Eric Goebelbecker

This year National Dog Bite Prevention Week is Monday May 17 - Sunday May 23.

The CDC has some interesting information on their site.

As I have discussed before, children are the individuals most at risk for bites. But according to the CDC, men are bit more often than women. Interesting, especially given my post last week.

They also include a great list of tips for children. Here are a few of them.

I made a mistake last week. This isn't really news. As a matter of fact I probably made a mistake every day last week, so I should probably say "I made a mistake last Sunday" or maybe even "I made several mistakes last Sunday night around 11:00PM and I'm thinking of the third or fourth one right now."

Anyway, I was asked to answer an e-mail interview (man I hate that picture) and one of the questions struck me funny. Funny enough that I outsmarted myself. Again, not news — I'm an engineer and experienced in outsmarting myself. (Ask me about the SSL redirector and CPU utilization sometime over beers.)

The question was : What are your views on negative reinforcement? What do you think about dog owners using spray collars and even shock collars?

It's popular — and pretty easy — to complain about our modern culture of instant gratification. Almost everything;  the credit crisis, the obesity epidemic, the popularity of certain dog training TV shows, can be tied to our desire to get everything now-now-five-minutes-ago.

But instant gratification has a far uglier and more dangerous cousin. You don't see this cousin on TV or in big box stores - you see it at the office. It's "More With Less."

More With Less is the idea that a group or process is somehow inefficient and if we remove the excess...whatever...we won't just get the same results for less, we'll somehow get more. This idea is rampant in business, rampant enough that it was beautifully satirized in "The Wire" on HBO (and most likely watched by people that later went and tried to implement it at their jobs while believing the show didn't apply to them.)

Anthropomorphism is "the attribution of uniquely human characteristics to non-human creatures and beings, phenomena, material states and objects or abstract concepts." It's a natural human tendency that is almost unavoidable, and something we need to be conscious of when we are dealing with our dogs. We often put very human ideas and feeling into our dog's heads — and they don't really belong there.

It's easy to come up with unhelpful examples of anthropomorphism:

A case could be made for much of the training based on pack theory being a big exercise in anthropomorphism. Are dogs really keeping a mental tally of who is in charge based on who walks in front of whom or enters a doorway first? Are dogs really in a constant battle with us for supremacy? Or is this just an example of something that an insecure human frets over?