OK, it's a book, but I figured this forum was the place where most people would be interested.
Has anyone else read "The Philosopher And The Wolf", by Mark Rowlands? I'm reading it at the moment, and it's fascinating. Rowlands was a professor of philosophy, and he bought a wolf cub. He talks about the trials and awesomeness of raising a pet wolf, and the lessons you can learn from it about the difference between simian behaviour and lupine/canine behaviour, and what we can learn about ourselves from it (that makes it sound like a bunch of hippy crap, but it really isn't).
It's pretty amazing stuff, I have to say, and it's really making me think about stuff that's never really occurred to me before. The idea that wolves live in a mechanical universe (they have to figure out, say, how to get past a fallen tree) and dogs live in a magical one (they don't have to figure out how a lock works, they just have to tell a human to open it for them and the mechanics of it are a mysterious irrelevance) is a pretty neat one.
I'd recommend it to anyone, but especially anyone who has a dog.
Has anyone else read "The Philosopher And The Wolf", by Mark Rowlands? I'm reading it at the moment, and it's fascinating. Rowlands was a professor of philosophy, and he bought a wolf cub. He talks about the trials and awesomeness of raising a pet wolf, and the lessons you can learn from it about the difference between simian behaviour and lupine/canine behaviour, and what we can learn about ourselves from it (that makes it sound like a bunch of hippy crap, but it really isn't).
It's pretty amazing stuff, I have to say, and it's really making me think about stuff that's never really occurred to me before. The idea that wolves live in a mechanical universe (they have to figure out, say, how to get past a fallen tree) and dogs live in a magical one (they don't have to figure out how a lock works, they just have to tell a human to open it for them and the mechanics of it are a mysterious irrelevance) is a pretty neat one.
I'd recommend it to anyone, but especially anyone who has a dog.
