Singing mice? What could be cooler than that?! You can read the Smithsonian Magazine article that precipitated this podcast here. Also, for those who asked, this is what the new door looks like: It still needs to be primed and painted as does the frame and adjacent house, but I haven’t decided on the color yet. Luckily a lot of rain and other activities are giving me time to think about it. But I’m determined to get it done before the end of the summer.
Read more →How others perceive reality, regardless of species, has always been a subject that fascinates me. Equally fascinating, if frustrating, is the negative effect our society’s aversion to all but a relatively small collection of natural scents has on our relationship with animals. While most of us are willing to admit that certain flowers or their seeds (in the form of spices) possess scents that we enjoy, few if any animal scents fall into that category. When we speak of scents related to hormones or pheromones, those more often than not rate an even more negative response… …which is too
Read more →For the gazillioneth time, permit me to note that I’ve been blessed with some of the most amazing clients and patients anyone in my line of work could hope for. Because of this, I feel it keenly when owner and animal alike succumb to the negative effects of questionable beliefs, often those imposed on them by someone else. This in turn puts a negative self-fulfilling prophecy into motion that undermines the dog’s behavior and relationship with the owner. For me, that’s especially sad because it’s so avoidable. And worth meandering about…
Read more →I recorded this at the the end of April, but didn’t have time to edit it until the Friday, May 13th. Apparently my computers are superstitious because I encountered more than the usual cyber-crises doing this. If you wonder why the cat came in twice during this podcast but you never heard him go out, it’s because his second exit was deleted along with all the racket he and the dogs were making that caused me to evict him for a while. I didn’t want you to think that there are holes in this house that are big enough
Read more →Surely everyone who shares a home with an animal can recall a situation where the animal makes it easier for us to do what we want to do. For example, when it’s time to feed my dogs, they stay out of the way because they know I’ll get the food in the bowls and the bowls down on the floor faster if they do. I haven’t taught them to do that any more than I taught the cat to wait patiently for me to fill his bowl, either. They somehow figured out on their own that cooperation pays. Those
Read more →In this podcast I attempt to articulate–read “meander about”—the approach-avoidance conflict I have with studies of animal cognition. Sometimes I feel like the little boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes because my take on what these studies reveal about animal cognition is so different from that of many around me. I don’t question that the studies reveal that animals possess cognitive ability. But what they also reveal to me is that animals possess far more cognitive skill than the conclusions of these studies grant them.
Read more →This past winter I discovered that recording podcasts is the perfect activity for during power outages. My voice recorder is battery-powered, the woodstove kept me warm, and recording doesn’t require any light. But one unintended consequence of this winter’s multiple storms was that I wound up with a back-log of podcasts that I didn’t get a chance to edit. No sooner did the storm end than I’d be cleaning up the snow and doing the work I couldn’t do when the power was out. Now that the weather has calmed down a bit, I’m playing catch-up. But what better
Read more →Another phenomenon that goes along with the shift to a game view of reality is that it posses the potential to convert once comfortable human-animal relationships into adversarial ones when problems rise. The well-behaved pet is viewed as a team-player who follows the rules of the game. By extension,the animal who develops problems isn’t. That the animal’s behavior might be a legitimate, albeit unacceptable, response for this animal in this particular physical and mental environment gets lost is the shuffle.
Read more →Is there any place where spring begins the day the calendar says it does? It used to in my area, but now it arrives here earlier, about 2 weeks so. When I was editing this podcast, I realized that climate change has revealed yet another of those paradoxes in human behavior. It would seem that those the most remote from nature would be the least bothered by some of the extremes in weather that this has caused, and those most attuned to nature would be the most upset. But my experience has been the opposite: those who are most
Read more →I’ve meandered about the ways dogs make up games and also the playfulness of cats before. But this past winter Bamboo, aka Bam, raised this to an art form in his attempts to avoid succumbing to cabin fever during a very long winter in a very small house. Here are two pictures of Bam sitting in my office window two days apart. The first day it was sunny and balmy and he basked in the warmth. Forty-eight hours later, he watched large globs of snow create almost white-out conditions following a day of rain.
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