Category: dogs

08:26 – Another science study, this one confirming something that ordinary people have known for about 30,000 years now: Dogs can detect emotion in human voices, study shows

Humans and dogs have lived in mutualistic symbiosis for more than 30 millennia. It’s facultative symbiosis, yes, but at times it approaches obligate in either or both directions. Of course we can understand each other and are each sensitive to the other’s moods and emotions. Without Canis lupus familiaris, H. sapiens sapiens might never have achieved civilization.

10:40 – Talk about inflation. The 56-quart (53-liter) Sterilite bins that we’d been buying at Home Depot back in November and December and early this year for $5.97 each are now $6.97 each. That’s 16.75% inflation. With the eight we brought home today, that takes us up to 23 of them, which should suffice.

11:04 – In Arizona right now, we have some people—mostly religious-right Republicans—trying to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. They’re opposed by another group of people—mostly gay rights groups and Democrats—trying to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. The issue is presented as whether businesses should be forced to serve everyone who wants to buy their products and services, regardless of the personal religious beliefs of the owners. Across the country, there have been numerous prosecutions and lawsuits lately targeting businesses owned by religious people who refuse to, for example, provide a wedding cake for a same-sex wedding. A pending Arizona bill, supported by governor Brewer, would allow such businesses to refuse to provide goods or services to some customers, based on the religious beliefs of the business owners.

As much as I support gay rights, I have to side with Governor Brewer here. But she has not gone far enough. Personal religious beliefs should have nothing to do with it. Any business should be completely free to choose which customers it serves, based on any criteria that business owner chooses. If a restaurant, for example, wants to exclude gays (or straights) or blacks (or whites) or men (or women), that’s the owner’s right. Any owner who exercises such criteria is ignorant and stupid, but we have a Constitutional right to be ignorant and stupid.

The problem, as is nearly always the case, is that most people conflate discrimination by governments with discrimination by individuals and private companies. The government should never be free to discriminate against any citizen for any reason whatsoever. The government should not even be keeping data on age, sex, race, and other labels. Individuals and private companies, on the other hand, should be completely free to discriminate (or not to discriminate) for any reason or for no reason at all. It’s their business, not the government’s.

09:39 – Understanding finger pointing is an extraordinarily complex cognitive function. Until recently, only two species were known to understand it: humans and dogs. Dogs don’t have to be taught to understand it; they do so naturally. Not surprising, given that humans and dogs have been living as symbiotes for more than 30,000 years. Nor is the behavior one-sided. Sometimes, for example, when I throw the ball down the hall it’ll go into Barbara’s office and roll behind her filing cabinet or somewhere else inaccessible to Colin. He’ll come and get me to let me know that he can’t get the ball. He’ll lead me down the hall and stand pointing at the ball with his snout. If he had an index finger, I don’t doubt that he’d be using it to point.

Even our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, do not understand finger-pointing, and cannot be taught to do so. It’s simply beyond their cognitive abilities. But now it seems that there is at least one population of elephants that understands finger-pointing naturally, without being taught. The implication is that elephants are extremely intelligent, more so than chimpanzees but probably not as intelligent as dogs.

I say that because as far as I know there’s no evidence that elephants are capable of deductive logic, let alone inductive logic. Dogs routinely use deductive logic. For example, Colin is excited by anything that makes noise, unfortunately including my laser printers. Many of our science kits have things added immediately before shipping, so when I get an order I carry a kit from the stock room to the kitchen, add whatever needs to be added, tape up the box, and carry the box to the foyer, where it sits on the table to await pickup. Colin watches me doing that, and then trots to my office, where he stands staring at the bottom drawer of my desk. That’s where I keep the shipping labels. After he watches me pull out a label, he shifts his attention to the manual-feed tray, waiting for me to insert the label. I send the label to print and yell at Colin to warn him not to fang the printer. He then leads me back to the foyer and watches me stick the label on the package. Some kits don’t require anything to be added before shipping, so they sit in the stock room taped up and ready to ship. When I take one of those from the stock room and put it on the foyer table, Colin heads for my office because he knows I can’t ship the kit without printing a postage label for it first.

It’s impressive enough for a dog to be able to watch a process and predict the next steps that must occur in sequence to lead to a particular result. What’s even more impressive is to watch a dog use inductive logic–to observe a result and know the steps that must have occurred to lead to that result. And I’ve seen our Border Collies do that often enough through the years to become convinced that they actually do use inductive logic. I know that people think I’m kidding when I say that Border Collies are smarter than some people, but I’m entirely serious.