When I record and edit these podcasts, I often find myself fantasizing about what will happen in the future regarding this particular subject. When I thought about the changes being made, albeit sometimes grudgingly, in UK show rules to ensure the health of purebred dogs compared to what’s going on in the US, the following scenario popped into my head. In this fantasy, the AKC waits until the UK Kennel Club makes all the difficult choices such as eliminating physical features from show standards that may create problems for the animals and permitting breeders to breed animals from different
Read more →Near the top of my ever growing list of advantages of getting older is how much easier it is to admit I’m wrong. For those of you who have yet to see this quality in me, this podcast should convince you. Granted I probably don’t like being wrong any more than anyone else, but in a field like behavior it happens a lot for multiple reasons. One is because, while our knowledge of training has bubbled along nicely, our knowledge of domestic animal behavior has lagged. My guess is that this results from a semantic mix-up. In this country
Read more →Some people can go on and on about wine or cheese whereas I find cat pee an fascinating subject. No kidding. I returned home after a seminar on various urinary tract conditions in cats (and a few dogs) and was so wound up with new thoughts and ideas that they kept me awake that night. As far as I’m concerned, urine is the most energy-efficient calling card an animal possesses. Because of that, it doesn’t surprise me that animals, and especially more solitary animals like cats, experience urinary tract problems when they feel physically or mentally insecure in their
Read more →This podcast reflects some thoughts about parents, kids, and animals that have been wandering around in my brain in one form or another for years. In a way, that makes sense because so many companion animals belong to folks who have kids. What intrigued me though was the usual: how changes in ourselves and our society affect our perception of the role of companion animals play or should play in our own or our children’s lives.
Read more →Fortunately, this second of the outdoor recordings lacks the worst of the snaps, crackles and pops that showed up in the first one. Perhaps the wildlife figured out what I was doing and decided to cut this poor human some slack. 🙂 Relative to animals, we humans typically have taken the “If it looks like a duck” approach to animal identification. As we’ve become ever more remote from nature, for more of us it’s become a case of if looks like how we think a duck should look, that’s reason enough to call it a duck. A good example
Read more →Because the weather was so unseasonably hot and beautiful, I decided to record this podcast outdoors. The good news is that technically the result is a good example of habituation. The not so good news is that during part of this you’ll hear the drone of a small plane heading for the airport about 35 miles north of me, a sound so familiar to me that I didn’t hear it at all when I recorded this. You also might notice more Rice Krispies effects, those audio snaps, crackles, and pops caused by shifts in position or whatever. Like the drone
Read more →It seems like all of the world’s major religions recognize something comparable to Christianity’s Golden Rule. It reminds us that we humans, like other animals, learn by modeling. If we want another person to behave in a way we find nonthreatening and even enjoyable, we need to display that same behavior first. Needless to say, that doesn’t sit well with some of us some of the time and others most of the time. After all, it takes a lot less energy to tell someone to do as we say and not as we do. Given how reluctant we may
Read more →This podcast discusses one example of a type of communication that’s becoming disturbingly common in the animal-related arena: emotional blackmail. Those with products or services to sell try to convince us that purchasing these expresses love for our animals. And if we refuse, some even may try to make us feel guilty or irresponsible. However other forms of emotional blackmail such as the one discussed in this podcast are more insidious. These folks extract seemingly reasonable promises from us when we lack the time and sometimes knowledge to properly analyze their full meaning. When this occurs we don’t even
Read more →Even though it didn’t occur to me when I recorded this, I wonder if so many politicians succumb to sexual indiscretions because, like some animals, they haven’t been able to make the transition from competitor to leader either. Makes sense to me. 🙂
Read more →If some consider the unraveling the genome as the Holy Grail of genetics, it’s probably the discovery of genes associated with specific behaviors more so than those associated with any specific disease. Unfortunately why this is so may have more to do with imperfect human nature than any quest for knowledge.
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