What my dogs teach me
Some of my most popular posts are about common training errors. It seems that I have an infinite supply, and I’m willing to use myself as a naughty example. New errors keep popping into my consciousness (and my training) all the time.
In this post I’m going to focus on two main categories of errors: problems with criteria, and problems with food handling. Can you identify with any of these? Continue reading “6 Common Dog Training Errors”
My mother had Alzheimer’s. She passed away in 2012.
I was a loved and indulged child and my mother and I were very close. I had the usual adolescent fallings out, and a rather less usual falling out when I was an adult, and I didn’t see her for many years. When we were reunited, I believe she was already losing some cognition due to dementia, but we felt like family again, and remained so until the end of her life, even though quite early in the illness she stopped being able to remember my name or call me her daughter. Those things didn’t matter. We were completely comfortable with each other and could laugh and enjoy things the same way we had earlier in our lives.
When she still had enough cognitive ability to send me things in the mail, my mother would send me California pomegranates in the fall. She sometimes bought them and some she picked herself off a bush in her neighborhood. She knew they were one of my very favorite things.
When I was a kid, our next-door neighbors had a giant pomegranate bush. I got spoiled. There were more pomegranates than any five families could eat and I had carte blanche to forage as often as I liked. They were giant, got perfectly ripe and split open, and my best friend and I spent many happy hours eating pomegranate seeds (outdoors, because of the mess) until our hands and faces were magenta with the juice.
As an adult, no longer living in California, I have been very disappointed in the pomegranates that make it to the stores here. They are rarely ripe.
But back in about 2005, I accidentally grew a pomegranate bush. And some years later, I actually got a pomegranate off of it. Here is the story of my pomegranate bush. It starts with a hot pepper plant.
In the mid 1990s, in what I would call the early days of the Internet, I belonged to an email discussion group called Chile-Heads. It was for gardeners and cooks: anyone who enjoyed growing and cooking with hot peppers. From time to time people would offer seeds, and one year I got some from a guy in Corpus Christi, Texas. As I recall I traded some seeds from some extra tasty chile anchos I had grown. He called his peppers “petins” and I believe they were a variant of the chiltepin. The peppers are very small and round and are quite hot. I came to love those plants and would grow a couple every year. (They are perennials in parts of Texas, but the winters are too cold where I live.)
One year the bush had gotten so magnificent that I decided to try to overwinter it. I dug it up in mid-autumn, before a freeze could get it, and put it in the biggest pot I could manage to tote around. It lived in my guest room for the winter. I successfully did this several years in a row with the same plant, which started looking like a little tree. I would plant it in the garden again every summer.
I know I was doing this as far back as 1998, because when my sister came to visit that year I remember her mentioning how much she enjoyed staying in the guest room with the giant friendly pepper bush.
Here’s how I described, in a letter to my mother, the next thing that happened.
10/7/07
I grew a pomegranate bush by accident. I had this enormous chile pepper plant called a petin that I would pot up in a huge pot and bring in the house every winter. Along with the garden soil would come some pillbugs. They live on rotting matter, and over the course of the winter, living in a potted plant, they would run out of stuff to eat. I would see them patrolling round and round the edge of the pot in the morning, seeming rather desperate. So I started to feed them. (I have always liked pillbugs, and I certainly don’t want to see any wildlife starve because I have interfered in their lives.) I would give them peelings and old stuff from the refrigerator. They were thrilled and would chomp it all up as soon as it got a little old.
Once I let one of the pomegranates you sent me go partly bad, so I put the fermented seeds in the pot for the pillbugs. They dutifully ate the pulp. I wonder if they got tipsy? But they left the actual seeds, and some little volunteer pomegranate plants appeared in the pot with the pepper plant. I took care of one of the plants and finally planted it out. The picture shows how big it was last year. It’s lots bigger now. They are not technically supposed to survive here because of the hard freezes in winter. But it has survived 2 or 3 winters so I guess it is going to make it OK.
I miss getting pomegranates from you. It’s hard to get ripe ones here. But my bush had several blossoms this year and I am hoping for some fruit next year.
So that dates my pomegranate bush back to 2004 or 2005. It is now 11 or 12 years old.
I should mention that I love pillbugs. They are also known as sowbugs, wood lice, armadillo bugs, and roly polys. Did you know that they are not insects, but crustaceans? I think they are fascinating. They look cool, don’t hurt anybody, and they clean up the trash. Here’s a photo of some in my garden. I’m not embedding because I imagine they are gross to some people. Not me!
I never knew whether to expect fruit from the bush. I didn’t even know if it would be fertile. If the seed had been from a grocery store fruit, it could have been some sort of hybrid. Gardeners hope for everything though, so it was always in the back of my mind. As I said in the letter to my mom, I got some blooms early on, but nothing came of them. This happened for 8 years or so, and I had given up hope. But in 2013, when I was idly looking at the bush with an eye to trimming it, I found two baby pomegranates on it! I went ahead and trimmed the bush and idiotically managed to trim off one of the branches with a pomegranate. Aaaaaagh!
But one survived, and come November, it was one of the best things I ever ate.
Naturally, being a gardener, I decided to read up on pomegranates again and maximize my chances of getting fruit the next year. I pruned when it said to. I fed what it said to, when it said to. And I got NO blooms on the plant in 2014. Zero, nada. I was very ticked off. I didn’t pamper it the next year and again, got no blooms. It even entered my mind to take out the bush. It’s not all that handsome. But I didn’t really entertain that thought seriously. How could I, with its connection to my mom? There’s even that mother/daughter thing in mythology with Persephone and the pomegranate seeds. So of course I kept the bush.
So now it’s 2016 and I have taken a few sideways glances at the bush throughout the spring. Nothing doing. I have thought frustrated, slightly wicked thoughts about the pomegranate bush. I’m still miffed that it tantalized me that one year.
Then, two days ago, I saw two blooms opening! I took a good look and counted about 10 more, but some could be male blooms only. The male blooms pollinate, but don’t fruit. So now I am checking every day and cross pollinating the hermaphroditic blooms (yes, that’s really the term) by hand as they open. (A friend of mine used to call that having sex with her plants.)
I have big plans for my 5 – 10 pomegranates this year. I shall baby those fruit and build them little slings and do whatever it takes to keep them safe. If I harvest some fruit, I’ll do as my sister suggests and share some seeds with the pillbug colony. It’s only fair.
But even if I get no fruit, the bush will stay, of course. My mom sent me the seeds. And the pillbugs helped them grow.
Copyright Eileen Anderson 2016
A couple of weeks ago I published a post: “Body Language Study: Fear and What Else?”. It featured the short video clip embedded below. (You can watch the video now if you didn’t already.) In the post I solicited comments about Summer’s behavior. I noted that I saw fear and caution and something else, and asked folks what all they saw.
Link to the video for email subscribers.
I got a great response, with people seeing both the stuff I was angling for, and also a whole other category of behavior that I had not noticed.
What I saw but didn’t mention, and was trying to find out whether others saw it, was predation. Plenty of other people did. Deena Lavine, Melinda Schneider, Meghan Smith, and Susan Hatzen all mentioned prey drive in the comments, and others did on Facebook.
I wasn’t sure how obvious it would be to those who haven’t seen Summer’s behavior over time. She is a serious predator. And she has a special interest in reptiles, including turtles, toads, and snakes.
What was notable to me in the interaction in the video was that she kept re-approaching the area where the reptile was. Fear often results in distance-increasing or escape behavior. This is often flight, although a cornered animal will sometimes freeze or attack a threat in self-preservation. (Dr. Susan Friedman classifies this type of attack as escape behavior as well, because the goal is to remove the threat.) In the clip, Summer was obviously nervous about the lizard that she sensed in the hose reel area, but she was also exhibiting distance-decreasing behavior repeatedly. She had ample opportunity to get away from the reptile. Instead, she returned again and again.
I noted the most basic of analyses: she kept moving her body, carefully, back towards the hose reel and what was hiding inside it. Then she would jump back when she thought the “thing” might be interested in having a go at her.
I think she thought the lizard was a snake. It certainly looked like one–glass lizards have no legs. Perhaps it smelled like one too, because before she ever seemed to get a good look at it, she was exhibiting the same behavior she does when she thinks there is a snake present.
I have witnessed it plenty of times before. When she thinks there is a snake in the grass, she will approach with great care, ready to jump backwards at a second’s notice. She obviously learned the hard way that snakes strike, but with snakes as well she still keeps returning. When she used to go to doggie day care, they told me that she had cornered a large snake once. I have never seen her do that at home and would actively intervene if I did. But I have seen that cautious approach when she thinks there is something hidden in the grass. She does something similar with stinging insects, which she also has a hard time leaving alone. She really wants to kill them, though she has been stung in the attempt before.
Some viewers mentioned that Summer was curious, and I absolutely agree with that. But I’ll go a step further, both from her behavior and what I know of her history. She wanted to investigate and kill the lizard.
If you’d like to see Summer’s reptile obsession, check out the video “Summer and the Turtle,” where she tries to bite and claw her way through a chain length fence to get a terrapin on the other side. Or this blog post: Summer’s Turtle Diary, which features a video where she digs her way under two fences over the course of several days in order to get to a terrapin on the other side. (Sorry about the terminology mashup. I regularly misuse the word turtle to mean shelled reptiles on land, but technically what I am discussing are terrapins. Turtles are aquatic.)
What I missed in my original examination of the video, but agree absolutely was there, now that others have mentioned it, was resource guarding. When Summer grabs the Styrofoam container and lifts it out and backs up, she is not trying to get away from the reptile. Nor was she doing what a human might do: moving something and backing up to see the results. Upon consideration, I think she pretty clearly believes she has the reptile in the Styrofoam, and is likely trying to get the whole thing away from Clara, the other dog. (If I leave the snake theory aside for a moment, she may even think the Styrofoam-with-reptile-odor-inside is a new and weird type of turtle!)
Many people mentioned the angle of her body with regard to Clara, and the direction of her glance. She thinks she has the prize and is getting it away. She didn’t know there was a hole in the bottom of the container.
Ellen Barry asked in the comments whether my dogs regularly guard things from each other. Oh yeah! They do, but generally at a very low level. It is what I would classify as normal resource guarding, and they work things out without violence. My movie “Resource Guarding in Slow Motion” shows many such interactions between my dogs. In most interactions between those Clara and Summer, Clara keeps or wins the access to the resource. But she knows when to back off. Clara acts like a big lug a lot of the time but her sense of dog social cues is very finely tuned. In the last interaction in the resource guarding movie she wisely allows Summer to keep a toy with only a small but significant glance from Summer, and she generally stays well away when Summer is guarding a reptile or other varmint. I think she knows Summer is willing to go well beyond a dirty look to keep such a thing. Clara, with all her pushy behavior, is actually quite a peaceable dog.
Summer, not so much. Below is an old photo of her giving Cricket a very hard look–while pushing into her space–for coming too close while Summer is after a turtle. This is from the Summer and the Turtle video I mentioned above, at 0:30. See that very dirty look?
Clara can read that type of look very well. So when Summer said, “MY critter,” Clara wisely stayed away. Ironic that she was the one who got the closeup of the lizard. (And she startled too, did you see!) But lucky for the lizard that it was Clara!
Thank you to everyone who viewed and commented on the video. I’m so glad that others are interested in this stuff. Oh, and to Meghan, who noticed Summer’s low tail set in the video. Yes, I noticed that too and it was definitely atypical. Usually Summer’s tail is curled up over her back like a husky’s when she is aroused and going after something. My best theory is that the fear and caution were keeping it down in the lizard interaction.
More comments are welcome! What do you see? What have we missed?
Copyright 2016 Eileen Anderson
