Bob Vila would not eat meat by-products (but your dog should!)

I went to a talk by a veterinary nutritionist yesterday at Tufts Vet for Obesity Awareness Day. Her talk was really educational. For instance, I learned that the body that regulates pet food nutrition, content, etc. is called AAFCO (Association of American Feed Control Officials). They seem to be a lot less stringent than FDA regulating human food. Anybody can make a pet food and put it on the market, regardless of whether it meets your pet’s nutritional needs. Moreover, pet food does NOT have to be tested in feeding trials to go on the market. Why does this matter? Well, our pets generally have only one or two sources of food – whatever we feed them on a daily basis (compared to people, who eat a variety of different foods and obtain different nutrients from each one). Our pets cannot synthesize certain vitamins and amino acids, so it is important that their food provide these.

The label will tell you whether or not it’s been tested. Definitely buy one that has been tested. How will you know? Read the labels. Here is how to interpret:

TESTED wording (example): “Animal feeding tests according to AAFCO procedures substantiate that…”

NON-TESTED wording (example): This food has been formulated to meet AAFCO standards…”

Key point here: “formulated to meet” = “HAS NOT BEEN TESTED”

When buying a pet food you also need to look for the words “complete and balanced” on the label. That means the food meets all your pet’s nutritional needs.

Wording (example): “Animal feeding tests according to AAFCO procedures substantiate that XYZ food provides complete and balanced nutrition…”

If the food is appropriate for puppies/kittens, it will say, “provides nutrition for growth of puppies/kittens,” and for adults it will say, “for maintenance of adult dogs/cats.” Foods can be appropriate for both youth and adult stages. But some foods are only for one or the other.

Wording (example): “Animal feeding tests according to AAFCO procedures substantiate that XYZ food provides complete and balanced nutrition for growth of puppies and maintenance of adult dogs…”

The only marketing claim word that means anything on a pet food label is “natural.” So “organic” is just a marketing term. Which is of course the opposite of people food, where “natural” is meaningless and “organic” has to be backed up.

Don’t worry about buying the fanciest food for Fido. More expensive or prettier packaging does not necessarily equal better nutrition. Just make sure the food has undergone AAFCO feeding trials and provides for all your pet’s nutritional needs: “Complete and balanced” – just like FOX News!

More Brain-Melting Pet Photos

In "The Truth About Dogs", Steven Budiansky makes the case that dogs are essentially a successful parasite. Harsh? Perhaps, but his argument provides a lot of insight into the human-pet relationship.

A successful parasite is one that takes advantage of a mechanism in the host that the host cannot live without. (If the host could live without the mechanism, the selection pressure from the cost of the parasite would slowly extinguish the required mechanism.)

Pets fit this criteria - they get us 30-somethings with our ticking biological clocks that have been snoozed for year after a year to devote our important resources (read: food) to pets instead of our own offspring. Fortunately pet food is pretty cheap. It's a good thing the pets don't have a taste for filet mignon.

I think Lori and I may be infected: we can spend hours babbling about how good the pets are and how sleepy they get. Perhaps the parasitic infection is melting our brains?

Anyway, what follows can be thought of as a chronic condition.

I am in your office paying your billz! Can haz stamps?

Corporate-espionage-kitteh is stealin your secretz.

(Without our kodez u is 2 yearz behind us. With our kodez u is 4 yearz behind us!)

Warning: absurdly cute.

I can haz kitteh?

Apartment-kat sez: upstairz neighbor is makin too much noize!

O hai...big sister, you is good pillow.

Rent This House

We spent the last two days preparing pictures for our home web page. You can see the end result here.

As usual, the pets were immensely helpful!

We're ready for our close-up.



I don't want to go in the toaster!



After a big day on set...we get soooooo sleepy!

CC Is Tired


I am ready to help if you need me!

More Absurd Pet Pictures

Some more absurdly cute dog and kitten pictures...a few notes:

• I do not pose them like this!  They just get in these positions on their own.
• It's mostly the kitten's idea - that is, the dog usually lies down first, then the kitten finds her and joins in.
• Where the dog has her legs around the kitten, this is not duress - the kitten just sleeps through it.

They pretty much do this every day...

New Chandelier

Lori's parents were in town last week, and as always, did some really wonderful work on the house. Here is our old chandelier, which came with the house. If it looks sort of cheap, that's not because of the picture.



Lori's dad in action!



CC is alwys helpful, particularly when there are heavy things, electricity, and ladders.



The new chandelier:

Warning: Extreme Cuteness Follows

After their morning hyperactivity and bad behavior, CC and Nublet like to snuggle. They both get very sleepy!

Bob Vila Would Never Club a Robotic Baby Seal

...Because they're too cute apparently. I must admit that, having heard the story before viewing it on the web, I imagined the robotic baby seals to be cuter than they really are.

Now part of me thinks that when we are using a robotic pet to comfort the elderly, we have really, really lost our way.

But the truth is, I am a technological grumpy-old-man, and the war between the young and old regarding technological integration (that is, integration of technological into the domain we would have reserved for "life") is being lost every time a new baby is born.

Having had my formative years before the internet and instant messaging and ubiquitous wireless technology, the notion of asking someone out on a date (or ending a relationship) via text message or posting all of your personal information on a MySpace page strikes me as moderately ridiculous.

But to my own self I must be true: I am a fossil. Human beings, when presented with these technologies (among others) see nothing unusual - we integrate every technology we develop into our lives. I don't think my 2-year-old nephew sees any difference between the remote control and wooden blocks. They are all simply objects to be explored, touched, chewed on, and mastered until, like all tools and technologies, they are an extension of him, part of the fabric of human life.

My negative reaction initial to robotic seal pets* (besides being caused by a lack of coffee) comes from a line in the sand that is crossed when technology starts to affect us emotionally. But this is a ludicrous line in the sand; all technology affects us emotionally, even ones that are not supposed to. (Tell me there isn't enough hate caused by Microsoft Windows Vista to start a war!!) We connect emotionally to our cars and computer programs, perhaps because we connect emotionally to everything.

And robots don't have a monopoly on button-pushing. In "The Truth About Dogs" Stephen Budiansky argues that dogs are fundamentally parasites. A successful parasite attaches to its host using a property of the host so integral to its survival that the host cannot "close the door" on the parasite . In the case of dogs, by triggering all of the responses that make us care for children, they obtain food, shelter, medical care, toys, belly rubs, and in some cases trips to spas. If we didn't think dogs were cute, we'd probably toss our babies out on the street too.

As Lori and I sit around blathering about how cute it is that the dog is rolling around under the bed or that the cat approves of the new sofa (as shown by sleeping on it) we realize that we have animals in the house that have reduced our mental functioning, and in the process, mooched hundreds of pounds of pet food. If Martians came to do a documentary on human culture I am sure the narrator (who would sound just like Morgan Freeman) would say:

"This human pair has become infecting by a dog and a cat. The animals play on the humans nesting instincts, diverting their normal course of development. The humans do not yet have offspring, but instead foster the dog and cat."

In the end I think Daniel Ariely's view makes sense; we humans are hopelessly hard-wired for some irrational behavior. Whether it's another species that wants a free meal, or a robotic baby seal engineered by researchers, we are going to attach to things emotionally whether it makes any sense or not. We can't change who we are. All we can do is be aware of our human heritage and navigate the murky waters of technological change as best we can.

* If someone makes a robotic baby seal with laser beams mounted on its head, I will be the first to buy it!

This Is My Day

CC and Nala's relationship has come a long way in almost a year; originally we could not have them in the same room, and we had a gate or door separating them at all times. We've reached a point now where I don't have to separate them at all.

The turning point in their relationship was when Nala decided it was more fun to hit CC than run away from her. Nala's previous owners declawed her - if she had a little more firepower they would have found a balance of power much quicker (basically the dog doing whatever the cat wants). Instead this drama plays itself out probably about once a day.

Now I must admit, I did intentionally allow this to happen by asking the dog to come sniff the cat once I had the camera ready. It's a situation with a predictable course:

1. Dog decides she really, really, really needs to smell the cat - perhaps the cat smells different than yesterday? You never know!
2. Dog attempts to smell the cat, usually by jamming her nose as close to the cat's belly as she possibly can.
3. Cat decides she does not like the dog doing this and hits the dog, perhaps 8, 9, 10 times in a row.
4. While it didn't happen this time, the cat usually then immediately washes her paws because she has "dog cooties", which are totally gross.
5. Cat decides to leave and go somewhere else.
6. Dog whimpers because the cat doesn't love her.

Never a dull moment.

These days I have been catching both of them sleeping in the same room (once even in my office) fairly close together, e.g. dog on the floor, cat on the chair, or cat on the dog's bed, dog on the floor...but the cat is always on alert so I haven't been able to get a good picture yet.

Devil Puppy!

This year for Halloween CC dressed up as "Devil Puppy".



Here you can see her trying very hard to be good and not eat her costume. (But it's so tasty!)



Nala says: I do not trust Devil Puppy at all.

This Blog Has Gone to the Dogs...

...which I think is indicative of how much time we spend on the dog and how little we have to work on the house these days.

We don't know what breeds CC is (she's clearly a mix of something and, um, something else), and I think I don't want to know. There are breed specific behaviors and I'd be tempted to attribute at least some of her actions to genetics if I knew.

Now that is theoretically fine, since some of her actions probably are genetic, but in practice dogs learn, and they learn in ways we might not expect. It's easy for us to say "Rover is doing X because he's a Y" but perhaps Rover learned to do X...perhaps we taught him without realizing it.

CC had a behavior that I finally figured out (which says more about how stupid I am about dogs than about her behavior): she would dig a little in the lawn, grab a big chunk of grass in her mouth, and run like hell.

I finally realized, it's not somethign she's predisposed to, it's something she learned. Normally digging would involve trying to bury something, or digging in its own right (a 'play' behavior, one part of a normal sequence of behaviors taken out of sequence). I don't know if she learned it from her previous home and we reinforced it, or she learned it from us, but our attempt to stop this behavior (by moving toward her to reclaim the hole, yelling at her, or chasing her to attempt to get control of her) all reward what she's done. She figured out that the best way to ask her human friends to play a nice game of chase was to dig, eat the lawn, or both.

We have figured out something that does stop the behavior almost immediately: Lori and I say nothing, don't react, and simply walk into the house, closing the door behind us. She immediately drops what she's doing and comes to the door.

The moral of the story (besides "CC is bad for the lawn") is that social recognition is enough of a positive reward to encourage behaviors, and being told "no" is probably more fun than being told nothing. (And being chased after is really, really fun!) As we've internalized this (I would not have thought before getting a dog that yelling "no" at it would be a reward) it's changed how we manage problem behaviors, and helped us get CC under control.

As a final thought: sometimes dogs become anxious in the dog park, sometimes with merit, sometimes just because. The humans (owners and otherwise) almost always react the same way: "you poor thing", comfort the smaller, more fearful dog. But what is that smaller dog really learning? In mathematical terms...

big dog + anxiety = affection

Hrm...accidental operant conditioning...that's probably not what we want to teach our dogs.

Alpha Rolls, Treats, and the Dog-Cat Relations

In my previous post I admitted that Lori alpha rolled CC a few times and that it had a positive impact on her behavior. Looking back on that, I must admit I have some mixed feelings. My favorite dog-training book is "The Other End of the Leash" by Dr. Patricia McConnell, and I am sure she woudn't approve of an alpha roll or anything else you might see on the "Dog Whisperer."

Did it work? I think it's hard to say, but two things are clear:

• The immediate effect was to modify CC's behavior in a significant and positive way - we saw reduced jumping and much more response to command instruction (that is, when Lori asked CC to sit, she was more likely to sit).
  
• I don't believe it will have any long term effect -- I think the only value of what happened is that perhaps it created a window of more subdued behavior during which we can use extinguishing and lure-reward (that is, ignoring CC when she jumps and treating her when she sits).
• The situation was our fault - lure-reward and extinguishing could have been adequate had we acted much sooner. The reason we couldn't apply it in the more extreme case was logistical: CC is big enough and has sharp enough claws that if we ignore her and she persists in jumping, we can get scratched pretty badly.

If you look up Cesar Milan on Wikipedia you'll find that a lot of heavy-weight academic behaviorists are pretty unhappy about what he glamorizes on national television. I don't agree with all of their criticism, but I do agree with one: what he does is complex and very sensitive to timing, amount of force, and very careful reading of the dog's behavior. If you use lure-reward training, the worst thing that happens is your dog gets fat. But try what Cesar Milan does without his particular natural aptitude for dogs and you're likely to make the dog a lot worse, and possibly get injured in the process. I can only hope there aren't too many "amateur Cesars" out there trying to mimic bites with their hands and issuing corrections that are too harsh, at the wrong time, and for the wrong reasons.

(On the other hand, I think that the Dog Whisperer does contain some reasonable advice - increasing the time of CC's walks has done more to curb bad behavior than anything else, and we have realized how much our mental state and body language affect her behavior.)

As for the dog and cat, the situation continues to be problematic. Nala is quite nervous about CC and is easily scared off by a bark. Furthermore, she prefers to try to get by the dog when we are not watching, which means that a dog-cat chase tends to break out just when we think that we don't need to be paying attention. (Turns out that we need to be paying attention all the time.)

To try to improve things, we moved the dog's crate away from the door to the room with the cat's litter box, so the cat wouldn't have to approach the dog so closely to get in. This seems to be helping - the cat goes down there more often and doesn't seem to hesitate, and the dog barks at her less.

CC will respond to a verbal correction or a command -- if I am trying to keep the dog away from the cat what seems to work best includes:

• Early detection. If I catch CC watching the cat and give her alternate instructions, she will virtually always comply. Once she is up and going after the cat, she tunes us out.
• Blocking - it's not necessary to touch the dog to get her not to chase the cat. Putting a leg into the space she wants to go to, blocking her, will cause her to stop motion in that direction.
• Stay - she'll hold a stay (in response to a flat "stop" hand out) and keep her eyes following me if requested.
• I've actually found the "Cesar Milan ssh" noise works really well - it doesn't make her more stressed, or raise her excitement, anxiety or aggression level, but she always notices it and refocuses on me. The noise Cesar Milan makes strikes me as consistent with Dr. McConnell's research on the effect of frequency and duration on animal behavior. "ssssh" definitely gets better results than "no", I think because of the difference in pitch.

My hope in the long term is that with enough practice (I'll sit on the stairs and feed the cat while dog watches - the dog gets a treat if she stays calm during the exercise) I can break the cycle of dog-chases cat.

Bob Vila would not chase the cat

We just finished our second week of puppy-kindergarten with CC. It's been a transitional time for her behavior, and what we see in class illustrates it pretty well.

When it comes to demonstrating the things she's "supposed" to be learning (sit, lie down, watch me, come here, etc.) CC is the star. If the trainer needs someone to demo a trick, she's good for it. She is very motivated (especially for treats) and a very fast learner. She had learned most of her homework after one day last week.

But...when you stop working with her and ignore her, that's when things go down-hill rapidly. She'll bark and jump up and generally instigate until you pay attention to her. Looking back, it's clear to me that these behaviors are my fault - I taught them to her. When we first got her, for the first few weeks, her behavior was just totally unmanageable. She wasn't listening to us at all, so we felt like we had no control of the situation. I got fed up with it and decided that, no matter how long it took, I would teach her to reliably sit, lie down, and stay.

I work at home, so I have access to her all the time, and it turns out that "how long" was only a few days. She's really smart and figures out what you want her to do for a reward in no time. But, with such success with "training behaviors", I would use training as a way to keep her busy when she was bored, and that evolved into training her when she "asked" to be trained by barking, jumping, and generally being bad until we paid attention to her. So essentially I trained her to bug us for attention.

I'd been struggling to understand this last week - one of the reasons I think the behavior wasn't more clear is that this is also the week that Lori decided to deal with domination-related jumping. When Lori first got CC, her reaction was to give her a big hug and go "I love you so much" and crawl around on the ground with her. If you watch the Dog Whisperer you can see how this can amplify behavioral problems by a combination of not establishing dominance (e.g. letting the dog jump on Lori), rewarding bad behavior, and exciting the dog all at once.

This week Lori tried something different - she came home and CC ran to her. Lori said sit and the CC ignored her and jumped up. At that point instead of just backing away, Lori scruffed her and pinned her down. After a few applications, CC has stopped the dominance jumping (she'll still jump up to get attention, but I think you can tell by how she jumps what her intention is) and obeys commands much more readily when Lori issues them.

In the process of all of this, CC had a period of trying to dominate me. I'm not sure what her dog-logic was, exactly, perhaps something like "I can't be number 3, I have to be at leaset number 2 in the house". So intermingled with bad behavior for attention we've also had a reorganization of our pack, which led to some confusing behaviors. I think we're past the worst of the dominance behavior though, so we'll see how the next week goes.

I went to the vet to get tutored!

While Lori and I were on vacation we boarded CC at the local vet, and neutered her. She got her stitches out today. (And despite all of this vet-related trauma she still loves the car and thinks the vet is a dog park. She has a very optimistic personality.)

Just when her fur had grown back, they shaved it off again!

"What? You brought the dog back??"

This is how I learned that an unsupervised dog who likes the dig, left in the back yard with the sprinkler on, is not a good idea.

We had started to crate-train CC before her trip to the vet, but after a week of boarding she was pretty much used to it. This works out well for us...the sun-room isn't air conditioned, so we didn't have a good place to keep her when we wanted to go out and it was hot out.

"I'm in jail!"

Raining Cats And Dogs

Life with cat and dog remains a bit of a three-ring circus.

CC likes to hang out in the family room. She'll play with a rope or another toy while we hang out, but unfortunately her favorite toy is, well, Nala.

Nala likes to sleep on the chair in the family room and refuses to give up territory (probably good). Even though we've made a few cat-only rooms (using hooks to keep the door cracked) the cat will follow the dog around, watching from the other side of the room, until the dog comes over to play, at which point Nala hisses and swats and acts in a quite un-lady-like manner. (We got that cat tree to give Nala more high places to stay, but she just stays in the ground and instigates.)

CC is a little bigger than we planned for a dog - 40 lbs and growing. She can hold a regulation frisbee in her mouth easily, but doesn't really know how to play games with it. We're working on the basics first (stay, down, come, don't torment the cat, even if she started it).

A rare moment of peace in the living room - everybody's sleeping!

It's a cat in a box!