I don't know if it's the constant drizzle of aphid pee and caterpillar pellets this time of year, or the four atoms of peanut butter that floated down from a sandwich, but it's all I can do to keep Pappy moving on a walk. Yesterday Pappy was so enraptured by sniffing under under a weed that I got bored, put down his leash, walked about 100 feet, and looked back at him. Finally he stood up, startled, and gave me a look as if to say "how did you do that?"
I am currently listening to the audio book "A Good Dog" by Jon Katz, where he describes his experience with alternative treatment as a way to help his troubled Border Collie. In this section of the book he describes not only sessions with an acupuncturist and herbal healer, but also an animal communicator and a shaman.
I live in Takoma Park, which probably has more wiccans and spirit walkers per capita than any US city outside of California. And maybe New Mexico. Searching the internet, I did manage to find a small animal masseuse in town, but didn't see any animal communicators or soul retrievers. The former communicate with animals through telepathy, not just grasping ideas and images, but actual language in your pet's thoughts-- there's a more complete description here. A soul retriever goes out and reassembles the free floating parts of a pet or human soul that have escaped through trauma. One can find more information here. There are a surprising number of practitioners out there, or perhaps it isn't so surprising.
In the book Katz acts all hard-bitten and skeptical about these methods, but it's clear he's totally sucked in before he even gets to the first appointment. Personally, I am going to have to stick with veterinarians for Pappy, and, even then, as infrequently as possible.
When I was little everyone used to say that dogs saw in black and white. More recent research indicates that their color vision is different than ours. Rather than being trichromatic, theirs is only dichromatic-- they see yellow-blue, but are red-green color blind. The picture above provides some idea of how all those brightly colored toys appear in Spectacular Dichromascope. In Temple Grandin's "Animals in Translation", she talks about a problem at a farm where their pigs would mysteriously startle, and the cause was a hanging yellow raincoat fluttering in a breeze. Yellow really stands out like a searchlight in a dog's otherwise muted world.
Well, I spoke too soon about Pappy's rebound from his injury. Once the painkillers wore off, or once the muzziness of the sedation kicked in, he spent a lot of time standing like a zombie. Today the muzziness seems to have worn off, but now he's standing around lightly wimpering despite the pain pills. It's a heartbreaker. It seems like he handles short sharp pains better than long-term soreness. The light at the end of the tunnel is that, when we saw a dog on a short evening walk last night, he was rarin' to meet.
In Temple Grandin's Animals in Translation, she talks about dog and animal perception of pain as compared to humans. She mentions some tests on human chronic pain sufferers, who had been bedridden because of their pain. They had neurosurgery to have some connections severed to their frontal cortex, where most of the advanced functions of the human brain reside. This surgery didn't cut the link to the pain receptors, but somehow isolated the pain from the higher-level brain. Formerly bedridden patients were then up and around. When asked, they said they felt the same pain, it just didn't bother them as much-- they weren't suffering. Grandin then goes on to draw parallels between this surgery and the fact that animals have a much less developed frontal cortex, and so may not suffer quite the same.
But the way things stand right now, it's seeming like ol' Pappy suffers plenty.
Pappy is always standing at the sliding door to the back yard, pining to go outside and chase a ball after dinner. Now, in the heart of the Fall, this takes place in total darkness. When we first tried this I was sure that he'd lose the ball immediately, followed by him searching frantically with his tail whisking in circles and the occasional whine. Then, I envisioned, we'd be done until we found the ball the next morning.
But this isn't what happened. He was retreiving balls in the pitch black. He was snatching a ball out of mid-air, when I couldn't even find it after he dropped it at my feet. So I asked myself how he did that. A dog's bionic hearing is great, but it isn't radar. Hearing a ball's bounce is helpful, but won't tell you its trajectory and he was catching them on the fly. Smell is great for finding stationary balls, but there's some latency in scent that isn't going be as helpful in chasing them in motion.
So it had to be something to do with sight. But how can a dog who can't see the treat on the floor in front of him see a ball at night? Once, on a walk, he nearly desocketed my arm chasing after a pipe sticking out of the ground that stood a little too much like a squirrel. I looked up a couple of articles on dog sight here and here. Though dogs don't just see in black and white, their vision is only dichromatic (blue/yellow) and they don't distinguish many colors well. Apparently their visual acuity also isn't great-- if a human's vision is 20/20, a typical dog may only see from 20 feet what the person sees from 75 feet. But dogs have great night vision. First off, they have a much higher ratio of rods to cones than humans-- these are the high-definition, motion sensitive, black and white receptors in the retina. Humans have greater concentrations of rods in the peripheral vision, sometimes making it easier to see things at night by not looking directly at them. Dogs also have a "tapitum lucidum," a reflective layer behind the photoreceptors. This is what gives them the creepy glowing eyes at night. With the extra reflective layer, somehow the wavelength of dim light is enhanced providing better contrast.
Bottom line... looks like I am going out after dinner to toss balls all winter long.
As a follow on to my bit on the dog IQ testing, I'd like to examine the question of whether Pappy, and terriers in general, are blithering ee-jits. The opening example Stanley Coren uses in "Intelligence of Dogs" is the case of the Dandy Dinmont Terrier. He describes them as dogs bred to go with reckless abandon into dens after foxes and otters as large or larger than themselves. One might admire their courage, but "a more intelligent dog would simply say... 'this is too dangerous'". He then goes on to infer that they are untrainable morons. Ooooh, them's fightin' words.
I'm not sure Pappy is exactly the kind of terrier that Coren had in mind. I mean he's a bit leggy to be headed down the fox hole. In keeping with his terrier kin, he is reckless and obsessive in chasing things, and has a prey-drive that won't quit. But he also has a pretty good instinct for self-preservation-- when he goes flying around after balls he never collides with anything, and he never rough-houses with a dog that might take it the wrong way. He's very distractable, but where there are treats involved he has total focus. He's not well trained, but he's certainly not untrainable.
In Stanley Coren's "Intelligence of Dogs" he proposes a series of tests to measure your dog's intelligence. There are some folks out there that get a little steamed about the real-world applicability of these tests, but you have to suspect that their dogs didn't do so well. To me, it looks like they'd be fun for most dogs and owners.
This is a quick summary of the tests listed in the book:One of the interesting ideas in my dog books is the concept of neoteny, or the retention of juvenile characteristics, as a common feature of almost all breeds of domesticated dogs (see this article). When you look at dogs in light of this, you really do see the "puppy-like" traits and behaviors.
One of the references used in a couple of the books concerns a 40-year experiment in domesticating Siberian Foxes to simplify their care in (originally) Soviet fur farms. After a just a few generations of selecting for tameness, the foxes underwent a number of seemingly unrelated physical and behavioral changes. They developed shorter snouts and floppy ears-- common to many canid puppies-- and multicolored fur, which undermined their value in the fur trade. They also took to barking, wagging their tails, and whining for joy at seeing a friendly face, which are behaviors unknown in wild foxes. They were just trying to make a less freaky fox, and they reinvented the dog in a person's lifetime.
There's a bit more about the study here.
As I've mentioned, I've been listening to Temple Grandin's "Animals in Translation", and in it she paraphrases my least favorite dog-book hack, Elizabeth Marshall whozits (EMw) of "Hidden Life of Dogs" notoriety.
Given that I can accept when Temple Grandin, Stanley Coren, and most other animal authors tell their share of unbelievable whoppers over the course of their books, why do I dislike EMw so? I'm capable of taking in the information, weighing how well-founded it seems, and accepting the solid research while overlooking the idle speculation. Why can't I give EMw the benefit of this balanced assessment?
Probably because she starts off poorly in the introduction of "Hidden Life" with an explanation that she is no scientist, followed by a lame-brained rationalization of anthropomorphism of dog behavior as a vital element in her "research" method. To translate, she describes a tiny scrap of dog behavior and proceeds to weave it into a tapestry of thorough nonsense. She brags of logging thousands and thousands of hours observing her pets, yet she is blithely unaware when they dig an extensive den feet away from her back door. One of the scenes that drives me nuts is when she is trying to comfort her pregnant dog by telling her that she'll be fine, but the dog won't believe her. I sure don't believe her.
Amazon is always an interesting forum for rants about authors, though it's impossible to come away with a common opinion. Here are some links to people weighing in on EMw, Temple Grandin, and Stanley Coren. In looking over the reviews for EMw, I see that I posted one many moons ago-- can you guess which one?
While doing chores this weekend I've been listening to an audiobook of Temple Grandin's "Animals in Translation". She is autistic, and the central premise of the book draws parallels between the thinking and perceiving of animals and autistic people.
She says that humans process out an extraordinary amount of sensory information that animals and autistic people can't-- we can't see the same things, so we have trouble understanding their reactions. She is a consultant in the humane handling of livestock. As a result, many of her examples concern why cattle balk at entering a chute (strong transition from bright to dark lighting), and why pigs wouldn't go down an alley (bicolor vision made a yellow ladder frighteningly bright).
It's more readable than my examples indicate, and I am just now getting into the more doggy portion of the book. For scientific tastes it probably oversimplifies the subject, but for the rest of us it is a good blend of research and storytelling.
I got a copy of "Intelligence of Dogs" by Stanley Coren. While many dog authors, especially boneheads like Elizabeth Marshall whozits of "Hidden Life of Dogs" note, seem to attract mixed reviews, Coren seems to be widely respected. Other authors regularly quote or reference his books as source material. I've got a copy of another of his books, "How to Speak Dog" on the shelf, but I'm taking this one on the plane today and plan to make some headway.
