Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Emotions and wildlife

[Norman Gauss (normangauss]

Hi Jan in Australia:

   Here is a rebuttal to some of your points on emotions and wildlife that
were directed to Rob Sandelin.

> Pet owners and parents may be emotional and therefore in your opinion
> irrational, but what sort of a world would we have if people were
motivated
> entirely by reason?  In fact, would that be enough to motivate them?  And
> without feelings could you say they were truly human?  Would we even have
> community if people were not influenced by their emotions?

    Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini were motivated entirely by emotions.  Were
they human in the sense you mean?

     The important point is to not let emotions blind you to reason.  Given
sound assumptions and good information, the exercise of reason will give
better results over the long run than blind adherence to emotional goals.
The end result for the entire community and what it wants to achieve is what
counts. This takes precedence over individuals quest to satisfy their
emotional needs.

     There are non-emotional factors that motivate people to live in
cohousing communities.  Living in a community has many practical advantages
not connected to emotions, and I, for one, am not drawn to cohousing
communities primarily because of the emotional element.

>
> The same goes for the other side of the debate.  When people fight to
> protect wildlife they are primarily motivated by feelings not reason,
which
> is why for example here in Australia there's not much trouble finding
> supporters for the fight to save cuddly koalas, not so easy for the other
> 99%, the invertebrates.


The protection of wildlife is not primarily motivated by feelings.  I admit
that a focus on one species to the exclusion of all the others in the
natural community is motivated by emotion.  Thus in the United States, the
emotional focus to protect deer at the expense of the habitat that supports
deer leads to overbrowsing and starvation of the deer.

A healthy ecosystem focusing on sustainability with a maximum of species
diversity is the goal of most nature lovers.  This is based on the many
studies of natural ecosystems that have been performed during the last 75
years.  Thus reason tells us that excess predation will eliminate many
desirable species that are good for the ecosystem.  Emotion has nothing to
do with it.  Any community that permits cats to dominate the predation of
small creatures is blinded by their emotional attachment to cats at the
expense of the other creatures in their surroundings.

Norman Gauss
OakCreekCommons [at] yahoo.com








>
>
> Jan
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Rob Sandelin [SMTP:floriferous [at] msn.com]
> > Sent: Tuesday, 4 September 2001 15:23
> > To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org
> > Subject: RE: [C-L]_Cats. Wow!
> >
> > Let me put on my  group facilitator hat here: Just to belabor the
obvious,
> > Pets are a major conflict issue in pretty much every community. They
rank
> > right up there in conflict issues with kids, work, food and
relationships.
> >
> > I have seen an interesting pattern in many communities I have visited,
> > especially cohousing groups. The conversation goes like this:
> >
> > Pet Owner: We don't have any problems with pets.
> > Non-Pet Owner: Our biggest undealt with problem is pets.
> >
> > I have worked with groups dealing with pets and kids and both bring up
> > similar emotional attachment blocks for many people. They can talk about
> > lots of things, but as soon as you bring up a subject where they have a
> > strong emotional attachment (pet/child) they lose the ability to
maintain
> > any sort of subjectivity and rationality. It is common that emotionally
> > attached people take any general criticism of pets/children personally
and
> > often respond with the defensive methods they characteristically use.
> >
> > In my experience, when dealing with either kids or pets it might be a
good
> > approach to work on abstract goals first. What do we want to accomplish?
> > Then, once you have a set of goals, you can work towards specifics of
> > accomplishing them.
> >
> > It is pretty common to find cohousing groups that espouse environmental
> > goals which then do nothing to regulate the carnage on local wildlife
done
> > by the pets. Constraining pets is simply too hard for most groups to
work
> > out.
> >
> > Now I put on my naturalist  hat:
> >
> > Cats in natural systems are super predators, their population is not in
> > anyway linked to the prey populations. In a natural system the
population
> > of
> > the predators is directly linked to the population of the prey. When the
> > prey drops to a low point, it causes the predators to die or move on,
> > leaving a small remnant prey population to then rebuild its numbers.
Super
> > predators keep feeding on the prey base until it is locally extinct,
> > because
> > they do not rely on the prey for survival. There are over 200 studies
now
> > of
> > cat predation effects from all over America, and there is a good
abstract
> > of
> > this research available from the Audubon society. It used to be on their
> > website.
> >
> > Rob Sandelin
> > Ex-facilitation trainer
> > Natural history teacher
> >
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