A good friend of mine showed me a hysterical collection of dogs trying to get statues to play ball with them (thank you Adam!). Here's one of them:https://youtu.be/VEiX_6s-sJc?t=9 You don't have to work hard to find examples of dogs reacting to statues of people as if they were live humans. Here's another one of my favorites:</ifram Just google videos of dogs greeting statues for endless more entertainment.I find it all delightfully amusing, but there's an important lesson in it: Dogs pay attention to outlines, to silhouettes, as much as to any other visual cue. That's why many dogs bark at people with hats on, or big bulky back packs--I've always thought in a dog's mind it's like seeing characters in a sci-fi movie who are mostly human, but not. Read More

Full disclosure: I used to be a breedist. My family didn't believe that little dogs were really dogs at all. "Rug rats" they called them. And then, in my second or third week of seeing clients in 1988, a Toy Poodle trotted into my office and proved to me how wrong my family had been. This little dog was as smart as any dog I'd ever met, and won my heart and admiration within five minutes. He was a good teacher too, reminding me for the rest of my life that in terms of intelligence and trainability, size doesn't matter.I thought of that poodle when I read a recent study that asked whether larger dogs have a higher level of cognitive ability than smaller dogs. The study, done by Daniel Horschler et. al. at the Arizona Canine Cognition Center, found that larger dogs performed better in Read More

All "back on the farm" today, having fun with my camera this weekend:Maggie and I spent Thursday and Friday in heaven, learning learning learning, at a sheepdog clinic put on by one of my favorite sheepdog instructors, Scott Glen.  I didn't take many photographs but got lucky with this "money shot" of friend Donna's four-year old dog, Davy. It's the shot all of us want of our dogs, and really, really hard to get. Right time, right place. Lucky! And lucky me and Maggie to have learned so much; we came home, both of us, grinning like fools.My dear friend Meg is visiting this weekend, and her brilliant, artful photography has inspired me.  That and a plethora of blooming flowers in the garden and the prairies. And I'm so happy to have bees in the garden again.Last iris to Read More

This is a repost of an article I wrote in 2014 (July 7) about the motivation behind barking. Since it's been five years, and since barking plays such an important part of our experience with dogs, I thought it would be fun to repeat it. I've done some minor updating, but the post still focuses on the age old question Why Do Dogs Bark? Seems like the answer should be simple, right? But, it gets a bit complicated when you start to think it through, including the reminder that adult wolves rarely bark, adolescent wolves bark more often, and that barking is energetically expensive and therefore has a "cost".From July 7, 2014:Have you seen the stage play, Sylvia, in which a man brings a stray dog home from the park and adopts it? The dog is always played by a woman, who often barks at Read More

       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, as should we all, and is now doing X with consistency and dedication.Oh, wait, it's not going to be like that because I can't say that I'm now doing X with "consistency and dedication". But I can say I'm a little better at it than I've been in the past, and I'm trying to do better. And it does feel good.Solve for X? In my case it's making notes about my progress training Maggie to work sheep in a competitive trial context. I do take notes on how things are going, what I learned at a clinic, etc, and always Read More