• for: humans vs other animals, personal experience, personal experience - pets, control vs adaptation, human features, quote, quote - Ruth Gates, quote - humans vs animals, quote - control vs adaptation
• quote
  • . In terms of evolution, animals adapt to their ecological conditions, but as humans, we have been able to control our ecological conditions.
• author: Ruth Gates
• source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJV0Kx7oGxU&t=496s
• comment
  • personal experience
    • her remark made me think about how often I feel this difference with our pets. They adapt to whatever we do. We control our environment by building something. They just adapt to whatever we build.
      • Our pets never build anything, but simply adapt to what we build.

“Sharing a few minutes with a pet will minimize anxiety and [lower] blood pressure and raise serotonin and dopamine rates, two neurochemicals that play a major ...

Apr 29, 2020 — Why Having a Pet Can Boost Your Mood and Keep Your Brain Healthy ... hormone cortisol and boost release of the neurotransmitter serotonin, ...

Playing with a dog or cat can elevate levels of serotonin and dopamine, which calm and relax. Pet owners have lower triglyceride and cholesterol levels (indicators of heart disease) than those without pets.

The famous opening of Northanger Abbey describes Catherine Morland “as plain as any.” Yet from the list of qualities and habits that set her against narrative expectations—the Gothic and the sentimental—and social expectations—femininity and propriety—Catherine’s character ultimately emerges as unconventional, too. In seemingly trivial and funny details, such as her preference for cricket over “feeding a canary-bird,” the narrator intimates her inconformity with dominant beliefs about the nature of women. The canary alludes to existing associations between birds and women that underscored women’s lack of rationality and their supposed vulnerability.

In many portraits of the period, young girls were eroticized through their connection to birds, particularly when portrayed weeping for a dead pet bird, a sign of their loss of sexual innocence. Canaries, a favorite songbird in the late eighteenth-century household, were associated with young girls through their delicate size, beautiful and soft feathers, and prized songs [1]. At the same time, women’s musical abilities, as exemplified in Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1815), were a sure-fire sign of their marriageability: good singers made good wives [2]. Maturity didn’t save women from disparaging associations with birds. Spinsters were oftentimes portrayed surrounded by parrots and bird cages, the equivalent of crazy cat ladies [3]. By creating a heroine who is more likely to be found outdoors exercising than feeding a small, delicate bird, Austen disassociates Catherine from these sexist beliefs. Not all associations to birds were troubling, though. Songbirds figured in stories for young children to instill kindness toward other animals, as in Sarah Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories (1786). Austen’s contemporaries shared a strong belief that educating children to treat animals with kindness was the foundation for instilling sympathy toward other humans [4]. Yet, as Mary Wollstonecraft argued in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), a rational woman knew that compassion “for the bird starved in a snare” came second (or third) to compassion for her fellow humans.

This annotation draws on research developed for a forthcoming essay which will appear in Science and Storytelling, edited by Dave Alff and Danielle Spratt.

Media, P. A. (2021, April 23). UK scientists find evidence of human-to-cat Covid transmission. The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/apr/23/uk-scientists-find-evidence-of-human-to-cat-covid-transmission

Some good advice on pet training. Potentially useful for helping to calm Lily with regard to our putting on shoes or getting the leash to go for walks.

How will Chewy Pharmacy be structured compared to PETS's business model?

What would the re-order sales of PetMed Express vs. new order sales be in the future?

Where exactly does PETS source its inventory?

What is the cycle for sales typically?

The one thing you will remember from this course when you are 95 years old.