Dream On

Earlier this week it snowed. It started snowing during the night and was still snowing early in the morning when Sandy woke up. This was exciting news from Sandy's point of view. She loves the snow, and it was such an important development that Sandy had to wake me up as soon as she noticed.


Snow Dog

The first day she woke me at 6:30am. She showed up at the bedroom door and whined the way Lassie does when Timmy is stuck in the well. Next day it was still dark, but snowing, when I awoke thinking I'd better go see about that well. It was still sometime in the 5's. I didn't get up right away, but I didn't get back to sleep, either.

That night I went to bed thinking how great it would be if it didn't snow and I could sleep until the alarm at 7:20. Although it didn't snow that night, I dreamed that Sandy woke me up. She was in the dream with me. I heard her voice, like a human voice in the dream. She said, "Wake up, Cate! It's snowing! We have to go out RIGHT NOW!"

I woke up, got up, looked outside. No snow. I looked at the bedroom door. No dog. I found her sleeping soundly in her crate, and she was startled awake when I showed up. She sighed and stretched and turned around and settled down again, closed her eyes and went back to sleep. Maybe she dreamed about snow.

Math And Science

In his new book, “How Dogs Think: Understanding the Canine Mind”, Stanley Coren spends a part of a chapter discussing The Mathematical Mind of Dogs. Dogs, that count, dogs that can distinguish which thing is larger than the other thing, and canine calculus.

That dogs know math comes as no surprise to me. Certainly Sandy is much better at math than I am. We walk parts of the Mission Creek Greenway three or four times a week. It's a public park, crescent-shaped, and it follows the creek. At irregular intervals there are trash cans where dog owners are expected to deposit our little bags full of dog poop.


Dogs easily find the farthest distance between two trashcans.

In this crude sketch, the X’s mark the most frequent spots (!!) for dogs to relieve themselves. How do they know it's the farthest point from the can ahead and the can behind? I don't know. But I see a lot of people carrying these little bags, not just me. Yesterday I heard a man call his dog "Hypotenuse."

Dogs know something about science, too. Our dog, while not a scientist, is a willing participant in scientific experiments. Think of her as a technician.

She waits hopefully by the stove and by the kitchen table, ready to alert The Authorities the moment the laws of gravity are repealed. She'll know because food will cease to fall to the floor where she can pick it up "before the germs get to it."

This has never happened, but she remains optimistic.

Winter

Winter approaches and with it comes snow. It snowed just a little bit last night --- enough to stick but not enough to cover the green stuff completely.

Sandy loves the snow. She couldn't wait for my alarm; she had to get me up at 6:30 this morning (Saturday) to let me know about the snow outside. If you were to ask her about it, I'm sure she'd tell you it took me way too long to get ready to go out.

We headed to the Enterprise off-leash area where there was a little more snow accumulated than in our back yard, and where the pond had a mist hovering about a metre above it. Can dogs see that? Sandy just plunged into the pond, stood there looking stunned for a minute, and then tried to act casual as she headed back for the shore. "I KNEW it was going to be that cold," she said. "No worries."

We played with a stick. We don't really play "Fetch." We play another game, which as far as I can tell is called "It's MY stick now!" Sandy doesn't mind chasing a stick, but bringing it back to me must seem like a pretty bad idea. "You're just going to THROW it again! Where's THAT at?" So I throw the stick, Sandy chases after it, picks it up, shakes it to make sure it is, in fact, dead, and then takes it far away and guards the hell out of it. It's a pretty good game. Sometimes we play it with a Frisbee.

Today she grabbed the stick, ran with it, dropped it in the snow and then rolled on it. She stood up and watched me. I could see her breath. She was beautiful and happy. She tossed the stick up in the air and caught it. She galloped around with it. In the end, she brought it back to me and when I threw it again, she sighed and went after it. It was a great morning.