In Soul Dog, the story of her remarkable journey with her dog and teacher Brio, Elena Mannes has created something beautiful, moving, important and deeply empowering. We are told always that there is no such thing as soul and that this life is all there is. Worse, we live in a state of anesthesia when it comes to soul and the world of soul. We cannot feel it, so we come to assume that it isn’t there.
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Researchers have found what may be the earliest depiction of dogs hunting alongside a human companion in Saudi Arabia, in a sandstone carving believed to be more than 8,000 years old. The human is armed with a bow and arrow, accompanied by thirteen dogs, including two that appear to be tethered to their biped counterpart by what the researchers believe are leashes — possibly the oldest record of the use of such a restraining device by humans.
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It has long been recognised that birds use the Earth’s magnetic field (MF) for navigational purposes, but a recent study published in Frontiers in Zoology has uncovered a rather more unexpected animal response to this enigmatic MF energy.
It transpires that, when they stoop to poop, dogs prefer to align their bodies to the north-south axis of the Earth as signified by the geomagnetic field.
What the study did not manage to determine was why dogs choose to do this, but after observing 70 dogs of different 37 breeds 1,893 times during defecation, the scientists were able to confirm with some confidence that "dogs preferred to excrete with the body being aligned along the North-south axis under calm MF conditions." read more
Dogs are not only considered a delicacy in Vietnam, they are slaughtered with intentional cruelty because the adrenaline this produces in the suffering animal improves the flavor. Dogs are also rare in Vietnam and must be smuggled in from other countries in an illegal trade that activists in Thailand are trying hard to stop. This is because the country where most of the smuggling originates is Thailand. Pet dogs provide the best meat and, because of their love of man, are easiest to handle. Activists believe that 98% of the animals involved are stolen pets.
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