Category: Dogs
-
If Doctor Doolittle offered online courses in animal languages, I would take them all. He'd have many customers. Actually, all of us already know a few phrases in animal languages. We don't need Intro Dog to know that this dog is saying “I might bite! Check out these teeth!” We don't need Conversational Cat to guess that…
-
Tag the Destroyer has a new bad habit. He goes to the side yard and barks. Bark bark bark bark. Pause. Bark bark bark bark. Pause. Bark bark bark bark. It's a strange pattern. He ignores our cries of rage and despair. Tag's getting deaf. He no longer barks at the loathsome package delivery trucks,…
-
I was lucky enough to write this story for Parade about detecting cancer by the sense of smell. It starts with dogs and moves on to technological nose equivalents. Check it out — there's video. The electronic and chemical noses researchers in this story are working on will do only a fraction of what a…
-
La Dolce Vita di Lampo Lampo slept in the station at Campiglia Marittima, a busy railway junction. In the morning he'd jump on the train to Piombino and walk Mirna Barlettani to school. Then he'd take the train back to Campiglia. When the Turin or Rome Express stopped in Campiglia, Lampo would gaze meaningfully…
-
Even if they have never seen a cat and their parents have never seen a cat, the smell of cat hair fills a young rat with horror. You can easily measure aspects of this. For example, if they smell a cat in the “play chamber,” normally exuberant young lab rats won't play as much, an…
-
Curiosity killed the cat. I never heard exactly how. But The History of Borough Fen Decoy, written by Tony Cook & R.E.M. Pilcher, explains how curiosity killed a lot of ducks. With the help of some dogs. A decoy, in this sense, is not a fake duck meant to encourage real ducks to fly down…
-
Long long ago, people brought dingoes to Fraser Island, a big sand island off eastern Australia. The dingoes went wild and self-supporting. Nowadays, dingoes in most of Australia have had the chance to breed with more recently imported dogs. (Don't get silly. I do not speak of the dingopoo, the cockadingo, the dreaded dingohuahua.) The…
-
For a story on a pit bull rescue organization, I was visiting Kim Ramirez. Kim has two dogs, and she was fostering a third, Spyder, a worried young dog who had been confiscated from the Michael Vick dog-fighting operation. I was there to meet Spyder, since the Vick dogs were celebrities. I also met the…
-
Sometimes people get sentimental about the nobility of animals. But it depends on the animal. Perhaps you saw the story of Yosuke, a pet African Grey parrot in Japan. One day he got out. As parrots do, he flew around for a few days and a few miles before landing and seeking human help. (“Free!…
Site Title 