Low Tech Communication Aids

 

The latest development on my YouTube channel is Memberships. In order to support my research, you can join the channel as a Donor, a Patron or a Benefactor. Here is a link:

https://www.youtube.com/c/AyaKatz/membership

Among the perks available to members are previews of videos about Bow's writing, literacy and other intellectual pursuits at a time when these are not yet available to the general public. Since revenue from viral videos comes primarily from people who are not subscribed to my channel and could not care less about ape language research, this seems like a fair allocation of our resources. The general public gets to view grooming videos right away, but more recent advances in ape language studies are shared first and foremost with our Donors, Patrons and Benefactors.

Since the inception of  Project Bow, I have found that low tech methods work better and are more cost effective when working with a strong but intellectual chimpanzee such as Bow. A talking machine was quickly replaced by laminated menus, self-flushing toilet by a plastic potty chair and a touch screen computer by an old fashioned notebook and pen.

The problem that the touch screen computer was meant to solve was Bow's reliance on caretakers' hands to point at letters on the glass. This is a problem of proof, not of communication. It looks to outsiders as if Bow is being manipulated by his interlocutors to point at the letters.  But it certainly does not look to us that way, and it does not explain why Bow can tell us things we did not know and share information available only to him. So it was suggested that the intercession of a non-manipulable computer could solve this PR problem for us.

In order to motivate Bow to use a computer to communicate, certain ape language researchers suggested pairing the touch screen computer with a food dispenser, so that Bow would essentially be typing for a food reward. "Machines can't be manipulated, so he would have to say what the machine wanted him to say," I was told.

I don't want Bow to  have to say anything. I want him to be able to say what he wants to say.  Here is an example of something ordinary, but totally unexpected, that Bow recently said to his caretaker while I was away: "Go sit outside." She was confused, "You want me to sit outside? How do you mean, like on the porch?" He answered: "Yes."

There is nothing extraordinary about this exchange, but it could not have happened with a touch screen computer tied to a food dispenser. Bow could not tell the dispenser anything. He would be totally subject to its mechanical limitations.

Recently, Bow and I watched a video of an Israeli young man who lost his voice while serving in the army. Bow identified with the voiceless man. He watched as the young man talked to a reporter by writing in an ordinary old fashioned notebook by putting pen to paper. "You could do that, too," I told Bow. "You could talk to people by writing in a notebook."

Bow was moved to try. His attempt looks like letters, though hard to tell what he wanted to say.  You can contrast his attempt to write letters  with his drawing on  this other page in the same notebook, in which a  month earlier he had tried to draw a face. (The face Bow drew is only in black ink. The other bigger face in blue was one I tried to draw.)

If you want to see the videos of Bow writing and drawing, you can join as a member of my channel. Eventually, these videos will all be released to the public, but you will see them in advance, and you can know that you helped finance my research.

Thank you!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMFOFKeAjwLWAlNrCvQVxvQ

Bow and Art

Last year, I got involved in Inktober, a month-long, non-competitive art event open to anyone. During Inktober, people use ink to create a sketch from a verbal prompt consisting of a single word. Each day in October we get a new prompt, and we have to complete a sketch that day. My favorite drawing that came out of Inktober 2018 is a portrait of baby Bow.

Unfortunately, I got sick that year and was not able to complete Inktober. This year I was  finally able to do one drawing each day in October, and many of my drawings have been of Bow.

While I drew on my own, I also encouraged Bow to draw, too. He didn't always want to, and when he did he would not tell me what he was drawing. By looking at older art from other family members, including myself as a child and Sword in her preschool years, I have noticed a distinct difference between the sorts of art that Bow makes and the art of children I have known. Human children do not strive for realism early on, but they do make representational art that is largely symbolic. Body parts are given symbolic representation and part/whole relations are very important. When Bow draws, he may be representing things, but not so much by symbolism, and quite possibly by a direct attempt at realism.The video linked below demonstrates more fully what I mean.

Here is a picture of the etching that we discovered on the floor of the inner pen in 2008. It had not been there before.

Do you see a head of an ape when you look at it? Do you think this is an artwork by Bow?

RELATED

http://notesfromthepens.blogspot.com/2013/07/interpreting-inkblots-or-looking-at-art.html


http://notesfromthepens.blogspot.com/2014/06/where-is-sunshine.html

Grooming Videos Save the Day

You may have noticed that I have been writing in my blog here less and posting more and more videos on YouTube. There's a very simple reason for that: YouTube pays. This blog does not. But there are some things that you can say in a blog post that are harder to say in a video. I am primarily a writer, not a performer. So I will continue to blog, albeit not as often.

After I came home from my brief illness, I kept posting more and more videos on my main YouTube channel, and within a month, as I recovered my strength and stamina, I also regained my YouTube income. Here is the video I posted at the time I learned that monetization had been restored.

In February of 2018, with the advent of the new YouTube rules, I lost my monetization, because I did not have a thousand subscribers. I had many more than the required views and minutes watched, but I had not asked people to subscribe. I had no interest in my viewers, was not counting how many there were, and I was perfectly happy with the extra pocket money I was earning to pay for Bow's bananas.  But when they took all that away, I was really put out. I did not understand why I needed subscribers, when subscribers did not pay a subscription fee, and people can see exactly the same videos when they do not subscribe. But if that is what YouTube wanted, I figured I could probably get most of the people who were already watching to subscribe, if I asked them nicely. They would be doing it as a favor to me, because it's not as if they would be cut off from the videos if they didn't subscribe. This is why it felt like a slightly non-commercial transaction between me and my viewers. They were doing me a favor when they subscribed, because this was information they were handing over to Google, when they could just as easily watch incognito. For all I know, some of my most ardent viewers may still be unsubscribed.

After nine months of asking people to subscribe, I gained the required one thousand subscribers and got my monetization back. Now my channel is bringing in about fifteen times what it had brought in before. And right now, as I write this blog post, I have 4,582 subscribers. I got 3,126 of them in the last 28 days. Most of these subscribers like to watch "grooming videos". Most of them will never read a novel by me, much less a scientific article about ape language studies. For them, it is all just stimulus and response, grooming and ASMR. But luckily for me, I believe in the free market, and I feel no compunction about exploiting their interests, so that I can be free to pursue mine.

Thanks to my new subscribers, I was able to get Bow a new hammock and a new sleeping bag for Christmas, not to speak of a number of other items for Leo, Summer and the cockatiels.

Things are looking up. Julia Hanna and I have expanded our interview show to include important researchers, scientists and academics. We had a whole series with Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh.

Last night, we interviewed a linguist and author in Iran.

I feel very lucky to have as much freedom as I do to live as I want, despite the fact that many liberties have already disappeared from the American way of life. Though I do not understand YouTube or the reasons for its rules, I am happy right now with the deal they have offered me. In the coming year, I plan to continue working with Bow, while posting more and more interviews with leading thinkers, writers, scientists and academics. 

As for Bow, he is always happy as long as there is someone there to read him a story.

Bow has Personality!

Yesterday was Halloween. Bow and I celebrated in our own way. You can watch our Halloween special right here.

Watching this video, you might be asking yourself: is this really a chimpanzee who can spell out words? Is he really sixteen going on seventeen? Is he really an intelligent being? There are those who when they see too much playfulness or behavior that in a human we might associate with a lower IQ become even more skeptical about my claims about Bow's literacy.

However, language ability does not necessarily imply overall high IQ in humans. Literacy can also exist in the form of hyperlexia, implying excellence in decoding letters into sounds and patterns into words, without a high level of comprehension. Many humans I know who are perfectly normal use their language skills just to express their feelings or interact socially with others, without ever having to encode new information. They keep talking and talking, but all they are really communicating with all that hot air is how they feel at the moment or how they want to relate to another person. They can go their whole lives without expressing an original thought or comprehending an original thought expressed by someone else. That is all normal behavior for humans, and chimpanzees like Bow are not all that different.

Recently I was sick and was away from Bow for two days. He was in good hands, and people were taking care of him in my absence. When I got back, he was very gentle with me, grooming. He did not say anything at all about my illness. But one time, totally spontaneously, after a couple of days of my being back, he took my hand and spelled:  שתי דודות שמרו עלי      "Two ladies watched over me."

I think he just wanted me to know he had been well taken care of in my absence. There is nothing super deep about that, but it did touch my heart.

This morning, I noticed Bow had not yet used the potty. So I asked him if he needed to pee.

                                                                                                       ?אתה צריך לעשות פיפי

His answer tickled me: רק קצת  "Just a little."

This is not a deep interspecies communication moment. But that is how Bow uses language to express his personality.  He is not a needy person. He only needs to pee "just a little."

Bow Can Talk

Bow prefers carbs

I haven't been blogging as much lately. Sometimes it seems as if everything that could possibly be said has already been said. I don't want to repeat myself. But then something happens that opens up a whole new reserve of the as-yet-unsaid. This morning I got a comment on one of my videos that did just that. "If only Bow could talk, I wonder what he would say." It was an innocent comment made on one of my more popular grooming videos. Ten thousand three hundred and twenty-four views. But none of them know Bow can talk. 

I wanted to shout out the truth. But instead I had to be polite. So I answered: "Bow does talk. He spells out words. You should definitely check out the information about this in the Project Bow DVD playlist. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvKl93VPL_oNJtFvdQcpSC3WEy4bDCCpZ

You might also want to subscribe to my blog. http://notesfromthepens.blogspot.com/."

Project Bow was an ape language research project that I began in 2002. In 2007, when Bow was five years old, we had our big breakthrough. Bow began to spell out words to express what he wanted and what he was thinking. The Project Bow DVD playlist chronicles all of that. It takes about two hours to sit through it, but if you want to know about Bow's history and his language ability, then it is well worth your while.  Although those of us working directly with Bow knew that he was spelling and expressing himself -- in both Hebrew and English -- we could not prove it to the satisfaction of the scientific community. If you would like to understand why, here is an article you can read.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267568830_Standards_of_Proof_in_Ape_Language_Studies_The_Case_of_Bow_and_Literacy

As my funding was cut, I remained with Bow twelve hours a day, but I could not afford interns and caretakers. In some ways, the past ten years have been very difficult. It's not because of Bow. Bow is a sweetheart. But just not having the help I needed meant that I often had to miss some of my daughter's functions at school and reduce my social interactions with other people. Bow and I became increasingly isolated.

I did have a chimp sitter named Lawrence for most of those years. Bow spelled in English to tell Lawrence what he wanted. He spelled in Hebrew to communicate with me. During those first years, Bow would tell me a lot of things. He gossiped about the neighbors. He made up tall tales. But then gradually, as he went through puberty, he became less talkative. He was more silent and subdued. He still told me what he wanted to eat and when he wanted his blanket and made an occasional sardonic comment about the mutability of things ("everyone dies"), but mostly he kept his thoughts to himself.

Part of it was just our extreme isolation. Nothing new ever seemed to happen, and with nothing to talk about, there was a lot more silence. Then one day, about a year ago, Lawrence had to move. His wife had died, and he was starting a new family, and he let me know he could no longer sit with Bow. So that made things even harder. For a whole year, I went without a sitter, only going out at night when Bow was asleep. I missed my daughter's move-in day to college, and recently I missed one of her choir concerts, because it was held during the day. Thankfully for technology, Bow and I were able to attend the concert via a livestream on my iPhone.

And then this summer my mother, who lives in a different state, said she was feeling weak and asked me to come visit her. At first I did not know what to do. In this current age of Animal Rights activists, and with Jane Goodall getting US Fish &Wildlife to declare domesticated chimpanzees an endangered species,  thereby activating the Endangered Species Act to allow strangers to bring lawsuits against chimp owners,  I knew I could not just advertise for a chimp sitter and take a complete stranger into my home. A friend of mine who had had a stranger volunteer to help her has gotten into all sorts of trouble with PETA, because the volunteer was a mole. I would rather stay put than risk putting myself and Bow in that position.

And so I spoke on the phone several times about taking a risk on a new caretaker, and I guess that Bow must have overheard me, and he must have been concerned about that risk.

Finally, I dared to ask a friend of Bow's who has been visiting with him once a week through the grid if she would be willing to train to sit for Bow. Bow liked her, and she liked Bow, and she does not believe in Animal Rights, only Animal Welfare, so she was a very good fit. Still, it was a risk I was taking. I must have reiterated that on the phone talking to my friends in English. Bow overheard.

The thing about Bow is he files everything away in his mind, and he never forgets. He may not say much, but he knows what he hears.

The new chimp sitter is named Jessica. Bow loves her. I trained her for a week. At first she went in for only an hour. Then two hours. Then three. Until we worked up to a whole day. Bow was well behaved with her, but at first he was reluctant to speak to her. She had to coax him to spell to her. But eventually, he told her what he wanted to eat, and when he wanted to go outside, and other very mundane things. And also, he spelled "she".  "What do you mean Bow?" Jessica asked him. Bow did not answer. But later when I asked him what he had meant by repeatedly spelling "she", he answered in Hebrew that he had meant אמא -- "Mommy."

So the day came when I had to leave for my mother's house. Bow knew I'd be gone for a week, and he seemed okay with it. Jessica kept in text and telephone contact with me, and Bow and I Facetimed a couple of times during the visit. Bow was doing well. He was asking for what he wanted. But every once in a while, for no particular reason, he spelled "risk." "What do you mean by risk, Bow?" Jessica would ask. But Bow never explained. He would just go back to his usual routine, only to spell "risk" again the next day.

A text exchange between me and Jessica

Bow liked Jessica a lot. He wanted to be on good terms with her. He used the potty regularly. and he even took the trouble to inform her when he had peed when she was out of the room. (He never bothers to tell me!) But he was also concerned about "risk". He understood that he and I were taking a risk by trusting Jessica. But he did not really know how to explain it to her.  So he just kept spelling risk.

And that problem he had spelling "peed" correctly? That's a perfectly normal language phenomenon for someone who is bilingual. When he refers to that in Hebrew, he says פיפי. In English, that would transliterate to /pipi/.  So naturally, he thought "I pid" would be a good way to spell "I peed." This is not proof that Bow can't spell, so much as that he has language, and he uses it dynamically.

If Bow could talk, what would he say? Well, he would talk about "risk" and "peeing". Like anyone, Bow has a wide range of things to talk about. Some subjects are mundane and others are very abstract.

Bow and Jessica

My mother turned out to be fine, and we had a nice visit. And now that I am back, Bow is a little more talkative. It helps to mix things up sometimes. You don't want to get stuck in a rut!

RELATED

To support Project Bow, buy this book

Things that Happened Around Easter

The cockatiel eggs did not hatch. One of them even broke, and it did not look as if it had been fertilized. Nevertheless, there were plenty of other kinds of eggs around Easter time.

While the annual Easter egg hunt for Bow had to be cut short due to chain saws in the woods behind our house and later rain, a few days  later, Bow found another egg that he had overlooked on April 1.

It was a nice, sunny day for a change, and Bow enjoyed his find.

After sniffing the candy, he determined it to be good.

While the sunshine lasted. Bow and Leo made the most of it in the back yard.

But the sun-soaked days did not last long.

Soon it was snowing again.

RELATED: An Interview with Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh. 

The End of a Paystream

Today is the day YouTube plans to cut me off. No more banana money for Bow.

After over nine years and and 1,968 video uploads, with  44,183  minutes that my videos were watched last month and monthly views of 30,424, I am going to lose my revenue stream for bananas, because I do not have one thousand subscribers. Today is the cutoff date.

They gave me a month, and I spent that month trying to get more subscribers. In the process, I seem to have alienated some of my most loyal viewers -- who are not now and never were subscribers!

Toward the end of last month, I was making around $40.00 per month. It has come down as I added commercials for myself and my channel to try to drum up subscribers. But my viewers are not my fans. They are not my friends. They are just people who like specific videos for reasons of their own. And if YouTube cared about its revenue as much as I care about mine, they would not have made this ridiculous rule about the thousand subscribers -- an impossible goal for someone who has a valuable product to sell, but is not herself popular.

Yes, my friends have subscribed. But I haven't got a thousand friends. And to tell you the truth, my subscribers do not watch my videos all that much. My own mother has better things to do than sit around all day watching my videos. My friends wish me well, but most of them have not seen most of my videos, because they have lives of their own. My real viewers are the nameless, faceless people who put food on our table, but will never, ever subscribe. My thanks go to them, even though I do not know who they are. And I understand why they do not wish to reveal their identity by subscribing.

Maybe someday YouTube will catch on.

The Innocence of Academics

People in the ivory tower are sheltered from the everyday concerns of those outside. They are willing to publish their findings without pay, because they are already secure in the funding for their day to day life. People outside the academy need to find ways to make what they do every day provide them with income.

Every day, I work at documenting life with Bow, and I also work at earning money for Project Bow. I post about Bow on this blog, and I also post videos on YouTube. This was yesterday's video:

Videos of grooming do much better than videos about academic papers, such as this one:

They also do much better than videos about the history of Project Bow, such as:

Today, I was contacted by someone from Cornell asking if they could film Bow and me and place the video on their site or on their YouTube Channel. Now, I am familiar with Cornell's channel. Bow and  I watched Anurag Agrawal on that channel. They currently have 98 subscribers! Why on earth should I give them my work product for free? They should be asking me for tips on how to improve their subscription rate.

I, too, need more subscribers for my channel. I will be happy to subscribe to their channel if they subscribe to mine. I will be happy for them to embed my videos on their site, so I can earn more money. I have already embedded one of their videos on my site.

There have been times when people have tried to shame me for wanting to be paid for what I do. But they get paid for what they do. YouTube videos have been paying for Bow's bananas. Until a better deal comes along, I am keeping that revenue to myself. In the meantime, if you have not yet subscribed to my channel, please do. It really does make a difference to Bow and me.

https://www.youtube.com/user/AyaKatz

Out in the Snow

We have been snow bound for several days now. I have gone for a walk each day, but Bow has not wanted to go out.

At first there was not much snow on the ground, but it was nice to take a walk down the path in the snow flurries.

On the second day, there was much more snow on the ground, though by afternoon when I took my walk, it was not snowing any longer.

On the third day, I saw deer bounding over the path. On the fourth day, it was so cold out that I cut my walk very short, and we concentrated on grooming.

 And today, on the fifth day, Bow asked to go outside. I did not know whether to take the request seriously. Sometimes when he is bored, but it is too cold out, he will drag me all the way to the outer door, but never actually go out. But this afternoon he jumped out without hesitation. Naturally, his feet never touched the snow. He landed on the bench.

Bow shook his head at the cold, but did not ask to go back in. Instead, he lay on the rim of the bench's backrest and sunbathed for a good long time, before asking to go back inside.

A Place of No Return

Do you remember the scene from Pinocchio where the bad guys are recruiting children to go into their Sanctuary? (Yes, I'm going to call it a sanctuary, because it's a place where children are liberated from adults.)

The real problem with the proposition from the fox and the cat was not just that it was a misrepresentation of Pleasure Island as a Sanctuary free from care. The real problem was that it was a Place of No Return."They never come back ... as boys."

I know of a lot of places with a hard sell, but no right of return. They include sanctuaries for chimpanzees and old folks homes. These places are advertised as Pleasure Island where the isolated chimpanzee or elderly person can find friends of his own age or species, but they don't offer a money back guarantee or a free ticket home if you don't like it there. In fact, many old folks homes expect the elderly to sell their house and give them all the money. They have complicated contracts, so you can't just decide to go there as a vacation and then return home when you have had your fill. I have known a few people who went into those homes. They never come back out alive.

By this, of course, I do not mean that the institutions intentionally kill the elders who enter there. Most die of old age. But once you put yourself there, it is very hard to leave. The same is true for chimpanzee sanctuaries.

Once a chimpanzee enters the sanctuary system, he might be sent to a different sanctuary if the one he is in turns out to be a death trap, but he can never leave the sanctuary system. There is no going home. If I were a chimpanzee, I would be afraid to go there for that reason alone, much less what might happen to me during the first introduction to  other inmates.

"If you really respect Bow, you would leave it up to him to choose," my primatologist friend said to me recently. Really? And if I had a little boy like Pinocchio, I suppose you think I should leave it up to him to accept or reject the offer of the fox and the cat? Because after all, that is the libertarian position, right?

Wrong. Which brings me to the recent issue of age of consent that came up in my libertarian circles. Most of us agree that minors do need to be protected by their parents and should not be allowed to make irrevocable decisions about their lives without the help of a parent while they are yet too immature to be emancipated. Most libertarians, even the radical ones, understand that being a human does not automatically equip one to deal with complex, life altering issues from day one. Literate fifteen-year-olds are in most cases still not ready to sell themselves to the highest bidder.

"But if you believe that Bow can read and write, then why won't you let him decide for himself?" For the same reason I would not let any teen sell himself to a place of no return.

The truth is, if there were a place that Bow could go for a fun vacation, I would probably let him go. I would use that time to take a vacation, myself. But I am not shipping him off to Pleasure Island -- because if it were a good place, they would not have a no return policy.

It's All in the Point of View

Bow and I  are getting ready for Christmas. As we put up our tree, many of the ornaments, which are just pictures of Sword and Bow in their younger days, make us reminisce about the past.

Then we  look at old photo albums and old books, like my own When Sword Met Bow.

You cannot go back in time, but our memories are fairly vivid, and we can see old scenes replay in our mind's eye, even with our eyes closed.

But back in the present, there are also wonderful things taking place. From the perspective of research, publication, or just plain living, good things are happening, and we have much to be grateful for. Sometimes I try to share our happy little moments with others on social media, but every person has a different point of view, and each one sees something different.

We have different audiences on Facebook and on YouTube. On Facebook, the video of Bow jingling the bells is really taking off. Everyone on Facebook agrees that Bow is cute. And, of course, that's true. No denying it. But there are other aspects to Bow's personality, and the focus of YouTube viewers is a little different.




On YouTube, it's the grooming videos that everyone wants to see. My top performing video at the moment is the one below.

Sometimes viewers will ask me questions that reveal their own bias. "Why do you  have so many grooming videos?" One person asked. "Is Bow your pet chimpanzee?"

I do not have "so many grooming videos." Out of 1903 videos, only a handful are of Bow grooming someone. But just at the moment, those are the ones that are trending. They are not even my top ten videos of all time.

Besides the Leslie Fish music videos, which have always done well, there is the Diorama of an Amazon rain forest that Sword made when she was in grade school. I always suspected that it got so many views, because there were so many other children and parents scrambling to assemble one of those, since it was assigned to them in school.

But besides class assignments, which are often mandated by the government, and besides Leslie Fish songs, which are very rebellious and cool --and I enjoy them, too, or I would not have them here -- the vast majority of the public has ignored the vast majority of my content.

There are the very serious playlists of videos explaining Project Bow and its scientific findings.




There are the songs from my musical with composer Daniel Carter, The Debt Collector.




And there is a playlist of the trailers for my books.



Not one of the videos in these playlists is anywhere near the top ten for my channel. This is not a reflection on me. It is an indication of what YouTube viewers like to watch.

The vast majority of my videos include nature scenes, like the one below of a Monarch butterfly. Hardly anyone watches them, though.

I was so excited to get this close to a Monarch butterfly this year! I was really proud of this video, but most viewers did not notice it at all. That is perfectly fine, though, because each of us has different interests, and one of the great things about YouTube is that we can watch whatever we like. As a libertarian, I am all for that.

But it's amusing when a viewer complains about there being too many grooming videos on my channel. If all you see on my channel are grooming videos, then that is because that is all you are looking for. It reflects on you, not on me! Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and so are the videos that rank high with each viewer.

Bow looks through When Sword Met Bow

Today, Bow and I were reminiscing about the good old days.  So we leafed through When Sword Met Bow. 

It is one of the books that would make fine gift for someone on your Christmas list.

Books by Aya Katz

There's something in there for everyone. But if all you see are books on a particular topic, then that might be because that is the topic that appeals to you. We each create our own universe from our  point of view.

Our Tree -- How many of my interests can you spot in this picture?

Meanwhile, enjoy the holidays, and if you find one of my books appealing, give it a read!

The Logging Continues

For the past three days, the loggers have been cutting down trees close to our property line. They start at seven in the morning, when we are not quite done with breakfast, but they are gone by noon. This has been tough on Bow, but I have tried to let him know that since the logging was taking place outside our borders. the people cutting down the trees have every right to do so.

What makes this especially hard on us is that the house does not sit in the center of our ten acres. It sits far back from the road and very close to the woods. The woods were a buffer for us, and they helped to give us that secluded feeling that characterizes our corner of the world .

Of course, I realized when I bought the property that my part of the woods was very shallow, and I inquired who owned the rest of the woods, and whether there might be a possibility of buying a part of the woods adjoining mine, so as to have a bigger buffer. At the time, the property was owned by the venerable matriarch of a well established local family. She explained to me that the woods were not for sale, as they had been in her family for a long time, and she was leaving them to her grandchildren. She also reassured me that there was nothing to worry about, because while the family would cut down some trees occasionally, to thin out the forest, avoid wild fires, cull out dead wood, and so on, they were not planning to substantially alter the woods.

I hope that is still the case, but she has since passed on, and it is now the new generation who is in charge. I remember her fondly. She was very kind to me and to Bow and Sword.

The neighboring woods used to extend all the way to our fence line, but as early as 2013 I had observed that a clearing had been created between the two properties, and now a dirt road was there just outside our border. This road is now being used to carry the logs out of the woods.

Bow keeps asking to go outside so that he can observe the loggers.

However, since he seems so upset by what is happening, I have asked him to stay indoors today. Yesterday, I baked lemon poppy seed muffins as part of my effort to distract Bow.

Poppy seed Muffins and Books by Aya Katz

We were reminded of The Lorax, and we reread a small part of it. No, I am not a tree hugger. Yes, I realize we live in a timber town, and I know trees are logged for a living and regrown. I am hoping, though, that the basic layout of the woods here will not change drastically, because it would leave Bow exposed to a lot of noise if there were no woods there any longer. Bow's outer pen is behind the house, and it faces the woods. That's why the current activity back there is such a concern for Bow and me.

The Fifth of November

Today the clock was set back, and Bow was annoyed with me for not getting up at the usual time. By 5:30 am he was vocalizing loudly, even though it was still dark.

The day was warm. Somebody online reminded me that it was Guy Fawkes Day. Bow wore no mask, although a few days earlier, just before Halloween, when we had our first big freeze, he had  looked a little like jedi master when he greeted me that morning.

Today, we spent a lot of time outside in the outer pen. Bow groomed me, and then I groomed him.

Then we went indoors, but Bow did not want to groom anymore. He just asked for a drink of water, which I promptly provided. It's all so undramatic at our house. Elsewhere in the universe, somebody shot a church full of people -- in Texas! But that's not what happened for Bow and me in the pens.

Sometimes we do hear the neighbors shooting, but that's to do with deer season. However, no one is shooting at the deer on our land, and, for the time being, they are perfectly safe to graze on the front lawn, in plain view.

If only the rest of the world could be as calm and peaceful as our little corner!

Playing Tag and Tit for Tat

Yesterday, I started out to clip Bow's nails. but he wanted to play chase, instead. So I decided to film our game of tag, and in the process, I forgot that I was still holding onto the scissors. So it turned out I was running with scissors, something you should never try at home!

I am probably not the best person at interpreting body language, but just as I insisted that Bow learn to spell out what he wants, he has always insisted that I should also try to read his body language. Over the years, even though I may still seem obtuse to Bow, I believe that I have gotten better at reading simple non-verbal cues -- not just Bow's. I have gotten better at paying attention to those things in humans, too.

Bow is a gentle playmate who is perfectly harmless if you respect his personal boundaries -- and if you insist that he respect yours. But most of that is not something we do with language alone. Yes, saying "no" when you don't like something is important, but if you don't back up that "no" with immediate action, then nobody -- least of all Bow --will take it seriously.

This is something that I found really difficult to explain to many interns, and it is one of the reasons I am reluctant to advertise an opening for an intern and caretaker for Bow. People have not been trained in the simple rules of tit-for-tat, and so they expect other countries not to invade them out of the kindness of their hearts, other people not to harass them just because it is not nice, and everybody to act PC -- or else, they will get a lecture ten years later about how they really hurt someone. And if they find that this does not work for them -- which invariably it doesn't -- they hold seminars and workshops on world peace, sexual harassment and anti-bullying.

No bully will ever be stopped unless we stand up to him right then and there, in the moment, and no rape was ever prevented by crying foul long after the statute of limitations has run. I'm sorry, but life does not work that way.

With Bow, as with every other person I know, you have to let him know right away if he's crossed a line. He respects boundaries, but you need to clearly signal where they are. If he does something you don't like, you have to respond strongly, but firmly, neither over-reacting nor just letting it happen. I tried to explain some of this to my interns years ago in this hub:

https://hubpages.com/animals/So-you-want-to-work-with-Bow

Right now, in the current political atmosphere, I do not feel I can impose the rules outlined above on anyone who has been socialized to fit in to today's society. Most people have been trained to submit to a violation of their boundaries, and then to complain about it afterwards. This policy leads to an escalation of the initiation of aggression over time throughout the society. When I try to speak out about this, I am shut down on social media.

I think maybe the problem goes all the way back to kindergarten. Everybody knows the Golden Rule, but it is being taught all wrong to American children right now. They are told to treat others in the way they would like to be treated, but they are not told what to do if others do not treat them that way. The tit-for-tat part has been left out. Here's how it was taught to me. When I was going off to kindergarten in Israel, my mother said to me:  "If anybody hits you, Aya,  you hit them right back -- only harder." I didn't particularly want to. I'm not a violent person. But she explained that it wasn't about what I wanted. She said it was my duty as a good person, because it would help other people, too. If everybody lived by this rule, I think it would save us all a lot of trouble.

If you nip aggression in the bud, it does not have to escalate. You have to react in real time to any small breach of your personal boundaries. At the same time, it is more than okay to engage in appropriate play, where you recognize friendly overtures. Bow loves to play tag, and you can watch the video and see the light way in which he does tag me, and you can see from his body language that he knows it's a game.

  Bow is a chimpanzee. He does have aggressive instincts. He's a natural bully, but he is also really easy to manage, and a joy to interact with, if you understand and properly apply tit-for-tat.

Grooming as Peace-Making

Yesterday afternoon,  while I was saying goodbye to Sword, who had come home for a visit for Fall Break, Bow rearranged the potties in his enclosure, putting both of them in the center of the room.

"Put them back where they belong!" I told him.

So then he proceeded to push each of them into the opposite corner from the one where it had been before, as if in an act of oppositional defiance.

I wasn't really angry about that, but I acted as if were very upset about it. "No, that's not where they go! You put them right back where they were!" So he did. (He knew exactly where they were supposed to be.)

After that, he tried to apologize to me, and then he decided to groom me very thoroughly. The noises he was making at the very beginning of the grooming session were part of his apology.

A Persimmon for Bow

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It is fall. The leaves are changing colors. 

And the persimmons are ripening and falling to the ground.

Many other animals are enjoying the persimmons, but I managed to snag one for Bow.

They say you should wait until after the first big frost to harvest the persimmons, but we have not yet had our first frost, and they are almost all gone. I see their seeds scattered on the road embedded in  animal droppings. And this one was so ripe that it split open and some of the juice dribbled on my hand.

Bow enjoyed the persimmon so much that this is all that was left of it in the end.

I'm glad we did not wait for the first frost.