Dog walkers do not show up on my radar very often, living as I do on a farm in the country. Jim and I are the dog walkers, and we like it that way. However, I am also aware how very lucky we are to have the time and the logistics to be able to take our dogs on long walks. Certainly I've worked long hours--I've seen many a twelve-hour day in my time--but I always had the luxury of working close enough to run home to let out dogs or to bring them to my office. There have been some days, especially when I taught at UW-Madison, that I had to ask a friend to take my dogs out (thank you Harriet!), but those days were relatively rare. Nor have I seen a lot of clients as an animal behaviorist who came to me because they wanted to be a dog walker and wanted to know how to get started. But when a Read More
Why Do Dogs Roll in Disgusting Stuff?
Why do dogs roll in disgusting stuff? Ah, but of course, it's not disgusting to them, right? But oh, the things with which dogs anoint themselves are usually awful to us humans, even with our lousy sense of smell. Here's what I wrote about it in The Other End of the Leash: "If you haven't smelled a dog who's rolled in fox feces, then your life is slightly better than mine, because it's a horrible smell, skunky and repulsive, and it clings to dog fur like a burr." But why DO dogs roll in strong smelling scents? And why choose the scents that they do? Why not roll in mint or lavender or, for that matter, old food cartons left on the sidewalk? First, let's look together at the guesses about why dogs roll in the first place. One suggestion is that they aren't trying to get the scent on Read More
Can Your Dog “Smell” Your Emotions?
As often happens, a study on human behavior got me wondering about how it might relate to our relationship with our dogs. The study in question asked if emotions could be conveyed through body odor. The researchers asked 12 men with pads in their arm pits to watch videos that designed to elicit fear, happiness or a neutral reaction. After confirming that the videos did indeed influence the men's emotional states (the fearful videos induced "negative emotions" and happy ones elicited "positive emotions"), the pads taken from their arm pits were then presented to women. (Insert bad joke here about what emotion the smell of a man's arm pits would elicit automatically.) An analysis of the women's facial expressions found that the "happy sweat" induced more activity in facial muscles related Read More
I wish my dog knew. . .
I recently happened upon a news story that grabbed my heart, about Denver teacher, Kyle Schwartz, who asked her students to complete the sentence: "I wish my teacher knew...". Some of the answers are funny, and some will break your heart, like: "I wish my teacher knew sometimes my reading log isn't signed because my mom is not around a lot." The project was so compelling that it went viral on the Twitterverse, (#Iwishmyteacherknew). Which led to an outpouring of answers from students all around the country. ("... that the reason I talk and laugh a lot in class is because school is really the only place I can be happy.") This project reminds me of the book PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives, initiated by Frank Warren for a community art project. Frank received more Read More
Spring Photo Album
It's all from the farm today: Lambs! Finally! Lady Baa Baa had two healthy, little ewe lambs last week. Yearling Pepper had an all white, frisky male Saturday night. I thought of last week's post about the healing powers of oxytocin while I watched them frolic this morning. I wish everyone could start their day watching lambs play; if they could I suspect the world would be a better place. Here is Lady Baa Baa and her two adorsable lambs. (No, that's not a typo. There's something about the non-word "adors-able" that fits with baby lambs.) Was I not writing about the power of oxytocin just last week? Willie and Maggie got in a lot of sheep work this weekend. Here Willie stalks up to the flock to get them moving toward me. I love seeing the sheep with the sky as the background. On Read More
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