Search Results: Away To Me

So I don’t bury the lead, here’s where I’m going today: Why does the concept that dogs can get angry make some people angry? I was reminded of that when I was looking something up in For the Love of a Dog (I often forget where I wrote what . . .) and ran into…

  This week is all about the Nippersink or Swim Sheepdog Trial, outside of Lake Geneva, WI. It was our first competition of the year, and given that training hadn’t been going well, I didn’t have much in the way of expectations. But it turned out well, and most importantly, Maggie and Skip appeared to…

A dear friend (thank you Kathy!) sent me an autographed copy of a wonderful book, The Great Animal Orchestra, by Bernie Krause. Subtitled Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places, the book is a “. . . travelogue of sound, based on a lifetime of study, (and) will leave you hearing–and seeing–nature…

Skip had surgery last Friday to remove his internal testicle (unilaterally cryptorchid), because of its higher probability of causing testicular cancer. (This issue… neutering or the removal of one testicle, is a huge one, and controversial at that. I started to delve into it as part of today’s post, but decided to wait for that…

                                (Excuse me, there’s a growth on your head. Is it dangerous?) Recently I read an article in Bark Magazine titled “8 Things We Do That Really Confuse Our Dogs.” Written by Melissa Starling and Paul McGreevy, (and originally published in The Conversation), the authors lists several points to which I say Hear Hear! (And…

The title of this week’s post is from Mary Oliver’s perfect question: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Here’s one answer: Become a Size 4, develop washboard abs, win the National Sheepdog Trials, cook perfect dinners that are perfectly healthy, rescue 1oo homeless dogs, and write a…

Those are the words of Dogen Zenji, a Zen master, quoted in one of my favorite books, Zen Miracles by Brenda Shoshanna. I repeat them here, because I think they have the power to ease life’s journey for all of us. The message is simple, but profound. Of course you, and everyone around you are…

I’m not sure Maggie could be any clearer about an exuberant Basenji puppy who has come to visit. Captions for her facial expression welcome!   Nothing like the roil of the holidays, a global pandemic and a country in turmoil to get a person thinking about emotions. You know, those powerful internal forces that many…

I’ve been looking forward to receiving my copy of Tim Lewis’s new book, The Biology of Dogs: From Gonads Through Guts to Ganglia for a few weeks now, given all the buzz it has generated. And wow. I have not been disappointed. Lewis is a professor of biology at the University of St. Thomas (MN),…

Looking for some good news? Well here it is: Dr. Karen London’s new book, Treat Everyone Like a Dog, is out, and it’s fantastic. Here’s what Ken Ramirez says about it–“My only complaint: I wish I had written it!” When Ken says that, it’s time to pay attention. Here’s from the Foreward that I was…

    How many times have you said your dog’s name, and nothing else, when you wanted her to come, or sit, or stop jumping up, or . . . ? It seems to be universal, this tendency to say a dog’s name, and then assume they know what we want them to do without any…

I thought I’d share some videos and photos this week. First, here is Maggie and I practicing driving last week for the season’s first sheepdog trial. I’m standing on the left, out of sight, and have sent Maggie to pick up sheep in a corner of a friend’s field. She does a beautiful “lift” (getting…

On July 6th, 2020, Dr. Chris Zink, a sports medicine veterinary specialist and a person I greatly admire, wrote a piece titled “Stop Taking Your Dog for a Walk.” You can imagine that got my attention, since I had recently written a post about the importance of, uh, taking your dog for a walk. However,…

  Have you ever had a dog that you loved, but didn’t like? If you have, you’re not alone. Last week I asked readers what was on their mind and what they’d like to talk about. In response, loyal reader HFR wrote “Having a dog you love but not like.” That comment opened a flood…

Introducing dogs can be great fun. There’s nothing like watching two dogs meet and begin playing to soften your heart and brighten your day. However, as we all know, that’s not always how it goes. Many dogs are uncomfortable when greeting an unfamiliar dog, including, as it turns out, our new guy, Skip. He grew…

Dogs can find places where bones were buried 2,700 years ago, even when the bones aren’t there anymore. You might want to read that again, because it’s astounding. One of the highlights of my month was interviewing Cat Warren about this discovery, highlighted in her recent article in the New York Times, “When Cadaver Dogs…

Zazie Todd, the author of Wag, The Science of Making Your Dog Happy, has already made many contributions to the world of animal behavior and dog training. She has her own blog (which I never miss), Companion Animal Psychology, and a column in Psychology Today, “Fellow Creatures“. One of the things I like about her…

  If you’ve been home more often than not because of Covid Safe at Home, this is a good time to ensure that your dog doesn’t end up with Separation Anxiety (SA) when you go back to work. I’m concerned, as are many of my colleagues, that there is going to be a surge in…

Just photographs today, in honor of the Easter weekend, spring and the insanity of our last few days. So, it’s all MEANWHILE, back on the farm: I’ll get right to the insanity part (as if we all needed more in our lives). Skip was running with a visiting dog, and came back to me on…

So many good questions. About how to socialize puppies. About whether to go to dog parks. So few good answers. But here’s a perspective that I hope is helpful: Risk management. It’s all about risk management. FOR PUPPIES what are the risks if you have a puppy and can’t follow the usual guidelines for socializing…

    I always have the same reactions after seeing Ken Ramirez speak or watching him train. One: He is an astoundingly good animal trainer, possibly the best I’ve ever seen. Two: I myself am, by comparison, completely incompetent. Three: I can’t wait to go home and train everything. Or anything. Right away. Because I…

Dog Parks. No controversy there, right, about the good, the bad and the ugly of them? However, the pros and cons of dog parks are usually discussed inside the dog world, not in a national news outlet like the New York Times. But the Times jumped into the fray, with an article provocatively titled The…

Hi. I’m Skip. Tall Two-Leg Female asked me to introduce myself. My name is Skip, and I was born in Ireland. I’ll be three years old soon. I am handsome. I very am strong and powerful, so please ignore all those strange sounds that Two-Legs make about “congenital heart malformations” and the fact that I…

Today I’m reposting an article I wrote almost ten years ago to the day, (January, 2010) with a few additions and revisions. I find it is as relevant today as it was then. I’ll love hearing your comments now as much as I did then. Clients often tell me that their rescue dog must have…

This topic is making me yawn. Literally. I’m doing it as I type this. Not because it’s boring, but because yawning is contagious in a large percentage of people (If one person yawned, then 45-60% of the people observing it yawned themselves, according to one study). You don’t even have to see someone yawn to…

This is a tough one to write. As regular readers know, I primarily got Hope as a playmate for Willie, my turned-around crazy dog who took three years of intense work to deal with his pathological fear-based aggression to other dogs, his episodes of all-out rage, his extreme sound sensitivity, his dysfunctional gut, etc etc…

Nothing like the end of a year and the beginning of a new one to cause us to do some accounting–of things accomplished, and things desired for the future. This morning I was doing a different kind of accounting, looking at book sales as much out of curiosity as anything else, and discovered that the…

I’m still reveling in a holiday break. Seeing friends, working Maggie, learning about writing fiction, cooking, eating . . . Even organized my massive collection of recipes: I also have file as big as your arm of “recipes that I should try sometime.” There are so many that I’d have to do little but cook…

A top handler said, after Maggie and I had had a rough run at a sheepdog trial last month, “You’re in good company, this is hardest thing I’ve ever done”. Bless them for their compassion. I’ve probably heard that ten times this summer, from people who in their other lives are accomplished professionals who work…

The author Clive Wynne sums up his book’s thesis in its title: Dog is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You. He argues, compellingly, that dogs aren’t special because of their intelligence, but because of their social bond to us, which after extensive research, he is happy to call “love”. One might say that…

Rain. Rain. Rain. Mud. Rain. Mud. Rain. Mud. You get the idea. It is so wet here in southern Wisconsin that it feels like we are living in a petri dish, designed to grow every plant disease known to man. Granted, it’s not like the monsoon rains I remember from coastal Alaska, but then, that…

Years ago, I was in the Scotland at a reception kicking off a conference on animal welfare. I was introduced to the group by my host as an “American Ethologist.” There was a smattering of welcoming applause in greeting, and then a kindly-looking gentleman approached me, asked if he could get me a glass of…

It’s been a busy weekend at Redstart Farm. The weather was cold, cold and windy, then rainy and windy, then just plain cold this morning at one below. But the snow melted enough so that it’s not too deep to work Will on sheep, so Friday, Saturday and Sunday Will and I got to work…

Monday’s question (6/3/19), about what we can tell about a dog from a photo, had a fantastic response from you. So grateful! (Also true on Facebook, (199 comments at the moment!) Most people thought that the dog looked somewhat anxious, worried or unsure, but the comments varied tremendously from relaxed, about to bolt, or worried…

        Oh dear. I fear that this is going to be one of the “self-help” pieces in which the author begins by talking about how bad she is at doing something (we’ll call it X), and then tells you why it’s so important to do it. It might end with the author seeing the light,…

This is, in part, a repost of one of the very first blogs I wrote, from August of 2008. (Almost 11 years ago? Wow.) I am posting it again for several reasons–we have a lot of new readers; it’s always fun for me to see if I still agree with what I wrote in years…

Jim and I left last week on a trip, long planned, to play for a few days in Chicago with friends.  Who knew it would be such good therapy, in part because good friend and dynamite animal trainer Laura Monaco Torelli arranged for us to get a behind the scenes tour at the Shedd Aquarium.…

  I am out of town this week, meeting with the good people at Dogwise in Wenatchee, WA. So I’m reprinting a post from 2010, which has me grinning like a fool because 1) It’s fun for me to read about Willie’s early driving lessons nine years ago, and 2) I’m using similar techniques with…

It’s about 5 AM. Haven’t slept much, neither has my husband Jim. It’s the morning of his mother’s funeral service and there’s a brutal snow storm going on outside. We don’t know if one son and daughter-in-law will make it from California, last we heard they were stranded in the Dallas airport. Jim forgot his…

Last week I listed my “non-resolutions,” not wanting to call them New Year’s Resolutions because so many fail within weeks. (U.S. News reports that 80% fail by early February.)     But I was on the Larry Meiller Show last week, (you can listen in the archive files) and found myself thinking about how the…

Your comments have been so interesting about the ‘fair’ and/or “jealous” issue that I thought I’d respond in another post for everyone to read. I’ve included some of your comments, because they add so richly to the discussion. First off, I agree with many who’ve commented that we need to be very cautious about making…

What’s in your dog’s repertoire? We all know the standard cues we use with our dogs–Sit, Stay, Lie Down, Come. (Some of our dogs actually do too.) But cruising through old blogs led me to this post from 2012 about “non-traditional” cues that some of us use. I was gobsmacked at how many responses it…

No flooding at the farm thankfully, but our dear community, the tiny towns of Black Earth and Mazomanie are still coping with the effects of 11-15 inches of rain in a 12 hour period. Here’s the bridge going west from Black Earth toward Mazo (photo from WSJ). The milk truck in the background had to…

Oh my, I wish you could have been at the Animal Behavior Society Conference, just held in Milwaukee, WI. The “Applied Track” and “Public Day” were awesome. I’ll be writing posts about it for many weeks to come. (Next year it will be in Chicago, IL. Be there or be square. More on that in…

  Whew. Paws crossed, it looks like the worst is over. It’s not quite two weeks after surgery, and Willie, Jim and I are starting to imagine normal life again. It’ll be awhile still, but Willie’s incision finally has healed enough that we no longer feel a need to watch him, literally, every second. We…

For those of you without grey hair, the index cards on the right are how we organized information back in the dark ages. (Also known as The 80’s.) I found hundreds of them this weekend while cleaning out a closet, kept from the research I did for my dissertation on the effect of acoustic structure…

I spend a great deal of time thinking about food. I wake up and think, “What’s for dinner?” This isn’t totally crazy, because Jim and I have much of our food stored away in a freezer the size of a live cow, and it needs to be defrosted before it is cooked (the food, not…

I’ve heard it said that New Year’s Resolutions are To Do Lists for the first week in January. Yup, we all know the statistics about the unsuccessful nature of New Year’s resolutions. With that in mind, and added to what I’ve learned by reading my private journals for the last 30 years, (lots of gratitude…

(Warning: This is not a happy holiday tale. I write it only because it is about an important issue, and something I’ve been involved in for almost two years. I wish more than I can say that I didn’t feel a need to tell you this story.) On January 22nd, 2016, Frannie and Gary were…

I suspect I have been classically conditioned from years of school to relentlessly read in fall. Oh yeah, I also love to read. There’s that. This weekend I read How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog) by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut. I highly recommend it, with the following caution: The book…