I’ve traded in the mountains of Colorado for my valley in New Hampshire where the flowers managed to survive in my absence. This podcast marks my first attempt using the laptop and results were mixed. The quality isn’t as good and some technical difficulties ultimately drove me back to the desktop to finish editing it.

The idea that we use words such as “healthy,” “normal,” to say nothing of “aggression,” “dominance” and that whole Pandora’s Box of behavioral terminology as if some universally accepted definition of these exists continues to fascinate me. It’s another one of those areas where certainty seems to affect those at the opposite ends of the knowledge spectrum the most keenly. Those who know little or nothing about these subjects take an Alice in Wonderland “Words mean what I want them to mean” approach. Those who are deeply entrenched in some behavioral pursuit or discipline of one sort or another assume that their definition is the only right one.

It’s only when we step back and get the big picture that we realize how these terms are defined may vary to the point that their use may be meaningless.

One of the most awkward situations for me is to find myself among a particular group of  dog- or cat-lovers  who assume I’m a kindred spirit. The distinguishing feature of these folks isn’t just that they’re head over heels in love with dogs or cats—a lot of people are, including me. What makes them stand out and, to me, sometimes painfully so, is that these dog-lovers are as rabidly dismissive of cats as the cat-lovers are of dogs. I find this troubling because I owe a great deal of what I know about canine behavior to my knowledge of cats. And vice versa: I couldn’t understand domestic feline behavior nearly as well as I do without my knowledge of dogs. Hence my wish for a cloak of invisibility at such times. When I found myself in such a gathering, I could surreptitiously slip it over my shoulders, and vanish.

Every once in a while I get distracted by a phone call or something else while I’m proof-reading a blog. If I’m almost near the end of it, my distracted little brain may decide I’ve finished it. Said distracted little brain then deletes “proof-read podcast blog” from the mental do-list and replaces it with “upload blog”. That’s no problem if the last sentence has no errors. But sometimes it does..

which is what happened this week. I’ve already corrected it on-line, but sometimes and maybe all the time—how such forwarding programs work is all a big mystery to me—these changes aren’t sent to those who receive the blog via email or other feeds.

So this is for you. The corrected last sentence appears below:

Once years ago I was complaining to friend about how difficult it was to find clothes that fit me. What can I say? I’m not a matched set. Either some other female got my boobs or I got her butt.  As so often happens in such conversations, the idea of buying clothes of the one-size-fits-all ilk came up. As most women faced with anatomical inequities well know, the response to this concept depends on where one is in one’s monthly cycle. If in a kindly mood, the idea that such clothing is possible is amusing to rolling-on-the-floor hilarious. On more testy days, the desire to do something very painful to its creator seems like a very reasonable response. Nonetheless, one-size-fits-all has been the most common teaching standard for years.

Once years ago I was complaining to friend about how difficult it was to find clothes that fit me. What can I say? I’m not a matched set. Either some other female got my boobs or I got her butt.  As so often happens in such conversations, the idea of buying clothes of the one-size-fits-all ilk came up. As most women faced with anatomical inequities well know, the response to this concept depends on where one is in one’s monthly cycle. If in a kindly mood, the idea that such clothing is possible is amusing to rolling-on-the-floor hilarious. On more testy days, the desire to do something very painful to its creator seems like a very reasonable response. Nonetheless, one-size-fits-all has been the  most common teaching standard for years.

Any couple who has expected a child knows how much busier life can become during the pregnancy. So many baby-related things to do! And if there’s a dog in household, chances are some of the items on that seemingly endless do-list are about baby-dog issues.

In this podcast, I ponder how the same well-intentioned, but limited problem-oriented approach that can pave a hellish road when applied to other human-animal relationship concerns can come back to bite us when we apply it to those related to dogs and babies.

One of the things that happens when I record a podcast is that, as with my writing, it sometimes doesn’t go where I plan it should go when I start. This happens even when I have a list of points I want to cover. Usually I manage to get the first few points recorded, but then something happens and I meander off in some other direction. Perhaps aliens take over my mind. Or maybe that’s another perk of age: there are more mental trails that my notes open for my exploration. If I recall one I think is more interesting than the one I had in mind in when I wrote the note—or if I happened to forget the first one—down that path I go.

So what began as an overview of the past 100 weeks turned into something else, including a celebration of getting older.

You may notice that I didn’t brag about my continued mastery of electronic technology. I didn’t because I couldn’t without lying.

Also note that no cats were harmed in the recording of this podcast.  In our 50-odd weeks together, Bamboo has made it clear that he has more than 9 lives and he intends to live them all…even if he has to shorten my life to do it.

Ideas for my podcasts often come from strange places. The seed for this one was planted by several reports I read or heard about the ingenious way the Youth Safety Council of Vermont came up with to convince kids that driving while texting really isn’t a good idea.  (Click here for a video of teens taking the texting-while-driving test, and here for more about the campaign.)

This got me thinking about how much better some animals, and especially dogs, grasp what happens to human minds when we’re talking on the phone. And sometimes we can use our distracted mental state to our animal’s advantage, too.

Here’s the second vignette to test your powers of analysis. Also, think about how your responses to this story mesh (or not) with those to the first one.

For the next two podcasts and maybe longer depending on the response to it, I’m going to try something different. But first some background. Over the years I’ve spent a fair amount of time pondering how to best help people make the kinds of changes necessary to improve their animals’ behavior and health. One of the things I’ve noticed is that, when we make up our minds very quickly regarding what’s going on, it’s more difficult to consider alternatives. Not only that, we’re more likely to take any suggestion that requires change very personally. When that’s the case, we can add a lot of useless, energy-wasting, negative emotion to the process. And when that occurs, the result is often an inconsistent response that makes the animal’s problem worse.

What’s equally interesting is that people who normally are able to see multiple sides of most issues completely lose this multi-dimensional skill when it comes to certain issues related to animals. This explains why I’m apt to use analogies as well as stories, some of them totally unrelated to animals, when I want to communicate a particularly complex point regarding human relationships with animals and/or animal behavior.

This week’s podcast begins a two part self-test that consists of two vignettes. What I’d like you to do is to think about your first impression regarding what’s going on in each story. Next, think about all the other possible explanations for these same events. And, naturally, think about any emotions that attend this process: Do you see it as a fun challenge? Hard work? A useless pain in the butt? If so, think about why you feel that way, too.

After my lackluster success with growing vegetables the past few years, this year I decided to focus on flowers, the sight and scent of which I consider food for the soul. Below is a picture of my first soul-food harvest that brightened my spirits in spite of the troubling event described in this podcast that also occurred in the garden that day.

You may notice that I don’t say anything about the quality of the shelter I provide for Bamboo the cat. This was not because it slipped my mind that he’s part of the household. Unlike as is the case with the dogs, I can’t point to a particular location—highly valued or not—that Bam claims as his own because he claims the whole house. I’m as likely to find him sitting in the sink as on my desk, in the back of my closet, on my bed, in the dog bed, or the back of couch. And while there are a few areas that are off-limits to him, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if these were only off-limits during those times when I wasn’t around to enforce the rules. So all in all, I’d say the quality of his shelter is pretty good.

As so often happens when I discuss behaviors in animals and humans, I realize after-the-fact, that I used the  same word to refer to opposite states of mind. Come of think of it, that’s the way behaviors are, too. The same behavior can have two completely opposite meanings depending on the context in which it occurs. In this podcast I used the word “dependence” to describe relationships between animals and their owners that have quite opposite consequences for the animals. Luckily for me, the intelligence of those who listen to these meanderings is so superior, I’m sure you won’t be confused.

Click here to learn more about the mouse study.

How much of what does your pet have to do to prove to you that he or she loves you? And how much of what must you do to prove the same to  your pet?  Even though most of us may not consciously think about the answers to these two questions, most of us have some idea about what these are or should be. Not only that, wondering whether we or our animals measure may take up a fair amount of our time.

But is all this soul-searching necessary?  I’ll let you be the judge of that.

Normally when I think of guilty pleasures, I think of something like chocolate or reading when I should be mowing or weeding. But this podcast explores another kind of guilty pleasure: the ability to sometimes interact in a less-than-perfect way with our animals without succumbing to guilt. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t all strive for perfection. But there’s something to be said for not getting so involved in such a quest that we lose sight of what’s really important.

Here’s Ollie preparing to protect me form the invasion of the Demon Cat, as if said Demon Cat doesn’t live here and isn’t his best bud!

If this podcast doesn’t convince you to lighten up, here’s another good reason. According to researchers at Loma Linda University (CA), repeated bouts of laughter offer some of the same benefits as moderate exercise, among them lower blood pressure and lower cholesterol. Laughter also affects levels of ghrelin and leptin, two hormones that help regulate appetite and are also affected by exercise. So not only does enjoying life make it easier for us and our animals to relax and learn, we can exercise at the same time. (To read more about the study, click here.)

Hmmmm. I wonder if happy animals belonging to happy people can lose excess weight faster than stressed dogs whose owners are uptight…

An additional story related to ducks and alarm calls:  Several years ago, I previewed one of Ken Goddard’s wonderful animal forensics adventure/thrillers. In this he used the code word “merganser”, the name applied to fish-eating ducks who belong to the genus Mergus as an alarm call. When one of the members of his undercover team used the word, this would set into motion a complex human response. Unfortunately when I reach the part of the story where the “Merganser!” call was given, my immediate response was, “Duck!” Alas, that completely inappropriate response under those particular circumstances would have guaranteed my demise at the hands of some very unsavory characters!

This experience made me realize how deeply embedded alarm calls are in human and nonhuman animals. The good news is that this enables us to respond to those calls given by members of other species as well as our own. The bad news is that this also may cause us to automatically, but erroneously, connect something with an entirely different meaning to an alarm call  and react as if threatened. Those owners who react to every little yip or yowl from their dogs or cats as if the world has ended are one example of this.

Speaking of hammers, you may notice what sounds like mice or some other small creatures armed with small tools periodically doing some construction work during this podcast. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what that was. Frica was on the rocker next to the woodstove; Ollie was hiding his ball under the pillow on the dog couch then flipping the pillow up to discover the ball again; Bam was outside watching the sunrise. As I recall, I was doing my usual wandering around the main downstairs room as I recorded, which wasn’t anything different either. ‘Tis a mystery. Hopefully the hammer(s) causing those particular noises won’t get any bigger.

What do one of English literature’s most beloved detectives and companion animal behavioral problems have in common? As it turns out, a lot more than I thought. I just didn’t realize this until I reread The Secret of Father Brown to which I, in a recording stupor, alas referred to in this podcast as The Scandal of Father Brown which is a different collection altogether.

To atone for this grievous sin on my part, a click here will take you to Project Gutenberg where you can read and/or download the book that triggered this podcast. If you enjoy Father Brown’s escapades, you can read The Scandal of Father Brown and other collections there as well.

This podcast was precipitated by an email with this link which those of you with high-speed connections will hopefully be able to open.  Here in the dead zone, I could not, but the person who sent it to me included a verbal description of the depicted canine subject’s spinning behavior. Although this particular animal’s behavior was considered newsworthy by the media,  spinning or circling is fairly common. And like so many other behaviors, that same behavior can reflect mental states at opposite ends of the stability spectrum.

After years of either completely ignoring stress or reviling it as some sort of diagnostic dumping ground, science is finally acknowledging the role stress plays in health and behavior. As a result, the amount of stress-related information almost seems to double every day. Unfortunately in my effort to reduce some of this to podcastable chunks, one of my listeners rightfully pointed out a crucial point about stress I ignored. This podcast will, I hope, correct that.