The Eentsy Weentsy Dog

Single-bed dilemma... or not

2012-01-23T18:26:00.000-07:00

For years, I have wished to go back to sleeping in a single bed. When Tinky-Winky and I moved into our furnished apartment, I asked the landlady if I could have a single bed, but they had none. So for the last four years, I have been sleeping on the hide-a-bed, and Her Majesty favours me with her company... when she feels like it. But now, by coincidence, the landlady had two single beds on hand when I was getting ready for the quasi-foster child, and I borrowed one. Thus I now have a single bed in my house, and I intend to keep it, in case more children come over, and because I always wanted one.

The advantages of the single bed seemed too numerous to count. First of all, I won't have to make the bed every night and put it away every morning, so I won't spend so much energy just on getting in and out of bed. And when I have insomnia, I'll be able to get up, sit on the couch for a while, and go back to bed when I'm sleepy. The apartment looks much more welcoming now, in my opinion, and at night my bed doesn't take up the entire place. And I can have a nightstand with a lamp and other nightstand-ish things on it, which wasn't practical with the hide-a-bed. It seemed perfect...

and then it hit me: where is Her Majesty going to sleep?

Oh no!

Well, obviously she can keep sleeping on her bed, which is her favourite anyway. Or she can sleep on the couch, which she likes too. In fact, I don't think she really likes to sleep on my bed, even though lately she's been doing it of her own free will a lot. So maybe it wouldn't matter to her, but it matters to me. She's my dog and I like having her on my bed.

Accordingly, last night I went to bed in the single bed for the first time. Tinky-Winky considered the situation and decided to jump up on the couch, where her blanky was. So I got up, picked her up, and put her on my single bed.

And...

she plonked herself down and went to sleep. No trouble whatsoever.

So, apparently I was worried about nothing. I can have a single bed and have my dog sleep on the bed.

Of course the downside is that she takes up most of the bed and I'm not quite sure where I am supposed to sleep, but that's really just a detail. As long as Her Majesty is happy, all is well.

Things that are poisonous

2012-01-10T16:32:00.003-07:00

An anonymous reader commented that grapes are poisonous to dogs. Hmmmmm... Good to know. So for my own information, I googled what else is poisonous to dogs, thusly. But for those who don't want to read the article, here is a short version:

Alcoholic Beverages
Apple Seeds
Apricot Pits
Cherry Pits
Candy containing the sweetener Xylitol
Chocolate
Coffee
Grapes
Hops
Macadamia Nuts
Moldy Foods
Mushrooms
Mustard Seeds
Onions and Onion Powder
Peach Pits
Potato Leaves and Stems
Raisins
Rhubarb Leaves
Salt
Tea
Tomato Leaves and Stems
Walnuts
Yeast Dough

It should also have tobacco. And if you think people don't give their pets tobacco, my uncle had a sheep who did tricks for cigarettes. He ate the cigarettes. The uncle later died of lung cancer; I'm not sure what became of the sheep.

Tinky-Winky and the foster child

2012-01-10T09:01:00.000-07:00

Tinky-Winky and I have a little girl staying with us this week. She's not technically a foster child in that the government hasn't intervened (yet), but she kind of is in that she got dropped off with a complete stranger because none of the people who have a legal position in her life are available to take care of her. Anyway.

The thing is, little girls love Tinky-Winky, and Tinky-Winky does not like little girls. So Little Girl is always trying to play with Tinky-Winky, and Tinky-Winky is always running away from her. Most of the time I intervene, but as soon as my back is turned, like when I go have a shower, Little Girl is harassing Tinky-Winky again. Her Majesty is not amused.

Also, Little Girl doesn't really care to go for walks, and she walks really, really slow. We have to walk the dog regardless, and it's good for her since she's overweight and she insists she wants "seven big dogs". But it annoys Her Majesty. Plus today is horribly windy, so Tinky-Winky chose to come back home without pooping. Oh well. She didn't really eat last night anyway.

So, Her Majesty is out of sorts. She hasn't slept on my bed since Little Girl got here. Well, at least she hasn't slept on Little Girl's bed either. That would annoy me.

The moral of this story is, I don't think Tinky-Winky is in favour of having foster children in this house. I guess she'll be really unimpressed when the little autistic twins come sleep over. Still, I believe in putting people ahead of dogs, but this is her house and her life, not just mine. People who can't get along with her will not continue being welcome in my house. After all, she was here before them and she'll be there long after they're gone. Loyalty goes both ways.

Have you got a shar pei?

2012-01-07T15:44:00.002-07:00

I'm not looking for another dog. Tinky-Winky is in excellent health and will be my only dog as long as she lives. But, once upon a time, I joked that when she's gone I'm gonna get a shar pei, because it looks surly and not cute at all, and it feels like petting a toothbrush; that way I'll finally be able to walk my dog without being interrupted every few years by someone who thinks it's adorable.

That being said, I've heard that shar peis smell and are prone to various ailments, particularly of the eyes. So if anyone reading this has, or had, a shar pei, I'd like to hear about your experiences with them.

Kthxbai.

So you're my best friend, eh?

2012-01-02T19:31:00.000-07:00

From time to time, I start to worry that Tinky-Winky is going deaf. So to test it, I call her.

Yesterday, I tried calling her several times. Outside the house. Inside the house. When she was busy. When she was not busy. When she was alert and when she was bored.

Nothing.

She never once turned her head to look at me.

Oh no! My dog is deaf! Whatever shall I do?

Oh well. Being dinner time, I took some cheese out of the fridge.

Immediately, the dog came galloping from the other end of the house. Deaf, eh? She's not the least bit deaf. She can hear cheese for miles. Turns out she was just ignoring me the whole day.

Sigh...

At bedtime, it had gotten quite cold, so I put my heating pad under the sheets to warm up my spot before bed. Then I went to brush my teeth and so on.

When I came back, the dog was lying on the bed... right on top of my heating pad.

Sigh...

Frankly, if this is my best friend, I'm glad I don't have very many friends. Or to draw a less cynical conclusion, she's lucky she's a dog, because as a human she'd be a real bitch. Then again, "cynical" comes from the Greek "kunos" meaning "dog", so many cynicism is the best way to look at it.

Oh well. I still love you, bitchy-witchy. (Yes, that is actually one of the nicknames I call her.)

Maybe her heart grew three sizes?

2011-12-05T19:26:00.001-07:00

If you've been following this blog (and at least 29 of you are), you're aware by now that Tinky-Winky used to have a problem with aggression, but she's getting better all the time. On Sunday we were walking off-leash in the afternoon, seeing as the Bylaw guy got fed up with the stupidity of our town council and is no longer doing anything about the dogs, or anything else, that I can tell. The town council doesn't want to enforce anything because it's either "too much work" or "contrary to our northern culture". Anyway, the fact that the mayor and four out of seven councillors are morons is not the point, but thanks to their stupidity, we can now walk off-leash whenever we want. In fact, there are more off-leash dogs downtown in the middle of the day than there used to be before we hired the bylaw guy.

Have I mentioned yet that the mayor and four out of seven councillors are morons?

So back to my story, we were walking off-leash in broad daylight, and coming opposite on the trail was the town hall clerk (probably the last person in town who believes in the dog bylaw) and her two on-leash dogs, Dexter (a pug) and Freddie (a Boston terrier, or French bulldog - I can never remember). Tinky-Winky has previously done some social peeing with Dexter. Freddie is new. Both have a habit of freaking out at oncoming traffic when on leash.

So. Freddie, Dexter and their person face off with Tinky-Winky on the trail. I tried to call her back. She thought about it, while Freddie and Dexter barked at her, and their person pondered her next moved. Luckily, she's not the kind to freak out when dogs start barking, and also she's aware that her dogs have behavioural problems, so she doesn't let them go after someone else's dog and then blame the other person. So, nobody panicked.

Tinky-Winky went off the trail and around the dogs peacefully, sniffed their tracks, and waited for me.

Attagirl!!!

Today, as we were exiting the building for our evening walk, someone else was walking in carrying laundry and followed by two off-leash dogs. Or more specifically, if I'm not mistaken, two off-leash bitches. We've met them before, though I don't know their names. Sounds Hawaiian, or something. One is an adult, somewhat reminiscent of an Irish setter but a bit taller and bulkier, and a different coat. She's had her nose bit by Tinky-Winky before. The other one is a puppy, and not a very old one. I think maybe four months. She's about the same height as Tinky-Winky already, but lanky, like the big one. Unlike the big one, though, she's normally smarter than to tangle with my Wolverine.

Anyway. We're exiting the building as they're entering, so we're all in the air space between the two doors together. The big one followed the person into the building. The puppy, for some reason, decided to get all over Tinky-Winky. Seriously all over her. She stuck her nose in Tinky-Winky's ears, smelled her lips repeatedly, smelled her butt, with lots of body contact. Tinky-Winky was sitting and I had my hand on her collar, but I actually wasn't restraining her. She didn't even look mad. I have seriously never seen her half that close to another dog. Even when she doesn't fight, she'll still bite the nose off any dog who tries to sniff her butt, let alone her ears.

After a while she did give one half-arsed little snap, not even close to hitting the puppy. The puppy's person pulled her away, but then the big dog must have thought something like "oh, you're sniffable now?" So she ran back out the door to sniff Tinky-Winky, too. And Tinky-winky didn't freak out.

There is no way Tinky-Winky doesn't freak out at a hyper, large, probably female dog jumping all over her. But she didn't.

I think my dog is a lot less messed-up than everyone thinks.

Predacon: terrorize

2011-12-05T18:55:00.000-07:00

Recently, Tinky-Winky has taken to sleeping on my bed of her own free will. In the past she would usually sleep under the bed, or only sleep on the bed when I put her there. The last few weeks, she waits for me to make the hide-a-bed, then she jumps up and sprawls out right in the middle. And of course, laterally across the bed rather than length-wise so we could both lie down comfortably.

Two nights ago, apparently, she was in a hurry, so she jumped up when I still had two blankets to add. Hmmmm... Oh well. I put the next blanket over her and waited for her to crawl out.

And waited.

Her Majesty sat up, still under the blanket, and turned her head this way and that, but didn't move her butt.

I waited a while longer.

She still didn't move her butt.

Fine.

I pulled the blanket off her head. Immediately she lay down again and went to sleep. Laterally across the bed, of course. She looked adorable.

Later, as I tried to fit my fat arse onto the tiny sliver of bed she left me, she put her little paws over her little nose and squeezed.

It looked even more adorable.

That's funny. She could crush all the bones in my hand with her teeth. She could rip out my trachea before I could even blink. And she looks completely adorable while preventing me from getting into my own bed.

We think we're so smart, but really dogs are playing us all for the fools we are.

Things I love about my shiba

2011-11-13T09:59:00.000-07:00

Shiba Shedding Time.

As far as I know, I'm the only shiba owner who loves Shiba Shedding Time. If you're not a shiba's personal assistant, you may not be aware that shibas blow their coat twice a year, spring and fall; and as they have a double coat, this entails a considerable amount of hair. Shiba Shedding Time typically lasts for several weeks, during which you will be vacuuming at least twice a day. And when you think you're done vacuuming, you turn around and you can't even tell where you've vacuumed and where you haven't.

Most shiba people whose blogs I've read (I don't read any currently because they displeased me) have some kind of super-aggressive grooming tool to try to rip off most of the old coat in three brushings. That sounds like exactly not what a shiba would like. I, on the other hand, have just a simple brush. I brush Tinky-Winky very slowly, for a few minutes a day. Usually I only get to do one side per session, because she lies down on her side for brushing, and when she's had enough she stands up and walks away. I find the best way is to brush gently against the coat at first. This will lift up clumps of the undercoat that are ready to come out. Then I focus on those areas, brushing against the hair to lift it and then with the hair to remove it.

You see, Tinky-Winky is not a cuddly dog. She only likes to be petted in her own time, which is generally while she's waking up in the morning. It suits Her Majesty that I should get up quickly and then attend her for twenty minutes while she eases out of sleep. That being said, she didn't start this tradition until we had been together more than three years; in fact we were together 2 1/2 years before she ever willingly showed me her belly. But when she's shedding, she's actually quite willing to be brushed. It's the only time when I can go to her and start handling her and she won't walk away in seconds.

So, I love Shiba Shedding Time because I get to spend much more time petting my shiba than any other time of year. (And also, I keep the dead hair, then some day I can have it spun and knit myself a... toque, probably. If I wanted a sweater, I should have got a bigger dog.)

Oh no! My dog is autistic!

2011-11-03T11:21:00.002-06:00

A couple months ago I scored Tinky-Winky's dream job, which is anything with short hours and home every night. From my point of view, I'm making f-all for money, but she doesn't know that. Other than that though, the job is awesome, particularly the part with the eight-year-old autistic boys. They're very awesome.

But then, I noticed something about autism.

Lack of connection with others

Violent outbursts

Obsessive behaviours

Lack of typical play behaviour

Unusual thinking and communication patterns

Normal intelligence

Ok, not all autistic people have all these traits, but you know who does? Tinky-Winky. Even as a puppy, Tinky-Winky didn't play normal dog games. She still doesn't. She doesn't interact with other dogs and she's rarely affectionate with me, and only on her own terms. She freaks out and beats up little dogs. She spends hours shaping her doggy bed, unless you redirect her. She looks for me in the woods by sight and not by smell. She's not at all stupid, she's just really odd.

Oh no! My dog is autistic!

Hahaha, I crack me up. Is there such a thing as autism in dogs? Is she just one strange little dog?

Well, who knows. I like her. I like my autistic kids. My ex-husband has Asperger's, and my stalker probably does too. I guess that's just the kind of people I attract.

Shiba as service dog: fail

2011-10-03T16:19:00.001-06:00

Be still, my heart!

2011-09-20T20:48:00.000-06:00

I met a really handsome dog. His name is Bruce and he's a nine-month-old akita puppy.

At the other end of the leash is a really handsome young... carpenter.

O.

M.

G.

I must find out if they have an alpha bitch in their pack, or if they could be asked to join our pack. Tinky-Winky hasn't even tried snapping at Bruce yet, even though he's incredibly hyper, so it's promising. I think she's too smart to snap at dogs that can squish her like a bug.

Maybe we should pee on the guy's apartment door to make sure no other bitches can go in there?

Shiba as service dog

2011-09-06T07:36:00.000-06:00

I don't think anyone has tried to use a shiba as a service dog. They're just not very helpful. Tinky-Winky's world view is that people serve dogs, not the other way around. You know that saying, that dogs think "this creature pets me, feeds me, takes care of me, he must be God", while cats think "this creature pets me, feeds me, takes care of me, I must be God." Shibas have cat-like thinking.

So the only way to get a shiba to help you is if what you need also happens to serve his or her purposes.

Consider this. Tinky-Winky knows what time it is, and especially what time I'm to take her for her off-leash walk. For a few years we walked off-leash in the evenings, but now that we have the new bylaw guy, who stays up late but doesn't get up early, we off-leash in the morning. In summer, when it's daylight all night and the sun rises at four, it's easy enough to get up at 4:15 to walk the dog. Now that sunrise is after six, I set my alarm for 5:15... and I snooze it. I'm the queen of snoozing. I can snooze my alarm for two hours or more.

That's where Tinky-Winky comes to my aid.

Snoozing interferes with Her Majesty's morning off-leash walk; therefore she has taken to making sure I get up. I hear the alarm and snooze it once, and then I listen, hoping that she's still asleep. If I'm lucky, I hear nothing. But if she's awake, she'll be sitting up in bed panting, and then I know I better be up and at them. And if she really gets impatient, she'll give her one bark that means "human, do something for me!" I can sleep through two hours of my alarm clock, but not through that one shiba bark.

The only drawback of the shiba as alarm clock is that she's not consistent. On statutory holidays, she will bark at 5:15:00 right on the dot, but on work days, meh...

Yo dog, you're in my spot.

2011-08-06T15:15:00.001-06:00

A three-walk day

2011-08-01T22:38:00.000-06:00

Tinky-Winky and I have been on two walks a day for about a month now, which is not good for me as I'm gaining weight. For her, however, it seems to be working. She still occasionally drags her feet in the evening, but mostly she has enough energy for her two walks.

Today, however, she was feeling peppy. She woke me up at 3:55 am, not for any particular reason, but because she was awake and I wasn't and she desired my company. So, we went for our walk. When we got home, I went back to bed, and she actually jumped on the bed on her own, which she hasn't done in a very long time. So we went back to sleep and got up around 10:00. By lunch, she was fidgetty again. She kept wanting attention, and then walking around the apartment, and then back to me for attention.

After lunch, I spent more time with her, playing with rawhides, going through her tricks, cuddling with her... Usually after a while she'll go to sleep, but she continued wide awake. So, I took her for an afternoon walk. We drove around to the beach, which is no longer suitable for walking, having been ruined by squatters over the last three years, then we walked along the dirt road looking for interesting things to look at. We didn't walk very far or very fast, but even so, when we got home, she looked tired. She slept like a log the rest of the day.

For our evening walk, therefore, I thought she wouldn't want to go very far, so I took the route that allows her to turn back any time she wants. But she actually led me all the way around with good energy and no foot-dragging. Then she had to have seconds of dinner, because she had worked up quite an appetite.

Maybe she's feeling better because the weather has been cooler, or maybe the rest has done her good. Or maybe this was just a good day for her. Sometimes when I look at her now, she's starting to look her age.

Mmmm... Comfy...

2011-07-24T13:57:00.000-06:00

Garden dog

2011-07-24T13:45:00.001-06:00

I think Tinky-Winky dog is jealous of the garden. As soon as I spend any amount of time gardening, she tries to get in the middle of things. She is also fascinated by the smell of bone meal, so here she's trying to get into the bag. Once it was open, though, she wanted none of it. I think the smell of the whole mass is too strong for her. Bone meal is a natural product made from, obviously, crushed bones of animals such as chickens. This one in particular has no cow bones in it - I suppose they tell me that so I won't be worried about Mad Cow? So anyway, I doubt it would do the dog any harm. It smells and looks like fish food, mostly.

Doggy storm shelter: success!

2011-07-20T07:00:00.001-06:00

Finally, the dog understands the purpose of the crate. She hadn't stepped inside yet, even though I put all her shredding blankets in there. Then Monday afternoon there was a thunderstorm, and she started freaking out as usual, so I put her in the cage. She shredded for a while and then came back out. But Tuesday, when the thunder started, she went into the cage of her own free will and lay down at the back.

Booya!

Well, that doesn't look very comfortable. I've been meaning to get her some bedding in there, but I really don't feel like spending money on a dog bed and a comforter just now. So, instead I'm lending her some of my crochet blankets, thusly:

The one inside the cage is a queen-size and makes a nice thick mattress. I hope she won't tear it. Crochet blankets are much more resistant than fabric, but you never know. The one draped over the cage is mostly to shut out more light and sound and make it more cave-like, but it also makes it more esthetically pleasing to me. Better feng-shui, hopefully. Also, both these blankets are hand-made by me and have been in the house for years, and were on my bed all winter, so they should be thoroughly permeated with my smell, and hopefully that's a comfort to her when I'm not home.

This morning, the dog went to look at the cage again, and at first did not approve of my modifications. So I grabbed her and put her inside forcibly, and she lay down at the back and made herself at home. I'm not sure she likes having a blanket over the cage, actually. It shuts out some light and noise, but on the other hand, she can't see me anymore, and that always annoys her. She likes to keep an eye on me.

Tinky-Winky's favourite food

2011-07-15T16:22:00.000-06:00

Tinky-Winky's favourite food, bar none, is cheese. Cheese is like cocaine to her. She will do just about anything for it, such as obeying commands. This is convenient for two reasons. First, there is no naturally-occurring equivalent to cheese in the natural world, so she can only get it from me. Thus cheese is a huge motivator in getting her to recall. She's actually desisted and come back to me as she was approaching another dog to lay a beating on it, just because I had cheese. Calling "Tinky-Winky, come!" is successful fairly often. Calling "Tinky-Winky, cheese!" is 100% success.

The other reason is that the dog catcher does not carry cheese. He tries to bait dogs with store-bought extruded dog treats, which works on under-privileged dogs, but not on Her Majesty. She has way better food at home, and no way is she selling her freedom for extruded treats when she knows she can get cheese for it.

But other than cheese, Tinky-Winky's favourite food is whatever I'm eating. And that's funny, because she eats way better than I do. She has fresh meat and vegetables on her plate, and I'm eating mac and cheese, or wieners, or toast, and she wants my food. Some of the stuff she begs for rather boggles my mind. Lemon tarts, for example. What kind of dog eats lemon? She does. She loves lemon tarts.

Also, zucchini. When we were in Calgary in the fall, I made a zucchini casserole. I also bought supermarket sushi fairly often, because I can't get it at home. So one time I had this cheap sushi and the zucchini casserole. I offered the dog sushi, she turned her nose up at it and tried to get into the casserole. So I gave her the casserole instead. Not only she ate it, but she chased the roommate's cat away from it. There was no animal protein in it at all, just zucchini, olive oil and bread crumbs. She loved it.

Of course because she has expensive tastes, the more expensive my food is, the more she wants it. Cheesecake, for example, costs its weight in... scrap iron, at least, and she MUST have it. Are you serious? Do you know how often I can afford cheesecake? You're a dog. Go eat garbage. I'm not giving you my cheesecake.

Tinky-Winky even wants my food if she doesn't even want to eat it. For example, fruit. She doesn't like fruit, and generally speaking, neither do I, but sometimes I do buy some. Expensive stuff, usually, like raspberries. Naturally, Tinky-Winky wants some. The first time she asked, I gave her some. I was sitting on the couch eating grapes, and she wanted some. I gave her a grape. She lowered her head to where I couldn't see her, and then came up and asked for more. I gave her another one. I must have given her about ten grapes, and I was thinking "wow, I never heard of a dog eating grapes before." Then I got up to go to the kitchen and saw that all the grapes were on the floor. She was lowering her head to spit them out, and then she kept asking for more, secure in the knowledge that next time, surely, I was gonna give her something tasty to eat.

Likewise with strawberries. She doesn't eat them, but she'll lick every one of them if you let her.

The one thing I eat (reluctantly, I'll admit) and she won't is... peanut butter. Seriously. Most dogs love peanut butter; she won't even look at it.

What a strange little dog she is.

My poor little dog

2011-07-14T15:40:00.000-06:00

When I'm not home, the dog sleeps on her lawn. She's dug herself a comfortable little depression, which I've given up on filling, and since the lawn is watered frequently, it's nice and cool in the dirt. She likes it there, which is good since that's the whole point of the lawn.

When I'm home, the dog would like to sleep on her lawn, but she can't, because from the lawn she can't see if I'm getting ready to leave. So she sleeps in the hallway, where it's somewhat cooler than in the living room, and I have to walk past her to leave. I try to tell her that I'm not going anywhere for a while, or that I'll let her know if I'm leaving, but she doesn't understand, so she can't sleep on her lawn.

If I thought she'd understand, I'd get her a baby monitor so she could sleep on the lawn and keep an ear on me, but she wouldn't understand.

Poor little dog. What a dilemma.

We interrupt this program

2011-07-14T11:42:00.001-06:00

PEOPLE ARE STARVING IN AFRICA!

Ok, so that's not news. People were starving in Africa ever since I was a kid, and before. But right now, the World Food Programme is short just $191 million from their budgeted need for Somalia and the Horn of Africa.

"Just" $191 million?

That's right. Because that works out to just $11 per Canadian worker. That's half the price of a twelve-pack of beers. It could be a burger and fries. Three or four ridiculously overpriced coffees from a big franchise. There is a lot of stuff you spend $11 on that you don't even need. Just skip one of those things and save Somalia! (For now, anyway.)

Donate here. Or donate to some other charity you like. If you don't have $11, give $5. Give something. And pass it on to your friends. You'd do it if that was your kid in the photo, wouldn't you? (The photo is actually from a feeding centre in Ayod, Sudan, on March 31, 1993, because I had it handy. Starvation looks the same anywhere. Photo by Corinne Dufka/Reuters.)

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelp! People starving! Help! Help! Help!

The tale of the dog license

2011-07-13T11:23:00.004-06:00

This morning, I went to get a dog license for Tinky-Winky. I've had her six years, maybe it was about time I licensed her. Though it makes no difference, really, she has a tag with my phone number, and from a distance the bylaw guy can't tell it's not a town license tag, so he doesn't know she's not registered.

Still, licenses are free for fixed animals, so why not?

So I went down to Town Hall with my bill of sale. First of all, I wrote down the breed on the application as "shiba inu". The town employee had never heard of it, and indeed on her log of tag applications, there are no shiba inus listed. Apparently, none of the several shiba owners in town figure their dog is likely to get caught, either. Probably because none of them ever walk their dogs, so it's not likely to go missing. They're also too fat to run very far.

Next problem: the bill of sale shows the dog's name as "Sunojo's Playmate of the Year" aka "Bunny". But I put on the application "Sissi" which is what I call her at home. ("Tinky-Winky" is her username. I started calling that on my old blog where everyone has blog names, to prevent googling.) The town employee was confused. "This says Bunny, not Sissi," she says to me. Right. Because the seller called her Bunny, and I call her Sissi. Get it?

No.

After some further explanation, she accepted that I don't call my dog the same name the previous owner did. But then she found the registered name, and that confused the issue further. Am I the only one in this town with a CKC-registered dog, or what? The dog has a registered name, and a pet name her breeder called her, and a pet name I call her.

This did not seem to make any sense to the town employee.

Finally I told her, it really doesn't matter what you call this dog, she's not gonna come anyway.

This seemed to settled the matter to her satisfaction, and she gave me my dog tag.

Phew. The next dog is getting Tinky-Winky's old town tag, I can tell you. It's not like anyone here can tell one shiba from another anyway.

That can't be comfortable

2011-07-12T21:35:00.000-06:00

Her Majesty is lying on the bare concrete balcony with her head in a pot of pansies. There is NO WAY that's comfortable. Also, just before she picked the pansies as a pillow, she had her head in the baobabs. And if anything happens to my baobabs, this little dog is going to get rebuked like she's never been rebuked before.

You know why she's lying like that though? Because I was fussing with those plants. She doesn't like to sleep on the concrete with her head in the pansies; she's just an attention hog.

It's lucky she's her, because I wouldn't take this guff from any other dog.

Cats are evil

2011-07-12T21:00:00.000-06:00

That's from October 7, 2006. My ex's cat, Emily, always figured shiba tails make the best cat toys. I named her Emily after The Exorcism of Emily Rose. She was the most psychopathic cat I've ever met.

But even though Emily was evil, she's not the reason Tinky-Winky is scared of cats. She was already scared of cats when she came to live with me.

Today she had another humorous cat adventure. We left the apartment to go for our evening walk, and while I was locking the door, Tinky-Winky was wrapping the leash around me in a state of great agitation. So I was like "what in the world are you doing?" Then I noticed that our neighbour's cat, Mackenzie, was reaching her evil little paw under the door, trying to grab Tinky-Winky. So I poked her paw and she retracted it, like some evil little clawy snail. But then she did it again! Tinky-Winky insisted that we make for the elevator post-haste. Then she zoomed through the lobby, and didn't slow down until we were well away from the building and into the oppressive heat.

A few minutes later, on the trail, we met a rottweiler. Tinky-Winky gave it the Stare of Death and it recoiled.

It always makes me laugh that she can terrorize large dogs but runs from little cats.

Your offering is not acceptable

2011-07-12T12:15:00.001-06:00

I've been meaning to buy a dog crate for a while, in case we have to fly, but a lot more so that the dog can have a little den to hide in when she's scared. But in this town, you can't just go out and buy stuff. You buy what's at the store, or you don't; you don't get to choose. So I was waiting to go down south. On the other hand, we have a Facebook group for buying and selling second-hand stuff. Yesterday a post comes up for a dog crate that was quite a bit bigger than Tinky-Winky, but the price was right. So I bought it.

I guess not. Clearly, the concept of having a little den is in her mind as well, but she doesn't want the cage.

Oh well... She'll get used to it, I'm sure. Once it gets our smell on it instead of the other pack's smell. Speaking of which, the dog whose human was selling the cage is quite nice, and I've never seen either the dog or his human walking around with a female human. Of course that doesn't mean anything because they don't live anywhere near me, but being me, I just had to ask myself again whether we could combine our pack and their pack. And this kind of thinking is exactly why I'm single, I'm sure.

Attitude adjustment, day 2

2011-07-06T10:24:00.002-06:00

Yesterday was ok. On the morning walk she went back onto the road... That's annoying. Then she came back onto the trail to look for me. I didn't go out in the afternoon because it wasn't good insect weather. Evening walk, she was slower, but still not too uncooperative.

Her new thing now is she doesn't remind me of her evening walk, she reminds me of her morning walk. That makes sense since that's her offleash walk. On the other hand, her morning walk is at 4:30 AM, so I suspect I'm gonna regret getting her into that habit sooner or later.

Ain't that the truth

2011-07-05T10:15:00.000-06:00

Attitude adjustment, day 1

2011-07-04T22:14:00.000-06:00

Our morning walk went great, as I already told you. In the afternoon, I got ready to walk, and the dog watched me. Then I just walked out of the house. Without her. I wonder what she made of that. I had a perfectly lovely walk all by myself. Then I came home. I'm pretty sure the dog knows I went for a walk without her.

Since she was short a walk, I figured she'd be asking to go for her evening walk fairly early. So I'm sitting on the couch doing whatever, and I look at the time and it's 8:40 pm. Um... What? Her walk is supposed to be at 7:00. So I says to her "you dog, why aren't you telling me it's time to walk?" She gave me a blasé look without even lifting her head off the pillow.

Hmmmmm...

Well, too bad. I started getting ready to walk. The dog watched me. When she saw me pick up the camera, she gave a funny little squeak and ran for the door. Nonetheless, when I was ready and grabbed her leash, her expression gave a distinct sense of "oh, bother." So I told her, skipping the evening walk isn't an option, because she has to relieve herself. (Technically, that's not true, she can go literally days without relieving herself, but I don't approve of that.)

So we stared at each other for a few seconds and then she came to leash up. Great, I thought, that's gonna be another fight.

Not at all! Once we were outside, she moved forward in a nice active trot. She had to smell a few things, which I allowed her, within reason, but she didn't get tangled in the leash, didn't get itchy, didn't have to pee every twenty seconds, and didn't yank on the leash to go in different directions all the time. Aaaaaaaaah... That's nice. I even had to step out a fair bit, which hasn't happened in quite a while.

I was prepared to let her pick the itinerary, and expected her to turn back fairly quickly. Our protocol is that on evening walks, we can't turn around until she relieves herself. In the afternoon I don't care because she won't have long to wait for the next one, and in the morning she's either off leash or if I'm working, we walk a set route and go home whether she's gone or not, because otherwise she'll hold off so I can't go to work. She's wily. Anyway, she relieved herself and kept right on going. I was following her, in defiance of Cesar, and she chose to go by the so-called "ravine" trail. It's not a ravine, it's a paved trail along the old spillway. There are no ravines around here. Anyway, the town has been cutting brush in the ravine, so the mosquitos are very, very angry. So at first we were doing fine, but after a while there were so many mosquitos on the dog, I decided to run.

So, we ran. I used to jog and I've run with Tinky-Winky a few times, and she really likes it, actually. Walking is too slow for her. So we ran most of the length of the ravine, even though at this time I'm totally out of shape and I don't have running shoes. Tinky-Winky is as feisty as ever, though, and because she's such a good dog, she actually runs right beside me on a slack leash, like a polite little dog.

Then we got home, and the elevators are acting up. When they're not in use, one comes back to Main and the other to 2nd, and sometimes the one that's on Main doesn't open when you hit the button, but it "thinks" it's open, and the other one "thinks" things are under control, so nothing happens. Then you have to take the stairs up to 2nd and get the other elevator. And Tinky-Winky gets tired pretty quickly on stairs. I let her go her own pace, but she petered out after about eight steps. Then I carried her the rest of the way.

Because she's such a good dog, I gave her some cheese in addition to her dinner. Now she's all passed out on the floor.

She may have her fits of attitude sometimes, but she's a great dog.

I think I've walked my dog enough

2011-07-04T05:20:00.000-06:00

What?? How is that even possible?

Well, I didn't think it was, but yesterday, for the first time that I can remember, Tinky-Winky didn't want to walk.

Our afternoon walk was short because she was being uncooperative and I didn't feel like putting up with it. I figured we'd have a good evening walk instead.

Evening comes and I'm getting ready for our walk. Tinky-Winky is lying in the hallway, watching me douse myself in DEET and put my shoes on. Then I grabbed her leash, and she stayed right where she was.

?

I jingled the leash. She stayed right where she was.

??

At this point I realized I didn't have the camera, which she associates with walks. So I grabbed it and showed her I had both her leash and the camera. She got up and took two steps towards me, and then turned around.

???

She looked back and forth between me and the living room for a while, and then ran back into the living room. I followed her to see what she was doing. She was getting a drink of water. Then she came to me and after some more pussy-footing, she got her leash put on.

Wow, that took long enough.

Finally we get outside and she just will not walk. She is constantly finding excuses to stop and pull in any direction but forward. And I kept looking at her and wondering if she's tired, or sore, or old, but she looked fine. She didn't have her head down or her tongue out, she didn't move like she was tired, and she had plenty of energy for fighting me.

We didn't get very far before I got tired of dragging her along and turned back. And she trotted all the way home at a good clip without stopping for anything. So it really wasn't about being tired; she just didn't want to walk.

Ok, so this morning I bring her back to the same spot, which isn't our usual off-leash walk. Normally in the mornings we go along the paved trail and then the road. I'd rather be on the nature trail, but I tried it all winter and she takes off and runs on the road instead, so I gave up. But now when we're on the nature trail, she's constantly finding things she allegedly wants to explore. So fine, let's go off-leashing on the nature trail.

It went perfectly. She stayed on the trail and ran along ahead of me, staying mostly where I could see her. When I reached the point where we normally turn onto Gaetz, I did a U-turn instead and walked back along the road, and she still stayed with me. Full of energy and happiness, big smile, bright eyes, everything. And when we got home she didn't hem and haw about leashing up and going inside, either.

So, clearly it wasn't about fatigue, it was about attitude. Which is worse, actually. Fatigue is cured by rest; attitude is a much more baffling problem, especially in a little dog. So since I don't have a strategy for bad attitude, I'm going to treat it like fatigue: by reducing her walking. Since she doesn't want to walk on leash with me and it's not really possible to walk her off-leash twice a day right now, she can stay home when I go for my afternoon walk, and in the evenings we'll have a short walk on the leash. It works out well for me anyway because the afternoon is prime insect-watching time and I can't chase insects and fight with the dog at the same time. And hopefully she'll appreciate her walks more when she's getting less of them.

Her Majesty's bedtime ritual

2011-07-02T11:51:00.000-06:00

Left to her own devices, Tinky-Winky will usually sleep on her own bed, unless she's upset and wants me to protect her. But because she's my dog and I expect her to keep me company, I like her to sleep on my bed. She even knows a command for jumping up on the bed (or couch, or into the car), but she chooses not to. So, we have evolved a routine which dates back to our days in Yellowknife. At that time, I would be in the computer room until 21:30, and Tinky-Winky would come with me and fall asleep on the futon. Then I would have a shower, and then I would pick her up off the futon, bring her into my room, put her on the bed, and go to sleep. In those days, whenever I would go to pick her up, she would tense up, and I thought she was trying to resist me, until I realised that actually, she was lifting up her ribcage so I could get my hand under her more easily. She expected to be carried to bed, the lazy creature.

Now that we're home, which is a bachelor suite, she's usually on her bed, and then I go to open up the hide-a-bed. At that point she will inevitably go into the hallway and lie down right in the corner. Then I go to pick her up, and she does the same thing, lifts herself up so I can get my hands under her. Then I put her on the bed.

The next issue, though, is that once she's on the bed, she digs at the blankets. This is why the top blanket on my bed is always a dog blanket, to prevent my own blankets getting shredded. But even so, it's quite annoying that she spends forever digging furiously and walking around in circles. The reason she does this is to shape a little doggy bed out of my blankets. And after watching her for years, I've discovered that she has a very specific shape in mind when she does this. She's trying to make a little crater the size of her body, with one side high as a pillow for her head. But because she has no hands, it can take a while to manipulate the blankets into that shape.

So now, when I put her on the bed, I take the dog blanket and shape it into a little crater around her, with a high side for a pillow. And instead of digging, she lies right down and goes to sleep. This also has the advantage of making her sleep where I put her, and not where she chooses, which is inevitably in MY spot.

Cesar would be appalled, I'm sure, but he doesn't sleep in my bed (not that I'd mind, though), so we do it our way. My dog must be smarter than his dogs anyway, because she doesn't assume she's the boss whenever I do something for her. Sometimes I do what she needs me to do for her, and the rest of the time she obeys me. Or at least she obeys the cheese in my hand.

I really want to get one of those signs that say "the dog and her housekeeper live here."

Nothing to do with dogs

2011-06-30T11:13:00.002-06:00

Passive-aggressive dog

2011-06-27T21:33:00.001-06:00

No, I didn't get a new boyfriend. I'm talking about my actual canine dog. (Haha, a joke!)

Consider the following:

This is Tinky-Winky. Sitting. On the trail.

Why is Tinky-Winky sitting on the trail?

She just is.

See, Tinky-Winky doesn't like walking on the leash, so she's always finding all kinds of reasons not to cooperate. "I'm itchy. I gotta pee. My foot is caught in the leash. I gotta pee again. Grass is tasty. Something smells funny over there. I gotta pee! Wait, now I gotta poop. Ow, itchy. Oooh, something smells interesting. Mmm, tasty grass. My foot is caught in the leash. Let's go this way now. I gotta pee. ITCHY! Wait, I need to get those sticky tree things off my paw pads. I gotta pee."

Aaaaaaaaaaaargh!

She doesn't even actually pee. I figured that out in the first year. I used to let her stop to pee, but not to sniff at things. Then I noticed, she'd squat to pee and nothing was coming out... she was just pretending so she could smell at things. What a snaky creature!

In the winter, the cold keeps her moving along at a certain pace, but now that it's warm, grannies with walkers get impatient when they're stuck behind us. It's really painfully slow. For a while I thought she was getting elderly and tired, but no, she's just resisting. If you take the leash off, she's off like a shot. She just doesn't want to cooperate with the leash.

This is a new one, though. Just sitting down and choosing not to walk. Just like that. The Gandhi of dogs.

And for good measure, she gave me the "poor poor little puppy" look. Oh, yeah, you snaky thing, you're so hard done by! As if!

Pff. Sometimes you're lucky I love you.

I'm sorry, little dog

2011-06-22T13:28:00.001-06:00

Tinky-Winky was outside when it started to thunder again. So she came in and sat with me for a while, and then went back out and came back again looking much calmer.

A little while later, I go out to the balcony and see this:

Dang! That lawn was starting to look good, too. Oh well... That's why it's HER lawn. So I gather up the dirt, put it back in, throw down some more seeds on the shredded area. Then while I'm out there, I figure I might as well water the plants. And while I'm doing that, Tinky-Winky comes back out, goes to her lawn, and start digging again. And by reflex I said "no no no!" and she stopped.

Oops...

I didn't mean it! It's your lawn! Go dig it!

I tried to explain in words that it's ok to dig the lawn. I tried pointing at it. I tried putting her on the lawn and making her paw at it. She's not digging it.

I'm sorry, little dog. That was YOUR lawn to dig at for stress relief and I've reprimanded you, and now you think it's not ok to dig it. I'm sorry I can't explain to you that it was my mistake and you're allowed to dig the lawn all you want.

Darn. How do you un-train a dog after you've reprimanded it?

Tinky-Winky and the thunderstorm

2011-06-22T08:35:00.000-06:00

1:18 am. I can't sleep. Then, the wind picks up. "Oh no," I think, "Tinky-Winky is gonna start freaking out."

Sure enough...

I tried to ignore it, but I could hear her panting in the non-dark. (It doesn't get dark here this time of year.) So I get up and look for her everywhere, which is weird because we live in the smallest bachelor suite I've ever lived in, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of room for a little dog to go AWOL.

Finally I locate her, grab her and go back to bed. Then I ignore the wind and hope she'll go to sleep.

Ha.

The wind turns into a thunderstorm and Tinky-Winky is completely freaked out. I try holding her, petting her, talking to her, putting the sheet over her head, nothing works. By the time the storm is overhead, she's shaking so hard the whole bed vibrates. Knowing that her favourite stress release is to shred things, I let her get up from time to time and give her a blanket. The top blanket on my bed is always a dedicated dog blanket, so that if she feels shreddy in the night, she'll tear something of hers and not one of mine. But even that didn't work. She kept throwing her blankie on the floor and going after my blankets, sheets and pillows. After the fourth time, I gave up on that and simply restrained her.

It took 40 minutes for the storm to blow over completely, and I spent the whole time trying to comfort my dog. Why? Nothing bad has ever come to her from wind or thunder. I don't think it's the noise, because she can ignore much louder noises of different natures. Is she sensitive to ions in the air, or static, or something of the kind? Who knows.

See, people say your dog picks up how you're feeling and acts on that, but I think that's absurd. I like thunderstorms. I can sleep through any amount of thunder. Tinky-Winky completely freaks out. Obviously she's not getting it from me.

And of course now that it's morning, she's sleeping like a log. Crazy little dog.

Sitting on the lawn of the library

2011-06-22T07:03:00.000-06:00

Apparently, Her Majesty doesn't want to be seen with me.

Mission accomplished

2011-06-20T16:09:00.002-06:00

I always say that my goal with Tinky-Winky is to have the world's spoiledest shiba, not in terms of behaviour or bling or things like that, but in all the things that actually make dogs happy, such as good food, a comfy bed, and lots of walking.

Right now, because it's hot, we've had to cut our mid-day walk short. She just gets tired quickly in the heat. So instead, this afternoon, I took her to sit on the lawn outside the library. I'm on a lawn chair, with the dog on a long tether so she can sit anywhere she likes, choose sun or shade, explore, whatever. She has a bowl of water. She has me. And I'm connected to the library's wifi, which is nice since I don't have internet at home. So I'm thinking, what more can a little dog want?

Then... she started whining.

Ok: you really are the world's spoiledest shiba, if you can be sitting on the grass on a beautiful summer day and still find something to whine about.

I'm totally judging you

2011-06-19T14:37:00.003-06:00

I'm totally judgmental. I'm better than I used to be, but I'm totally judgmental. And I'm judging you by your dog. Is your dog clean, groomed, shiny, happy and well-behaved? Then I like you. Unless it's a breed that I don't think should even be bred, in which case I don't trust you. If you have a large dog, I think you're full of yourself. If your dog is dirty, I think you're lazy and negligent. Unless he's soaked and covered in fresh mud, in which case maybe you just took him for an energetic walk. If you have a tiny dog, I think you're absurd. If you have a very stupid dog, I think you're insecure. And if your dog has behavioural problems, I definitely don't like you.

There is a saying that there are no bad horses, only bad riders. And so with dogs. There are no bad dogs. If your dog has problems, its main problem is probably you. So I'm totally judging you by your dog, and I'm merciless. It's a sin, but I do it anyway.

The black dog, or why retrievers should be banned

2011-06-18T17:11:00.000-06:00

I think it was two summers ago, on a street that Tinky-Winky and I traverse on our daily walks, two households got puppies. One was a large black lab. The other was an even larger yellow... lab, or something. The yellow dog had a fenced yard. The black dog didn't. Therefore, the black dog was allowed to spend the days at the yellow dog's house, playing together in the fenced yard. Everything was copacetic.

Unfortunately, puppies don't stay small forever. The two puppies became huge, and for lack of training, they became unmanageable. The yellow dog was gotten rid of. The black dog wasn't. But since it wasn't invited to play in the fenced yard anymore, it got tied outside its house. All by itself. So it started to bark and jump up and down whenever people or dogs walk by. This was a nuisance, so the people fixed it with... a shock collar. Which doesn't really work.

Since I've been home for a few months, I started working on that dog. I approach her to pet her. If she barks or jumps, I leave. If she's quiet, I pet her. So it took months, but now when she sees me coming, she lies down quietly and waits for me to come to her. Then she rolls over on her back. Did I mention it took MONTHS? Most people are amazed how fast I can get their dog to roll over. This one took months. (On the other hand, I had Tinky-Winky full-time for 2 1/2 YEARS before she would roll over, which tells you something about how headstrong she is.)

The other day, I was petting the black dog, and she was lying down quietly. A human came out of the house, and immediately the black dog was jumping and barking. The human yelled at her. (Why? The dog barks, you yell; the dog thinks you're doing what she's doing, then she does it some more.) Amid all the noise, I said to the human "she's getting better though, isn't she?" and the human said "oh, I don't know, some days she's ok and others she's just impossible."

Hmmmmmm...

No, I don't think she's impossible at all. I spend two minutes with your dog once or twice a day and she's quiet with me. You live here and she barks and jumps at you. That seem funny to you? Well it doesn't seem "funny" to me at all. Your dog isn't "impossible", she's bored and lonely. She wants to play. With another dog, preferrably, but she'd be happy to spend time with a human. When is the last time you walked her? When is she ever allowed to sit quietly beside you? She's tied up outside all day, every day, all by herself, watching everybody walk by and pay no attention to her. Poor dog.

It goes without saying, the black dog is not getting walked. I've seen her walking with her human ONCE and I was all happy that they were walking, but it turned out she had escaped and the human was only bringing her home. I feel I ought to walk her, but honestly, I don't want to. For one thing, she's at the farthest point of our walk from home, so it's really inconvenient. I also hate picking up after large dogs. It grosses me out. Also, Tinky-Winky hates her. And also, inevitably, she's gonna be a huge pain to walk on leash for quite some time. I'm a construction worker, so I can handle a fairly strong dog, but I don't really like to spend my walks doing that.

Also, because she's such a large dog, she needs to walk fast, not dawdle along at Tinky-Winky's whim. Tinky-Winky on the leash is painfully slow, because she's uncooperative. Every two seconds she has to pee, or scratch, or tangle herself in her leash, or pick sticky tree things off her paw pads, or smell something, or otherwise find anything to do that isn't walking along with me. It's takes us forever to get anywhere. Take the leash off though, we're like the wind. But that's a story for another post. The point is, a two-year-old lab needs to move a lot faster than an ornery 12-year-old shiba. In fact, in order to get up enough speed to get that dog exercised, I'd need a bike. And that's not in the budget for this year. So, I'm not offering to walk the black dog, and I feel bad for her, but I just don't really want to take on her problems. I also get the feeling that her female human is getting annoyed by my interference with her dog.

So that's one reason people shouldn't have retrievers. I don't know a single retriever who gets walked. People say "they're good with children." Yeah, well, they're very patient dogs, but that's absurd. Teach your children to be good with dogs, instead of expecting the dog to put up with them. You know what "good with dogs" means? It means you WALK THEM. Teach your kids to walk the dog. Three hours a day, fast enough that the dog is trotting, not walking. Don't worry about the dog being "good with kids"; the dog is gonna treat your kids a thousand times better than you're gonna treat the dog.

Nobody should have a dog they're not gonna walk, and no one I know who has a retriever ever walks further than the couch to the fridge. Some say they need the dog to hunt with, but first of all they don't train it for hunting, and second, what are you gonna do with the dog the other 363 days a year? Tie it out in the yard and ignore it? That's nice. Some poor dog is gonna spend his or her whole life crying in your yard because you want to feel like a big man with a gun a couple weekends a year.

Here is how you know if you need a retriever: do you spend two to three hours a day, every day, even when it's raining or very cold, jogging, biking or rollerblading? If so, get a big dog. If not, do you spend two to three hours a day, every day, even when it's raining or very cold, walking? If so, get a dog that trots at the speed you walk. If not, get a ferret. Some people, seriously, even a bearskin rug is too much of a pet for them.

The other reason people shouldn't have retrievers is that they're so prone to cancer. I've read somewhere that 40% of retrievers get cancer. Is that true? I don't know. But they sure don't last very long. Cancer in a dog costs thousands of dollars. A friend of mine has a pug who just got diagnosed with cancer. It cost over $4,000 just to diagnose her. She's 5 1/2 and she will be dead in a month or two. Chemo could buy her another month or two, but there's no money left for chemo. I think spending thousands of dollars on a dog with high medical needs is a waste anyway, but you can always get more money, and you'd probably waste it anyway. But the bigger thing is, YOUR DOG IS GONNA DIE OF CANCER. Why would you buy a dog so you can watch it die of cancer at a young age? Even supposing you're completely selfish (which you probably are if you're getting a dog that you're not planning to walk), and you don't care that the dog is gonna suffer, do you think YOU are gonna enjoy watching your dog die of cancer?

So that's why retrievers should be banned. Some breeds get banned because somebody decided to stick the label "vicious" on them, instead of putting the blame on the owners, where it belongs. Well, "vicious" dogs are only dogs that have been mistreated. Retrievers have miserable lives with people who don't take care of them, and then they die a slow and painful death. Isn't that being mistreated? Just because they don't turn on people doesn't make it ok. So they should be banned, not because they're dangerous to people, but because people are dangerous to them. You want to feel like a big man, buy a Harley. It won't mind one bit sitting in front of the house day in, day out while you don't take care of it.

Guard dog: fail

2011-06-17T15:49:00.000-06:00

I came home and the dog didn't come running to greet me.

Hmmm...

Ok, she must be on the balcony.

I went to have a look and indeed, she was asleep on her lawn, with her back to me. I went back and got the camera. Now the camera beeps when it acquires the autofocus, and again when it takes a picture. So you can see she has an ear toward me. She must have thought she heard something, but she was too lazy to turn her heard. On the second photo she did turn and look.

Do you suppose when she saw me, she came running to me?

No.

She ran inside, past me, and toward the door. Then the little cogs in her head clicked into place, she hesitated, turned around, and came to me, and then she started doing her "I'm happy you're home" thing.

What a strange little dog...

Emergency procedure: fail

2011-06-12T22:08:00.000-06:00

I woke up in a panic in the middle of the night. I leapt out of bed, threw some sweatpants on over my pjs and ran for the door. I stepped into my shoes on the way out. We sprinted for the elevator, which came quickly, for once. We raced across the lobby and were out of the building in record time.

As I watched the dog disappear into the tall grass, it occurred to me that it would have been a good idea to put a leash on her. A neighbour informed me it was close to 2:00 AM.

The nature of the emergency? The dog had whined.

Shibas whine. As far as I know, they all do. They have very expressive whines which I think are meant to imitate us. Tinky-Winky whines for all kinds of reasons, but only one of them would have her out of bed and walking around at 2:00 AM: she needs out. I've said before that she never asks to go out, but that's not quite true. About three times in the last six years, she's asked. The first time, I ignored it, and spent a couple of hours cleaning explosive diarrhea off the carpet, and everything else. So now, if she asks to go, we run like the wind. It takes me about one tenth as long to evacuate the building when the dog whines as when the fire alarm goes off. And other than the fire alarm, the dog is about the only thing that wakes me. (Ok, violent crime, too.) I can sleep through almost anything, most of all my alarm clock, but also music, thunder, phone ringing, neighbours partying... but not my dog crying, barking or throwing up. Same when I had cats, the fastest way to wake me was for a cat to start heaving. And I'm active and fully operational instantly, very much unlike the alarm clock. They should make an alarm clock that sounds like a puking cat.

Anyway. A more considerate creature, having relieved herself, would have thought something like "the human got out of bed in the middle of the night to help me, I will go back in promptly so she can go back to sleep." But that would be utterly unlike Her Majesty. She was outside, she was off-leash, and the weather was beautiful. PARTY! (And yes, this means I didn't pick it up, but have you ever tried to pick up liquid off the grass in a bag? I actually have. Turns out you can't pick up diarrhea even if you try.)

2:00 AM on a Saturday night is a really rotten time for a dog to be off-leash in downtown Hay River. The bars close at 2:00 AM, and that night there was a dance, too. All the cops are out, all the drunk drivers, all the drunk walkers, everyone. It's a very busy time. And there is my dog, not only off-leash but without even her collar, which reflects some light.

Man, that was dumb.

So I went back upstairs and got some cheese to bait her. And a Ziploc bag. She can hear "cheese" from miles away, but cheese doesn't have a sound. It has to be in a plastic wrap, so she can hear the wrap. So I'm outside crinkling a Ziploc bag at 2:00 AM, with cheese in one hand, my hair all over the place, wearing my gross sweatpants that would fit a fat man on Thanksgiving, just when every eligible man in town is out and about. And did I mention every cop in town? Then a cop car drives by, then another, and I figure, knowing my dog, that's exactly when she's gonna show up. And she did, too. Luckily for both of us, she had been just around the corner of the building, not across the street, so she didn't run afoul of the cops. That was lucky.

The dumbest thing is, her leash hangs on the key rack by the door, right next to my keys, so it wouldn't have slowed us down one second to grab it and put it on in the elevator. I guess I'm not as smart at 2:00 AM as I'd like to think.

So, new emergency evacuation procedure to learn:

1. Put clothes on.
2. Leash up dog.
3. Evacuate.

That being said, she should be good for another two years or so.

Poor sad little dog

2011-06-11T12:31:00.000-06:00

We woke up this morning and it was raining. Pouring rain. Real ugly. So I ate breakfast and then instead of going for a walk, I just turned the dog loose. I do that when the weather is ugly, partly because I'm lazy, but also because that gives her control over how much time she wants to spend in the ugly weather. Right now, on nice days, I might have to wait for her an hour after I get home from our off-leash walk, because she's happy outside. This morning, I read three pages of my book before she wanted back in.

She came in and looked mournfully out the door. I held it open to see if she wanted to change her mind and go back out, but no, she wanted in. She cried as we walked to the elevator. We got into the apartment and she was still crying. She tried to lick her soup bone from yesterday, but it didn't comfort her. I tried to towel her dry, but we both know she hates being towelled, so she stayed wet. She was so sad I even gave her cheese, which is like cocaine to her, but she ate it sadly and kept crying. She went to the window and looked out on the world and cried. Then she went to her bed and lay down sadly. Poor little dog. She was absolutely inconsolable. Her whole world was ruined by having her morning walk rained out.

I tell you, dogs live for walking.

You're lucky I love you

2011-06-10T22:04:00.000-06:00

Ok, picking up after the dog is one thing. One quick move, tie up the baggy, and you're done. Though that's certainly one good reason to get a small dog, so you're not walking around with a two-pound bag of excrement.

You know what I don't like though? Digging out the marrow that she can't get out of the marrow bone herself. It's all soft and gelatinous and it spreads like peanut butter, and yet it sustained the life of the cow. Somehow, even though I eat meat, I just do NOT like to scoop the marrow out of the bones.

Sometimes, I think that dog is lucky to have me.

My dog, the Grinch

2011-06-10T15:51:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, in the lobby of our building, we met a girl who was holding a three-week-old puppy. It could barely lift its head or open its eyes. She oohed and aahed about how cute my dog is. I oohed and aahed about how cute her dog is. Then I was like "Tinky-Winky, come look at the puppy!" I was gonna pick her up and hold her so she could see, but the girl was faster than me. She crouched and stuck the puppy in Tinky-Winky's face, which as you and I know, is never a good idea.

Fortunately, Tinky-Winky is cranky, but not evil. She did not snap at the three-week-old puppy. Instead she sniffed at it for about two seconds and then lost interest.

WOW. How heartless was that? I know it's not her puppy, but it's a tiny orphan and she's had three litters, you'd think she could show the slightless glimmer of maternal instinct?

Well, at least I don't need to worry anymore about her abducting a fox cub or other wild creature while she's off-leash. Clearly, the last thing she wants is more puppies. Little great-grand-mother Grinch.

Making good choices

2011-06-07T14:03:00.000-06:00

You know how people try to teach their kids to "make good choices"? My dog makes good choices naturally.

I've said many times, and I'm sure it will come up again, that you cannot approach dog training as "conditioning", because dogs aren't zombies. Whether you're using treats or clickers or ranting and screaming, the dog doesn't obey by reflex, but because of two things: understanding and choice. Just like anybody else.

Consider the following. I'm a construction worker. If someone tells me to go "rip some plywood", do I reflexively go rip some plywood because I'm conditioned? No. First of all I understand what "rip some plywood" means, which many people don't because they don't have the vocabulary. Second, I choose to do it because I've decided that cooperation is in my best interest. I could choose, and I have chosen in the past, to walk off the job screaming insults at the boss. That was also a conscious decision based on what was in my best interest.

Same with the dog. You can see it more in Canada because of the bilingual situation, actually. One time when we were in Yellowknife, some of the roommate's francophone friends came to visit, with their kids and their dog. The kids kept calling my dog "viens, Tinky-Winky, viens!" She had no idea what they wanted. Meanwhile, in the kitchen, their dog was asking me for food and I kept telling it "sit, Pepsi!" He had no idea what I wanted. Finally I thought long and hard and said "assis" and voila, he sat. Dogs need vocabulary, just like anybody else. If they don't know your words, they can't do what you're asking. What you're doing when you "train" your dog is teach vocabulary, not condition reflexes.

Once the dog knows your words, he can choose to comply or not. That's what most people fail to realize, really. Dogs have free will. And the reason I'm on about this today is because of what happened on our morning walk.

There is a big dog in our building named Otis. He's friendly, by which I actually mean that he's a dog that other dogs can be friends with, not some spastic weirdass jumping lunatic. And he's interested in making friends with Tinky-Winky. She, being the cranky old boot that she is, snaps at him. Otis has two people, a male and a female. The male will ride in the elevator with Otis, myself and Tinky-Winky. The female would rather not, because of the snapping, but I tell her it's good for them to learn to share the elevator. A lot of the dogs here are allowed to get territorial about the elevator and that causes fights, so I always make Tinky-Winky ride with others and behave herself.

Anyway. This morning, Tinky-Winky and I were on the road, off leash, and Otis was on the trail in the woods, off leash, with his female human. He saw me from a distance and came running through the woods, not to see me, but because he knows I'm Tinky-Winky's person. His human tried to call him back, but he wouldn't listen. When he emerged from the woods, he looked around and saw Tinky-Winky. Of course I was calling her, too, and she did in fact listen to me. She looked at Otis, looked at me, and then did not come. Otis approached her politely, presenting his side instead of head-on. She let him come up to her and sniff her butt like a polite dog. While he was sniffing her, she looked at me, and she was smiling and relaxed. After a while she did give a half-assed snap, mostly to maintain her image, I think. Otis hopped about three inches, then she mellowed out and he went back to sniffing her. She was still smiling and relaxed. Then his person caught up to him and led him away. Tinky-Winky laughed and ran "to" me and right past me, and kept on in the direction of our walk. After a few yards she looked over her shoulder to see if I was following, still smiling.

And that was that. A nice peaceful interaction between two off-leash dogs.

The important thing here is the difference between this morning and the Evil Giant Chihuahua incident. Otis is about six times the size of Evil Giant Chihuahua, yet Tinky-Winky chose to come to me to avoid Evil Giant Chihuahua, but let Otis come to her. Both times, she clearly understood the situation: there is another dog and I'm calling her to come to me. But she made up her mind what to do, according to which dog it was. She doesn't like Evil Giant Chihuahua, so she came to me so I could deal with it. But she's comfortable with Otis, so she interacted with him on her own terms. And she seems quite satisfied with the outcome of the interaction. In fact, in both cases, she was clearly happy to come to me. When she needed help with the chihuahua, she came TO me, and when she was done with Otis, she came BY me, but either way, she was happy to acknowledge that I had called her. So you can see that she clearly knows "come", she just makes decisions whether to come or not.

So that, essentially, is the difficulty in training dogs. Or employees. Or horses. Or anything else. First of all they have to understand what you're asking. This is the easy part. (Except with employees. Employees are f'ing dense.) The challenge is in getting them to choose to do as you say, and this depends on more or less three things: the trainee's personality, the trainer's leadership, and the trust between the two. When I had my horse, I could make her back up into a narrow, dark space, just by pointing. Most horses don't like to go into a dark narrow space even forward, let alone backward, but she always assumed that if I said so, it was safe to do it. Tinky-Winky trusts me to manage interactions with other dogs for her, so if she sees a dog she's not comfortable with, she comes to me. On the other hand she knows that when I call her, she's likely to get the leash, so she doesn't come TO me unless she needs my help. She comes by and stays out of reach, so I can't leash her up. And that also is a form of trust, in my opinion. Generally we think "trust" means we expect a positive outcome, but I think it just means we can predict with confidence what someone is going to do.

In summary, dogs are not zombies, you cannot "condition" them to obey orders. You teach them vocabulary, then they choose whether to do as you ask or not, depending on what they perceive as their best interest. Just like people.

I'm glad we're together

2011-06-06T17:01:00.000-06:00

On our afternoon walk today, we saw a woman with a Welsh springer spaniel. The spaniel pulled toward Tinky-Winky. Tinky-Winky pulled toward the spaniel. The woman yanked on the leash and said to her dog "move" and kept him motoring forward. When they were past, I let Tinky-Winky make a wide curve to go sniff the other dog's trail, as is our custom. And as we were doing that, I heard this ugly hollow "thunk". The woman had kicked the spaniel in the ribs.

WTF?????

I was completely speechless. I didn't know if I should even say something, because the dog never made a sound or looked upset. Was the dog ok with getting kicked in the ribs? Dogs have incredible pain tolerance; maybe it didn't hurt him. Then I remembered, I've seen her do that before, too. And I couldn't believe it the first time either. And I still can't think of what to do about it. It seems like anything I say would just make her angrier and then she'd take it out on the dog again.

It's so bizarre. I can understand hitting your kids, first of all because it was perfectly acceptable from the dawn of human evolution until about 15 years ago, and second because kids are often deliberately rude and difficult and you're stuck with them anyway. But dogs? Dogs are not being deliberately difficult. If your dog is difficult, it's either a health problem or your own fault. Either way, if you don't like it, you can just get rid of the dog. Especially a beautiful little dog like that. Lots of people would be happy to take that dog off that woman's hands. And yet she keeps it around so she can kick it. What a witch.

Also, a dog can kill you. Even a spaniel. He could rip out her throat and eat her face and there's nothing she could do about it. He could bite her hand and break every bone. If that little dog chose to defend himself, that woman wouldn't stand a chance. And yet she kicks him and he doesn't even make a sound.

What an evil witch.

So Tinky-Winky and I got home and she lay down on her comfy bed and looked at me with a big smile. So I was glad that she's with me. No matter how vile people are, at least this is one little dog that no one will ever kick, because she's with me. Anyone tries to kick her, I will make them rue the day they were born. So no matter what, I can keep this one little dog safe and happy and completely oblivious to the fact that people are evil. And she knows that she can count on me to make everything right for her.

I'm glad we have each other.

You may be a dog person if...

2011-06-02T11:19:00.001-06:00

I don't really bother to look at men on a regular basis, and they return the compliment. (Vice-versa, actually, they started it. But that's beside the point.) Tinky-Winky, however, likes to check out men. Not male dogs, male humans. She just loves to stare at men. She has lousy taste, too.

Conversely, when we meet a dog we like, if it's walking with a male human, I always ask myself if the human might be single and if I should try to bond with him so we can spend time with his dog.

You may be a dog person if you pick men by whether you and your dog like their dog, rather than whether you like the guy.

A man forewarned is fore-armed

2011-05-29T16:31:00.000-06:00

It's windy again.

Before I left the house, I put the pillows and blankets in the closet, picked up anything shreddable, and opened the balcony.

I came home two hours later and found... nothing shredded. Booya!

Then I went out on the balcony and discovered she had destroyed her lawn. Oops...

Well, that's alright. The lawn is there for her, and I can always reseed it. I need to make a deeper lawn, though, so she doesn't dig right through to the bottom of the container every time. Other than that, it's all good.

That's one thing I learned from my first two dogs, who were husky puppies: if you don't want something destroyed, it's a lot easier to put it out of reach of the dogs, than to fix it after they eat it.

Shibas don't recall, eh?

2011-05-29T16:17:00.000-06:00

That's the biggest myth about shibas: that they don't recall. Maybe your shiba doesn't recall, but shibas as a breed are perfectly capable of it. But like I always say, it's a matter of motivation, and if your dog isn't getting off-leash time, it's certainly not gonna be motivated to come back when it gets loose.

Anyway. All this to say, I have an anecdote. I think it was Friday morning on our off-leash walk, the Evil Giant Chihuahua and its person came out of their house somewhere ahead of us. This freaked me out, because the human uses a walker. If Tinky-Winky gets into a fight with a regular dog, well, that's one thing. But what if she got into a fight with this man's dog, and he tried to intervene and fell? At best, he'd be rightfully upset, at worst he might really hurt himself. And since the Evil Giant Chihuahua likes to antagonize Tinky-Winky, a fight seemed probable.

Uh-oh.

At this point, Tinky-Winky was behind me, so I called her. She could see that I had the leash in my hand (as opposed to around my neck as I do when just carrying it) so she knew I was gonna leash her up. So she sauntered past me well out of my reach, until she saw ahead of her the Evil Giant Chihuahua. She stopped and looked at me. Then at the chihuahua. Then at me. I kept calling her, still with the leash in my hand. She looked back and forth between me and the chihuahua for a while, and then she made her decision. She got her big shiba smile on her face and ran back to me. Not past me as she likes to do to show obedience to the letter of my command while ignoring the spirit of it. No, she ran right to me, stopped, and waited to be leashed up.

When we resumed walking, what happened next is that the Evil Giant Chihuahua wiggled out of its harness and came running at us, snarling and barking. I stopped, held Tinky-Winky by her collar, and tried to grab the chihuahua. This is part of why Tinky-Winky is willing to come to me when there is another dog: because I'm going to handle the other dog. She knows this. She knows it's better to let me do it than to fight the other dog herself. If I recalled her and then tried to force her to "make friends" with the other dog, she'd never come. So here I am holding my dog with one hand and trying to catch this psychotic chihuahua with the other hand, and the dog's person abandonned his walker and came running after his dog, to the best of his ability, which is exactly what I had feared in the first place. Technically, now that it's his dog off-leash and not mine, I'm at least free of liability, but that doesn't change the fact that I don't want this man falling or getting hurt. Luckily, he did neither. He was able to grab his dog, and then walk safely back to his walker, and continue his stroll.

Just to be sure, though, I didn't let Tinky-Winky off the leash again as I normally would after passing another dog. I just didn't want to take a chance while the man was out there. So, she lost about a quarter of her off-leash walk that day for being a good dog. But she didn't even ask me to let her loose again. That's the great thing we have that I think many dogs are missing: trust. She trusts me to take good care of her, and I trust her to be a responsible little dog.

So yes, shibas recall. They just have to want to.

Things that go on in my dog's head

2011-05-28T22:42:00.000-06:00

Today, between our afternoon walk and evening walk, Tinky-Winky snapped at four dogs, including a Bernese, a black lab, and two large mutts. All the dogs cowered and shrank away from her. Not one of them was less than three times her weight.

Then this evening, I went to see my neighbour, not noticing that Tinky-Winky had followed me out the door. I was gonna put her back in the apartment, but the neighbour invited her in. He has a tiny cat who runs to our door to sniff at the dog's smell every chance she gets, so we decided to introduce them. The cat is seriously minuscule. I think she weighs about 4 lbs. She walked right up to the dog and started sniffing her.

Tinky-Winky started panting and cowered behind my chair, and then lay motionless until the cat lost interest. She looked miserable until we left.

???

Seriously, my dog, you can put the fear of God into a Bernese with one malevolent glare, you've fought porcupines, you antagonize beavers and bison, and you're afraid of a 4-lb cat? I don't know what goes on in your head sometimes.

And the funny thing is, too, the smaller the cat, the more she's scared of it. We've lived with cats before, and she's seen cats outside, and she's much more terrified of little cats than big ones, whereas with dogs, she's more likely to avoid a fight with a big dog and start one with a little dog.

Ah well. I'd rather she fear cats than harass them.

How to introduce dogs

2011-05-25T21:18:00.000-06:00

It drives me nuts when people want to stick their dogs in Tinky-Winky's face so they can "make friends." That's not how dogs make friends. This, on the other hand, with a fence between them, is perfect. Now they have no choice but to be polite. Well, they can walk away, I suppose, but most dogs are curious about other dogs. So they sniff noses through the fence for a while, then she pees on her side of the fence and walks away. It's like people leaving their card. If they meet outside the fence now, they're properly introduced. They might not become "friends", but at least they're starting off on the right foot.

Suddenly, a horrible thought occurs to me

2011-05-23T17:52:00.000-06:00

As you know, I'm always preoccupied with the fact that Tinky-Winky is going to die. This is inevitable, and barring some unforeseen circumstances, she's going to die before me. This bothers me, but actually, I'd be even more upset if I died before her, because she has no one but me to take care of her. But that's not the point.

According to the vet, shibas live "9 to 12 years", which would have her dying this year. According to her breeder, dogs of her bloodline have generally lived to approximately 16 years, barring unforeseen circumstances, like the fact that her father ran away and was killed by a car at a young age. And since Tinky-Winky shows no signs of being near death yet, I'm thinking the breeder is right. She would know, anyway, she keeps in touch with her dogs. So, I've been living with the idea that Tinky-Winky will die in 2015. But then, because she eats healthy, gets a lot of exercise, and looks nowhere like a 12-year-old dog right now, and looks better than photos of 12-year-old shibas I've seen, I've been telling myself she might well live longer than that.

But then, as we were walking this morning, a terrible thought occurred to me. I remembered reading an article many years ago about a study they did on rats, where they found that all other things being equal, mellow rats who did nothing all day long lived much longer than active rats who were always busy. The article then pondered the fact that in cultures where people take long siestas and sit around quietly in the evenings, as long as their diet is healthy, they live for a hundred years; whereas people who exercise and are always busy, even though they also seem healthy, die much younger. And it's also true in aquarium fishes that if you keep the water warmer, they're more active, but die younger, whereas in colder water they move less and live longer. So the moral is, apparently creatures only have a certain amount of activity in them, and they can spend it faster or slower, but when they run out of it, they die, whether they're young or old.

That's horrible!!!!!!

I've always prided myself on the fact that Tinky-Winky gets more exercise than any other pet dog I know. We walk three times a day, twice 45 minutes at a slow pace because she drags her feet on the leash, and once 45 minutes at a mad gallop when she's off the leash. Then sometimes we take extra-long walks. In the summer, we usually go for a three-hour walk at least every other weekend.

What if all this activity is making her die faster? Granted she's the healthiest dog alive as far as I can tell, never has a health complaint, not even a cough or an upset stomach. She can still run for hours. She can still run 40 km/h. But what if she's going to have a healthy but short life? Would it be better to walk her less so she can live longer? Her walks are all she lives for. What's the point of making her live longer with less happiness? That's absurd.

Suddenly I'm worried that I don't have four years left with her after all.

Nobody's perfect

2011-05-16T19:56:00.001-06:00

Have I mentioned that my dog never does anything wrong?

Apparently she does.

Here is what happened. Tinky-Winky is scared of the wind. Not when we're outside, of course, but we live on the seventh floor of the only highrise structure for 500 km, on a wide open plain reaching from the Arctic Ocean to Mexico, so you can imagine that we get some windy days up here. And with windows open on all sides of the building, air shafts, things that don't close properly, what have you, there is quite a lot of whistling and rattling when the wind is anywhere from NNE to SSE. This freaks her out, and when she's freaked out, she wants to hide, or she wants me to comfort her.

Fine.

So it had been windy for two days, and as I was trying to sleep in the morning, Tinky-Winky kept climbing up on my pillow and digging at it. I reprimanded her several times for scratching the pillow, then I kicked her off the bed altogether. She went to sleep on the floor.

Later that day, obviously, I had to go out. I closed the picture window so it wouldn't be as loud inside, and I left. This was a mistake, because if I had left it open, Tinky-Winky would have gone out on the balcony and had a nap on her lawn. (She has a lawn on the balcony. Because I'm nice like that.) Being out in the wind doesn't bother her at all, like I said, it's the noises inside the house. But since I locked her in the house with the noise, she continued freaking out. So she dug everything that could be dug, kicked the pillows on the floor, tore the 300 thread-per-square-inch Egyptian cotton pillowcase, then tore the pillow open, then ripped the fiber out, then must have kicked it around for good measure, as it was torn-side down when I came home.

After that, I guess she must have felt better, because that's the only thing she tore. Or maybe she had just been in the process of tearing it when I came home, and that's what stopped her.

Well, oh well. I guess I brought it on myself. Knowing she was after the pillows, I should have put them in the closet. And I should have left the balcony open so she could get out of the noise. Maybe also, she'd feel safer if she had a nice pet carrier she could crawl into like a little den just for her. I've never needed to put her in a cage, but maybe she'd like it.

In any case, that's ok. A dog is allowed to screw up once in six years. That's like 42 human years. Who doesn't screw up once in 42 years?

Dog fight versus posturing

2011-05-16T10:24:00.001-06:00

You know, I've discovered that most people have no idea what a dog fight looks like. One guy who poses as some kind of expert on the web stated once that a normal dog fight is just a bunch of snarling and snapping, and only pitbulls grab and hold on to another dog.

Riiiiiiight...

In that case, my dog is a pitbull, and that doesn't explain how she's a champion, daughter, mother and grandmother of champions, and all of them as shiba inu and not pitbull. Got all them judges fooled for generations!

No, seriously though, all dogs fight the same way: attack, grab something (preferrably the jugular), hold on until death or the other guy says "uncle".

I know this because when Tinky-Winky came to live with me, her breeder told me that this is a breed renowned for being agressive to other dogs, that the bitches are especially agressive, and that this is the most agressive shiba bitch she, the breeder, has ever seen in her life. In fact, the conditions of getting her at all were that I wouldn't let her get fat, and I'd work on her behaviour.

In the beginning, obviously, I never let her off the leash. Other dogs running off leash would come running up to us and I'd tell the other owner "call off your dog" and they'd say "oh don't worry, he's friendly!"

Right. Actually, your dog isn't friendly, he's rude; but that's not even what I'm worried about.

Tinky-Winky would attack so fast you didn't have time to blink. Unlike other dogs who go into a frenzy of barking, she wouldn't make a sound. If I had looked at her rather than the oncoming dog, I suppose her body posture would have been threatening, but she never barked, just attacked. I'd always think "next time I'll pick her up before she can attack"; but the next time she'd still always be too fast for me. She was fast and she was deadly accurate, too. She would hit right at the jugular, no matter how small or large a dog. And she attacked some pretty large dogs. She's always had a special hatred of retrievers, for some reason, but she's also fought Belgian shepherds, boxers, an Am Staff terrier, two Doberman pinschers at once, and some malamute-like crosses we have in town. Always the same: strike for the jugular. The only way she would miss is if the other dog had a very heavy coat. More often, before you could even react, the other dog would be on the ground screaming in terror with this insane little creature clamped to its throat (except the Dobermans - they just screamed and ran). So believe me when I tell you, shibas do clamp their jaws and hang on. I've had to pry her jaws open a few times, and got bit twice doing it. If she had been any bigger, she'd probably have been put down as a vicious dog.

Six years later, you'd never know it. We walk past all kinds of dogs on the trail and she never says boo. Even with crazy little barking dogs. There is a pug who blows his top every time he sees an oncoming dog, and she totally ignores him. And yesterday something like a large chihuahua tried to attack us, and she ignored that too. Off leash, she's even better... 99% of the time. Almost always, if another dog is blocking her path, she'll come back to me, wait to leash up, and then walk calmly past the other dog. Over the winter, I got in the habit of carrying cheese in my pocket in a Ziploc bag; she recalls to the rustling of the Ziploc much better than to her name, let me tell you. Well one time a dog passed by and she started to stalk it with agressive body posture; I rustled the Ziploc and she came running back to me. So I can actually recall her from a fight she was about to start. You wouldn't know that's the same dog I had six years ago.

That being said, she's still not a "friendly" dog. First of all, that 1% of the time, or actually, more like 0.25% of the time, she'll attack a little dog. Just for the sake of attacking a little dog. She'll spot one from a distance and just go after it. She's done it twice in the last two years, but not in the last year. Maybe she's over it; maybe my strategy of not bringing her out when little foofy dogs are afoot has more to do with it. I just know I can't trust her with little dogs. (Actually, one of them is bigger than her, but he's got that little-dog behaviour.)

The other thing is, when she meets another dog, she doesn't tolerate bad manners. Normally she prefers to go around them and smell their wake after they're past her. If she actually interacts with another dog and the other dog approaches politely, she'll sniff noses, then butts, and then ignore it. If the other dog is "friendly", as people call it, that is, jumping all over her, she snaps at it. And that is where you can see that people have no idea what a dog fight looks like. Tinky-Winky will snap at their dog and clearly miss, so that there is literally a loud "snap" as her jaws shut. This isn't a miss. Tinky-Winky does not miss. In fact when she does this, she doesn't even lunge at the other dog. Just a snarl and a snap, and normally the other dog will back off. Occasionally, if the other dog is slow, it gets its nose nipped, but it's not her intention to bite another dog's nose. If it was, she'd have it by the nose every time and not let go. No, this is just a warning snap. And people get all freaked out and think she "attacked" their dog. Which is all the more unfair since their dog is the one being rude, and most of the time they've insisted on bringing it close to her so it can be extra, extra annoying.

So before you freak out thinking that dogs are "fighting", see if anyone's actually biting. When they're circling each other snapping and snarling, that's just trash talk. If they're actually fighting, it's a contact sport. There will be one angry trashing pile of biting dogs, not two or more separate dogs.

It's funny that we've had dogs for tens of thousands of years and people don't even know that.

More foxes that look nothing like shibas

2011-05-01T14:12:00.001-06:00

Things I love about my shiba

2011-04-29T07:28:00.000-06:00

She's the worst bedmate.

Usually she likes to sleep on her own bed, but sometimes I put her on mine. She'll make right for the middle, then dig and claw at the blankets and spin in circles until she's built herself a comfy little nest. Then she sprawls out and pins all the blankets, and becomes an immovable object for the next 12 hours. She hates getting up in the morning. And she always sleeps with her butt towards my head. From a pack point of view, it makes sense, this way we're guarding both ends; from a human point of view, not so much.

Yesterday I wanted to sleep on the floor because my back hurt, so I set up some blankets, and then I sat on the couch to read one more chapter before bed. Meanwhile, the dog colonized my blankets. She picked the middle with mathematical precision, rounded everything up, and fell asleep. And I like to let her sleep, so I had about a foot of blanket for the rest of the night.

You might think this isn't exactly a good thing, but I like it because it helps balance out the evils of being single. If I had a man, he'd make trouble about the dog's bed manners. And he'd probably be right, even. But since I'm single, I can enjoy the cuteness of it in peace. And unlike a man, she at least lets me sleep, even if I have to contort myself to fit in the space she gives me.

Save water, shower with a dog

2011-04-05T21:57:00.001-06:00

I've had either cats or dogs for close to twenty years and I've come to the conclusion that the best way to wash them is to get naked and get in the tub with them. Otherwise you get water everywhere and in the case of cats, usually a shredded shirt.

The other thing I've discovered is that bathing them releases a huge quantity of allergens all at once, and of course I'm allergic to cats and dogs. (Also apples, pears and poplar.) So I have to shower as soon as possible after bathing them, or I break out in a huge red rash all over my body. Then on top of that I generally need every allergy drug in the house: Benadryl, Visine, calamine, and usually some ibuprofen as well. And now that I'm back on asthma meds, my fast-acting inhaler. But it's all worth it to end up with a nice, soft, fluffy, clean-smelling little dog.

Also, it helps release all the dead hair during shedding season.

I'm really not sure how people live without dogs.

Things I love about my shiba

2011-04-05T21:47:00.000-06:00

When she misbehaves.

Tinky-Winky never, ever misbehaves. Her recall isn't 100%, but that's about the only bad thing she ever does. In the house, she's perfect. She doesn't bark. She doesn't chew. She doesn't dig at the carpet. (I planted her a lawn on the balcony and she dug it up, but that was her lawn to do with as she wanted.) She doesn't pee. She doesn't get in the garbage. She even knows to puke on the linoleum.

But sometimes, she does something that's like the beginning of a misbehaviour. Then I say "what are you doing?" and we both laugh.

We're a good match in that way. Neither of us is the least bit playful or has any sense of humour. We're uptight each with our own kind. We're both spinsters at heart. But we "get" each other.

So today, Tinky-Winky decided it was her walking time. Yes, yes, Cesar, blah blah blah. The reality is, things between us are balanced enough that I don't need to be strict with her anymore. Once upon a time she was really bossy with me. Now she's not. So when she asks for something nicely, usually she gets it. But back to my story: she decided it was walking time, so she came into the living room and did a play bow. And this brought her face to face with a library book that was lying on the floor. She looked at it and got the idea to play with it. First she tried to open it with her nose. Then she tried to chew on the inside. Then she tried to chew on the cover. Then I said to her "we don't eat library books." And she looked at me and we laughed. She didn't even get any drool on the book.

I love my dog.

Looks just like a little fox!

2011-04-05T21:44:00.001-06:00

Actually, he looks like a pretty badass mofo of a fox. And he's on our trail.

Looking right at us.

And he's not going anywhere.

After ten minutes he moved over to the side of the trail and we walked through.

You know what he totally doesn't look like though? A shiba. Racoon, maybe. Hyena, totally. Shiba? Not a chance.

Things that go on in my dog's head

2011-03-11T21:51:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, I taught Tinky-Winky to roll over. It took two years and a good 70 lbs of cheese, but we did it. Or... more or less. She knows what I mean by "roll over". That was the easy part. She got it the first day. The part about motivating her to do it took two years, and she still always tries to get out of it by doing some other trick instead, or she'll go on her side and then get back up and pretend she did it. So, I don't really ask her anymore. Obviously she doesn't like it, and there is no purpose in making her do it.

The funny thing is, when we're playing on the floor together in the evenings, sometimes she rolls over of her own free will. I don't even have cheese handy or anything, and we're just playing, and she rolls over and doesn't ask for anything in return.

Now why would somebody do something they don't like to do but they know matters to someone in their life?

Hmmmmmmm...

I think that's her way of saying "you know what, human, you're alright."

The ten-dog race

2011-03-07T12:53:00.000-07:00

Before anyone starts thinking I'm posting these because I care about LUSH wanting to ban dog racing: I don't give a tupenny Ford about what LUSH wants to ban. I only even know about it because someone else blogged about how they are boycotting LUSH because of the dogsled issue, and I made time to read the blog, and I was disappointed by the lack of anything worth discussing. I wouldn't want anyone to think I am gonna blog something boring about LUSH and the sled dogs.

I shot these photos on Sunday for the simple reason that we have dog races the first weekend in March and the ten-dog race goes right past my house, and the weather was beautiful, and therefore I went down to take some photos. It has nothing to do with advocacy of any kind.

However if you want to know what I think of LUSH, I think it's bizarre to boycott them because they want to shut down dog sledding, but not because they want to shut down the oilsands. Seriously: we need the money from the oilsands, and if you ever ride around in a vehicle with an internal combustion engine, or you own anything that was ever carried in a truck, train, ship, or airplane, or you live in any kind of man-made dwelling, then your lifestyle depends on oil, just like everybody else's; while on the other hand, nobody's lifestyle or livelihood is seriously dependent on sled dogs. So it strikes me as rather hypocritical to get huffy about the dogs and not about the oil. Also, LUSH is not an effective advocacy group, nor do they care. They do this because it's their corporate image, that's all. And again, it's hypocritical to boycott LUSH because of their corporate philosophy, but keep buying petroleum products. Or coffee. Or any foods not grown locally. Or anything made in China. Or Microsoft.

Then again, it takes zero effort to live without LUSH, and considerable effort to live without petroleum products, coffee, food, Microsoft, and things made in China, so I see your point.

Personally, I buy from LUSH, and I don't care what they advocate against, or whether they even advocate against anything. I also like dog sled races, not because I have any opinion on the ethics of the people involved, but because if I had enough money to keep ten dogs, I'd totally be racing myself. Because it would be awesome fun.

And now I totally conned you into reading a boring, pointless blog post about LUSH v. sled dogs. Bahaha!

Things you don't see often

2011-03-05T16:46:00.001-07:00

A shiba with muddy paws. So rare, I only have one photo, after five years together. (Another time, she fell into a swamp full of H2S in Yellowknife, but I didn't take a picture of that. She was miserable.)

Is there such a thing as being too attached to your dog?

2011-03-01T15:07:00.001-07:00

I have a lifelong dream of going to the south pole. That's not very realistic. Getting a job in Antarctica is realistic, but where you work in Antarctica depends on your profession and citizenship, which means I wouldn't be at Amundsen-Scott regardless.

You'd think that would be really disappointing, but really, not really. Because when I look at photos of Amundsen-Scott, the interesting thing, to me, is the ceremonial pole marker. And every time I look at it I think "wow, Tinky-Winki would LOVE to piss on that." (If you've been reading this blog a while, you know that Tinky-Winky likes to piss on man-made markers.) However, you can't bring your dog to Antarctica, and what's more, the contracts are six months to two years, so I won't even be applying until after she's dead. And when I visualize being at the south pole without her, it doesn't seem worth going anymore.

Hmmmm...

Maybe, when your main motivation for going to the south pole is "so the dog can piss on it", it's time to deprioritize the dog a little.

(All the same, when I go to Antarctica, I'll bring her ashes with me, in case I get a chance to go to Amundsen-Scott after all and scatter some there.)

The bed that survived

2011-02-13T23:50:00.000-07:00

Tinky-Winky is a great shredder of blankets. She went through five in our first four years together, and I mean "through". And through and through and through. Plus some really good quality towels that I was using as a draft stopper and she mistook for a dog bed.

Being the perfect dog she is, though, she never goes through my blankets. Occasionally she'll inadvertently tear my comforter a bit, but she never goes to town on my stuff like she does on her own.

Anyway, about a year and a half ago, I took her last un-shredded blanket, folded it in four, stuffed it with all the stuffing from two comforters (one queens, one double) that I had given her and she had destroyed, and sewed the sides shut.

Miraculously, she still has that bed. No holes or tears in it. And she sleeps on it all the time. She actually stopped sleeping on the couch ever since she's had that bed. She rarely even sleeps on my bed anymore. She does still have some shredded remains of her own blankets that she likes to shred even more when the mood strikes her, but she doesn't shred her bed.

I guess she must really like it.

She's that cute

2011-02-11T22:48:00.000-07:00

On our regular walk at home, Tinky-Winky and I walk through the secondary school grounds. This evening, as we crossed the street to the school, there was a woman on the grounds talking to a man with a young-looking German-shepherd-like dog. Then the woman walked away and I thought the guy was a cop, because he was dressed too neatly and stood assertively instead of loitering. But then as we approached him, his dog jumped toward Tinky-Winky, wagging his tail and excited. And a police dog wouldn't do that.

So the guy says to his dog "heel" and the dog ignores him. The guy had to tell him four times, and on the fourth time he yanked hard on the leash, and finally the dog paid attention to him, heeled, and assumed a submissive attitude. Then I noticed the guy had a gun strapped to his leg and a toque that said "police" on it. (Hey. It was dark.)

Me: So it's a police dog, eh?
Guy: Yes he is.
Me: I thought police dogs heeled on the first try.
Guy: Usually he does.
Me: Is he on duty?
Guy: Yes he is.
Me: Oh. I better get out of here then.

Yep. My dog: distracts an on-duty police dog so he won't respond in four tries. She's actually that cute. Good to know in case I ever need to sneak past a police dog.

(Ok, in reality, the dog was already distracted before we got there, otherwise maybe he would have stayed focused. But it's still rather disturbing that it would take four tries to control a police dog who's on duty and on leash. What happens when it's off leash, then?)

"If only you could talk"

2011-02-11T00:01:00.000-07:00

Of course not. If my dog would talk she'd be like everyone else who can talk: bloody annoying.

But sometimes I do wonder, when she looks at me with her big brown eyes, whether she's happy enough. Not that there is anything more I can think of to do for her, but does she wish she had more dogs in her life? She's never really tried to make friends with other dogs, even when we take friends' dogs on walks. She wants to be with me and she wants the other dogs away from me. But if we spent enough time around the same dog, would she become more interested in interacting with the other dog and less in guarding me?

It doesn't matter very much in that I'm not getting a second dog. One dog is completely portable. I can go to hotels, to friends' houses, I can rent a room or an apartment, I can take her in the car. Two dogs: not even. Two dogs would be a huge pain in the arse. Nonetheless, if I had a boyfriend, and he had a dog, then his dog would be his dog and my dog would be my dog, and so, theoretically, it might be possible for the two dogs to become friendly without having to give up their one-man-one-dog privileges.

Again this is purely speculative since I'm not getting a boyfriend. But I do wonder if the dog wishes I would get a boyfriend who had a dog.

Things that go on in my dog’s head

2011-01-18T13:28:00.000-07:00

I think a major reason why people fail to train their dogs is because they over-simplify what goes on in the dog’s head. Like “it’s all operant conditioning” or “I’m gonna train my dog only with positive reinforcement” or even “it’s all about being calm-submissive.” The reality of training a dog, or an employee, or a child, or a tropical fish, is that you need two things: first they need to understand what you want, and second they need to care (and this is where dominance comes in, but it still doesn’t constitute “training” unless the animal also understands what you want). And in order for you to understand this and exploit it, you need to understand how your dog thinks.

The key is this: dogs think. They’re not brainless little larvae that simply react to stimuli. (Ok, some are. And those ones are the least trainable of all.) They have trains of thoughts. They have plans and ideas and problem-solving. If you’re trying to train your dog through conditioning, the dog is vastly outsmarting you.

Also, it’s really cute watching the little wheels turn in their heads. So what this post is actually about, is some examples of Tinky-Winky’s trains of thoughts.

Example one. Tinky-Winky gets two kinds of food: free-choice kibbles, and a home-cooked dinner of rice, peas, carrots, eggs and beef after her evening walk. The home-cooked food isn’t made fresh daily, however; I make a big batch, keep three in the fridge, and put the rest in the freezer. So the first one is perfectly fresh, the next two are at least never frozen, and after that, it’s all previously frozen food. And apparently, this dog has a fine palate, and she much prefers fresh food to previously-frozen food. So the day that I cook a new batch, she gets super excited. First of all she knows I have the ingredients, because it’s pretty much the only time I ever bring meat into the house. So all day, she watches what I’m doing. It takes some time, because you have to boil the eggs, cook the rice, let everything cool for hours, then mix all the ingredients and pack them. Then we have to have our evening walk, then we can have the first dinner of the new batch.

So, Tinky-Winky keeps checking on the progress of her dinner. She can’t see the top of the counters, and her breeder trained her not to stand up to try and look, but she’ll walk into the kitchen and look up, or look at the fridge door, frequently during the day. Then, she’ll ask for her walk early. See, like most dogs, she can tell time. Supposedly, they do this just by responding to their internal body rhythms, i.e. “every day when I feel like X, Y happens; therefore when I start feeling like X, I know Y is about to happen.”

Hmmmm… I doubt it, really, but whatever. Tinky-Winky knows what time her walk is, and if I’m late, she reminds me that it’s walking time. But on days that there is a new batch of food, she reminds me of her walk more than an hour early. So clearly she’s not just responding to how she feels at that time of day: she’s able to predict that “soon” it’s walking time, and after walking time is eating time. So she has much more of a concept of time than she’s given credit for, and what’s more, she can predict things several hours in advance.

Then we go for our walk, and instead of walking energetically for 45 minutes to an hour and not wanting to come home, she’ll take three steps, pee, and then ask to go back in. And as soon as we’re inside, she sprints for her food dish. So, clearly, she’s able to recognize a situation that has implications several hours away, and take steps to modify the world to get to the outcome faster. She’s not just reacting to stimuli: she’s connecting events for several hours and understanding how they connect together, and how to manipulate them.

Another food-related example has to do with pigs’ ears. The first time I bought her pigs’ ears, she wouldn’t touch them, so I put the bag next to the garbage for later disposal. But then she was acting up through the day, and we were cross with each other, and in the evening, she decided to steal the bag of pigs’ ears from the garbage, tear it open, and eat some pigs’ ears. And she was acting very stealthy, even though I can see her plainly, and giving me these dirty looks like “well if that’s how it is, I’m eating your precious pigs’ ears that you’re storing carefully next to the garbage.” So now I always store the pigs’ ears next to the garbage, and whenever she’s feeling ornery and cross with me, she goes and steals some. But if I offer her one, she still doesn’t want it. She really seems to feel that stealing and eating pigs’ ears from the garbage is an awesome way to get back at me. Try explaining that one with conditioned reflexes.

Then, there is the matter of urinating on things. Some people who consider themselves real pundits on dog training are also convinced that human urine is of no interest to dogs, because “how would they even know what that is?” or something specious like that.

Please. Even we humans with our useless noses can tell the smell of urine. Urine is urine and we know it when we smell it, no matter what species it is. What’s more, we can even tell which species it is. I can most certainly tell cat urine, human urine and horse urine apart by smell, and what’s more, I can tell mare urine from horse urine, and whether the mare is in heat. So if I can, certainly dogs can too. Except because they have much finer noses, they can tell much more subtle differences; for example, they can tell two dogs apart by their urine. Which is why whenever my dog sees another dog on the trail, she likes to let it go past and then smell its tracks and have a look at it from a safe distance. She’s connecting the visual of the dog to the scent; I suppose it’s much like meeting someone in real life that you’ve only known online. You’re putting a face to the username. Likewise the dog is putting a face to a specific urine smell.

Do they care about the urine of other species? Absolutely. When Tinky-Winky and I first went to Yellowknife in 2009, she was fascinated by the smell of fox urine in the bushes where we took our walks. Until one day she saw some foxes on the trail. She stared at the foxes. The foxes stared at her. Everyone twitched their noses at each other. She had never seen a fox and was mesmerized, and the foxes were finally getting to see who made the new smell in their territory. Then the foxes advanced on us, and Tinky-Winky got a good scare; ever after, she avoided fox smell. (How do I know where there is fox smell? Because I can see the foxes with my eyes, so I know where they’re leaving their smell. And I can see how Tinky-Winky reacts to those places.)

Speaking of territory, by the way, I think we overstate the concept of territorial pissing. Yes, animals piss on things and this marks a territory, but I don’t think they’re thinking “this is mine, I mark it. This is mine, I mark it. This is mine, I mark it.” Well, cats do. I don’t think dogs do. Dogs piss on things because they’re there. It’s more like a graffiti. “I was here. And here. And here.” Then another dog comes along and sees “I was here” and has to overwrite it with “I was here too.” And everyone who’s been there leaves a mark to show they’ve been there. It’s not exactly a statement of ownership, just a sign that they were there. Now one creature might smell another one’s urine and think “So-and-So was here, I better stay the heck out of here.” That’s possible. But I don’t think the concept of “territory” is as prominent in an animal’s mind as we think.

Anyway, one thing I find amusing with Tinky-Winky and territorial markings is, she always tries to piss higher than the other dogs. This is challenging when you’re only a foot tall, so whenever she’s marking a tree, post or hydrant where height is relevant, she’ll do a handstand and piss as high up the tree as she can. My theory is that she’s trying to convince other dogs that she’s much bigger than they are. Because dogs do care about size. It’s been very noticeable in working on Tinky-Winky’s aggression problem, that it progressed according to the size of the other dog. At first she’d attack anything, until she met a malamute and thought twice about it. Then she started thinking twice about smaller and smaller dogs. Now she mostly attacks very small dogs, especially foofy little ones. That’s not an admirable quality, but it does show she understands how size relates to ass-kickings. Hence the need to make others think she’s a really big dog when she marks. It’s a form of dominance behaviour.

But that’s not really where I was going with all this. What’s more interesting is how they react to human urine. Some people, who call themselves smart, think that a dog would never interpret human urine as having any meaning, much less as having the same meanings as dog urine. I think they’re much less smart than they think, because you just have to watch dogs to see how they understand urine, and human behaviour in general.

One day, Tinky-Winky and I were walking in Nose Hill Park, and we found a little pile of stones that someone had made on the vast empty prairie at the crossing of two trails.

Tinky-Winky peed on it.

At first I was amazed that she would recognize a human marker as a marker at all, then I thought to myself, surely, the guy who built this must have pissed on it himself. Guys, like dogs, like to piss on everything. So I decided that her interest in this little marker stone must have to do with the kind of markers dogs use, and not with understanding what humans use for markers.

However, another day we were walking in the woods, and among the undergrowth, Tinky-Winky found a buried utility flag. So she pissed on it. Hmmmmmm… Surely the workers who put it there didn’t piss on it, yet clearly she recognized that this was a marker, and if someone marked there, so must she. A friend of mine translated her train of thought thusly: “this looks important, I better piss on it.” And this is interesting because clearly, she does have a certain understanding of how humans mark things as “I was here”, and she participates in the marking game right along with us. When you think about it, it’s not really surprising. Dogs have lived with humans for 10,000 years and more, and unlike us, they’ve learned from it. Humans still don’t have a clue how to cooperate with dogs, for the most part, but dogs are very adept at obtaining cooperation from humans. They know how to get food from us, how to be taken into our houses and kept warm, they certainly know how our urine smells, and I don’t see why they wouldn’t have noticed, some time in the last 10,000 years, how we mark things of importance.

I think the “smart” people who are so sure that dogs don’t understand human urine are missing the fact that animals don’t care about species. To a dog, all animals are equal, and if some are more equal than others, it’s mostly because they can kick more ass. All animals smell, all animals piss on things, and all animals kick more or less ass. That’s how the world works; it is not narrowly divided into species and such things.

In any case, it’s much easier to explain all these behaviours with “my dog is capable of thinking” than with conditioned reflexes. Dogs think. They look at the world, analyze the data, and come up with solutions. If you show them that you’d like something done, they think about it, and decide to do it or not. Smarter dog understand faster; dumbass inbred dogs never understand. That still leaves the problem of whether the dog cares about the things you want, which in shibas, tend to be “heck no.” But there’s certainly no point having a dog who wants to please if he doesn’t understand what you want. So if you’re having trouble training your dog, one of three things is happening: either your dog doesn’t care, or he’s too dumb, or you’re too dumb. You have to be capable of a certain degree of scientific thinking to figure out how to train your dog.

The strange incident of the barking dog

2011-01-10T11:53:00.000-07:00

This morning at 6:55, Tinky-Winky barked once.

I immediately woke up from whatever stage of sleep I was, and leapt to her assistance. Cesar would have been horrified, but you see, Tinky-Winky doesn't bark. She used to bark at the door, but now she doesn't even do that. And there is only one situation when she uses that particular one-bark call: when she needs my help. So I leapt to her assistance... and couldn't figure out what she wanted.

When I responded, she was standing in the hallway, so I assumed she wanted out, except that's not how she asks to go out. First of all she never asks to go out, because she has a bladder like a Swiss bank vault. We've been together more than five years and she's never once asked to go pee. If she asks out it's because she has diarrhea, and then she doesn't bark, she cries, and you know you have to get her outside fast. I learned that the hard way. But she wasn't crying, and in fact she wasn't even looking at the door. Actually, she lay down as soon as she saw I was up. I asked her if she wanted out, no reaction. I don't know if she really understands that much English, but I certainly understand enough dog to know she didn't want out.

I went into the kitchen and checked her food and water. She had both. And she didn't follow me into the kitchen, so clearly that's not what she had been after. She might have wanted a chew, since we're out of pig's ears and she's been sad about that, but she knows where all her chews are and she wouldn't have woken me for that.

Since food, water and walks are the only things she ever really asks for, I ran out of ideas. So I petted her and went back to bed, and she didn't object. Whatever she had been after, clearly, I had met her needs.

Huh?

My best guess is that she dreamed that she was lost, and did one of those things where you wake up and you don't know where you are and whether the dream was real. So she barked because she thought she was lost, and as soon as I was there, her world was back in order.

There's a saying that "the more I know people, the more I love my dog." Conversely, the more I know my dog, the less I like people. They're so needy.

Gary Larson on dogs and obedience

2011-01-05T13:02:00.001-07:00

The “next dog” conundrum

2010-12-31T01:21:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me yesterday that I’m worrying for nothing about what kind of dog to get after Tinky-Winky. Not that I won’t have to face that decision sooner or later, but most likely, it’s going to be much, much later.

Dogs in Tinky-Winky’s family tend to live about 16 years, short of violent death such as cars. Tinky-Winky is 11, but doesn’t look even close to that old, so I’m rather hopeful that she’ll have an exceptionally long life. Twenty is probably too much to ask, but 18 seems plausible enough to me. So that’s seven more years, praise be to God.

After she’s gone, I’ll have a few dog-less years. Partly to avoid the “rebound dog” thing, but much more because I have some projects I want to pursue in life that just aren’t compatible with having a dog. So for a few years, maybe, say, five years, I won’t be looking for another dog. And that makes twelve years.

So let’s say ten to fifteen years, plausibly, before I have to worry about finding a new dog.

But I still worry about it. Partly because I’m not sure whether the things that annoy me with Tinky-Winky are her own idiosyncrasies, or really “breed traits” that I’ll have to put up with again if I get another shiba. I can deal with the attitude (sometimes barely) because I love Tinky-Winky. I don’t think I’d tolerate it from any other dog. Of course I could argue that she was already six years old when I got her, and if I had had her from a puppy, I could have raised her differently.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

So should I take a chance on another shiba when the time comes, or am I better off to go with a less cute but “probably” more cooperative breed like a Norwegian buhund?

It’s not for another ten to fifteen years. Why am I worried about it now? Why don’t I let it go?

Who knows. Talk to The Brain about that.

Another thing that’s begun to nag at me in the Next Dog Conundrum is the realization that the next dog is probably the last dog I’ll ever have. Ten to fifteen years from now plus fifteen years of the next dog’s life means any subsequent dog would almost certainly outlive me, and I don’t want to do that to a dog. So the next dog is gonna be the last dog.

Again, why is this gnawing at me? Who cares? Why does it matter?

It shouldn’t matter. But I have several dog names in mind and I won’t have as many dogs as dog names. I don’t believe in imposing names on dogs anyway; I let the name come to me as I get to know the dog. So I’d like to name my future dogs WHMIS, Riddick, Satī, Shi Huangdi and Cheka, but realistically, at most one of those will happen. Which of these five dogs might cross my path? Each name evokes a specific personality in my mind. But at most one of the five will become real.

It really doesn’t matter. Not for ten to fifteen years. Right now my precious has stacked all her doggy beds and blankets in a neat pile and is sleeping peacefully curled up on top of the pile… with one ear toward the fridge and one ear toward me. The last thing I need to decide now is “shiba or buhund.”

But it keeps gnawing at me.

Greed, thy name is dog

2010-12-26T20:30:00.000-07:00

As I was saying yesterday, the dog ate half of a huge steak for Christmas dinner, on top of her regular supper. So afterwards she lay passed out like a snake that has eaten a goat.

After a while I turned her out for a digestive stroll, and when she got back, the first thing she did was… go look for the meat wrapper in the garbage. Excuse me? I told her “leave it”, which is one command she respects pretty consistently. So then she looked expectantly at the microwave and the tops of the counters. She can’t see that high, of course, but she uses this looking-up trick to communicate to me that I’m about to give her something good.

Yeah: no. You had all your regular food plus half of a really expensive steak. And there are kids starving in Africa, by the way. So that’s more than enough for you today.

That’s the species’ entire evolutionary strategy: insatiable greed, complete absence of conscience, and the ability to mutate into shapes that make us think they’re adorable.

But it still beats the average boyfriend.

Of dogs and men

2010-12-26T20:24:00.001-07:00

One thing my dog does have in common with the average boyfriend though, is she has “her” side of the bed.

Technically, all sides of the bed are mine. So I’d like to think. However, since I have to turn off the light before I get into bed, I always get into bed on the same side, and so I don’t sleep quite in the middle, and so it appears the dog has decided the other side of the bed is hers. I hadn’t realized that until yesterday, when I had stretched my legs on “her” side and she jumped up, found “her” spot was taken, glared at me, and then made a big show of lying down on my leg as if it was comfortable.

Hmmmmmm…

I’m not really full-out Cesar Millan in the rules of the house, but I think this requires firmness on my part. I like having the dog on the bed, but it’s my bed. All of it. Whatever side of the bed I want to sleep on, the dog can bloody well take the other side, or else sleep in her own bed.

Things I love about my shiba

2010-12-25T21:07:00.000-07:00

She loves the way I cook meat.

One thing I don’t love about Canada is how people cook meat, especially beef. They marinade the crap out of it, paint it with steak sauce, and then grill it until it’s tough as rawhide. You might as well be eating a steak sauce-flavoured chew toy. My ex especially always said he hated the taste of meat, so he’d buy really expensive cuts and cook them so you’d never know you were eating cow. I don’t see why we couldn’t just have bought tofu and soaked it in steak sauce.

I cook steak the way my father taught me in the Old Country. You get the pan red hot, throw the steak in, flip it, get it out. Ninja steak. If you want seasoning on it, you put a bit of expensive mustard on your plate and apply it to the steak as required.

For Christmas dinner, the dog and I had steak. Today instead of yesterday, because I broke my wrist on the 22nd and yesterday I was still feeling too sick to celebrate anything. And one great thing about having a dog instead of a boyfriend is, the dog has no idea what we’re celebrating or why or when, and it’s all the same to her that we had Christmas dinner a day late.

So I cooked the steak the way I like it. About that, actually, I’ve taken to eating my meat much more rare since I’ve been cooking dog food. Every time I mix a batch of dog food I’m tempted to eat it, which of course I don’t because raw ground beef is not considered safe for human consumption. But on the rare occasions when I eat steak, instead of medium-well like I used to before I had the dog, now I make it rare. Today we had a really expensive piece of meat which was more than an inch thick, so I had to cook the outside for about three minutes to pretend that the inside was gonna be anything other than raw. This didn’t completely succeed; in fact in the thickest parts of the steak, the meat wasn’t even hot. It was dark red throughout and bled profusely. If it had been any less cooked it would have mooed when I poked it with my fork. And so tender, you hardly had to chew it at all.

Dang, that was good.

Tinky-Winky, of course, got half the steak. Probably 100 to 150 grams (4-5 ounces). She ate her share in about four seconds and has been passed out ever since. She’s like a snake that just swallowed a goat.

One other thing Tinky-Winky and I have in common is that when we eat steak, we wash it down with water, not alcohol. That way she doesn’t get crazy and verbally abusive after supper. It’s nice being able to share a holiday dinner with someone who appreciates my cooking and mellows out after eating.

If men were as good as dogs, maybe I wouldn’t be single.

Does your dog eat zucchini?

2010-12-13T15:54:00.005-07:00

Mine does. I didn't even know that, as I don't typically cook any, but I had made a zucchini casserole for a potluck, and I had two zucchini left, and I have to eat all my leftover foods before we leave next Tuesday, so I threw something together. Rice, bread crumbs, cheese, zucchini, olive oil and basil. It's not even particularly good by human standards, which is fine because I have no palate anyway.

The dog got super excited about me cooking. I assumed that since I normally cook only for her, she figured I was making her something good. Then when I was eating it, she was staring at me with her big brown greedy little eyes. I figured she was after the rice, bread or cheese, three things she likes to eat. So I gave her the last bite, as I usually do. Including one small piece of zucchini, which I figured she'd eat around.

She ate the zucchini.

Ok, mistakes happen, right?

The next serving, I left her more zucchini and less of the rest. She ate the zucchini. I've now eaten five of the six servings I had created, and she's still loving the zucchini. Today she spat out a big piece and left it on the floor, so I thought, she's finally realizing that dogs don't eat zucchini. I picked it up to go throw it out, but she ran after me, followed by the male cat, who doesn't like anything we eat but begs for it anyway. So I gave Tinky-Winky the zucchini, and she gave it another try. She had a hard time with it because it was so big, so she had to chew it - not a skill dogs are good at, especially for chewing vegetable matter. Their teeth aren't shaped to do that. But, not only she managed to eat the whole piece, but she also gave the cat the evil eye when he tried to get too close to her prey.

Ha. You practically have to mince carrots to make her eat them, but she will have words with a cat over a giant piece of zucchini. What up with that?

Seriously, if you're reading this, do me a favour and leave a comment to let me know whether your dog eats zucchini. I'd like to get a feel for how normal this is.

Dear cat: I like you as a friend. Get out of my bed.

2010-12-10T21:02:00.003-07:00

The roommate's cats like me. Not more than they like her, of course, but she works long hours, so they've seen a lot more of me than of her the last few weeks. They're a bit attached to me. They sit with me and ask me for food. The male especially likes to come into my room and sit on my bed. More specifically, on Tinky-Winky's assigned blanket on my bed.

Hmmmmm...

I like you, cat, but this is my bed. Mine and Tinky-Winky's. You don't get to sleep here. Only Tinky-Winky and I sleep in this bed. Also, I'm allergic to you, so please stay the heck off my pillow.

Also, I think the roommate is not too amused that her cats like me a lot more than my dog likes her. Tinky-Winky likes the roommate more than any prior roommate, but she's a stand-offish and very monogamous little dog. My monogamous little dog.

And I think Tinky-Winky doesn't like how much the cats like me, and the cats don't like how much I like Tinky-Winky. We all get along really well, but there is a small undercurrent of jockeying for each other's affections. Which makes me glad that I've never got a second pet to keep Tinky-Winky company when I'm not home. I know she likes having the cats when no humans are home, but I don't think it's worth more to her than having my undivided love. And I don't feel like dividing my love anyway. Once upon a time I had four cats, two dogs, a horse, and a variable number of tropical fishes. Most of them didn't get nearly the amount of bonding and attention that Tinky-Winky gets.

Another reason I'm glad I have a dog

2010-12-09T19:30:00.003-07:00

One word: litterbox.

The place with the cats in Calgary is actually very nice for a roommate place, but the litterbox is just off the kitchen. It's sick. Like anybody else, I hate the smell of litterbox, let alone when I'm trying to make food. And even if it didn't smell, I'd rather not have a big box of excrement in the house. It's certainly no worse picking up after the dog than doing the litterbox, and at least the smell stays outside.

I'm glad I have a dog

2010-11-25T20:30:00.004-07:00

Two of our roommates in Calgary are cats. I used to have four cats, long before Tinky-Winky, so you'd think I'd love cats.

Now that I have a dog, I don't like cats as much as I used to. They're strange creatures. Their skulls are so tiny and bony, it feels like you could crush them like eggs. And when you pick them up they're all limp and saggy, like water balloons with claws.

It's not that I dislike cats, but I'm glad I have a dog instead. My Tinky-Winky is no more ornery than a cat and at least she's a solid, not a liquid in a cat pelt. Her skull is nice and solid, and when you pick her up she maintains her cylindrical shape.

I prefer the love of my life not to deform so easily.

World's spoiledest dog

2010-11-21T17:23:00.003-07:00

It's actually my goal in life to have the world's spoiledest dog. Not in terms of behaviour, or by buying her outfits and carrying her in a purse, but by giving her as much as possible of what dogs want out of life.

Dogs want three things in life: pack, food, walks. Which is why Tinky-Winky and I walk off-leash as much as possible. At home that's once a day if I'm working, three times a day if I'm not. But right now we're in Calgary AB for my technical training, so off-leashing is twice a week at Nose Hill Park. In fact, I picked Calgary not only because it's an excellent school, but because of Nose Hill Park. And I picked the place I'm renting because it's close to Nose Hill Park, and I picked my church because it's close to Nose Hill Park.

See, Nose Hill Park is the greatest urban dog-walking place EVAH. It's gigantic and nobody goes there. Well, some people go, but compared to the size of the park, there is almost no one. Perfect for a dog who's unpredictable in her dealings with other dogs. Also there are porcupines, and Tinky-Winky loves porcupines. Though not in a good way.

The downside of Calgary, however, is that it's located high up the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, and that leads to some pretty surreal weather. Up to last Sunday, November 14, it was warm. I didn't need a coat to walk around. Neither did Tinky-Winky, so she blew her coat with a vengeance. She looks like a rat.

In the night of Monday to Tuesday, an Arctic air mass blew in. It got to -13C (9F), it snowed, and it was hideously windy from the north. I don't remember ever being so cold in -13C. I don't remember being this cold in -30C, for that matter. It was UGLY.

After three days, the snow stopped, and the wind died down mostly, but the cold stayed. Arctic air masses get really stable once they stop moving, which is why in our subarctic latitudes back home, we get beautiful winter weather: -20C (0F), sunny and no wind. Perfect construction weather, I can tell you. So, it wasn't so bad, but it was still ugly for my poor dog with no coat. It's pretty normal for her to get cold feet at the beginning of winter, because she's getting older, but usually she gets over it pretty quickly. This time, she can't get over it, because she has no coat and her whole body is freezing.

So, I wasn't going to take her to Nose Hill yesterday, but towards park-going time, she got all excited and pushy. Poor dog. I loaded her in the car and we went. At the park, she ran up the hill all excited like she usually does. "That's going better than I thought", I thought. Then she got to the top of the hill and ran right into the wind. And she turned around and ran back down the hill just as fast as she had run up, and back to the car. We were out of the car less than ten minutes.

Today, same thing: I wasn't gonna take her, but she was begging to go out, so I took her. But this time, I took a fleece blanket along. I carried her partway up the hill wrapped in the blanket, then I put her down. She went about five steps, got cold feet, and stopped. So I wrapped her up in the blanket, picked her up, and carried her until she stopped shivering. I put her down and she went five steps, and got cold. I picked her up and carried her.

After the fourth time, she was feeling warm enough to start galloping around on her own feet. She stayed near me for a while, and then took off ahead as she usually does. I was somewhat happy that she was feeling better, but on the other hand, I was worried that she'd get overconfident and get frostbite or hypothermia before I could get to her and all I'd find would be a sad frozen little dogsicle.

Luckily, that didn't happen; I was close to her when she got cold. She had run maybe ten minutes on her own. I turned around and carried her until she stopped shivering again, and then I put her down and she ran right back to the car of her own free will again. We were out of the car for 25 minutes.

I wish we could have got a photo of me carrying her around the park all bundled up like a scarecrow. She was adorable.

So how does that make her the world's spoiledest dog? Well, I don't know anyone else who puts one tenth as much effort into making sure their dog gets off-leash time.

You know what else looks like a shiba?

2010-11-17T21:18:00.001-07:00

A Norwegian buhund. It's about 20% bigger than a shiba, and I bet it recalls a little better.

Some people are so rude

2010-11-17T20:58:00.007-07:00

In the neighbourhood where we're staying in Calgary, there is someone with a small bearded dog, like maybe a miniature schnauzer. I've only seen it at night, so it's hard to tell. Whatever it is, though, it's aggressive towards dogs.

So, as we're walking along today, Tinky-Winky and I saw that aggressive schnauzer thing coming the other way on its flexileash. And you know how we feel about flexileashes.

Tinky-Winky and I pulled over into a driveway to give them room to pass by. But the schnauzer came at my dog, barking and snarling. Still at the end of its flexileash. Ha. I'm sure Tinky-Winky is gonna take that kind of BS... NOT!!! She started barking and snapping too. I held her back and waited for the person and the schnauzer to walk by. Instead of which, the person stopped and pulled feebly at the leash. She didn't reel in her dog, she didn't talk to him with authority, she didn't simply walk by and pull him along. She stood there feebly while her dog tried to start a fight. If I had reacted the same way and let my dog go after hers, we'd have had a big fight on our hands.

In the end I had to pick up Tinky-Winky and carry her away from that annoying little rat. And his useless person.

Really, who does that? You're responsible for your dog. If it's trying to pick a fight, control it and get it away from others. Don't just stand there uselessly waiting for a fight to start.

And by the way, if your dog weighs less than about 40 lbs, PICK IT UP. Solves just about any problem you're having. Or however many pounds you can lift. Get a dog that weighs less than you can pick up off the ground, then you always have a way to control it.

Things I love about my shiba

2010-11-12T19:40:00.002-07:00

Some times she twitches in her sleep.

I suppose all creatures do that, really. It's just way cuter when she does it.

Things I love about my shiba

2010-11-04T19:32:00.001-06:00

Everything.

Zoom zoom!

2010-11-04T19:31:00.001-06:00

Camouflage: I haz it

2010-11-04T19:28:00.001-06:00

Places we love to run: Nose Hill Park

2010-10-30T14:56:00.001-06:00

And I do my little turn on the catwalk

2010-10-22T03:27:00.001-06:00

I gotta have this dog's babies

2010-10-10T13:57:00.007-06:00

Isn't he just God's gift to bitches everywhere? He's a Shikoku inu and I don't know his name... but for my next dog I want his baby. (Photo by Kato the Walrus who writes Tora Inu.)

Rebuttal from the "puggle" people: "die, bitch!"

2010-09-27T17:49:00.003-06:00

I think that was more or less it, but really I didn't waste my time on reading too much of it. One guy apparently went through every bit of information about me that can be found online so he could construct a lengthy essay on why my life sucks. Clearly, a potent rebuttal to my opinion on "designer dogs" and the arseholes who breed them.

So, statistically, 100% of a self-selected sample of "puggle" owners not only have lousy literacy skills, but are also really rude, mean people who don't know how to respond to an argument.

Curiouser and curiouser, isn't it? I know all kinds of very normal people who own mutts, and yet everyone I know, even marginally, who owns a "designer dog" is apparently a nasty moron.

You gotta lay off that "designer dog" shit; clearly it's ruining your mind.

Herding: you're doing it wrong

2010-09-26T13:52:00.002-06:00

This photo is from May 31 but I forgot to post it. I had stopped to take photos of bison, obviously, and Tinky-Winky got out of the car before I could close the door. Luckily the bison didn't stampede. She's spooked a whole herd before, but this time they must have realized she's only a foot tall and there's only one of her. So they ignored her, and being not a herding dog, she ignored them... until she crossed the path of this cow who was trotting past me, and gave herself a good scare. The cow was nowhere close to Tinky-Winky, really, but no one likes to see a 1,200-pound cow coming right at them. I doubt she learned anything from it, though.

That fox looks just like a shiba!

2010-09-26T12:56:00.003-06:00

The thing with foxes is, they move fast. Really fast. Much faster than shibas. So I got two shots at this one. He (or she) is the only fox I know who has more or less the same colour as a shiba. And there are lots of foxes in Yellowknife; you just don't see them on this blog because I'm not fast enough to shoot them. But you can come see for yourselves if you'd like. Foxes, even the species that's called "red fox", are at best a muddy blackish kind of red. This is the only one I've ever seen that's orange like a shiba. Even so, it still doesn't look like a shiba. It's tall and skinny with a huge poofy tail, and it looks like it's on crack.

Also, "puggles" will ruin your literacy skills

2010-09-25T20:39:00.003-06:00

My last post about the "designer dog" fraud drew many angry, rude comments from "puggle" fanciers, which all had this in common: they had nothing to do with what I wrote.

Hmmmmmm... Well that's amusing. Who would have thought that 100% of a self-selected sample of "designer dog" owners would have lousy reading skills and no ability to think rationally?

Ok, actually, it's very likely that I would have thought that. If you're buying into the "designer dog" thing, I'm not gonna have high expectations for you.

For those who can actually read, let me explain what's wrong with "designer dogs."

First of all, I've said this before, but there is nothing "designed" about them. The only design is to part fools from their money. Large amounts of money. A breed is designed and created over generations by selecting stock for desired traits, so that the end result consistently produces those same desired traits over and over when bred to the same breed. Beagles and other scenthounds, for example, are designed to have very keen noses, lots of endurance, and a one-track mind. Terriers are designed to be small enough to go down a burrow, tenacious enough to want to do it, and brave enough to face down the creature that lives in the burrow. Sheep dogs are designed to herd. Retrievers are designed to find the ducks you shoot and bring them back to you.

Are you following this? Breeds are designed, that is, they have a purpose. And they're bred selectively over generations to isolate the traits that fulfill that purpose. Most of the time the traits are either recessive, dominant but uncommon, or partially inheritable, so you have to make sure you bring together the individuals who best display those traits, in order that the offspring show the trait as well or even better than the parents.

In some breeds, particularly pugs, the desired traits are grotesque morphology and below-average intelligence. Whoever designed the pug should have been beaten bloody for the evil scum of the earth s/he was, because who would do that to a dog? It can't hunt for itself, it can't burrow in the snow, it can barely breathe or drink without choking. All it does it entertain people by its grotesquerie. It's the politically-correct twentieth-century version of the medieval fool: a stunted, misshapen human kept as a pet to entertain other humans.

Anyway. Let's consider now the "designer dog" fallacy. "Designer dogs" are not bred from two carefully selected specimens to enhance a desired trait. They're also not bred with a consistency of purpose. If someone was trying to create a new breed, the offspring that best displayed the desired traits would be bred to offspring of a like crossing that also displayed the desired traits, and on and on until the new breed was stabilized. That's not what "designer dog" breeders do, though. They just breed the same cross over and over and send forth the offspring into the world for $600 a head and don't care what happens next.

The original "designer dog" was actually bred for a purpose, which was to create a hypo-allergenic service dog by crossing Labrador retrievers with poodles. The offspring, predictably, was unpredictable in both its hypo-allergenic aspect and its ability to train as a service dog. It was also discovered that this was completely unnecessary, because well-bred poodles are very smart and perfectly able to train as service dogs.

The average "designer dog", however, is bred for the sole purpose of selling the puppies. The "puggle" is a particularly good example of the failure of that ill-thought-out cross as a "breed". If you look at photos, they're losing almost all of the pug phenotype, and no data is available on their success as hunting dogs. So the desired qualities of both breeds are lost. This is predictable if you care to remember that breeds are mostly from traits that are recessive, dominant but rare, or partially inheritable. Obviously the recessive traits of both breeds will be lost; dominant traits never breed true unless the recessive alleles can be culled; and partially inheritable traits are diluted by breeding to individuals that don't have them. So, you get something that has no specific traits by which you could write a breed standard, and that will not breed true.

Why is that important? It wouldn't be, if you don't care about predicting a dog's likely aptitudes, size and personality. But most people do care about that, and what's more, "designer dog" fanciers will actually tell you that their "breed" is such and such way. They're lying. There is no predicting what traits each parent will pass on, or how the various traits will work together. I know a dog who is allegedly a Labrador retriever x Belgian shepherd cross. It looks exactly like a lab... and is very aggressive like a badly-handled Belgian shepherd. I think it's a remarkably stupid cross because most people expect a retriever to have a mild, friendly personality. Breeding a dog who looks exactly like that but has an aggressive personality common in a completely different breed means people will approach your large, aggressive dog as if it was a nice friendly black lab.

Another problem, along the same lines, is when people decide after the fact, without any knowledge of a dog's breeding, that it's such or such "designer dog", and in addition, buy into the lies the "breed" fanciers have come up with about that cross's traits. Guessing a purebred dog's breed is one thing, and most people get it wrong a lot. A friend of mine once lost a Gordon setter and found it at the pound labelled as a "Rottweiler x spaniel." Guessing the parents of a mutt, even assuming both parents were typey purebreds, is an exercise in futility. Like the puppy in my previous post. It looks exactly like a bloodhound puppy, but that's not a breed most people have ever seen in person, because it's very hard to keep, so that's not somebody's first thought on looking at that puppy. Well, it was my first thought, but of course I spend tons of time looking at breed standards.

If you're going to assume it's a mutt, then there are many possible crosses. Clearly, it looks like a scenthound, though not particularly much like a beagle as they're never self-coloured. Other hounds that have the same body shape as the beagle include the foxhound and harrier, and I'm not sure how anyone pretends to know by looking at a mutt whether its ancestors were beagles, foxhounds or harriers, seeing as they all look practically identical except for height. The most you can say is that based on probabilities, there are probably way more beagle owners willing to breed them to anything that pisses on fire hydrants than foxhound or harrier owners.

Then again, why would it be a pug x beagle if the colouring occurs in neither pug nor beagle? One could assume that both colours are recessive and that the offspring are getting the brown colour from the beagles and the self-colour from the pugs, but that the tricolour or bicolour or gray coats are all recessive to self-brown. But then if we're going to say that, we're admitting that this cross is losing the most visible trait of each breed, and then how can we pretend that we're going to predict any of its traits?

Back to guessing the parents' breeds, again, why are we guessing "beagle" when it looks like a bloodhound? Bloodhounds are not bred by crossing pugs and beagles, so where do we get the idea that if it looks like a bloodhound, the most likely ancestry is pug x beagle? If it has pug in it at all, which there is absolutely no reason to believe given the absence of any pug-like traits, it would still make more sense to assume the other half was a bloodhound rather than a beagle. Because at least it looks like a bloodhound.

The whole thing is clearly futile. If you're getting a mutt from a rescue, it's a mutt. It's not a maltipoo, yorkipoo, cockapoo, labradoodle, puggle, boggle, borkie, pomchi, shichon, zuchon, glechon, porkie, shorkie, snorkie, or anything else of the kind. It's a mutt. M-U-T-T mutt. It might be a wonderful dog or a retarded creature who can't even housetrain, or anything in between, but you'll never know until after you bring it home, because as a mutt of unknown breeding, it doesn't have any predictable traits. Except that being a dog, it will probably eat, shit, sleep, and want to go for walks and chase living creatures.

On the other hand, if you're buying your "designer dog" from a breeder or a pet store, you're just being had. You're paying hundreds of dollars for something you could get for free from the shelter, and you're encouraging the unscrupulous individual who's selling it to you to continue adding to the dog overpopulation problem.

And that, more than anything, is what's wrong with "designer dogs." The very concept of "designer dog" exists strictly for the purpose of selling random mutts to gullible people who don't care about dog overpopulation. Then, they get a dog who's not what they expected, and it ends up in rescue.

If you want a dog, either get a mutt for free from the shelter and call it a mutt, or buy a purebred from a responsible breeder and call it a breed. Never buy a dog who's advertised under a portmanteau name, because they're ipso facto lying to you. Don't buy a dog from a pet store or a backyard breeder. In fact, don't buy a dog at all unless you have a very specific set of criteria and you've found the purebred that will match them. If you just want "a dog", get a free one from a shelter and call it a mutt.

And don't comment on people's blogs if you don't know how to read.

Reader comment: I don't agree with your stupid blog, therefore you shouldn't even have a blog

2010-09-24T17:42:00.004-06:00

Piss off, morons. I blog whatever the Ford I want. Doesn't bother me any if you don't like it.

Seriously, get over the "designer dog" BS

2010-09-18T16:05:00.006-06:00

A fellow blogger was given a dog, which looks like this:

"It's a puggle", she says. A reader commented that indeed, the puggle is a recognized "species."

Yeah... not so much. A "puggle" isn't a breed, it's a portmanteau word to refer to a dog believed to be a pug x beagle cross. Waste of a beagle, if you ask me, because why breed a scenthound to a breed with a nose so misshapen they can't even breathe? People do the dumbest things.

So I looked at the photo and it looks nothing like a pug. Not much like a beagle either, but certainly nothing like a pug.

"Oh yes he does," she says. "He has a wrinkled face."

And... your point is? Most puppies have wrinkled faces. Many breeds also have wrinkled faces as adults, such as... scenthounds. Imagine that. Pugs don't just have wrinkles, they have a squished face, which is a genetic deformity that has been bred for selectively, for no good reason, to produce things like bulldogs and mastiffs. And pugs. All dogs who are not very good at breathing, and in the case of bulldogs and pugs, not much good for anything else either.

Luckily, this puppy looks nothing like a pug. Yes, it has a wrinkled face. But it doesn't have a squished face, or bulging eyes, or a curly tail, which is very common in "puggles" if you look at the "breed's" official website. There's nothing about this dog that suggests it's ever even been near a pug.

You know what it does look like though?

A bloodhound puppy.

Not a highly typey, award-winning bloodhound puppy, but it looks like a bloodhound puppy. And you're gonna be sorry if that's what it is, because a bloodhound is a BIG HUNTING DOG. It needs tons of training, tons of exercise, mental stimulation, firm leadership, tons of exercise, and did I mention tons of exercise? It needs tons of exercise. Like a beagle, except tons more.

Also, most hounds bark often and very loud. That's what they're bred for.

Also, bloodhounds are reputedly difficult to house train. Or to train to anything, but most people never go any further than housetraining, so that's no big deal, maybe.

And also, bloodhounds are on average a medically high-maintenance breed.

So other than the fact that there's no such thing as a "puggle", maybe you shouldn't take home a puppy of unknown ancestry just because someone made up a cute portmanteau word for it... because in your lack of knowledge, you might be taking home a bloodhound that you'll never be able to handle.

There are two kinds of dogs: purebreds and mutts. Purebreds are bred from consistent stock to have consistent traits, so there is some predictability in them. Mutts are everything else, and you never know what you're gonna get until you try. And calling it a "puggle" doesn't make it anything other than a mutt. Or maybe a bloodhound.

Rock hound

2010-09-12T22:27:00.001-06:00

More training practices that don't involve "positive reinforcement"

2010-09-11T18:11:00.003-06:00

My dog is trained to puke on the linoleum. As were all the dogs and cats I had before her.

How is that even possible, you ask?

It's simple. Every time they start heaving, I pick them up and move them onto the linoleum. Then I stay with them and hold their hair while they're puking.

That's seriously all it takes to train your pet to puke on the linoleum. And they get very committed to it, actually. One time Tinky-Winky started throwing up blood. While I was at work, she threw up so much my entire kitchen was just a sea of blood. By the time I came home she was too weak to walk, in fact she hardly had the strength to blink... but she never let a drop of blood hit the carpet. My brave little dog.

So is this positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, punishment, or extinction?

Actually, it's none of the above. It's something much more useful: understanding. It works on people, too. You can try to train your employees to do things your way by rewarding them, by punishing them, or by making the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard... but the most effective training method by far is simply for them to understand what result you're trying to achieve. My pets know I don't want them puking on the carpet, so they go puke on the linoleum. Simple as that.

But you could try teaching them the same thing with candy, I suppose.

Tinky-Winky makes friends with a pug

2010-08-29T23:11:00.003-06:00

The difficulty with Tinky-Winky isn't so much that she's aggressive, but more that she's unpredictable. I would say 95% of the time, if she meets another dog off leash, she will come back to me and nothing happens. Out of the other 5%, some times she attacks like a demon, especially small dogs... and some times, as in this case, I find her peacefully having a pee on a rock with a pug. Of all things, you'd think she'd hate pugs? Not at all. Maybe she just doesn't realize they're dogs at all.

In any case, that's my problem with her. If she was always aggressive, she'd never be off leash, and if she was never aggressive, she'd never be on leash... but you never know with her. That's the problem.

One more wolf before bed

2010-08-23T22:51:00.000-06:00

That wolf looks just like a shiba!

2010-08-23T22:44:00.001-06:00

(The wolf is the top one.)

Shiba as art

2010-08-15T18:33:00.001-06:00

That dog looks just like a shiba!

2010-08-14T22:34:00.003-06:00

You think???

It doesn't, really. It's the same colour, and clearly a spitz breed, but it's not a shiba. Though I have seen people adopt dogs that look just like this and tell you that it's a shiba "with a strange coat."

Hmmmmm...

Ok. It's not impossible. But as for the dogs in these pictures, they're not shibas. They're Icelandic sheepdogs.

I've been looking at them for a while because I worry about what to do when Tinky-Winky dies. I can't imagine having no dog; I can't imagine having a dog that doesn't look like a shiba; and most of all, I can't imagine taking that much lip from someone other than my precious. So... maybe the Icelandic sheepdog will be a valid compromise. But hopefully I won't have to find out for many years yet.

Dogs I'm glad I don't own

2010-08-14T20:19:00.002-06:00

I'm glad I don't have a sheltie. It's an attractive breed. I thought about it when I looked for the perfect dog. Now there is a sheltie on the street where I stay in Yellowknife, and I'm glad it's not mine.

The sheltie is always running. Always. It goes for "walks" with its person. The person rides a bike, and not slowly either. The sheltie runs like a maniac beside the bike but still pulls on its leash to go faster or to go check out other things. Then they get home, the sheltie gets tied in the front yard, and it runs back and forth along the fence like a maniac every time something walks by. I don't know what it would take to get the energy out of that dog, but I'm sure glad I don't have one.

I'm also glad I don't have a retriever. I've never even considered a retriever, because their "I love the whole world" attitude annoys me. I don't love the whole world. More importantly, what good is it that someone loves you, if they love the whole world anyway? I want a dog who loves me and only me of all humans. Even if I'm buying her love with food.

But the main reason I don't want anything like a retriever is that a retriever is a very large duck-hunting dog. No, really. I'm not sure why people with little kids buy retrievers. Because it's "good with kids"? There's no such thing as a dog that's good with kids. Some kids are good with dogs, not the other way around. I'm sure someone somewhere has had their baby eaten by a retriever and could tell you they're not good with kids.

So yeah, I'm not sure why people who have little kids and never walk further than around the block would buy a very large duck-hunting dog. I'm guessing they've never seen field trials for retrievers. I have. It involves making the dogs run through swamps and standing water all day. The dogs get absolutely filthy, but they sure don't get tired much. You have to keep at it for a very long time to wear them out. And then you still have a filthy, wet dog.

So then people take these very large duck-hunting dogs and think they're gonna walk them around the block once a day and it's all good... it's not. They're very large dogs with lots of energy. They pull on the leash, because they're not walked enough. The more they pull, the less they get walked. Then they find water or mud, get dirty and smelly, aren't wanted in the house anymore, and end up spending the summer on a chain in the backyard. Not getting any walks at all.

I'm sure glad I don't have a retriever, but I'd be more glad if other people didn't have them either. Unless of course they do a lot of duck hunting.

For the same reason, I'm glad I didn't end up getting a spaniel. My short list of dogs was either one of four breeds of spaniels, or a shiba. I'm thinking the spaniels would have been a lot more trouble than the shiba.

Altogether, I'm pretty glad I don't own a dog that's not a shiba.

Dogs don't sin

2010-08-12T19:25:00.004-06:00

A while back, against my better judgement, I let myself participate in a really stupid conversation about religion, on a dog blog. (Terrierman's, if you must know. Hence I don't read it anymore.)

Now normally I try not to dwell on things, because it's bad for me, but I keep being mesmerized by one particular moment. I said that dogs don't need communion because they don't sin, and Terrierman said "how would you know?" or something to that effect.

I'm mesmerized because it's self-evident that dogs don't sin. At least I should think so. I think it's much more self-evident than "all men are equal in rights", which we can plainly see is just utopia. Whereas dogs, obviously, don't sin. And yet, because it's so self-evident, it becomes somewhat challenging to explain why dogs don't sin.

Or, maybe not.

Dogs don't sin because sin is a human invention. Likewise dogs don't have money because money is a human invention, and they don't sing dodecaphonic music because dodecaphonic music is a human invention. But to take a more scripturally-based approach to the answer, it's like this: sin, the original sin, was that man ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. I haven't pondered, or asked my pastor, exactly which is the sin: disobeying God (unknowingly), or acquiring the knowledge of Good and Evil. I think it's the latter.

In the Tao Te Ching it says, and it's obvious when you think about it, that we name "good" only by opposition to "bad", "short" by opposition to "long", and so on. I think the concept of the Tree of Good and Evil is a way of saying that good and bad are only as we make them so, by our perception. Before we ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, nothing seemed to us either good or evil, and also we had no sin. Sin, apparently, is what happens when we decide to call some things "evil" and others "good".

Dogs don't sin because, metaphorically, they didn't eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and more literally, because they don't think in terms of good and evil. They seek out what feels good, and they feel good about the rest as they get it. Sunbeam: good. No sunbeam: also good. Rain: also good. Food: good. Home-cooked food: good. Rotting carcass on the ground: good. Other dog: good. Smelling other dog's butt: good. Dog fight: also good. They're not at all concerned with the notion of "evil" and knowing the difference between good and evil. They just maximize their comfort and minimize their discomfort. If you're religious, they're doing exactly as God intended, without knowledge of Good and Evil, therefore they have no sin. And if you're not religious, you don't believe in sin, therefore dogs have no sin.

So I'm still mesmerized that someone would ask "what makes you think dogs don't sin?" But as to how I know, well, now you know.