Let me share some thoughts with you. Let me be a source of encouragement and support. May you never forget your dreams and remember miracles happen every day. Let us laugh, have fun, and inspire one another.
“The house was shaking and if I slept I knew I would be putting my life in danger”
The roof of this yellow house in Nomazamo was blown off on to overhead electrical wires. Photos: Velani Ludidi
On Saturday Lizzy Mathiso woke up to find the crèche she owns and
runs in Lwandle in shambles. Two classrooms which cater for 54 children
were destroyed.
She was one of many people living in Cape Town’s informal settlements
to have their shacks destroyed or damaged and to find themselves
without electricity after a severe storm made landfall in the Western
Cape on Friday night.
“I do not know how I will be able to rebuild because the crèche was not insured,” said Mathiso.
Although there was no major flooding in the informal settlements, the high winds caused extensive damage.
An electricity pole in Nomzamo blew over, causing power outages in the area.
Electricity in Nomzamo was affected after electricity poles with transformers were uprooted by the north-westerly wind.
“Since Friday night just before 10pm we had no electricity,” said Anele Daki.
On Sunday morning, parts of Asanda Village in Nomzamo were still without power.
“The house was shaking and if I slept I knew I would be putting my
life in danger,” said Moruti Masala. “I went to sleep at a friend’s
place for the night and this morning [Saturday] the house was gone.”
He said that he would have to start building from scratch.
Moruti Masala with what remains of his home after the storm on Friday night.
Ward 86 councillor Jongidumo Maxheke said, “We have informed disaster
management and they are attending to some informal settlements. Due to
the City’s policy, only people who live in informal settlements will get
assistance. Others with RDP houses that are damaged will have to fix
their houses themselves.”
The Victor Cash Store in Nomzamo also had its roof blown off.
The City’s Disaster Risk Management Centre manager, Charlotte Powell,
said, “Power disruptions in Milnerton, Plumstead and Sybrand Park have
been reported. Roofs were blown off in Belhar, Strand, Khayelitsha,
Woodstock and Claremont
“The City’s Electricity Department is busy restoring the power and other City departments are busy with mopping up operations.”
A person died in New Village, Nomzamo, after being electrocuted while
trying to restore electricity. The area has many illegal connections.
Onlookers gather after a man in New Village , Nomzamo, was electrocuted while trying to restore power to some shacks in the area.
One of the Boer concentration camps.
Photographical Collection Anglo-Boer War Museum, Bloemfontein SA
More than a century after 48 000 people died in concentration camps in what’s known as the South African War between 1899 and 1902 – or the Anglo-Boer War – the events of that period are back in the headlines.
The camps were established by the British as part of their military campaign against two small Afrikaner republics: the ZAR (Transvaal) and the Orange Free State.
The scandalous campaign is back in the news following controversial comments by British Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg on a BBC television programme.
Rees-Mogg’s statements have caused consternation because they were riddled with inaccuracies. It’s time to set the record straight and to refute his inaccuracies one by one. I do this based on the historical research I’ve done on the South African War for the last 49 years.
Setting the record straight
The claim that caused the most upset was Rees-Mogg’s allegation that the concentration camps had exactly the same mortality rate as was the case in Glasgow at the time.
This is simply factually incorrect.
In its recent Glasgow Indicators Project the Glasgow Centre for Population Health gives the death rate of people in the city as 21 per 1000 per annum in 1901.
Inside one of the British concentration camps.Photographical Collection Anglo-Boer War Museum, Bloemfontein SA
The death rate for Boer civilians in the concentration camps in South Africa exceeded this by a factor of 10. It’s well established that 28 000 white people and 20 000 black people died in various camps in South Africa. Between July 1901 and February 1902 the rate was, on average, 247 per 1000 per annum in the white camps. It reached a high of 344 per 1000 per annum in October 1901 and a low of 69 per 1000 per annum in February 1902.
The figures would have been even higher had it not been for the fact that British welfare campaigner Emily Hobhouse exposed the deplorable conditions in the camps. A subsequent report by the Government’s Ladies Commission prompted the British Government to improve conditions. Another factor that reduced the fatality rate was that Lord Milner, High Commissioner for South Africa and Governor of the Cape Colony, took over administration of the camps from the military from November 1901.
Rees-Mogg also revealed his total lack of understanding why the British military authorities established the concentration camps in statements such as:
Where else were people going to live when … (the Boers were fighting the war)?
People were put in camps for their protection.
They were interned for their safety.
They were being taken there so that they could be fed because the farmers were away fighting the Boer War.
The reality was very different.
The origins of the camps
After Lord Roberts, chief commander of the British forces, occupied the Free State capital, Bloemfontein, on 13 March 1900, he issued a proclamation inviting the Boers to lay down their arms and sign an oath of neutrality. They would then be free to return to their farms on the understanding that they would no longer participate in the war.
Eventually about 20 000 Boers – about a third – made use of this offer. They were called the “protected burghers”. Roberts had banked on this policy to end the war. But after the British occupation of the Transvaal capital, Pretoria, on 5 June 1900, there was no end in sight. On the contrary, the Boers had started a guerrilla war, which included attacks on railway lines.
In reaction Roberts issued a proclamation on 16 June 1900, stating that, for every attack on a railway line the closest homestead would be burnt down. This was the start of the scorched earth policy. When this didn’t work, Roberts issued another proclamation in September stating that all homesteads would be burnt in a radius of 16 km of any attack, and that all livestock would be killed or taken away and all crops destroyed.
This policy was intensified dramatically when Lord Kitchener took over from Roberts as commander in November 1900. Homesteads and whole towns were burnt down even if there was no attack on any railway. In this way almost all Boer homesteads – about 30 000 in all – were razed to the ground and thousands of livestock killed. The two republics were entirely devastated.
Meanwhile the Boer leaders were reorganising their commandos after some major setbacks. One action was to remobilise the Boers who had laid down their arms.
Roberts felt he should protect his oath takers and gather them in refugee camps. The first two were established in Bloemfontein and Pretoria in September 1900.
But the scorched earth policy had led to more and more Boer women and children being left homeless. Roberts decided to bring them into the camps too. They were called the “undesirables” – families of Boers who were still on commando or already prisoners of war. They were given fewer rations than others in the camps.
A Boer family looks on at their house that was set alight by the British forces during the South African War.Photographical Collection Anglo-Boer War Museum, Bloemfontein SA
These families eventually outnumbered the protected burghers and their families by 7:3.
These families were taken against their will. They were forcibly put on ox wagons and open railway trucks and taken to the camps. They were not, as Rees-Mogg claimed, moved for their protection and safety. Nor were they moved to the camps to be fed. Rather, their internment had everything to do with ending the resistance of Boers still fighting the British.
The administration of the camps was appalling. Food was of a very poor quality, sanitation deplorable, tents were overcrowded and medical assistance shocking. Little was known at the time about how to handle epidemics of measles and typhoid.
This isn’t all. Rees-Mogg is also obviously unaware of the action that the British commanders took against black South Africans. A total of 66 black concentration camps where set up across the Transvaal and Free State where conditions were just as bad and the death rates similar.
These camps were set up to get black people off the land so that the Boers couldn’t get supplies from them. In addition, forcing black farmers off their land also enabled the British to use black men as labourers on gold mines.
Rees-Mogg was right on one point: the concentration camps didn’t have the same aims as Adolf Hitler’s extermination camps during the Second World War. The aim in South Africa wasn’t systematic murder.
But this shouldn’t detract from his numerous other falsehoods.
Dogs are a big part of their owners’ routines – which makes their loss even more jarring.
'Silhouette' via www.shutterstock.com
Recently, my wife and I went through one of the more excruciating experiences of our lives – the euthanasia of our beloved dog, Murphy. I remember making eye contact with Murphy moments before she took her last breath – she flashed me a look that was an endearing blend of confusion and the reassurance that everyone was ok because we were both by her side.
When people who have never had a dog see their dog-owning friends mourn the loss of a pet, they probably think it’s all a bit of an overreaction; after all, it’s “just a dog.”
However, those who have loved a dog know the truth: Your own pet is never “just a dog.”
Many times, I’ve had friends guiltily confide to me that they grieved more over the loss of a dog than over the loss of friends or relatives. Research has confirmed that for most people, the loss of a dog is, in almost every way, comparable to the loss of a human loved one. Unfortunately, there’s little in our cultural playbook – no grief rituals, no obituary in the local newspaper, no religious service – to help us get through the loss of a pet, which can make us feel more than a bit embarrassed to show too much public grief over our dead dogs.
Perhaps if people realized just how strong and intense the bond is between people and their dogs, such grief would become more widely accepted. This would greatly help dog owners to integrate the death into their lives and help them move forward.
An interspecies bond like no other
What is it about dogs, exactly, that make humans bond so closely with them?
For starters, dogs have had to adapt to living with humans over the past 10,000 years. And they’ve done it very well: They’re the only animal to have evolved specifically to be our companions and friends. Anthropologist Brian Hare has developed the “Domestication Hypothesis” to explain how dogs morphed from their grey wolf ancestors into the socially skilled animals that we now interact with in very much the same way as we interact with other people.
Perhaps one reason our relationships with dogs can be even more satisfying than our human relationships is that dogs provide us with such unconditional, uncritical positive feedback. (As the old saying goes, “May I become the kind of person that my dog thinks I already am.”)
This is no accident. They have been selectively bred through generations to pay attention to people, and MRI scans show that dog brains respond to praise from their owners just as strongly as they do to food (and for some dogs, praise is an even more effective incentive than food). Dogs recognize people and can learn to interpret human emotional states from facial expression alone. Scientific studies also indicate that dogs can understand human intentions, try to help their owners and even avoid people who don’t cooperate with their owners or treat them well.
Our strong attachment to dogs was subtly revealed in a recent study of “misnaming.” Misnaming happens when you call someone by the wrong name, like when parents mistakenly call one of their kids by a sibling’s name. It turns out that the name of the family dog also gets confused with human family members, indicating that the dog’s name is being pulled from the same cognitive pool that contains other members of the family. (Curiously, the same thing rarely happens with cat names.)
It’s no wonder dog owners miss them so much when they’re gone.
Psychologist Julie Axelrod has pointed out that the loss of a dog is so painful because owners aren’t just losing the pet. It could mean the loss of a source of unconditional love, a primary companion who provides security and comfort, and maybe even a protégé that’s been mentored like a child.
The loss of a dog can also seriously disrupt an owner’s daily routine more profoundly than the loss of most friends and relatives. For owners, their daily schedules – even their vacation plans – can revolve around the needs of their pets. Changes in lifestyle and routine are some of the primary sources of stress.
According to a survey, many bereaved pet owners will even mistakenly interpret ambiguous sights and sounds as the movements, pants and whimpers of the deceased pet. This is most likely to happen shortly after the death of the pet, especially among owners who had very high levels of attachment to their pets.
While the death of a dog is horrible, dog owners have become so accustomed to the reassuring and nonjudgmental presence of their canine companions that, more often than not, they’ll eventually get a new one.
So yes, I miss my dog. But I’m sure that I’ll be putting myself through this ordeal again in the years to come.
The dominant reading of George Orwell’s dystopian novel, “1984” has been that it was a dire prediction of what could be.
Denis Hamel Côté, CC BY-SA
Seventy years ago, Eric Blair, writing under a pseudonym George Orwell, published “1984,” now generally considered a classic of dystopian fiction.
The novel tells the story of Winston Smith, a hapless middle-aged bureaucrat who lives in Oceania, where he is governed by constant surveillance. Even though there are no laws, there is a police force, the “Thought Police,” and the constant reminders, on posters, that “Big Brother Is Watching You.”
Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, and his job is to rewrite the reports in newspapers of the past to conform with the present reality. Smith lives in a constant state of uncertainty; he is not sure the year is in fact 1984.
Although the official account is that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia, Smith is quite sure he remembers that just a few years ago they had been at war with Eastasia, who has now been proclaimed their constant and loyal ally. The society portrayed in “1984” is one in which social control is exercised through disinformation and surveillance.
As a scholar of television and screen culture, I argue that the techniques and technologies described in the novel are very much present in today’s world.
‘1984’ as history
One of the key technologies of surveillance in the novel is the “telescreen,” a device very much like our own television.
The telescreen displays a single channel of news, propaganda and wellness programming. It differs from our own television in two crucial respects: It is impossible to turn off and the screen also watches its viewers.
The telescreen is television and surveillance camera in one. In the novel, the character Smith is never sure if he is being actively monitored through the telescreen.
A publicity photo on the set of the CBS anthology television series ‘Studio One’ depicts a presentation of George Orwell’s ‘1984.’CBS Television
Orwell’s telescreen was based in the technologies of television pioneered prior to World War II and could hardly be seen as science fiction. In the 1930s Germany had a working videophone system in place, and television programs were already being broadcast in parts of the United States, Great Britain and France.
Past, present and future
The dominant reading of “1984” has been that it was a dire prediction of what could be. In the words of Italian essayist Umberto Eco, “at least three-quarters of what Orwell narrates is not negative utopia, but history.”
Additionally, scholars have also remarked how clearly “1984” describes the present.
In 1949, when the novel was written, Americans watched on average four and a half hours of television a day; in 2009, almost twice that. In 2017, television watching was slightly down, to eight hours, more time than we spent asleep.
In the U.S. the information transmitted over television screens came to constitute a dominant portion of people’s social and psychological lives.
‘1984’ as present day
In the year 1984, however, there was much self-congratulatory coverage in the U.S. that the dystopia of the novel had not been realized. But media studies scholar Mark Miller argued how the famous slogan from the book, “Big Brother Is Watching You” had been turned to “Big Brother is you, watching” television.
Miller argued that television in the United States teaches a different kind of conformity than that portrayed in the novel. In the novel, the telescreen is used to produce conformity to the Party. In Miller’s argument, television produces conformity to a system of rapacious consumption – through advertising as well as a focus on the rich and famous. It also promotes endless productivity, through messages regarding the meaning of success and the virtues of hard work.
Television has a profound effect on its viewers.Andrey_Popov
Many viewers conform by measuring themselves against what they see on television, such as dress, relationships and conduct. In Miller’s words, television has “set the standard of habitual self-scrutiny.”
The kind of paranoid worry possessed by Smith in the novel – that any false move or false thought will bring the thought police – instead manifests in television viewers that Miller describes as an “inert watchfulness.” In other words, viewers watch themselves to make sure they conform to those others they see on the screen.
This inert watchfulness can exist because television allows viewers to watch strangers without being seen. Scholar Joshua Meyrowitz has shown that the kinds of programming which dominate U.S television – news, sitcoms, dramas – have normalized looking into the private lives of others.
Controlling behavior
Alongside the steady rise of “reality TV,” beginning in the ‘60s with “Candid Camera,” “An American Family,” “Real People,” “Cops” and “The Real World,” television has also contributed to the acceptance of a kind of video surveillance.
For example, it might seem just clever marketing that one of the longest-running and most popular reality television shows in the world is entitled “Big Brother.” The show’s nod to the novel invokes the kind of benevolent surveillance that “Big Brother” was meant to signify: “We are watching you and we will take care of you.”
But Big Brother, as a reality show, is also an experiment in controlling and modifying behavior. By asking participants to put their private lives on display, shows such as “Big Brother” encourage self-scrutiny and behaving according to perceived social norms or roles that challenge those perceived norms.
The stress of performing 24/7 on “Big Brother” has led the show to employ a team of psychologists.
Television scholar Anna McCarthy and others have shown that the origins of reality television can be traced back to social psychology and behavioral experiments in the aftermath of World War II, which were designed to better control people.
Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, for example, was influenced by “Candid Camera.”
In the “Candid Camera” show, cameras were concealed in places where they could film people in unusual situations. Milgram was fascinated with “Candid Camera,” and he used a similar model for his experiments – his participants were not aware that they were being watched or that it was part of an experiment.
Like many others in the aftermath of World War II, Milgram was interested in what could compel large numbers of people to “follow orders” and participate in genocidal acts. His “obedience experiments” found that a high proportion of participants obeyed instructions from an established authority figure to harm another person, even if reluctantly.
While contemporary reality TV shows do not order participants to directly harm each other, they are often set up as a small-scale social experiment that often involves intense competition or even cruelty.
Surveillance in daily life
And, just like in the novel, ubiquitous video surveillance is already here.
Video surveillance is part of our modern-day lives.Africa Studio
Surveillance footage from these cameras is repurposed as the raw material of television, mostly in the news but also in shows like “America’s Most Wanted,” “Right This Minute” and others. Many viewers unquestioningly accept this practice as legitimate.
The friendly face of surveillance
Reality television is the friendly face of surveillance. It helps viewers think that surveillance happens only to those who choose it or to those who are criminals. In fact, it is part of a culture of widespread television use, which has brought about what Norwegian criminologist Thomas Mathiesen called the “viewer society” – in which the many watch the few.
For Mathiesen, the viewer society is merely the other side of the surveillance society – described so aptly in Orwell’s novel – where a few watch the many.
You might just be getting better at the game you’re practicing.
Malcolm Lightbody/Unsplash, CC BY
You’ve probably seen ads for apps promising to make you smarter in just a few minutes a day.
Hundreds of so-called “brain training” programs can be purchased for download. These simple games are designed to challenge mental abilities, with the ultimate goal of improving the performance of important everyday tasks.
But can just clicking away at animations of swimming fish or flashed streets signs on your phone really help you improve the way your brain functions?
Two large groups of scientists and mental health practitioners published consensus statements, months apart in 2014, on the effectiveness of these kinds of brain games. Both included people with years of research experience and expertise in cognition, learning, skill acquisition, neuroscience and dementia. Both groups carefully considered the same body of evidence available at the time.
Yet, they issued exactly opposite statements.
One concluded that “there is little evidence that playing brain games improves underlying broad cognitive abilities, or that it enables one to better navigate a complex realm of everyday life.”
The other argued that “a substantial and growing body of evidence shows that certain cognitive training regimens can significantly improve cognitive function, including in ways that generalize to everyday life.”
These two competing contradictory statements highlight a deep disagreement among experts, and a fundamental dispute over what counts as convincing evidence for something to be true.
Then, in 2016, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission entered into the fray with a series of rulings, including a US$50 million judgment (later reduced to $2 million) against one of the most heavily advertised brain training packages on the market. The FTC concluded that Lumos Labs’ advertisements – touting the ability of its Lumosity brain training program to improve consumers’ cognition, boost their performance at school and work, protect them against Alzheimer’s disease and help treat symptoms of ADHD – were not grounded in evidence.
What does clicking away on a laptop really improve?Akkalak Aiempradit/Shutterstock.com
In light of conflicting claims and scientific statements, advertisements and government rulings, what are consumers supposed to believe? Is it worth your time and money to invest in brain training? What types of benefits, if any, can you expect? Or would your time be better spent doing something else?
I’m a cognitive scientist and member of Florida State University’s Institute for Successful Longevity. I have studied cognition, human performance and the effects of different types of training for nearly two decades. I’ve conducted laboratory studies that have directly put to the test the ideas that are the foundation of the claims made by brain training companies.
Based on these experiences, my optimistic answer to the question of whether brain training is worth it would be “we just don’t know.” But the actual answer may very well be “no.”
Brain training studies often look at its effect on multiple cognitive tests – of attention, memory, reasoning ability and so on – over time. This strategy makes sense in order to uncover the breadth of potential gains.
But, for every test administered, there’s a chance that scores will improve just by chance alone. The more tests administered, the greater the chance that researchers will see at least one false alarm.
Brain training studies that include many tests and then report only one or two significant results cannot be trusted unless they control for the number of tests being administered. Unfortunately, many studies do not, calling their findings into question.
Picking the one task that she improved on out of many casts doubt on the study’s validity.De Visu/Shutterstock.com
Another design problem has to do with inadequate control groups. To claim that a treatment had an effect, the group receiving the treatment needs to be compared to a group that does not. It’s possible, for example, that people receiving brain training improve on an assessment test just because they’ve already taken it – before and then again after training. Since the control group also takes the test twice, cognitive improvements based on practice effects can be ruled out.
Many studies that have been used to support the effectiveness of brain training have compared the effect of brain training to a control group that did nothing. The problem is any difference observed between the training group and the control group in these cases could easily be explained by a placebo effect.
Placebo effects are improvements that are not the direct result of a treatment, but due to participants expecting to feel or perform better as a result of having received a treatment. This is an important concern in any intervention study, whether aimed at understanding the effect of a new drug or a new brain training product.
Researchers now realize that doing something generates a greater expectation of improvement than doing nothing. Recognition of the likelihood for a placebo effect is shifting standards for testing the effectiveness of brain games. Now studies are much more likely to use an active control group made up of participants who perform some alternative non-brain training activity, rather than doing nothing.
Still, these active controls don’t go far enough to control for expectations. For instance, it’s unlikely that a participant in a control condition that features computerized crossword puzzles or educational videos will expect improvement as much as a participant assigned to try fast-paced and adaptive commercial brain training products – products specifically touted as being able to improve cognition.
Yet, studies with these inadequate designs continue to claim to provide evidence that commercial brain training works. It remains rare for studies to measure expectations in order to help understand and counteract potential placebo effects.
Participants in our studies do develop expectations based on their training condition, and are especially optimistic regarding the effects of brain training. Unmatched expectations between groups are a serious concern, because there is growing evidence suggesting cognitive tests are susceptible to placebo effects, including tests of memory, intelligence and attention.
Is there a likely mechanism for improvement?
There’s another important question that needs to be addressed: Should brain training work? That is, given what scientists know about how people learn and acquire new skills, should we expect training on one task to improve the performance of another, untrained task? This is the fundamental claim being made by brain training companies – that engaging in games on a computer or mobile device will improve your performance on all sorts of tasks that are not the game you’re playing.
Brain training programs ‘gamify’ the process to keep people practicing.Gustavo da Cunha Pimenta/Flickr, CC BY-SA
As one example, “speed of processing training” has been incorporated into commercial brain training products. The goal here is to improve the detection of objects in the periphery, which can be useful in avoiding an automobile crash. A brain game may take the form of nature scenes with birds presented in the periphery; players must locate specific birds, even though the image is presented only briefly. But can finding birds on a screen help you detect and avoid, for example, a pedestrian stepping off the curb while you’re driving?
This is a crucial question. Few people care much about improving their score on an abstract computerized brain training exercise. What is important is improving their ability to perform everyday tasks that relate to their safety, well-being, independence and success in life. But over a century of research suggests that learning and training gains tend to be extremely specific. Transferring gains from one task to another can be a challenge.
Consider the individual known as SF, who was able, with extended practice, to improve his memory for numbers from seven to 79 digits. After training, he was able to hear a list of 79 randomly generated digits and immediately repeat this list of numbers back, perfectly, without delay. But he could still remember and repeat back only about six letters of the alphabet.
This is just one of many examples in which individuals can vastly improve their performance on a task, but demonstrate no training gains at all when presented with an even slightly different challenge. If the benefits of training on remembering digits do not transfer to remembering letters, why would training on virtual bird-spotting transfer to driving, academic performance or everyday memory?
Brain training programs are an appealing shortcut, a “get smart quick” scheme. But improving or maintaining cognition is likely not going to be quick and easy. Instead, it may require a lifetime – or at least an extended period – of cognitive challenge and learning.
If you’re worried about your cognition, what should you do?
First, if you do engage in brain games, and you enjoy them, please continue to play. But keep your expectations realistic. If you’re playing solely to obtain cognitive benefits, instead consider other activities that might be as cognitively stimulating, or at least more fulfilling – like learning a new language, for instance, or learning to play an instrument.
The most important lesson from the literature on training is this: If you want to improve your performance on a task that’s important to you, practice that task. Playing brain games may only make you better at playing brain games.
Dogs can connect neighbors, but in multicultural areas they can also reinforce racial barriers.
Shutterstock
Cities in the United States are getting less segregated and, according to a recent national survey, most Americans value the country’s racial diversity.
But the demographic integration of a neighborhood doesn’t necessarily mean that neighbors of different races are socializing together.
I spent 18 months studying Creekridge Park, a diverse and mixed-income area of Durham, North Carolina, to understand how black, white and Latino residents interacted with each other. Between 2009 and 2011, I interviewed 63 residents, attended neighborhood events and conducted a household survey.
I learned that white, black and Latino residents led rather separate social lives in Creekridge Park. Eighty-six percent of white people said their closest friends were white, and 70% of black residents surveyed reported that their best friends were black.
One black resident lamented that neighbors weren’t as “friendly as I had hoped and thought that they would be – or at least, this image I had in my head of what ‘friendly’ would be like.”
White, black and Latino people in Creekridge Park even had different experiences with something as seemingly innocuous as pet ownership.
Many white residents described friendships growing as a result of walking their dogs around the neighborhood, with chance encounters on the sidewalk turning into baseball games, dinners and even vacations together.
“It’s the dogs that are our connectors,” said Tammy, a white homeowner in her fifties. “That’s how a lot of us have gotten to know each other.”
Such positive interactions did not necessarily happen across racial boundaries. More often, I found, dogs reinforced boundaries.
When Jerry, a black homeowner in his sixties, stopped to chat with some dog-owning customers, who were white, in the outdoor seating area of a neighborhood bakery, the staff asked him to leave.
“I owned some dogs like that at one particular time. And I was just speaking to them. All of a sudden, I’m a panhandler,” Jerry said, incredulous and hurt.
Jerry is a black disabled veteran who was wearing his old army uniform that day. He figures they thought he was begging for money.
The dogs didn’t create the interracial boundaries at the bakery, which caters to a primarily white, middle-class clientele. In fact, the dogs presented an avenue to connect black and white neighbors.
But they gave bakery staff a reason to intervene, to maintain interracial boundaries.
Neighborhood watch
The treatment of dogs in Creekridge Park also divided neighbors of different races.
Tammy, the same resident who said dogs served as “connectors” in the neighborhood, disliked that her Latino neighbors wouldn’t let their dog into the house, leaving her tied up in the backyard.
Tethering dogs is a common practice in Durham, NC.Shutterstock
One day, when she heard her neighbor’s dog barking, she decided to monitor their backyard with binoculars, to make sure the dog was OK. When the father spotted her doing her surveillance, Tammy lied. She said she was looking at a different dog.
Tammy was not, however, embarrassed when recounting this story. She felt she was justified in considering the dog’s well-being. She offered the family a bigger dog house and began to take the dog on hour-long walks twice a day. Eventually, she adopted the dog as her own.
Tammy said that she always intervened whenever she saw dogs mistreated in the neighborhood. However, the only examples she shared during our interview involved Latino families.
Latino families are not the only Creekridge Park residents who tied up their dogs. The practice is common enough across Durham that a local group was formed in 2007 to build free dog fences.
Police come ‘almost immediately’
Several white residents of Creekridge Park have even reported their neighbors to the police for suspected animal abuse.
Emma, a white homeowner in her thirties, called the police when she thought her neighbors were involved in dog fighting.
They “came almost immediately,” she said.
Generally, Emma told me, if she knows her neighbors, she will confront them directly about problems she perceives. Otherwise, she prefers to call the police.
Given how segregated friendship networks are in Creekridge Park, this seemingly non-racial distinction between “known” and “unknown” neighbors means that in practice Emma involved police in conflicts only with black and Latino neighbors.
Dogs can connect neighbors – but they can also divide them.Shutterstock
How white people enforce their rules
This white willingness to report non-white neighbors for “unruly” behavior recalls numerous recent incidents nationwide in which white people have called the police on black people for perfectly legal activities.
In July 2018 a white woman in San Francisco threatened an 8-year-old black girl for “illegally selling water without a permit.” A few months before, a white woman dubbed by internet users as “BBQ Becky” called the cops on a black family barbecuing in an Oakland park for using an “unauthorized” charcoal grill.
In U.S. neighborhoods, middle- and upper-class white residents enjoy a privileged social position by virtue of their race and class. They understand that police, local businesses and government agencies exist to serve them – the same social institutions that often underserve or even target racial minorities.
By drawing arbitrary lines between right and wrong, insider and outsider – even good pet owner and bad – white people like Tammy and BBQ Becky use that power to try to shape diverse neighborhoods into their preferred mold.
As a result of white residents’ focus on their own comfort in diverse places, racial inequality can pervade everyday life – even, my research shows, when walking the dog.
Don’t worry the puppy.
Shutterstock/The Vine Studios
If you think your dog looks stressed out, it might be your own stress levels that are affecting your pet pooch.
More than just being “man’s best friend”, it appears our pet dogs may be mirroring our mental state too, and that can be bad for their health.
It’s all in the hair
Swedish researchers studied 58 dogs – 33 Shetland Sheepdogs and 25 Border Collies – as well as their owners. The dogs selected were balanced for sex, breed and activity level.
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Both dog and owner personality was assessed through standardised personality questionnaires, with owners filling out the Dog Personality Questionnaire on behalf of their pet.
Border collies were used as part of the study.Flickr/Tamsin Cooper, CC BY-SA
The researchers also measured the hormone cortisol in the hair of dogs and their owners over a year-long period.
Cortisol is a measure of physiological stress, which can be raised during mental distress. But it’s also elevated for short periods such as during exercise and illness.
Hair cortisol is a good way of measuring long-term trends in stress levels, as hair grows slowly (about 1cm per month) and absorbs circulating substances from the blood.
Impact on dogs
The results showed a significant correlation between human and dog cortisol levels across the year. In 57 of the dogs in summer and 55 in winter, cortisol levels matched those of their owners. This means that for these dogs, their cortisol levels rose and fell in unison with their owner’s.
This correlation was not influenced by dog activity levels or dog personality. It was, however, influenced by owner personality. Owners with higher stress levels tended to have dogs with higher stress levels too.
Female dogs had a stronger connection with their owner’s stress levels compared with male dogs. Previous studies have shown that female dogs (as well as rats and chimpanzees) are more emotionally responsive than males.
There’s also evidence that increased oxytocin (the love and bonding hormone) in female dogs results in increased interactions with their owner, causing a corresponding increase in the owner’s oxytocin levels. This effect wasn’t seen in male dogs.
A limiting factor to the new study was that it did not identify any causes of elevated stress in the dog owners. But what it does show is that regardless of the cause of the stress, our reaction to it impacts our dogs.
Our relationship with dogs
Researchers have long discussed the concept of what is called the “human-dog dyad”, a close bond between humans and dogs. This relationship, developed over 15,000 years, is unique in the animal world.
Although many aspects of this inter-species relationship are positive (particularly for us), it’s likely there are some drawbacks to this close relationship with dogs.
We know that failing to providing basic care like food and shelter is cruel, but we often overlook how disregarding the mental lives of our pets can also negatively impact their welfare.
Helping our dogs cope
Dogs are sentient animals. This means they can experience both positive and negative emotions, such as pleasure, comfort, fear, and anxiety.
A poor mental state, where a dog is regularly experiencing negative emotions such as anxiety, can lead to poor animal welfare. If owners have an impact on the stress levels of their dogs, it means we also play a role in protecting their welfare.
The impact we have on our dog’s stress levels goes both ways - positive and negative. If we reduce our own stress levels, it’s likely we will also reduce our dog’s stress levels.
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We know chronic stress is bad for both humans and dogs, increasing the likelihood we will get sick as well as decreasing our quality of life.
If you don’t work on decreasing your stress levels for your own sake, perhaps you will do it for your dog. There are great resources available for decreasing stress levels, and the good news is that some of them, such as getting out in nature, can be done with your dog right by your side.
