Thursday 29 September 2011

Martin McKenna and dogs

Here's a link to the most interesting interview I have ever heard with an animal behaviourist.

Martin McKenna, interviewed by Margaret Throsby, had me in tears as he recounted details of his unusual, harsh upbringing and explained why he is so attuned to the thinking of canines.

The interview is long - an hour - and has interludes of music chosen by Martin. Quite a bit of time is taken up in discussing his own life, also.

But I believe he has a lot to tell us about our dogs. For one thing, now I understand why Penny sits down facing away from us each evening after she has eaten!

At Dogz Online there's a short discussion of dog owners' reaction to reading his book. The general consensus seems to be that he has valuable insights but some of us aren't in a position to apply all his theories.

If you do a search of the Net, there's a lot of information about him, the most reported fact being that he lived with a pack of dogs for some time.

8 comments:

Unknown said...

This sounds very interesting, I will have to book mark it and make sure to listen to it.

Thanks for sharing :)

Molly the Airedale said...

We definitely need to check out this link!
Felting is when you knit with wool and toss it in the washing machine and the fibers shrink and tighten up. Needle felting is done with a barbed needle. You take wool roving and poke, poke, poke it into the mitten. The roving gets locked in the yarn mitten forever. It's really fun!

parlance said...

Hound Girl, it's an unusual interview but I found it fascinating, as I said.

parlance said...

Maggie and Mitch, I'm coming over to have another look at those mittens.

Arran, Arthur and Mum said...

It sounds very interesting, I will get Mum to check out his book.

parlance said...

Ludo, when I looked around, it seemed the book is due out soon. I don't quite understand, because he mentioned having written one book already, by dictating it to either a machine or a person. He had to do it that way because he had never learned to read and write. I can't see that book for sale anywhere. But I'm going to look for this current one.

Unknown said...

both books are fantastic the first one is the dogman and the second one is called what your dogs telling you, this guy really knows his stuff he is a legend

parlance said...

Thanks for the info, Kim.