Tag: Dogs

Move over, Clint.


“‘He followed us through the gate and ran over and found Suryia. As soon as he saw Roscoe, Suryia ran over to him and they started playing. ‘Dogs are usually scared of primates, but they took to each other straight away. We made a few calls to see if he belonged to anyone and when no one came forward, Roscoe ended up staying.‘”

As a mental health break of sorts, the Daily Mail catches up with an orangutan and bluetick hound who’ve become best buds back home in South Carolina. And for those parents already bored with Go the F**k to Sleep, the pals, a la Owen and Mzee, “have released a picture book capturing their unorthodox friendship.“

The Dogs of War.


“Dogs have been fighting alongside U.S. soldiers for more than 100 years, seeing combat in the Civil War and World War I. But their service was informal; only in 1942 were canines officially inducted into the U.S. Army. Today, they’re a central part of U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan — as of early 2010 the U.S. Army had 2,800 active-duty dogs deployed (the largest canine contingent in the world).“

With word that a canine supertrooper helped to take down Bin Laden, Foreign Policy‘s Rebecca Frankel lets slip the dogs of war. (But don’t believe everything you read about titanium teeth. Also, in the interest of equal time, here are the kittehs.)

We’ll see how smart you are when the K-9 comes…


“Chaser proved to be a diligent student. Unlike human children, she seems to love her drills and tests and is always asking for more. ‘She still demands four to five hours a day,” Dr. Pilley said. “I’m 82, and I have to go to bed to get away from her.‘”

The NYT tells the tale of Chaser, a border collie with a vocabulary of over 1000 words now. “Dr. Pilley said that most border collies, with special training, ‘could be pretty close to where Chaser is.’…Dr. Horowitz agreed: ‘It is not necessarily Chaser or Rico who is exceptional; it is the attention that is lavished on them,” she said.’” (Sorry, Berk…At least I taught you bacon and tacos — you know, the important stuff.)

A Decade of Berk.

As of today, Berkeley — GitM’s ombudsdog and my roommate, power animal, and all-around sheltie-american enabler — is now ten years old [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9].

After one does the dog-to-human-year conversion, that puts him at exactly twice my age. Here’s hoping I’m as spry, convivial, good-natured, and slightly deranged when I reach his years. Happy b-day, l’il buddy.

A Theory of Justice (and the Dog Park.)

“That traditional view of morality is beginning to show signs of wear and tear. The fact that human morality is different from animal morality — and perhaps more highly developed in some respects — simply does not support the broader claim that animals lack morality; it merely supports the rather banal claim that human beings are different from other animals…Unique human adaptations might be understood as the outer skins of an onion; the inner layers represent a much broader, deeper, and evolutionarily more ancient set of moral capacities shared by many social mammals, and perhaps by other animals and birds as well.“

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, bioethicist Jessica Pierce and biologist Marc Bekoff suggest what apparently agreed-upon rules of canid play teach us about animal morality. (via FmH.) “Although play is fun, it’s also serious business. When animals play, they are constantly working to understand and follow the rules and to communicate their intentions to play fairly.“

Pointing to the Bacon.

“The chimps did badly, able to learn the meaning of a pointed finger only after lots of training. The apparent explanation for these results was that pointing — and the social smarts behind it — required a humans-only level of intelligence and evolved in our ancestors only after they branched off from the ancestors of chimpanzees some 7 million years ago. When Tomasello suggested this idea to Hare, however, Hare demurred. ‘I said, “Um, Mike, I think my dogs can do that.”‘”

TIME’s Carl Zimmer “probes “the secrets inside your dog’s mind.” And what he finds is much like the articles here and here. Like babies, dogs (including Berk) understand pointing because it was evolutionarily advantageous for their ancestors to comprehend our behavior. Put another way, the dogs that watched us verrry carefully in the scavenger days, and ingratiated themselves accordingly, were the ones that often fared better than their more feral (and unobservant) friends.

Pets versus Bots.

“Sympathetic owners sometimes just retire their new purchases. In other cases, the pets take matters into their own paws. Peter Haney, a university administrator in Lethbridge, Alberta, twice found his Roomba in pieces after letting it clean while his flat-coated retrievers, Macleod and Tima, had the run of the house. ‘No one is talking,’ he says.” They’re only trying to save us from our future cybernetic overlords…From the bookmarks and by way of a friend, the WSJ broaches the thorny issue of the canine-robot divide. As I noted earlier, the Battle for 122nd St., 5D went to Berkeley, whose fearsome arsenal of dog hair apparently convinced my Roomba to give up hope.

Eight for the Sheltie.

So I surreptitiously received some very interesting photos from the Clinton campaign this morning…

Yep, Berkeley, GitM’s resident ombudsdog and Sheltie-American, turned eight today. [3, 4, 5, 6, 7.] As you can see, he finds all the dissermatating a bit of a drag sometimes, but otherwise is his normal spastic self, particularly with other dogs, squirrels, and/or Evil afoot.