arg arg arg. well excuuuuuuuuuuuuuse moi. am eye knot inn the room ore what? czech out this link.

eye quote from the aforementioned linked article: "a program to pick dead animals off toronto streets may soon be roadkill because of the city's cash shortage."

eye doughnut no what peas me off moor, the faq that toronto has bean putting there dead dogs out on the curb four trash pickup, ore the faq that there upset that the program is losing funding.

ever herd of a shovel end a back yard ewe idiots? dig a whole. shed a tear. plant a flour. give a sheet. dog gone it.

just weight until this gets back two the toronto dogs. hears tomorrow's headlines, "lassie the wonder dog lets house burn, drags bodies two curb four trash pickup." ha ha ha lol.

I’m becoming increasingly concerned with the issue of identity theft online, and feel compelled to express some of my concerns. If you spend much time on the web, you soon realize that there are web sites written by dogs, and web sites written by humans about the dogs they live with. And that’s all fine and good. But more and more what I’m finding is web postings that are identified as written by dogs, when in reality they are written by… yes, you guessed it… humans.

Read a few of the posts on this web site and you’ll see what I mean. Sure these posts are written in the first dog, but are dogs really writing them? I say no. How can you tell? I'll tell you.

For starters, dogs never refer to any human as "Mom," "Mommie," "Mum" or any other human variation on the word bitch. We don’t use bizarre phrases like "T.T.ing" to refer to "taking a piss." And we certainly don’t lapse into some kind of mid-20th-Century-blackface-plantation-movie-pseudo-patois as a way to suggest that we’re not human. I quote: "Mum sez the evil vetman sez I should have a bath evvy WEEK with de medisin soap!!"

"With de medison soap?" Huh? Show me a dog that talks like that and I’ll show you a bad Hollywood screenwriter in a poodle costume.

So what can you do to prevent identity theft?

Unlike your paw print, which is unique to you and cannot be given to another mammal for their use, your personal scent can be used, if it falls into the wrong hands, to personally profit at your expense.

The most important thing you have to watch out for is to not let humans sniff your butt. Once they’ve acquired your scent they can go out and claim territory, threaten other animal species and have relationships with the opposite sex, all using your good name.

And don’t forget to eat all your turds. More than one dog has been victimized by identity theft because they left a smelly tell-tale pile of crap laying around for human identity thieves to abuse.

If you have to spend most of your time in proximity to humans that you’re not sure you can trust, be sure to never poop where they want you to poop. Try to poop someplace where your scent will be contaminated by other scents, such as a kitchen or bedroom floor. Carpets are good because the texture makes it hard for humans to retrieve an uncontaminated sample.

And of course, as every dog knows, if you regularly eat cat turds it will mask the true identity of your end result.

And finally, always remember to be e-mail savvy. If you get an e-mail message with an attachment labeled "deadsquirrelguts.exe" DON'T OPEN IT. I don't know how many times I have to tell dogs that you can’t send dead squirrel guts through the Internet, and the sooner you figure that out, the sooner we’ll get a handle on all this spam.

* * *

On a related subject, the aforementioned issues have caused us to lose faith in our human tech support and so we have changed our tech service over to Primate Programming Inc. We expect that this will help us keep our web site more secure and shouldn't result in any change in quality to our readers.

Now that the Supreme Court has taken off for its summer recess, it's a good time for me to take a look back at the impact of various recent legal rulings. I'm not going to waste a lot of time on the High Court rulings that primarily affect humans, since they're of little consequence, but I'll reference a couple of them just for the benefit of my biped readers.

The first case revolved around some folderol about diversity in higher education and alleged resistance to said diversity. Now I'm going ignore whatever presumption it is that lets humans refer to a four-year paid vacation from reality as "higher education" and get right to the point. As long as humans make dogs go to obedience school specifically for the purpose of learning to get along with other dogs, then I say what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Without a bit of obedience training we can't take you out in public because you just start yelling at strangers.

The other court case that seemed to get everybody's panties in a bunch had something to do with a couple of people in Texas who were doing it doggie-style. You can imagine what my position is on that. At any rate, you probably know that I'm an advocate for neutering humans before they're old enough to breed, specifically because they're so infantile about sex. They all do it, but they all go bonkers when anyone else does it. They'd all be much less high-strung if they were neutered. And it also helps preserve that melodious high-pitched voice in the males.

But none of that is either here nor there. What I'm really concerned about are the cases that more directly impact our lives.

Perhaps one of most significant legal rulings in my lifetime is the one coming out of Utah that rules that cats and dogs are not the same. This gives legal weight to my long-running assertion (which is also the title of my new book, due out in October) that "Dogs are from Neptune, Cats are from Uranus."

In a decision that's both despicable and retrograde, a New York court has ruled that cutting off a dog's tail does not violate an animal anti-cruelty statute. I'm like, "say what?" I mean, when there's a rule that says that no dog's tail can be longer than four inches, I'm pretty sure we're dealing with some seriously misplaced pianist envy. As our legal champion argued, dogs use their tails to communicate. The logic that tails get tangled in the briars may be true, but I'd like to point out that if we cut the tongues off of our humans, they'd get in a lot less trouble, too. That doesn't justify the act. Sheesh. (P.S. - AKC show dogs running around in briars? Those prissies? Yeah, right. I'll believe it when I see it.)

And here's an amusing lawsuit as told from the human POV. Apparently some guy named his dog after his next door neighbor and then went around cursing the dog by name in public. What it doesn't mention is that not only did the dog initiate her own countersuit alleging slander, but she has also changed the name of her human from "bark bark" to "barf barf."

And finally, there's the issue of just how much a dog is worth. Here's a case where God says a dog is worth "$50,000" and the Court is left to decide whether or not it dares to differ with the omnipotent one. Now there's a lot to consider in this case, but I'd like to point out that the time your dog warned you that your husband was home early and coming up the driveway was probably worth $50,000 all by itself, right? And I won't even mention how many times we've had to clean out the cat box for you. So be generous.

Well, I'm back from summer camp and sucking up all the air-conditioning I can get up my nose. I was at Camp Derryduh doing some post-doc research in semiotics, a recent hobby of mine. For those of you who are unfamiliar with semiotics, it's the study of signs and symbols and signal fires and artificial constructs, etc.

Some of my friends think that studying semiotics is dumb, but it's not, it's just French. Granted, the word itself comes to us as a bastardization of the phrase "semi-neurotic," and originally referred to ideas that were halfway stupid, but we're well past the time when there was anything halfway about it.

What I've been concentrating on is trying to figure out what signs about dogs really signify. For instance, here's a sign I found posted on craphound.com (apparently not a real dog) that I've been analyzing. (click image for larger original site version.) As near as I can tell, this sign is a funny jab at women, who are more used to being told "Attention Wives: Pick up after your husbands. Thank you." Of course dogs don't leave their underwear and beer cans laying around, so the tongue-in-cheek humor is immediately evident. But I'm not interested in the human humor. Rather, I'm concerned about the second part of the sign that starts "Attention Dogs…"

Trying to figure out what this sign signifies is problematic on several levels. You know how Japanese children like to run around with t-shirts that have English phrases on them? And you laugh at how ridiculous it is? Stuff like "I love your happy watermelon" or "My homework went to the bathroom and all I got was this stupid t-shirt." But they don't know what it says. They just think it's amusing to be wearing something with English on it.

And the same thing happens with English-speaking athletes walking around with Asian character tattoos that look cool but actually say something like "My mom's hairdresser is in the very orange refrigerator."

So, I have to assume that whoever it was in the North Vancouver district who made this sign didn't actually speak dog and didn't realize that when dogs see "Grrrrr, bark, woof" it means "Did any of your father's bear turds lose this weird collar?"

Woody is of the opinion that there's a typo in this sign and what the human meant to say was "Grrr, bark, wolf" which, of course, means "Next rest stop, 23 miles, so you better go now." Possible, I guess, but if they're not willing to hire a dog proofreader, then they deserve to be ridiculed.

Anyway, if you, like me, are a big fan of semiotics, then you might be interested in my Master's Thesis: "The Semiotics of French Dog Signs" even if it is a bit technical for the casual reader.

snarg, snarg, snaaaaarg... dam bug up my nose... oops, pardon me... anyway... eye eye eye realize that their our a lot of blogs out their, butt eye half two confess that eye dew knot reed very many of them. my mane complaint is that most blogs our buy people, and knot very mini our buy dogs. face it. people our boaring with lousy priorities. they'd rather talk about politics then deer ticks, about girls then squirrels, about corporate malfeasance rather then possum guts. and if eye, four a moment, thought sum won else's sex life was the least bit interesting, eye'd bee putting up daily posts about gilda's pathetic fantasies.

butt... and this is a big butt, people blogs often half sum thing that eye dough knot half. and that's a "wish list." that's wear a blogger has a list on amazon.com of stuff ewe can by them inn order to simulate the task/reward ritual. ore sum thymes it's about lechery. sort of a virtual come-on four blog readers in heat. (end they complain about leg-humping. two each his own, eye say.)

sew, and at any rate, in order two stay current, get sum free stuff, end facilitate yor fantasies, eye halve established my own wish list. jest by me anything ewe see on this list end eye will imagine myself dewing whatever it is ewe want me two imagine myself dewing two ewe. how cool is that? huh?

You know, sometimes I give humans a lot of grief, but the one thing I really admire about them is that they're neither greedy nor materialistic. For instance, when a human finds a really well-aged piece of raw meat, the kind of meat that makes you drool so heavy they measure it in gallons-per-minute. I mean a piece of meat so luscious you have to beat the flies off with a stick, with an aroma so fragrant that even from 100 feet away you have to take deep breaths to keep from swooning. Yes, I'm talking meat as good as it gets, and yet humans never even take a bite. Instead they share the whole thing amongst their animal friends.

Then there's Woody. Given the same opportunity, he'd suck that whole piece of meat down faster than a scared squirrel with bad gas and a tail on fire.

And the greed doesn't stop there. Woody has to have EVERYTHING. If it's bigger than a dog tag, he's gonna claim it and pee on it. He just spends all day pee-ing on things. "That's mine, and that's mine, and that's mine," he's saying. "This tree over here is mine, and this shrub is mine, and this fence is mine, and this hubcap is mine and this stick is mine and this rock is mine." Pu-leeese.

Compare that to human behavior. Humans don't seem to need to own hardly anything. Humans keep life simple. Granted, they all seem obsessed with laying claim to the big white drinking bowl in the bathroom, but other than that you only see occasional displays of materialism, and that's usually way out in the country where nobody else cares.

So what's all this got to do with us not posting for a couple of weeks? Well, it's like this. A while back I was working on a post about training humans to leave the refrigerator door open when Woody comes by and wants to post something about squirrel porno. I say, "As soon as I'm done, Woody," but Woody, being Woody, lifts his leg and says "No now. This is MY powerbook." And, well, he shorted out the monitor and fried the keyboard and it's taken two weeks to get it back from the shop.

Have you ever noticed how humans have this tendency to just suddenly get up and leave and forget to take you along? Sometimes they just go out the door and walk out of sight. Other times they get in their automobile and drive away. They seldom realize that such behavior is not only a major breach of pack etiquette, but that they are placing themselves in grave danger.

For instance, whenever we're along in the car, and we see a dog along side the road, we immediately start screaming and barking to make sure it doesn't try to leap on the car hood, smash the windshield, tear Stump's arms off, steal all the groceries, mark on the front seat and leave. It could happen. Plain and simple, we can't do our job if our human forgets to take us along.

It would help if we knew more about why they leave, but it's hard to tell. A study by noted dog sociologist Professor Tucker suggests that this might be some kind of food-seeking behavior, noting that sometimes humans return from these trips with a fresh supply of dead cans, which they then open and make available on a sporadic basis. On more successful hunting forays they will return with these large flat round things that are covered with cheese, tomato and dead pig parts. Tucker speculates that it's some kind of road kill, but that doesn't explain the flat cardboard box. Anyway, it's good if you can scam a piece.

But regardless of the reason people leave, some dogs just tolerate it, sitting meekly while their human disappears out the door. What those dogs don't realize is that this just reinforces the subtle message that "yes, it's okay to abandon me here and consequently place yourself in grave danger." That's bad for you and it's bad for the person, so let's discuss some ways to educate your human.

For starters, you need to understand the human word "stay." Often, before they leave, humans will look at you and say "stay." Some dogs respond to this by sitting and watching, but that's a mistake. More recent studies indicate that "stay" actually means, "wait here for a moment while I try to leave, then you run as hard as you can to catch me." It's a fun game, although you'll probably get bored with it before your human will. They just keep doing it over and over again. They say "stay," they leave, you run and catch them, they bring you back, they say "stay," they leave, you run and catch them, etc., etc.

But regardless of whether or not your human is playing the "stay" game, or just leaving home without a word, you are going to have to retrain that behavior to maintain a successful relationship. Some humans are more responsive than others to this kind of training. Lots a times a dog can succeed just by chasing after their human every time they leave until they finally relent and take you along. But you have to be consistent here. Forget once or twice and the human will quickly start reverting to old behavior patterns.

Other humans aren't nearly so quick to learn. Some dogs have tried choke collars on their humans, but it's cruel and I don't think fear is a very effective training method. Rather, I prefer shame. Next time you get abandoned, try this. After your human has gone, you leave and go the other direction. Find a place to hide; in the woods, under a house, whatever. The important thing is to stay there as long as you possibly can. You might want to chow down in advance, because this could take a few days.

When your humans return they will start looking for you. They will wander the neighborhood, call your name and over time will start sounding increasingly worried and desperate. Your task is to wait as long as you can, then return home. It's best if you can return in the rain all covered with mud. Think "bedraggled." This usually convinces your human that they should never leave you home alone ever again. (Once they've cleaned you up, this is also an excellent time to push a few other boundaries, such as eating out of the cat food bowl).

Finally, there's the special case of you "partment" dogs. For those of you who don't know, partment dogs are dogs who live in human kennel facilities, large buildings that house many separate packs of humans. It's usually not possible to get away and hide when you're locked in a partment. But you can still use shame as a training tool. Here's how.

Wait until your human is gone. This usually means listening for at least two or three doors to close. Then start barking. A lot. Loud. Let the neighbors know how much pain you're in. Say things like "help, my paw is stuck in the toaster," or "there's a rabid cat hanging from the light fixture," or "I fell down and I can't get up." Then when your human comes home, the neighbors will have summoned the behavior modification people (those folks in the blue uniforms with the shiny badges). These folks will explain to your human that from now on they either take you along when they leave, or end up in the people pound. That usually does the trick.

So good luck with your training, and remember what they say, "a human without its dog is like a tree without it's bark."

It pretty much goes without saying that humans aren't exactly the most attractive animals on the planet. Large bare patches of skin, that ungainly upright posture, glaringly white teeth and funny ears are just some of the visible characteristics that take some getting used to. But for most dogs the most ungraceful aspect of the human appearance is the nose, or, more accurately the lack of a nose. Sure we get used to it, but how many of us really understand the human nose and how it functions?

Most dogs assume that the human nose, like the dog nose, is for smelling scents. And it's possible that once upon a time that was right. But even a casual observation of human behavior indicates that they have little, if any, ability to smell. Have you ever seen one human smell another human's crotch or butt? Doesn't happen. (Well, there was that one guy, but he seemed to get hit a lot.)

Humans are so totally oblivious to the scents of other people that the only way they can tell if another human is in heat is to get the person drunk and see what happens. And they're always getting into fights because they can't smell trouble coming a mile away.

You've probably played the smell game with your human, where you take a favorite shoe or remote control device and hide it to see if the human can find it. They rarely can. And even if you play the game over and over again, they never get any better at it.

Dog scientists who study human cadavers point out that the human skull just doesn't have room for enough nasal sensors. The human nose only accommodates a nasal passage a few inches long, whereas the dog's longer nose with its convoluted nasal passages would reach nearly 1500 miles if stretched out in a straight line. (That's in dog miles.)

As humans have evolved their skulls have gotten increasingly bulbous in the area behind the eyes where it seems to have no useful purpose, while the nasal area continues to shrink. There is even evidence to suggest that humans have a tendency to ostracize other humans with large noses, refusing to breed with them or put them in the centerfolds of their magazines. They seem to want to maintain just enough nose to hold their glasses, and then go to surgeons to get the rest removed.

There is probably no way to reverse this negative development, but we can learn how to make the best of it. Here's a few tricks that can help your human get a little bit more in touch with what's left of his or her inner smell.

For starters, always remember to breathe directly in their faces. If you sit quietly at their feet, they're never going to know that you just cleaned out the cat box for them.

Humans can rarely smell anything that's not extremely close to them, so what professional trainers often do with their humans is pay careful attention to the paths they walk, and then leave large piles of do-do where humans can step in them. This way the human will carry your scent around for a while and develop a deeper understanding of just who you are and what you smell like. This is especially effective if your human wears those waffle-soled hiking boots.

And when you can't take your human to the smell, you can always bring the smell back to your human. Say you're out running around and you come across a deer carcass that's been rotting in the woods for three or four weeks. If you run back to the house and try to tell you human, you can bark and jump and roll over and beg and do everything but write "dead deer" in the mashed potatoes and he's not going to come out and look at what you've found. But if you roll around in the juicy parts of the dead deer and get the smell all over your fur (and remember, human smell is weak, so you've got to REALLY rub it in) and then go home, nine times out of ten your human is going to jump up, grab his own nose to indicate understanding and scream "Omygod, Woody found a dead deer!"

There's just nothing more rewarding than a moment like that when you've actually managed to establish direct communication with your human, however brief. It makes it all worthwhile, even the bath afterwards, and that's saying a lot.

This is my second installment on human behavior and training. Last time I talked about sweat, this time I'm going to cover thumbs. Thumbs are those opposing appendages humans have on their front legs sort of where we have dew claws. It gives humans a unique ability to grasp things. (If only they could grasp ideas as easily as they can grasp objects.)

If you think about it, dogs could easily become extremely resentful of thumbs (assuming we ever became resentful about anything) since just about every tool that exists out there requires a thumb to operate. But then again, the existence of thumbs more or less explains how humans have evolved into dog's best friend. By keeping humans and their thumbs around, we've got willing help that can open cans of food, drive cars, remove ticks, and find the animal channel using the remote.

But of course, when you combine thumb-ability with that flighty and caffeinated human personality, there's going to be a down side. And that, as we know, is that they like to pick things up and throw them. Talk to any dog over the age of 40 and they'll tell you how much of their youth was wasted picking up after humans.

If you're new to humans, here's what to look out for. You'll be chilling, just hanging out, and suddenly the human will pick up your ball or toy or your favorite stick and throw it as far as they can. You run out and pick it up, bring the toy back, and as soon as you put it where it belongs, they pick it up and throw it again. Over and over. Some days it would drive me so nuts that I'd stay up all night just barking in frustration.

But you don't have to tolerate that behavior. With a little work you can train your human to behave, it just takes a bit of tough love. Here's what you do. First of all you have to assess the value of the thrown object to the human. If they just pick up a stick, then you don't move. Just let 'em keep throwing sticks until there's none left.

If it's something the human doesn't want to lose, then you run out, pick it up, and then make them chase you to get it back. When they finally catch up with you, hang on tight and make them bribe you with a dog treat before you'll let go.

If it's something REALLY valuable to the human, say one of those silly designer dog toys that looks like a bone or a plate, but costs a lot, then you run out, pick it up and keep running until you're out of sight, then you put it down where they'll never find it. I know it's hard to do that, because nothing makes a human more depressed than losing money, but with a little bit of nuzzling they'll get over it.

You won't cure them of throwing in day, but the important thing is being consistent. Start with short sessions and gradually increase your refusal to pick up after them. When they finally stop throwing things, remember to reward them. If you've got a dead squirrel hidden away or if you can regurgitate some hot lunch, just leave it out where it will surprise them. They won't forget it.

dam, dam, dam. sun, of, a, bitch. it's hunting season again. pee, puke, piss, poop, puss. i hate it when that happens.

what, ewe ask, is hunting season? it's the thyme of the year when humid beans, compensating four the fact that they have week eyesite, pour hearing, a lousy cents of smell and slow reflexes, put lawn chairs up in trees and use weapons of mess destruction too catch food. (some of them are sew stupid they don't even eat it after they kill it, but then again they never had to survive on canned dog food.)

sew why due i hate hunting season? because i have two where a bright orange collar four the duration and it itches like crazy. if only those fools had half a brain, they'd know the difference between a turkey and a dog and eye could get rid of this tacky outer where. it's sew knot fat. heck, if they'd just tell me what they wanted, i'd go catch it four them. it's what i due four a living.

hay hay hay! eye got won eye got won eye got won. hear's a grate party trick when you have a human around.

first, weight until the human sits. then walk up, sit down and hold yor paw up. when ewe due that, they almost always reach out, grab your paw and say "shake." you raise and lower your paw a couple of thymes, and then put it back on the floor.

then ewe dew the hole thing all over again.

this will get the human reel excited. the human will shout at the other humans two watch. then the human will hold out it's hand and say "shake." since all his friends are watching, ewe just stare at him like he's crazy. he will say "shake" again while holding out his hand. ewe just sit there. (maybe let your paw flinch just a little bit.) pretty soon he's sitting there saying "o come on, shake, shake, shake, come on, shake, shake, shake." and just like that you've got your human singing a 70s disco song!

Back when Woody and I first committed to the idea of a weblog (back when weblogs consisted of the fascinating if obsessed musing and diaristic detail spewing from the keyboards of anonymous citizens, not the daily pusillanimous political pontificating of self-proclaimed pseudo-cyber-journalists as well as becoming a desperate marketing gimmick for cash-strapped online magazines -- in other words, about two months ago, and I mean human months not dog months) one of the primary things we hoped to accomplish was to serve as an online place to inform and educate other dogs about the behavior and training of people. But since Woody is neither focused nor articulate, and totally capable of giving spell-checkers a bad name, we've been slow to start. But here's an attempt to get the ball rolling. So here's Lesson One.

The first thing a dog should know about humans is that they can't pant to dissipate heat. Sure you see them with their tongues sticking out, and their mouths are always open for one reason or another, but it's dogopomorphizing to imagine that that behavior is the same as the panting we normally do.

We're not really sure what that behavior is about in humans, although researchers Rover, Spot and Gritlips of the Second Back Yard to the South Institute note that humans are prone to imitation and what we consider panting in humans might be nothing more than mimicked behavior.

Why is this important to know? Because many dogs find themselves having to take their people for walks, out to play, hunting, etc. Some dogs are lucky enough to have people that will work along side them while they chase squirrels, bark at intruders, keep cats in line, etc., but most people are lazy and need to have a formal exercise period after you're done with the chores.

The problem is that dogs sometimes forget that, relatively speaking, people are slow and poorly conditioned and can only keep up with a dog in stride for short periods of time. (Remember that two of their legs are vestigial and useless and hang limply at their sides when they run.) But if you don't know how to recognize the warning signs of a human suffering from over-exertion, your human can suffer from increased appetite, heart attacks, flatulence and bouts of loud barking in your direction.

Ironically, if you persist, some humans are so anxious for approval that they will take a rope or strap and attach it to their hand and your collar just to help themselves keep up.

So how do you know when your human is over-exerting? Ignore the pseudo-panting and pay attention to their hide instead. When their hide starts looking very wet, sort of like they've been walking in the rain, that's an indication that their body is trying to dissipate excess heat. They call it sweating. Yes, it's smelly and disgusting, and it probably explains why they have so little hair, but hey, isn't that just one of the reasons we love them?

"heaven goes by favor. if it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in." —samuel clemens / mark twain