Immeasurably More

Dear Reader, LandLady sent me a video of Pony chewing on a rope chew stick.  It's not especially funny or unusual.  Just a big happy dog gnawing on a chew stick. I was not grateful to see this video, because I had bought the chew stick for Dog;  I wanted her to have something non-consumable to chew on since the bits of blanket and squeaky toys she had enjoyed chewing seemed to have unfortunate consequences for her digestion.  But Dog shunned the stick, presumably for the very reason that it is not-consumable.  So it was re-gifted to Pony, who is delighted by it. Dog is, in fact, resisting all of my efforts to keep her busy with non-food based entertainment.  But she is inventing her own games.   Games like "stand quietly just out of line of sight and see how long it takes for MyPerson to come looking for me".  Since I have reasons for not trusting Dog, she usually doesn't have to wait long.  So, fun times for everyone!! One reason I ...

Dear Reader, They say that dogs don't have great memories for the mundane.  For example, you can't punish a dog for a mess made on the floor earlier in the day.  By the time you get home and step in it, he's already moved on.  But for Greyhounds, trauma sticks around.* People are like that, too.  We filter out the unimportant stimulus and information in our lives (what did you have for breakfast last Sunday?), but we remember the details of things associated with strong emotional reactions.  (Where were you when you heard about 9/11?) I'm not sure how the memory thing works for rabbits.   I know that when I was a kid, I had a pet rabbit.   (Cottontail, cuz she was black with a white tail.  Clever, huh?)  My parents swear that one day they heard her scream when a loose dog attacked her hutch.  I wonder now if she had flashbacks of that day when, on a day years later, she met her end at ...

Dear Reader, Of course, I should have taken a photo, but Pony doesn't belong to me; he belongs to LandLady and when he jumped the baby gate, I panicked and didn't think to reach for my camera. But I'm getting ahead of myself. As previously mentioned , before I moved in with LandLady, she had agreed to let me adopt a dog. But not just any dog - specifically, a retired racing greyhound.  Because they are quiet and gentle and sleep about 18 hours a day.  Kind of like cats, but you can teach them to do useful stuff, like "come".* Over the course of my first two weeks here, as we discussed arrangements for the dog - Where to poop?  Where to eat?  Where to sleep?  How to train? - LandLady got more and more interested in the breed and increasingly excited about having something to pet.  I suggested that she could get her own dog, but she demurred, claiming she preferred to use my dog as a test of her own emotional and physical preparedness for dog ownersh...