Commentaries

Artistic Endeavors and Companion Animals

When I was doing a lot of media work back in the 90s, a common mantra in the industry was that “Kids and animals make good television” (We might also add that they apparently inspire grammatically questionable mantras, but that’s a different matter.) As I’ve been recording my novel, Getting Fixed, for free (!) downloading from this site, I’ve come up with another mantra: Animals make challenging recording. Admittedly its grammar is equally suspect, but it pretty well sums up what’s been going on in my office for the last 6 weeks. For someone who has never done any

Read more

Sleeping in Heavenly Holiday Peace

I’m a list-maker and as I’m writing this, I face my usual, crammed-full, ever-lengthening holiday do-list, which I suspect that most people could consider laughably simple compared to their own. Even so, it seems like a lot to me, and even an overwhelming “a lot” some days. That list got me thinking about its fulfillment as it relates to the pets with troubling results because I realized that in some ways the list is all about me. Nor do I think I’m alone in this. Although most pet-owners certainly don’t plan it that way any more than I do,

Read more

Some Tricks About Treats for the Holiday Season

True, it’s past Halloween trick or treat time, but it is that time of year when there are so many treats around it’s tough to avoid temptation. And because so often we take both our pets and our food-related beliefs with us when we jump aboard the holiday treat train, we and the pets may disembark with some extra baggage come the end of the holiday season. I’ve yet to hear of companion animals who routinely do their own food shopping and prepare their own meals and snacks, so this seems like a good time to explore some preventive

Read more

The BeeBee Chronicles: The Saga Begins

On September 4, 2007, I brought home a 16-week-old female Pembroke corgi pup. Those of you who routinely read these commentaries could very well be thinking, “I distinctly remember that woman swearing on a stack of religiously significant tomes that she would never get another corgi after Violet the WonderDog died.” And were you to think such thoughts, you needn’t wonder if your memory is failing you; your memory is fine. I did vow never to get another corgi because Violet was such a great dog that any subsequent corgi would surely suffer unfairly from comparison. So what changed?

Read more

Test and Label: Companion Animal Evaluations Revisited

An article in the August 20-27, 2007 Newsweek by science writer Sharon Begley, entitled “The Puzzle of Hidden Ability” describes the use of a common and a less familiar test to determine the intelligence of autistic children. I’ve been interested in autism for years because of its relationship to my own work so the study article immediately caught my attention. It also got me thinking about how easy it also is to judge and label companion animals based on tests about which we know little or nothing. Getting back to the Newsweek article, anyone who has been educated in

Read more

Buyer Beware: An Update on Quality Pet Selection

Even though we pet-owners routinely accept that our definitions of quality pet nutrition or healthcare will change as more information about these topics becomes available, when it comes to selecting a pet, that’s often not the case. Instead, we may rely on little more than what worked for us—or our parents!—in the past, or even some vague gut feeling. However, much has changed on the human-companion animal scene and those who want to ensure a positive experience for human and animal alike need to consider those changes. Step one is dispelling some myths about ideal pets and how to

Read more

Companion Animals as Teachers

Last month I discussed selective mimicry, a human trait that’s also displayed by domestic dogs. That naturally segued into a discussion about how pets also might learn from us using this same method. This month we’re going to look at the flip side of this: how and what young children can learn from pets and how breakdowns in communication can occur. Traditionally when people thought about children learning from dogs and cats, they thought about that knowledge children acquire by observing pet and free-roaming dogs and cats from birth to death. For example and ignoring any political incorrectness, Victorian

Read more

Canine Learning: Why our best sometimes needs to be better

It’s a well-established fact that animals learn by modeling their behaviors on those of others. But as any parent knows, children don’t automatically mimic what Dad, Mom, Sis, or some other person does. Instead, even infants make use of a mental phenomenon known as selective imitation. As it turns out, so do our dogs. How do we know this? Luckily for those of us who are fascinated by animal mental processes (a.k.a. thinking for those who accept that animals are capable of thought), researchers Friederike Range and Ludwig Huber of the University of Vienna and their colleagues designed a

Read more

Hop to It? Quality versus Quantity Exercise

Perhaps in response to the weight gains in the human and companion animal populations, the numbers of reports and articles about the value of exercise seem to be piling up as fast as those excess pounds. Among these are those that passionately promote exercise as the universal anecdote for an increasing array of companion animal behavioral problems. Given what some claim is a tremendous amount of scientific evidence to the contrary, how dare I recommend that some of my clients and their pets forego those lengthy romps in the park, at least temporarily? The reasoning underlying this seemingly bogus

Read more

Why Study Animal Behavior?

I teach animal behavior at a local community college and in this era of worldwide political chaos it would be easy to suffer from low course esteem. Those who teach history can proudly declare, “See? Didn’t I tell you that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it? Look at this example, and this one, and this one.” And what could be more important than a solid background in political science or economics to make sense of today’s seemingly nonsensical world? Still, I would argue that knowledge of animal behavior serves as a virtual rosetta stone when

Read more