Just a little bit of dog love....

There are times Elka's mere existence amazes people. There aren't many Dobermans in my town (I saw one from afar the other day, and we played with a puppy last year or the year before), and even a not conformationally correct Doberman is striking. Elka is also very large, which adds to the wow factor.

Look over there! What's that?

I know it's kind of the stereotype of the dog owner to think that their dog is the smartest and bestest dog of them all. Really, it's every individual dog's job to be the best dog. It's just the way things are.

Of course I have stories like that, though. Where I just couldn't believe Elka's intelligence, or the mental connections that she made to reach the behavioral end. A main reason we picked Doberman is for the intelligence; perhaps we didn't think that through? But it's been great, for the most part!

Book Review: The Social Life of Dogs, by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

Previously, I read The Hidden Life of Dogs, by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, which was a book about dogs with dogs, and the sorts of lives they form and decisions they make without human intervention.  The fact that Thomas did this "study" with her own dogs in her house (and later in a fenced area of her  prodigious yard in Virginia) made this very strange to me.  It was well enough written, however, that when I saw The Social Life of Dogs in a used book store in town, I bought it with the change in the bottom of my purse, willing to give it a whirl.