I’m on vacation now, wrote this earlier in the week, but here are some of the pictures I promised while I was gone:
Bee Balm in full bloom in front of the barn. Very 4th of July-ish.
Heavy hydrangea blossoms weighted down by the rain (yes, it’s back, just in time for my vacation, of course!)
Will and Hope playing on the front lawn (love Will’s relaxed open mouth expression):
Dena (Izzee's Mom) says
Seeing the pictures of Will and Hope together does my heart good. I get that yummy oxytocin surge.
JJ says
The puppy is looking so big!
Roo says
Your farm is absolutely beautiful. Roo would go nuts romping there. 🙂
Will seems to play so nice with baby Hope. Roo’s taking notes 😉
Catherine says
Beautiful pictures – love the bee balm against the red barn!
As a follow-up to the discussion of imitation, this NYT article describes how squirrels perform other cognitively complex behaviors, such as as deceptive hiding of nuts, that would suggest that one squirrel forms a notion of what another squirrel’s intent might be.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/science/06angi.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage
It briefly mentions that squirrels can learn from watching (i.e. imitation), but the pedestrian example could be based on observation that traffic stops when pedestrians walk, rather than imitation of the pedestrians. I’m curious to hear if you or your readers have more insight on whether these studies provide convincing evidence of imitation.
Shelly says
It’s funny how much you can see Hope has already grown. I’m glad to see that he and Will are getting along so swimmingly!
Frances says
Lovely to see Will so happy with Hope. There is nothing quite like well-mannered dogs playing joyfully together – sheer exuberance!
Melissa says
I used to do a little bit of wildlife rehab and it was fairly common knowledge that when an animal got hit by a car, or ran into a house, or was caught by a dog or cat, it was highly likely that if it was an adult it would have a huge parasite burden. Obviously in the wild everything has a parasite burden, but I guess with stress their immune system takes a dive and the parasites take advantage of it. So often you’ll get an animal stressed because it has just been ousted from its territory, for example, and then it will suddenly get a huge parasite burden, and that will create further problems, it will get skinny and other signs of immune suppression will appear like skin infections and sooner or later the weakened animal will get caught by a pet or hit by a car and end up in care. So it’s a bit like if you find an animal doing poorly because of parasites often it’s doing poorly for some other reason and the parasites are just taking advantage of the fact.
Having said that, a year ago we had a terrible flea infestation and nothing was killing those buggers. My old dog was getting hammered. We had a brief respite after she went and my older dog wasn’t so prone to them, but then we brought a puppy home and the poor thing was waking us up in the night because he was too itchy to sleep. Thank goodness at that point Comfortis was released in Australia and in 3 months we were flea free. Just needed a new killer.
Erik is pretty wily and has just recently started holding off from coming inside. I bring the older dog in and I say to Erik “Fine, stay out, then.” and shut the door and walk away. I take my older dog with me. It usually takes Erik about 10 seconds at most to start hammering on the door. He can’t bear being left out of things. So then I come back and refuse to open the door unless he downs for it, and holds the down until I release him. He actually got out of the yard one day and wouldn’t come back in, so I shut the gate and walked away and yep, he was hammering on the gate 5 seconds later. I could be doing something really fun without him in the yard!
He has also cottoned on to leaving the dog park and is sometimes hesitant to come back to get his leash on. We pay big when he does come back, and pay again after his leash is on. Usually doing some training with Kivi will bring him over. He can’t stand other dogs being trained and not him! We do lots of check-ins and recall practise at the park as well. Call him in, give him a treat, then tell him to go and play.