Pets

Speaking of dogs (as we were indirectly in contemplating the Late Great Dog Food Question), I’ve been reading an entertaining book by psychologist Alexandra Horowitz called Inside of a Dog. In it, she proposes to help us appreciate the canine umwelt—the dog’s unique way of experiencing the world—by understanding what and how a dog sees, smells, hears, senses, and thinks. Based on what we know to date of dog physiology and psychology, she suggests we can figuratively get inside a dog’s mind.

As intellectual exercises go, it’s great fun, and the insights you gain are slightly different from Cesar Milan’s dominance-and-submission theories. She points out that though dogs probably are descended from wolves, after tens of thousands of years spent living with humans, they’re not wolves, and their mentality, intellectual capacity, and social interactions are markedly different from those of wolves. This has some amusing implications.

The book isn’t especially well written and in places it’s poorly edited, especially near the beginning. She doesn’t start to get on a roll until almost half-way through, but once she does hit her stride, her story gets pretty interesting. We’re amazed by how “smart” (human definition) dogs are about some things and how obtuse they appear to be about others…quite reasonably, on reflection, in light of what dogs and humans do to get by in the world.

At one point, Horowitz reflects on the extent to which dogs understand the meaning of human speech, specifically their skill at recognizing individual words. She suggests they respond to the prosody of speech—its patterns and musical “meaning”—but they’re not always good at recognizing individual words. Says she,

Try asking your dog on one morning to go for a walk; on the next, ask if your dog wants to snow forty locks in the same voice. If everything else remains the same, you’ll probably get the same, affirmative reaction. The very first sounds of an utterance seem to be important to dog perception, though, so changing the swallowed consonants for articulated ones and the long vowels for short ones—ma for a polk—might prompt the confusion merited by this gibberish.

Hmmm…. A challenge! To paraphrase a less than perfectly articulate robot, “I love a challenge!”

But first, what the heck is a swallowed consonant? Simon Mumford, an English instructor, tells us a “swallowed consonant” happens when a speaker elides a consonant in such a way that it can barely be heard or can’t be heard, as in “I got a cold” for I’ve got a cold. Doesn’t seem to apply in the substitution of polk for walk, but what the hey. Every writer needs an editor.

So, to try this on Cassie the Corgi:

HUMAN: arising, walking up the hall, and paraphrasing the daily liturgy with accustomed verve: Do you want to go for a smoggy talk?

DOG evinces puzzled expression.

HUMAN evinces continued verve:  C’mon! Let’s go for a smoggy talk!

DOG’s expression morphs to utter befuddlement.

HUMAN: Smoggy talk! Smoggy talk! Hurry up! Let’s go for a SMOGGY TALK!

Still appearing mystified, DOG eyes HUMAN with evident curiosity and takes a few tentative steps after it.

HUMAN: Gathers collar, leash, package of dog mound baggies, and hat.

DOG, viewing HUMAN‘s activities: Arf!

DOG dances toward front door.

HUMAN: It’s time for a smoggy talk!

DOG, whirling in circles: Arf arf arf arf ARF!

HUMAN: “Smoggy talk,” eh? {snort!} Here, hold still while I get this collar on you.

DOG and HUMAN exit, stage left.

So, alas, it does not appear that dogs deduce meaning from tone, emphasis, prosody, or brute human verve. It also appears that this particular dog can tell the difference between “doggy walk” and “smoggy talk.”

Arf, she said. Arf.

So, taking a moment of rest late this morning to read news online, I checked Craig’s List for the third time, to see if anyone might have lost the Found Hound. Depressing, all these people with muttley pups and kittens from unspayed pets, trying to give them away for free…and while you’re at it, will you take the mother, too? Feeling overwhelmed, I was just about to click out of there when my eye was caught by this heading:

I have lost my dog (with a zip code right next to mine)

Click on that and find…

I lost my dog her name is Angel she is a cream colored German Shepperd and Chow mix she was not wearing a collar. She is 16yrs old and can’t hear very well and she decided to venture away from home. Please if you have seen her or have her I really miss her very much and would love for her to come home. If there is anything you know please call me at 888-765-4321 and please only call if your serious. Thank you Crystal

Holy mackerel! That fit Orphant Annie to a T! Called the number: no answer. E-mailed the Yahoo address, attaching a photo. A few hours later, phone rings. A young voice says the photo looks just like her dog. She says she was at the shelter Tuesday noon and didn’t see the dog; I said the guy showed up at my house to pick up the dog right about that time.

So she said she would try to retrieve her dog. Haven’t heard anything more from her. I hope she found her Angel/Orphant Annie and that they hadn’t put the dog down because of its extreme age.

Where she said she lived is about a mile and a half from the park, as the crow flies. But the road she lives on does not follow the crow’s route. It breaks for about a quarter mile between the canal and Central Avenue. To get to the park, the dog would have had to follow quite a circuitous route, and she would have had to cross over the canal. To get to a crossing, she would have had to go a half-mile north or south and a quarter mile west. Then she would have had to walk along and then cross over a seven-lane main drag, possibly in the middle of rush hour. She probably walked somewhere between two and three miles.

Think of that. A 16-year-old large-breed dog is about the equivalent of an 80-year-old human. Imagine your 80-year-old great-grandmother making her way across two or three miles of urban streets in 90-degree heat.

Must be one tough dog.

Update

Crystal just e-mailed to say she found Angel and now has her home with the family. So! A happy ending.

🙂

This morning in the park, Cassie and I picked up a hanger-on:

Very thirsty and very hungry, she followed us home. She has no collar and no tags, but she’s been spayed quite recently. This leads me to suspect she was just sprung from the Sunnyslope Humane Society, which microchips adopted dogs unless you tell them not to. So I figure if I take her up there, they probably can find her humans.

Or not.

It’s not a no-kill shelter, and so I hesitate to take her there. The staff can be pretty officious, and they could demand that I leave her even if all I do is go in and ask them to check if she’s been microchipped. And it’s entirely possible that the present set of humans took her to the park and dumped her: she’s not house-trained, and her idea of the loo is wherever she happens to be standing. I’ve cleaned up after her three times in the past two hours.

She’s a mellow dog, probably six or seven years old. Claws need to be clipped. She may still have stitches. And she has a spot on one ear that looks suspiciously like the mange.

Her skin is black and her hair is coyote-dust tan. Probably weighs 45 or 50 pounds. She has long, slender legs reminiscent of a coyote’s, too. In fact, when I first saw her wandering in the park looking confused and lost, I thought she was a small coyote, but then quickly saw she was all doggus domesticus. The blue tongue suggests she has a fair amount of chow in her, but her hair is not even faintly chow-like—her coat is so coarse as to be almost wire-like.

What she looks like, to my eye, is a reservation dog. She looks exactly like the mixed, mixed, and remixed mutts that roam the rez in hordes.

She’s a nice dog. Cassie’s not nuts about her—mostly ignores her except for a little competition over the dog chew toys, and except for a few moments of putting her in her place. Oddly, for a female, she’s pretty submissive and permits herself to be cowed by Cassie’s threats. Or at least, so far she has: she hasn’t growled back. Yet.

So I’m not real sure what to do with her. I’m sure the Humane Society isn’t open today. We are totally out of food. Tomorrow is the first day of the new budget cycle, and because I have to spend the entire afternoon tomorrow getting the damaged shoulder examined again, I’ll have to spend the whole morning running after groceries. I’m not comfortable with leaving her outside (although I suspect she’s been an outdoor dog all her life, given her toilet habits)—yesterday the thermometer in back read 110 degrees. It’s 94 now; supposed to be cooler today, only 104. She probably will get the gollywobbles from the human food she had, which I’d just as soon not have to clean up off the floor. It was clear from her mound that she’s been eating an inexpensive dog food. No doubt the switch from kibble to grain, veggies, and meat will give her a passing case of enteritis. In fact, I can hear her gut rumbling now. 🙄

So, I guess my choices are to lock her in a bedroom while I’m gone, so that I won’t have to search all over the house for puddles, or to leave her in the backyard and try to get home as quick as can be.

Actually, Anna’s old crate is still out in back. It’s been sitting out there rusting and collecting leaf litter for the past 10 or 12 years, so it would take some doing to clean it up. Probably not worth the effort, without knowing whether this dog will go in a crate.

Meanwhile, I’m printing up a few flyers to tack up around the park. Don’t have much hope that whoever she belongs to will respond…people dump dogs in this neighborhood all the time. They think because the place is affluent, some rich person will take the dog in and give it a good home. In fact, the rich persons just call Animal Control and have the critters hauled away.

If nobody claims her in a day or so, I guess I’ll have to take her up to the Humane Society. {sigh}