Retrieving, Thinking and Philosophy of Mind

Quite a long time ago I read a philosopher's paper which I do not remember well. I think it was Dennett, and I think it was on decision-making, but what I do remember vividly is that he wrote about throwing two tennis balls for his Labrador. The dog would race back and forth between the two for quite some time, then choose one apparently at random when he was tired enough.

Now, what is surprising here is that I didn't try this on one of my own dogs sooner. I think this must be a paper from when my husband was in graduate school, when we had a dog who didn't care to fetch, or from my undergraduate program, when the dog was at home with my parents and school had nothing to do with my retreats there. However, Dennett was recently brought back to my attention by a secondhand social contact, and I tried to recall if this was his story.

Then I formed a hypothesis. Not all dogs are Labradors, bred to take directions. Some breeds, particularly herders, are required to make snap decisions on their own, and the German Shepherd Dog is one of those breeds. I expected that one object would bounce more or further, and that my dog would go after that one. Then, of course, I whistled for Dustin.

His current obsession is magnolia cones. They bounce and skitter tolerably well, and saved me the trouble of finding two reasonably well-matched balls in this chaotic household. Also, it's not too hard to fit two in one hand to throw together. And it turned out I was right: one cone always activated the naughty-sheep protocol by bouncing further, and he chose that one without hesitation every time. At first he would bring it to the less-traveled cone, good herding dog that he is, intending to bring both, but then he would switch to retrieve protocol on realizing only one would fit in his mouth. Then, of course, he brought the bouncier one.

I suppose the moral of the story is that before one generalizes about the simpleness or complexity of canis lupus familiaris minds, one must first examine multiple breeds. Labradors, as my friend Mary is wont to say, were bred to do what they were told, however it might be conveyed, by men who went to the training field with a six-pack and a gun. Those who stayed in the gene pool were the ones who could figure out how to what they were told, not those who made up new ways to do things. Herders, on the other hand, have to make snap decisions on controlling the individual sheep (or ducks, cows, reindeer, what-have-you) to conform to the large-scale directions given by their handler. Two or more lambs (see previous parenthetical) may take off in different directions at once, and the herding dog has to have a plan for that or devise one on the fly.

Of course, that does lead to an inventive streak the rest of the time. Sunny took to doing her obedience exercises with flair, and I suppose that the AKC guidelines don't say the dog can't walk from front to finish on her hind legs while whooping to the ceiling. At least, they didn't before she came along. I haven't checked the handbook lately. Dustin, asked to herd ducks, decided it would be more fun to push them into a group if he could then excite them into standing tall and quacking wildly, then do a sort of Evel Knievel routine over them. He seems to feel that it's rude to boss around such small and harmless creatures -- give him a good big rude sheep any day.

Or, of course, a naughty magnolia cone.

Getting Back To Work

Tracking has been irregular lately. I'm trying to get the most possible good out of the fewest and shortest possible work sessions, generally between prying the rugrat off my leg. Luckily the rugrat likes watching the dogs do stuff outdoors while he sits in his stroller, and tracking makes a happy change from ball-chasing.

Today was hard-ground cold, which is somewhat unusual down here, so I decided to try a polishing technique that some people use as a primary technique. My dogs are mainly trained to find articles and down on them, and then figure out that there's a line of tracks between -- a sort of connect-the-dots approach that I learned from Mary Adelman. My critique of it, at this point, is that the dogs tend to get gung-ho and launch from each article, or blast past turns and then circle to correct, rather than keeping a close nose from start to finish. Today, since it was too cold for ants to get on the food, too cold for the mice and squirrels to be foraging (and in this yard full of nut trees, it's pretty obvious when they're not out), and generally bright and clear otherwise, I went ahead and put a bit of cheese or dried gizzard into each footprint of a short track for Dustin.

Mind you, I mean a really short track for Dustin. Putting food in each footprint means doing a deep knee-bend at each pace, and it's hard to manage the food bits unless you're barehanded, so forty paces with an article every ten paces was all I could manage, along with a turn at fifteen and thirty-three paces. Then I went in and tended to the child, and ended up running the track about two and a half hours later.

Dustin happily snoodled up the goodies in the scent pad beside the tracking flag and headed off down the line. I slowed him down and showed him that the first footprint had cheese in it. He sniffed, stared, pondered -- and lay down on the human-scented article before consuming it. And on the next one. And the next. All told, he put his elbows to the ground (though didn't always bring down the back end) some forty times.

I couldn't fault him for it, either. Since the goal is to have a dog who will do the VST, which has articles of many different materials, I start off with an "Anything could be an article" approach. I have four Schutzhund-appropriate leather articles from Morgan Struble, and treasure them, as I'm far too poor to go cutting up any good leather I happen to have or buying bitsies. Business cards from Mary, gone ratty in my elderly wallet, seemed appropriate for use. So did a laminated ID from the Four Rivers Canine Search, Rescue and Recovery days, fair game for such use because it gave my now-departed Sunny's breed as "German Sherhrud." That may just be my favorite typo of all time, as Sunny certainly didn't conform to the GSD standard as written by any organization in any country. One of my articles is a dead 9-volt battery; another is a large alligator clip, which is nice for holding together the business cards, badges, and defunct ATM cards until they're due to be dropped.

Today, of course, the track was full of things I had handled. As far as Dustin was concerned, they were all quite tasty scent articles.

PAWS bill in House and Senate

The full text of the Puppy Uniform Protection and Safety Act, Senate form, is available at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:SN03424:@@@P. Enjoy. It's an exercise for logicians. I mean, the exercise parts seem reasonable though unenforceable, seeing as we don't have enough USDA employees to inspect our slaughterhouses, never mind trying to determine the appropriate amount of exercise for a Pekingese. The weird part is the beginning, defining a high-operations breeder as someone who produces more than 50 puppies a year for sale as pets AND owns at least one intact bitch over the age of four months.

So, if you own an intact bitch over four months (personally I don't like to spay that young) but produce fewer than 50 puppies per year by her (oof!), you should be fine. Likewise, if you don't own even part of a reproductive bitch but successfully pull more than 50 puppies out of a hat, you're fine. Presumably that last is meant to put rescue operations in the clear. However, also, if you produce more than 50 puppies but they're not being sold as pets -- work, say, or show prospects -- it sounds like you're still in the clear. Since anyone can claim they're producing working or show prospects, this pretty much defangs whatever is left of the bill. It's in large part a dead damn waste of ink and time. The only real hazard in it for most respectable breeders is for those who take the extra care of their dogs to co-own them, which can increase the number of puppies you produce in a most unfair manner if you co-own ten of your dogs for their own safety.

Now, if we were funding the USDA to actually enforce the already existing animal welfare laws and giving them the artillery necessary to go after Joe Redneck's huge and heavily-guarded chicken-wire puppy mill operation once they're done cleaning up our food supply, that would be great. As it is, this bill makes a lot of mild-mannered law-abiding retirement-age dog fanciers who adore their critters very nervous and accomplishes very little else. It also, incidentally, completely overlooks catteries.