After Adam had eaten of the fruit of the Tree, the dog did lick juice from the fruit, but from its flavor decided that the fruit was not food. And so the eyes of the dog were but little opened. The cat did merely sniff of the fruit, and then turned to other things.

I recommend that the reader follow any one of these links

• Sheep Art Video (2:45)
• Sheep Art Video (2:45)
• Sheep Art Video (2:45)

each of which should be to a copy of the same video as that of the other two links.

Okay, now I could write about the idiocy of the War on Drugs, but I want to instead talk about something else that makes me furious.

Far too many police, in far too many cases, have clearly demonstrated that they believe themselves to have the right to punish criminals by executing their dogs.

I'm not talking about cases where the dog has attacked, or has behaved in a way that indicates that it is an immediate threat.

It's not the right of a police officer to punish, period. And it's not the right of anyone to punish some person by killing an innocent companion animal. It doesn't fundamentally matter, when it comes to the killing of the Calvo dogs, that the Calvos were innocent. Even if they had been guilty of something truly criminal, it wouldn't be the right of police to kill their dogs because of who their owners were.

Police officials who needlessly kill dogs are never given worse than slaps on their wrists. Instead, they need to do hard prison time. More specifically:

• If it can been shown that police conducted a raid such as this, where they could have brought and deployed non-lethal measures but did not, then one or more of the officials needs to spend years in prison. It should even be a criminal offense (albeït perhaps just a misdemeanor) for any participating officer not to know who has been assigned responsibility for those non-lethal measures, so that treasonous bastards cannot merely pretend that there was a mix-up. Note that I am not claiming that non-lethal measures can always be employed; but, when it is practicable to prepare them, police should be required to prepare them.
• In any case where lethal methods have been used against a dog that is plainly not acting aggressively (as in the case of the dog who was attempting to flee), there should be years in prison.

These sorts of laws need to be effected on a state level. Governor O'Malley of Maryland should be recalled from office if he isn't the very first governor to produce a bill to such effect.

Those of you who followed my LJ might remember that a few years ago I took care of a neighbor's Yorkie for a while.

My neighbor had a partner who had (and has) AIDS. His health had notably worsened, and so he had left, to be with family. (He later seemed to bounce-back, and when last I knew he was doing alright.)

Anyway, the two of them had jointly shared responsibilities for the Yorkie, and I picked-up some of the slack for a bit. During part of that time, the dog simply stayed with me. At other times, I was just getting him from my neighbor's apartment, taking him for a walk and returning him, once or twice a day.

I really like that little dog. I would have been quite willing to just take ownership of him, but I didn't want my neighbor to lose his dog to me in a moment of weakness, so I never suggested such a thing.

A few weeks ago, my neighbor moved from our complex to another part of the city. I regretted the fact that I would probably never see the dog again. I do, however, see my former neighbor occasionally, as he has come to David's Coffee Place.

On Tuesday, I asked him how the dog was doing, and learned that the dog had been given away. My neighbor had felt that he couldn't handle the dog's needs.

Apparently, the dog has been placed with an affluent family, and now has a privileged existence. I'm very glad of that. But part of me wishes that he'd been offered to me.

(I would in any event of course have had to clear acceptance with the Woman of Interest. Anything that cannot be kept in something like a medium-sized terrarium, aquarium, or bird cage should get her okay.)

Yester-day, I saw a couple of especially small Yorkshire terriers (each at a different place and time). Often, when I see little dogs, I wonder what their lupine ancestors would have thought and done if they could have known that H. sapiens was going to do this to their children.

I understand that the initial process of domestication was likely to have been as much something undertaken by the wolves themselves as by the humans. Domestication was often a matter of plants or animals adapting to human beings without humans first thinking to selectively breed or train the other species.

(Indeed, in a sense, H. sapiens even domesticated ourselves without deliberately setting-out to do so, becoming increasingly neotenic.)

But, at some stage, people got it into their heads to shape deliberately some domesticated plants and animals. And, in the case of wolves, one result has been tiny, fragile creatures, utterly incapable of survival for more than a matter of days if left to fend for themselves.