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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1999-11-17, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 1999. PAGE 5. No, I am not making this up It doesn't come easily, but I'm beginning to feel just an atom or two of sympathy for the big tobacco companies. Poor guys. All they ask is to be left alone to peddle a product that kills a few million customers every year and what do they get? Senate investigations. Bad press. Ridicule from the pens of cartoonists around the world. And now this: The R.J.Reynolds tobacco company is being sued for defamation. Sued by an organization that believes in Unidentified Flying Objects. A lawyer for CAUS (Citizens Against UFO Secrecy - and no. I am not making this up) has filed notice that he intends to take R.J. Reynolds to court over a newspaper ad they’ve been running. It's an ad for Winstons. It shows a typical artist's impression of a flying saucer over the caption: “If aliens are smart enough to travel through space, why do they keep abducting the dumbest people on earth?” Personally, I think the question is legit. The Alien Abduction disciples have to be the most gullible humans this side of the Brian Mulroney Fan Club. International Scene - :By Haymond canon Why are dogs man’s best friend? Few animals have such an international existence as dogs. They are to be found all over the planet and judging from their names, some areas specialize in specific breeds. Thus we have the Norwegian elkhound, the German shepherd, Irish setter, Scottish collie, Chihuahua, French poodle, Newfoundlander, St. Bernard, Labrador and so on. Before I go further, I should declare my bias. I am an avowed dog-lover. Just ask the dogs in the neighbourhood, especially the dog in the house beside me. He has been my close friend right from the beginning and he grew up thinking that I was just a member of the family who lived next door. He thus protected my house with the same intensity as he did his own. As for the people who lived on the other side, and who paid no attention to him, he could care less. He either ignored them or treated them as just another intruder who might trespass on our property. If someone carted away their house, we would probably help them. My granddaughters were delighted to take him for a walk. He loved their attention and, if we happened to meet somebody on the way and stopped to talk, he would automatically stand between them and the girls. He never snarled, growled or barked but just kept watching the stranger to see if they made one false move. It would likely be their last! Do you think they ever stop and ask themselves questions like: Why do these abductions always occur at night? And in a deserted setting? And only to stranded motorists, and farmers out standing in their fields? How come they never occur at The SkyDome, say, during a Blue Jays doubleheader? Or on Parliament Hill during the Changing of The Guard? UFOlogists will argue that aliens are ‘shy’ and ‘don’t want to upset us’. Why the hell not? These are supposedly beings that can time warp through space, hover indefinitely and fly loop de loops around our fastest aircraft. They routinely (according to UFO believers) hijack random citizens, suck them into their ships, strip them naked and perform all kinds of bizarre medico-scientific mumbo-jumbo experiments on them. And they're supposed to be worried about our feelings? I'm not saying there’s no such things as UFOs - I don’t know. But keeping an open mind is not the same as accepting, holus- bolus, yarns from every hare-brained neurotic who comes down the ‘pike. It's easy to get sucked in. After all, even U.S. President Jimmy Carter had a ‘flying saucer experience’. It happened in 1969, well before his ascension to the Oval Office. Jimmy later He was, by the way, a Norwegian elkhound and looked a lot like a Husky. But I have been reading up on the research in various countries done on dogs, their origins and their characteristics and some of it' is rather surprising. For one thing, we have believed the old adage about a dog being “man’s best friend,” devoted to his or her master and willing to go to great lengths to do things for them. This new research shows that the motive for such behaviour is not exactly what we thought it was. Many thousands of years ago, dogs came to the conclusion that, rather than compete for their existence with other animals, such as their cousins the wolves were doing, the best thing to achieve their goal of survival was to cosy up to humans and do what they thought humans wanted them to do. That they have been successful goes without saying; there are currently about 100,000 wolves in North America compared to 65 million dogs and those are only the ones that have licences. People are always talking about dogs being smart. They are, in the evidence, smarter than we think, especially when it comes to surviving. We read constantly about dogs attacking people without provocation. At the present time there are no less than a million such attacks in North America in any given year and four-fifths result in injuries serious enough to require medical attention. Part of the reason for all this comes from the efforts of humans to breed aggressiveness in their dogs but that cannot explain the entire phenomenon. Springer spaniels, which are not reported that at 7:15 that evening, shortly after dark, he and a group of about a dozen people beheld a glowing object in the sky over Leary. Georgia. “The object stood still for 10 or 12 minutes,” Carter wrote, “slowly changing its colour, size and brightness, and then gradually retreated in the distance, disappearing from view”. Well. From the lips of a peanut farmer about to become president - endorsements don't get any more high-toned than that. Except that subsequent investigations prove Mister Carter only thought he saw a UFO. Robert Sheaffer, a man who specializes in investigating UFO claims, delved into astronomical records and discovered that on that evening, sitting precisely at the spot Carter spotted his UFO ... was the planet Venus. Venus is the galactic object most often mis­ identified as a UFO. Even Jimmy Carter was fooled. As Robert Sheaffer delicately (and dryly) concluded: “Either an extraterrestrial space vehicle was covering up Venus that night, or Mister Carter was looking at the planet.” So. UFOs - fact or fantasy? Don’t ask me. The whole argument reminds me of one of the wisest observations I ever read. It says: “There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.” considered to be an aggressive animal, have a remarkably high rate when it comes to biting people —o ne in four to be exact. Some of this aggressiveness can be traced to the way dogs have been bred, more specifically our efforts to create highly distinctive varieties, instead of being content with the garden variety of dogs which many of us have. In so doing, we have been reinforcing some of the very traits that are coming in for criticism, as in the aggressiveness mentioned above. In short, Fido is not quite the animal we have considered him to be. But the new research will probably not detract, at least in the short term, from the role dogs have played as man’s best friend. It is highly likely that dogs would prefer to keep it that way. Letters Policy The Citizen welcomes letters to the editor. Letters must be signed and should include a daytime telephone number for the purpose of verification only. Letters that are not signed will not be printed. Submissions may be edited for length, clarity and content, using fair comment as our guideline. The Citizen reserves the right to refuse any letter on the basis of unfair bias, prejudice or inaccurate information. As well, letters can only be printed as space allows. Please keep your letters brief and concise. The Short of it By Bonnie Gropp Puzzled by fashidn An hour spent prepping and she emerges from her room, ready for Saturday night. Her straight, blond locks, parted in the centre, hang to her shoulders, her face is virtually devoid of makeup. Cool in her tie-dyed shirt and hip-hugging bell bottoms, she doffs her moccasins and bids farewell to Mom and Dad. Not, however, before parental rebuff. "You’re going out like that? Do you think you look nice?” Like most of the older generation, my mother had a difficult time reconciling her vision of fashion with mine. To say it puzzled her that my best jeans had ripped hems from dragging on the ground, that moccasins and sandals were the only shoes I owned, that my hair and face were worn au naturel would be a definite understatement. She found it an affrontery to middle-class womanhood. Her lack of coolness didn’t bother me, it was what I would expect from a parent. But I vowed that as a mother I was going to be different. I would be hip. It seemed a fairly reasonable expectation. After all, baby-boomers were the first to dare, to set limits and push them. As a friend once said, "We've done it all. What can these kids do to shock us?" Well, though I wouldn't say I'm shocked, today's young folk have come up with some inventive ways to fly over the norm. Tatoos, piercings, shaved heads and thrift shop attire, have me pondering how my mother could ever have thought I looked strange. And now my son has green hair. Apple green no less. Every time he throws one of these cosmetic whims my way, and this has unfortunately not been the first, I must remind myself that in the big scheme of things this is not worthy of stress. It's important to find ways to express yourself, to define who you are and to enjoy the freedoms to do so, — within reason, however, if you're a minor. But, as I watched his transformation to the jolly green giant the other evening, I was struck by a slight contradiction. Generally, and I know I'm going back quite a ways, if memory serves me young people do drastic things to stand out, to be unique. And so, they do things that all the other kids with their interests are doing, making them... ... all the same. There was a line in an episode of The Simpsons that perhaps better summed up this thinking. When Bart gets his ear pierced, his sister Lisa remarked on how rebellious it was — "in a conformist sort of way". Most kids dress the way they do simply because they like it, with their non-conformity being attributed instead to the older generation. That my dress code bothered my mom was hardly the instigation, but it did make it fun. The irony is if you can keep an open mind these days with greater exposure comes less surprise. I've met kids with Mohawks, pierced eyebrows and lips, black nail polish and tatoos. Underneath it all, they're just good kids. After all, green hair may look ridiculous but it can never hide what a parent sees when they look at their child.