Meet Bean

Name: Bean
Age: About five years old
Breed/s: Border Collie
Nicknames: Beanface, Crazydog, Wild-dog
Arrival Story: Bean was adopted from Richmond Animal Care and Control in April of 2010. She had heartworm and various behavior problems when I adopted her, and several people had already withdrawn adoption papers on her. I was at RACC to look at a younger dog, but something about the black, shaved dog with the wild bark appealed to me. Haven’t looked back since!

Favorite food: Homemade liver treats.
Special talents or skills: When she escapes her lead during agility, she shows me how she can do the WHOLE COURSE by HERSELF. Also insane talent at keeping the backyard squirrel-free.
Biggest fear: Thunderstorms
Most annoying habit: Having to scour the kitchen for even the tiniest morsel of food that may have dropped on the floor.
Arch-nemesis: Garbage-man

Bean is an awesomely devoted dog that took the place of my departed Rollo, a chow that accompanied me since I was twelve years old. I would have never guessed that Bean (so named because she would jump like a jumping bean every time I had snax) would have been able to fill the big shoes left by Rollo. She’s whip-smart and currently on her second round of agility classes, after passing Canine Manners and Agility A at the Richmond SPCA. I tell people I rescued her, but I think the reality is that she rescued me.

I can seeee!

Look. At. This.

This is a Pet Peek. It’s a clear plastic bubble inserted into a hold in the fence, large enough for an inquisitive canine to fit their face into and steam up the interior, also sold by Opulent Items. I’ve had these on my wish-list for awhile, but every time I check they’re sold out.

We have a privacy fence in the backyard, and the dogs are always running around, hooting, trying to peek through cracks every time they hear the garbage man. They recently found a knot-hole that had fallen out due to recent rains, and there’s been a squabble for the prime garbage-man-viewing real estate so they can see who they’re barking so fiercely at.

Obviously, I’d need two – and at $35 a dog, it would probably be money well-spent!

Dogs are psychic!

This news will come to no surprise to anyone who has lived with dogs: Dogs likely are born with “Canine Telepathy”.  Naturally, there’s a reason:

Practice makes perfect, however, so the more a dog hangs around humans, the better he or she becomes at “canine telepathy,” which actually relies upon hyperawareness of the senses.

Those of us who have owned or been around dogs for any period of time know how well they often “get” us, sensing tiredness, depression, headaches or other maladies before we consciously exhibit any major outward signs of distress. Dogs can even detect when a person has cancer. They also seem to sense our joy and good health.

Most dog owners know this. You think about getting the dog a cookie, and suddenly they’re there, slavering all over your leg with eyes lit up like Christmas trees. You move toward the hallway, thinking that it’s time to take Fido for a walk, and suddenly they get dancy feet and start running around like a wild beast.

One of the probable theories is that they respond to micro-cues that people don’t know they’re sending, the same types of unconscious cues that led to Clever Hans’s reknown.  Dogs are even better at this than horses, given their longer history and greater adaptability to human behavior. This hyper-awareness of human cues is probably a result of domestication, as the Russian Fox experiment demonstrated. As animals learn to live cooperatively with humans, they begin to exhibit traits that enhance that partnership – whether deliberately selected by humans or not.

In the study, the researchers come to the same conclusion:

The dogs and wolves had to choose whether to beg for food from an attentive person or experimenters whose faces were blocked. Their faces were blocked in one of four ways: their backs were turned, they held a book over their faces, they had a bucket over their heads or they held a camera over their eyes.

Researchers found that both dogs and wolves were more likely to beg from experimenters who were facing them than those with their backs turned.

Whatever the reason, the ability to learn and predict human behaviors definitely contributes to the adage that dogs are a man’s best friend. And if you’ll excuse me, I was thinking about getting the dogs a cookie and I’m pretty sure they’re not going to leave me alone until I fulfill their prediction.

Pedigree Dogs Commercial

I love this commercial! It’s shot using a high-powered camera, and you can see each tiny change of expression. So cute!