Word: dog
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...following morning I took a ten-mile run in a placid valley beneath the Green Mountains-a stream, a junkyard dog, an 18th-century one-room schoolhouse, a falconry camp, farms, farms, more farms-then enjoyed a nice breakfast drenched in the world?s best maple syrup and, after shopping, pointed the Honda south. I decided to take the shunpikes down to Brattleboro, hotting village after village. In funky Jamacia, Vermont, I stopped and bought the kids some maple moose pops at the general store. The longhaired kid at the cash register was talking Sox with...
Anyone who has owned dogs or spent much time watching them is familiar with the posture: hind end up, chest down on the ground, forelegs stretched forward, an eager expression on the face. It's obviously a friendly, playful gesture, and for most dog lovers, that's all you need to know. Ethologists--animal-behavior experts--go a step further. They call this move the "play bow" and know it's used not just by dogs but also by wolves and coyotes to signal an interest in the romping, pretend-fighting sort of games that canines of all kinds seem...
...Marc Bekoff, an ethologist at the University of Colorado, always suspected there was something more going on. True, the posture happens most often at the beginning of a bout of canine play. But it also happens in the middle, and not randomly. And the more closely Bekoff observed dog behavior, the more he began to recognize other ritualized motions and postures--some of them so fleeting that he couldn't really keep track. So he began making videotapes, then playing them back one frame at a time. "The more details I saw, the more interesting it got," he recalls...
That understanding is nothing short of revolutionary. Only a decade or so ago, scientists were arguing vigorously over whether animals had emotions: just because a dog looks sad or a chimp appears to be embarrassed doesn't mean it really is, the skeptics said. That argument is pretty much over. The idea of animal emotion is now accepted as part of mainstream biology. And thanks to Bekoff and other researchers, ethologists are also starting to accept the once radical idea that some animals--primarily the social ones such as dogs, chimps, hyenas, monkeys, dolphins, birds and even rats--possess...
...really expected to believe that treating a detainee like a dog, depriving him of sleep and making him dance with a box over his head are going to lead to credible intelligence? I bet that most people, if treated in such a perverse manner for a prolonged period of time, would tell their interrogators what they wanted to hear. I find it significant that when Detainee 063 finally confessed to al-Qaeda involvement, he stated he was doing it "to get out of here." The interrogation techniques currently used by the U.S. on suspected terrorists appear unethical and outrageous...