The latest in canine fashion

I don’t think Kyra cares what she looks like, considering her sleeping positions sometimes. (See candid shot at right.)

But if your dog is more fashion-conscious, you might want to check out the all-new Warby Barker website. They have the latest in canine eyewear, and even a blog where readers may contribute photos of their dogs modeling various styles.

I especially like the FAQ section, as well as all the cute photos (be sure to check out the Man’s Best Friend page). The Dogocle is also most impressive.

 

It adds up to one smart dog

This article about a mathematically gifted Labrador retriever is a perfect example of the kind of undiscovered animal abilities Temple Grandin writes about in Animals in Translation (see my post from a few days ago). Grandin would not likely credit Beau with being able to calculate square roots or do algebra, but she would agree that he has an amazing ability.

Grandin told about a horse, Clever Hans, who could tap a hoof the right number of times to answer math questions. His owner was convinced his horse could count, since he wasn’t signalling Hans when he had reached the right number. A psychologist finally was able to show that the owner (or anyone else asking Hans questions) really was signalling Hans, they just were doing it without being aware of doing so. Whatever it was they were doing, another person could not detect, but Hans could. When the questioner was put out of Hans’ sight, or the questioner didn’t know the answer himself, Hans could not give the correct answer.

Beau’s owner and others who are convinced the dog is a math genius evidently haven’t read Grandin’s book. The article offers, as evidence that Beau is really doing math and not just watching for signals, that he can answer questions even when his owner is out of sight. But there is no indication that they have tested Beau with questions when the questioner is out of sight, or the questioner does not know the answer. It does say that Madsen (his owner) will ask him a question so complicated that you (the observer) are still trying to figure it out when Beau gives the answer. But Madsen presumably does have the answer figured out, and Beau is watching him very intently.

Grandin’s conclusion is that animals such as Hans and Beau are very intelligent – but it’s not the kind of intelligence that does math calculations. As she points out, no one knows how to train an animal to do what Hans did, and Beau is doing (though Madsen believes he taught math to Beau). These animals taught themselves to observe something so hard to detect that people have no idea how they do it. Other animals have taught themselves to predict when their owners are going to have a stroke, and no one knows how they do that, either. (They were trained to respond to seizures, but on their own they went beyond that to react before the seizure starts, something that humans do not know how to do.)

Books: Animals in Translation

I had been intending to read a book by Temple Grandin at some point, but hadn’t gotten around to it. When I found Animals in Translation in the library catalog, I immediately put a hold on it. The book not only tells some of Grandin’s own story as a person with autism who has a successful career and communicates effectively, it explains a great deal about animal behavior, and touches on issues of language and brain research. Once I had finished reading The Big Burn, I read through Grandin’s book in a single day.

Besides touching on multiple subjects that are important to me, it’s an easy and enjoyable read. I had wondered what the writing would be like in a book written by a person with autism. Grandin had a co-author, Catherine Johnson, so I don’t know just how much of the “feel” of the book is Grandin’s and how much is Johnson’s, but I got the impression that I was hearing Grandin’s “voice.” (The acknowledgements section at the end of the book includes a section by each writer; Grandin’s section reads like the rest of the book, while Johnson’s reads quite differently.)

The writing is simple and straightforward, without the abundance of complex and subordinate clauses that many writers (including me) tend to use. Unfamiliar words (of which there are many, at least for a reader not previously familiar with the study of the brain and animal behavior) are explained clearly. I don’t think I ever had to go back and reread a paragraph because I hadn’t understood it the first time. But there was no sense of reading a book that had been deliberately simplified.

The focus of the book is understanding animal behavior. Grandin has a Ph.D. in animal science, and has spent her career working with livestock (designing equipment for humane handling of livestock and providing consulting on various livestock handling problems). She had noticed, both in her academic research and her work with livestock, certain similarities between how she perceives things and how it appeared that animals perceived things.

Killdeer nest, revisited

This time I went back with my digital camera. And this time the bird left the nest, displaying the distinctive behavior that I had read about, the “broken wing act” designed to lure predators away from the nest.

Not being a predator, I took a picture but did not follow. Instead I focused (literally) on the eggs, and got a pretty nice picture of them.

 

 

Close up, they look very much like eggs and not stones, but I would have had a lot of trouble finding them if the bird hadn’t been sitting on them when I first approached.

When I left, Mrs. Killdeer had given up the broken wing act, and she and Mr. Killdeer were walking calmly back toward the nest. I think what surprised me the most was how plump she looks when she’s trying to protect the nest, either by fanning out her feathers as she did Friday, or pretending to have a broken wing as she did this time. But once she’s calmed down, she looks so much smaller. (I didn’t take a picture, but the photo at wikipedia shows how she normally looks.)

What a place for a nest

The FedEx driver has been telling me lately about a nest among the stones that line the roadway where he parks to make deliveries to our office. He’s afraid that one of these days, he’s going to step on it by mistake.

I went looking for it this morning, but I couldn’t find it. Had the eggs hatched already, I wondered? But at lunchtime a co-worker and I went and looked, and this time the bird was sitting on her eggs (while another bird, I suppose the father) stood a few feet away.

I had forgotten to take my digital camera, and the picture I took with my cell phone doesn’t show much detail, but you can see the bird in the center. We could barely see the eggs (when I tried to get close, the bird flared out her tail feathers in what I assume was a gesture designed to warn me off), but my impression was of speckled eggs that were nearly indistinguishable from the stones that surrounded them.

I suppose that makes this a good place for a nest, if you want to keep the eggs safe from predators. I had already seen this morning that the nest was just about impossible to find without a bird sitting on it to mark the spot.

Unfortunately the bird’s instincts don’t take into account the fact that large human feet stepping off a delivery truck can do as much damage as any hungry predator. So far, so good. But I don’t know how many more days it will take before the eggs hatch.

As best as I can tell from looking at pictures, the bird seems to be a killdeer. Killdeer do in fact make nests that are mere depressions in the ground, fringed by stones (and blades of grass, according to wikipedia, but I guess our killdeer decided to forgo the grass in order to have plenty of stone camouflage).

I hope to remember my camera next time, to get a better shot. If the eggs are still there, that is – not yet hatched … or stepped on.

21st century falconry

I’m not sure which surprised me more, reading this article in today’s Wall Street Journal - to learn that 21st century airports employ falconers to keep gulls and geese out of the way of jets, or that due to budget constraints, JFK airport is replacing falcons with shotguns.

No doubt there’s some reason, dating back to when air travel was less common, that a major airport is located so close to a national bird sanctuary. If people want to protect birds enough to maintain a sanctuary, you’d think it would also make sense to find a way to keep the birds and the jets apart. You can hardly expect the birds to stay in their own airspace – they’re birds, and to a bird, the sky belongs to them, unless it already belongs to a predator.

Falconry seems like an ideal solution. For fifteen years, apparently the people in charge of the airport thought so too. But guns are cheaper than falcons. They don’t eat or require training, and the people using them don’t require nearly as much training either.

Life imitates Disney

In recent years I’ve seen reports of some unusual trans-species friendships. There are Tarra and Bella, an elephant and a dog who became best friends. Several years ago, there were Owen and Mzee, a young hippo and an old tortoise. A search of the internet turns up a variety of less well-publicized odd animal pairings (the hamster and snake have to be the most surprising, as Gohan was initially intended as a meal for Aochan, not as a companion).

But a deer standing guard over a goose’s nest differs from the above, as the relationship is not one of two companions but of protector and protected. How does the buck even know that the goose needs protection? A male deer will fight other stags to protect his herd of female deer. Does this one know that the goose is female?

I wonder if anyone has ever encountered a real-life friendship between a meerkat and a warthog.

Marketing the snot otter

I have no desire to work in marketing. I much prefer working in IT, making sure analysts can compile the data marketing needs for their work to promote the company’s products. But I did find the marketing classes I took in my MBA program very interesting, just to realize what goes on behind the scenes in corporate marketing departments.

How do they come up with brand names? (Brainstorm lots of ideas, and try them out on focus groups.) What does it take to put together a successful marketing campaign? What are some examples of marketing successes and failures? (Case studies can be fascinating.)

If you want an idea of what could be a real challenge to market successfully, consider the case of a North Carolina zoo trying to generate interest in promoting clean rivers in order to save an endangered species known as the snot otter. That’s not exactly an appealing name, but no worse than its other name: hellbender. It oozes toxic slime, and it’s anything but cute and cuddly.

Who knows what some well-designed T-shirts and posters can do, though? Americans do like to root for the underdog. With enough good PR generated by hellbender enthusiasts and a group of students practicing their skills in advertising and graphic design, the snot otter could become a well-loved mascot for clean rivers.

Welcome, Edward Pincherhand II

Our son’s fifth grade science class just finished a unit on habitats. They made habitats for three kinds of animals – fiddler crabs, African dwarf frogs, and millipedes. Now that the unit is over, the students were invited to adopt the animals and take them home. (I sort of hoped Al would only bring home a millipede, because I don’t think we’d feel too bad if it died.) But Al requested a fiddler crab, and yesterday he came home with one in a plastic cup, plus a bag of sea salt and a bag of food.

I knew nothing about taking care of fiddler crabs, so we had to learn in a hurry. They need sand and brackish water. Sand wasn’t too much of a problem – for years I had kept a box of play sand that my son played with when he was little. I finally dumped it out next to the shed last summer, but it wasn’t too hard to shovel it back into a new box.

Brackish water was another matter. I had no idea that brackish meant slightly salty – I always imagined it meant muddy, and probably full of debris like twigs and leaves. Brackish water isn’t as salty as seawater – from what I read, it’s about one fifth as salty. That didn’t help much, though, in figuring out how much of the sea salt to add to the water. Finally I found instructions to add about a teaspoon to a gallon of water. Plus if it’s tap water, it either has to be left out for a day, or dechlorinated with drops from the pet store (which I bought today).

Lacking either the drops or time to let it sit out, I used tap water yesterday rather than leave our pet with no water at all. Hopefully the chlorine didn’t bother him too much – he certainly wasted no time about immersing himself in the water as soon as it was available. Then I realized that he might need help getting back out, so I found a stone and a shell for him to climb up and out.

I really wanted to include a photo here, but he has burrowed into a corner of the sand (obviously he did manage to climb out of the water). Al can see him, but to me he looks like just another lump of sand. It’s kind of hard to tell how much of his dried plankton he has eaten, but so far he seems to be in good health – the few times he’s been out and about he scambles away very fast when my hand is hovering nearby.

When the students first got the crabs in the classroom, they gave them names. Al named one Edward Pincherhand, but a few days later he sadly reported to me that Edward Pincherhand had died. That is why this crab is Edward Pincherhand II. I certainly hope he lives longer.

Nose to nose

Parrots, king penguins, elephant seals, meerkats – if you want to see some cute pictures of animals sharing a moment of affection (or at least what looks like it), take a look at this series of animal pairs. Nature is certainly not always soft and cuddly, but these photographers have captured some wonderful images of animals at their most appealing.

I can’t help but be reminded of a picture from our wedding, and Jon and I come together for a kiss. My husband said he hadn’t realized what big noses we both had until he saw that photo. Oh well, we manage, as do the herons and hippos and hares.