This evening Cosmo found a dead fish on the beach……he enjoys a dead fish, but today he did actually 'Leave it'. Most times he runs off and scoffes it. This used to anoy both me and my wife, but dogs are scavengers and that is kind of their reason given to them by nature.
This is something I can not change without training the dog so much that it is unatural. I am not prepared to do this as Cosmo is a constant link and reminder of the natural world to me.
I came across the term 'Muted Totemic Memory' on tinternet today, turns out somone at Yale University wrote a whole 27 page paper about! I could not read all of it, but what a great thing to have identified. I love aboriginal and native american cultures they seem so much more sound than ours. They are both Totemic societies. Western society this paper says is unable to include human activity and culture as natural. We have lost the ability to reference ourselves as part of the rest of the natural world, unable to see ourselves as natural creatures at all, that also live in a world with other animals and species. The result of this is the environmental mix up we find ourselves trying to understand and can not deal with.
Bang On Annabelle Sabloff (she is the author of this paper).
