Articles
The Once and Future Pug
Pug puppy: 3-month-old male, nicknamed S’more. Born on Valentine’s Day, he’s ready to love you and your family! One of a litter of 4. He’s all pug: big brown eyes, button nose, adorable smushed face, and a perfect double corkscrew tail. Fawn-colored coat, silky ears. Pugs are famous for being affectionate and laid back. Good…
Horsepower: Rereading “Black Beauty”
I wasn’t crazy for horses like some girls, though in fourth grade my best friend and I made regular trips to Woolworths and collected a small herd of plastic ones. I was crazy, however, for books about horses, novels like The Black Stallion, My Friend Flicka, and their sequels. I loved the stories because of…
The Three Bears
On April 6th, they left around 8:00 in the evening. The two cubs’ heads were snuggled up against their mother’s belly as if they had fallen asleep while nursing. The bigger cub stirred, began to squirm, and then clambered over its sibling and on top of its mother. The cubs did this all the time-using…
“Eavesdropping on the Human World”
More Reflections on Animals, Humans, and Being Smart. People flocked to see Clever Hans. He wasn’t an acrobatic Lipizzaner or the Secretariat of his day. But when his owner asked “What is 4 + 8?” the horse tapped his hoof twelve times. Hans could count the number of people in the audience. He could count…
Who’s the Smartest of Them All?
Some Reflections on Dogs, Humans, and Being Smart. First there was Rico. In 2004, researchers reported that a border collie had learned the names of over 200 objects. What’s more, Rico could recognize a new word and retrieve a new object from among a group of familiar objects, inferring the name of the new object…
A Few Words About Numbers
Sometimes, I just want to know. How many pets are there in the United States? How many people have a pet? How many dogs are there? How many cats? According to one source, in 2017-2018, 68% of American households kept at least one pet of some kind (from guppies to budgies to palominos), including 94.2…
