the five random facts include two about my dog

Penny doesn't know it, but I’ve been tagged and challenged by Stacey at ispirato

Here are the rules for this challenge:

Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
Share 5 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird. (Well, I'll do five, but seeing this is really Penny's blog I'll include two about her.)

Tag 5 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
So here are five odd facts about me and Penny:

1. I once shook hands with Prince Charles. He landed at Coolangatta airport in the 60s and in those more relaxed days walked around shaking hands with children in the crowd that quickly gathered when word went around that he was there.

2. I've walked on a glacier.

3. I was sea-sick on an ocean liner before it had even sailed out of Sydney Harbour. (Yep, I was sick for the whole cruise.)

4. Penny might be a Tibetan Terrier cross. Or, perhaps she might be a shih tzu X maltese. Or, on the other hand, she might be some sort of lhasa apso. There's a rumour that her aristocratic parent met a cute guy in a Mcdonald's carpark. And the rest, as they say, is history...

5. Penny likes tennis balls.

I'm tagging two humans:

Slavenka in Croatia, whose jokes and funny videos lighten my day

Wayfarer Scientista in the US, who gives me the chance to experience the beautiful natural environment far from home

And three canines:

I was going to tag Amber-Mae in Malaysia, a solid-gold dancer, but she has just completed a similar challenge, with SEVEN facts. So I guess we can just read them and consider the challenge answered!

Sparky in Canada, a little dog with big dreams

Noah in Australia, who has just given his human family health scare but thankfully is well again.

can dogs count?

When Penny was 'herding' her two bouncy balls in the creek today, it occurred to me that she can count. She'll swim around in the water till I start worrying she'll exhaust herself, trying to bring both balls back to shore. And if we throw one ball around on the grass for a while, she'll head back to the spot where the second ball is, before we leave. (Well, usually...)

It's not surprising that she can count a small number of objects. Many animals can do so. For instance, in the 1970's Pamela Egremont observed that cormorants used for fishing in China could count to at least seven.

Marc Hauser, a Harvard Professor of psychology, has conducted studies that show monkeys can count to four. In the Harvard University Gazette it says:

Additional tests by Hauser and other researchers reveal that monkeys can count up to four. The human ability to count to higher numbers apparently came only after we evolved language and developed words to describe quantities like 25 and 1,000.

Some human cultures still don't use large numbers. The Hadza people, hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, for example, have words only for "one," "two," and "three"; anything more is "many." They are aware that a picture with 30 dots displays a larger number than one with 20 dots (as are monkeys), but they have no words for the precise numbers of dots

An article in New Scientist, called Lab tricks show dogs can count, says:

Dogs can count, new work on mongrels reveals. Dogs are descended from wolves, which not only have a large neocortex - the brain's centre of reasoning - but live in large social groups. So their mathematical ability could, in evolutionary terms, have been useful for working out how many allies and enemies they had in a pack, the researchers think.

The experimenters repeated a technique that shows human babies can count. They put out objects, then hid them behind a screen, adding or taking away some of them. If they manipulated the results to be untrue (eg one and one adds up to three), both dogs and babies looked longer at the resulting group than if the result was correct. The Telegraph newspaper in Britain also has a report on this experiment.

All of which comes as no surprise to anyone who lives with a dog!

And by the way, the Harvard article has an interesting test for self-awareness that you could try on your dog.(Okay, in deference to those feline lovers out there, I guess you might be able to try it on your cat. Maybe?)

dogs having fun in Germany

Penny and I did a little bit of doggy dancing in the kitchen today. She has been deprived of her usual training classes because of the Summer holidays, so I thought we should at least do a few minutes' training. She jumped to her feet and began wagging her tail as she weaved between my legs. I think we're both looking forward to the time when classes begin again.

Looking around on the Net for tips as to how to work with Penny in the meantime, I came across a German video clip of a class that I think is called 'Fun and Games'. (My German's more than a little rusty.) The class seems to be for ordinary dogs, and is intended to make them more responsive and to increase general fitness. I was interested to see the slightly different equipment from what we use here in Australia. I especially like the wooden box that flips up a treat.

I also thought the little tent with the holes in it was interesting, as I have a somewhat similar item in my home-made collection of agility equipment.

dogs being possessive about toys and bones

I took Penny's delicious lamb shank from her yesterday because I heard a louder than usual noise as she crunched it and I began to fret that it wasn't defrosted enough. (We have a horrible suspicion that the tooth that broke last year might have been caused by a frozen bone.)

She was definitely not impressed and ran outside. I followed and held onto it till she let go. I suspected I heard a tiny growl but I'll give her the benefit of the doubt as she did let me take it. I mentioned this incident to Jabari's mum and she said she always teaches her dogs to give up their bones if asked. I guess we'd better get onto it! Little does Penny know what a stressful time is in store for her. I think I'll just ask her occasionally to give up her meal and then give it right back.

As for her toys, she likes to lie with them gathered around her, but is more willing to give them up, probably because we have always expected that of her since she was young. She has two new toys today, imported especially from New York by a household member who has been on holidays there.They've both been a great success - so much so that Penny keeps them tucked up beside her safely while she rests.We took the Roller Bone to the creek today and it did, as advertised, float. And it was easy to pick up in the water, too.




























I'm not sure if the "Roller Bone" is available in Australia but I think the "Spider Ball" probably is. This toy seemed to be making some interesting noises as she mouthed it.

it's not only dogs who need toys for stimulation

Penny sometimes lies on her mat with a collection of favorite toys beside her. However, she lets us take them when we're tidying up. On the other hand, Louis the octopus at the Blue Reef Aquarium in Newquay, Cornwall, doesn't like it when the keepers take his toy away to fill it with treats. I love the picture of him clinging to his Mr Potato Head.
I followed this link from Boing Boing, who were sent it by Spluch.

can dogs think of the future?

I wonder whether Penny can think about future events? Each day I receive an excerpt from a book, mailed to me from an intriguing site called delanceyplace.com. Today's snippet was from a text by Daniel Gilbert called Stumbling on Happiness, published by Knopf, 2006, pp. 4-5:

"The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future. Now ... I do recognize that non-human animals often act as though they have the capacity to think about the future. ... For example ... the squirrels in my yard act as though they know they will be unable to eat later unless they bury some food now ... [but instead] they have regular squirrel brains that run food-burying programs when the amount of sunlight that enters their regular squirrel eyes decreases by a critical amount. Shortened days trigger burying behavior with no intervening contemplation of tomorrow ... Until a chimp weeps at the thought of growing old alone, or turns down a Fudgesicle because it already looks to fat in shorts, I will stand by my [statement]. We think about the future in a way that no other animal can, does, or ever has, and this simple, ubiquitous, ordinary act is a defining feature of our humanity. ...

"The greatest achievements of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future. As one philosopher noted, the human brain is an 'anticipation machine,' and 'making future' is the most important thing it does."

I understand what the first paragraph says, but I question the idea that dogs, for instance, can't imagine situations that don't exist right now. It seems to me that each evening Penny sits around speculating as to whether the possums have come out in our garden. She'll go out to see and come back if there's nothing happening. Surely, in a wild dog pack, someone in the pack must be able to plan ahead, or who would decide it was time to go on a hunt?

Stanely Coren, in his book How Dogs Think; Understanding the Canine Mind, says that the ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Diogenes had a higher opinion of the intellect of dogs than we do these days. Diogenes even adopted the nickname "Cyon," which means "Dog." When he founded his school of philosophy, he and his followers were known by his nickname as "Cynics" or "Dog Thinkers."

Coren relates the following anecdote as evidence of his own dog's ability to plan ahead:

There are many times when the behavior of my own dogs brings me back to the admiring views of Plato and Diogenes. One cold rainy day, when I was feeling too tired and uncomfortable to take my dogs on their usual morning walk, they had to content themselves with being let out in the yard for a short while. For my flat-coated retriever, Odin, this simply was not an acceptable situation and, late in the afternoon, I was disturbed from my reading by a clatter at my feet. I looked down and noticed that Odin had somehow found his leash and deposited it on the floor. I picked it up, put it on the sofa next to me, and gave him a pat and a reassuring "Later, Odin."
A few minutes passed and there was another clatter at my feet; I found that Odin had now deposited one of my shoes beside me. When I didn't respond, he quickly retrieved the other shoe and put it down next to me. Obviously, to his mind, I was being quite dense or stubborn, since I still delayed going out into the cold and wet weather. It was at that moment that Odin ran to the door and gave a familiar bark. It was a distinctive sound that he only used when my wife, Joan, was approaching the door. I had spent several years teaching at a university in New York City and had developed the habit typical of New Yorkers, which involves always locking doors, even on days when I was inside working at home. This tended to annoy Joan, who grew up in the safer and less paranoid environment of Alberta, Canada. So when Odin gave his "Joan is here" bark, I got up to unlock the door rather than leave her fumbling for her keys in the rain and getting annoyed with my inconvenient habit. The moment I got within a foot or two of the door, Odin dashed back to the sofa and grabbed his leash. Before I had even determined that Joan's car had not arrived in its usual place, he was nudging my hand with the leash he carried in his mouth.
I started to laugh at his subterfuge. I could imagine his mental discourse of the past few minutes running something like "I want a walk, so here's my leash.—OK, I've brought you your shoes, so let's walk.—All right now, while you're already standing at the door, and while I'm now offering you the leash, why don't we just take that walk?" I have obviously added to Odin's behavior a whole lot of reasoning, an internal dialogue, and the idea that there was some kind of conscious planning involved; however, these behaviors certainly would have been consistent with his actions. And by the way, he did get his walk.

Coren suggests that in the seventeenth century the influential French philosopher Rene Descartes taught that dogs can not think, because it was not consistent with his religious beliefs to accept intelligence in dogs.

It's likely that dogs don't think as we do, though. William E. Campbell, in a book called How Dogs Think, suggests that they think in images. He points out that we humans think in images at times, too.

I like this excerpt from Buzzle.com on The Tricky Issue of Assessing Dog Intelligence, which points out that as long as we keep comparning other species to our own way of seeing the world, of course they won't seem to be as intelligent as we are.

Our understanding of dog intelligence has come along way and certainly immense comprehensive strides have been made since the days of Rene Descartes (the renowned French philosopher, scientist and mathematician) who pioneered the school of thought that proposed animals were nothing more than biological machines!

According to Descartes, observed animal behavior amounted to nothing more than a reflex response to external stimuli, much in the same way as when a bare-footed person steps on a sharp object such as a thumb tack when they immediately withdraw the affected foot without any apparent conscious decision.

Descartes' views on animal intelligence, or more accurately put, lack thereof, not only denied the existence of intelligence in animals they propounded that animals were not self-aware and thus were incapable of emotional range or being able to consciously register pain. Being an extremely influential person of his time Descartes' opinions went a long way in justifying undue cruelty to animals be it through experimentation or otherwise.

However thankfully those barbaric days are long behind us and today it is the rare individual who still believes that animals are incapable of thought or emotions. That said though, there's still a ways to go before we can accurately qualify and quantify animal intelligence. Ironically this is perhaps so for the simple reason that since we measure the intelligence of different species against that of ourselves we are inherently practicing anthropomorphism (attributing human qualities and characteristics to non-human subjects, be they animals or inanimate objects), because we innately identify and attribute higher value to those behaviors that somehow mimic ours or make some form of sense to us.

the third eyelid in dogs

I don't generally look closely at Penny's eyes except when she rolls in the privet blossom that is everywhere in our backyard at the moment and I'm trying to brush the tiny flowers off her gorgeous long eyelashes. (I have read that dogs with hair that falls over their eyes, as Penny's will do if it's not trimmed, have longer than usual eyelashes to hold the 'fringe' away from their eyes. The Lhasa Apso has this feature and I'm convinced that somewhere in the mix of Penny's ancestry is one of these beautiful creatures.)

Anyway, back to eyes...
A friend had a scare the other day when her dog's eye seemed to be partly red and rolled back into her head. The vet said it was a problem with 'the third eyelid'. I looked around on the Net for some information and came across a series of photos of the third eyelid at The Pet Center.com In part it says:

The Third Eyelid is also known as the Nictitating Membrane. It serves as added protection for the eye through an interesting ability to close upward and over the dog's eyeball. The canine is able to retract the entire eyeball backward into the eye socket, and coupled with this retraction is the Third Eyelid's ability to slide up and over the retracted globe.

At LookD. com there's a general overview of dog anatomy and it says:

Each eye of a dog has three eyelids, the main upper and lower lids and a third lid hidden between them in the inner corner of the eye. The third eyelid can sweep across the transparent cornea of the eye and clean it like a windshield wiper.

ChinaRoad Lowchens of Australia has an article about conjunctivitis. It says this is a common problem in dogs and looks at various causes. It continues:

Regardless of the cause, a patient with conjunctivitis will often squint and/or keep the third eyelid partially covering the eyeball. Conjunctivitis is often painful, causing a dog to paw at or rub the eye against objects such as your leg or the carpet.