Authorities in central Florida say a German shepherd helped firefighters locate the two young children of his owners in heavy smoke as a blaze destroyed their home.

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My best dog friend ever, Sweetie Pie, also known as Batdog.

One of the least happy parts about living with a great pet is that eventually they will age, their illnesses will increase and they will pass away, probably before you do.

This is a very difficult topic to write about and hard to live through. However, part of the responsibilities of pet ownership is also the grief associated with their passing.

There’s a lot of websites out there that are for support of pet owners that are in the grief phase of their relationship with their pets. Check our links page to see some of them.

Each of us has to accept that this is a part of living and a part of the relationship we have with our pets, be they dogs, cats, lizards, snakes or bunnies or whatever other creature you share your life with.

One critical aspect of this entire living with them life that we share with them is remembering them as they were when they were young and full of energy. As they age, they get slower, have physical problems just like older humans do but at the same time, pets seem to be graceful when they are old.

It always amazes me how well our pets face death – they seem to have an acceptance of the process that we humans lack.

So this morning, don’t forget to give your special companions a big hug when you leave.

One of the topics that will be discussed in “Living With Them” when it’s published will consider how animal intelligences vary from one individual to another. I have had two companion pets that most certainly had “somebody home” in the brain department. These videos are of wild animals interacting with humans for help.

On national pet day, just like at the end of the year the list makers are making lists and checking them twice.

Not only are the animals on the list obvious, I would be that every state says you can’t have these as pets.

Link

National Pet Day means you have an official excuse to be as excited about your pet on social media as you want and nobody can call you obnoxious.

Link

Cute pets in another country – New Jersey cute pets.

Link

So this guy is hosting a television show in the UK when he happens upon an injured Swan which he nurses back to health. Well you guessed it, a few years go by and the Swan remembers him with a giant hug.

Link

There are several articles and how to pieces on the internet about writing books online using WordPress. This article goes into more depth than most do. Yes, it’s a longer read and goes into the weeds several times but it’s worth it to not have a bunch of false starts, especially if you’re a first time book author like I am.

I’m also happy to help (on a limited basis) other authors who have trouble setting up their WordPress for writing. Just us the contact form on the site.

Many of us choose to write books. Each year, 200 million of us at least think about it if you believe the statistics. The point is that a lot of people don’t write the book they want to either because they don’t know how, don’t have the time or realize how much work it is once they start. The motivation and time are only two of the issues for writers.

In my opinion and experience as a first time book writer (I’ve got 40 years of experience in journalism to light my path in the darkness), the most difficult part is not creating the words but how to put them in a coherent format that makes sense to your brain so you can write instead of thinking about how to write.

I searched for book writing software, explored various cloud solutions and generally stumbled around and didn’t actually do any writing simply because I was worried I’d find something better and have to move everything I wrote to a new format.

The Device To Write On

Whether it’s a typewriter, a pencil and paper or in electronic form, you have to choose a format to write on and stick with it. One of the great aspects of all the devices we all have from smartphones to tablets, PCs, net-books and even our vehicles is being able to write anywhere, any time. But the big hangup (for me) is a seamless way to use the cloud effectively where you can edit at will without apps, programs and not knowing if you’re editing the right version of your work.

Another real pain I’ve found – actually two pains – is that some clouds save the document under a different name each time so you may have dozens of copies of the same document and woe be you if you edit away on the wrong version and then have to combine them all together.

As divine providence would have it, I’m writing a book about grieving and have been having all sorts of issues trying to write effectively using the cloud. When you’re using a variety of platforms every day – Windows XP, Vista & 7, various android versions, maybe an iOS, you will come across doing gymnastics just trying to save the thing let alone being able to concentrate on writing. I used one program that has a great “save to cloud” feature so you can, as they bill it, write on any device, only to find out their Android app doesn’t have that “save to cloud” feature. Losing!

After weeks of this, I stopped writing and set out to find something easy and effective as well as having the ability to share it all easily for the eventual editor, not to mention those experts that agree to help me with technical information about the topic. I am happy to report that there is an astoundingly simple solution, that once set up is seamless and I’m going to show you how to do it.

The Solution For Writing Anywhere, Anytime

Almost everyone knows about blogging. You can get a very inexpensive web server account for just a few dollars a month at places like Bluehost or any other good hosting company. The great thing about this is that once you get an account with a web hosting company, you also have your book site. Which of course goes beyond the scope of this article in that you need to choose a web address as well. You will find out that when using the most inexpensive web server accounts that you share that server with other websites. If you start to get a lot of traffic on your site, you’ll need to upgrade your account – keep that in mind when you choose a hosting company! Be sure you can upgrade your account.

Next, you’ll need an installation of WordPress. This is super easy using “one click install” features on web servers. WordPress, if you’ve never used it, is a free, open source blogging/content management engine that drives vast numbers of websites. You probably visit WordPress powered sites all the time and don’t realize it. I’ve found it to be intuitive and as time goes by, become more and more advanced.

Next, you’re going to need what are called “plugins” which are nothing more than little scripts that extend the features of WordPress. Here’s what you need.

This is important. You need to think ahead, not just willy nilly screw around. You will need to, just like any technology, test it first by creating a test document with all the parts you plan on having in it from footnotes to tables of contents to font styles.

1. A really simple theme for your WordPress site. Themes are what the public sees when they visit your site. It’s the presentation of your information. The one I chose for my book writing site is called “A Dream To Host. it’s a really simple, basic no frills theme that is astoundingly fast to load and work with. it’s designed to be a breeze to modify and change to your liking or just use it as it is. If you like the way it looks here, use the contact form and I’ll help you get it just right.
2. A table of contents creator. You may or may not decide to use a TOC plugin. I decided to NOT use one and created my table of contents by.
   
3. A footnote creator. I tried several of them and came up with a solution that works the best (for me).
   
4. Conversion Tool.A tool to download what you write into a Word or other format so you can send your book to publishers, convert it to an ebook format and be able to do the final editing on your computer of choice.
   
5. A privacy tool to keep the general public from seeing your work unless you want them to. This is a great tool because the experts that you might be getting to help with your book can have access to the drafts of your chapters while the general public only sees what you want them to.
   
6. Extended Editing Tool. WordPress has a basic control system for fonts, font sizes and other doodads that you might use. There are plugins that extend this to font sizes, type faces, colors, inserting of dates and other handy tools.

Really,  that’s it. I installed all of this in less than an hour and it works beyond great. The creators of WordPress even have a neat tool to write without even going to your WordPress installation. Another winner in the formula is that when you get done with the book,  you can also use your WordPress site to market your book, collect email addresses, let interviewers read parts or all of the book and probably dozens of other uses I haven’t thought of.

Here’s the list of plugins that I use on my book site:

Advanced Image Styles – this lets you control how images and graphics look from borders to white space.

Apose conversion plugin – winner, winner chicken dinner. This handy tool converts and saves your work in just about any format you want for easy editing in your word processing software/app. NOTE: Apose also has a document importer and an ebook generator so make sure you’re installing the right one.

Hide this – lets you hide whatever you want from the general public using “shortcodes” – i.e. putting a bit of text in brackets that gives WordPress a command to follow. Example: [a bit of code]

Zotero – NOT a WordPress plugin but a footnote tool. Works as a stand alone program or as an addon for your browser.

WP Superedit – Extends the stock editor in WordPress a LOT!

Private Content Plus – Sets permissions for individual pages and blog posts so the public can’t see it.

FD Footnotes – I have found this to be the perfect footnote generator (for me) and transfers seamlessly to other document styles like Word and PDF.

Add To Any – Sets up social network sharing buttons (Facebook, Twitter, Google +, etc.) so visitors can share your site with others.

From 2013, an article at the Discovery channel website discusses spiritual experiences in animals using science rather than faith as the starting point.

A neurologist and other scientists argue animals are capable of having spiritual experiences.

The researchers hold that spiritual experiences originate within primitive parts of the human brain, structures shared by animals.

This is a very interesting subject simply because of the gist of this site and my book, Living With Them. We know that our pets and wild animals show signs of higher awareness when they grieve for lost mates and offspring. Likewise we observe in our own lives connections with our domestic animals. Dogs seem to know when they’ve done something wrong, some pets know when we’re depressed, upset or ill.

Knowing that all mammals share certain brain structures, we can also assume as a starting point that there is also some sharing of experiences across species.

The trick, of course, lies in proving animals’ experiences.

“Since only humans are capable of language that can communicate the richness of spiritual experience, it is unlikely we will ever know with certainty what an animal subjectively experiences,” Kevin Nelson, a professor of neurology at the University of Kentucky, told Discovery News.

“Despite this limitation, it is still reasonable to conclude that since the most primitive areas of our brain happen to be the spiritual, then we can expect that animals are also capable of spiritual experiences,” added Nelson, author of the book “The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain,” which will be published in January 2011.

Among Nelson’s work is looking into whether or not animals have near death experiences like humans.

The Spiritual Doorway In The Brain

“In humans, we know that if we disrupt the (brain) region where vision, sense of motion, orientation in the Earth’s gravitational field, and knowing the position of our body all come together, then out-of-body experiences can be caused literally by the flip of a switch,” he said. “There is absolutely no reason to believe it is any different for a dog, cat, or primate’s brain.” Other mammals also probably have near-death experiences comparable to those reported by certain humans, he believes. Such people often say they saw a light and felt as though they were moving down a tunnel.

I find that to be incredible – that the disruption of parts of the brain can trigger an out of body experience. This points out how meditation can trigger out of body experiences and how near death experiences work from a scientific point of view.

Read the article at discover.com

There is an interesting discussion going on today at a discussion forum, godlikeproductions about animals and whether or not they have a soul. If you’ve read the first chapters of Living With Them, you can see where I stand on the subject. Here are some snippits and quotes from that thread in case you can’t get onto the site – they have an aggresive permission set regarding visitors.

This question is no joke for the scientific community. They allege now that a group of chimps “may be engaging in spiritual practices—and could even believe in God.” This “discovery” may help explain “how human religious rituals started.” What we are being bombarded with is another aspect of the God-defying atheistic evolution theory, which is a foolish abomination in God’s eyes. The Bible proves—and some honest scientists admit—that the entire evolution concept is wrong and a scientific impossibility. We are offering two free booklets, discussing this fact.

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New footage of ritual behaviour by chimpanzees, taken and analysed by researchers, shows they may be engaging in spiritual practices – and could even believe in God…

“The ritualized behavioural display and collection of artefacts at particular locations observed in chimpanzee accumulative stone throwing may have implications for the inferences that can be drawn from archaeological stone assemblages and the origins of ritual sites.”

This discovery is made even more interesting by the fact that Indigenous West African people also collect stones at sacred trees in a way that the resarchers said looks “eerily similar to what we have discovered here”… Link

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I’m a Protestant Christian. I’m not a scholar and I really should be reading my Bible more often but I’d like to try and give my take on the matter.

A good question is: Do animals believe in God, or sense God?

This really is a hard question to answer but it seems to be yes to a certain limit. The Bible has allot of really cool stories about animals. Belem’s donkey, Danial and the Lion, Noah’s raven and dove, and Adam and Eve might have been able to communicate with animals. Everything was designed by God.

The problem lies in the idea if animals have souls. Also, how diverse are animals with thought? A deer is afraid of death, but doesn’t ponder why. Or do they? Also, why are some animals perfectly healthy go on a killing spree (a Val Killmore movie I can’t remember the title was about lion’s senselessly killing people for sport).

So it is a mystery. I’m no expert on the subject but I hope I was able to contribute a little bit from my point of view. This is a very interesting topic to discuss and thanks for sharing the video.

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Here is what I’ve written in that discussion:
I’m writing a book about grieving for pets. Part of my research is regarding animals and whether or not they have a spirit or soul. The Bible is fairly clear that God gives them at the least spirit but is unclear on the soul aspect. I would put forward that sin would come into play if they had a soul. How would animals seek forgivness of sin, do they sin in the eyes of God, etc..

Emotions and spirit may or may not go hand in hand simply because of whether or not animals are able to have a concept right and wrong. It seems to me that also calls into play the concept of original sin and whether or not animals are affected by it. Another aspect is that we have bred animals as pets to achieve a certain set of behaviors.

As far as wild animals go, cases of grief in the wild world are well known from Elephants to Dolphins and even other Homininae (the subset of Hominids that includes gorillas, chimpanzees, apes and humans).

Read the article