Today began fairly typically for a pre-holiday day in off-the-beaten-track New Hampshire. I took the dogs out in the predawn hours, then listened to the news for as long as I could stomach it. Some days, though, I don’t get the news turned off soon enough, and the reports and rumors of wars, terrorist attacks, outbreaks of disease, economic ruin, and other real or fabricated human-created horrors that always seem to worsen this time of year make it difficult to focus my thoughts. “Is this any way to practice thanks-giving or the peace and good will of the holiday
Read more →Recently I had the opportunity to speak at the annual conference of the Association of Pet Dog Trainers and, in one of those fits of inspiration that occur far too seldom when I seek to end a presentation just so, I remembered Lao-tzu’s words about teachers: Good teachers are best when students barely know they exist Not so good when students always obey and acclaim them Worse when students despise them. Of good teachers, when their work is done and their aims fulfilled, The student will say, “I did this myself.” In the past I’ve paraphrased this profound sentiment
Read more →I confess. When it comes to comprehending what some consider fundamental behavioral terminology, I am impaired. As soon as people start throwing jargon around, my eyes glaze and I can feel my brain cells shutting down, one by one. True, I also experience this problem when it comes to medical terminology, particularly now that I’ve reached the age when micro-organisms and surgical techniques receive make-overs and new names to go with them on what seems like an almost daily basis. However, keeping up with animal behavioral jargon is much more challenging because those working in this area come from
Read more →A friend recently acquired three kittens and has been in awe of the animals’ playfulness ever since. Ethologist Paul Leyhausen once stated that the more animals need to learn, the more they need to play. For small wildcat kittens and members of other solitary species who must learn all they need to survive before weaning, that makes for a very playful early life indeed! But even though young animals of all species do spend more time playing than adults, adult animals play, too. For many years scientists missed this reality, and that probably explains why some owners (and those
Read more →To me one of the most enjoyable aspects of my work involves observing how animals normally interact with each other. And because cats and dogs are the most common domestic household pets, these supply a rich source of input. However, you don’t need to observe canine-feline interactions very long to realize that some, and possibly many, dogs and cats don’t subscribe to the antagonistic relationship described in the old saw “fighting like cats and dogs.” That raises the question of why some people wanted or may still want to believe this. Given the hypertext way my mind works, the
Read more →Because I spend a fair amount of time working with aggressive animals and their owners, I naturally pay a lot of attention to how the general public and the media respond to these events. Within western society, we tend to take a villain-victim approach to what we perceive as an attack by one animal on another member of the same species. Aside from the fact that this completely disregards the fact that animals normally may communicate with members of their own species with teeth and claws and that what we perceive as an attack may not be an attack
Read more →Recently I was reading a very well-researched study of human-animal interactions and couldn’t help noticing how often both researchers and those surveyed used the phrase “unconditional love” to describe a cherished quality of a companion animal. As surely anyone with any interest in companion animals knows, that phrase crops up in the mass media so frequently that most of us could write the articles or conduct the interviews ourselves: Interviewer: “And what is it about Ipswich that you like the most?” Owner: “It’s his unconditional love for me.” In the midst of all of this certainty, I found myself
Read more →Regardless of the specific feline qualities that endear a particular cat to a particular person, human-feline relationships can be relatively intense. And because the more intense the relationship, the greater the pet’s sense of loss when separated from that person, it’s important to understand why and how this occurs. In spite of the fact that many domestic cats can and do form quite complex social relationships with others, this doesn’t erase the fact that their physiology and behavior reflects the successful evolution of a small, solitary, nocturnal predator over thousands and thousands of years. Although we may choose to
Read more →A great deal has been written on the subject of pet loss as it affects any surviving humans or other pets, including by me. However, as several recent e-mails have reminded me, little is written about how to help a dog cope with the loss of an owner. Unfortunately, two factors—one canine and one human—may combine to create problems for these animals and make those problems difficult to resolve. On the canine front, if a person a dog perceives as leader of the human-canine pack departs and none of those remaining in the household share that same kind of
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Words of Wisdom for Animal-Lovers
January invariably spawns numerous commentaries about resolutions we should make to resolve every problem known to plague everyone, including animals. For pet-owners this, in turn, may generate a multitude of promises to correct those animal-related problems which we soon break when the demands of daily living take hold again. Rather than contribute to that guilt-producing sequence, this year I offer three quotations from those much wiser than I which I believe are of particular value to all who enjoy interacting with the nonhuman animals who comprise the overwhelming majority of the animal life on this planet. The first, from
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