For the last two days, Willie has been acting abnormally. He regressed back to sleeping in the bathroom, instead of his dog bed beside my bed. He took his stuffed Kong in the morning to his usual place, but then wouldn't eat anything out of it. He came into the office this morning and lay down in the dark cavern underneath my desk. All atypical for him, at least in the last couple of years. There's something else that has changed these last 2 days, and that is the weather. I don't know where you are right now, but in the midwest we've been pummeled by a tsunami of wind. The wind gusts have been over 60 miles an hour, and the roar of it was so loud it kept me from sleeping on Monday night. I thought that the wind noise was probably a significant factor in Willie's change in behavior, Read More
What Do They Think We Do with all that Poop?
Seriously. I jokingly asked this question at the end of my talk at APDT (more on that in the next post), but although it's not exactly a burning question related to training and behavior, I still wonder about it. Honestly... what do they think? We collect it and object when they try to eat it. One of my dogs had no interest in coprophagia until he watched me collect dog feces after the snow melted in late winter. Could it be that they think we prize it in some way? Hoard it for ourselves? Or do they think about it at all? Anyone else wondered about this, or I am the only crazy one who thinks about such things? Ah, now we're back to the beginning of my talk... thinking about thinking. (Try defining what you're doing when you're thinking. Think about it about!) MEANWHILE, back on Read More
Off to Atlanta & APDT
Oh my, I overslept this morning, a rare event for me, and my plans of writing a substantial blog this morning are buried under the mess of blankets and covers that I threw aside when I finally woke up and looked at the clock. Holy moly. But I'll write from the road and keep you up on the first 2 days of APDT. (I am leaving Friday morning, so I won't be able to report on the rest.) I am looking forward to so much of the first two days: I can't wait to meet Vickie Stillwell and Kyra Sundance, and will attempt to forgive them for both being young, thin and drop-dead gorgeous. The symposium on canine cognition will be a highlight for me, and as soon as my part is over (my laptop is randomly choosing not to play my videos--if you see me licking my paws and stress yawning before my talk that's Read More
Do Dogs Inherently Understand Pointing Gestures?
I'm working on my Intro for APDT's symposium on Canine Cognition, and one of the hot topics right now is why dogs seem to be better able to interpret a pointing gesture than are wolves or chimps. Various research projects (see below) have shown that dogs go directly toward food hidden under one of two objects (both scented with food) if a person points toward it, while wolves and chimps do not. Some have speculated that at least 10,000 years of co-evolution (probably more) have resulted in a genetically-mediated ability of dogs to inherently understand human communicative gestures. I've always wondered about the results of these studies, because in my experience, you have to teach dogs to look in the direction you are pointing. When they are young, it seems to me that they pay no Read More
Juvenile-Onset Shyness & Juvenile-Onset Myopia
Earlier I mentioned a possible correlation between reactivity and vision problems, which got many of us thinking about the relationship between eyesight and reactive and/or fearful behavior in dogs. I had remembered that a researcher at UW-Madison did a study on eyesight in dogs, in which GSDs had an especially high rate of myopia, or nearsightedness. That got my attention, given how many reactive GSDs I'd been seeing in my office at the time. We just found the study, and here is a summary of it: (You can find the entire study in Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, Vol 33, No 8, July '92, by Murphy, Zadnik & Mannis). The researchers looked at the physical structure of the eye (no one asked the dogs if the marks on the wall were bones or dinner bowls!), to evaluate the Read More
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