ABOUT TIME

The Salmonella Story in Dogs

Today would have been my father’s 100th birthday had he lived that long. I was incredibly lucky to have spent over sixty years of my life with him as an influential part of it, so compared to many other people I accept that I was privileged, but being lucky does not stop the feelings of missing an individual who was incredibly important to me, and I am not ashamed to say someone that I loved unconditionally. There is simply never enough of that commodity called time when it comes to those special relationships we form with loved ones both human and animal.

This has been the busiest time of year for me since setting up the Scott Creative Arts Foundation in 2016, as it is the time for our annual Emerging Artist Award presentations and exhibition. In July I am split in two halves with the arts filling one half of my time and the sciences, the other. In truth there is always art in science and science in art, but just as the tips of icebergs emerge from the surface of the ocean, the two different approaches to understanding the world, expand to emerge with very specific demands in July, and break through the surface of the normal day to day rhythm. The subject I set for Yorkshire emerging artists to interpret this year is TIME, so perhaps this subject has been quietly occupying my mind for a while; it has certainly been occupying the minds of our ten wonderful finalists who have been creating their submission pieces over the last five months. Time becomes an ever more precious commodity as we age and as we bear witness to so many living beings being robbed of their time on earth through the decisions made by the humans who hold the power over our nations.

Time is basically the story of change. This is, in part at least, why if we simply get into the groove of every day being roughly the same, eating the same food, at the same time of day, go to work, do our job, go home, watch TV, go to bed, we might wake up one day to look back and feel a sense of complete emptiness; a giant void between childhood and death. Time can seemingly gobble up our life in the mid years, especially if there was nothing new and challenging for your brain to notice and mark time, during those endless days of sameness. This again is part of why time seems to speed up as we age if we fall into the trap of reducing the number of new experiences that we expose ourselves to and simply fill every day with the mundane. As humans reach advanced old age they often spend much of their reflective time recalling their early years, as these were the years of multiple new experiences that made the brain work hard to pay attention and ensure that they learnt from those experiences by laying down memories. It is survival instinct in essence. I doubt that many of us in our dotage will luxuriate in recalling the memories of hours and hours of emails, streams and social media; this is time spent that we will never seek to recall in joyous moments of reverie.

Animals also experience the flow of time and each species and individual within a species experiences time in a slightly different way according to the lives they lead and the different challenges that they face. For example, the tiger as a species is a hunter and has to have sharp timing abilities to allow them to spot and accurately hunt down prey, but there will be a vast difference in experience between a captive tiger in a zoo with a ready food supply that arrives at a predictable time each day and a tiger in the wild that may be experiencing limited food resource for example. Time will appear to pass differently for tigers as a species compared to say sloths, and it will be perceived differently by the captive versus the wild tiger. Metabolic rates, ecological roles and environmental demands all shape how an animal perceives time and each species will be using sensory input in a different way to another both at the receptor end of the system and in the way the central decoding of the information is handled in the brain. For example a fly sees things in fast motion compared to us as their brains can process a lot of visual snapshots in the time it takes us to process just a few.

The more we understand the differences between our perception of time and that if other species gives us another whole dimension of connection with other living beings. Recognising that our dogs have a quicker sense of time compared to us, allows us to fine tune our communication with them. The best dog trainers out there know this and will for example use quick, clear signals, reward within half a second of a correct action and change things frequently to keep their dogs focus and attention. The hardest thing for most of us when training our dogs is to minimise the background noise of unintentional signals that confuse them and distract their focus, as for us these other movements are less noticeable making us more careless in our actions. Dogs when focused on us can pick up on all the tiny shifts in our body posture, eye movement and direction, facial expression and of course odour to give them a pretty good idea of what is about to happen often before we have even finalised the thought! They are quite simply ahead of us in time.

This week I will be celebrating our ten amazing finalists and enjoying ten completely unique interpretations of the subject of time. The crazy crescendo of preparation for the main event will soon be over and I can look forward to the time when I am back in the delusion that I have regained control over my time. As for the animals, I am going to try even harder to be mindful of how they might perceive time and space and see where that might take me.

THE SALMONELLA STORY IN DOGS

This month, one of our veterinary journals published an overview of the public health impacts of Salmonella and its relevance to small animal vets in practice, pet owners and pets. As with so many pathogenic organisms and associated diseases, the emphasis is on protecting human health first and foremost, with animal health and welfare sadly the secondary focus. It is that human centric approach that lead to the changes to The Zoonoses Order Legislation in 2021 making Salmonella isolates in dogs reportable to the government agencies APHA/SRUC (Animal and Plant Health Agency/Scotland’s Rural College), which adds to their statutory surveillance of Salmonella in chickens and turkeys and diseased animal reporting in cattle, sheep, pigs, horses and deer.