Science: Cats want to play fetch. Cat Sutra

"Zig, hey!" says ginger white kitty, while extending its paw in the air (zaLysonArts/Getty).

.

A surprising number of cats want us to play fetch with them

What good results from the deed of meditation?

Many people have seen dogs fetch, but cats like to get into the game, too. Despite their very different hunting and play styles, fetching appears to combine elements of predatory [hunting, stalking, killing] and social behavior for both species.

Although their domestication histories and natural behaviors are very different, cats and dogs share many similarities.

Both species are predators, live closely with humans and are capable of enjoying rich social experiences with us.

Is this fake Buddha quote true? Kind of, partly

In our newly published study, we found that more than 40% of cats described in our survey data played fetch, compared with almost 80% of dogs.

We also outlined several possible reasons for fetching, including play, selection during domestication, and learning effects. More

The Creeping [Cat] Sutra (AN 10.216)

Karmic-result? Deal with it.

“Meditators, I teach an exposition of the Dharma on creeping. Listen, attend closely, and I will speak.”

“Yes, venerable sir,” they replied. The Buddha then said: “What, meditators, is the exposition of the Dharma on creeping?

“Meditators, beings are the owners of their karma (deeds), heirs of their karma; they have karma as their origin, karma as their relative, karma as their resort; whatever karma they do, good or bad, they are its heirs.

I'm a stalker. I'm a predator. I'm a killer.

(1) “Here, someone destroys life, is murderous, bloodyhanded, given to beatings and violence, is merciless to living beings.

“One creeps along by body, speech, and mind: One's bodily karma is crooked, one's verbal karma is crooked, one's mental karma is crooked.

“[Therefore,] one's destination is crooked, one's rebirth is crooked. And for one with a crooked destination and rebirth, I say, there is one of two destinations -- either the exclusively painful hells or [rebirth/reappearance as] a species of creeping animal.

“What are the species of creeping animals? The CAT, the snake, the scorpion, the centipede, the mongoose, the mouse, and the owl, or any other animals that creep away when they see people.

I was after Maus. I guess karmic-results are just

“Thus, a being is reborn from a being; one is reborn through one’s deeds. When one has been reborn, contacts [impressions] affect one. It is in this way, I say, that beings are the heirs of their karma.

(2) “Someone takes what is not given… (3)…engages in sexual misconduct… (4)…speaks falsehood… (5)…speaks divisively… (6)…speaks harshly… (7)…indulges in idle chit chat… (8)…is full of longing… (9) …has a mind of ill will and intentions of hate… (10)…  More

• [EDITOR: KARMA (deeds, intentional actions, courses of action) refers to doing. Having been willed, carried out, and stored up, there are two kinds of outcomes -- the "resultants" (vipaka) and the "fruit" (phala) that ripens. [One might distinguish between immediate mental resultants and longer-term fruits or future circumstances that result from deeds.]
• Mikel Delgado, Judith Stella, The Conversation, Nature via ScienceAlert.com, 9/5/24; Dhr. Seven (ed.) "Creeping" (AN 10.216) based on Bhikkhu Bodhi translation (suttacentral.net, AN 10.216), CC Liu, Ashley Wells (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Science: The Emotional Lives of Animals

Yes! (alternet via Marc Bekoff/Pasadena Weekly, 2/7/19); Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly

Among my many emotions are curiosity and RAGE at dumb humans with cameras.

  

Grief, Friendship, Gratitude, Wonder, and other things we Animals Experience

Eat pu...not animals. Go vegan for Earth's health!

Scientific research shows that many animals are very intelligent and have sensory and motor abilities that dwarf ours.

Dogs are able to detect diseases such as cancer and diabetes and warn humans of impending heart attacks and strokes.

Elephants, whales, hippos, giraffes, and alligators use low-frequency sounds to communicate over long distances, often miles.

And bats, dolphins, whales, frogs, and various rodents use high-frequency sounds to find food, communicate with others, and navigate.

 

When I get a moment alone, it's mammal time.

Many animals also display wide-ranging emotions, including joy, happiness, empathy, compassion, grief, and even resentment and embarrassment.

It’s not surprising that animals -- especially, but not only, mammals -- share many emotions with us because we also share brain structures, located in the limbic system, that are the seat of our emotions.

In many ways, human emotions are the gifts of our animal ancestors. Many animals display profound grief at the loss or absence of a relative or companion.

What karma leads to which rebirth? Be kind.

Sea lion mothers wail when watching their babies being eaten by killer whales. People have reported dolphins struggling to save a dead calf by pushing its body to the surface of the water.

Chimpanzees and elephants grieve the loss of family and friends, and gorillas hold wakes for the dead.

I once happened upon what seemed to be a magpie funeral service. A magpie had been hit by a car. Four of his flock mates stood around him silently and pecked gently at his body. One, then another, flew off and brought back pine needles and twigs and laid them by his body. They all stood vigil for a time, nodded their heads, and flew off.

California mountain lions, pumas, will kill.

I also watched a red fox bury her mate after a cougar had killed him. She gently laid dirt and twigs over his body, stopped, looked to make sure he was all covered, patted down the dirt and twigs with her forepaws, stood silently for a moment, then trotted off, tail down and ears laid back against her head.

After publishing my stories I got emails from people all over the world who had seen similar behavior in various birds and mammals. More

The new BLT trio (Bear, Lion, Tiger)

Wisdom Quarterly; Telegraph.co.uk

The kindest "BLT" is made of bear, lion, and tiger (telegraph.co.uk)

 

Hey, what about us?! (Christy30/flickr)

Rescued eight years ago during a police drugs raid in Atlanta, Georgia, the three friends were only cubs at the time and barely two months old. They had been kept as status symbol pets by the drug barons.
 

Delivered to the Noah's Ark animal rescue centre in Locust Grove, Georgia, the decision was made to keep the youngsters together. "We could have separated them, but since they came as a kind of family, the zoo decided to keep them together," said Diane Smith, assistant director of the Noah's Ark zoo.

"To our knowledge, this is the only place where you'll find this combination of animals together, they are our BLT, (bear, lion, and tiger). More

• Scientists baffled by see-through "ice fish" with transparent BLOOD
• Now chocolate can be one of your five-a-day: Scientists create bars without the fat that are made from fruit juice
• Workers send and receive 10,000 emails a year - but has it made us any more productive?
• The social networking teen turn-off: MORE evidence chat apps are set to take over from Facebook and Twitter
• Hacker shows off phone app that can electronically hijack and control a PLANE
• Is algae the next super material? Bacteria used to create substance that could make everything from armor to phone screens
• Secretbook lets users hide ANY message in a Facebook picture
• Has the iPad killed the PC? Biggest sales slump in history reported as users turn to tablets and phones
• Drunk and emotional people are the most likely to log on to Facebook, researchers find
• Professor Stephen Hawking calls for space exploration to continue as humans will not survive another 1,000 years on "our fragile planet"
• Mysterious 60,000 ton stone "grave marker" at the bottom of the Sea of Galilee baffles archaeologists
• NASA gets go ahead to try and capture an ASTEROID in "stepping stone" for Mars mission
• Is the UK heading for ANOTHER Arctic winter? Met Office calls emergency meeting to discuss if melting ice is causing Britain to freeze
• The fin that led to the foot: Researchers find "incredibly unusual" fish fossil that gives new insight into human evolution
• Martian twins: The unique "double craters" discovered on the red planet
• Violent images in movies, TV, or computer games CAN act as triggers for aggression, says new report
• Kingfishers caught in the act: The breathtaking pictures of nature's finest fishermen that took TWO YEARS to capture
• Could lip-smacking noises made by monkeys be the start of human speech?

• MORE HEADLINES

Apes have "mid-life crises," humans too

Wisdom Quarterly

Balding, flabby, and testosterone-poisoned, that's the crisis at mid-life (WQ)

 
Yet again proving that we humans are simply the most spiritually and intellectually (albeit not necessarily the most socially or emotionally) evolved of the apes, we aren't the only ones to go through a mid-life crisis.

Everything we do, perhaps short of moral reasoning, exists in the animal world: tool-making, language (all animals communicate and some, without adequate voice boxes, manage to mimic our linguistic sounds, e.g. parrots, Mina birds, Beluga whales, howling dogs), promiscuity (bonobos), planned violence, murder, cannibalism, self-injury (most animals in captivity), anorexia (dolphins chuck), bipedalism (all birds walk on two legs in addition to a better way of traveling), smoke (monkey in Tobacco Company studies), drink (under fermenting fruit trees in desert oases), pleasure themselves... The great Noam Chomsky declared chimps could never use abstract language, until Nim Chimpsky proved him wrong.

(NewsyScience) Noc can talk. But marine biologists
discovered whales' human voices back in 1984.

 
Even apes have "midlife crises," study finds

Youth in a tube (cartoonstock.com)

(FOX News) Chimpanzees in a midlife crisis? It sounds like a setup for a joke. But there it is, in the title of a report published Monday in a scientific journal: "Evidence for a midlife crisis in great apes."

  

So what do these apes do? Buy red Ferraris? Leave their mates for some cute young bonobos? Uh, no. "I believe no ape has ever purchased a sports car," said Andrew Oswald, an author of the study. But researchers report that captive chimps and orangutans do show the same low ebb in emotional well-being at midlife that some studies find in people.

• Bigfoot is part human, study finds - Giants - 11 most mystifying Bigfoot sightings - Atom smasher creates new matter - Phantom island found on Google Earth - Ancient life lives in Antarctic lake - Alibaba: The new Facebook?
  

That suggests the human tendency toward midlife discontent may have been passed on through evolution, rather than resulting just from the hassles of modern life, said Oswald, a professor of economics at the University of Warwick in England who presented his work Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A second study in the journal looks at a younger age group and finds that happiness in youth can lead to higher income a few years down the road. More on that later. Let's get back to those apes. Several studies have concluded that... More

"This is one of the great patterns of human life.

We're all going to slide along this U for good or ill."

- Study author Andrew Oswald

When the Buddha was Bad: Greedy Jackal

Wisdom Quarterly translation based on an archaic initial translation by H.T. Francis and E.J. Thomas (Jataka 148)

It is easy to think of the Rebirth Tales (Jatakas) as nothing more than children's stories, far fetched fables and parables the Buddha skillfully employed in teaching simple lessons.

Indeed, Aesop's Fables are based on them as they traveled from culture to culture to the delight and edification of many who lost sight or never knew they originated with the Buddha.

But as these videos show, they could very well be based on actual, albeit implausible, events. That they often involve animal communication or admirable characteristics is not to suggest that all animals are capable of higher-order reasoning or communicating. But it does suggest that some are. After all, it's not an ordinary being having these experiences, but a very special one.

THE GREEDY JACKAL GETS CAUGHT

(Buddhist Rebirth Tale 148)
Once upon a time, while Brahmadatta was reigning in Benares, the Bodhisatta [Sanskrit, Bodhisattva] was reborn in the animal realm as a jackal. He lived in a forest alongside the great Ganges river.

At that time an old elephant died by the banks of the Ganges. And the jackal, finding the carcass, congratulated himself for discovering such a great store of rotting meat. [Elephants are pachyderms, which means "thick skin."] He bit the trunk, but it was like biting a plough handle. "There's no eating here," said the jackal and bit at a tusk.

But that was like biting a large bone. Next he tried a flexible ear, but it was like chewing the rim of a winnowing basket. He pounced on the stomach. But he found that as impenetrable as a grain basket.

The feet were no better. They were as tough as a mortar. He tried the tail, but that was like a pestle. "That won't do either," said the jackal.

Having failed everywhere else, he chewed at the rear and found that like eating a soft cake. "At last," he exclaimed, "I've found the right place!'' And he ate his way right into the belly of the great beast. There he made a feast of the kidneys, heart, and other organs, quenching his thirst with blood.

Having got his fill and feeling night come on, he lay down inside. As he rested there, a thought came into the jackal's mind: "This carcass is both meat and house to me; why would I leave it?"

0:26 shows that a carcass can be a home.

So there he settled to dwell in the elephant's innards, eating away. Time wore on until the summer sun and winds dried and shrank the elephant's hide. And the entrance by which the jackal had crawled in closed leaving the interior in utter darkness.

There the jackal found himself, soaked in stench, cloyed, cut off from the world, and confined in the space between worlds. After the hide shrank, the flesh began to wither, and the blood dried up. In a frenzy of despair, he rushed back and forth slamming against his prison walls in a fruitless endeavor to escape.

But as he bobbed excitedly up and down like a ball of rice in a boiling pot, a storm broke out. And the downpour moistened and softened the shell of the carcass. Restoring the entrance, light soon shone in like a star through the fetid canal.

"I'm saved! I'm saved!" cried the jackal. And backing up against the elephant's head, he rushed headlong at the outlet. He struggled and struggled and finally managed to get through, but only by leaving his hair all along the way.

And first he ran from his jail in joy. Then he halted and sat surveying his hairless body, which was now as smooth as a palm stem. "Ah!" he exclaimed, "this misfortune has befallen me because of my greed and my greed alone. From now on, I will not be greedy nor ever again crawl into offensive end of an elephant."

His terror at what had almost happened found expression in the following stanza:

"Once bitten, twice shy.

Ah, great was my fear!

Of elephants' innards

Henceforth will I steer clear!"

With these words the jackal ran off, never again to so much as look at another elephant carcass. [And the moral to the story is:] He was never greedy again.

"LIFE" (Discovery Channel)

(Discovery Networks) Coming this Sunday (March 21, 2010) -- the next chapter of "LIFE" on Earth begins. An 11-part series narrated by Oprah Winfrey, it's all new on Discovery! In Buddhist cosmology, the Animal Realm – or the potential for our rebirth in an animal womb (Pali, tiracchāna-yoni, Tibetan, dud.'gro) – comprises the entire animal kingdom where individuals are capable of feeling suffering, from the smallest microbe or insect to the largest elephant or whale.

• See the making of "LIFE" behind the scenes videos

Six Realms of Existence (Mahayana)

The Wheel of Existence
Text by Barbara O'Brien, About.com

The Six Realms are an allegorical description of "conditioned exis-tence," or Samsara, into which beings are reborn. The nature of one's existence is determined by karma (intentional deeds). Some realms seem more pleasant than others -- heaven sounds preferable to hell -- but all are unsatisfactory (dukkha), meaning they are temporary and imperfect.

The Six Realms often are illustrated by the Bhava Chakra, or "Wheel of Life." Note that in some [Mahayana] schools the realms of angels (Devas) and titans (Asuras) are combined, leaving five realms instead of six.*

1. Deva-gati, the Realm of Devas (demigods, angels, luminous fine-material beings) and Heavenly Beings. In Buddhist tradition, the Deva realm is populated by godlike beings who enjoy great power, wealth, and long life. They live in splendor and happiness. Yet, even the Deva grow old and die. Further, their privilege and exalted status blind them to the suffering of others, so in spite of their long lives they have neither wisdom nor compassion. The privileged Deva will be reborn in another of the Six Realms.

2. Asura-gati, the Realm of Asuras (Titans). The Asura are strong and powerful beings who are sometimes depicted as enemies of the Deva. Asura are marked by their fierce envy. The karma of hate and jealousy causes rebirth in the Asura Realm. Chih-i (538-597), a patriarch of the T'ien-t'ai school, described the Asura this way: "Always desiring to be superior to others, having no patience for inferiors and belittling strangers; like a hawk, flying high above and looking down on others, and yet outwardly displaying justice, worship, wisdom, and faith -- this is raising up the lowest order of good and walking the way of the Asuras." You may have known an Asura or two.

3. Preta-gati, the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. Hungry ghosts (pretas) are pictured as beings with huge, empty stomachs, but they have pinhole mouths, and their necks are so thin they cannot swallow. A hungry ghost is one who is always looking outside himself for the new thing that will satisfy the craving within. Hungry ghosts are characterized by insatiable hunger and craving. They are also associated with addiction, obsession and compulsion.

4. Naraka-gati, the Hell Realm. As the name suggests, the Hell Realm is the most terrible of the Six Realms. Hell beings have a short fuse; everything makes them angry. And the only way hell beings deal with things that make them angry is through aggression -- attack, attack, attack! They drive away anyone who shows them love and kindness and seek out the company of other hell beings. Unchecked anger and aggression can cause rebirth in the Hell Realm.

5. Tiryagyoni-gati, the Animal Realm. Animal beings are marked by stupidity, prejudice, and complacency. They live sheltered lives, avoiding discomfort or anything unfamiliar. Rebirth in the Animal Realm is conditioned by ignorance. People who are ignorant and content to remain so are likely headed for the Animal Realm, assuming they aren't there already.

6. Manusya-gati, the Human Realm. The Human Realm is the only realm of the six from which beings may escape Samsara (i.e., continued rebirth). Enlightenment is at hand in the Human Realm; yet, only a few open their eyes and see it. Rebirth into the Human Realm is conditioned by passion, doubt, and desire.

-

Details and pictorial close ups: CLICK HERE

-

*NOTE: The existence of only six realms of existence is a later development of the Mahayana school. Originally, the Buddha taught that there were thirty-one planes of existence, as maintained by the Theravada school.]