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About Me
- The Beebs Blog
- Arlington, Virginia
- I was born on the Arlington streets in the Summer of 2001, rescued from the Arlington Humane Society by Carol and John in November of 2001 telling them at the time "yea, kids, I can handle this gig on Stafford Street and hang out with these two cat lovers for awhile." Seven years later, I figured, this was enough.
3 comments:
Carol and John now have my two half brothers to care for, Coal and Chessie, who they love and cherish like they did with me.
Big Black Fly in the house.
Buzz, buzz.
I'm at the computer at the dining room table and suddenly, on the other side of the table,
Chessie leaps 5 feet straight up to try and snag
the fly.
Height: 9.5
Degree of difficulty: 9.0
Artistic Merit: under consideration by the judges
Success in snagging fly: 0.0
There is an Olympic event is there not?
Two passages from Granta’s 2010 “The Last Vet”
1.) In 1952 Konrad Lorenz published King Solomon’s Ring in which he set out the terms of ‘the Covenant’. The Covenant describes the relationship between human and canine, its beginnings and the stone upon which it is founded. A pack of jackals followed Stone-Age man’s hunting expeditions and surrounded his settlements, were tolerated, accepted and ultimately encouraged. Firstly for the warning note they sounded at the advance of predators, secondly for their ability to track game. The jackals, who initially followed the hunters in the hope of scraps and entrails, began to take the initiative, running before instead of behind the hunter, bringing to bay larger animals than they would be able to hunt without assistance. And so the covenant was created, an interdependent exchange of services. This is how, fifty years earlier, Rudyard Kipling described the origin of the Covenant in ‘The Cat that Walked by Himself’: ‘When the Man waked up he said, “What is Wild Dog doing here?” And the Woman said, “His name is not Wild Dog any more, but the First Friend, because he will be our friend for always and always and always. Take him with you when you go hunting.”’ For Lorenz, who went on to win a Nobel Prize, the contract between human and animal was: ‘signed...without obligation.’ Jalloh, closer to Kipling than to Lorenz, would disagree. There is an obligation, it is unequivocal and one-sided. Having brought the jackal into his sphere, having bred the wildness from him – man owes dog.
2.) Milan Kundera’s test of humanity: ‘True human goodness can manifest itself, in all its purity and liberty, only in regard to those who have no power. The true moral test of humanity lies in those who are at its mercy: the animals.’
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