it’s face.
All those red dots are organs called the ampullae of lorenzini, and they sense electrical stimulus. They’re the organs that all cartilaginous fish use to locate food - when you see a ray sweeping it’s rostrum across the sand, it’s using it’s ampullae to search for buried critters. So if a shark is curious about something, say, a human, the first response is to nose it to get more information. That’s not aggression, it’s curiosity. Then, unfortunately, if it still wants more information, it’ll go and take a nibble - because, if you look above, there are more dots right around the mouth than anywhere else. Sharks are basically the really sharp aquatic equivalent of that annoying baby who has to put everything in it’s mouth.
Because humanity is collectively terrified of anything that has more naturally provided pointy bits than we do, everything has to demonize sharks, and that ends really badly. Everything gets interpreted as aggression. This, for instance, is a video in which a shark attempts to figure out what a pontoon boat is and gets stuck in the float. The people watching it of course put JAWS music on and captioned it as an attack, but that’s just a stressed shark going ‘wtf is this weird thing and why won’t it give me my teeth back’.
It’s shark season, but that doesn’t mean they’re out to eat us. We’re a bony, problematic food that likes to play mean tricks by pretending to be seals. If you don’t want to get attacked by a shark? Be careful about being in the water, and don’t surf at sunset or sunrise. If you see a shark being inquisitive, just bop it. They’re not used to any sort of physical contact from something that isn’t either food, a predator, or a mate, so they’ll generally just leave immediately.
Tl;dr, sharks are mouthy babies who aren’t good at differentiating humans from seals, and we certainly don’t help them any.
#super important#zoology#animal welfare#shark#sharks#icthyology#white shark#white sharks#great white shark#great white sharks
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Here are the sharks again but cut up into tumblr-digestible pieces!!
have you ever wanted to learn about some hipster sharks you may or may not have heard of before?
because BOY do i have a bucket of Fun Shark Trivia for YOU
(drew and researched these pages for pinkcloverpress on twitter for an Animal-themed magazine last year!!! Twas a blast to get back to my Science-y roots for a hot second)
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A mountain lion cub feasting on a mountain goat carcass. Photographed by Stay Wild Media.
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This is a tribute to Peter Benchley, not the movie Jaws (1975)
The author of 'Jaws' dedicated the rest of his life to reversing the unexpected negative impact his book had on the image of sharks.
Not only were sharks supposedly killed to create props for the movie, but 'Jaws' ended up awakening a bloody sea of ignorance in people at the time, who, haunted by an irrational fear and lack of understanding about marine predators, felt motivated to take to their boats and kill thousands of great white sharks in the most feared ways.
Such as the promotion of great white shark hunting championships that targeted the biggest ones, which were mostly pregnant females who, after being displayed as a trophy, had their jaws ripped off and their bodies discarded in the garbage.
Fear spread widely to all shark species, creating a lack of sensitivity that made it convenient to exterminate entire shark populations around the world that for a long time remained invisible to people's perception.
And this has continued to resonate for a long time with the entertainment media perpetuating the portrayal of sharks as monsters, newspapers favoring sensationalism about shark incidents, governments promoting shark culls, the advance of the unregulated predatory fishing industry, scientists not being supported in their studies of marine predators, the destruction of their natural habitats and the pollution of the oceans.
For thousands of years, sharks have taken care of the health of our oceans, older than the dinosaurs or the first trees, they have gone through great mass extinctions, they have been worshipped and respected as gods and guardians by oceanic peoples and now we demonize them in our media and exterminate them by the millions every year, who is the real monster?
We are shark-eaters.
I hope you can also hear what Peter Benchley himself had to say about all this:
I finally finished this artwork! Hope you like it. At some point I will adapt it for my little Redbubble store.🛍️
I reduced the quality to try to prevent them from stealing. I hope it's enough! 🙁
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Muskrat (Ondatra zibethicus) a semi-aquatic rodent native to North America (and introduced & invasive in parts of Europe and Asia). Their name possibly derives from muscascus, an Algonquian word meaning "it is red."
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Hey, happy Earth Day! Who wants to talk about climate change?
Yeah, okay, fair, I kinda figured the answer to that would be "ugh do we have to?" What if I told you I have good news though? Good news with caveats, but still good news.
What if I told you that since the Paris Agreement in 2015, we've avoided a whole degree celsius of global warming by 2100, or maybe more?
Current projections are 2.7C, which is way better than the 3-5C (with a median of 3.7C) we were expecting in 2015. It's not where we want to be - 1.5C - but it is big, noticeable progress!
And it's not like we either hit 1.5C and avoid all the big scary consequences or fail to hit 1.5C and get all of them - every tenth of a degree of warming we avoid is going to prevent more severe problems like extreme weather, sea level rise, etc.
This means that climate change mitigation efforts are having a noticeable impact! This means a dramatically better, safer future - and if we keep pushing, we could lower the amount of global warming we end up with even further. This is huge progress, and we need to celebrate it, even though the fight isn't over.
It's working. Keep going.
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BREAKING: New Jaguar Just Dropped!
A Center for Biological Diversity analysis of a trail camera detection by wildlife enthusiast Jason Miller confirms we have a new jaguar in Arizona, making it the 8th jaguar documented in the U.S. Southwest in the past 3 decades.
The rosette pattern on each jaguar is unique, like a human fingerprint, and it enables identification of specific animals. The pattern shows this jaguar is not Sombra or El Jefe, two jaguars who have roamed Arizona in recent years.
Jaguars once lived throughout the American Southwest, with historical records on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, the mountains of Southern California and as far east as Louisiana. But they virtually disappeared from this part of their range over the past 150 years, primarily due to habitat loss and historic government predator control programs intended to protect the livestock industry.
Read more: https://biodiv.us/3RORtQp
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Sea squirt (Aplidium conicum), Cabo de Palos, Spain
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all my cat art; newest at top to the oldest at the bottom :)
still plenty more i can add to this collection
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