Category: People and their pets

A game called Fetch!

Today, delighted to offer a guest post from author Garth Stein

Garth Stein and dog!

But first to how this came about.  Way back in June, I was contacted by Wiley Saichek who signed off his email, Marketing Director, Authors On The Web.  To be frank, I hadn’t heard of the organisation before.  Wiley invited me to participate in something he called a Blog Tour on behalf of Garth Stein. It was connected with Garth’s latest book, The Art of Racing in the Rain.

Jeannie had read it some time ago and thoroughly enjoyed it.  The book had been next to my side of the bed for weeks but, ironically, the demands of my own writing had just got in the way of me reading it.

Anyway, back to the Blog Tour!

Apparently, the ideal was to have the guest post published on Learning from Dogs during the period July 18th to August 1st but I dragged my heels waiting and hoping that the story from Garth could include a picture of Comet.  The picture has not been forthcoming so here it is anyway.  I shall be reviewing Garth’s book The Art of Racing in the Rain as soon as I can get around to reading it.

A Game Called Fetch, by Garth Stein

People often ask me about my dog, Comet.  They want to know if she was the inspiration for Enzo, the dog narrator in my book, The Art of Racing in the Rain (and the young reader version, Racing in the Rain:  My Life as a Dog).  And the answer is, flatly, no.  Enzo is a singular character, I tell them, and has no predecessor.  Comet is goofy and silly, and is very much not Enzo.  But she’s still very smart–in her own Comet way–and has taught me much about the world.

When Comet was just a pup, she hated being left at home; she didn’t like the responsibility of having the house to herself.  She would always get into some mischief:  eat an entire bunch of bananas, for instance (having peeled them first!).  Or claw her way into the pantry looking for cookies.  But one day, she communicated her anxiety in a way that was so clear, so unmistakable, there was no doubt at all as to her feelings.  We went out for a couple of hours, confining her to the kitchen/dining area of our house.  And when we came home, there was a perfectly round, undisturbed puddle of urine on the dining room table.

Now that is a statement.  Message received.  Since that day, whenever we get ready to leave her alone in the house, she willingly–one might saygratefully–finds her crate, curls up, and waits for us to secure the door.

While Comet may not be able to wax eloquently about philosophy and popular culture as Enzo does, she did teach me an important lesson this summer.

Comet loves playing fetch with a tennis ball.  She always has.  And she will run herself into the ground chasing balls, so that my arm gets sore throwing a ball for her with my Chuck-It, and I find myself neglecting my cooking duties, my lawn mowing, my reading, my writing, and even my children…all to throw a tennis ball for Comet.

This summer I purchased a GoDogGo.  It’s a ball launcher with a bucket of tennis balls and a delayed feed, so one can teach one’s dog to play fetch with herself.  A brilliant idea!  The machine spits the ball, the dog fetches it, drops it in the bucket, the machine spits it again.  Ad infinitum.

And so one weekend this summer, I decided to teach Comet how to use this machine so I could do other things that needed doing, like cleaning gutters and grilling chickens.

Well, she got the idea right away.  Launch, fetch, drop.  She was really quite good.  And then I taught her launch, fetch, drop-in-the-bucket, prepare for re-launch.  And she got that, too.

“I have the smartest tennis-ball-dog on the planet,” I thought.  “She picked this up in ten minutes!  Now I can go have an iced tea while she plays fetch with a ball throwing machine.”

But it didn’t work.  As soon as I stepped away, she lost the thread.  Ball launch, ball fetch, ball dropped in the bucket.  Instead, she dropped it next to the bucket and stared at it while the machine ground its ball-throwing wheels in anticipation.

“Come on, Comet,” I said.  “Drop it in the bucket!”

I dropped the ball in the bucket, the launcher launched, Comet fetched, and dropped the ball at my feet.

“In the bucket,” I said.  She wagged, sat and barked and waited for me to drop the ball in the bucket.

I spent two days teaching her how to drop the ball in the bucket by herself.  Sometimes she’d do it for me–so I knew it was possible!–but the moment I stepped away to attend to some other business, she lost her ability to drop the ball in the bucket.  She’d stand over the ball and bark until I came to help her.  It was a miserable time.

As Sunday evening arrived, my wife came outside to see how our training was going.  I expressed to her my frustration.  “She knows what to do,” I said.  “She just won’t do it.”

My wife watched as I put the ball in the bucket and the launcher clicked, ratcheting up its gears.  Comet had gotten to recognize the clicks that meant the ball would soon be launched, and she sunk to her haunches, tail wagging, staring at the launch tube.  And then with a thwack! the ball sailed across the yard and she took off after it, recovered it, dropped it at my feet and barked happily.

“She won’t drop it in the bucket,” I said, bewildered.  “She wants me to drop it in the bucket.”

My wife smiled at me my sympathetically.  “Comet doesn’t want to play fetch with a machine,” she said.  “She wants to play fetch with you.”

And I realized, in my effort to make my life more efficient, in order to multi-task one more thing during a busy day, that playing fetch is not about economy and efficiency.  It’s about playing fetch.

The ball launcher sits in the shed gathering dust these days, but the Chuck-It is always in use.  And while Comet might like to spend every waking hour of every day playing fetch, she realizes that I have to put the ball down at some point to cook dinner or play with my family or write a book.  But she’s okay with that.  Because when we do play fetch together, that’s the only thing we’re doing–we are focused on each other, and that’s what the game is all about.

The meaning of words

With grateful thanks to MaryAnne for forwarding these.

LOVE

Love

RESPECT

Respect

FAITHFULNESS

Faithfulness

COMPASSION

Compassion

COMPANIONSHIP

Companionship

The sustainable dog.

Looking for sustainability?  Try this!

Sustainable is an overused word these days.  All for the right reasons, of course!  But how often is the word used in the context of relationships?  Of the relationships between the domesticated dog and man?  I suspect rarely.

Take the example of the Japanese Akita dog called Hachi, (Hachikō in Japanese) that I wrote about almost a year ago.

In 1924, Hidesaburō Ueno, a professor in the agriculture department at theUniversity of Tokyo took in Hachikō as a pet. During his owner’s life Hachikō saw him out from the front door and greeted him at the end of the day at the nearby Shibuya Station. The pair continued their daily routine until May 1925, when Professor Ueno did not return on the usual train one evening. The professor had suffered from a cerebral hemorrhage at the university that day. He died and never returned to the train station where his friend was waiting. Hachikō was loyal and every day for the next nine years he waited sitting there amongst the town’s folk.

Hachikō 1925

“…. every day for the next nine years he waited sitting there amongst the town’s folk” Truly a sustainable relationship.

Now to something closer to home; literally.

The Payson Roundup is our local newspaper. Last Tuesday’s edition had the following story which Tom Brossart, Editor, has kindly given me written permission to reproduce here on Learning from Dogs.  Thank you, Tom.

Best friends help save man’s life

Both Logger and Harold Green are a little gray around the muzzle, but they have lots of good days ahead after Logger helped save Green’s life back on July 1.Photo by Andy Towle

By Teresa McQuerrey

August 30, 2011

Logger is Harold Green’s best friend. Logger isn’t a flannel-wearing, tattooed burly woodsman; he is a sweet-tempered chocolate Labrador retriever. And this best friend saved Green’s life.

Green makes his home up in Happy Jack. Recently he and Logger drove into the woods and went for a walk, and then Green had a heart attack. He didn’t have a history of heart disease, but all of a sudden his chest became tight. He collapsed and on his way to the ground, he hit a fallen log and wound up hitting his forehead and nose, tearing his bottom lip away from his gums, cutting his chin and breaking a rib.

“Right before I had the heart attack I had a page there was a fire, and that’s the last thing I remember,” he said. Green is an emergency medical technician with the Blue Ridge Fire Department.

He said the next thing he remembers was waking up and trying to call 911. “There was so much blood in my eyes I couldn’t see at first, but Logger licked the blood away.”

Green was conscious long enough to dial 911 and try to explain where he was. He heard the sirens go past him and with that information; the emergency responders had a place to start looking for him.

At that point, Logger left Green’s side to go to the rescue personnel.

“From what they told me, he was like Lassie. He came running to them, barking, and started running back to me, stopped and made sure they were following,” Green said.

The first person on the scene with him was a law enforcement officer with the Forest Service. Green said he told him his nose was bleeding so much he thought it was broken.

Next to arrive was a deputy sheriff. Green said he later learned the guy was off duty, but came to help anyway.

The Blue Ridge ambulance crew arrived next.

“Logger did the same with all of them as he had with the first one on the scene. They told me, without Logger’s help they would have had to search for me a lot longer.”

Green said when they first reached him his heart rate was in the mid-40s and he had no blood pressure. The rescue team stabilized him and carried him out to the ambulance to take him to the fire station where a helicopter could land.

“They said Logger tried to get into the ambulance with me,” Green said.

He said he has little or no memory of everything that took place, when he woke up he was in the hospital in Flagstaff.

Logger couldn’t ride in the ambulance with Green and couldn’t come see him in the hospital, but since he has been out, the dog has not been more than three feet from him for three weeks.

“It is really humbling to have so many friends there to help you out,” Green said.

The people who came to his rescue were all friends and, just like Logger, they did what best friends do, except it was something they do every day, for friends and strangers alike.

Logger has been part of Green’s family for seven years, joining it when he was just a puppy.

Green is the son of longtime Rim Country Realtor Bea Baxter, who has been in the community for around 40 years.

So dear, lovely Logger also demonstrated the same, deep sustainability of relationship that Hachikō did back in 1925.  There is so much that we can learn from dogs.  Think about sustainability, as it relates to the relationship between dogs and man.  It goes back at least 30,000 years.  It’s an unimaginable length of time.

In this context, sustainability is an underused word!

The beauty of service dogs

A recent item on the BBC website provides a welcome reminder of the power of the relationship between dogs and mankind.

Practically no-one is unaware of the role that dogs provide, for example, as guides for humans with sight impairment.  But there’s much more to the ‘service’ dog than that.

A service dog might be described as,

“any guide dog, signal dog, or other animal individually trained to do work or perform tasks for the benefit of an individual with a disability, including, but not limited to, guiding individuals with impaired vision, alerting individuals with impaired hearing to intruders or sounds, providing minimal protection or rescue work, pulling a wheelchair, or fetching dropped items.”

That definition is taken from the United States Code of Federal Regulations for the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990!

Carrie and Lilly

But then cast your eye over this, as I mentioned, from the BBC on the 26th May, 2011.

Dogs can help reduce stress in parents of children with lifelong developmental disability autism, a study suggests.

The University of Lincoln compared 20 families with dogs with 20 without.

Daniel Mills told a Royal Society of Medicine conference early results suggested any breed could improve communication and relationships.

The veterinary behavioural medicine professor hopes to use video footage to show how dogs can improve child eating, sleeping and tantrum behaviour.

At a three-day Parents’ Autism Workshops and Support course, the families listed more than a thousand ways their dog had helped – from developing language and establishing a routine to using the pet to request action in a non-confrontational way.

Full story is here in which is included Professor Mills saying: “While there is no shortage of opinion on how dogs can help, there has been little money given to scientifically look into this.”

Autism is a challenging condition and anything that can establish a scientific underpinning for the role that dogs can have is to be welcomed whole-heartedly.

Finally, there are quite a few videos online that provide more information about the special, almost magical relationship between dogs and autistic people.  Here’s one that is the first part of a series of five.

More love in many forms.

A fascinating and beautiful insight into wild turkeys!

Yesterday, I published a couple of stories that demonstrated that close, loving bonds can form between different species, including an orang-utan and a dog, and a duck and a man.

By chance, Jean and I came across another example of cross-species bonding.  This time between Joe Hutto, an American living in Florida, and a brood (is that the right description?) of newly-born wild turkeys.  The first thing these tiny birds saw when they opened their eyes after breaking clear of their egg was Joe, and they immediately imprinted him as their ‘mother’.

Joe spent a complete year and more being ‘mother’ to these birds right up to the point where they naturally flew the nest, so to speak.  Joe’s experiences led to a book, Illumination in the Flatwoods, and from that to a BBC Natural World special My Life as a Turkey, regrettably not available to viewers outside the UK.

But speaking to someone who did watch the BBC film, it was clear that it was a most beautiful and touching account of how young wild turkeys can bond to a human.  Here’s part of the programme review in the British Guardian newspaper,

By Sam Wollaston, Guardian.co.uk

Joe Hutto’s life changed when a local farmer in the Florida flatlands where he lives left a stainless steel dog bowl full of wild turkey eggs on the porch of his cabin. Joe put them in an incubator, and waited. Some weeks later, cracks began to appear. This is the crucial time: “imprinting” only occurs in the first few moments after hatching. So Joe put his face down to the level of the opening eggs and the first poult emerged, wet and confused. Joe made a chirping, clucky noise, the poult looked him square in the eye, “and something very unambiguous happened in that moment”.

The little turkey stumbled and crawled across to Joe, and huddled up against his face. It recognised Joe as its mother. In the next few hours, Joe became mother to 15 more baby turkeys and remained so for the next 18 months. My Life as a Turkey: Natural World Special (BBC2) tells that story.

Across to the programme details from the BBC2 website (may not be available 26 days after the date of this article),

Biologist Joe Hutto was mother to the strangest family in the world, thirteen endangered wild turkeys that he raised from egg to the day they left home.

For a whole year his turkey children were his only companions as he walked them deep through the Florida Everglades. Suffering all the heartache and joy of any other parent as he tried to bring up his new family, he even learnt to speak their language and began to see the world through turkey eyes. Told as a drama documentary with an actor recreating the remarkable scenes of Joe’s life as a turkey mum.

Behind the scenes image of turkeys and Jeff Palmer (actor) in misty forest in Florida. Cameraman (Mark Smith) on track & dolly shows how some of the beautiful sweeping shots were filmed.

Sam Wollaston of the Guardian continues,

It’s not hard to see how the little birds were taken in. Joe’s moustache does look a bit like feathers, he has a long scraggy neck, an understanding of the forest, and a tentative, birdlike walk. He takes them out, to catch their first grasshoppers; he teaches them how to roost. For Joe, as for any mother, parenthood is an emotional rollercoaster ride. There is the joy of seeing his babies grow, but almost constant worry. Grief too, when one is taken by a rat snake, and another by a hawk, and two more get sick (bird flu?) and die.

Adolescence arrives with all its associated problems. The males start fighting; only the toughest will get to mate. “I had no way of knowing how I was going to be part of this rite of passage,” says Joe. Steady now, Joe, let’s not take this too far, you’re not supposed to mate with any of them. For one, they’re your children. They’re also turkeys. That would be doubly wrong. Sometimes I think Joe spends too much time alone in the forest.

Quite so!  However, the film was so beautifully shot that it was very, very easy to forget that this was a re-enactment of Joe’s original experience.  That love is all about how you make someone, or in these cases, some other creature, feel.  Another couple of pictures from the BBC website,

Lights, camera, action!
Jeff Palmer (actor) sat on large felled tree on his cell phone with a dozen wild turkeys.

One final extract from the Sam Wollaston article in The Guardian newspaper,

My Life as a Turkey isn’t simply a wildlife film though. It’s not just about wild animals, it’s about one man’s relationship with wild animals, and that’s what makes it so fabulous. Serious animal behaviourists may not agree, but if you throw a human being in there, it all suddenly becomes a lot more interesting. I’m thinking Ring of Bright Water, Gorillas in the Mist, I’m definitely thinking Werner Herzog’s brilliant Grizzly Man about a man named Tim whose friendship with bears went wrong and he ended up inside one. My Life as a Turkey has something of Grizzly Man about it – a man obsessed, alone in a beautiful place, living with wild animals. But, although Joe was attacked, he didn’t end up inside one of his turkeys thankfully. There would have been a certain irony to that, especially if it had happened at Thanksgiving.

Anyway, it’s a lovely film – beautiful, charming, funny, sad, thought-provoking even. What thoughts did it provoke in me? That I need to go and see my mum.

Unfortunately, as mentioned above if you are outside the UK you are not able to watch the film via the BBC iPlayer system.  But you can buy the book.

Joe Hutto's book of his life with wild turkeys.

Available from Amazon, here’s just one of the reviews,

My review is not unbiased because Joe Hutto, author of “Illumination in the Flatwoods,” and I have been friends for almost 25 years.

Joe is the most humble man I’ve ever known. I am honored that he brought me the original manuscript to read. It was so beautiful I could have cried.

With the same graceful writing skills used by conservationists Aldo Leopold (“Sand County Almanac”) and Herbert Stoddard (“Memoirs of a Naturalist”), Joe gives a masterful mix of documentary-style nature reporting and heartfelt thoughts on the meaning of life. As dramatic as that sounds, I think most readers will agree that “Illumination in the Flatwoods” is a life-changing book.

You will never regret the dollars you spend to buy this book nor the time it takes you to read it. . .

Kathy McCord Cooley

“Love is just love, it can never be explained.”

Love comes in many forms

A chance email from Dan G. opens up a whole treasure trove.

Here’s what Dan sent to me,

True Friends 

After losing his parents, this 3 year old orangutan was so depressed he wouldn’t eat and didn’t respond to any medical treatments. The veterinarians thought he would surely die from sadness. The zoo keepers found an old sick dog on the grounds in the park at the zoo where the orangutan lived and took the dog to the animal treatment center. The dog arrived at the same time the orangutan was there being treated. The 2 lost souls met and have been inseparable ever since.

The orangutan found a new reason to live and each always tries his best to be a good companion to his new found friend. They are together 24 hours a day in all their activities.

Roscoe and Surya

They live in Northern California where swimming is their favorite past time, although Roscoe (the orangutan) is a little afraid of the water and needs his friend’s help to swim.

Roscoe and Surya
Roscoe and Surya

Together they have discovered the joy and laughter in life and the value of friendship.

Roscoe and Surya
Roscoe and Surya

They have found more than a friendly shoulder to lean on.

Roscoe and Surya
Love across the species boundary

Long Live Friendship!!!!!!!

I don’t know……some say life is too short, others say it is too long, but I know that nothing that we do makes sense if we don’t touch the hearts of others…….while it lasts!

So after I had seen the pictures above, it was pretty easy to find this YouTube video.

 

Then if that wasn’t amazing and wonderful, try this,

Well that’s enough for today.  But tomorrow, I will continue with Part Two which recounts the amazing year that Joe Hutto spent in the Florida wildlands with ….. (you’ll have to wait for tomorrow!)

Sunday smile

With grateful thanks to friend Neil K from South Devon, England for forwarding this to me.

How do you know when it is time to “hang up the car keys“?

I say, when your dog has this look on his face!

The Tenacity of Dogs, part two.

More on how dogs adapt to challenges in their lives.

(As readers picked up from my closing comment in yesterday’s part of this story, technology has rather interfered with events.  ‘Touch wood’ things appear to be back to normal!)

Yesterday’s article (thanks to Paul Gilding for the link) was about the stray dogs in Moscow.  Before musing on the more general nature of how dogs survive as strays, there is a video on YouTube about these Muscovite dogs.  Just over 7 minutes long, it further underlines the amazing adaptability of the domesticated dog when thrust into self-survival.

As regular readers of Learning from Dogs will know, before Jean and I met, Jean had spent a large part of her life rescuing dogs in the San Carlos area of Mexico, much of that with Suzann (who was instrumental in Jean and me meeting!).  Indeed, when Jean and I moved up to Payson in February, 2010 we had with us, much to the amusement of the American border staff at the Nogales crossing, 12 dogs and 6 cats, all rescues except my German Shepherd dog, Pharaoh.

So Jean has lots of stories about how the far-too-many stray dogs in San Carlos developed strategies for staying alive.  Dhalia, see story below, shows her feral habits when we go out for a walk in the forest by constantly looking for food, despite the fact that she is a well-fed, happy and contented dog.  Jean recounts finding Dhalia,

It was in 2005, about three months after Ben died (Jean’s husband). I was driving out to the small Mexican fishing port of La Manga where there were many stray dogs.  The aim was to feed them on a regular basis and hope that they would become sufficiently comfortable with my presence so that they could be caught, so that they may be spayed or neutered and then offered for adoption.

On the way there, I drove past a couple of dogs running alongside the highway.  Dogs frequently did this looking for ‘road-kill’ that they could feed on.  I stopped the car wanting to put out some food and water.

One of the dogs was so feral that it immediately took off into the bush.  I turned around and the other dog was standing about ten feet away.  It was cadaverous and obviously suffering from mange but cautiously came up to the food, sniffed carefully and then started to eat.  That dog allowed me to pick it up and then sat quietly with me on the front seat of the car while I continued to La Manga.  It sense immediately that it was safe and from that day has remained with me.  I named her Dhalia.

Dhalia in Jean's arms, November 2008

Fast forward to today.  Dhalia is one of Pharaoh’s group of dogs and is a sweet and loving animal.

Finally, a couple of other stories to give you a feeling about these rescue dogs. One from August 2009 about a dog called Lucky Lucy.  The other about Corrie, both stories from Suzann.

Enjoy.

Why we have cats and dogs!

Author Sue Miller perfectly articulates our relationship with dogs and cats.

As a rest to the number of non-fiction books that I have been reading over the past few months, Jean recommended a novel she recently finished, While I Was Gone, by Sue Miller.  It’s featured on Oprah’s Book Club, from which I quote,

About the Book

A decade ago she put a face on every mother’s worst nightmare with her phenomenal best-seller The Good Mother. Now, Sue Miller delivers a spellbinding novel of love and betrayal that explores what it means to be a good wife.

In the summer of 1968, Jo Becker ran out on the marriage and the life her parents wanted for her, and escaped–for one beautiful, idyllic year–into a life that was bohemian and romantic, living under an assumed name in a rambling group house in Cambridge. It was a time of limitless possibility, but it ended in a single instant when Jo returned home one night to find her best friend lying dead in a pool of blood on the living room floor.

Now Jo has everything she’s ever wanted: a veterinary practice she loves, a devoted husband, three grown daughters, a beautiful Massachusetts farmhouse. And if occasionally she feels a stranger to herself and wonders what happened to the freedom she once felt, or how she came to be the wife, mother, and doctor her neighbors know and trust–if at times she feels as if her whole life is vanishing behind her as she’s living it–she need only look at her daughters or her husband, Daniel, to recall the satisfactions of family and community and marriage.

But when an old housemate settles in her small town, the fabric of Jo’s life begins to unravel: seduced again by the enticing possibility of another self and another life, she begins a dangerous flirtation that returns her to the darkest moment of her past and imperils all she loves.

While I Was Gone is an exquisitely suspenseful novel about how quickly and casually a marriage can be destroyed, how a good wife can find herself placing all she holds dear at risk. In expert strokes, Sue Miller captures the precariousness of even the strongest ties, the ease with which we abandon each other, and our need to be forgiven. An extraordinary book, her best, from a beloved American writer.

Have to say that even though there’s an obvious gender difference between me, the heroine and the author, I found the book tough reading , as in emotional, from time to time.  Especially, the euthanasia of Arthur the dog towards the end of Chapter 7 – Jo is a vet.  A few paragraphs I just couldn’t read .  But then on page 137 in Chapter 8, comes this,

Pure bliss.

I stood in the center of the yard for a moment and tilted my head back to let the soft snow touch my face.  The dogs pranced and rolled for pure joy in the pale, gray-brown light.  They chased each other wildly.  I made snowballs and threw them; the dogs leapt and bit at where they’d disappeared.  As they played, their muzzles whitened, their paws pilled up.

I left them reluctantly and came back in.  Watson trailed me around as I did my chores, watching me soberly.  I shut him out of the cat room, where we had only two boarders.  I let one of them out to roam and use the litter pan while I checked its cage.  I put more food down.  Then I went back out and worked my way through the dogs’ cages.  Two of them had had accidents, so I cleaned up and changed their bedding.  Several of them had their own food, in cans – those dishes needed to be washed.  Water refreshed, kibbles set out for the others.

I went to the cat room, put the first cat back and let the other one out.  Then I called the reluctant dogs in.  Watson greeted each one like a tiny worried mother, licking at their snow, fussing about how they smelled.  Slowly I recaged them.  I released Lucky and let him go outside for his solitary run while I refilled his food and water dishes.  Three dogs needed medications.  I put the last cat back in, called Lucky inside, locked up.

And while I did all this, I thought only of them, of the dogs and cats, of their requests for affection, of their comical or passionate relationships to one another, of the performance of their bodily functions.  I was taken up by them and their life and energy, by what they needed and asked of me.  I let go of everything difficult or complex in my life.

It reminded me of my days at Dr. Moran’s, caring for the dogs and cats he boarded and treated.  It reminded me of what a comfort it had been to me, even just physical escape into the lives of animals.  As I was driving home, I thought of all this, and it seemed to me that I’d chosen work which offered me daily the presence of pure innocence, a forgiveness for all my human flaws.

the presence of pure innocence, a forgiveness for all my human flaws Impossible to add anything; so I won’t!

Social intelligence of dogs

Underlining what 30,000 years of domestication produces!

This video, just under 6 minutes long, may well be ‘old news’ to many dog owners but still very much worth a viewing.

Scamp

And while I think about, if you didn’t see the video about Scamp and his ability to identify, and then comfort, humans very close to death, when it first appeared on Learning from Dogs, then do drop back to here and watch it.  It’s from the Extraordinary Animals series from Channel Five on British television and just 22 minutes long.