Water, water, everywhere

Weather... dogs... mud... all bound to make you think

The parts of the world in which I have a vested interest have all had a hard February. Flood waters in SW France have yet to subside; the water table in Worcestershire, Shropshire & Herefordshire is high and there are several flood alerts in place. Last week was a week for 4x4s alone on the local roads with ice, slush and rain, as well as potholes. All my consultations have, thankfully, been on line. Meanwhile, a couple of shelters I work with have had to move animals out of enclosures or out of kennels because of flooding or electricity cuts.

Local farmers in both areas have lost livestock and poultry to floods; fodder is poor; the outlook is not good with several sites under water where crops simply rot in the fields - whether they are feed crops for livestock or crops for human consumption. I’m still haunted by a video from 2025 in which a cow was caught up in floods and carried out to sea to her certain death - along with the other animals in her herd. It’s not been quite as dramatic here on UK shores, but there have still been agroindustrial poultry farms who have experienced significant animal deaths, as well as desperate farmers who have nowhere to keep their cattle or sheep from knee-deep water.

Lidy and I took a sodden walk across one of our routes close to home to find a farmer desperately trying to move sheep from one saturated field to another. It’ll be a hard season for lambing, he says.

Yet despite this hard, heavy rainfall which overflows aquifers and disappears, there are enormous issues of water scarcity, even in the wettest regions. Data centres in Ireland are now using just over 20% of Ireland’s electricity every single day, including millions of gallons of water. While we are told to take shorter showers, use our dishwashers fully loaded for economy and get water-saving toilets, it’s clear that this most basic resource will soon become even more challenging to manage, facing increasing competition. Hard, fast rain leading to flooding and erosion in the winter on the one hand, then increasing scarcity in summer. This will always hit animals the hardest. It will also hit countries with high inequality and less development hard too. I read this weekend a report from Australia about how water shortages are severely affecting both wildlife and livestock, where the thousands of sheep and beef farms will struggle, and the wildlife struggle even more. Then another report from Kenya, Botswana and Zimbabwe about elephant losses due to the disappearance of traditional water spots and competition for water from livestock, business and domestic use. Where tech companies say they are working with renewable energy, often that renewable energy is created in distant, less wealthy places and ‘offset’ against their figures.

A lot of this comes in a time that seems to follow Mark Zuckerberg’s motto: move fast and break things.

What gets broken, however, often harms the most vulnerable first. That’s as true for people and dogs as it is for wildlife and livestock. Shelter dogs and free-roaming dogs always suffer environmental and social injustice unequally compared to the lives of dogs belonging to wealthy people who can ride out environmental uncertainty more easily.

Move fast and break things is a present-tense motto. Costs are counted afterwards, when it is too late to do anything meaningful.

It’s not my motto.

It also seems that people simply aren’t aware of the costs until it touches their lives personally and the breakages impact their own lives. I’ve seen this first-hand a bunch of times this month with the membership institutions and organisations who have taken it upon themselves to lead the dog industry, making decisions that they don’t yet realise will break things for their own members.

It feels kind of ironic to me for one membership body to be putting on an event about the ethics of urban-rural interfaces and to have used a lot of images clearly produced by AI to market the event. Like, dude, rein it in! We’ve got be personally accountable for the costs, not contribute significantly to breaking things ourselves, if you ask me. One image here and there is one thing. Talks produced using enormous amounts of generative AI, on the other hand…

Part of the ‘Move Fast. Break Things’ approach to life.

The membership body that I will be leaving in July when my subscription ends recently asked us - the paying behaviour folk and trainers who sustain the organisation - to contribute (for low pay) to overseeing and editing AI programming for a highly unscrupulous, financially and legally opaque company they’ve gone into ‘partnership’ with. I don’t think it’s much of a surprise that I’ll be leaving that organisation since they’re literally asking people to contribute to funding their own career funerals to favour online ‘training’ programmes making very heavy use of generative AI that cares not for stealing content.

‘Hi… Please welcome our new partnership with *****’

‘We’re looking for behaviour consultants to contribute materials and to oversee AI responses to paying customers.’

‘Please ignore the fact ***** have registered their business in Cyprus, the well-known tax haven, and please ignore all their Trustpilot reviews that say they are a scam and they cheat people out of money. Just ignore the seedy marketing claims, the fact they delete all negative comments from their social media and all the other scammy bits.’

‘Don’t worry about your future. We’re happy to pay you a quarter of what you were earning as a behaviour consultant if you contribute materials and oversee just enough that we know it’s not entirely slop.’

‘You won’t get any credit from this, and nobody knows that the company are in partnership with us, because, to be honest, it’s a bit embarrassing.’

‘If you’re worried about how this organisation will fund itself when we no longer have consultants and trainers able to pay their fees, we’ll just be getting kickbacks from the AI company, so our own jobs are safe. Don’t you worry about us!’

Move fast. Break things. Don’t ask your members for their thoughts. Ignore them when they share concerns with you. Ride roughshod over them, because you’ve got to move with the times, right? Sure, Emma, it’s not perfect for qualified, experienced, knowledgeable behaviour consultants to be feeding an artificial system that will make them redundant. No, Emma, it’s not perfect to be in partnership with a financially and legally opaque company who scam people out of their money and sign them up to programmes they didn’t pay for. But you’ve got to be in the boat to help steer it, right?

Move fast. Stay afloat.

Seems like an “edgy” way of saying we shouldn’t consider the consequences of what we do.

Now, as a behaviour bod and lover of all things human psychology, I can’t help but think that’s the antithesis of my approach to life.

Consequences are all.

Unintended consequences of life probably make up about 80% of my caseload.

When we act in haste with our dogs, we are unable to understand the potential consequences that may occur. I was thinking too about how much writing the Moving Beyond Fear course has taught me. In one of the sessions, I say something along the lines that, if you want me to create fears of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in a bunch of otherwise healthy 8-year-old children, I can absolutely do that. We know so much about fear these days that we know how to engineer it. We know who is more susceptible. We know what kind of 8-year-olds will be more vulnerable to learned fears.

The consequences are predictable.

We can make such confident predictions about the consequences of raising dogs in isolation, in agro-industrial breeding facilities (read a hangar in the damp Welsh countryside or a barn in Ireland), in failing to help them habituate, in proliferating heritable disorders, in creating accidentally traumatic learning experiences… a complex, synergistic and dynamic system, indeed, but one with predictable outcomes.

Hindsight is marvellous, but when we know the components and their effects, the outcomes are not surprising. I don’t think it even is hindsight when ‘breaking things’ seems to be baked in to the very mode of function. It’s what you’re supposed to do.

Anyway, I’m not a fan of moving fast and breaking things.

More moving thoughtfully and treasure life. And you’ve got to have both. Moving thoughtfully and the treasuring bit. Remove emotion from the situation and people find it impossible to make decisions. Ablate the amygdala and remove all emotion, and people simply can’t decide. You’ve got to have the love, the treasuring, the cherishing of life itself. It’s what determines how you move. Without that, you’d simply be paralysed.

It seems at the moment that fear is the only emotion governing a lot of human behaviour. It’s not a surprise in a world that goes out of its way to manufacture fears so that they can play on these and sell us things. Fear is powerful at motivating behaviour.

But I don’t want to live that way - where fear is the reason to act swiftly without considering what outcomes there may be. Not with my dog. Not for the world beyond us. Moving with care. That’s about my style these days. Making choices that at least consider the ramifications. You know, like you do when you’re moving through mud and puddles. You don’t simply wade in and hope for the best if you want to keep your feet dry. Sometimes, you’re going to find you’re quickly out of your depth.

I think that’s my thought for the week. Move deliberately, like you don’t know what lies beneath your feet. Be a little scared the water might be higher than you expected. Be cautious. But be bold enough to take the next step in thinking hard about where you land.