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
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