Tangents
This page contains a pushdown list of curiosities, miscellany, recommendations, and generally fun stuff. Got something to add? Email a suggestion.
- If you've looked at the Further Reading page, or attended one of my bookstore readings, you know that I'm a big fan of Dr. Patricia McConnell, whose books, The Other End of the Leash and For the Love of a Dog, are great examples of well-grounded behavioral science applied to dog training. There's a wonderful interview with McConnell available on the web, where you'll hear her discussing some of the common problems dog owners face and how she handles them. As usual, along the way she provides numerous asides and anecdotes related to dog behavior. (7/28/2008)
This week's New York Times Sunday Magazine features a cover story by James Vlahos entitled "Animal Pharm" which examines the trend toward applying "lifestyle drugs" to behavioral problems in pets. It's one of those pieces that gets better the further you read, an anecdote-sandwich with all the meat in the middle. Some of that meat includes a nice précis of canine evolution, a virtual debate on the existence of emotions in animals, and a reference to Thomas Nagel's seminal essay on animal consciousness, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?". The animal-consciousness argument embodied in the article is nicely captured by this single question: "If the strict Cartesian view were true -- that animals are essentially flesh-and-blood automatons, lacking anything resembling human emotion, memory and consciousness -- then why do animals develop mental illnesses that eerily resemble human ones and that respond to the same medications?" But the larger point concerns when the use of such drugs is an inappropriate substitute for training and when it is an effective adjunct. (7/14/2008)- After reading this post on the New York Times Paper Cuts blog, I had to know what sort of word cloud Wordle would make of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. In my software life, I've written a lot of code that performs statistical analyses of text -- clearly part of what Wordle does in order to decide how to size the words. Here's a sample of the results. I just might make a t-shirt of one myself. Click a thumbnail to see a full-resolution PDF version. (7/5/2008)
- Joshua Klein discusses how to train a crow to fetch spare change. This is interesting in and of itself—particularly the moment when the crow bends the wire into a hook—but it also reminds me of the argument, put forth in Ray and Lorna Coppinger's book Dogs, of how wolves, with their innately twitchy retreat from human approach, somehow managed to evolve into an animal whose natural habitat is the human sphere. Their explanation is that prehistoric human garbage dumps functioned much the way this peanut vending machine worked; over generations, wolves with less and less fear response gradually thrived (and, I'd add, people with less and less wolf-fear must have thrived as well.) (5/15/2008)
- Here's an interesting story about canine cognition research, this one published in Spiegel Online. I'm late in finding this (published August 2007) but it is entirely worth reading. It's a flyby summary of research conducted by researchers Friederike Range and Julianne Kaminski at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. For example, they tested dogs on a variety of recognition tasks using touch screens (nose-touch screens, in the case of the dogs) as well as a number of gaze-following experiments, at which dogs handily beat primates. Make sure to follow the links to Part 2 of the article, with its description of how dogs learn from one another through "selective imitation" — by watching other dogs and inferring from their behavior, without being trained directly. (5/7/2008)
- Gil Adamson has written a truly gorgeous novel entitled The Outlander, from Ecco Press, the publisher of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. Set at the turn of the (last) century, it tells the story of Mary Boulton, a self-made widow who finds herself fleeing through the Canadian wilderness. It's a great read—a masterful combination of story and prose style. Without verging into spoiler territory, I can tell you there is a moment in this book that had me, figuratively, standing up in astonishment. I love when that happens! The other day, Gil and I were jointly interviewed by Dave Weich of Powell's Books; look for the result to appear on their web site soon. (4/23/2008)
- Check out Martha Sherrill's book Dog Man: An Uncommon Life on a Faraway Mountain. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first biography of a dog breeder ever written, and the story Sherrill has to tell—about Morie Sawataishi, his wife and family, and the dogs he helped rescue from oblivion—is both beautifully rendered and riveting. There's a dog in common between this book and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle; read both and you'll see the connection. (4/3/2008)
If you've read the March issue of National Geographic, mentioned below, you'll wish you could see Rico the Border Collie in action. Check out this video of him fetching both toys with known names (a blue dinosaur and a red doll) as well as an unnamed object, the white bunny, which has been given a novel name. Look near the bottom of the page for an explanation of the commands (in German) being used and the video link. This is the "fast mapping" behavior that Fischer and her colleagues claim Rico demonstrated—the same sort of near-instant word acquisition that children display. (3/16/2008)- Read Virginia Morrell's article "Minds of Their Own," surveying the results of research into animal cognition in the March issue of National Geographic magazine. (Thanks to Sybil Steinberg, 2/23/2008)
- Watch this video of a dog childproofing a bathroom cabinet drawer the old fashioned way. (Suggested by Dave Jenkins, 2/19/2008)
- Check out the IMDB entry on the forthcoming film "Hachiko: A Dog's Story", directed by Lasse Hallström and starring Richard Gere and Joan Allen. And visit the Further Reading page for more on Hachiko. (2/13/2008)
- Watch Carolyn Scott and her dog Rookie do their amazing freestyle dance routine on YouTube. Is this dog having fun or what? Carolyn and Rookie are also discussed in Chapter 14 of Stanley Coren's book How Dogs Think. (2/12/2008)