I’ve traded in the mountains of Colorado for my valley in New Hampshire where the flowers managed to survive in my absence. This podcast marks my first attempt using the laptop and results were mixed. The quality isn’t as good and some technical difficulties ultimately drove me back to the desktop to finish editing it. The idea that we use words such as “healthy,” “normal,” to say nothing of “aggression,” “dominance” and that whole Pandora’s Box of behavioral terminology as if some universally accepted definition of these exists continues to fascinate me. It’s another one of those areas where
Read more →One of the most awkward situations for me is to find myself among a particular group of dog- or cat-lovers who assume I’m a kindred spirit. The distinguishing feature of these folks isn’t just that they’re head over heels in love with dogs or cats—a lot of people are, including me. What makes them stand out and, to me, sometimes painfully so, is that these dog-lovers are as rabidly dismissive of cats as the cat-lovers are of dogs. I find this troubling because I owe a great deal of what I know about canine behavior to my knowledge of
Read more →Every once in a while I get distracted by a phone call or something else while I’m proof-reading a blog. If I’m almost near the end of it, my distracted little brain may decide I’ve finished it. Said distracted little brain then deletes “proof-read podcast blog” from the mental do-list and replaces it with “upload blog”. That’s no problem if the last sentence has no errors. But sometimes it does.. Which is what happened this week. I’ve already corrected it on-line, but sometimes and maybe all the time—how such forwarding programs work is all a big mystery to me—these
Read more →Once years ago I was complaining to friend about how difficult it was to find clothes that fit me. What can I say? I’m not a matched set. Either some other female got my boobs or I got her butt. As so often happens in such conversations, the idea of buying clothes of the one-size-fits-all ilk came up. As most women faced with anatomical inequities well know, the response to this concept depends on where one is in one’s monthly cycle. If in a kindly mood, the idea that such clothing is possible is amusing to rolling-on-the-floor hilarious. On
Read more →Any couple who has expected a child knows how much busier life can become during the pregnancy. So many baby-related things to do! And if there’s a dog in household, chances are some of the items on that seemingly endless do-list are about baby-dog issues. In this podcast, I ponder how the same well-intentioned, but limited problem-oriented approach that can pave a hellish road when applied to other human-animal relationship concerns can come back to bite us when we apply it to those related to dogs and babies.
Read more →One of the things that happens when I record a podcast is that, as with my writing, it sometimes doesn’t go where I plan it should go when I start. This happens even when I have a list of points I want to cover. Usually I manage to get the first few points recorded, but then something happens and I meander off in some other direction. Perhaps aliens take over my mind. Or maybe that’s another perk of age: there are more mental trails that my notes open for my exploration. If I recall one I think is more
Read more →Ideas for my podcasts often come from strange places. The seed for this one was planted by several reports I read or heard about the ingenious way the Youth Safety Council of Vermont came up with to convince kids that driving while texting really isn’t a good idea. (Click here for a video of teens taking the texting-while-driving test, and here for more about the campaign.) This got me thinking about how much better some animals, and especially dogs, grasp what happens to human minds when we’re talking on the phone. And sometimes we can use our distracted mental
Read more →Here’s the second vignette to test your powers of analysis. Also, think about how your responses to this story mesh (or not) with those to the first one.
Read more →For the next two podcasts and maybe longer depending on the response to it, I’m going to try something different. But first some background. Over the years I’ve spent a fair amount of time pondering how to best help people make the kinds of changes necessary to improve their animals’ behavior and health. One of the things I’ve noticed is that, when we make up our minds very quickly regarding what’s going on, it’s more difficult to consider alternatives. Not only that, we’re more likely to take any suggestion that requires change very personally. When that’s the case, we
Read more →After my lackluster success with growing vegetables the past few years, this year I decided to focus on flowers, the sight and scent of which I consider food for the soul. Below is a picture of my first soul-food harvest that brightened my spirits in spite of the troubling event described in this podcast that also occurred in the garden that day.
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