In my relentless pursuit of making mistakes myself so that you can avoid them, here are two recent examples of ways I've attempted to confuse my dogs. The first example relates to Willie charging through the door when we said "Willie, wait". He is usually very responsive to the cue "wait", and I couldn't figure out why he was barreling out of the house when we asked him to wait at the door. Both Jim and I began getting all primate-like and frustrated when Willie flew through our legs (or into them) after we asked him to stay still. Fortunately, I took a breath and thought it through, and realized it was me that was causing the problem. (Can you hear me sigh?) Years ago, when I had five dogs, I taught all the dogs to wait at the door when I said "Dogs, wait". Then I released each dog Read More
Archives for September 2018
Apple-icious
You know it's fall when good friends Jeff and Denise invite you to their annual cider-making celebration. It might be one of my favorite ways to spend a Saturday afternoon. (Jeff was my advisor in graduate school; I love that he lives near by and we are good friends.) First, you pick apples. Apples and apples and apples. Apples that have not been sprayed or treated in any way except to prune them in their early years, and then let nature take its course. They don't look like the apples you buy in the store; their skins are covered in blemishes and their size varies greatly, even from the same tree. Some are tiny, the size of walnuts. Some are huge and round and look, well, fat. The tiny, red ones are super sweet, with just the right amount of tang. The fat, green ones are richer, more Read More
Quiet, Please.
How much, and what kind of noises are your dogs subjected to? I say "subjected," because so much of the soundscape surrounding our dogs is negative. Between high pitched whines from electronics (some of which we can't hear ourselves), loud televisions or music, traffic noises (city), chain saws and tractors (country), groups of people laughing at parties, dish washers churning, there is a lot of noise out there. Noisy soundscapes have a cost--to us for sure, but also to our dogs. Here's a summary from an article by Basner et. al., 2014 about the effects of noise exposure on human health. "Observational and experimental studies have shown that noise exposure leads to annoyance, disturbs sleep and causes daytime sleepiness, affects patient outcomes and staff performance in hospitals, Read More
Muzzle Punches, Air Snaps and Tooth Clacking 2018
It being Labor Day as I write this, I'd rather not (labor). So I've searched the archives for some of the most popular posts and found a line of inquiry that sucked me into reading all the comments again, nine years later. It all started with a post about "Muzzle Punches, Air Snaps and Tooth Clacking" that I wrote in October of 2009. That post elicited 117 comments. Wow. The comments about this issue were so interesting that I wrote second piece that summarized people's guesses/beliefs about what the behaviors mean, and data from the wolf literature. Here's what I wrote nine years ago, with some minor editing: (That's a long time ago. 63 years ago in dogs years?) What have we learned since then? MUZZLES PUNCHES/POKES: As best I could, I categorized your responses about the Read More