The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

Something being obvious once it's brought to someone's attention is a comment I hear a lot. From clients. As in, "Your suggestions are so totally obvious once you say them. How come we don't know these things?"

Ah...well...umm...

So today the shoe is on the other finger and something wasn't obvious to me until I read it; Gambling is not a wild activity, meaning animals don't gamble.

Well of course they don't. Duh! Despite those pictures, you know they can't hold cards or dice in their paws. Come on.

Seriously, the physiological effects that a habitual gambler and most occasional gamblers experience is part of every day life in the wild. The sparrows at my feeders gamble that the hawk flying over my house won't notice them or take interest. The chipmunks dashing under the feeders gamble that the fox crying in the woods won't burst forth and take them.

Domestic animals -- cats and dogs, primarily -- under the right circumstances will fall into so deep a sleep they will snore or twitch. These don't happen in the wild because a truly deep sleep is usually a death warrant in the wild. For that matter, humans didn't fall into truly deep, deep sleeps until recently in recorded history. Same reason. It's only been recently that the daily gamble was so heavily in one's favor that a truly deep sleep could be allowed. Even then, all you need do is fall asleep in an unfamiliar setting to appreciate how close to the wild you really are.

Which leads me to wonder; domestic animals, the ones that can fall asleep so soundly they twitch and snore...do they gamble?

I mean, how would we know? I can't even tell when my pets take a day off.

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