I am asking people to change their behaviors and practices. Sometimes it’s not so hard for people to change, and other times it’s a challenge. I think that we can do better for dogs and cats. Every day I am asked to help a dog or a cat where the situation was avoidable or preventable, or, if the dog or cat was lost, people could have taken better or different actions to recover the pet quickly and safely. I have knowledge in my head and in my books and writings and videos, that could relieve the suffering or thousands of cats and dogs. If people would use the loss prevention methods I have described, pets would go missing much less often. If pets do go missing in spite of precautions, my rescue and recovery methods could greatly increase the percentage of pets that are found. It would save lives. Not just the lives of the animals. People who lose a pet can be deeply impacted by the loss of a cat or a dog. To try to help a stray dog and have that dog die, it is a traumatic experience. I want everyone to know at least the basics of what I know about loss prevention and quick recovery. I want people to change the way they deal with cats and dogs, the way they manage them, and their attitudes towards cats and dogs. The changes I’m asking people to make aren’t necessarily difficult. It’s not a sacrifice, in most cases. It’s not like going on a diet or living without a car. It could seem like you are sacrificing if you have an outside cat and then you have to manage him indoors. For me, that would just be a different way of enjoying my cat, but I could see how for some people it could be a hardship to keep a cat indoors. Inconvenient at least. If your cat is indoor-only, and if you take some simple measures to prevent an escape, the benefit to the cat, and to wildlife, is orders of magnitude greater than any inconvenience on the part of humans. For little cost to yourself, you can greatly improve the life of your cat or dog.
As a part of my attempt to motivate people to change, I can show people that I have changed and am changing. I have wanted to change in a lot of ways, and I have succeeded in some ways. Somewhat indirectly related to my work with lost pets, I want to be less of a burden on the biosphere. Just my average consumerist lifestyle is killing the planet. I never wanted to destroy nature, but daily life just makes it easier to trash the planet than to act responsibly. I may have been greener then the average American, but my carbon footprint has been too large. Our lifestyle is based on models of growth and GDP, and nature has not been valued properly for most of our civilized life. I would like the sum total of my life to be a net positive benefit to the biosphere. If ten billion people were on average a net benefit to the planet, we could heal the biosphere and have a healthy planet, and we could all lead better lives. If I were the greenest person in the world, if I were Greta Thunberg, wearing used clothes and eating vegan and not using fossil fuels, it would not save the planet. The only way I can really be a net benefit to the biosphere is by living long enough to be a part of a general society that has the goal of being a net benefit to the planet. It wasn’t just my actions, driving big cars and working in dirty extraction industries, that threatens to kill the planet. It was my life as one of billions with similar lives. If I ever want to be a net benefit to the Earth, it can only be in a community of like-minded people who also want to be a net benefit, Earth-positive. I want to publicly pursue a greener life and encourage and join with others who want the same. I don’t want to be a cancer on the planet. I don’t want to drive species extinct. I hope I live long enough for technology and societal structure to allow individuals to work together so we can all become Earth-positive.
For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to change things about myself, and in some ways I have succeeded. I haven’t eaten meat in ten years. I am much less of a consumer of goods than I used to be. Now I try to only accumulate digital goods like photographs and writing, preserving experiences with the smallest environmental cost. For my goal of getting people to change their behaviors towards cats and dogs, and also for my goal of eventually becoming a net benefit to the planet, I have to live a longer, healthier, more productive life.
I’m reaching the age my father was when he had an aortic dissection, an aneurysm of the aorta, which caused a stroke and brain damage. He lost most of his abilities to work and take care of himself. Because the healthcare system is designed for profit, they hurt him in specific ways, on four separate occasions, that damaged him and ruined his chances to regain function. Medical professionals specifically mistreated him in ways that had profound impacts. Sure, his aneurysm was mostly caused by years of smoking and poor choices in diet and exercise, but his problems were compounded by the healthcare system. Basically, they stole his life, with indemnity.
I want to be healthier. I am addicted to junk food, such as jalepeno potato chips. Quite often, I don’t get the exercise I want to. The other night, I went and looked for a dog that I never found, and the time I spent there cost me my workout for the day. I want to become healthier for many reasons.
1. A healthy person is less of a burden on the planet. A healthy diet and exercise are less damaging to the environment than a consumption-based lifestyle. Also, being in the healthcare system can have heavy environmental costs and prevent you from being productive. Also, I want to live long enough so I can eventually balance out the damage done by my lifestyle.
2. I definitely can’t afford to have some catastrophic health event happen to me. If I became disabled, it would be a disaster for my dogs. They are crazy, and it would be difficult for anyone but me to care for them. Also, they are working dogs, and they need me to work. If I had a stroke like my father did, that would potentially be catastrophic for my dogs.
3. I am a memory palace for my dogs. Kelsy and Porter and Tess live in my mind. I keep them alive in my thoughts, and when I see their pictures and remember our adventures. If I were to die or become disabled, much of their life in memory would die with me. They could be forgotten. Some day, Mu and T and Fozzie and Sky won’t be with me physically, and I will want to have a healthy brain where they can remain alive and active.
4. Recently, several producers or creators have approached me about making a documentary or a TV series of our work. I haven’t been in the optimum health I should be, and it is a distraction. I don’t like the way I look in video and pictures. Personally, I wouldn’t be in front of a camera if I had a choice. Of the 140,131 pictures and videos on my IPhone, almost none of them are of me. I don’t take selfies. I don’t want to do stupid dances on TikTok. I don’t want to be an idiot with a baseball cap and a scraggly beard talking into the camera about topics where I have no expertise or insight and I’m just expressing my uneducated opinions as if they were somehow worth someone’s time. As I have told people who expressed interest in creating video of my work, I wouldn’t want to be on camera just for the sake of being seen. I would only want to do a project in order to advance the understanding of the best ways to help cats and dogs. If I were to do a video project, either produced by someone else, or just my own videos for instruction and information, it would definitely be better if I weighed less and if I was just healthier.
5. Another reason I want to be healthier is that I need to be able to carry a 105-pound Gerberian Shepsky from three miles deep on a mountain trail, back to the car and to safety, if he was injured. I can’t do that right now. I would like to be able to lift my dog over a fence and then get over the fence myself, in order to continue a search, which is not something I can do right now. I do get a lot of steps in, with my work, but I need to be more consistent about it, and lose weight.
6. I would simply enjoy being healthier. I like running, and I want to be able to run farther, faster, and easier.
These are some of my goals for why I want to be healthier. Why would I tell anyone about this? If I make me goals public, then I can fail publicly. Every January, I make resolutions to get more exercise and eat better, and I usually fail. I am in the Apple ecosystem, and I use the Apple Watch to see if I’ve closed my rings. One of the theories behind that is that keeping track of what you’ve done helps you see how you are doing and stay motivated. You can see what works and what doesn’t. For those reasons, I want to document more of my life in a semi-public way. Not that I think everyone should be interested in my personal changes, but I want to be transparent and accountable.
Another change I want to make is that I want to keep better records of my efforts to find lost pets. Good records could inform what the best practices and methods are, and help people in the future. I also want to keep a record of my dogs for my memory palace. Another reason that I would want to document my life more publicly is that, I talked earlier about a Jukebox of Souls, which you can read about here. I am as young as I’m ever going to be from now on. I have been thinking recently, that, as I get older, I could be more capable and productive than I ever was in the past. For example, when I first started finding lost pets, I didn’t have a good phone with GPS maps and high-resolution cameras, and instant communication with anyone and everyone. I was much less efficient in finding lost pets, even if the basic principles were the same. Now I can record all kinds of data more easily and with less effort. Even though I’m getting older, aging in typical ways, I have the potential to be more capable and productive than I’ve ever been. I really need to be the best I can be because I have at least ten books in my head that I want to write, and I really need to get cracking before I run out of time. I need to manage my time for my health and my business and routine maintenance on the house. I don’t want documentation of my life to take up too much time and effort, to the point where journaling prevents be from getting stuff done. I want to be fairly automatic and efficient about it, like, for example, this note that I’ve written here was first captured in voice memos as I was walking my dogs. I edited out all the parts where I was yelling at them to stop being so crazy. Although it took time to transcribe it, technology makes it much easier to capture this sort of information. I don’t want to be always documenting the fact that I’m documenting my life. I want to spend my life being and doing, and have the documentation be less cumbersome and intrusive.
I think the documentation of my life is important, to see if I’m changing in the ways I want to, to be healthier, to work smarter, and to get my message of loss prevention out to people. This type of journaling could help me along my way to being a net benefit to the planet. I’m a fairly private person. I don’t especially like to spend a lot of time with people. Even people I like, smart, kind people who like animals, I don’t necessarily want to spend too much time with them. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with them. Being with people wears me down and uses up my energy. Being with dogs, I can do that all day. I like people in small doses, limited. I’m always glad to not spend time with people after a while. So, I’m not sharing this seemingly private information to say, hey, look at me, which seems to be what a lot of people do these days. I want to share aspects of my life to promote the proper care of the biosphere, to promote the proper care of cats and dogs, and to help people change in positive ways. I am asking people to change, and I want to be transparent and accountable, showing that I am changing too. Of course, there is always the chance that I’m going to fail at meeting my New Year’s resolutions, as I often have, but there’s a chance I could succeed. Stating my goals publicly can theoretically help me stick to it. If I know that the whole world is watching, or at least the two and a half people who might actually read this, then that could help me stick to my goals. This is an experiment, basically. I want to do more documention of my life. It will be boring for the most part. Also, I will share trivial things, like pictures I would share on Facebook. I would rather share things here than on Facebook, which I think is evil.
This newsletter is not something I will promote, as though people ought to care about how fast I can run or if I succeeded in avoiding jalapeño potato chips, but it is here so that people can see that I am trying to change as I am asking others to change their behaviors.
Goals for 2023:
Close my fitness rings every day.
Document every request for help and every search with the dogs.
Lose 20 pounds at least.
Run a mile in 7 minutes or less.
Add to my album of Best Pictures.
Improve my chess rating.
Get started on becoming a net benefit to the biosphere, and find ways to have less of a footprint.
I don’t expect this will be of interest to too many people, but it is available here to those who are interested in following this experiment.
You can scroll through and just look at the pictures of the dogs. I won’t mind.