Police-dog school open day

One station north of Chynów is Sułkowice, home to the famous police-dog school (Zakład Kynologii Policyjnej Centrum Szkolenia Policji or the Police Cynology Department of the Police Training Centre.) This is Poland's national centre for training dog-handlers and service dogs. Today was the annual open day at the school, so I popped over to see.

Below: the handlers began the day by showing off their dogs' obedience to commands, verbal and non-verbal. The dogs, mainly German and Dutch shepherds and Belgian Malinois, seem focused and well-behaved; the handlers have on their belts bags of treats that are frequently given to reward correct response. 

Police dogs are trained here for general patrol work as well as searching terrain and buildings; pursuit and arrest; and tracking human scent. Specialist tracker dogs are used for sniffing out narcotics, explosives, weapons, ammunition and human remains. I have also been told that the national revenue administration trains dogs here to sniff out illegal alcohol stills. The tracker dogs, which include bloodhounds, terriers and spaniels, were not on show today. 

The school is located on a 45-hectare site that includes 21 hectares of training ground, where dogs learn to cope with various forms of obstacles and simulated conditions that they may encounter on service duty, such as smoke (below).

As well as the dogs, there was also a police-horse display, with six horses and their riders down from Warsaw for the event. The horses wore visors and nose-guards, and like the dogs, were entirely comfortable dealing with fire (below).

The dogs showed their worth on the big obstacle course that straddles the Czarna river behind the school. Here, we could watch the hounds scramble over a wooden wall (below).

After all the dogs made it over the blue planks, three more unpainted planks were added to the wall. The final one raised the wall to around two and half metres, and here the dogs finally met their match, none could make it over this height.

Below: the dog tower tested the animals for surefootedness; getting down was harder than getting up, but this obstacle proved to be no problem for these dogs. In the distance, the forest of Wola Pieczyska.

Below: the final display involved police dogs involved in catching a 'criminal' in well-padded clothing. Blank ammunition would not deter the charging hounds; once caught, the dogs would not let go of their prey; the actor playing the thief had to have the padded jacket removed from him, the dog still attached to it! Police dogs are not to be messed with.

The school stresses suitability, health and working ability as paramount considerations when taking on new dogs. They are typically bought at one to two years old, so assessors can test an already visible temperament and body, rather than gamble on a puppy. Dogs must pass obedience and health tests before being trained further. They are function-first dogs. Sułkowice is not producing show dogs; animals are selected that can work around noise, crowds, vehicles, slippery floors, strange buildings, civil-defence exercises, scent trails and a handler under stress. Polish police dogs are bred for utility rather than appearance.

Many of my neighbours in Jakubowizna are retired police-dog trainers, and have set up canine-adjacent businesses; there are dog hotels, dog breeders, service-dog equipment makers, and civilian dog trainers (at weekends, groups of dog owners together with their charges and a trainer, make their way up and down my lane, the dogs learning to respond to commands).

Sułkowice is also famous as the place where Poland's most famous dogs on film were trained.

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Letters to an Imaginary Grandson (IV)

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Poland's sleeper-train services – summer timetable

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Conscience, consciousness and sensitivity

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Little annoyances and optimising one's life

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The 13th thirteenth

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Ghastly June day in London

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Perfect weather week in Warsaw

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Further progress is unimaginable

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Baletowa reopens as rail works move on

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Polish doctors in UK offer new healthcare model

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The closure of the Góra Kalwaria-Pilawa railway link

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My blazing bus pic gets on front page of Gazeta Stołeczna

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Storm clouds rising

Lent 2026: day 38 – do animals have souls?

Czester and Scrapper went to the vets today for the snip – a far less invasive operation than what poor Wenusia had to endure. It's eight pm, they've just had their first (small) meal of the day, and they both seem in fine form. Still, I felt guilty that the two boys were being deprived of their sexual potential. Fatherhood is no longer a reason for them to live. Why do cats live? What do they live for? Who do they live for? We keep cats as pets, and it is for our convenience that we get them sterilised. We humans manage their reproduction. Companion animals are cared for, fed and sheltered, but wildlife – hunting and culling excepted – self-regulates, existing as it does at the fringes of human civilisations. Deer, hare, boar, we see them from time to time; their lives are perilous but fully agential. Living in instinct and intuition. And aware of their existence.

Whenever I look into the eyes of any of my cats for any length of time, we end up staring at each other, exchanging slow blinks. We may not know what each of us is thinking, but I am aware that I am looking into the eyes of a conscious creature, just as self-aware as I am. A being that is as central to the universe as I feel that I am.

I absolutely refuse to speculate on the possibility of cross-species reincarnation, for I have never had any experiences that could possibly inform me of such. But I do feel that my cats have that small 'c' consciousness which I possess, and that their feline bodies are indeed containers for consciousness. Or souls.

Our relationship with our pets, is more simple than the complexities of inter-human relationships. The feelings we have for our pets, fondness, love even, expect no reciprocity. The ego doesn't get in the way, no trying to show who's boss. Just acceptance of who we are.

Dogs, having lived in the presence of humans for much longer than cats, have evolved facial muscles that can form expressions to which humans can ascribe emotions. Cats can't do this (yet!), rendering their faces more enigmatic to their human owners. Yet cats' inner experience cannot be denied. That feline mind is forever occupied by something. It is paying attention; it is there in the present.

But does the cat have metacognition – is it aware of being aware? Probably not. I'd posit that metacognition requires a substrate of higher intelligence in parallel with the substrate required for consciousness. But this lack of consciousness of being conscious does not negate the presence of consciousness in animals.

In 2012, the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness (2012) concluded that many non-human animals, including cats and dogs, possess the neurological substrates necessary for consciousness. This landmark scientific statement challenged the long-held view that consciousness is unique to humans, and has since influenced global animal welfare policies.

Take a strictly Darwinian view of animals and their purpose is solely to survive and reproduce. But spend time getting to know cats and you will see that there's more to them than that. There's a soul in there, and that soul is also on the eternal journey from Zero to One.

Lent 2025: day 38
A Lenten interruption (heart attack)

Lent 2024: day 38
Neither a follower nor a leader be

Lent 2023, day 38
Go with the flow, or swim against the tide

Lent 2022: day 38
When I was a child, I understood as a child

Lent 2021: day 38
Will we ever understand what's inside the atom?

Lent 2020: Day 38
Religion, Society and the Individual

The pathetic fallacy – are creatures sentient?

While walking to the station the other day, I passed the small farm on the corner where free-range chickens roam. I was in a hurry, brisk pace, so the chickens moved away from the road, clucking as they fled. But the rooster didn't. The rooster continued to watched me and  started advancing in my direction. The rooster was protecting his hens and demonstrating to them his bravery in this situation. I was looking at him, his gaze was fixed upon mine – and then his foot slipped on a clod of freshly ploughed earth. All of a sudden, he felt somewhat foolish. I could sense the shame in his galine face. The proud defender of his brood made to appear clumsy by a misstep.  I stopped for a moment. He turned away, the literal picture of 'crestfallen'.

But am I merely imposing human ideas of emotion upon a creature that's a mere automaton, devoid of soul, lacking in what we would call consciousness? This, in literature and art, is the notion of pathetic fallacy – conferring human attributes to non-human entities.

Yet I certainly would confer personhood upon creatures. When a pet-owner makes eye contact with their cat or dog, they feel certain that their pet is sentient, that it subjectively experiences existence, that their pet is for itself (just as you are to yourself) the centre of the world. Eyes are indeed windows to the soul, and just a fleeting moment of eye-to-eye contact lets you intuit the state of an animal's consciousness; anger or irritation, fright or anxiety, contentment or bliss. In the case of this rooster, I sensed annoyance and embarrassment; a small misfortune that made the ruler of the roost appear uncoordinated and maladroit; no longer was he a challenger but an unsteady bumbler.

The rooster may not make much sense of his surroundings; there are the people that feed it, the barnyard, the henhouse, the strangers that walk past where it lives, there are boxy objects moving around like little metal huts, there's ample food, many hens to tread, no natural predators (foxes are a rarity round these parts) – existence is good. Intellectual attainment, however, is not what chickens have evolved for; humans have bred them for food for the past 8,000 years. 

I ponder for a while about the nature of consciousness; I deeply believe that it is something far more than a mere emergent property of neural matter, the product of evolution. The leap from non-life to life has yet to be explained or replicated artificially. Moments such as this make me suddenly realise that consciousness exists in other living beings too. The fact that they are bereft of human-level intelligence does not mean that they are unaware of their own existence, although they are probably not aware of being aware.

Science and spirituality continue to develop along separate pathways, but ultimately I feel they will converge, though the road be infinitely long and the setbacks will be many.

******************************

The prospect of Trump returning to the White House fills me with dread and existential anxiety for the future of mankind. Another four years on a knife-edge. I cannot bear to switch on the news. Kiss goodbye to Net Zero. The zloty has lost 2% of its value to the dollar in a few hours. The market senses that this part of Europe may be thrown to the wolves; the dangers of an authoritarian turn are clear to all people of goodwill and reason. I had been fearing this moment. Hopes are dashed.

This time two years ago:
Sunny Sunday meditations

This time eight years ago:
To Dawidy Bankowe, Łady, Zamienie and back

This time 13 years ago:
Town planning and the Sublime Aesthetic

This time 14 years ago:
On the long road from Zero to One

This time 15 years ago:
Łódź Rising

Animal spirits, animal consciousness - Lent 2022: Day 39

Out on my walk yesterday, in the fields between Dawidy Bankowe and Łady, I spotted a small group of deer. I was surprised that they are still there, living in these fields, which from year to year are filling with new houses. How do they regard the encroachment of humans on their habitat? Of course, humans have always farmed here, scattered dwellings and barns, fields criss-crossed by paths and the occasional road. Deer have co-existed with humans in some kind of equilibrium which now seems threatened as this land becomes engulfed by development. How do they perceive us and our encroachment on their terrain? 

Back in the garden, moles have made an unwelcome return to our lawn after several years. They have generally learned to stick to the herbaceous borders, having learnt that molehills on the lawn are met with an instant drenching with human urine. Recent snow cover, however, had disoriented them and suddenly four large and seven smaller hills appeared. All dealt with. The question now is - for how long? Again, it's a human-wildlife equilibrium issue. What do they think of what goes on above ground?

This morning, Felusia the cat meows at my door as she does most mornings; she jumps onto my bed and gives me a couple of playful head-butts in greeting, then lies at my side purring. I interpret her morning ritual as an expression of gratitude for food and shelter and mutual affection. Unlike deer and moles, the cat has spent  thousands of years living with humans; the process of domestication has given cats insights into human behaviour. I can observe Felusia's instincts - cats are hunters; her attention betrays her intentions - ears rotating to focus on some new sound, tail swishing, slowly adopting a crouching position... But from time to time, we make eye contact for a second or so, and two conscious beings communicate simple acknowledgement - "I'm alive and you're alive and I acknowledge your awareness of your existence".

As I wrote earlier this month, I feel certain that consciousness is a fundamental property of the Universe, rather than something that merely emerged as a by-product of the evolution of life. My big question is whether consciousness is a property of matter (along with mass and charge), existing within material particles in discrete units, or whether consciousness is even more fundamental than that. Could it inhabit all the space between particles? Maybe consciousness is the dark matter that keeps galaxies together? Or the dark energy that propels galaxies away from each other at ever-increasing velocities?

Whichever it is, consciousness seems to me like mass in the way it accretes - increasing by natural growth or addition. Matter has a tendency to clump together; quarks into protons and neutrons, protons, neutrons and electrons into atoms, atoms into molecules, molecules into proteins, then into life, which takes on ever more sophisticated forms. 

At the core, consciousness is no more and no less than the awareness of existence. Could an atom be aware of its own existence? Nothing more - there's no sensory input to prove it. I can prove to myself that I am alive by looking out of the window and looking at the garden, the branches of the trees swaying in the wind... Can a cat do that? A deer? Certainly. A mole? It's a different world down there a few inches beneath the ground in that sandy loam, hunting for earthworms. But I guess that in the end, the experience of the qualia of existence are similar for all sentient life. 

But at lower levels of creation?

This time two years ago:
A myriad paths to God

This time three years ago:
No God for those who don't believe, a God for those that do

This time four years ago:
Work proceeding around Jeziorki

This time five years ago:
Karczunkowska reopens to traffic

This time nine years ago:
Goodness gracious!

This time ten years ago:

Muddy feet, Warsaw 'pavements'

This time 11 years ago:
Cycling and recycling

This time 12 years ago:
Winter clings on to the forest

This time 13 years ago:
Toyota launches the iQ

This time 14 years ago:
Old school Łódź

Pregnant cats should not climb trees

Moni's cat that came from Łódź to become a permanent part of the household is pregnant. Liluś eats more, spends more time resting on rugs or radiators and is less frisky. However, that other call of nature - the imperative to ascend trees - proved stronger than the maternal instinct. She spent all night up this silver birch. But by morning the thought of a full cat bowl prompted her to make a cautious descent into my waiting arms.

Being a tortoiseshell-and-white tabby, her offsprings' colour will be determined by gender. Only the females will acquire tortoiseshell colouration; Lila's male kittens are more likely to reflect the father's coat. Five or six weeks to go...

This time last year:
TPSA turns Orange

This time two years ago:
Prophesies

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Volcano shuts down aviation over NW Europe

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Large, charismatic fowl

This time five years ago:
Antonov An-26 in the twilight of its career

To live is to be aware

I'm in the kitchen reading a paper when just at the edge of my field of vision, I observe a tiny fly. Smaller than a fruit fly - small - BAFF! It's dead. I've swiped it swiftly, without consciously thinking about it. Suddenly I pull up. Its little life - extinguished. Its brief existence within the universe - terminated abruptly. Was it aware? Conscious? Its last millisecond of life taken up by the awful realisation that it's too late to dodge the massive object hurtling down upon it... Or not - the fly I killed was no more than an animate collection of a central nervous system wrapped up in an exoskeleton, propelled by two pairs of wings and three pairs of legs, provided with sensory organs and an alimentary tract to fuel it. Probably the latter.

But let's climb up the evolutionary ladder. We have a rat (Ratboy - despite its name, a girl), Moni's 18th birthday present from her friends, who after a term in Łódź, made her way back to Jeziorki where she lives (15 months old now) in her spacious cage, dining on Lindt chocolate, pistachio nuts and Parmesan cheese. Ratboy is super-intelligent, friendly and curious, though she'll bite your finger should it ingresses too far into her cage. She is most certainly aware in the sense that you or I are aware; and aware that you are aware she is aware.

Larger, but dim in mammalian terms is our cat, below, officially Papusia but to me Chisko or Chiskie (from kocisko the augmentative of kot, 'cat'). Chisko is legendarily thick. She wants to go outside, but can see from the patio door that its raining. So she miaows by the front door to be let out; because she can't observe the rain through the solid wooden door, she reasons it isn't.

Compare a cat eating (it shovels its face into a bowl of food) to a rat (picking out what it wants with its hands, then holding it as it eats); it suggests that the rat has evolved further.

Chiskie is in her tenth year and matronly. Over-feeding has given her the proportions not so much a rugby ball but of a Zeppelin, moving slowly and silently towards her moorings (the catfood bowl or any sleepable surface). Is Chiskie aware? I guess being inside her brain is much like being at the bottom of a swimming pool; vague sensations making their way through but little to make sense of. Most important things in her mind about humans - they've mastered the art of opening tins of cat food. And in winter their houses are warmer than what's outside.

Moni has acquired a stray kitten, a tortoiseshell/white female (as yet unnamed) which came to Warsaw for the Easter break. What a contrast. The kitten is a fireball of energy, full of restless curiosity, courage, trust and incredible friendliness, yet with delicate toes. Despite checking out every horizontal surface in the house, she's broken nothing. A little learning machine, she's able to put two and two together very quickly and not repeat mistakes made. A very high level of consciousness compared to Old Chisko.

That's enough cutism for this blog. Suffice to say, harmony between cat and rat has been upset; Moni's kitten returns to Łódź on Sunday and the non-human residents of the house can get back to normal functioning.

This time two years ago:
Why did this happen

This time two years ago:
Britain's grey squirrels turning red