Reconnect With Nature Blog

Dogs and Our Well-Being

This morning, I was talking on the phone to a friend who recently had surgery. He was telling me what a struggle it was to overcome the pain, to have to move around when everything hurt, and to believe that everything was turning out just fine.  Then he told me that in moments when he was feeling particularly down, he would talk to his dog, and she would listen attentively and then lick his hand until he started to feel better.  He said that his dog gave him more comfort than his family and more comfort than the advice of the medical professionals who were treating him.

After I finished the phone converstation, I thought about what my friend said. In this respect, he was not an isolated case. Many of us talk to our dogs, and feel that we get love and concern, if not actual understanding, for our problems. Studies have shown that people's blood pressure, breathing rate and heart rate go down when they stroke a dog, and they generally become calmer. Other studies have shown that people who have pets tend to live longer than people who do not have any animals in their household. The idea of therapy dogs is relatively new, the idea that dogs can come into hospitals and retirement facilities and interact with residents, but it seems to be paying off in terms of people feeling better when they connect with a dog.  Dogs offer love without any strings attached, and sometimes it is easier to love a dog than it is to love a person.

And yet that love does not seem to extend to other animals. The dog's closest genetic relative, the wolf, is often pictured as an object of fear.  Despite the fact that there are very few documented cases of wolves actually attacking people, the popular conception paints them as animals who are just slavering to tear apart any person who happens to lose his or her way in the woods.  I saw an early 20th century Russian plate recently on TV that depicted a troika (three horses pulling a sleigh) being chased by a pack of fierce wolves, with the driver of the troika frantically flogging the horses so that he would not be savaged by the hungry man-eating predators.

While I have never encountered any wolves in the wild, I have found leopard tracks circling around my tent in Africa, and had lions roar within 100 meters (300 feet) of my camp on starry African nights. All it would have taken would have been a single claw to rip through my tent, or a simple lunge by a lion to grab me while I slept. Yet here I am, still uneaten.

As we huddle in our cities, we are losing our connection with Nature, and are substituting fear of the natural world for a deeper connection that we once might have had. Perhaps our love of dogs is a symbolic vestige of a connection that we once had with all animals, when we might have understood that most animals were concerned with their own lives and were not out to get us.

Reconnecting At The Ocean

One of the ways to reconnect with nature is to sit and look at the ocean. As I sit on the beach in Cambria, California, I watch the waves coming in to shore. A scattering of birds darts around, moving with the incoming waves. Sandpipers scuttle away from a wave, then move to follow it as it recedes, probing with their bills into the wet sand in the hopes of turning up something to eat. Seagulls stand on the sand and watch the passing scene, lazily moving when the water comes too close. 

A feeling of peace comes over me. The day is windy and cold, so there is no one else on the beach. Normally, there would be dogs scampering on the sand, running out into the water to catch sticks thrown to them by their barefoot owners. Today, there are only the birds and the water.  The wind, remnants of the Santa Anas that are so common at this time of the year, whips past me and blows against the incoming waves, peeling off spumes of water that trail behind, like ephemeral feathers spreading out to greet the next incoming wave.  The waves crash into the shore with a deep bell-like sound that dissolves into the hissing of a thousand snakes as the water laps up along the sand, approaching me and then turning around the join the next surge of nature's power and energy.

As I look at the rhythmic movement of the waves, I realize that nature is always in motion. Nothing stands still. The waves move. The wind moves. The birds move. I have the illusion that I am sitting still, but in reality I am moving too. Everything within my body vibrates and moves. Cells divide. Blood flows. Nerve impulses travel. It is only an illusion that I am sitting quietly and still, watching passively the world around me.

So why do I feel so peaceful and still? I think it is because I am in harmony with the flow around me. The endless chatter in my mind, worrying about what I will do tomorrow and what I should have done yesterday, has died down, leaving nothing but the present moment. My body takes in the sounds and smells and feel of the ocean, without stopping to analyze or plan or think. I feel as though the rhythm of my body has synchronized with the rhythms of everything else around me. At this moment, I am a part of nature. At this moment, I am completely at peace.

Cooperation, Not Competition

Our culture conditions us to think in competitive ways. We compete for jobs, for money, for approval. We tend to think that everything is a zero-sum game. What we lose, someone else wins. One sports team wins, another one loses. And we transfer this outlook to our view of nature as well. Ecologists talk about competition being responsible for structuring communities of plants and animals, and refer to the Competitive Exclusion Principle (where two species cannot occupy the same ecological niche without one species excluding the other) as something that happens often in nature. This principle, first suggested by Gause (see G. F. Gause, 1934, The Struggle for Existence), was demonstrated in the lab when he placed two species of Paramecium into a confined space and showed that one species outcompeted the other for the resources that were available.  This has led us to think that competition is common in nature.

But in actuality, cooperation is found more often than competition in nature. Think of the human body, with its vast collection of cells, all cooperating to keep the body alive and going. Ah, say the biologists, all of these cells are related to each other (i.e., they have the same complement of genes) and that is why they all cooperate. But the cells that make up the body are composed of structures that once were different organisms, and joined together into cooperative structures. Lynn Margulis has proposed the endosymbiotic theory (see L. Margulis, 1970, The Origin of Eukaryotic Cells), in which she suggested that animal cells were collections of cooperating organisms. We now know that mitochondria have their own DNA, a fact that validates Margulis's theory.  At some point, animal cells did not have the same complement of genes within a larger body, yet they cooperated to form the body.

As we look at nature, we can see a lot of other examples of cooperation. Ants defend acacia trees from predators, and in turn the acacias feed the ants. Cleaner wrasse pick parasites off of predatory fish that could swallow the wrasse in an instant, but do not do so because of a cooperative relationship. The examples are numerous. And where ecologists have tried to find competition in action, the results have been elusive. Sometimes ecologists have had to resort to a historical argument, suggesting that even if competion cannot be documented now, it must have occurred in the past to separate species into different niches.

Rather than being competitive, nature tends to be cooperative. Instead of a zero-sum game of scarcity and winners and losers, nature tends to be a win-win game, with mostly winners. Yes, sometimes there are periods of scarcity and deprivation, and species can go extinct. But most of the time nature provides periods of plenty, and species cooperate with each other to use nature's bounty. A part of reconnecting with nature is recognizing the harmony that exists among species in the natural world.

Fear of Nature

November 15, 2006. The other day, I had to give a talk in downtown Phoenix. I arrived early, not knowing what the parking situation was likely to be.  Fortunately, there was a city garage right across the street from where I was supposed to talk, so I found that I had more than 30 minutes of time on my hands. It was 12:30 pm, and a number of office workers were out having lunch on benches near the sidewalk.  I sat down on one of the benches and watched the people and the traffic.

All around me were hungry birds, pigeons and sparrows, that were trying to pick up crumbs that fell from people’s sandwiches. As I watched this, I was amazed to see that most people did not appreciate having the birds come close to them. In fact, a number of people expressed some fear of the birds, moving their bodies slightly away from the approaching bird and sometimes kicking out with their leg to keep the bird from getting too close. Some people gave soft screams or yells as a pigeon came close to their shoes, and others expressed to their lunch companions that they did not want a dirty bird to get very close.

Sparrows and pigeons are pretty innocuous. They do not have huge talons that could rip flesh, nor do they have beaks that could injure someone. Yet the people around me were clearly afraid of the birds, or at the very least uncomfortable with their presence.

I realized then that this is one of the problems that people face in reconnecting with nature. Fear. Nature to many people represents an unknown, and people tend to be afraid of the unknown.  The people around me probably knew nothing about how these birds live, had no appreciation for these birds as living being that are a part of nature. When they were growing up, they might have been taught by their parents or by other kids that animals were dirty, unclean, untouchable.  I have heard people talk about pigeons as rats with wings, and part of folklore is that rats are dirty and disease-ridden. So pigeons must be dirty too, and we can throw sparrows into the same category for good measure.

Reconnecting with nature starts by letting go of the fear. Most animals are neither disease-ridden nor are they out to hurt people. The more we learn about the lives of other beings, either people or animals, the more we understand that they are concerned with their own existence and are not out to get us.