Storm Brings More Than An Inch Of Rain To Some San Diego Communities

12/3/14 Midday Edition Program Transcript MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Our top story on Midday Edition, San Diego got a good soaking last night and the major rain system is not finished with us yet. We should expect scattered showers through the day and the coastal flood advisory is in effect until 10 AM tomorrow. As San Diegans searched for the dusty umbrellas and tried to remember how to drive in the rain, many of us wondered could this be the start of a normal or better than normal rainy season for California. Joining me to discuss this storm and what may lie ahead for us in the forecast this winter is my guest Alex Tardy, meteorologist with the National Weather Service. Alex, welcome to the show. ALEX TARDY: Thanks for having me on. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: How much rain have we gotten so far? ALEX TARDY: Well it sure seemed like a lot of rain since it's been so long. Everyone in San Diego County had at least a half of each of rain. Some places like in Poway had around an inch of rain. So the rain took a while to start. Yesterday morning we were wondering where it was and then it came right during the commute and when it did come it came right through the evening on and off. A good soaking rain, not a rain that caused flooding per se, but a rain that saturated our ground and made road problems like you talked about. If your tires were not ready for this or if you were not ready for it, that's the reason why we had a lot of car accidents. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: How much are we expecting today? What kind of rainfall totals for today? ALEX TARDY: Right now we've seen a little break in the rain. It's kind of a steady drizzle of rain right now. As I walked in the studio. We are actually seeing an additional amount of rain that could be similar to what we had yesterday that will come in late this afternoon and through this evening. So people should see another quarter to three quarters of an inch of new rainfall this afternoon during the commute and during the dark hours this evening from what we call a tropical wave moving up, from the Southwest. So the moisture is already in place as you can see the fog outside. And will wring out that moisture with another wave coming through. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Now, I'm not complaining and I'm not being I hope overly critical but it did seem in a way, that considering the buildup to this storm that the rain was a little bit tame, you know, that we heard at the beginning of these predictions maybe 3 inches, 5 inches for coastal areas in San Diego. So, has this rain system actually lived up to expectations? ALEX TARDY: That's a good question. It probably depends where you are. Some places did see quite a bit of rain 3 ½ inches up at Palomar Mountain. Coastal areas, no they didn't. But the rain we get this afternoon and this evening around those two together most places will have seen 1 to 2 inches of rain. And the San Bernardino Mountains, we were hoping for some snow, that was all rain in the Big Bear area had about 3 inches of rain. So everyone kind of knows by now we are in the worst drought we have seen in years, so this is very beneficial rain. So the answer to your question, some fun news is that the moisture that is in place right now and yesterday how we measure is with a weather balloon that we launch twice a day out of the Miramar was at a record level. So, even though that did not translate to rainfall in our gutters or backyard, the exact amounts that we were originally expecting, we set a record for all-time moisture levels in December. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: So what does that actually translate into? ALEX TARDY: So it is a measure of the quantity of moisture that is in the atmosphere. So the fancy word is perceptible water, but it is tropical moisture that is in place right over us. So basically what we saw is moisture and transported away from the equator to San Diego. And that is what brought these record levels of moisture. So if it seems unusually damp it is not green earlier this time it is the tropical moisture that is in place but so, that is why this afternoon when the next wave of moisture comes in or the next wave of energy comes in we do expect. Good rainfall rates during the commute and into the evening hours. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: I see. Again I'm speaking with Alex Tardy. He is a meteorologist at the National Weather Service. Alex, when is the last time we had a major storm like this with major rainfall? ALEX TARDY: I can't remember. Just kidding. You have to go all the way back really to December 2010. Right before Christmas we had two or three days of torrential rain. That brought a lot of flooding. To put it in perspective, most places in rainfall received 3 to 6 inches of rain. Even in the city. That was the last big one. That was a big impact, but something that was more comparable would be February 28th of last year would be the last time we had something comparable to what rain we have seen MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Now okay, and you spoke a bit about the rest of California, how they got rainfall in the mountains when they were hoping for snow. We heard reports from like up in LA that there were evacuations and there were some landslides. Where did the rain hit the heaviest of the state? ALEX TARDY: The heaviest in the state, it was quite evenly distributed but the North Bay of San Francisco has the heaviest rain there have been several inches of rain. It's actually still raining there as we speak. They also got some thunderstorms. Some good news is that the northern Sierra Nevada is getting snow now, pretty good snow, too. They are getting several feet of snow. In the LA area most of that was from the big burn scar, the fire we had last year. We are on the edge in Orange County we also have the Silverado burn scar and it has not moved yet but they've seen an additional inch of additional rain today. So the common report that I saw today was rockslides. San Bernardino Mountains and even down in San Diego a lot of rocksliding just because the ground is so dry and is not used to seeing any rain so things are starting to move. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Now you say in San Diego we are seeing maybe 1 to 2 inches of rain total from this storm. What does that do to boost the total rainfall for this year? ALEX TARDY: Well that's going to put us above normal, but since the season is so young, it's early December, the wet season is just beginning that does not speak a lot because if you have another four or five weeks of very little rain on into January that sets you back to where you came from. So the normal rainfall is a little over 10 inches. So we are just barely 1/10 of that you know, depending on how much we get this afternoon and this evening. But our long-term deficit is about a season and a half of precipitation. So we have a lot to make up for. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Is that true for all of California as well? ALEX TARDY: In general it is. There are some places even worse. Orange County, San Bernardino Mountains they are short two seasons of rainfall from just in the past four. So that's a lot of precipitation to make up for. To put a number on it, we are short, as of this rainfall now we are short about 14 inches of rain in the past four years just in San Diego. You could double that in the mountains. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: You mentioned that this was subtropical, that that's why there is so much moisture in the air here. And I think that most people felt that the temperatures were kind of mild even though it was so stormy out. Is that because of where the storm was coming from? ALEX TARDY: Yeah it's like we took a little vacation down to Hawaii because this tropical moisture is very noticeable in the mountains, too. The snow levels are incredibly high. Right now the snow levels are about 9000 feet in Southern California. So the skiers are not getting snow. A lot of times when we get snow here we assume the top of Mount Laguna will get snow if it gets cold enough. Not the case in this storm, too tropical, too much moisture which is kind of ironic because we are asking for moisture and we get too much. So we are not even able to get snow in the mountain ranges. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: The kind of moisture that we can save and use in the future. ALEX TARDY: Yeah, this is a beneficial storm. It will help us for the fire weather concern because we have been going after one after another Santa Ana wind events this fall. Luckily no real major fires, so this helps for the spring green up. But this is just a start. This is just a start in the right direction, but really the beginning of a lot more that we need. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: This in fact has been an exceptionally overall warm year. ALEX TARDY: It's an incredible year, looks like 2014will go down as the warmest on record. The records go back to 120+ years, it's pretty amazing there are very few exceptions in the state where 2014 has not been the warmest. If it is not the warmest, it is the second warmest. That includes high temperatures and low temperatures. Averaged altogether since last January. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: I remember we were talking earlier in the year, we were talking about the high temperatures overnight, how day after day, every day was a little bit above normal and the night temperatures just did not drop down to where they should be. ALEX TARDY: They did, and to put some perspective to it, October was about 4 1/2° above normal. So some of people will not notice it when it's one or 2° above, but when you start talking four or 5° above normal over the whole month they noticed it. Water usage was up in October, energy bills were up in October that somebody noticing it, but the bills and other things feel it as well. It's pretty extreme how warm it has been. The whole state is about 4 1/2° above normal for the whole year of 2014. Have not seen it that warm ever on record. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: I'm speaking with Alex Tardy on the National Weather Service. I'd like to welcome Tim Barnett disagree research physicist emeritus at Scripps and Tim, welcome. TIM BARNETT: Thank you. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: I know that Scripps has been tracking and trying to track the development of an El Niño for a long time now. Is this a storm the first indication that an El Niño has developed? TIM BARNETT: Well golly, no. There has been a lot going on that tells us that an El Niño is here, ----there is a certain number or temperature that has to be exceeded in the equatorial Pacific. This is a now a provided definition. Been around in a while I can tell you that there are other definitions for El Niño. And let's look at what comes along with it. First of all the equatorial region,, more than normal which is the case not by one or 2°C. There is an increased number of tropical storms in the eastern Pacific. And we sure had a bunch of those this year, in fact near record amounts of them. In fact, in one case we tied the all-time record for the number of hurricanes that we have seen. And some of those got up here. You know what happened to Cabo San Lucas basically wiped out there, but the thing that is most impressive about this that makes you think that the ocean is really going the wrong way is the change in--- I mean particularly the pelagic fishes, listen to cut off here in May, that has never happened before. Somebody caught a blue Marlin off of Catalina, that had not happened since 1931. It goes on and on like that, I mean species that we have never, never seen are here in great numbers. That's probably the best indicator of an El Niño that you can get. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Tim, I just wanted to interrupt you by saying that what we have heard at this point is what has developed is a mild El Niño. What does that mean for San Diego's weather? TIM BARNETT: Can't tell. That's been looked at and when you have a very strong El Niño that couples with large amounts of rain over the Southwest. But unfortunately when you get down to these mild or moderate El Niño events you can't really tell what the rainfall is going to be. It can go either way. Now, the one thing that gives hope there that is associated with this one, the ocean temperatures from the Gulf of Alaska down to the tip of Cabo and out 1000 miles, are warmer than normal by quite a bit. That heat in the ocean can be sucked up by the atmosphere and increase the storm potential and the rainfall. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: We could create our own little El Niño. TIM BARNETT: Keep our fingers crossed that that happens. What Alex is talking about happening there is the transport of water vapor from the equatorials stopping here. That happens during an El Niño. The one thing that has a lot of us bothered about the current event is that normally for an El Niño to be the kind of thing that we know and love we need the ocean and the atmosphere to cooperate. They need to get in sync with each other, in rhythm and that just has not happened so far. We still have got a month or two for it to happen but the kind of storms we've seen here, this one is very typical of what we would expect during the El Niño year. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Tim Barnett from Scripps, thank you so much for speaking with us. I really appreciate it. TIM BARNETT: All right. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Alex, given what Tim has said it's like still we do not really know. What do you think, do you think we should see more of these storms as we approach the holiday season I mean more than would be typical in San Diego? ALEX TARDY: Yeah this, Tim makes some good points very accurate. When you look at the El Niños in the past that were weak to moderate or mild like you described there's about eight or nine of them. And you can really pull your hair out because some of them produced way below the amount of persecution like 1976, 77. 2006, 2007. Then there's a handful that produced extremely wet winters like 1978. So you really have to throw those out, and I think what more what you are saying the Pacific Ocean efficiency of the storms what you get, going to be a little bit better and that's kind of what we were seeing in the storm right now. So the long-term projection is at least for Southern California we will see more storminess, not just more storminess than last year, but storminess that brings us on track to a normal, seasonable winter and potentially slightly above normal. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: And the snowpack? ALEX TARDY: The snowpack is so critical. Its indications are not for above normal snowpack in fact probably below normal snowpack throughout California. And that's why just rain is not alone to get us out of the drought. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Exactly because we still get a lot off a lot of water from the Northern California comes. ALEX TARDY: We do. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Lots of Californians will be traveling to other parts of the US during the holiday season, can expect the kinds of storms and snow fall that hit the east around Thanksgiving? ALEX TARDY: It's hard to say this far out from Christmas, but we are expecting active East Coast weather in general through this winter. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: What does that mean? ALEX TARDY: It means rain and snow storms like these coasters know all about and that is largely due to the track of the jetstream carving across the East Coast. We do not expect, you know how we started off the year really brutally cold across the upper Midwest. We don't expect that kind of winter even though we had a last year and it started after we expect active weather across the East Coast and active weather coming across Southern California into Texas. So if you are going through those areas there's increased chance you will see wet weather, and/or snow weather. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: In some ways probably. I've been speaking with meteorologist Alex Tardy with the National Weather Service. Thank you so much. ALEX TARDY: Thanks for having me on. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Coming up, a conversation with California historian Kevin Starr about the Centennial celebration in Balboa Park. It is 12:24 and you are listening to KPBS Midday Edition. This is KPBS Midday Edition. I am Maureen Cavanaugh. This weekend's December night celebration in Balboa Park will also serve as an opening ceremony. It is then that city leaders will officially kick off the 100th anniversary celebration of the 1915 Panama California exposition. Just how to mark the centennial has been a sticking point in San Diego Civic life for the last several years. The plan has morphed and changed. Now we have a pared down, locally-focused lineup of centennial events. The upheaval that accompanied the planning of the centennial was not that much different from the planning of the original Panama California exposition. Joining me to talk about the history of the event and what Balboa Park has come to mean to San Diego is historian and scholar Kevin Starr, author of a series of books on the history of California called Americans and the California Dream. Kevin, did you follow the ups and downs of the planning for the centennial event at Balboa Park? KEVIN STARR: Yes I did, from a distance. It was just as outside of San Diego from the point of view of San Francisco and Los Angeles. I live in San Francisco but I also teach at USC and it reminded me that it ran parallel to, San Francisco incidently has not, I don't think Los Angeles had any problem in this area because it's never really had an exposition, but San Francisco had the Panama Pacific international exposition of 15 and San Francisco is not necessarily ramping up in a big way etc. I think that if you make too much of these things, that they overload the consciousness of people today who are busy, whose sensibilities are being constantly informed by radio, television, motion pictures, news, etc. And if you look at these events, these 1915 events 100 years ago, if you take a kinder gentler approach and you say let's not try and make this as if it is going to change your life to pay attention to this, but let's take a look, we San Franciscans to what we were in 1915 and let's take a look, we San Diegans to this incredible exposition put on by a city of 49,000 people. And, why were they doing this and what were their ambitions? What were they including in the exposition in the architecture and the exhibits etc. What were they including that has proven over time to be part of the enduring out of San Diego. I think if you take that point of view it's a little easier. And emphasize public entertainment, too, because the San Diego, the Panama California exposition of 1915 had a remarkable public entertainment component to it, the Spreckels organ, Adam Schumann [inaudible] sang and different operatic and symphonic performances etc., popular music, Spanish dancing etc. And make it a fun thing rather than just another lesson. You know, I'm a professional librarian. And I've been librarian of San Francisco and I've been librarian of the state of California for 10 years and we in the library world are tutors and instructors and promoters of understanding but we also try and link it with the pleasure principle. And with self navigation. So I think that if you come out in a great big way and say we're going to have this and we are going to have that, you do not know particularly what the resources, the psychological resources, the time resources that people have for interest. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: I want to ask you more about the way that this has morphed, the conception of what this centennial at Balboa Park should be like. But first I want to go into a detail. You know, we have taken, some people have taken us to task for calling this the Balboa Park Centennial. They point out the park itself dates back to the 19th century. Is that right? KEVIN STARR: 1868. Can you imagine in terms of the impending urbanism of San Diego that a city or should we say a town of 3000 people in 1868 should set aside a 3000 acre park reserve. That is almost 1 acre per person. Because of this as a symbol of the city would be over time and also I think the great influence of Central Park. The creation of Central Park, New York in the 1850s also prompted San Francisco in 1855 to set aside Golden Gate Park Preserve. Although it did not really fully start to develop it in a big way until the late 1870s and really not fully until the 1890s. So that's an interesting point. That they meet there, it was not called Balboa Park, it was called City Park. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: There must have been more parks and people. KEVIN STARR: There was more parks, and the city sublet parts of it like for instance Kate Sessions had a magnificent nursery there from which she helped orchestrate the planting of this region with making it the heart the city. There was an orphanage there for a while etc. Then San Diego began to consolidate say its ambitions even further in the early 1890s with the arrival of the Panama Canal in 14, the opening of the canal, that the park began to yield a promise that it had to the people who gave it it's existence in 1868, 69. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: As you point out Kevin, the park did not receive its name, Balboa Park until the planning of the California exposition. KEVIN STARR: Of course Balboa is the discoverer of the Pacific from the point of view of Spain and said we San Diego now is going to be, through the canal in the Atlantic and Asian Pacific basin port of call. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: That is the thing, I think it's kind of hard to put together the idea of the celebration for the completion of the Panama Canal in San Diego. So that was the mindset. Now that the canal is open. KEVIN STARR: Absolutely. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: San Diego is the gateway to the Pacific. KEVIN STARR: Absolutely, and think what this meant, for instance in the gold rush. Even a Yankee clipper ship, I think the world record by one of them said was something like 167 days to come around the horn. In you went down the isthmus of Panama and had to go across by canoe and hiking etc. It was a terrible trip to get to California and in 1855 the railroad was put across the isthmus of Panama and the female population of American and European female population of California grew from 1% to 10%. You begin to have society develop. Think of what this would mean because the report, that they had been under the Spaniards since the 1540s, since Cabrillo, [Castagno] later on when you have linked the Atlantic and Pacific into one great pathway of oceanographic traffic. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: You say that San Diego had ambitions to become the Gibraltar of the Pacific. KEVIN STARR: Well Gibraltar, you have been to the Gibraltar, the beautiful enclave at the entrance to Spain, where, San Diego had an extraordinary, this is tied up with some of the things I'm going to be talking about. San Diego had an extraordinary time of conflict in 1910, 1911, 12, 13 because of the IWW conflict, the great dock strike of 12. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: A lot of union violence. KEVIN STARR: Left or right wing, violence,there was a sense that the Fair would say enough already, okay. Let's move forward and do a reconciled city. And well, what is our industrial base going to be? 1913, 1917 San Diego had the two mayoral elections called smokestacks versus geraniums and the smokestack candidate was wild. He won but he couldn't change San Diego. So he moved to Los Angeles. But by inviting the Navy and the Marine Corps, the San Diego Chamber of Commerce set aside in the early 20s $280,000 to purchase properties for the Navy. That's a lot of money. That's a lot of money today and it was an enormous amount of money in the early 20s. By bringing the Navy and Marine Corps and especially the Navy you bring in an industrialized port related activity that of course by definition is a little bit more stable. Notice Bertrand Grossman Goodhue who designed the magnificent California state building which is of course the one of the cores of Balboa Park or any park was also Goodhue in the early 20s who designed the Marine Corps barracks here. That is why the Marine Corps barracks look like a college campus because the man who designed the chapel at West Point designed that. The man who designed St. Thomas Episcopal church in New York, the chapels at Princeton with Ralph Adam [Scram] and chapels at the University of Chicago. So, this is expressing through architecture the aspirations of the community. In the beginning the Navy was saying we need an industrial base. Let's start with the Navy and we will go on from there. Of course within a few years you have development of the fishing fleet going off Ecuador, the tuna fleets etc.and only slightly at the year of 15, but growing very slowly, I mean, very much in the 20s, aviation. Remember the Spirit of St. Louis was manufactured here by [TE cloud nine]. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Linbergh Field KEVIN STARR: Tested here, exactly as among the half-dozen most iconic airplanes that was ever created. So San Diego then taking to this Gibraltar-like, then in World War II of course the major training for the Marine Corps. The Marine Air Force, the Navy etc. is centered here. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: So San Diego's ambitions were centered on the exposition in 1915 and it was rough going. They had a hard time putting it together, but they put it on, how did it go? KEVIN STARR: One of the things they have a hard time putting it together because San Francisco tried to [stop it] and tried to maneuver them and they could not get to William Howard Taft who was the president. They wanted the president to sign, I think what you call an executive order, we've heard about those lately, in effect saying the federal government will cooperate with this and designate sufficient, they could get it however. But when Woodrow Wilson won the presidency because he won with California in 1912 and because his support in Southern California was so strong it became different. Wilson then backed San Diego and you had both of the fairs were given federal sponsorship. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: It was a huge success. KEVIN STARR: A success for San Diego and the finances of it actually managed to show profits at the end of the first year, in 15 and it was reprised the next year as the California-Panama international exposition. And it was a rocky start because like you have startup costs for any company. They finished on the right side of the line in both years. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: I'm speaking with, Kevin Starr, California librarian emeritus and author of a series of books on history of California called Americans and the California Dream we are talking about the kickoff event for the celebration, the 100th anniversary celebration of the 1915 Panama California exposition”. Nina, Kevin it strikes me that San Diego seem to have a particularly strong feeling for Balboa Park. Is this different in any way from other parks in major cities in California? KEVIN STARR: It is intense. It is of course intense in New York City, to because of the density of New York City. But if you look at the topography of San Diego, of the arroyos and the neighborhoods they are separated from each other by rather dramatic geological structures. In other words, San Diego is not just laid out in one flat place where everybody is in the same place bring its laid out in many places and therefore the power of that part in those buildings, but the park especially is common ground, literally common ground for the city. I think that, plus they have kept the buildings were not torn down. They were rebuilt over. Time, different ones. You've got a lot of ongoing things there. You've got and make this an art museum, there. You have the San Diego historical Society. There is a botanical garden's. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: The Old Globe KEVIN STARR: The Globe and part that also was not necessarily part of the fair was the San Diego zoo which is arguably one of the two or three great zoos of the planet. So what came out of that in terms of public recreation. And this is something about San Diego in 1920s and 30s there was a love of the outdoors, tennis, golf, parks, horticulture. Etc. and I think I think that still continues. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: You know, back in 1950 was a way for San Diego to sort of present itself to the world as a major city. And that was one of the ideas in the development of this Centennial event. People wanted to have a world-class major international event showcasing San Diego to the world. It's not that, at this point because of many different reasons, but do you think San Diego now needs an event like that to put it on the world stage? KEVIN STARR: Not particularly. I just think San Diego has to be San Diego. I think, this kind of identity came into San Diego in a major major rush with World War II with the maturities on the belt of the Navy in the Pacific Fleet which of course would was headquartered here before Pearl Harbor, the accelerated San Diego into it and incidentally why the affair was revived in 1935 in the middle of this growth. And I think that the San Diego that has been developed since is developed this around this kind of DNA code that was encoded in the fair. And by the time of the Republican convention and 80s it was the sixth largest city in the US. But it's been a city that has also always said we are a city but we are not necessarily an anti-city but the smokestack versus a geraniums and debate is still very strong in the San Diego collective identity. The no cities have collective identities. Don't know exactly how they work. They work through communication, through public media, through the attitudes people have toward their own and architecture, landscapes. In San Diego there's tremendous pride but also a sense of let's not let this get out of control. And I think anything that tries to booster San Diego's Center that way there is a kind of renaissance, a slight caution. My friend Ali Neil Morgan always used to compare San Diego to Lisbon. In other words Lisbon Portugal my goodness one fifth of the world was sort of touched by the Portuguese in 15 and the 16th century. By Lisbon remained a kind of modest city and I think San Diego is not Las Vegas. And there is a, you've got to prove why you need to do this here. Of this exposition, the Centennial for it. And I've had been asked about it. I say stress the ongoing legacy of the fair. Stress and the zoo, stress the city planning. Stress the relationship to an [inaudible] stress the anticipation that the fair had on the importance of the Hispanic population in the American southwest of which San Diego and said it's going to be the capital of the culture. There, then you can bring in the past as a usable past, useful past. I think today there is too much [aiming at] people's consciousness that you cannot just come press a button and say that is this we have to all get excited about. It is very tough to do that people have enormous sources of entertainment. They are busy, they are working, there's not necessarily a recession now but it's not necessarily flush times. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: I think you've got a very nice framework for what is going to be a very important event for San Diego. Kevin Starr, thank you very much. KEVIN STARR: Thank you. I'm delighted to be here. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: This is KPBS midday edition. I am Maureen Cavanaugh. You may have seen the story last week, the rescuers of an elephant chained and abused for 50 years in India say tears flooded down the animals face when he was taken to safety. Not everyone believes the stories like that, but a growing consensus on animal behavior is leaning toward the theory that animals have complex emotional lives. And the kinds of emotions displayed can be depression, anxiety, self harm. In fact, the very traits that might be diagnosed in humans as mental illness. A new book takes its cue from the problems of one disturbed dog and examines what the emotional problems of animals can teach us about ourselves. I'd like to welcome my guest, Laurel Braitman is author of Animal Madness, how anxious dogs, compulsive parrots and elephants in recovery help us understand ourselves. Laurel, welcome to the program. LAUREL BRAITMAN: Thank you so much for having me. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: We hear a lot about animals and emotions some of it is wishful thinking on the part of humans. What kinds of emotions do behaviorists think animals experience? LAUREL BRAITMAN: Interestingly I think this is still a battleground in a lot of ways. So veterinary behaviorists actually, their whole purpose is to help people diagnosed emotional troubles and the resulting behavioral troubles in animals that wind up in their care. That ranges from mood disorders to canine compulsivity disorders. And I really have not spoken to a veterinary behaviorist who hasn't had an animal who feels like we do, which is particularly fear or debilitating anxiety and thankfully joy. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: You say your book was inspired by the problems your dog Oliver was having. He had a host of anxious, almost panicked behaviors and he kept jumping out of windows for one, tell us about that. LAUREL BRAITMAN: Sure, his most extreme act was in a panic we'd only left alone for a few hours and he pushed a window air-conditioning unit out of the way. He caught a hole through the window screen, somehow help the sash shop and jumped out of her apartment and we lived on the fourth floor of a brownstone in Washington DC so that was just a disaster. Luckily he survived. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: What other sorts of behaviors did he display? LAUREL BRAITMAN: My goodness, he'd eat things that were not food in anxiety and panic something and egg carton with no eggs, fabric. He tore through a couple of wooden doors, he dug up the wood floors in our apartment, he hallucinated at night, he would go after flies that he could not see. He could be a aggressive, he had a high prey drive at the dog park. All kinds of things. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Did you ever trace the cause of all this anxiety? LAUREL BRAITMAN: I grew up on a ranch, we had dogs, they were well-adjusted and I believed animals could have emotions but if you told me a dog like this would come into my life and he would have gotten diagnosed with the canine compulsive disorder and a mood disorder or separation anxiety I think I would have thought it was a bit too anthropomorphic. But you know, we change by often falling in love with someone who tests our preconceptions about the world and that's what happened to me. So, he wound up, yeah, with a prescription, with the veterinary behaviorist and ultimately we were not able to help him, but we did try everything. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: What have you learned about how animal anxieties like our own, and different from the kinds of things we experience? LAUREL BRAITMAN: It is really similar to our own, and in fact that is why antianxiety drugs work the same way in us as they do in many other species from cockatoos to hamsters, to all the apes and monkeys and dogs and cats. There are physiologically the drugs work really similarly in us and them. That said, anxiety probably feels different if you are a cockatoo or elephant or human. The truth is that anxiety probably feels different for me than it does for you. So it's really hard to make generalizations and I do not want to. I would never say that canine PTSD in a dog who served Iraq and Afghanistan is the same as a human veteran, but we can see things, we can tell they are not sleeping well, we see the personality has changed maybe they were a sweet dog before they deployed and came back aggressive or they developed specific fears of men with beards for example. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: There's been a lot of theories about animals through the centuries and other animals are capable of the kind of emotions we are talking about what did you find out about the history of this debate because it's gone back and forth and some really great thinkers have taken this on. LAUREL BRAITMAN: Yes and in that way nothing is new under the sun and I think we are in a new the day and age where we have come back to when Charles Darwin was arguing about that humans are another kind of animal different only in degree, not in kind. And I think this work really supports a lot of what he was arguing for in the 1880s. Now just writing a lot of letters and spending the weekend talking the Victorian naturalists who are putting dogs in MRI machines to figure out their emotional response. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Is there any way to figure out how their emotions are different from ours is a just experiential that we will never know or are there theories about that? LAUREL BRAITMAN: There are theories about that I know that is similar to learning about the emotional experience at least for me children--- what happens if someone [inaudible] and it really affects my dating life. You know, you can ask someone how they feel and it does not mean that they could tell you it does not even mean that they know how they feel and often times that is really what underlies psychotherapy is that it takes us where to find the words for what we feel. So it's not easy, but you can learn a lot through compassionate and long-term observation MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Long-term observation. Well you simply have had an awful lot of people talk to you about what they have observed in their animals acting strangely. Can you share with us some of the things that people have brought up to you about the kinds of problems that people have had with their pets. LAUREL BRAITMAN: Absolutely. That's been the best thing about the book tour. I wrote the book not to feel lonely and its [meeting] the people who have come out of the wood work to tell about their stories just that last week I went to me about her cat named Ping that she adopted from a shelter in chief and he was hiding in the closet anybody turned on a vacuum and he was really under weight, really skittish cat and she tried to put together the history and she found that he lived alone with another cat with an elderly man and one day the elderly man was vacuuming and he suffered a heart attack and he died and the two cats were left alone with this man's body for a week before anybody found him and the vacuum was running the entire time and what's amazing is that was I think two or three years ago and over the course of the last two or three years Ping has just become a really confident, affectionate cat and they can now vacuum with him in the house. They have to keep in in a safe space, but he is different. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: This was not brought about by the use of prescription medication at all. LAUREL BRAITMAN: No, this was just just and compassionate humans helping them. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: And yet there's a lot of prescription medications prescribed to animal suffering from various forms of exciting, right? LAUREL BRAITMAN: Absolutely more than anxiety, compulsivity, mood disorders all kinds of things. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: In your book you describe animals and they are all in various states of the captivity, either as performing animals or members of households they are all with human beings. Is it possible that we are driving these animals crazy? LAUREL BRAITMAN: Often but I would not say that domestic animals are in captivity at all. The natural environment for a dog or cat is to live with us and often times you see two dogs of the same household who have not been abused in any way shape or form and one will develop a phobia of blenders and the other one will not. So that's just a mystery of the animal condition and I do think there can be mental illness and certainly abnormal behavior and emotional distress in wild animals it's just harder for us to see because we don't have a normal baseline for them. So in order to understand when somebody's tipped into the territory of mental illness you have to know what their normal is. So it's hard to do with wildlife, but not impossible. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: When we are talking about domesticated animals in the past if this was a major problem, if humans were having a major problem with their pet tt might be one of the major reasons that pet was euthanized. Is that still something that happens on a regular basis? LAUREL BRAITMAN: Absolutely. The animals that are most likely to end up at a shelter are the animals with behavior problems. They are the cat that will stop spraying bedspread or the parrot that only attacks redheads and you happen to have a redheaded son. These are the creatures that get relinquished and often the creatures that have been adopted and returned again unfortunately. So the stakes for this stuff is really really high. A dog who cannot be helped with a terrible behavior problem is going to end up euthanized and it happens to millions of animals every year in this country. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: What is the thinking of veterinarians and people who actually work with enough a lot of animals are suffering from these problems question can most of these animals be helped? LAUREL BRAITMAN: Yeah, I mean I think so a lot of people when I started doing this asked me, animal mental illness, that is so depressing. Why would you want to do this and this has actually been the most joyful project I've ever worked on. It is so much fun. It turns out that we are so resilient and by we I mean a lot of pigs and cockatoos and beagles. It's really just incredible answer many of the things that help assess and so many things that help us help them everything from healing relations tips to sometimes a pharmaceutical, or more exercise, less time waiting for others, less screen and more time outside chasing after things. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: So this is the part of your, the more you talk about how animals and recovery are actually teaching us. Are they reinforcing things we already know, or are they also teaching us how to recovery happens? LAUREL BRAITMAN: Both. Actually I think probably what we know of as oftentimes therapy animals for people or things that we have observed helping animals that we are trying to help. So you know, a lot of them actually, the Internet foresees to go around wasted in these are such a joke every day I have something in my inbox about the orangutan and make sense of the donkey and elephant and they'll feel better but there's actually something to that which is amazing which is that that actually works. That your therapy animal does not even have to be your species. It could be another and humans can be therapy animals for other animals. Oxytocin levels raise in dogs and people when they are together when they like each other. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: What advice do you give to people who come to you and they have, because you must get it just like a doctor, people who say I'm having this terrible problem with my cat or my dog, what do you tell them to do? LAUREL BRAITMAN: You know this is the hardest part about being a historian I feel like I know enough to be dangerous but not enough to be really helpful. Mostly I give them a hug and tell them they are not a terrible person. Like most of us do so much, we go into debt, we put $10,000 on the credit card we really ransom advice to help the creatures close to us, and I would say sometimes that is not enough. It was not in my case. I have since gone on to help other creatures and see many other creatures recover, but I think most people need to give themselves a break. You know, you have tried really hard to help your guinea pig or your cat and they are still having a tough time. It's okay. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Is there anything too, from time to time we see TV shows or hear stories about dog whisperers or horse whispers. Are there people who have this special affinity can help animals that are going through problems? LAUREL BRAITMAN: Absolutely, yeah and if you came to me with a very specific species and the particular problem I would send you in the direction of a specialist. Certainly some people, particularly people who do not tend to be super verbal and who are really patient tend to do really well helping these other creatures. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: I want to let everyone know that Laurel Braitman will be signing and reading from her book animal madness. That is tomorrow night at 7:30 at Warwick's bookstore in La Jolla. Laurel, thank you so much. It has been fun. LAUREL BRAITMAN: Thank you so much for having me. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Be sure to watch KPBS evening edition and five. Again at 6:30 tonight on KPBS television and join us again tomorrow for discussions on Midday Edition right here on KPBS FM. I am Maureen Cavanaugh. Thank you for listening.