CRACK Think Right Now Subliminal Software
Harriet Wehrenberg
The passing of seasons feels especially bittersweet for us, because on Friday we said goodbye to two special ewes, Barbie and Rosebud. Both ewes suffered from OPP (Ovine Progressive Pneumonia) and we felt that it was kinder to put them down now rather than make them get through another winter. Both ewes were having trouble breathing comfortably, so they are now in that great pasture in the sky. Barbie was known for being a great mother to her lambs, her intolerance of the lambs of others, and her, uh, lack of knowledge that sheep are supposed to be docile and defenseless. She had a total of 14 lambs for us, for which we will always be grateful. Here she is with her last two, Holstein and White Guy. Thanks Barbie, you had quite a run.
So often we try to build logical arguments around why we make subconscious judgements, because as is mentioned above we want so much to think of ourselves as governed by logic and not by our primitive brain.
Only last week I was extremely proud of myself because I finally managed to take a photo of Mailo trying to reach the counter. I posted that picture on facebook as proof that Cavaliers reach a shoulder height of 80 cm ? When my Golden tries this kind of stunt, I first call him off and then take a picture of the damage.
The unspoken taboo. Why is a leg of lamb on the counter of an animal lover? Unless it is attached to the rest of the lambs body standing on your counter. As you know, sentient beings all feel pain, suffering and love just as you, I and Maggie.
Hi Patricia, thank you for being so brave and responding to my question. Let me start off by stating I think you are wonderful and I enjoy your writing and insights very much. However, we have large differences of opinion on this topic. ? Allow me to ask a few follow ups based on your response.
Compassion does not discriminate.
Just as it is readily apparent to most people that dogs are sentient and conscious beings (excluding Ray Coppinger) extending that compassion and rationalization to all animals is not a stretch.
There are 3 pillars for not killing others/sentient beings.
It is a moral imperative to not harm others who can feel. Focusing on what we all have in common (feelings and emotions) rather than speciesism and discriminating against our superficial differences has caused more misinformation and death than all the genocides, holocausts and world wars combined.
As a conscious being myself who would very much rather have the chance at living a life that has moments of pain and fear and hardship, but also moments of joy and peace and companionship, I can say that I am not personally comfortable making the ethical argument that dairy cows would rather never have lived than live as they do now.
Even though vegans are not intentionally making the opposite argument, that would be the end result of everyone becoming vegan. With the exception of a few gentlemen farmers who just like to have the animals around, dairy cows would no longer exist. They would not be living natural lives where they choose their mates and raise their young as they please. They would not be living at all.
So we basically go through life thinking that we make decisions based on information from what we learn or perceive to be truth when actually what we perceive as truth is info from how our unconsciousness perceives it? And then we act on that unconscious perception? Just jotting down some thoughts with my morning coffee.
I did find it interesting how our conscious mind is so easily manipulated by optical illusion influenced by our unconscious perception.
Most of the time, our fast, intuitive mind is in control, efficiently taking charge of all the thousands of decisions we make each day. The problem comes when we allow our fast, intuitive system to make decisions that we really should pass over to our slow, logical system. This is where the mistakes creep in.
The strange thing is, both trains take the same route for the first 20 minutes or so, the York train then detours. Not obviously, it basically takes a junction whilst still travelling. I was distracted to look out of the window just after it detours. Is that an unconscious reaction.
This was a later time of day I was travelling and the train on the platform where I departed was actually two separate trains, although it looked like one. The front two carriages go to York, the latter two to Hull. They leave about two minutes apart. Because I was in auto pilot, I made an incorrect assumption. At other times of day, the York train leaves from another platform.
This is a nice simple model and based on neuroscience about how we can hijack our lives by overly reacting to our own emotions and instincts. It provides a simple model framework to teach people how to be proactive in managing and changing their behaviour.
It had the unwanted side effect of making Jack think that it was very dangerous for US to open the same cupboard, and barking frantically at us whenever we went to do so. However, after seeing that the horrible hissing snakes did not attack us, he quickly stopped worrying about it.
Ironically, the device was worthless for what we bought it for, which was keeping the cat off the table. She quickly learned to scout the area for the spray can and only avoid the table if it was out and regularly activated.
I know several poodles whose owners tried booby-traps to deter countersurfing. The dogs quickly figured out what was going on. One would stand on her hind legs peering into the room first, to see if any traps were in place. Another saw the traps as a delightful food puzzle, learning to jump up quickly and hit the cookie sheet, then leap back, letting everything fall to the floor and then dashing in to get the prize.
In our house, my teens were encouraged to put meals-in-progress in the microwave, cold oven, or an empty breadbox if they had to leave the kitchen briefly. We even had an empty breadbox on the counter for just this purpose.
There are no verbal cues that go along with this. The dogs realise someone is cooking in the kitchen. They go to check it out. Bacon is tossed onto the Magic Mat, or a bit of meat or whatever. Bingo!
Rather than try to retrain the cue, I started waiting and staring at the ceiling for her to offer me something better. I rewarded first one front paw in, then two front paws. I rewarded two front paws for a short time, then started waiting for her to withdraw her head as well.
Until one day, we were going somewhere and I decided to give the dogs a bigger dental chew on the way out the door. Generally, Jack runs into the living room with his and stares at it for awhile, prolonging his joyful anticipation. Madison takes hers in her open crate, eats it in two or three bites and then goes nosing after Jack.
In the case where I used the compressed air to startle Maddie away from the bin, I had to use it once and then again about a year later. She underwent about 30 seconds of moderate stress where she left the room looking worried. I thought it was better than risking her dragging something out of the garbage that was harmful, and yes I admit it was better than having her claw at my cabinets if I installed baby locks. And I would argue less stress for her long-term then keeping her forever baby-gated out of the kitchen when no one was watching her.
My other options were: 1) Have no garbage can inside the house at all and move it to the attached garage. A nuisance but possible in summer, a major drain on heating bills in the winter. My house design has no enclosed space for a can except under the cupboard. 2) Gate the dog out of the kitchen all the time, which would have meant moving her crate and water dishes and would have been more stressful to her than what I did, since she was already used to having run off the house. (When we had to gate her out of the upstairs because of seizures, it took her quite a long time to stop looking worried about her new lack of access to the steps). Or 3) Lock the cupboards. Miss Paws would have then clawed at the cupboard trying to open it, since she is a pawer. Call me mean, but having my almost-new cherry cabinets ruined was really not an acceptable alternative to me.
So we had one brief instant where the dog was startled by a can of compressed air hissing when she stuck her head in the cupboard. The dog left the room looking worried. The other dog barked. And that was that. Neither dog is afraid of the kitchen, the cupboard, or the garbage bin but Maddie now thinks sticking her head in the cabinet is a bad idea. Which I see as a good thing.
The difference is intent: I did not intend to startle the dogs with the cat or the smoke alarm or the dropped objects. But the actual result was greater alarm from all three than from the can of compressed air.
When I am ready to pass into the great beyond, there are several things in my life that I will feel guilty about, more than one involving ways in which I let my animals down. But I am quite confident that I will not give too much thought to the time that Maddie had some air hiss in her face and was successfully cured of raiding the garbage. Could I predict with 100% certainty how she would react to the air? Well, no, but having had her for some time and knowing how she responds to being startled, I was as confident as is reasonable to be that there would be no lasting harm. I prefer positive methods when possible. But I am not so opposed to aversives that I would rather permanently restructure my life than use a noise to keep the dog out of the trash. PEOPLE are also difficult to train, and I cannot guarantee that there will never ever be anything dangerous in the garbage. Having heard of more than one person who lost a dog to suffocation from a head stuck in a chip bag, I would really rather have the double protection of the humans trained to not put anything dangerous in the bin PLUS the dog not snooping in the bin.
Regardless, when I replayed the circumstances and thought of all the other times when many dogs would have growled, but he was softly compliant, I felt like I understood his side of the story a bit better.
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