You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April, 2007.
If you are wondering why all the dog owners at the dog park are carrying stop-motion cameras and protractors, wonder no more.
NY Times- It’s in his Tail
Apparently, when dogs are excited, they wag their tails more to the right side of their body, because the left half of the brain that controls the right side of the body controls positive emotions like nourishment and happiness. When a dog feels threatened, they wag their tails to the left, because the right brain deals with fear responses.
Or is it the other way around.
Matilda and I learned about “coming when called” this week. Our trainer pointed out that this is the command where owners are the most vulnerable because there is no way for you to enforce this command in a real world setting. To futher up the pressure, the trainer mentioned that every time a dog refuses to come when called, it is a challenge to an owner’s dominance; call the dog and it ignores you and your status goes down and the dog’s goes up. Yikes.
The trainer said that every single time you call a dog, there should be something good at the end. That dog should want to come to you and should be excited about it. She said never to call a dog to you in order to discipline it, because it will be a lot less likely to come the next time. The dog should get a treat every single time it comes, including a happy, excited and smiling owner.
Next week is our “final exam” for obedience class, including a best trick competition. Our trainer said she would be rewarding creativity, but I am fresh out. Anyone got a good trick that I could teach Matilda this week?
They REALLY REALLY suck. Came home from work on Thursday to find my door kicked in. About $5000 worth of items stolen. You could say I’m slightly pissed. Included in that count, is my laptop, which is currently my life. It had some grades on it that I hadn’t backed up (fortunately not many). It was also my connection to the world of “Planning the Move to Atlanta.” Stinkiness.
I’ve been working on making sure they can’t steal my identity. And maybe providing SOME chance of getting some of the items back, although apparently a lot of the burglaries around here are people who actually want to use the stuff for themselves. I’ve also got spiders now – not really poisonous, but their bite HURTS. Sorry to sound so complainy, but I really think I’m ready to leave OK!
I have no new philosophical observations to share from obedience class this week. We did a lot of review, including of heel, in which my dog excelled. The trainer kept saying, “Mattie’s got it, good dog,” and I have to say, I beamed like a proud mother hen.
This week we also learned about “lie down” which is a natural position for a dog to take, but is also a position of submission. By “downing” a dog, the owner (that’s me) is showing their dominance in a peaceful kind of way. Once she has a firm grasp on “down,” Matilda is supposed to start laying down in order to earn almost anything- her dinner, the leash to go for a walk, a toy etc. Just to remind her who is in charge. Our trainer says the best trained dogs will be “downed” up to 50 times a day.
An interesting observation I have made, entering my third month as a dog owner, has to do with the cult of dog owners. I feel like I have been admitted into a very elite group of people who frequent parks, outdoor cafes, sidewalks and grassy knolls. There is knowing nod and an automatic acceptance of fellow dog owners when I pass one on the street, our dogs stopping to sniff each other as we carry on. These people smile and say hello as they unload their dogs from their cars before class. There are quite a few regulars at the local dog park who appear at the same time every day, who smile and greet me and sit on the bench as our dogs play together.
Trouble is, I have no idea who these people are.
I know every single (regularly appearing) dog at the dog park by name. I know Rosie, the Dalmatian loves to play ball, Stella, the white dog is super shy, Dutchess, the hound dog who watches the squirrels outside the fence with a distant longing, and “Big Matty,” the huge black German shepherd who plays with a Frisbee. But ask me their owner’s names and I will draw a huge blank. I know their faces. I know there is an annoying girl who talks on her cell phone while her dog Rufus beats up and intimidates all the other dogs in the park. I know there is a mom who brings her 11 year old and their dog after tennis practice. I might recognize these people on the street, but the chances are higher if they had their dogs with them.
Granted, no one is screaming and hollering any person’s name when they run too far, or are fighting, or when it is time to go home. Also granted, not every dog is always attached to the same human- Rosie comes with a man or two women, depending on the day. Still, it is a club in which the human members remain mostly anonymous, allowing their four-legged friends to garner the attention.
Hee hee, the New York Times said package.
New York Times article on men’s underwear.
My favorite lines include:
“Novelty underwear, for decades the butt of jokes and the joke of butts, “
“the little-boy, Underoos-inspired nuttiness of fire trucks, motorcycles and hot dogs all over Ginch Gonch underwear — they’re fairly crying out to be called underpants”
“Not since the Peacock Revolution of the ’60s has there been such variety”
“Underwear by C-IN2 and Andrew Christian, artfully constructed with seams or straps to make the most of a man’s, um, profile, has done extremely well,”
“As they say, it’s all about packaging.”
I wonder if the reporter, facing severe writer’s block, pitched this story as a joke to an editor who took it seriously. Who would have thought that men’s underpants deserved such hard hitting reporting. Take for example this paragraph and its historical and pop culture criticism:
“IT’S all a far cry from 1951, when C. Willett and Phillis Cunnington wrote, in “The History of Underclothes,” that “man has never used provocative underclothing.” The “plain prose” of men’s underwear, they said, was “in singular contrast to the poetical allurements worn by woman.” How the sensational 1934 introduction of briefs — then called jock-style, Y-front or bathing-suit underwear because they were styled after a very brief French swimsuit — escaped their notice is puzzling. Especially given that the brief’s popularity (and its encoded meaning as hypermasculine attire) was cemented, in 1938, with the celebrity endorsement as the underwear of choice (in blue) of a nerdy yet steel-built reporter named Clark Kent. (How are the mighty fallen: old-school white Y-fronts recently got a more dubious superhero plug as the costume of Captain Underpants, the chubby middle-aged title character in a children’s books series.)”
Boys, any comments? How many of you have firetrucks on your “big boy underpants?” Or are wearing the “wonderbra technology for men” under your jeans? Better yet, would you be interested in being interviewed by the New York Times, who will no doubt turn this article into a hard hitting series.
3rd week of obedience class down. We are half-way through and I am happy to report that, for this week at least, Matilda is at the top of her class. She caught on to the concept of “heel” first, which our trainer calls, “the light bulb moment.” Teaching heel includes a training collar that looks a little like a medieval torture device and making quick 180 turns whenever the dog tries to take the lead. The turn creates a quick tug on the collar which pinches the skin on the back of her neck, a similar feeling to the way a mother dog would correct her puppies by gently biting the back of their necks. Four or five turns later, your dog figures out that it is easier to walk by your side and avoid getting pinched, then racing to catch up with you after each turn. Two days and four walks later, I think she is starting to get it. It makes our walks all the more pleasant now that she is not pulling my arm off the entire time. Plus, when she walks right at my side with slack in the leash, people on the street smile and I can almost hear them thinking, “what a well-trained dog.”
My homework for this week is to “sit on the dog.” The trainer was very quick to say that this is not a literal assignment. “Sit on the dog,” entails putting the dog on her regular leash, not the training collar, then tying it to the foot of a chair so she has enough room to sit, lie down and stand. Then, for half an hour, I am supposed to utterly ignore her.
This seemed like a strange assignment at first. Until the trainer put it in context. Say I am out walking the dog and I walk past a coffee shop. Three of my friends are there and they invite me to join them. I sit down and tie the dog’s leash to my chair. The dog continues to pull, bark, whine, cry and jump. This behavior will cause me to cut my visit with my friends short. “Hanging out” is a natural behavor for a dog, but outside, with lots of people, possible food scraps and all the noise of a streetside cafe is not likely to induce such a behavior. Unless I train her and teach her a signal to induce “hanging out.”
In the comfort of my own home, I engage in a similar behavior for a set length of time and eventually the dog will learn that the best thing to do in this situation is to lie down and just hang out. Being tethered to a chair leg now signals, in some Pavlovian center of her brain, “time to hang out.”
This is not the first time the trainer has mentioned how ignoring the dog will help in the long run. If the dog has some time to herself while I am in the house, it will help to foster a sense of independence and self-assurance. In order to help my dog become confident an self-reliant (to a point) I am supposed to ignore her for half hour increments, then do something fun with her, like play fetch or go for a walk. Who knew.
In the interest of improving both the morale and the operational efficiency of our great republic, I humbly submit the following modest proposal:
The great challenge of democracy has always been the desperate struggle to fill our government’s offices with those who are not only willing, but also worthy and able to serve. We are beset on both aisles of our legislature with nincompoops, derelicts, blackguards, and Quislings. From sea to shining sea we reap the bitter harvest sown by men and women whose incompetence and moral bankruptcy have prompted many ignoble punsters to speculate that, if prefixes are to be trusted, “progress” is the opposite of “congress.” To combat this rampant infection in our body politic, I advocate the ratification of a Constitutional Amedment guranteeing an immediate and unpardonable sentence of death upon any who fail to win re-election to public office. I recognize that many will object to such a seemingly brutal policy, but I can assure any nay-sayers that the advantages are many and profound.
The theory of natural selection alone offers ample justification for this course of action. Imagine how many Dan Quayles, Cynthia McKinneys, and Ross Perots could be weeded out of the system by the mere threat (to say nothing of the application) of lethal force. Once the Congressional pack has been culled of its old and weak (politically speaking) only the strong, honest, and effective statesmen (and women) would be left to thrive. Do we dare to picture a legislature made up only of Daniel Websters, Henry Clays, and Tip O’Neills?
Moreover, such a system would drastically improve the honesty of the politician on the campaign trail. If the chopping block were the eventual destination for those who could not keep their promises, how many would dare to write checks that their posteriers couldn’t gurantee? Rather than promising to end poverty in a decade, our politicians would instead be forced to plan for more realistic goals, and (dare we dream?) they would actually be concerned about achieving them. For that matter, the American taxpayer could then reasonably expect to get his money’s worth out of Congress; pain of death is a powerful incentive for legislators to stay in the Capitol and do their work, instead of twiddling their thumbs at fundraisers.
Naturally, some will raise the ethical question of whether we can, in good conscience, expect our leaders to submit to execution if they fail to faithfully uphold the responsibilities of their offices. But upon careful reflection, we can easily see that we expect as much or more from others who serve the general public. Has not our nation executed soldiers who fled the battlefield for no more base a reason than wishing not to be blown to smithereens? Aren’t we willing to accept the death of the innocent sick as a consequence of the incompetence of doctors? And more importantly, should not those who seek the power to govern our nation be willing to lay down their lives for it? They expect as much from the workingman whenever they enact the draft, and I suspect that the public as a whole will enjoy seeing the tables turned.
And if none of these advantages can be reaped, we can at least take comfort in the fact that, if Congressmen are sent to the gallows for their failures, we may reliably assume that the issue of term limits never need be brought up again.
Recent Comments