I was recently reminded that my first national book, The Other End of the Leash, was published in June of 2002, ten years ago (thank you Lisa). Wow. Ten years. It feels like a long time, and it feels like the years have flown by. Time is like that. There's something about big blocks of time and anniversaries--10 years, 25 years--that helps us to step out of our busy lives and look at the big picture. This feels especially relevant to me now as I work on a memoir. I find myself asking what parts of the book still resonate most for me, and what aspects of the book most relate to what I want to say in the memoir. At the moment there are two things that stand out the most: how understanding the world as best we can from a dog's perspective enriches our relationship, and how dogs are such a Read More
Willie & Trisha Back to Work
Some wonderful things to report today. The first is that I had a restful and relaxing vacation. I saw lots of friends, gardened, cooked and got back to working sheep with Willie (more on that soon). I took an entire three weeks off, which felt terribly indulgent, but also desperately necessary. The last two years have included many wonderful things, but they've also included some major challenges, including Jim's snapped bicep, surgery and recovery, my badly smashed knee, a summer raising a puppy who was (and is) better off another home, the death of Jim's sister, moving his mother to Madison three weeks later, the out-of-the blue death a month later of Jim's brother, Willie's shoulder injury, surgery and year-long recovery, and a raft of my own health problems that I've been fighting in Read More
Best. News. Ever.
Today, it's all about the farm. I had a blog written about the effect of acoustic environments on us and our dogs, some new products available for us to use to calm our dogs, and some new results of "calming" music that Katie and I have seen with our dogs. And then I erased it all with one key stroke. I'm sure that has never happened to you.... So I'll save that topic for later (and promise to catch up in the next month or so on other topics I've promised you, like exercises to calm the sympathetic nervous system, and the methods of the clicker versus no-clicker study ). Right now I have to get home to the dogs and work on the talk that Karen London and I are giving at the Interdisciplinary Forum on Applied Animal Behavior next week in Phoenix. So here's the second half of the blog, Read More
Do Dogs Form “Real” Friendships?
I had an entirely different blog written and about to be posted, but there's a swirl of discussion going on right now about an article that came out in Time Magazine by Carl Zimmer about "friendships" in animals. He has lots of good information from researchers who argue that true friendships are formed in many social species, including horses, dolphins, and baboons. I was a tad irritated at suggestions that "we" (scientists) haven't accepted that friendships can be found in other animals until just recently..." look at the writings of Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal for example for exceptions to that... but in general it's a truly good article. But imagine my surprise when he writes that evidence of true friendships can not be found in dogs. He says: ".. most scientists think Read More
Missing the Sense, Scent of the Missing
Part of the fun of preparing for the seminar I did in Orlando was working on the canine olfaction section. The overall topic of the day was Canine Communication (often compared to primates like us), and most discussions in this vein emphasize visual communication. That's all well and good, I'm a visual signal groupie from way back, but I loved beginning the day talking about scent, and imagining what it would be like to be able to use one's nose like a dog. We all know, intellectually anyway, how important smell is to dogs, but because we tend to be so oblivious to it, it is hard for us to imagine (Example of our obliviousness: What's the common word used to described people who can't smell? Yup, there isn't one.) Hard to imagine what it's like to be a dog (okay, impossible), but here Read More
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