The Dog Blog

Number one canine problem behavior is "home alone." Don't panic if someone tells you that your dog suffers from separation anxiety. It's probably not the case. Anxiety is a serious disorder and most dogs don't have any anxiety when left alone. They are either under-stimulated and burn their surplus energy by wrecking the furniture, they're having fun and don't know that it is wrong to destroy human possessions, or the owners have not taught them the desired routines when left home alone. There is a good chance that you can solve the problem with my five steps program.

"Can my dog be sad?" is a question many dog owners would like to have answered. We have all heard that it's wrong to attribute human characteristics to animals (anthropomorphism).

The argument for anthropomorphism is valid enough: if I can't prove (verify) something, I'd better disregard it (at least scientifically); and I can't prove that my dog is happy, sad, or loves me.

Then again, we are not better off with our own spouses, children, friends, not to speak of strangers. What do we know of their feelings and emotions? We can't prove either that they are happy, sad, or love us. We assume it (and often we are wrong) because we compare their behavior with our own when we are in particularly similar states of minds.

Our fear and hatred of the wolf begun much after its domestication, when humans took the first step to distance themselves from nature, to enslave nature and to exploit it—it happened when we invented agriculture. In the beginning, there were only some skirmishes provoked by the occasional domestic animal taken by a wolf. The wholesale extermination of the wolf is not due to a single factor, but to an intermingled combination of factors, i.e. mythology, religious zeal, environmental changes and economic incentives; and a deep psychological scar, as we shall see.

It's been a wild and wacky summer. There's a nip in the air, a shifting of the sun and back to school ads on the airwaves. I still feel a queasiness at these signs of a back to school feel, even though it's been a very long time since my own enrollment days. For years I have written about the trials and tribulations of balancing the care and nurturing of 3 daughters, a rotating stable of multiple dogs and cats and running my own pet and service dog training business. Not to mention taking an idea and turning it into Har-Vest, a patented product I'm almost as proud of as those aforementioned 3 daughters. But now there are transitions afoot in that same nipping air.