 And welcome to another edition of Likeable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen. With me today in Think Tech Studios is Think Tech's own Carol Mon Lee, Chief Operating Officer. And Carol graciously joins me here on Very Short Notice. And it's going to be a bit of a different show today. Likeable Science, we usually keep it very upbeat. We usually have scientists on. Carol will be the first to admit she's not a scientist. We're going to talk about a subject too that's sort of emotionally laden for us and for both of us. We both have lost companion animals in the recent past and we thought we would do a show on companion animals and why people get them, how they get them, some of the aspects of owning if you can be said to own an animal as much as they own you. So Carol why don't you give us a little bit of background on making it particular. Thank you, Ethan. And thank you for having me on this special show. And first of all my condolences to you and your wife on the loss of your parrot yesterday. I know it's very difficult. Yeah, I was the lucky, as you say, owner. I don't know who owned whom of Minky. We called her Minky Mon Lee because that's my middle and my last name and Minky was actually the mascot for Think Tech for the last two years. And there's a picture of Minky. She was a Maltese and I got her at the age of twelve from a friend of mine who was a hospice nurse and one of the patients said this, my friend was giving care to passed away and when she passed away she asked my friend Kayoko to take care of her dog after she passed away. So Minky was twelve and Kayoko and I decided to kind of co-parent Minky so Minky spent most of her time with me and also Minky stayed in the life of my friend Kayoko so it worked out really well. And so I had her for two wonderful years and during that time I have to tell you I had never owned a dog before. As a child I had cats and most of my life I didn't have any animals except my late husband had a cat who passed away at the age of twenty. So for me to get a dog was a completely new experience. I didn't quite know what to expect but it was an extremely wonderful, important and life-changing experience in many ways. Dogs are amazing animals. I mean they are so hooked into people in ways that virtually no other animal really is. I've kept a wide array of animals over the years from fish to hamsters to raise to baby squirrel. I kept large snakes for a while. I've had less, twenty plus years now. I've been had parrots. But dogs, although I've never really owned a dog I had some as a child with my family but dogs have been domesticated so deeply that they are incredibly attuned to people even when they have never seen people. You can take a puppy, a young puppy who has never seen a human being and on the first time they see a human being. If the human being looks one direction the puppy will turn and look that same way. Wolf pups won't do that. Jackal pups won't do that. Fox pups won't do that. Domestic dog pups will do it very reliably. It is as if they know something within their infantile brains already understands that people are very important to them and they should pay attention to what people pay attention to. And cats don't do that. Cats can care less about what we think in general. My son has a cat. I visit him all the time. The cat could not care less about it. I feel rejected. Cats generally care about what's good for them. They're very self-centered animals in general. I see. But dogs are not. But it's interesting to look back and think about how, when, why and where people started keeping animals because this didn't happen overnight, right? And the animals we keep as pets they are very different than their wild ancestors of eons ago. And of course, you know, initially people would keep animals, hunt animals, right? And then started keeping some for food or for milk and for the food. Raising animals for a live life. Right, right. And at some point, of course, dogs began working with people. They would assist them in hunting. They would serve as good sentinels. Dogs had very cute hearing. People soon discovered, of course, dogs would wake up and rouse a camp before people knew trouble was on its way. Cats, of course, early on people discovered cats were very good about keeping rodent populations down and they had more food for themselves. So one can sort of understand how both cats and dogs got deeply intertwined with humans. How long ago were we talking? I think the genetics are now showing that dogs have been domesticated for something in the order of 10,000 years, roughly. It looks like maybe they got domesticated a couple of different times in a couple of different places. And that's still a matter of some debate, I guess, among those who study that sort of thing. And what about cats? Cats, it's a little less good. I don't think the genetics have done quite so well. It's pretty clear that happened somewhere, I think, in northern Africa that cats were first... And, of course, the evolution of the animal from the large cats, tigers and lions to... No, those are cats of dollars. Well, they are big cats, right? They were descended, presumably, from some relatively small cat still. It wasn't like a tiger or a shrunk. But, gradually, over time, people began keeping animals for no apparent reason. I'd say that it wasn't working for them. It wasn't helping them actively in life. They were just... For food. Right, they were just pets, more or less. Companion. And indeed, that aspect of companionship is perhaps the driving force in today's... At least much of today's world, right? Do you find, though, for instance, China, when, over the years, more recently now, you find people who have pets and enjoy animals, dogs, as pets, but for many, many years, and maybe it was because of the economic situation, where food, the cost of food, the cost of day-to-day living, did not allow families to have that extra money to pay for food. Although, of course, dogs can eat scraps from the table. So, are there many cultures where dogs are not playing that role? No, I've actually wondered that. And I've not made any study of it, but I've often wondered that probably our cultural differences are more pet keeping in some cultures and less in others than certain animals. Dogs, which are, I gather, eaten for food in some cultures probably might not be kept as pets, so frequently they are. One would suspect that those two uses for a dog might be sort of sequestered from one another, right? One of the things that pets offer us in terms of companionship, the companionship is of a different nature than people, right? And you must know this from Mickey, right? Mickey trusted you and would never criticize you and say, you look awful, honey carol. Well, the only, of course, method of communication while there are many non-verbal methods of communication, but her verbal self, of course, was to occasionally bark. And I tried as much as I could to try to interpret her barking, but I couldn't always understand it. But I read something recently that was very helpful to me. It was talk to your animals, talk to your dog, because even though you may think that the dog is not understanding you, it's the sound of your voice, the comfort of the voice, and certainly the tone of your voice that they can glean what, you know, in general you're talking about. And they somehow seem to know. So I could differentiate a difference in the type of bark from Mickey, whether she was upset or purring, helping, you know, or tired or something, but I could never quite understand. Now, did your parrot talk? Yes, Ari knew a few phrases. I wasn't one of her real strengths, but she would say her name. She would tell you that she was a good bird. You could understand her saying her name. Right, yes. She would say, very clearly and would say she was a good bird. Sometimes she would say she was a pretty bird. Very occasionally she would say she was a pretty good bird, which we thought was very amusing. Did you teach her those words? She sort of seemed to know more of them at the start. And then words that she heard a lot she would gradually pick up on. You said you had Ari for how many years? We had Ari for almost 20 years. And she was how old when you got her? She was probably around three years old when you got her. So already verbal? Right, right. She was sort of verbalizing fairly quickly with a parent to a chick and all. Is that what you call a baby parent? Is it a chick? That's what we call any baby bird, I think. Oh. I don't know. There's probably a technical term for it. Ornithologists probably would criticize me here. But the whole emotional thing you were talking about, that you could look a bit of the posture, the way that ears go on a dog, the tail goes, those are all telling you just how the dog is feeling. The birds would be the same way. They would adopt certain postures and fluff themselves up when they're comfortable and relaxed. They'd sort of puff up and sit quietly. If they got scared they'd sleep down. You saw in those pictures of Ari there her yellow crest. When the crest goes up it's a sign of excitement. Could it show a picture of Ari? It could be excitement. The yellow crest feathers. They're mobile. There's another picture where the crest feathers are down. She's riding her skateboard. This was the other thing about these birds. They're incredibly smart. She rode a skateboard. She played the piano. She and Pico played basketball together. Did you train them to do that? We did. We did much of the training. I trained some. I used to train fish for some years of my life. You can train animals to do things. Training fish? Tell me about that. Training fish seems a lot harder than training a bird or a dog. The fish were not... They were in a tank. I was training the fish to approach a target that was lit up. Was this for a scientific purpose? We were trying to look at aspects of the system. If they could see this particular color of light, they would approach the light and they'd get a brine shrimp award. We could make that light a little bit dimmer. We kept giving them a choice until they were just choosing randomly. Then you knew they weren't really seeing the light anymore. You turned the light a little bit brighter and suddenly they'd shift back and be choosing all the right stuff again. What kind of fish were these? These were an African cichlid really more for scientific experience rather than for pets. Although people who keep cichlids as aquarium fish, they're very nice and quite pretty. They've got some interesting behaviors. They're a little too aggressive to keep with too many other fish but they're fine and interesting fish. That gets into the next thing I wanted to explore. There are these different kinds. Rabbits as pets. Mice as pets. Some people keep spiders as pets, right? Snakes. Snakes for many years. I think of those as sort of low investment pets in some sense. Typically those pets, not always but typically they don't require as much care from their owner. Moving it by with a little more just routine. It's got food, it's got water, that kind of stuff. And the animal is perfectly happy basically. Dogs, cats, and the parrots you have to do a good deal more than just sort of letting them be and seeing they have food and water, right? You also get a lot more in return. I don't see much return for a snake. I had one of my boas for 20 years. A boa. While the snake, I was quite convinced it actually knew me as an individual and she sort of liked me because she would preferentially sit on me rather than other people. I'd pass her around a group of people and she'd always end up back on me and settle down on me and would then move from person to person to person until she got back to me and that would stop. Was your boa the type that constricts? Well, always constricted. And were you ever afraid that it was going to harm you? No, no, she was, she had no reason to go after me. How about any other humans? One of the constrictors would attack people. People were really too big for them to eat. They might attack defensively if they felt badly threatened. Small animals, right? Yeah, small animals were quite at risk from them. To put it mildly, yes. Anyhow, it just seems to me there is a whole continuum, right, from very sort of low investment animals. The snakes, again, I could leave my boas for some literally. At home? Yeah, at home. Would you leave them in a cage? Yeah, they would be in a cage. There was a bowl of water, they had a heating pad there for them to sit on if they wanted to get a little bit warmer. So did you have the boas the same time you had your birds? No, no, those did not overlap. One would not survive, probably. Right, exactly. Some animals just don't really go together well. Right. But now the parents were very high maintenance, very emotionally attuned if we were to leave for 24 hours. We had somebody come in and sit with the birds and we would give them a six or seven page list of, here's all the routines, here's how to get them up, because they're very devoted to their routines, they get very upset if you break their routines. Did they fly around your house without a picture? We kept the wing feathers clips, because flying is a very dangerous thing. But we're going to have to take a break before we continue this conversation and we'll be right back. Carol Mon Lee, CEO of ThinkTech here and host Ethan Allen here on Likeable Science. Aloha, my name is Joe Kent and I'm the Vice President of Research at the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. The Grassroot Institute is a public policy think tank and we try to build a better economy in Hawaii and you can see us on the TV show Ehana Kako on the ThinkTech Hawaii Broadcasting Network every Monday at 2 o'clock. We'll see you there and let's build a better Hawaii together. Aloha. Aloha, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Pauline Shakmak-Chen. I'm the host for a new show on ThinkTech Hawaii called Outside In. Outside In will be taking a look at how the external world can help shape Hawaii's future and I will be starting the show hopefully next year in terms of regularly scheduled programming and we hope to invite a wide variety of different guests ranging from history, philosophy, art and architectural fields all the way to robotics, biotech, cryptocurrency, bitcoin and the like. So we're going to have a full range of guests to cover many different areas of interest and I hope to see you next year. Until then, Aloha. And you're back here on Likeable Science. I'm your host Ethan Allen here on ThinkTech Hawaii. With me today is Carol Mon-Lee, ThinkTech's COO and we're talking about pets or animal companions as many people like to call them and I think it's a better description really in many ways. People typically get these animals for companionship and that's that doesn't imply quite the inequity that pet ownership implies, right? That's right. But as people go into this business of getting pets in and we've seen this time and time again with parrots, people see a parrot or see somebody who has a parrot and think, oh, how wonderful these are, these colorful, bright, intelligent, active animals. Oh, I must get one and they rush off and they buy a parrot, not realizing what incredible amount of care these animals take, how emotionally in tune with you they are, how delicate they are, how loud they can be and then they decide after a few weeks or a few months and they hand it off to somebody else who maybe wants it and these parrots get passed around and to owners who don't understand them and the bird doesn't understand why its home is now changed abruptly and it doesn't work out well so there are questions I think that people should consider when they're thinking about a pet. If you're getting a pet for a six-year-old it's a rather different thing than if you're getting a pet for a twelve-year-old, right? A six-year-old has much less capability of doing some of the basic pet care and to some extent it seems to me it depends on what you want to get out of a pet Sure. Well, I'll give you my own personal story. As I said I never had a dog and my husband passed away about five years ago and after he passed away several friends said, you know you should get a dog because I live by myself and my son's on the mainland and he has a cat and he wanted me to get a cat and having had cats and my husband and I had a cat. I decided no I really wasn't interested in the cat and I was looking at dog pictures and dog books and friends would bring over their dog. There's Minky again on the screen and there's another picture of Minky where there are rabbit ears and time for Easter for everybody saying hi to everybody but I actually made a list of the attributes I wanted in a dog and he wanted it to be small and a female because I heard that a female dog is less aggressive. I wanted it to be older because I really didn't want to train it not having had the experience training. I'm not wanting to go through that learning curve both for the dog and for me. I also wanted to be hypo-elegantic because I am allergic to dogs and I wanted it to be white because a friend might have a beautiful white bechonfrise and I just thought it's such a nice little dog and I wanted it as I said small so I could manage it so I had this list of my phone and I went to a friend's house this nurse this hospice nurse who happened to have four dogs that she was caring for and one was Minky the Maltese who actually fit every single one of my items in my checklist and she was 12 so again very mature and she lived for another two years so I got Minky for companionship and she worked out beautifully and for me one of the many things that I enjoyed about her is that I was able to bring her to the studio all the time and so we had pictures of Minky with Jay Jay Fidel and she had been on there's Minky and me and Jay and the Jay as you probably know is a great dog lover he has Emily there's Minky with Jay on the phone yeah I recall you would show up with Minky and basically a large handbag yes I would take Minky everywhere but as she did provide wonderful companionship for me all the time and as you stay a part of the attributes is that because she wasn't judging me and I wasn't judging her particularly except for she had mistakes or accidents but she was a wonderful companion and opened up a whole new world for me and now what I find is even though Minky's been gone for many months now when I go on the internet I seem to gravitate toward pictures of dogs and other animals funny pictures and stupid pictures and you know warm stories about animals and it's just opened up this whole new slice of I was going to say humanity but I guess it's more than humanity right yeah you don't think you'll get another dog at this point you know that's the common question yes I would like to get another dog and I have been looking and friends have been suggesting different animals and I go to the Humane Society once in a while to look and I anybody walking in the market who has an animal, strangers I will usually say hello to their dogs so I'm looking I'm hoping the right one shows up like my last one should how about you are you going to get another parent to accompany your second parent? we are in transition it's too new to say what's going to happen here exactly but there is this issue and you alluded to it earlier about having the resources for the time, the energy you know with a dog clearly if you're working two jobs or three jobs you may not have time for it to give the attention it needs maybe you could get by with a cat particularly if you do and again these birds are even more demanding than dogs or cats in terms of their interactions with you they used to be in flocks of dozens to hundreds to thousands of their own kind and want to be interacting with others all the time well I know you had two birds were they interacting with each other? only very minimally they actually didn't particularly like one another they had been brought into our home at different times we brought in the second one thinking the first one was bonding a little bit inappropriately to Thea wanting to spend too much time with Thea regarding her as a mate so we thought let's get another bird purposely got a smaller bird, a female bird so we wouldn't have any of the aggressive interactions but they never particularly hit it off we sometimes jokingly would say it's because the first day that Ari met her she jumped down off the couch and jumped right on top of Pika and they may not have ever liked each other since then because you would have hoped that they could socialize with each other when you were both working right they could ruin each other that's what we hoped these two would but that's about as close as they would ever get and that's Ari on the right it's Ari down below there and you can see Pika sort of is actually keeping a close eye on her because that's very close for Ari to beat her and Pika was a little bit scared of Ari because Ari, although she doesn't look at there was about half again as big as Pika in terms of her weight So in home were they flying in a cage or are they flying free? Each had their own cage, we would have the cages open when we're home at all times whenever we leave we'd be sure the birds were in the cages and doors were secured because you don't want them wandering around Pika tended to stay on her cage Ari we actually had to put a little barrier at the foot of it so she wouldn't get down on the floor because otherwise she would wander around the house and could get into all kinds of trouble for years we actually had her free reign of the house in Seattle and she would run around and that was all it worked out well until one day we had a house guest of mine over and this guy who weighed probably 250 pounds took a step backwards and stepped right onto her tail and we realized another inch could just have been just devastating so we gave that up Now why did you get birds for companionship or for... My wife Thea had actually worked in a jungle gardens in Sarasota, Florida doing a master of ceremonies job for a bird show she had birds trained to ride bicycles on the high wire and play cards with audience members and ride balls and do all kinds of little tricks and she had a whole line of patter that went with this and so she knew all about these birds and knew they were interesting had a friend in Chicago then whose daughter had this bird Ari and the daughter got ill and was hospitalized and the bird needed a temporary home and so we agreed that we would foster a parent's bird for a few weeks maybe a month the daughter did not get better we ended up some months later the daughter was still in the hospital we were leaving Chicago for Seattle and brought Ari with us and she was with us then for many years and moved out to Hawaii with us laid one egg here in Hawaii but she was a remarkable bird she was smart, intrepid very good natured a lot of personality and just a truly amazing amazing animal leaving a huge gaping hole in our lives after all of the years but well pets companionship is really very broad term because as we know particularly dogs are used for so many reasons for emotional support and for help with disabilities and handicap and so many other reasons and actually other pets can serve that purpose too exactly, exactly, pets pets can help us on a lot of levels there's a lot of evidence that pets are good for people in hospitals that it lifts the spirits of people in senior living situations etc I think we're going to have to wrap things up here that's what I'm hearing but this has been very enjoyable and enlightening as I always want my guests to be so thank you very much Carol I've enjoyed having you here on likeable science and I hope you'll come back next week and join us for another episode here on Tic-Tac, Hawaii until then, aloha