A while ago we adopted a dog from the local animal shelter. Hector is a large boy, a mix of many breeds, and he is delightful. But he was given up for adoption when he was just under a year old – the humans who had him first said he was too difficult to handle.

He is not difficult to handle. He is eager to please and full of bounce and joy.

Hector didn’t have much in the way of manners or training when he came to us, but we’ve been working on that. We use clicker training, which is so fun and efficient. Fortunately I have a pretty good background in dog training, so that helps. And I’ve learned some good tricks for working with this boy, whose needs are different from those of other dogs I’ve trained.

So sometimes now, there may be posts about dog training intermingled with whatever else I blog about.

If you happen to have a dog and need help with training techniques, I can suggest lots of good books to read and videos to watch.

Ha! No problem. Look what Smartdogs’ Weblog found in a 1939 issue of Popular Science:

Signs reading "No Dogs Allowed" mean nothing to Miss Jeanne Lorraine, of New York City, since she taught her twelve-year-old pet toy collie, Jiggs, to drape himself around her neck and masquerade as a fur piece. The trick first worked on a clerk at a residential hotel that barred pets and Miss Lorraine has been using it ever since to take her dog through subways, past customs officers, on railroad coaches, and into other places where canine companions are not welcomed. [continue]

Oh my. This made me laugh until my tummy hurt.

From Why more offices are going to the dogs.

At Sermo, a Web company whose offices resemble a Romper Room for adults – complete with beanbags and arcade machines – finding the CEO is easy. Just look for his dogs. This particular afternoon, Daniel Palestrant’s two dachshunds act like draft stoppers outside their master’s conference-room door. Mr. Palestrant is something of a Pied Piper for dogs and instituted the office’s pet-friendly policy. As such, he loves to see employees playing with Lily, a Yorkshire terrier that treats a pink tennis ball like a homing beacon, or stroking Maddie, a woolly bichon frisé.

"What does it mean to work in a young, fast-growing start-up company? A little bit of chaos. A little bit of cleaning up everybody’s mess. And you can’t take yourself too seriously," says Palestrant, who founded Sermo as an online community for physicians. "We started finding that people who are most comfortable with dogs around are the one’s who gravitated toward the Sermo culture."

For many companies, Friday’s ninth annual Take Your Dog to Work Day will be the closest they get to experiencing Sermo’s roly-poly atmosphere. Yet pet-friendly workplaces are on the rise. They’re part of a broader axis shift: A younger generation is rejecting formal office culture in favor of fun workplaces that are fulfilling. [continue]

From the Wall Street Journal: In Moscow’s Metro, a Stray Dog’s Life Is Pretty Cushy, and Zoologists Notice.

MOSCOW — Like human commuters, this city’s stray dogs can often be spotted traveling on the subway, waiting patiently for a train to pull in and its doors to slide open.

In Soviet times, dogs were barred from Moscow’s metro. Today, however, they are so common there — curling up on empty seats, nuzzling their neighbors, lounging in stations — that there is even a Web site devoted to them: www.metrodog.ru.

A tiny group of zoologists study Moscow’s stray dogs and how they’re adapting to a rapidly changing city. Among them is Alexei Vereshchagin. He set out to study wolves — "such a romantic creature," he says — but as science funding crumbled with the Soviet government, he couldn’t.

So the 31-year-old, rust-bearded Mr. Vereshchagin started studying strays instead, and loved it. "The behavior of stray dogs is like theater," he says.

As the number of cars in Moscow has exploded, and their speed increased from the days of Soviet clunkers, strays have learned to cross the street with pedestrians. They can also be seen occasionally waiting for a green light. [continue]

From msnbc.com: These dogs have a nose for doo-doo.

Ally has a nose for wolves. Gator can sniff out grizzlies. And Tucker really knows his orcas. Or rather, what they’ve left behind.

Among the growing number of scat-detection dogs used to track wildlife by land or by sea, the canines employed by the University of Washington’s Center for Conservation Biology are showing that no technology can yet outdo their know-how for doo-doo.

Samuel Wasser, the center’s director, said feces is the easiest part of an animal to collect and a "treasure trove" of vital information. Apart from diet, scat can reveal the species, sex and identity of an individual through DNA, while released hormones can record an animal’s nutritional state, reproductive status and stress levels.

Dogs possess such an extraordinary sense of smell that they can distinguish among the feces of 18 species at once, Wasser said, making them ideal tracking aids for conservation biologists hoping to cover a lot of ground. Or water. Beyond helping document grizzly and black bear behavior in Alberta’s vast Jasper National Park, the dogs have located floating feces from endangered North Atlantic right whales in Canada’s Bay of Fundy and from the Pacific Northwest’s declining orca population. Remarkably, some of the poop snoopers perched on the bows of research vessels have tracked down whale scat more than one nautical mile away. [continue]

I know almost nothing about St Louis, Missouri, but it’s just captured my attention. From ksdk.com: St. Louis Mayor Signs ‘Doggie Dining Bill’.

St. Louis has become the first city in Missouri to allow dog owners to bring their dogs along when they go to restaurant patios and sidewalk cafes.

The so-called "Doggie Dining Bill" was signed into law by Mayor Francis Slay, at Forest Park, Sunday. The measure does not allow dogs to occupy a chair or sit on the table, and they must remain on a leash. Still, under the table, they are masters of all they survey. [continue]

How stunningly sensible.

From Alternet: Why Is the Pet Food Industry Killing Our Pets?

The commercial pet foods industry rakes in billions of dollars annually. In exchange for our dollars, we trust the companies to provide our pets with quality nutrition. The recent pet food recall demonstrated that our trust has been misplaced. But while many were shocked by the tragic deaths of beloved pets, many more would be shocked to know that the pet food industry has a long history of mistreating our pets. I first began researching the industry in 1990, when my two dogs became ill after eating a well-known commercial food.

The first thing that came to light was the fact that the pet food industry is virtually self-regulated. The only requirement that the industry must meet is to adhere to the Labeling Act, which states that food must contain the name and address of the producing company, whether the product is intended for dogs or cats, the weight of the food, and the guaranteed analysis. The source of the protein included in the analysis can be anything: condemned material from slaughterhouses, road-kill, zoo animals and even euthanized companion animals. Of course, the industry denies all this, especially the use of dead dogs and cats in pet foods. However, a senior official from a large rendering conglomerate in the United States wrote to me, "I know of no rendering company in the U.S. that will segregate companion animals from the rest of the raw material they process." [continue]

Continue reading →

From the New York Times: If You Want to Know if Spot Loves You So, It’s in His Tail.

…there is another, newly discovered, feature of dog body language that may surprise attentive pet owners and experts in canine behavior. When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left.

A study describing the phenomenon, "Asymmetric tail-wagging responses by dogs to different emotive stimuli," appeared in the March 20 issue of Current Biology. The authors are Giorgio Vallortigara, a neuroscientist at the University of Trieste in Italy, and two veterinarians, Angelo Quaranta and Marcello Siniscalchi, at the University of Bari, also in Italy.

"This is an intriguing observation," said Richard J. Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. It fits with a large body of research showing emotional asymmetry in the brain, he said. [continue]

(You’ll probably need a password in order to read the full article.)

By now you’ve heard about the pet food recall, yes? From ctv.ca: Owners fear for their pets after huge food recall.

Concern among pet owners is growing as officials look for the source of contamination that prompted the recall of more than 90 dog and cat foods across North America.

The recall by Menu Foods, based in Streetsville, Ont., involves 51 brands of dog food and 40 brands of cat food, including Iams, Nutro and Eukanuba. [continue]

Imagine how you’d feel if your dog or cat were to suffer serious kidney failure or die because of this. Just imagine! So here’s a note on pet diets, which you might think of as a public service announcement.

Why feed commercial pet foods to dogs and cats? Those animals are carnivores, so why not just feed them raw meat on the bone, plus a selection of veggies and fruits? This is what pet owners did for thousands of years before the commercial pet industry came along to sell us things our pets’ wild ancestors would never have considered eating. (How often do you hear of a wolf hunting the wild kibble, adding grains to his diet, or cooking his food?)

If you feed a biologically appropriate raw food diet you’ll know your pet is getting good quality food, and there’s no way that the pet food industry’s nonsense will hurt your pet. Plus you’re likely to have a way healthier animal. No need to believe me, though – check out some the links on this resource page.

We now return to reguarly scheduled programming.

From the New York Times: Can Your Dog Humanize the Office?.

Take Your Dog to Work began as a quirk of the dot-com boom — another perk that employers could offer to employees to persuade them to stay.

It had been thought that the patter of paws would go the way of casual Fridays and massages at your desk, but, alas, what has been disappearing instead are salary increases, fully funded pension plans and robust health insurance. The dogs, it seems, are here to stay, based on the volume of e-mail that I receive from readers.

This would come as a relief to Riley, my 6-year-old Wheaten, whose day job is to lie at my feet and gaze at me adoringly while I type. (His night job is to lie at the edge of the bed and do pretty much the same thing.) But while his work is in a home office, his comrades-in-paws are in office buildings across the country, and not just as watchdogs any more. [continue]

(I don’t think you’ll need a password to read the rest of this article.)