Day 2 – 6th April, 2008

Today finds me in our capital, Hobart. We ventured down to the south of the island by our selves and met up with Lillie’s parents and aunt and Nan. This afternoon when unpacking our stuff from our car I stood and marvelled at the enormity of the bag of medicinal supplies we brought with us. If anyone looked at this bag and knew of its contents one would think we were planning on staying away for a month, however we will only be away for 4 days. To describe how large this bag is it would be about the size of two pillows side by side.

Today we had to leave our two “boys” in a kennel whilst we are on this trip, for those who don’t know or anything about our dogs they are ex diabetic assistance animals. I have a Chinese crested and my wife has a Shetland sheep dog. My boys are my babies.

Now in the car coming down I began a train of thought. For years I have noticed dogs and how they will have behaviours that they seem to be born with. We had Carbi , my dog, from birth and for a while he only associated with other dogs at the vets or on walks. Now I remember Carbi would urinate on posts and growl at people coming to the door and burry bones. Carbi began to do these things without seeing another older dog do them, and what really baffles me is the burring of bones, Carbi would always have access to fresh foods and bones, now why did he feel the need to bury a bone for a later date??? Then I sat in the car thinking about the different behaviours that are bred into dogs and then my thoughts shifted to what sort of behaviours are bred into humans? I thought of things like people will have a block of land that they will defend from others, and I also thought back to cave man times when the man would claim a woman for himself and defend the woman in a way similar to the way he would defend the block of land. And my thought also began to come up with prisoners and that society will refer to prisoners as animals, and I began to think of the pecking order that animals endure to determine the ranks of the members of the group / pack and that prisoners will squabble and fight to obtain similar ranks. Now I have never been in prison and all I have to go off is the interpretation of prison from what I see on the tv. Now before I continue I want to add that I do not always believe what I see on the tv. In prison movies there are shots of gang rape and that got me thinking of animals will also dominate another animal in a similar way. Thus identifying the correlation between animals and prisoners.

On another topic, still in relation to human behaviours, is the way humans will strive to fulfil the basic needs. I am speaking directly about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Of the top of my head I can’t recall all of the needs that a human needs to fulfil / obtain but I do know that the basic needs are food, water, shelter but the needs extend into social acceptance and acceptance of others. I will have to research the list of needs outlined by Maslow, but I am beginning to wonder what of the needs (if any) could be needs bred into us as humans. Social acceptance isn’t something humans need to function but it is something that humans need to get by in life on a day to day basis.