I'll grant this is as much for me as it is for you all, but I imagine I'm not the only one who could use a good laugh around now. You may have seen this already, and you may have mixed feelings about putting animals in the place of humans . . . but, oh, oh, did I laugh at this video! Anyone know much about it? Meanwhile, enjoy! (I tried to upload the video itself, but the file is too big, so I'm stuck with just providing a link... (although on preview the video played directly, hope you can see it!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVwlMVYqMu4 It does bring up an interesting issue which we've been discussing in my UW class: that of putting animals in the place of humans for the sake of humor (or making ourselves feel superior?). I'm normally not a fan of such practices, it just Read More
Archives for March 2011
Helping Puppy Mill Dogs
This weekend I visited a wonderful woman doing rescue for small breeds, mostly bichons from puppy mills. I had somewhat randomly discovered that she lived close to me, and went to visit in hopes I could help out a bit. I also had a selfish motivation: as many of you know, Karen London and I are writing a booklet on adopting an adolescent or adult dog, and we are always looking for input from people in shelters and rescues. There were 4 or 5 dogs from puppy mills that were terrifically shy; so much so that they ran away from people, even after being there for a very long time. Obviously, this is a very common problem in dogs who grew up in almost total isolation, and was one of the challenges she was facing I hoped I could help with. We had one session, and it looked like it might be Read More
Do Dogs “know” how long we’ve been gone?
How many times have you heard that "dogs have no sense of time"? I've heard it and read it over and over and over again, and always wondered why anyone thought they knew it to be true. Or not. How would we know? I've been asked this question often, and always answered I simply didn't know, but that it seemed reasonable that they had some sense of time, even if it wasn't exactly like ours. So yeah for researchers Therese Rehn and Lindsay Keeling for doing a study, published in Applied Animal Behavior Science, that attempts to answer that question. ("The Effect of time left alone at home on dog welfare," Vol 129, 2011) In brief, they recorded the behavior of dogs left by their owners for 30 min, 2 hours and 4 hours, and found that if the dogs had been left alone for 2 or 4 hours they greeted Read More