Mia Speaks

Happy Halloween

Canine Good Citizen

Last week was a big one for Kasey.

On Wednesday, Kasey took his Canine Good Citizen test. He was a bit cautious with the examiner, but that was his only rough spot among the ten test items (sit/stay, down/stay, come, heel, accept a stranger in a friendly way, don't freak out when owner leaves the room, etc.), so he passed the test. It's kind of cool now to have letters after his name to validate his education.

We also started beginner's agility last Thursday. It was the first time that he has gotten to interact with the equipment, and we were curious to see how he would like it. Well, after seeing how he easily took to the jumps, and also to the tunnel and the dog walk after a little coaxing, we think that he'll love it and do well.

Since we brought this little dude home, we've been watching to see what his particular talents and favored activities would be (e.g., he'll fetch, but doesn't seem to love it). I believe, as does Patricia McConnell, that a dog's happiness depends upon whether he gets to spend time doing what he loves (whatever that is....agility, herding, chasing a ball, etc.), and not just upon pleasing his owner by performing arbitrary tasks. So, in the weeks to come, we'll see if agility keeps his boat afloat.

I hope if dogs ever take over the world, and they choose a king, they don't just go by size, because I bet there are some Chihuahuas with some good ideas.
- Jack Handey
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Obedience Debut

Well, Kasey got his big start in the... eh... amateur ranks today, with some achievement at a local Fun Match. He took third in Rally and second in Obedience. Ooooh, ribbons! Both were at beginner level (on leash), but hey, that's okay, it's a "tune up."

He was a little nervous, and his attention wandered when he was supposed to be maintaining a good heel, so we lost points there.

But then I think that we got some points back when he impressed the judge with his Elvis impersonation.

Urine Good Company

Well this is just great. Now I can't get dog pee out of my mind.

Anyway, it's no big news that dogs like to use their good scents in marking various locations with their urine and/or feces, sniff at the the locations marked by other dogs, greet new colleagues with a sniff of their anogenital regions (AGR), roll in wet odiferous matter and wear the fragrance into the house, etc. But humans just don't really know all the information that could be getting exchanged between dogs through scents (are they sniffing about us??), or how dogs actually choose the time and place for a pee or a sniff (smell art?).

Right now there's an interesting discussion happening on Trisha McConnell's blog concerning some new research on scent marking. It seems that one of the reasons they mark where they do could be because it can give other dogs a place to sniff them without intruding into their personal space to sniff their AGRs, particularly when they are entering a new area where other dogs are already gathered (thus avoiding being mobbed by multiple noses at once).

....or maybe it's just their way of sniff blogging.
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Hey, Nice Ecosystem!

So, we have this domestic dog species hanging around with humans since the Stone Age, and it theoretically descended from wolves, and it shows high intelligence and devotion. Wolves and dogs are also predatory and territorial species that show some capacity for aggression (though not as offensive as some humans, one could argue). In this context, I found an interesting National Geographic video documenting domestic dogs' key role in restoring ecological/economic harmony for wolves and ranchers in rural Spain. It's a beautiful story. Here's the brief video:



The earth trembled and a great rift appeared, separating the first man and woman from the rest of the animal kingdom. As the chasm grew deeper and wider, all the other creatures, afraid for their lives, returned to the forest - except for the dog, who after much consideration leapt the perilous rift to stay with the humans on the other side. His love for humanity was greater than his bond to other creatures, he explained, and he willingly forfeited his place in paradise to prove it.
- Native American folktale, quoted in The Lost History of the Canine Race by Mary E. Thurston
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Canine Heroism

Our friend and fellow blogger mouse pointed us to a video which shows a dog in Chile saving the life of another dog who had just been struck by a car on a busy highway. The video is difficult to watch, but it ends with the news anchor announcing that the injured dog survived (thanks to having been pulled to safety across heavy traffic by the fellow dog). You can view this amazing video here.

In my web surfing, I came across more videos showing dogs rescuing humans or other dogs. Of course, there are some videos that may have been staged, and others like the one above that are certainly genuine. Here's a video in which a dog saves a bullfighter from a bull (whatever you think of bullfighting - I don't like it at all - this small dog shows some big heroism):



I think that there are many more stories of animal heroism that get less play in the news compared to tragedies like the chimpanzee attack in Connecticut this week or the cases of dog attacks that occasionally get media attention. The amazing thing to me about the heroic incidents is that, in many cases, the animal never received specific training to perform such actions, but nevertheless risked his/her own safety for that of a fellow being. That's something that really must come from deep in the heart.

Sometimes when a man's alone, all you got is your dog.
- Mickey Rourke (saying this as he thanked all his dogs, living and dead, after winning the Golden Globe for Best Actor this year).
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Friday Play

It was another Friday off from work. Sasha, Kasey, and I enjoyed a day of play, and we all appreciated the sight of grass appearing from beneath the receding snow.



Another reason that I am glad about taking the day off was that it gave me an opportunity to phone a question in to Partricia McConnell, an ethologist specializing in dog behavior, and an author of several books about human/dog relationships. Dr. McConnell was interviewed by Susan Frank on "Wild About Pets." It's an interesting discussion for anyone who interacts with dogs, or for anyone who wonders what their dog really thinks about those affectionate hugs they get from humans. Go here to listen to the interview (and my brush with greatness).
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Watch This, Barney

Former French President Jacques Chirac was taken to the hospital this week after being attacked by Sumo the Poodle. The nature and extent of Mr. Chirac's injuries are not publicly known (Mr. Chirac's wife Bernadette would not reveal the anatomical location of the injuries), although it is reported that Mr. Chirac has been released from the hospital. Sumo is undergoing treatment with antidepressant medication. This is all true. Click here.

Plus je vois l'homme, plus j'aimie mon chien.
- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) dog lover, mathematician & philosopher
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First Dog

I've loved dogs since I was a little boy, when a skinny stray collie with matted hair walked into our village in search of care and comfort. We cleaned her up, fed her, and gave her a home. Her tri-color coat thickened and grew beautiful. We named her "Princess" - I think that my elder sister came up with the name - and Princess became a loving companion. She was generally very playful and easygoing, but we lived near a potato farm, and she would put on a badass display of let-me-tear-his-flesh-off whenever a farm worker would approach us as we took our walk past where the woods adjoined the farm. We wondered whether this reaction was a reflection of any traumatic experiences she may have had with people before she joined our family, as we never knew...never asked, really... who had been keeping her before she left her previous home to join ours. Maybe her previous people, maybe the farm workers, had abused her. Or maybe her defensive display was simply triggered automatically in a part of her primal dog brain which told her to guard us against the advances of unfamiliar grownups. Anyway, we kept her away from the farm workers, and she stayed with us for a few years until she developed some type of serious illness, and my parents decided that she should be put down. Of course, that decision was carried out over the tearful objections of my sister and me. Princess was a good dog who served, or tried to serve, an important function in our family.

Lately I've been reading some of the contemporary literature on the evolution, cognition, and behavior of the domestic dog. The way that ethologists think about dogs has been changing in interesting ways in recent years (see, for example, the work of Ádám Miklósi, whose textbook on the subject was given to me by my wife this past Christmas). The prevailing view among naturalists, from Darwin to the current generations, once held that domestic dogs could be of little interest to students of natural history, because their descent from wolves some tens of thousands of years ago theoretically occurred by an artificial, human-deliberated, unnatural process. According to the orthodox view, wolf and dog look and behave differently from each other because breeding them through artificial selection produced a domesticated variety of the wolf that is weaker, less intelligent, and more dependent. One is to imagine that the process began with humans capturing wolf pups from their dens during the Stone Age, and then breeding these domesticated wolves in a relatively sheltered environment, thus thwarting the mechanism by which natural selection would otherwise prevent unfit animals from spreading their genes through successive generations. In this view, the domestic dog is a weak and passive prisoner of human intentions, and her adaptation to human society is a byproduct of unnatural forces.

A less orthodox theory is gaining support in the field today. In this newer view, it is believed that wolves who were the early ancestors of today's dogs, who likely had already developed natural capacities for taking part in complex cooperative social systems, played an active role in connecting with humans by interacting with them in ways that promoted their survival (e.g., scavenging for food scraps at the outskirts of human villages, monitoring humans' actions to anticipate the best feeding opportunities, defending their human/canine turf against competing wolf packs, etc.). To the degree that human-friendliness and responsiveness to human cues are heritable traits in dogs (as current research findings suggest that they are), then natural selection would have favored increasingly domestic traits in dogs who lived near humans, and the domestic dog's natural history therefore would not depend upon humans raiding their dens and snatching their pups. The dog's evolutionary course is increasingly seen as having converged with ours, not having been derailed as claimed in the orthodox view. We can think of the origin of the dog even in spiritual terms, in a story of our ancestors forming a partnership in survival that endured through generations. It is a story that Princess reenacted when she walked into our neighborhood and became part of our family.