Friday, July 22, 2011

GET A CAMEL.

People swear by their own special cures for ailments or bad habits. Some people swear by the health-giving benefits of owning a dog or a cat. It has been scientifically proven that pets provide many healthy benefits besides unconditional love.
I just finished reading The Good Good Pig, by Sy Montgomery. Sy developed an unusual and adoring attachment to a pig she named Christopher Hogwood.  She claims all pigs are intelligent, sensitive souls. They love and crave company, and contact. They have a sense of humor, enjoy a good joke, appreciate music. Certainly nothing you’d expect from a relationship with a pork chop.

In her book she mentions E.O. Wilson who had ten thousand ants living in his office at Harvard. He would look at them through his microscope and could actually detect individual differences in them, much to his awe and delight.
Ants and pigs  don’t necessarily cure anything except  the blues, but Sy and her friends and neighbors clearly doted on this pig and claim to have learned much about humanity from him. Mostly that animals aren’t corrupted by greed like humans are. Now that is a truth one can count on.
But, I think if I were to get another pet, it would be a camel.

Consider that if we have a planetary holocaust, the Sheiks of Araby will outlive us all. They are used to an inhospitable land of desiccating heat; they have camels to provide transportation and food, plus dung for fuel. Camels  can live on practically nothing; you can seek shelter beside them in a sand storm, take liquid from their humps and then their milk has ten times the anti-bacterial and anti-viral properties of cow’s milk. It’s naturally low in fat, and has triple the vitamin C.  It is the closest thing to mother’s milk. Camels also have an insulin-like protein that survives the digestive tract.  I’m not sure why that is important, maybe their spit is good for you.
My advice to you is if you spot a camel in your travels, you might want to latch onto that baby.
But, in the meantime, I got another remedy in my mail from elmhurst:  “To ward off cramps in a foot or toe, take your thumb and first finger and gently squeeze the area just below the nose. This may have to be repeated for a very bad cramp or charley horse, but it works.”
Thank you for that.
And, Donna Parker questioned Elaine May’s balsamic vinegar cure for hiccups claiming her family’s cure is best because you can cure hiccups anywhere. You won’t be carrying along a bottle of balsamic on the plane or a picnic, right?  She has a point.
Donna’s cure: “Fold your hands as if in prayer interlocking the finger’s except for the index ones. Concentrating on getting the index fingers as close together without touching and before you know it you no longer have the hiccups.”
I almost wish I’d get the hiccups so I can try some of these cures!  I know for a fact that animals get hiccups, I wonder what works for them?

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