There’s a difference between rescuing a dog from a hot vehicle and saving the animal’s life. Which are you prepared to do?
Read more →A few weeks ago I read an article in the local paper touting the value of home-grown food that incomprehensibly segued into a tirade about laws that prohibit the keeping of chickens and other farm animals in suburbia. That surprised me because keeping farm animals in more complex suburban and urban environments isn’t a good idea for multiple reasons. It’s not good for the farm animals and it’s not good for the area’s companion animals and wildlife, to say nothing of the people who live in those areas. But while the reasons for this seem pretty obvious to me
Read more →The nice folks at Veterinary Technicians Schools On-line recently published an article, Top 100 Websites for Pet Ownership Advice, that included my podcasts on the list. Because my approach to all things animal tends to be so different from that offered by other sources, such recognition always brightens my day.
Read more →After several months thoughts of Whittington the cat become part of my memory mosaic with memories of the good times replacing the difficult ones at the end. Concurrently, the awareness that there was a cat-sized vacuum in this house increased and about a month ago I put out the word that I was looking for a new cat. My request was pretty specific. I wanted a short-haired mackerel tabby male with enough presence to tolerate dogs and kids. I also wanted a barn kitten or one from roots that would suggest good hunting potential because the basement of this
Read more →The Animal Talk Naturally interview I did last week is available for your listening enjoyment here.
Read more →After disappearing months ago, the yellow alien made a surprise appearance during my New Dog Dawning Seminar here last weekend. I had taken the big puffy dog bed from upstairs down to the living room and placed it on the floor beside the chair where I would be sitting. Rather than get into the gory details here, Ollie and Bee were NOT on their good behavior which we know can be marginally good at best. And benign neglect periodically lost out to the cute factor or, when it wore thin, the pain-in-the-butt one. Anyhow, somewhere along the line, we
Read more →Last Tuesday Whit had his staples removed and I’m pleased to report that he did very well. In fact, his behavior was fantastic. For him, that is. As you recall, being anywhere outside his home turf appeals to Whit about as much as being put on a rack and tortured. When a diabolical poltergeist knocked his crate off the end of the exam table on which I was holding him and it hit with a crash that caused anyone of any species within earshot to jump, all he did was shoot out of my arms like a cannonball and
Read more →Originally I was going to post this after a related podcast, but some phone and other challenges really messed up my schedule so the two are out of order. It doesn’t matter contentwise, except that I make a reference in the podcast to posting more details about Whit at some later date. Yeah, I know: more evidence of how anal I am! Having once again proven that, let me begin by saying that Whit had his surgery last week and did extremely well. Even though neither picture is that great, the pre-opt Whit on the left and the post-op
Read more →Wednesday I saw a client at the clinic and while I was there I decided to make an appointment to take Whit in. My thinking was that I wanted the first appointment in the morning when we’d be less likely to have to wait and the waiting and exam rooms fresh and clean and about as free of possibly threatening other animal scents as a veterinary clinic possibly could be. Because the practice is a busy one, I also thought it could be several weeks before such an opening would be available. Wrong. As it turned out, a quirk
Read more →Whit and I are more or less in a holding pattern. I continue to leave Ollie’s crate out and open for him–Whit–to use in hopes of getting him more accustomed to it. He’s been using it more as the evenings get cooler so I plan to get him to the clinic with minimum trauma for some bloodwork soon. His appetite blows hot and cold, but when he’s not interested in eating his canned food, he wants to go out. And when he goes out, he hunts and eats most of the rodent he catches. I think I could make
Read more →In my last entry I mistakenly referred to BeeBee as Violet. Violet the Wonderdog was my first corgi. These are the only pictures I have of her on this computer, obviously taken when she was a puppy. It’s weird, isn’t it? You think the past is gone and then you make a subconscious typo and it all comes back. Fortunately, I have a lot of great memories and other furballs to keep me from getting maudlin.
Read more →The stars in my technological house have never been particularly spectacular, but lately they’ve apparently either been on strike or on vacation. It began a while back when my camera bit the dust and was followed with an upgrade on the blog software than messed up the player for the podcast, followed by another upgrade in the blog software. I’ve started recording the first mystery for free download and then my son, Dan, gave me his old camera which is hardly old. Toss in multiple storm-related power outages, and the result has been METO, i.e. Matron Electronic Technological Overload.
Read more →By the time I went downstairs after I’d written and posted my last message, Whit had eaten all the food in his dish. But then the next morning when I went down to the basement to clean his litterbox, I discovered that he’d vomited what looked like all he’d eaten. Because the food he’d vomited was the first I’d offered him that contained actual chunks of fish or meat (which I thought was a step up), I then made an emergency run to the store to pick up some more of the less expensive, store brand pudding stuff. I
Read more →This has been a week of ups and downs. Until noon today, I could have reported that Whit was doing well, showing sufficient enthusiasm for life that I felt encouraged. But then today he showed no interest in his lunch. It’s a miserable hot and humid day here and, had he skipped a meal when he was younger–or if any of the dogs skipped one now–it wouldn’t bother me. But now he’s OLD, and that changes everything. Part of me wants to race down to the basement and dig out the empty cat food cans from the recycling bucket
Read more →Yesterday I picked up an assortment of canned cat foods for Whit when I went grocery shopping. He’s always eaten dried food and was such an excellent rodent-hunter that I tended to think of what I offered him more as supplemental feeding. Even so, I always provided him with what I considered the best, although I admit that I’ve made adjustments several times over the years when new data about feline physiology made it clear a particular era’s best wasn’t as great as we thought it was. But when I went shopping yesterday, the cardinal rule of nutrition was
Read more →Below are links to the show I did with Drs Kim Bloomer and Jeannie Thomason on June 17th about human emotions as they affect animal health and behavior. But as always happens with these two great folks, the conversation strayed to other areas, too. For the written/streaming version, click here. For the mp3/download, click here.
Read more →One of the wonderful things about working with companion animals is that I get an intimate view of how behaviors change as the animals mature. The puppy and kitten toddlers we get at 8-12 weeks give way to adolescents, young then mature adults, and then senior citizens, with each life stage adding its own unique spin to the basic canine or feline behavioral repertoire. It’s unfortunate that as our society has become more remote from animals as animals, we no longer recognize these changes as normal. Quite the contrary, when these occur, and sometimes they may occur as suddenly
Read more →Do you ever get the feeling that your dog or cat is trying to drive you crazy? I’m not referring to the way you feel when your dog rolls in maggot-infested dead animal guts 5 minutes before your boss arrives, or when the cat pees on your $75 French bra just because it’s new. I’m referring to more subtle behavior of the things-that-go-bump-in-the-night variety that makes you think neurons are leaking out of your brain when you’re not looking. Such has been my experience for the past week or so. At first I attributed it to the fact that
Read more →Human and animal perception, particularly as it relates to the same event, always fascinates me and last night’s events gave me a good example of this. It’s been extremely hot and humid, the kind of heat and humidity that has me leaving key pieces of clothing at strategic locations so I can grab them and put them on as I race between the office and the front door if someone arrives unexpectedly. Because the nights are also exceptionally hot and humid, I dragged the large fan out of the closet, aimed it right at the bed, and turned it
Read more →The Baby in this post is my 2-year-old granddaughter, but for alliterative purposes, I co-opted the name her cousin Lauren calls her, Baby Geneva. BeeBee and I stayed with Geneva last weekend while my son and his wife took some much needed time off and I saw a side of Bee I’d never seen before. Even more interesting, I didn’t realize its full meaning until after we were home again. When we first arrived, Geneva was still at daycare so I wasn’t paying as much attention to what was going on as I should have been. Consequently, I didn’t
Read more →At the end of my last entry about BeeBee, I was sitting in my car sobbing, but I didn’t remain that way for long. For one thing, there were too many nice people coming to the clinic who would surely come over to ask me what was wrong. If they did, I knew I would immediately start blubbering along the lines of, “I just left my brain-damaged, deformed dog to be spayed and what if her too long upper jaw and too short and crooked lower one makes it impossible to pass the tube into her trachea and give
Read more →On the drive to the veterinary clinic, BeeBee looked out the window for while, or at least she faced it for a while, then shifted her focus to the air coming in the vents. She soon tired of that, too, and curled up on the passenger seat and went to sleep as if riding in the car was something she did every day. Because it wasn’t, I was impressed. When we got to the clinic, at first Bee wanted to take a closer look at the donkeys and the llama, but as we got closer to them she decided
Read more →Did you ever congratulate yourself for having all the bases covered only to watch everything go down the toilet in an instant? That’s what happened to me the last day of April. I got up that morning and made a note on my calendar to set up an appointment to get BeeBee spayed in May sometime after her first birthday. My thinking was that she’d be old enough that her growth plates should be well on their way toward closing if not already closed and her stitches would be out before I took her to my son’s to babysit
Read more →Once again I’m behind as spring clean-up and creating a new garden out of an area that consists mainly of sand and rocks takes up what little free time I have. Still, there have been some changes and BeeBee has been involved in most of them. Previously I wrote about putting a Gentle Leader on BeeBee in hopes of reducing the troubling edginess she displayed around the puppies. It worked well and I rarely saw her acting as if it bothered her in any way. Because of this, one evening when I was brushing her (dog grooming is a
Read more →Since my last post several weeks ago, a lot has happened to remind me how much the quality of our realities depends on how we process the sensory stimuli we receive from the world around us. It began when winter ended. I don’t mean “ended” as in “It gradually started to get warmer and the snow gradually melted.” I mean ended as in kaput, pffffttt! One day and it was winter and the next, the Big Thaw was on. Plow lines along the road, driveway, and front walk shrank so rapidly, I felt disoriented and even somewhat vulnerable. Until
Read more →Spring officially came last week and with it a lot of changes. Let me pause here to note that “spring” is a relative term. Last week that meant only one snow storm and one night with record-breaking low temperatures. However, in spite of the fact that the snow was very heavy and very wet, there was only about 3″ of it and I decided to let it melt rather than shovel it or have it plowed. Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to take the puppies out every day to get them used to the outdoors, to get some sun, and
Read more →Here is a link to a toy my son Dan got his animal-loving daughter for her birthday. But when Lauren started playing with it, he realized what it was about when she yanked on the dog’s tail and poop came out. (All he saw was Barbie and dog and thought, “Perfect gift.” That’s my boy!) As he was coping with his shock regarding this surprising turn of events, the obvious question occurred to him: “Where does the poop come from?” Then he discovered that the poop also serves as the treats that Barbie feeds the dog. Hmmmmm….. Being the
Read more →Although I always hope I’ll be able to take those professional-looking pet portraits, the reality is that little puppies are remarkably fast. Add that the battery in my camera crapped out and I was reduced to plugging my camera into a wall socket which greatly limited my puppy-chasing mobility, and I had no choice but to resort to what my son did under similar circumstances to keep Cori still long enough to photograph her: I popped them into a decorator wastebasket. The only disadvantage of this is that, as you can see, they did not see this as a
Read more →This has been such a complex week that there’s been no time to write. It appears that the alien is a done deal because it has remained under the lip of the kitchen cabinets for a solid week now. I keep hoping it will redirect its energies into the art of French cooking (including cosmic shopping for same), but this has yet to happen. Rita told me she saw a really big alien pet toy, but just the thought of such a thing boggles the mind. The puppies are now 8 weeks old and will go in for exams,
Read more →On Saturday, March 4th, I was gone from before 8 until almost 5 celebrating my granddaughter’s second birthday. While I was gone, Rita came over and let the big dogs out, fed the puppies, and continued bonding with her new addition, The Puppy Formerly Known as Peanut Buttercup. I mention this to make it clear that I did not abandon them and that, if anything, what all the dogs experience when Rita is here is comparable to a blissful interval in Puppy Disneyland. Now to set the scene for what happened when I got home. Earlier this week I
Read more →Last night just as I was dozing off, something set BeeBee off and she started moving restlessly around the bed and acting like she wanted to jump off. I automatically tried to determine if anything had changed but that was useless. It was dark so we were both probably equally visually so I doubt anything I couldn’t see set her off. And because she’s deaf, that ruled out any unusual sounds triggering her display. Although it’s always possible that she could have smelled something I couldn’t given her enhanced sense of small, there’s no way I’d know that. Under
Read more →Sunday: Once again I got behind because of the weather, so I’m going to take this opportunity while I’m waiting for the plow guy to come, and all the snow to fall off the roof in front of the house so I can a) go out the front door without getting clobbered and b) and clean it up. The alien has pretty much been demoted to the status of toy, albeit a special one. There was one incident this week in which Fric went on a playing jag downstairs and then started to race upstairs with it. Unfortunately, she
Read more →BeeBee is now a young lady, or at least an older adolescent (more on that “lady” part later) as she experiences her first heat. With that has come a lot of changes. Her slender frame has filled out although her head remains more fine-boned and fragile looking than the rest of her thanks to her wonky jaw and muzzle conformation. Her left front quadrant (left side of face, left shoulder, and left leg) are the most compromised. She still revs her head up into a circular motion to get food out of her bowl, but she has learned to
Read more →Since the last time I wrote, a lot has happened which is why I haven’t had time to write, including that biggest time-consumer of all, more snow. I fear I destroyed the scientific validity of this study when I picked up the yellow alien and moved him. In my defense, I did this in self-defense. Fric went through a spell when the alien went out and came in almost every time she did. But when it started snowing in earnest on Friday, she left it on one of the little landings up to the front steps. Seeing it there
Read more →Sometime between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, the alien moved from the center of the yard to near the walk and there it sat until this morning. It was close enough that BeeBee could sniff it by putting her front feet up on the snow bank next to it. Fric observed this, but did nothing beyond peeing a discreet distance from the alien, presumably to mark it as hers. Then this morning we had a first in a long time. I took the dogs with me when I went down to put a letter in the mailbox, with Fric
Read more →From Monday evening to Tuesday afternoon, the alien was quite active. Somewhere along the line, it moved from the rug in the living room by the couch to an area rug by the aquarium. The next time I noticed it, it was on another area rug by the chaise where Watson and the cat spend a lot of time. I never saw any of the pets near it so I have no idea how it got from one place to another. However, when I returned home mid-afternoon today, Fric grabbed it and took it outside. And there it still
Read more →I’m back to dating these again because I got way behind in posting the updates. Frica did the “Oh, my God, there’s the yellow alien!!!” routine yesterday morning, running toward the alien on the kitchen floor as if she’d been searching for it for years. She picked it up and started to take it upstairs, but the cat was on the back of the couch and took a swipe at her. When she opened her mouth to bark at the cat, she dropped the alien–isn’t there an Aesop’s fable about something like this?— and it bounced off the back
Read more →Since I last wrote, the yellow alien has confined its movements to the downstairs. The first move took it from by the front door to the part of the open concept area I use for a living room. Perhaps it was thinking about doing some entertaining. There it remained until I went to see clients yesterday morning. When I returned mid-afternoon, it was in the kitchen area, seeking a snack or a cup of tea perhaps. BeeBee was in her crate when I was gone so she was not responsible for this. Frica certainly could have been because she
Read more →When we last left the yellow alien, it was doing God-knows-what where while I was watching my driveway turn into a sheet of ice. Several hours later, it appeared in kitchen near the table, about 5′ from its previous location. At this point you might be tempted to think, “Um, OK. Bad weather, can’t go anywhere. Old bat living alone. Probably got into the cooking sherry.” Although I might have if I’d had some,all I have in the house are two half bottles of wine vinegar (one white, one red) and several bottles of Bach flower remedies that I
Read more →The snow has changed to rain and the ice is piling up on the trees so I’m going to try to get this off before I lose power. (How’s that for an optimistic view of my power company!?) Apparently Mars is not retrograde enough that it enhances alien communication because there have been some strange things going on around here the past 24 hours. The yellow alien remained downstairs and did not move overnight, but yesterday Fric carried a catnip mouse downstairs the same way she carried the alien. This, too, she treated as something other than a toy.
Read more →I have no idea what a retrograding Mars looks like apparently that’s what Mars is doing now, which might explain why the yellow alien is on the move again. When I went to bed last night, it was still on the floor downstairs. When I woke up this morning it was on the rug at the foot of my bed. Fric had to go out twice last night and she could have grabbed it after she came in and I never would have noticed because I don’t turn on any lights. Given that I was half asleep both times
Read more →Sometimes I think the animals in my life wait for me to make assumptions or come to conclusions just so they can refute them. No doubt part of their strategy to keep me humble. Saturday I was in the bedroom for some reason, Fric followed me in, jumped on the bed, grabbed the yellow alien and moved it back into the office again. This occurred after we had company, including one of the pups from her first litter. She dropped the alien near the top of the stairs where it remained until late afternoon. Shortly after she brought it
Read more →Someone once defined a specialist as a person who knows more and more about less and less. I think I can legitimately call myself an alien specialist because the only alien who is moving is the yellow one and it’s not moving very much. I think Frica moved it a few inches on the bed so it was next to her when she slept, but after hauling wood and shoveling ice and snow for a good chunk of the day, I can honestly say I don’t remember much after my head hit the pillow. This morning I moved the
Read more →I found the furry ring in the toy box so I assume Fric took it downstairs at some point and I just picked it up along with all the other toys and didn’t even notice. Had a “Be still my heart” moment this morning when I looked into the pen first thing and all four of the pups rushed (OK, waddled at quadrupedal rather than larval speed) to the edge of the box to greet me. Tomorrow I plan to dismantle the pen and put up the playpen so they’ll have more room to stagger around.
Read more →Perhaps after the cat scored such a decisive victory in the on-going Who’s the Smartest: Bi- or Quadrupeds? games, things have been very quiet on the animal front. Or rather everyone seems to be acting pretty normal for once. The yellow alien is still on my bed and the two purple ones are still in their respective places on the floor. Just as I wrote this, I realized that the furry ring is gone, but I’ve been so alien-focused I can’t say when it disappeared or where it went. With each passing day, Fric is becoming more playful, both
Read more →Yesterday I heard some noise in the back of the downstairs closet and immediately thought Frica was in there. Because she was usually done doing whatever it was she was doing before I got there, this time I decided to sneak up quietly so I would not disturb her. (Why I thought this would work I have no idea, but it seemed like something Jane Goodall would do.) I crept slowly up to the door with my eyes focused on the far corner of the floor where the nest of under-the-rug thingys is. Call me anthropomorphic, but you will
Read more →As northern New England continues what appears to be a move in the northern rainforest direction, we’ve had several snows that ended with sleet and freezing rain. The result is a hard crust on the snow capable of supporting all of the dogs, but not me. In the past, this hasn’t been an issue because the bulk of the plowed snow from the driveway and parking area forms a natural barrier in the front of the house, keeping the dogs away from the yard and slope beyond. Until yesterday. We’re currently having warm spell (in addition to the usual
Read more →a.k.a. It’s not over yet. Last night when I was doing the nightly pillow-moving routine before going to bed, Frica came in and did a little digging at the part of Watson’s bed under my bed. Then she noticed the yellow alien that was now on the floor next to purple one close to Watson’s bed. By then I had the two pillows on the bench at the end of my bed. She picked up the yellow alien and jumped onto the bench with it, stomped a few circles on the pillows to make a nest for herself, and
Read more →Today Frica has shown minimal interest in the yellow alien with the most being to rush into the bedroom when I stepped it and it let out a loud squeak. It was outside Watson’s bed on the floor and I didn’t see it when I was making my bed. Scared me half to death! Once she saw what it was, she turned around and left and has shown no desire to get in the room since. So, something has changed, but what? Were I a better scientist, I would have attempted to control the environment to narrow the possibilities,
Read more →The yellow alien was once again/still in Watson’s bed when I got up this morning. Later, when Fric came into the bedroom, she went over to his bed and dug at the bed around its perimeter thereby again creating a nest with the alien in the middle of it. Then she left the room and has shown no interest in it since. It makes me think yet again of phantom fetuses: Do some animals (or even people for that matter) have a mind or spirit awareness of their unborn young that may persist even if the physical fetus is
Read more →Later yesterday I had to go into the bedroom for something and when Fric followed me in, I decided to show her the alien in the dogged to see what she’d do. As soon as I picked it up, she became very alert and jumped up on the bed, I assume to get closer to it. When I put it back in the dogbed, she immediate jumped into the dogbed with it and dug the bed up in a circle around it, then jumped out of the bed and went back to the office. To me, this means that
Read more →To my knowledge there was zero alien movement since my last report. Perhaps this has something to do with the puppies eyes opening. It could also be because whatever the hormonal changes were that were fueling it have declined along with Frica’s vaginal discharge. Or it could be that she found the ultimate location for the yellow alien in Watson’s bed because he slept on it last night. Even if she wanted to move it, there’s no way she couldn’t have gotten him to move off it until he was good and ready. It’s rare that this happens until
Read more →Big news! Well, OK, big news if you don’t have a life: the puppies eyes are starting to open. I turned around to look in the box while the laptop was booting up and saw one little puppy eye squinting at me for a split second before it shut again. In the realm of on-going sagas, all the focus is now on the yellow alien with everyone else apparently forgotten, no longer needed, or placed where they need to be to do whatever they’re supposed to be doing so there’s no reason to move them. Yesterday afternoon at around
Read more →There was no activity in Alien Land yesterday until I opened my bedroom door in the late afternoon. After that, I noticed that Frica had moved the yellow alien to the rug in front of the pen. However, it was back in bed with me when I woke up around 11 because the little female pup was crying. I finally gave up trying to figure out what was bothering her and got up, at which point she went to sleep and remained quiet until I left for a veterinary meeting at about 7:15. When I came upstairs to do
Read more →…pretty quiet. Only the yellow one has moved in the past 18 hours. Frica brought it down when I came downstairs yesterday around noon to get ready to go see a client, and it was still on the rug when I got home at 4:30. As the puppies have fallen into a routine that requires less of her time, maybe her interest in it is waning. She did check out the closet both yesterday and again this morning, by-passing the food container both times in favor of the pile of sticky stuff in the corner, but I didn’t hear
Read more →Just for the heck of it, yesterday afternoon I decided to look in the downstairs closet for the yellow alien, even though its being there would have meant that Fric brought it down and put it there shortly after she took it up stairs because that was the only time I was gone. Sure enough, when I moved the dog food container and peered into the corner, I discovered she had tipped over the bag I put that sticky under-the-rug stuff in, and made a little nest from which peered a pair of alien eyes. The alien remained there
Read more →Last night when I came up to bed, the yellow alien was in the box with the puppies and the short purple one was still on the rug in front of the pen. This morning, the furry ring, the yellow alien, and the short purple one were all in bed with me. The pointy head purple one was under the bed, but Fric had moved it closer to Watson’s bed. When we went out first thing, Fric took the yellow alien with her and dropped it on the walk again. I brought it in and later she brought it
Read more →This past week BeeBee passed another milestone in that she’s able to jump off the bed, or rather from the bed to the old bench at the foot of it, to the floor. The steps are still beyond her and it never might happen. However, when I lift her right rear leg now, she automatically puts her right front paw on the next step and then pushes off my hand. If I were willing to do that every step, I wouldn’t have to carry her up any more. Coming down is a different story. She can get down the
Read more →I want to preface this discussion with a few comments about non-alien-related (at least I think so) events. The core of my house was built in the early to mid 1700s and includes an unusual stone structure in the basement that almost certainly predates the house. There has been a ghost dog living here since I moved in in ’88, but I’ve not been aware of his or her presence in the last 10 years. Last Sunday when Fric was just starting to experience contractions, I heard the distinct bark of a dog from the corner of the office.
Read more →Fric has made no attempt to reunite the pointy-headed alien on my bed with the other two. However, either by accidentally moving them when she’s nursing or deliberately repositioning them, the other two are now back in the corners in the box. The puppies are getting more vocal. Hope the aliens aren’t teaching them bad habits… Unless there’s food around, BeeBee has no desire to get too close and face the Wrath of Frica.
Read more →After a week with little or no sleep, I got home from a consultation yesterday, vaguely recall feeding the pets and myself and doing other chores, went to bed, and remember nothing else until I awoke 8 blessed hours later. As soon as I did, I knew that poor Fric certainly had to go out during that time and that I hadn’t heard her or responded to her attempts to awaken me as usual. So I got up knowing that I had a cleaning job ahead and that it was my own fault, but feeling sufficiently refreshed that I
Read more →Staggered out of bed while it was still dark and took the dogs out. Thought I heard a soft squeaking noise from Fric but was too tired to care. Came back upstairs and went to make my bed while the computer booted up. Yellow alien and a piece of fleece from an old slipper that I gave the dogs years ago was on my bed. No aliens in with puppies who were sleep and looking chubby. Twice Fric came downstairs while I was doing morning chores and tried to get into the cupboard. Son Dan emailed me that I
Read more →This morning I removed the two aliens from her box to see what Fric would do. After she had nursed her pups and they were sleeping, she got out of the box and retrieved the first of these, giving a strange cry when she did this that I’d never heard her use before. At some point when I was working, she retrieved the second without a sound. Because I haven’t gotten much sleep since the pups were born and I had a consultation scheduled for this evening, I decided to take a nap on the couch. The other two
Read more →OK, so I lied. This morning, it was still fairly dark when I looked into the maternity suite and saw the two aliens. At that time I assumed it was the grungy yellow one Fric took up yesterday and the purple one I saw her heaving up the stairs this morning When it got lighter and I checked the box again looked again, I saw that there were actually two purple aliens, both tucked in a corner as if watching over the pups. So, sometime during the night she removed the yellow alien–whom I have yet to find–and replaced
Read more →Last night somehow Frica dragged BeeBee’s stuffed porcupine toy up the stairs, but rightly decided it was way too big to fit in the box with her pups. This morning she dragged a grungy purple alien up and it’s now in the box with the grungy yellow one. May need to get a bigger box…
Read more →The following posts are from a series of emails I’ve been sharing with friends regarding the fascinating behavior displayed by my shitzu-terrier mix, Frica, following the birth of her pups. I’m also including this in the BeeBee Chronicles because, aside from Frica being 2 years older, Bee’s presence is the only thing that has changed since she had her first litter. At that time, I did have another dog, but she was an adult female, not a pup like BeeBee. The original emails included pictures, but the quality of them when uploaded to the blog was so poor that
Read more →I’ve gotten way behind thanks to the holidays and weather, but did want to update everyone on what BeeBee’s been up to. She continues to grow longer and remains very svelte. When I carry her up and down the stairs, sometimes she drapes over my arm like Feron, the cat belonging to the Little Red-Haired Girl (I think) in the “Peanuts” comic strip. In a way, it’s easier to carry her that way than when she’s more upright and liable to swing her head around at any time. Carrying such a dog multiple times a day is also a good
Read more →As I discovered when we had our first major snowstorm, something quite unintended. To be sure, BeeBee loved romping in the snow once I’d cleared an area for her and Frica to play in. I also enjoyed the fact that the snow was deep enough that I didn’t have to worry about them going anywhere but where I’d shoveled because the deep snow acted like a natural fence. But above and beyond that, BeeBee enhanced my snow-shoveling experience for a quite unrelated reason: carrying her up and down the stairs for the past three months has increased my arm
Read more →Since I got BeeBee, I’ve been looking for something that would enable me to readily see her in limited light or darkness. There were two BeeBee-related challenges to this project. The first is that she’s so low to the ground that it couldn’t be anything of any size that dangled from her collar. The second is that she’s now getting a corgi ruff that could hide a smaller light source. As luck would have it, someone sent me an email about some dog-related event. The event didn’t particularly interest me, but I immediately zeroed in on a notice about
Read more →In addition to allowing her to compensate splendidly for her deafness and visual difference, BeeBee also uses her nose like a 5th appendage. Because of her pronounced overbite, she can stick her nose into narrower places than a dog of similar size and conformation with a normal jaw. This enables her, for example, to get her nose into the tiny space between the wood rack and wall. But much to her consternation, that’s all that fits there. I can always tell when her nose locates something tantalizing that she can’t grab or lick up with her lower jaw or
Read more →I swear, every day BeeBee gets longer and sometimes it takes a heroic effort not to worry about what that means for both of us. When she’s standing still, anyone with a basic knowledge of physics would recognize that the span between her front and back legs is too great. Were she an bridge, a engineer would immediately shout, “For heaven’s sake, put a support in the middle before the whole thing collapses!” And, indeed, I’ve had fleeting thoughts of strapping a roller-skate to her mid-section as a preventive measure. Realistically, though, that’s not an option, any more than
Read more →BeeBee has taken to barking–a loud, shrill bark–for no apparent reason that I can discern. When hearing dogs do this, I assume they’re reacting to some sound I can’t hear. This raises the question: what is she barking at? Accepting that I have no idea and that the bark is very annoying, including to the other pets, I’ve devised a hand and body language signal that means “quiet.” The instant I used it the first time, though, a funny thing happened. It hit me that BeeBee had created a koan for me. Surely expecting a deaf dog to obey
Read more →I’m a big fan of Oliver Sacks and when I was watching Fric and BeeBee tear around the yard, I couldn’t help but think of his book, A Leg to Stand On. In it he describes how people who have lost function of a limb may use it normally if placed in conditions that cause them to forget that they can’t do so. When BeeBee walks slowly her gait is half-way between the come-hither woozy swing of an inebriated street-walker and a dog who really has to go but doesn’t want to go just yet. There’s no doubt she
Read more →This morning as part of my morning ritual I draped myself upside down on my exercise ball on my yoga mat next to the woodstove with my head touching the floor and my eyes closed. Frica and BeeBee were doing their usual post-breakfast carousing while Watson napped on the dog couch and Whitman, the cat, tried to convince me to let him out. Normally I would have let Whit out before I started my yoga routine, but it’s cold and rainy and I knew what would happen when I opened the door for him. He would stand there peering
Read more →Are there times you look at your pet and think you don’t know anything about animal behavior? Well, click here and read about this study and I bet you’ll find yourself thinking, “Gee, I knew that! “
Read more →In the past ten years, there’s been an increase in the numbers and sources of street dogs being adopted by Americans as pets. In a moment of fancy, I found myself thinking about what might go through these dogs’ minds relative to the human species when they make this transition. I imagined myself a young street dog living by my wits in a culture that avoids or seeks to harm me because I could carry rabies or other micro-organisms (now including bird flu) that might harm them or their children. If these people address me at all, it’s in
Read more →I recently was introduced to Billy Collins’s poetry and, naturally, was attracted to that related to animals in some way. Among these, his poems about dogs particularly caught my attention because they captured the true essence of the human-canine bond. This isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy the many poems that romanticize the subject. I find the latter a pleasant diversion when the real world of human-animal interactions threatens to overwhelm me. And yet… Collins’s dog-related poetry isn’t nearly so predictable. Nor is it always comforting. What it is, though, is real. One poem written in the voice
Read more →Permit me to engage in a bit of pre-holiday Grinchness in response to yet another of those news articles about people who let their dogs run loose, then sue others for the consequences of their own irresponsible behavior. These owners routinely remind us that these beloved animals were like their children and thus possessed value far above and beyond the value of the animal him/herself. I have no problem with that kind of thinking up to a point. For sure, every one of my pets is worth far more to me than I paid for them, and even more
Read more →As I was putting together the information for the telecourse on history-taking, I had a flashback to my veterinary education years ago. At that time, a fair amount of time was spent on anamnesis. Never heard of it? Well, I bet you’ve heard of one of its opposite’s forms: amnesia. Whereas amnesia refers to forgetting, anamnesia refers to remembering. Although getting a comprehensive history before establishing a diagnosis and formulating any treatment would seem the obvious way to go, two human factors conspire against it. The first is that much of animal behavioral and veterinary medical education is still
Read more →I don’t know what topic described in this article fascinates me more: that dogs have been trained to locate right whale scat in the middle of the ocean to help scientists learn more about these animals, or the wealth of information that scat provides. Granted it didn’t come as a surprise that whale scat smells, but I had no idea that even the smallest bits of it could attract the attention of trained sniffing dogs a nautical mile away. Not only that, these dogs must work fast because, in addition to stinking, right whale scat sinks in less than
Read more →Here’s an interesting article about a course being offered by the Harvard Extension School called The Cognitive Dog: Savant or Slacker. What I found intriguing about this is that the course’s creator, Bruce Blumberg, works in animation and began studying his dogs in an attempt to understand their behavior. As a result, students gain the insights of someone who has objectively observed the way dogs behave in real-life situations. Compare this to the view of dogs we gain from observing a movie in which dogs have been trained to do what people want them to do in specific situations.
Read more →This is another one of those articles that demonstrates the Faustian bargain that sometimes (many times?) underlies the proposed salvation of working dog breeds. In this case, Chinese conservationist Wong How Man scours the mountains of Tibet seeking the sturdy and highly aggressive mastiffs used by nomads to guard their herds in the harsh and dangerous environment. However, doing so costs money and promoting his quest worldwide to gain funding naturally attracts dog-lovers. Unfortunately, the more affluent and naive among see Tibetan mastiffs as a perfect image pet, i.e., one which communicates that person’s wealth to others. Whether the
Read more →Click here for more evidence illustrating the elegance underlying normal animal behavior. This article is about a mathematician who mathematically analyzed his dog’s path to retrieve thrown sticks. I’m passing it along because of both its bond and behavioral elements. Among the bond ones, we see a man who is enchanted by his dog’s perfectly doglike behavior and seeks to translate these into the language of his profession. People who see a shared human-animal experience in terms of what it means to the animal as well as themselves are becoming increasing rare in our society. In a tribute to balanced
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