bunn

The other day the dogs went looking for rabbits and I got cross with them.  This is a major mistake.  It doesn't mean they come back faster next time. It means they get upset and emotional and do more undesirable things.    The way to get them to do what I want is to be very relaxed and happy and not at all insistent.  Control by letting go, or something along those lines...
( Thing I made while waiting... )

It was a grey old day, very glum and misty, so did not bother with camera. I did remember to give Perdy and Rosie their melatonin (yay!) although was rather disheartened when Perdy then almost immediately had a wild barking fit at a couple of spaniels across the car park. Still, onwards and upwards.
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Mixed results today.
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I always forget to take photos / video of the process of introducing dogs to cats, and then wish I had later. Sod's law says that this will be the dog where the process doesn't actually work, but I've taken photos anyway.  Need to read manual to find out how to get video off the new camera, as it seems non-intuitive.

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I do not want to go home.  I shall make myself very very heavy.
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I was just reading about Edward Thorndike's puzzle boxes - an experiment where he put a cat or dog into a box that had some sort of release lever to let it out, and waited to see if the cat or dog would work out whether/how to press the lever.

I now desperately want to put, say, 100 human beings into puzzle boxes, and see how long it takes each of THEM to work out that pushing a lever in a darkened room opens the door. Perhaps my view of humanity is pessimistic, but based on many of the support phonecalls I get, not only are most human beings incapable of empirically working out the solution to a problem, but they are also a species absolutely beset with cargo cult beliefs about the things that appeared to work but in the real world cannot possibly have done so...

I'm fairly sure that the people on my LJ friendslist can indeed reason their way out of a paper bag, but to be honest, I'm not sure you lot are entirely representative.

Both Az and Brythen were expert puzzle-solvers of the canine variety. Az could open doors, turn keys,and undo tent-zips, and it's a delight to see Brythen realise that he's on the wrong side of a fence and work out at speed how to navigate through a series of gates and gaps to the right side of it (when he decides to do so, and OK, sometimes he decides not to :-D ) . He can open a dog-crate from the inside, too. But These are Not Typical Dogs.