Author: Deer Me

Reference Photos Adoptable Dogs

Deer Me

I like to draw quickly from reference photos. Photos help because it turns off the narrative. Speed helps because it prevents thoughts and voices from the other room from getting traction. Anyway, here’s around 500 reference photos for images scraped from online where some description, or alt text, or automatic image tagging, resulted in their return.

Adoptable Dogs reference Photos

Abandoned Dogs Reference Photos

Mangy Dog Reference Photos

Dingo Reference Photos

Cat Reference Photos

Shelter Cat Reference Photos

Adoptable Cats Reference Photos

Files have been deduplicated and then numbered.

This is for sure already a thing, I just don’t know where to find smarter people talking about it.

Deer Me

I read this book about hearing. And from there I wondered about hearing in animals for whom it is a primary sense, like sight is in humans. Which made put me in the position of needing to know how those animals which have been with us the longest are different, so I read this other book about what thirty thousand years can do. Go figure, domesticated animals are demonstrably different and I don’t mean different like a pampered pet dog and a semi-feral village dog. I mean the new facial muscles they developed, the gaze following, recognition of self and aid rendered to conspecifics. That made me worried about dogs.

And then I had to read this book about laboratory dogs. There are things that are done on a terrible scale which are worse than heartless. There is a culture to keep it in place. There are people who literally abduct dogs and sell them to labs for “important testing” where they are prized for being more docile and trusting than the less socialized purpose-bred beagles. Naturally, I needed to read about the opposite sort of thing, which was this book about rendering aid as well as can be done.

Of course this meant I needed to know about pet keeping and I read this book with a very Eurocentric high-society type view of it. There was a good deal in there about grief for pets passed on from primary sources. From that I was obligated to read this book about the perception of death for a pet. And now I’m stuck. This isn’t a dead end, I just don’t know the path.

There’s a good explanation in the book about death and the understanding of it in different animals. There’s a field of study, comparative thanatology, that deals with that. There’s a frequent representation that science is unwilling to bestow upon animals the highest level of understanding death. Primates and cetaceans carrying the dead. Virginia possums feigning death where it is argued that the possum doesn’t understand what they are doing as playacting death, but that predators do understand it as death. It’s a rabbit hole, but if possums know genetically how to play possum, why should we ascribe predators a higher understanding of death and not also biologically mandated behavior.

Anyway, where I’m stuck. Do we understand death completely? There’s no reasonable expectation that we understand death at the most objective level. Alien race number one comes along, or if you like a dog blessed with speech, and witness sobbing over a coffin. Do they think it odd because our accepted representation of death is that it’s permanent absolute? Do they think it clearly wrong that the dead can not interact or do work because they see something we don’t? It’s a thing and I don’t know where to take it. Certainly not panpsychism.

Maybe I’ll read about bears.

Hearing is Odd

Deer Me

I have read The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind by Seth S. Horowitz. You should read it too, it’s fantastic. I am now qualified to state: sound is weird. Hearing sound is stranger still. A florescent bulb sounds like a chainsaw to a fly. The sun would sound like a jackhammer but for the vacuum of space. This is surprising in the way that affects those people who haven’t thought about it before. There’s a line in the introduction where it’s said that to a frog, the sound of street traffic would be equivalent to a mid-range earthquake. Extended out to other animals, it’s worth considering that humanity and all the sounds our terrible machines produce are geological scale disaster volume-wise. After all, there’s been very little time for evolution to adjust to our roar. This becomes stranger when one considers the way a mammals ear works.

Sound occurs at the level f molecules. This bit of nitrogen bumps into this other bit and then oxygen and argon and whatever else is in the air between a source of noise and the apparatus that hears it. This is why it’s “silent” in space, too few molecules, at least for our ears. Think about how sound works for dolphins or whales, they hear well under water; there anatomy is adapted to it. We hear well in the atmosphere; our anatomy is adapted to it. Surely some Lovecraftian horror can hear well in space, with a hypothetical anatomy adapted to it. Consider Venice. It’s limestone buildings and low traffic streets conspire to absorb the vibrations the way that foam egg-carton stuff does in recording booths. It’s all physical, environment affecting sound at least as much as anatomy.

Technology can actively manipulate both, and that’s interesting. Sound itself can manipulate sound. If we have an audible thing and it’s particular waveform looks like peak, we hear that. If we add an audible thing to it and that things particular waveform look like a valley, an inverse of the peak, we hear nothing. That’s real, that’s how active noise cancelling works in headphones.

Now, I’m starting to conceive that anatomically someone could be missing the mechanical anatomy to hear the valley everyone else hears. Such a person wouldn’t hear silence like everyone else, they would hear something. I hope to hear nothing.