Sunday Morn

This morning, we had oatmeal and vanilla ice cream for breakfast. Raven went through the same loud ritual in her crate and was so far last in line to get fed that the other family members were running outside before I got to her. The louder she gets, the longer it takes me to get her meal to her. This time, I put a stool in front of her crate, opened the door, and sat on the stool with her bowl of food. I put her on a sit stay in the crate and there she sat, quietly. OK, sobbing a bit, but fairly quiet for Raven standards. Drool was hanging off her canines and I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the little twit, BUT I didn’t let that interfere with our conditioning progress. I told her what a good girl she was and we sat together for a good 15 seconds, then I let her eat.

OK, I finally got a moment to revisit the progress on my high jump after that. First thing that happened was I pulled out a couple panels and as they were aligned together between a foot of space against the fence, it seems that that made a fine environment for WASPS to build their nests there. At least one wasp, and she was busily working on a new nest when I pulled the things out.

Uh uh uh! I told her there was no way that she could do that, and I asked her to leave. Then I went to hose off that nest from my high jump panel. She followed me across the yard and was on the ground hanging on the grass blades drinking water while I watered the panel. I hope she doesn’t pick that thing up and put it back on that panel. I’ll not leave them in that space again, but it’s a darn shame because that was a perfect spot to store them. The wasps used to build nests in the travelers palms, which are now gone, so I suppose this is my comeuppance for taking away their nesting places. I know they built them there because one year, I reached in to pull one of the palms forward so I could cut its dying leaf off, and boink! I got stung, but good!

I took all the posts off the ground for the frame of the high jump.  I hosed them off then I checked out the directions. It says to put a hole 7.5″ off the post for the first board. No way! When you put the post into the T that will hold it up, if the hole is at 7.5″, then the first board will be off the ground by 10 inches! AKC regulations say first board from ground to top should be at 8 inches. I know. I just checked their pdf file here. The pole does not go into the T leaving a 1/2-inch of space to the ground. It leaves more inches. Now that I figured that out, I have to figure out how to drill an even hole on one side of the 1-1/2″ post through the other. It’s too hot outside to do any figuring now, though.

So instead the FDSP and I are inside chilling out. A few of the more serious Kong eating members are quietly working on theirs in crates. Lilith and Raven. I gave a little one to Baby, and she’s in a room alone. Bet she hasn’t done much with it. She’s not into working hard for her food.  No Queen Mother is. And Bouchard has one in a crate, and I’m not sure he’s liking being crated with a frozen Kong. He likes his Kongs full of thawed stuff. But the frozen parts were meant to keep the youngsters and hypers mentally stimulated with working on destuffing, so they use some brain cells while I’m at work. When I come home, a bit tired at the end of the day, they are all ready to start their days otherwise. Woohoo!

Eek!

Evolution and the Ethics and Empathy of Dogs

While stuffing Kongs yesterday, one of the NPR shows I listened to was Weekend America. There is a segment called “Good News, Bad News, No News,” where the announcer reads a story and three journalists on the panel comment if they think the story is worthy of news by giving it one of the three labels. The show this week, August 23, 2008, had a story about how dogs have learned ethical behavior from humans. A team of reasearchers in Budaphest made this discovery back in 2000 or 2003! There should be a fourth category to this game – old news! Of course, the panel poo-pooed the idea, being they are probably fearful that a dog could eventually if not already hold higher ethics than the press itself. I already see a great decrease in human empathy as I have matured from one decade to the next. My dogs are much more empathetic than many people I run into in this area of the world. Call me jaded.

I searched on the Internet for some information at the root of this discovery. Below are a couple of sources I found. This is very interesting. Luigi, for one, oftentimes looks at me when he is in a bind with one of his toys, or if his Kong is on the counter out of reach. Or he’ll bark to call me in from another room, then I will ask him “What’s wrong,” and he’ll look at the problem, and bark to tell me he needs help fixing it.

ALMOST HUMAN
Has Evolution Taught Our Dogs New Tricks?

LONDON (Reuters)—Thousands of years of joint evolution have made man’s best friend into one of the family, an article in the journal New Scientist said on Wednesday [1 March 2000]. Research even indicates that dogs could empathize with the emotions of people who were sad or ill. Research carried out by scientists in Budapest indicates that dogs develop bonds with their owners as children do with their parents, the journal said. “What we found is that just as babies display a variety of levels of attachment towards their parents, dogs also show different levels of attachment to their owner,” Adam Miklosi of the Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest told Reuters. A study called the “strange situation test” demonstrates that babies are happy to explore a new environment as long as their mother is nearby but become anxious if she leaves. Miklosi found the same behavior in dogs. In 1997, researchers in the United States used DNA techniques to estimate that dogs may have been domesticated as long as 135,000 years ago—previously scientists had thought dogs became domesticated only 14,000 years ago. Thousands of years of co-existence have influenced dogs to become dependent on humans, Miklosi said in the New Scientist article. “The stronger the attachment between a dog and its owner . . . the more likely the pet was to behave in a socially dependent way, relinquishing its powers of independent thought and action,” the New Scientist said. Selective breeding of dogs over time has produced animals that form strong bonds and are predisposed to learn and obey rules, New Scientist said. “The dog’s natural environment is the human family or other human social settings,” the head of the Budapest team, Vilmos Cysani, said in the magazine article. Prolonged exposure to humans has also made dogs more responsive to human gestures than other animals which are purportedly more “intelligent” such as chimpanzees, the journal said. For instance, dogs are even better than chimpanzees at interpreting gestural clues and seem to understand what a human means when he points somewhere. Chimpanzees cannot, Miklosi said, though he pointed out long exposure could change that. More controversially, Cysani said his team’s research indicates dogs could empathize with the emotions of people who were sad or ill. He even goes so far as to compare canine bonding with human love, New Scientist said.

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How Did He Learn to Speak Volumes With a Look?

By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
As any poodle, spaniel or mutt owner knows, dogs have an uncanny ability to read human body language, whether it’s following a finger pointing the way to an errant tennis ball or spotting a glance that signals an imminent trip to the park.

But animal behavior experts have debated for years how much of this dogged perceptiveness is inborn and how much is learned by being raised around humans. New research, however, indicates that the capacity to communicate with humans silently through gestures and glances has become an inborn talent as a result of the thousands of years that dogs have lived, worked and played with people.

“They don’t speak like we do. But there is communication,” said Adam Miklosi of Eotvos University in Budapest.

Miklosi is among researchers around the world who have been working to gain a better understanding of the talents displayed by man’s best friend. Most recently, Miklosi and his colleagues conducted a unique experiment to try to tease out exactly how much of the capacity to interpret humans’ subtle signals is instinctive.

“People usually assume that dogs got more stupid because humans provided everything. All they have to do is lie back and enjoy life,” Miklosi said. “What we think is that dogs went through a re-evolution that started from some sort of wolflike animals. . . . They acquired skills that make them adaptive to the human environment. They interact with humans. They learn from humans.”

To test his ideas, Miklosi and his colleagues designed an experiment comparing dogs with their closest relatives — wolves. They took 13 wolf pups from their mothers when they were just four or five days old and raised them in human homes just like puppies. As adults, the wolves received intensive contact with their human caretakers, who literally carried the animals with them wherever they went.

Previous studies had shown that adult dogs were better than adult wolves at reading human body language. But it was unclear how much of that was inborn and how much dogs learned growing up around humans. This experiment was aimed at clarifying that point.

“The wolves got more human contact than the ordinary dogs got from their owners,” Miklosi said in a telephone interview. “They were really thrown into the human environment.”

The researchers then trained the wolves and various breeds of dogs to get a piece of meat by pulling on a string. After the animals learned how to get the meat, the researchers attached the string so that no matter how hard the animals pulled they could not get the meat.

The wolves just continued to pull on the string in frustration. But the dogs quickly stopped pulling when the string did not move and turned to look at the faces of the humans, the researchers reported in the April 29 issue of the journal Current Biology.

“The dogs gave up much earlier. They were, very quickly, looking at the humans, the owners, looking at their faces,” Miklosi said. “That is what is interesting. That never happened with the wolves. They just kept pulling. But the dogs, what they did was basically look at the owners. If you observe this as a human, you would describe it as an asking-for-help gesture.”

The experiment shows that “the dogs have adapted to use this channel” of communication, Miklosi said. “This has provided the opportunity to communicate with us. And the wolves have not,” he said.

“The dogs have learned our language, to some extent. So we don’t need to learn dog language. They can use our channels of communication, like vision,” Miklosi said. “You can point for a dog and communicate with it. You can point for a wolf, but it won’t understand what you are doing.”

Brian Hare of Harvard University, who previously conducted a similar experiment that showed dogs were superior to chimps and wolves at reading human gestures, said the results show that “dogs really understand that humans are their partners in life. They can elicit their help and use them as a kind of tool.”

“Wolves don’t know that. They keep trying to solve it on their own. It’s something that’s programmed into their genes,” Hare said. Hare is planning a follow-up experiment to try to determine why dogs are so much better at reading human cues.

“It could be that because there was selection for dogs that are smart — dogs that can read human cues and figure out what they want,” Hare said. “Those were the ones that survived and passed their genes on.”

But another possibility is that dogs’ ability is a byproduct of domestication. Hare tells the story of foxes that were domesticated in Siberia 50 years ago. Over the generations, the foxes developed physical changes, including floppy ears, curly tails, different colorings and smaller teeth and jaws.

The human caretakers of the foxes “weren’t trying to create any of those changes. They were just trying to get friendly foxes. But when they bred them together they got these changes as byproducts,” Hare said.

So, for dogs, “the alternative is that when dogs were domesticated,” the capacity to pick up cues from humans “was just an accident — just like the floppy ears,” Hare said.

Hare plans to compare the domesticated foxes with dogs to try to find out. “If they perform like dogs on the test, then we know it’s likely the dogs also changed as a byproduct,” Hare said.

“The question is: How did the evolution happen? It’s very rare that you can actually demonstrate what the selection pressure was,” Hare said. “That’s why this is so exciting. We’re going to take a big step towards solving a mystery.”

Marc Bekoff, a dog behavior researcher at the University of Colorado in Boulder, said that Miklosi’s experiment shows that “dogs aren’t just dumbed-down wolves.”

“A lot of people think that domesticated animals, when compared to wilder animals, aren’t as smart,” Bekoff said. “It shows that species adapt to the social niche in which they live. And the social niche for a dog would be its human companions.”

Bekoff said this ability probably helps explain the sense that many dog owners have that their animals empathize with their emotions. Dogs can pick up the subtle physical clues that signal what their human companions are feeling, whether it’s happiness, sadness, anxiety or anger.

“I think part of the reason there is this strong bond between dogs and humans is because we are empathetic to them and they show empathy to us,” Bekoff said.

“We can never know for sure. But I’ve done a lot of work on animals’ emotions. Animals and humans share a lot of the same neurological structures and the same neurochemistry. I think it’s really dog empathy.”

Kong-o-rama and Raven’s Complex Mind

Today I stuffed Kongs for a while. OK, a long while. Through three NPR shows. I used macaroni, cheese, shredded apple, pine nuts, marshmallows, bananas, and peanut butter. I now have a chest freezer full of stuffed Kongs waiting for next week. Now that the storm, Fay, passed us, I feel safer doing that. I didn’t want to risk the electricity going out last week and having to pull out loads of melting Kongs and saying, “OK everybody, eat! Eat! Eat!” Especially if in the dark.  Not that anyone would mind.  The FDSP would go for a good stuffed Kong anytime of day or night.

Raven’s signed up for Agility class basics. The class starts in September. Tonight I tried something new with the little temper-tantrum throwing beast. As usual, as I was serving dinners, she spat and barked and drooled and barked all over her crate. She calms herself down and huffs and puffs when I’m delivering dinners to dogs close to her, but as soon as I move into another area, she throws a bigger fit. She hasn’t learned patience yet. No, she hasn’t. That’s why she usually gets her dinner last. By the time I’m done, and standing nearby, she can hold it in long enough for me to give in and feed her.

But tonight, after everyone else got fed, and she was still blowing off steam, I opened her crate door. She wouldn’t come out. She stared at me with that “Well, serve me my dinner” look. Uh huh. I surprised her with a leash hooked onto her collar. I walked her out of the crate and brought her to the room where her bowl was waiting for her. Full and smelling good. It was on one side of the room across from the entrance where we were standing.

I put the little beast on a sit stay, and Lord Almighty, she was PERFECT! She sat and stayed and looked so saintly just waiting for me to give the OK and unleash her, so she could dive into her meal. Wow! And did she ever. She’s definitely as passionate about eating as she is about playing.

She’s also an enigma in fur.

If I Didn’t Have a Dog…

I could walk around the yard barefoot in safety.

My house could be carpeted instead of tiled and laminated.

All flat surfaces, clothing, furniture, and cars would be free of hair.

When the doorbell rings, it wouldn’t sound like a kennel.

When the doorbell rings, I could get to the door without wading through fuzzy bodies who beat me there.

I could sit on the couch and my bed the way I wanted, without taking into consideration how much space several fur bodies would need to get comfortable.

I would have money – and no guilt to go on a real vacation.

I would not be on a first-name basis with six veterinarians, as I put their yet unborn grand kids through college.

The most used words in my vocabulary would not be: out, sit, down, come, no, stay, and leave him/her/it ALONE.

My house would not be cordoned off into zones with baby gates or barriers.

My house would not look like a day care center, toys everywhere.

My pockets would not contain things like poop bags, treats and an extra leash.

I would no longer have to spell the words B-A-L-L, F-R-I-S-B-E- E, W-A-L-K, T-R-E-A-T, B-I-K-E, G-O, R-I-D-E.

I would not have as many leaves INSIDE my house as outside or hairs on my clothes.

I would not look strangely at people who think having ONE dog/cat ties them down too much.

I’d look forward to spring and the rainy season instead of dreading ‘mud’ season.

I would not have to answer the question ‘Why do you have so many animals?’ from people who will never have the joy in their lives of knowing they are loved unconditionally by someone as close to an angel as they will ever get.

How EMPTY my life would be!

Poopy Weather

There’s nothing more invigorating than a tropical storm in tandem with a herd of Dober and Aussie kids who have diarrhea. I cleaned up doo-dee when I came home at lunch, as I was about to go on my way back to work, when I came home at the end of the day, after I let them out and all through the night.


Annie was particularly crafty by pooping at the crate door and using her crate blankey to cover it. I’d wondered why she had that opposite set-up in her crate when I left for lunch. It wasn’t until hours later and plenty of wiping up and realizing the odor wasn’t going anywhere until I did some snooping and found the well-hidden pile. Eeek! That Annie is a crafty girl, she is!

It wasn’t easy getting some of my CSK (cross-species kids) to go out that door and use the great wet outdoors as their potty.

Luigi woke me up at 1:30 a.m., when he finally decided it was time to take a dump. Thank goodness he didn’t just drop it in the house. Because it was drizzling, I had to join him in the rain while he did his thing.

Because of all the action going on, I cooked up a batch of sweet potatoes, red potatoes and rice with a slice of cheese last night. That was a modified Dr. Marty anti-diarrhea diet because I wasn’t going out to the store for that turnip and leek. I think it may have worked, but time and my lunch break will tell.


Here’s what Tropical Storm Fay looked like. She was a bit rude. That ladder you see in the picture? Well, last night I’d tethered the door open so the kids could run in and out due to their innards erupting out the rear with barely any warning, and when I came out to take a look-see, that ladder was knocked to the ground. So were several chairs; and my Luigi tree – aka a Vera Wood tree – had been pushed onto the fencing I’d just put up a few weekends ago. You can see the top of the Luigi tree in the picture with the yellow flowers. I picked up the tree, and leaned it over in the opposite direction on top of the sweet potato vines.

Fay is still moseying on by, with occasional bouts of rain and wind, but mostly she’s just bringing the color gray to Fort Doberdale, Florida, and its surrounding vicinities.

Helen

P.S. The rice and potato dinner worked. Lunch time, I held my nose as I opened the door, but no need! The air was fresh and clean of the doo-dee odor. Yeehaw!