Archive for the Uncategorized Category

  I receive a fair number of video links, but living in the a dead zone with a dial-up connection prevents me from opening most of them. Either I can’t open a clip at all, or my connection crashes half-way through the download process. Because what others may consider a short clip can take me [...]

Shameless Self-Promotion, Gulp Consider it a(nother) sign of advancing years that I can remember how we kids used to share secretive sly looks when the minister or Sunday School teacher talked about some Biblical hero girding his loins for battle. We had no idea what it meant, but felt convinced that anything dealing with loins [...]

Right after the September commentary went up, I read two short pieces about one of my favorite mammals: ground squirrels. The first article was primarily about using ground squirrels, or rather their vacated burrows, to help struggling pygmy owls survive. It pointed me to the second article that further described how female ground squirrels chew [...]

First and foremost, thanks to everyone who asked about how I and the animals were doing. We’re doing very well having suffered no more than a small tree down, the worst of which I’ve already cleaned up, and a power outage of about 12 hours. What lingers is the awareness of what a huge difference [...]

Perception and Human-Animal Survival While I visited my son in Colorado last month, I began reading a book by neurophysiologist Dale Purves entitled Brains: How they seem to work. I did this because the studies of brain function are now so numerous and diversified that I knew I needed to upgrade my knowledge. Luckily for [...]

  Taking Animals Personally Taking animals personally. That sounds like a really good thing, doesn’t it? It raises all kinds of images of us really paying attention to animals and what they do and what it means to them as well as us. Sad to say, that’s not the kind of personally that sometimes shows [...]

The Rest of the Story Back in the seventies, anyone who cared anything about animals and enjoyed reading was reading a series of books written by British veterinarian James Herriot, a.k.a. Alf Wight. Later, the BBC made the books into a television series that introduced even more people to the life of a trio of [...]

Rita informs me that Dilly actually points with his paw, not his nose, which I maintain proves my point even regarding dogs as skilled teachers even more. Not only do dogs who use this strategy point, they point using a part of their bodies that makes the most sense to us even though it may [...]

Because I consider this site first and foremost an educational one, there’s a lot of text on it. And because of this, I’ve wanted to add a search engine to it for quite a while. Clients and others who visit the site also have assured me that this would be a welcomed addition. After some [...]

  Out-of-Context Behavior and the Human-Animal Bond Several people have asked me what I mean when I refer to behavior that is out of context for the animal. Often, but not always, this is in response to my observation that any time an animal accepts a reward for displaying such a behavior, that reward may [...]