Miscues (or Missed Cues?)

The other night, Elka asked to go out, so I sent her to the back door. We have a routine, she sits and waits, and I either snap the leash on and have her wait some more, or I let her blast out the back door. I thought maybe I'd seen a deer or something out back, so I wanted her to wait after the leash was on. Typically, we hold up a finger, like "wait a minute", for signal purposes. I held out my palm instead.

(just a picture of Elka sitting, not from "The event")

Sick and Sleeping

So, this week, I was largely felled by an unpleasant flu/cold thing. Not many activities were to be had.

Instead, there was a lot of this:

And some of this:

And even a little bit of this:

I will say, it's nice to know that you have a dog who ignores bags of used tissues that are within easy reach, because that would be totally gross and I don't even want to confront such an issue. It's also nice to have a nice, warm dog who will happily nap with you. If my nose wasn't plugged, I'm sure the Doberman-aromatherapy of brownies would have been very relaxing. Nice thing number 3? We thought to teach Elka hand signals, so when my voice went, we could still communicate just fine.

Doggie-Vous Francais?

One day last week, I saw on some news site or other, that there was a proposal to make sure all dogs in Montreal understood cues in both English and French. The notion would be that since in that part of Canada, lots of folks speak French, there shouldn't be linguistic barriers if you were interacting with stranger-dogs and stranger-people. Yearly testing to make sure owners were complying, etc. The thought of legislated language requirements in dog training makes me suffer ennui.

Of course, it was evidently a spoof. But that doesn't stop it from being an interesting thought. Does your dog understand more than one spoken human language? How is your dog doing with just English?