Bear in Mind

Exploring the common minds and emotions of people and other animals and their lives together.

by G.A. Bradshaw

Truth or Consequences

Science has brought us face to face with that latter day Faustian expression, “be careful of what you wish for.” Read More

The news is bad for elephants. Their extinction is no longer a farfetched idea, but imminent and bone-chillingly real. By the time children born this year attain their majority, the magnificent elephant will be gone. Read More

True Colors

From today's headlines: "Toronto Zoo Loses Accreditation Over Plan to Ship Elephants to Sanctuary.” [1] According to the report, the Toronto city council agreed to send three aged elephants from zoo to the highly regarded sanctuary, Performing Animals Welfare Society (PAWS) in San Andreas, California. Read More

Witness to Heaven’s Hands

One day, a few months past, I sat in the clinic waiting room. A woman emerged from the back, bent over, a friend’s protective arm wrapped around her shoulders. Her face was pressed into the folds of her jacket that muffled her weeping. Read More

A Convenient Untruth

Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love. — Fyodar Dostoyevsky Read More

15 Minutes of Shame

This past month the media reported that Ms. Amber Hansen's art project, The Story of Chickens: A Revolution, was in violation of Lawrence, Kansas ordinances that protect animals from being harmed or killed within city limits. Ms. Hansen is a resident lecturer at the University of Kansas. Read More

Man in the Mirror

We may have grown accustomed to, if not sanguine about, the landslide of today's devastating truths. Drowning polar bears, birds falling from the sky, and blistering out-of-season temperatures are hard to shrug off, but humanity plugs along obsessing on celebrities' crises and Wall Street's temperamental cycles. Read More

For Eden, Together

An old crabapple stands rooted / She is tense intention, enduring / At the cusp of fall turn-to-winter, Yellow green leaves fall first / One by one then / In waves of resignation / They all drop, But the fruit remains / Red glory against the sky / Witness to her heart. Read More

Imagine

According to a report in today's New York Times, "Chimps' days in labs may be dwindling." [2] Should Congress pass the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act of 2011 [3], this may indeed be true. The legislation bans invasive research on all great apes, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, gibbons, and orangutans.

Imagine there's no heaven Read More

Why the Caged Bird Does Not Sing

It is usual and customary these days to forewarn with disclaimers such as "discretion is advised." What typically follows are scenes of violence and its victims. Yet you will see no such cautions posted in "pet" stores or zoos, for one plain and simple reason: caged animals are socially acceptable and culturally normative. Read More

In Fall I Grow Silent

There was murder last night. It happened in broad daylight. Despite the waning light of fall, there are few shadows by six. We sat outside encased in the still of blue cold and reddened leaves. The squirrels are out, they have yet to burrow, but their movements are focused. They know that the day's blush of warmth is only a quick last breath of summer's grace. Cold awaits in certainty. Read More

Why Cats Should Teach

Other creatures are waiting for humans to make an overture to the higher spirits, and once the quest for relationship is set into motion, they join in bringing their knowledge to add to our understanding. -Vine Deloria, Jr. Read More

Chimpanzee Symphony, Opus 1060

In a way, to be indifferent to...suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Read More

Dissolving Caliban’s Line

We are not myths of the past, ruins in the jungle, or zoos. We are people and we want to be respected, not to be victims of intolerance and racism. -Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Nobel Peace Prize Winner, 1992

'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: 'we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.''How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland [1] Read More

In Summer I Weep

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow Between the crosses row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below. We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields. Read More

The Tempest in My Mind

World, I'm not the same. I can't remember my name half the time. I took a walk - I thought I'd get some air - but was really not aware of what I said or what I did. I never see the dark of night or the light of day. I took a walk into the park and never saw the children play. Everything I see is a crazy kind of mystery to me. .... I'm flirting, I'm flirting with uncertainty. Read More

Restore Our Daemons

In the magical world of Philip Pullman's novel, The Golden Compass, every person has a life companion in the form of an animal called a "daemon." A daemon is a cross between a soul and a best friend. The animal form it takes is a manifestation of the host's true personality. [1] Read More

Answer to the Elephants

How many years can a mountain exist before it's washed to the sea? Read More

A Trans-species Resolution for the Lunar Eclipse

Things not meant to be. Read More

Now We are One: Living Beyond Species

The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature. -Joseph Campbell Read More

A History of Violence

John Lilly, the guy who says he can talk to dolphins, said he was in an aquarium and he was talking to a big whale who was swimming around and around in his tank. And the whale kept asking him questions telepathically. And one of the questions the whale kept asking was: Do all oceans have walls? —Laurie Anderson Read More

Through a Glass, Darkly, and Out the Other Side

Today, Flo turns 53. However, there is little for her to celebrate. After a ten-year hiatus, she and 185 other chimpanzees are scheduled to resume their brutal existence as biomedical subjects. They are being sent from the protected Alamogordo Primate Facility back into research at the Southwest National Primate Research Center. [1][2] Read More

Repetitive Research Disorder: Trendy Fad or Growing Epidemic?

Psychoanalysts and elephants, they never forget. –Arthur Laurents Read More

Back to the Garden

We are stardust,Billion year old carbonWe are goldenCaught in the devil's bargain,And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden. [1] Read More

Chicken Like Me

She was stumbling around . . . on the far side where the low shelf piled with junk makes everything dark. A shaft of sunlight had caught her, but by the time I was able to get inside she had scrunched herself deep in the far corner underneath the shelf against the wall. She shrank as I reached in to gather her up and lift her out of there. Read More

What's Love Got to Do with It?

Oh what's love got to do, got to do with itWhat's love but a second hand emotionWhat's love got to do, got to do with itWho needs a heartWhen a heart can be broken. - TIna Turner [1]

Try this now at home, or if you are at work, sit back for a few minutes and imagine yourself chez vous trying to accomplish five small tasks: Read More

The Woeful Whale

It was cold, as only Iceland could be in mid-winter. But it did not matter. He was warm, healthy, and well insulated. In fact, the cold rushing past his face was exhilarating. Suddenly, his mother called. The world seemed to contract and he was surrounded by deafening screams, mothers calling for their babies, babies wailing for their mothers. He was never to see his own again. Read More

I Am Billy

Billy loved spaghetti. He would stick his fork right in the middle of pile of noodles, lift it dripping with tomato sauce, and slowly twirl until each noodle had wrapped around the tines. Only then would he put the forkful delicately into his mouth and chew with deep satisfaction. Read More

Perfect in Herself

Who then is free? The wise man, who has dominion over himself; whom neither poverty, nor death, nor chains affright; brave in the checking of his appetites, and in contemning honours; and, perfect in himself, polished and round as a globe, so that nothing from without can retard, in consequence of its smoothness; against whom misfortune ever advances ineffectually. —Horace Read More