dogs

Three years after she sneaked in, World’s Happiest Dog® is queen

By David McElroy · January 25, 2019

The first time I ever heard of Lucy, it was just a message from someone wanting me to help her find a home for a dog. That was all.

I absolutely, positively had no interest in adopting her. I was away from the house too much of the time and I was also just settling into a new house with the cats. There were too many things up in the air. The last thing I needed was another responsibility.

But I didn’t have any choice in the matter. Lucy adopted me.

A week or so before she came to my house, I went over to the apartment where she was living to take a couple of pictures of her. She was terrified of people. She was terribly unsure of herself.

The people who had rescued her from a chain when she was a puppy had too many animals and they were moving to a smaller place. She was the only one who didn’t make the cut to go to the new place. She was expendable.

We can’t save every animal in need, but I was happy to save Kiko’s life

By David McElroy · December 13, 2018

I didn’t realize it at first, but Kiko was minutes from death when I met her.

It was about 15 years ago and I had just pulled up to my vet’s office on a routine visit for yearly vaccinations. I had a couple of kitty carriers loaded with some of my cats. As I was getting them out of the back seat, a man parked next to me and then got out of his car with a big white dog.

Kiko was beautiful and full of energy. I didn’t recognize her as an akita, because I was unfamiliar with the breed. I told the man he had a beautiful dog, but he barely acknowledged me. He seemed angry and uninterested in talking.

When we got inside the office, he went straight to one of the exam rooms. I asked Barb, one of the clinic employees, what was going on. She told me that the man had brought this beautiful dog into the clinic to have her killed — because he couldn’t control her well enough.

Why are children unhappier today than in the past? And why are today’s teens at least five times as likely to be clinically depressed as teens of 50 years ago? In this sobering article for Psychology Today, a research psychologist argues that children are being deprived of the opportunity to play on their own and take responsibility for themselves. Peter Gray is a professor at Boston College who specializes in the role of play in child development. He blames “coercive schooling” and the rise of additional adult-directed activities for taking away children’s sense of autonomy and self-ownership. Gray says this leads to anxiety and depression. I went through a very traditional system of schooling, but today’s children have even less control of their time than I did. Parents who think they are helping their children by controlling their time and giving them so many well-meaning activities are hurting them instead.

If you get here from Flipboard, you might have noticed that many of the keywords with which Flipboard tags my stories are horribly inaccurate. I’ve reported this to Flipboard, but the system is automated — and there’s nothing I can do about it. If I happen to mention something in an article, the automated algorithm at Flipboard often randomly picks that extraneous item as a tag. The article above, for instance, is about making personal changes inside yourself. I compared it to the process of renovating a crumbling old house which has been abandoned, so the Flipboard software thinks the article is about home flooring. Another recent article mentioned Tom Hanks — though it was about something entirely different — so the software tagged it as being about Hanks. So if you end up here expecting to read about flooring or about Tom Hanks, I apologize. I’m aware of the issue, but it’s a Flipboard problem beyond my control. I’ll keep looking for a way to change it if I can.

Do antidepressants work? It depends on who you ask and what standards you use. But a new Danish study concludes we just don’t know. There’s no question antidepressants make chemical changes in the brain, but the truth is that doctors don’t know enough about those brain processes to do anything more than try certain drugs and see what they do. The Danish study says that if antidepressants do help, the effects are tiny. I know plenty of people who swear they couldn’t live without their antidepressants, but the more I study about the root causes of depression, the more I suspect the placebo effect is what’s going on. Although some studies suggest these drugs have slight positive effects for some people, others argue that the positive effects are tiny — and that they cause more deaths than can be explained. There’s nothing wrong with using any drug that helps with something wrong with us — especially short term — but I’m coming to suspect that whatever good SSRIs and similar drugs do comes from masking our underlying issues, not fixing them. Denial is popular with humans, so it will be no surprise if this eventually turns out to be true.

Your brain has almost certainly tricked you into making bad romantic choices. A California psychology professor writes in Psychology Today that there are four things our brains do that cause trouble: 1) We think we know what we want — but we don’t. I’ve seen this in myself and if you haven’t seen it yet, you will. The things I wanted in a mate when I was young are completely different from what the mature version of myself wants. 2) We like more choices — as many as possible. We tend to believe that more choices lead to a better selection in all sorts of areas, but the truth is that too many choices tend to lead to the paralysis of failure to choose. 3) We try to be rational by “keeping our options open.” We’re scared to make the choices we need to make, because we’re scared of doing the wrong thing. This keeps us trapped in bad situations — and better choices eventually disappear. 4) We stay with the wrong people, because we don’t want our effort to go to waste. I’ve done this. Maybe you have, too. On several occasions, I’ve stayed in a relationship that I knew was dead and needed to end. At this point in my life, I know to trust my gut. It’s a lot smarter about most things than my conscious brain.

I just noticed that I’m approaching 3,000 subscribers for this site again. Although I’ve had plenty of individual days with far higher readership, the core of any site is those readers who are interested enough to subscribe and keep coming back. In the days when I wrote about politics, I hit 3,000 subscribers at my peak, but once I shifted focus, those subscribers started dropping like flies. These days, the readership numbers are still lower than they were when I wrote about politics, but I think it’s a better quality reader — people who are interested in something more important to long-term happiness than politics will ever be. I don’t know if I’ll hit 30,000 readers in one day anytime soon — as I did one day years ago when Rush Limbaugh and several conservative commentators linked to me — but I appreciate those of you who keep coming back again and again. I can’t thank you individually — and I don’t even know who you are — but I want you to know that I really appreciate you.