Positive Zoo Quotes

I believe that the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it's a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotion systems in the brain. My theory is that the environment animals live in should activate their positive emotions as much as possible, and not activate their negative emotions any more than necessary. If we get the animal's emotions rights, we will have fewer problem behaviors... All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain.

The establishment’s reply is that dissenting students are bent, not on positive innovation, but on negative disruption. Against this, however, it can be argued that these two processes are very closely related and that the former only degenerates into the latter when it finds itself blocked.

It is a fact that if an impulse from one or the other sphere comes up and is not lived out, then it goes back down and tends to develop anti-human qualities. What should have been a human impulse becomes a tiger-like impulse. For instance, a man has a feeling impulse to say something positive to someone and he blocks it off through some inhibition. He might then dream that he had a spontaneous feeling impulse on the level of a child and his conscious purpose had smashed it. The human is still there, but as a hurt child. Should he do that habitually for five years, he would no longer dream of a child who had been hurt but of a zoo full of raging wild animals in a cage. An impulse which is driven back loads up with energy and becomes inhuman. This fact, according to Dr. Jung, demonstrates the independent existence of unconscious.

Elephants, it turns out, are surprisingly stealthy. As the sunlight fades, other species declare their presence. Throngs of zebras and wildebeests thunder by in the distance, trailing dust clouds. Cape buffalo snort and raise their horns and position themselves in front of their young. Giraffes stare over treetops, their huge brown eyes blinking, then lope away in seeming slow motion. But no elephants.

My heart was pounding out of my chest as I tried to decide if I wanted to hold position or take cover. In a few short seconds, I’d gone from feeling like a zoo patron watching the animals in their cage to being the main attraction.

They were two-thirds of the way up when he heard a woman’s voice right behind him. “Pretty. So very pretty.” He turned to see the lady patting Deedee’s head, almost petting her like an animal at the zoo. The little girl’s face was filled with horror. “Such a pretty child,” the woman said. “I could just eat you up. Like a turkey dinner. Yes. So sweet.” Mark faced front again, repulsed. There was a bulging feeling in his chest, as if something were trying to escape. He’d just taken another step when a man reached out and poked his shoulder with a finger. “Good, strong young boy, you are,” the stranger said. “I bet your mama’s proud, eh?” Mark ignored him, went up another step. This time people on either side of him put their hands on his arm—not in a threatening way, just a touch. Another step. A woman moved away from the wall and threw her arms around his neck, squeezed him in a quick and fierce hug. Then she released him and stepped back into her position to the side. A wicked smile distorted her features. Revulsion filled Mark. He couldn’t take another minute in that house. He threw caution to the wind and reached behind him, grabbed Deedee’s hand, then started moving faster up the steps. He could hear Alec’s feet pounding as he brought up the rear.

In spite of all these concerns, in the morning when I left my hotel I went joyfully down the stairs, whistling all the while, and emerged into the street at ten or eleven, whenever I wanted. It was fun, I felt happy, and then I realized that it wasn’t all much fun and I wasn’t all that happy. Had a weight been lifted from my back? The weight of living? I had been born bowed down with grief. The universe seemed to me a kind of enormous cage, or rather a big prison, with the sky a ceiling, and the horizon walls beyond which there had to be something else. But what? I was in a vast space, and yet it was locked. Or rather, I had the feeling I was in a huge ship, and the sky above was an enormous cover. There was a crowd of prisoners, and as far as I could tell most of them were unaware of their condition. What was there beyond the walls? Well, when you really thought about it, there was a positive side to the picture: the daily prison, the little jail inside the big one, had opened its doors to me. Now I was able to stroll at will along the main thoroughfares, the broad avenues of the big jail. It was a world comparable to a zoo in which the animals enjoyed a kind of semi-freedom, with man-made mountains, artificial woods, and imitation lakes, but at the far reaches there were still the same old fences.

We had been out for one of our evening rambles, Holmes and I, and had returned about six o’clock on a cold, frosty winter’s evening. As Holmes turned up the lamp the light fell upon a card on the table. He glanced at it, and then, with an ejaculation of disgust, threw it on the floor. I picked it up and read: CHARLES AUGUSTUS MILVERTON, Appledore Towers, Hampstead. Agent. “Who is he?” I asked. “The worst man in London,” Holmes answered, as he sat down and stretched his legs before the fire. “Is anything on the back of the card?” I turned it over. “Will call at 6:30--C.A.M.,” I read. “Hum! He’s about due. Do you feel a creeping, shrinking sensation, Watson, when you stand before the serpents in the Zoo, and see the slithery, gliding, venomous creatures, with their deadly eyes and wicked, flattened faces? Well, that’s how Milverton impresses me. I’ve had to do with fifty murderers in my career, but the worst of them never gave me the repulsion which I have for this fellow. And yet I can’t get out of doing business with him--indeed, he is here at my invitation.” “But who is he?” “I’ll tell you, Watson. He is the king of all the blackmailers. Heaven help the man, and still more the woman, whose secret and reputation come into the power of Milverton! With a smiling face and a heart of marble, he will squeeze and squeeze until he has drained them dry. The fellow is a genius in his way, and would have made his mark in some more savoury trade. His method is as follows: He allows it to be known that he is prepared to pay very high sums for letters which compromise people of wealth and position. He receives these wares not only from treacherous valets or maids, but frequently from genteel ruffians, who have gained the confidence and affection of trusting women. He deals with no niggard hand. I happen to know that he paid seven hundred pounds to a footman for a note two lines in length, and that the ruin of a noble family was the result. Everything which is in the market goes to Milverton, and there are hundreds in this great city who turn white at his name. No one knows where his grip may fall, for he is far too rich and far too cunning to work from hand to mouth. He will hold a card back for years in order to play it at the moment when the stake is best worth winning. I have said that he is the worst man in London, and I would ask you how could one compare the ruffian, who in hot blood bludgeons his mate, with this man, who methodically and at his leisure tortures the soul and wrings the nerves in order to add to his already swollen money-bags?” I had seldom heard my friend speak with such intensity of feeling.

He knows this is his position, he expects it, but doesn't seek it, and this is why it is his.

As we started our long drive back to the zoo, we stopped at what could be called a general store. There was a pub attached to the establishment, and the store itself sold a wide variety of goods, groceries, cooking utensils, swags, clothing, shoes, even toys. As we picked up supplies in the shop, we passed the open doorway to the pub. A few of the patrons recognized Steve from television. We could hear them talking about him. The comments weren’t exactly positive. Steve didn’t look happy. “Let’s just get out of here,” I whispered. “Right-o,” he said. One of the pub patrons was louder than the others. “I’m a crocodile hunter too,” he bragged. “Only I’m the real crocodile hunter. The real one, you hear me, mate?” The braggart made his living at the stuffy trade, he informed his audience. A stuffy is a baby crocodile mounted by a taxidermist to be sold as a souvenir. To preserve their skins, hunters killed stuffys in much the same way that the bear poachers in Oregon stabbed their prey. “We drive screwdrivers right through their eyes,” Mister Stuffy boasted, eyeing Steve through the doorway of the pub. “Right through the bloody eye sockets!” He was feeling his beer. We gathered up our purchases and headed out to the Ute. Okay, I said to myself, we’re going to make it. Just two or three more steps… Steve turned around and headed back toward the pub. I’d never seen him like that before. My husband changed into somebody I didn’t know. His eyes glared, his face flushed, and his lower lip trembled. I followed him to the threshold of the pub. “Why don’t you blokes come outside and tell me all about stuffys in the car park here?” he said. I couldn’t see very well in the darkness of the pub interior, but I knew there were six or eight drinkers with Mister Stuffy. I thought, What is going to happen here? There didn’t seem any possible good outcomes. The pub drinkers stood up and filed out to face Steve. A half dozen against one. Steve chose the biggest one, who Mister Stuffy seemed to be hiding behind. “Bring it on, mate,” Steve said. “Or are you only tough enough to take on baby crocs, you son of a bitch?” Then Steve seemed to grow. I can’t explain it. His fury made him tower over a guy who actually had a few inches of height on him and outweighed him with a whole beer gut’s worth of weight. I couldn’t imagine how he appeared to the pub drinkers, but he was scaring me. They backed down. All six of them. Not one wanted to muck with Steve, who was clearly out of his mind with anger. All the world’s croc farms, all the cruelty and ignorance that made animals suffer the world over, came to a head in the car park of the pub that evening. Steve got into the truck. We drove off, and he didn’t say anything for a long time. “I don’t understand,” I finally said in the darkness of the front seat, as the bush landscape rolled by us. “What were they talking about? Were they killing crocs in the wild? Or were they croc farmers?” I heard a small exhalation from Steve’s side of the truck. I couldn’t see his face in the gloom. I realized he was crying. I was astounded. This was the man I had just seen turn into a furious monster. Five minutes earlier I’d been convinced I was about to see him take on a half-dozen blokes bare-fisted. Now he wept in the darkness. All at once, he sat up straight. With his jaw set, he wiped the tears from his face and composed himself. “I’ve known bastards like that all my life,” he said. “Some people don’t just do evil. Some people are evil.” He had told me before, but that night in the truck it hit home: Steve lived for wildlife and he would die for wildlife. He came by his convictions sincerely, from the bottom of his heart. He was more than just my husband that night. He was my hero.

Today, this is the way we define the vacuum: It is the remnant left over in a volume out of which we have removed everything that can possibly be taken out. The existence of electromagnetic zero-point radiation implies that this vacuum still contains photons, the carrier particles of the electromagnetic field. The photons fluctuate into electron-positron pairs; that means that their fields also don't vanish in the vacuum. And so it goes for all the fields of all the other particles in our particle zoo-of the quarks and antiquarks, of the neutrino and the antineutrino, of the muons and the antimuons, of the W and Z bosons, of the gluons. All of them swirl around in this emptiest of all spaces, in all imaginable configurations, and for the briefest of time only. Recall, the larger the mass of any of these excitations, the shorter its lifetime, the smaller the volume in which it is concentrated. The excitations of the vacuum come and go; they oscillate, they fluctuate. It is not easy to conjure up imagery vivid enough to do justice to the fluctuating vacuum. But we know that all these fields filling the vacuum must, on the average, vanish; the only quantity that remains immutable is the energy, the zero-point energy. The average charge of a vacuum is zero, and so is its average momentum. Any calculation we might attempt to determine the energy of the vacuum must fail; the contributions from some particles and fields will tend to positive infinity, of others to negative infinity. Summing up such indeterminate quantities does not give us a finite answer.

The dying mall has attracted some odd tenants, such as a satellite branch of the public library and an office of the State Attorney General's Child Predator Unit. As malls die across the country, we'll see many kinds of creative repurposing. Already, there are churches and casinos inside half-dead malls, so why not massage parlors, detox centers, transient hotels, haunted houses, prisons, petting zoos or putt-putt golf courses (covering the entire mall)? Leaving Santee, Chuck and I wandered into the food court, where only three of twelve restaurant slots were still occupied. On the back wall of this forlorn and silent space was a mural put up by Boscov, the mall's main tenant. Titled "B part of your community", it reads: KINDNESS COUNTS / PLANT A TREE / MAKE A DONATION / HELP A NEIGHBOR / VISIT THE ELDERLY / HOPE / ADOPT A PET / DRIVE A HYBRID / PICK UP THE TRASH / VOLUNTEER / CONSERVE ENERGY / RECYCLE / JOIN SOMETHING / PAINT A MURAL / HUG SOMEONE / SMILE / DRINK FILTERED WATER / GIVE YOUR TIME / USE SOLAR ENERGY / FEED THE HUNGRY / ORGANIZE A FUNDRAISER / CREATE AWARENESS / FIX A PLAYGROUND/ START A CLUB / BABYSIT These empty recommendations are about as effective as "Just Say No", I'm afraid. As the CIA pushed drugs, the first lady chirped, "Just say no!". And since everything in the culture, car, iPad, iPhone, television, internet, Facebook, Twitter and shopping mall, etc., is designed to remove you from your immediate surroundings, it will take more than cutesy suggestions on walls to rebuild communities. Also, the worse the neighborhoods or contexts, the more hopeful and positive the slogans. Starved of solutions, we shall eat slogans.

As the pumping engines for the circulatory system, ventricles must have a particular ovoid, lemonlike shape for strong, swift ejection of blood. If the end of the left ventricle balloons out, as it does in takotsubo hearts, the firm, healthy contractions are reduced to inefficient spasms—floppy and unpredictable. But what’s remarkable about takotsubo is what causes the bulge. Seeing a loved one die. Being left at the altar or losing your life savings with a bad roll of the dice. Intense, painful emotions in the brain can set off alarming, life-threatening physical changes in the heart. This new diagnosis was proof of the powerful connection between heart and mind. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy confirmed a relationship many doctors had considered more metaphoric than diagnostic. As a clinical cardiologist, I needed to know how to recognize and treat takotsubo cardiomyopathy. But years before pursuing cardiology, I had completed a residency in psychiatry at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. Having also trained as a psychiatrist, I was captivated by this syndrome, which lay at the intersection of my two professional passions. That background put me in a unique position that day at the zoo. I reflexively placed the human phenomenon side by side with the animal one. Emotional trigger … surge of stress hormones … failing heart muscle … possible death. An unexpected “aha!” suddenly hit me. Takotsubo in humans and the heart effects of capture myopathy in animals were almost certainly related—perhaps even the same syndrome with different names.