Catherine Forsythe, at the Dog Reader, has posted Part 3 of “How to Teach Your Dog to Swim.” This is a great series of posts. See the links to Part 1 and Part 2 in my previous post. Important advice: if you need to “help” your dog in the water, get behind it and just push it toward shore.

Callie is really comfortable swimming now. She obviously loves to swim and would swim herself to exhaustion if we let her. We’re giving her small doses at a time.

The Fourth of July can be disastrous for dogs, because the sound of fireworks drives some of them to panic. The Humane Society has a good article titled “Keep Your Pet Safe on July 4th.” Best advice: Leave your dog in a safe room at home with a radio or TV playing at normal volume to help drown out the sound of fireworks. “Safe” means that there is nothing in the room that the dog can damage, or vice versa — nothing that can hurt the dog. The article tells the sad story of D.O.G., a white German Shepherd that ran away from home because of the noise of fireworks.

Callie is still “crate training,” so she will spend her evening in her crate with a radio to help drown out the noise.

Here’s an excerpt from “My Doggie Says…” that talks about Jamie’s fear of thunder and lightning. It’s an example of how you need to understand your dog sometimes in order to have a real relationship with it.

“I’m really afraid of thunder and lightning.”

Thunderstorms are not common in Southern California. But we had an unusually breathtaking and awe-inspiring storm this year, starting at midnight one summer evening. Many of the lightning strikes were less than a mile from our house. At first, Jamie acted like there were cats on the fence. She asked to go outside, and she ran across the back yard toward “cat corner.” She got very wet from the rain. The second time she asked to go out, I opened the door, but she saw how hard it was raining, and she just stood there and watched.

Jamie started to shiver. She was obviously miserable. She was shivering very hard and panting as if there were a hundred cats right outside the window. I tried lifting her up on the bed several times, but when the next thunder clap arrived, she slipped down off the bed and started looking out the window again. I tried getting her to lie beside the bed so I could give her a good puppy scratch. But that didn’t work either.

Finally, in desperation, I grabbed a blanket and got Jamie to follow me into the den, where I closed the blinds (so she couldn’t see the lightning flashes) and turned up the television volume (to drown out the thunder claps) and we both got a good night’s sleep.

This weekend we’re dogsitting daughter Karen’s Golden Retriever, Ishka (short for Uisgebagh, which is Gaelic for whiskey). Ishka, you will remember, if you read My Doggie Says…, was Jamie’s best pal. Ishka and Jamie were born within a few weeks of each other, and they were best friends right from their puppy days. Sometimes they played so hard you thought they would just melt into a little puppy puddle. At 12 1/2 years-old, Ishka goes pretty slow, so it’s interesting to watch the interaction between 6-month-old Callie, always full of puppy energy, and Ishka.

Here’s a photo from My Doggie Says… of Ishka (on the left) and Jamie at Lake Arrowhead.

But first two news items of importance:

The LA Times has an article today about using DNA testing to determine the genetic makeup of mutts. (“Decoding the secret lives of dogs,” LA Times, June 24, 2007.) If you’re really interested in understanding your dog — and nurturing it — this seems like a great idea. If you’re not sure about your dog’s genetics, why not find out? It seems like it could only help you understand your dog’s personality a little better.

On a tragic, and somewhat personal note, the Daily Breeze (serving the South Bay area of Los Angeles) has a very sad story today: El Segundo police dog killed in hit and run. The Dutch Shepherd, Basco, was a five-year veteran and hero of the El Segundo police department.

Somtimes things come together in strange ways. In March, I was the emcee for a dog walk in Redondo Beach called “Fido and Friends.” It was a fundraiser for the Wellness Community, a wonderful organization that serves cancer patients. Basco, the dog who was killed yesterday, was the star of “Fido and Friends.” He and another Dutch Shepherd gave a demonstration of their skills. The other dog’s handler, a different Officer Ken, is a friend of mine, and it turns out that last year he, too, lost a magnificent dog in a tragic accident. To put a final note on all this sadness, I saw (the other) Officer Ken Thursday night, at the viewing for our mutual good friend and shared veterinarian, Dr. Chris Omoto Beezley.

We’re all bonded to our pets, but imagine the bond and trust between our police officers and their canine pals. There are times when the lives of both man and dog depend on doing exactly the right thing at the right time. So, Officer Ken, we share the loss of a very special veterinarian and a very special dog.

On a cheerier side, we picked up Ishka on Saturday morning for the ride to Lake Arrowhead. Callie was all strapped into the back seat of our car with her puppy safety harness, but she had lots of room to maneuver. So when I lifted Ishka onto the car seat, Callie — in her puppy jubilance — jumped on Ishka and got her puppy harness hopelessly tangled up with Ishka and Ishka’s leash. Total puppy spaghetti!

Once we got the puppy spaghetti sorted out, we made our way to Lake Arrowhead, which is about a two-hour drive from Karen’s house. In the winter, it’s often around fifteen or twenty degrees cooler here at 5,000 feet elevation, but in the summer the daytime temperatures are about the same as down below. The air is refreshing and it’s a great place for doggies.

It’s a great place for doggies, so long as they stay away from the coyotes. There are plenty of coyotes around; we don’t see one every time we come here, but they’re not scarce. So it does seem a little strange that we spotted coyotes on our property twice yesterday. Callie’s always on a leash, but the coyotes may be paying attention.

Callie spotted something last night, when she was out on our deck, and she barked her first bark! It was probably either a racoon or a coyote — we didn’t see it — but Callie did. We were starting to wonder if she could bark. Now we know. At almost six months old, she has a great Golden Retriever bark.

These days the dynamic between Callie and Ishka is pretty much Callie trying to initiate play and Ishka saying “bug off!” And Callie’s very respectful. She tries a few times to get some play started, and then she goes about her business. I don’t know if this is because Ishka is the alpha animal, or because Callie just respects her elders. But last night Callie did something very cute — probably quite symbolic in a wolf pack world: She carried her favorite toy (a little stuffed dog) over to where Ishka was lying, and she dropped it right at Ishka’s front paws. And then Callie walked away and started to play with another toy. In the wolf pack world of alpha dominance and submission, this must be pretty close to the ultimate message that a doggie can send.

Most of Jamie’s “messages” in My Doggie Says… were based on a behavior. She would walk to a door, or stop and make eye contact. Or adopt a specific posture in a particular location. Her behaviors were acted out, and my challenge was to figure out what she meant by each one.

Here’s an example of Jamie standing in front of her puppy treat jar and making a polite request for one of the flavor gems.

Traditionally, though, dog talk has been interpreted in terms of how the dog wags its tail, holds its ears, pants, shows its teeth, and other specific body actions. Here are two good short articles on how to interpret this kind of dog body language: 1) Dog Communication (from Wikipedia) and 2) How to talk — and listen — to your pets (by Kim Campbell Thornton, MSNBC Contributor).

The Wikipedia article explains how a dog’s tail, teeth, ears, mouth, eyes and eyebrows, feet and legs, and head can send messages about its mood or aggressiveness.

As we discussed in an earlier blog, dogs are really into signalling their dominance, or submissiveness, over other dogs. This article explains that dogs sometimes signal their confidence, or degree of dominance, by how high they hold their tail, some even curling their tail up & over their back. This might be something to pay attention to with your dog.

Kim Campbell Thornton’s article also talks about tail wags and the messages they can send. A peppy tail wag can be friendly, whereas a slow steady tail wag can signal aggressiveness.

This article also suggests that establishing your dominance over your dog, as the alpha animal, can be over-rated. Being dominant in the relationship doesn’t guarantee that your dog won’t engage in problem behaviors.

I still like Amy’s comment from June 12: “Benevolent but Alpha.”

This article by Rob Stein, Washington Post Staff Writer, describes some fascinating experiments that suggest that dogs are smarter than scientists have thought. (What Were They Thinking? More Than We Knew. Washingtonpost.com, Monday, June 4, 2007)

The article describes an experiment performed at the University of Vienna. First, it was demonstrated that fourteen-month-old children imitated adult behavior, but only under certain circumstances. Then, a similar experiment was done with dogs. The scientists trained a Border Collie named Guinness to get a treat by pushing a wooden rod with her paw. Usually, a dog would do this with its mouth.

A group of dogs that saw Guinness push the rod while holding a ball in her mouth decided to push the rod with their mouths, because they concluded that Guinness was using her paw only because her mouth was busy. But the dogs that saw Guinness push the rod with no ball in her mouth concluded that this was the best way to get the treat, so they used their paws to push the rod.

The scientists were amazed that the dogs’ thought process was similar to that of the fourteen-month-old human children.

Many studies have tried to assess the “intelligence” of dogs. They all seem to conclude something like “dogs can’t work a Rubik’s Cube, so they must not be very smart.” Yet just being around my own pets, I’ve always felt that they were smarter than the scientists thought. Jamie (My Doggie Says…: Messages from Jamie. How a dog named Jamie “talks” to her people) really brought this home for me. She did some things that seemed to me to require a lot of intelligence.

Much of our intelligence comes from our brains’ ability to “associate” objects, ideas, places, images, people and other things. Jamie clearly had this ability. She could remember every jogging path we had taken. And she had her preferences. She knew, for example, which way to turn to get to our boat dock, which was her favorite place at Lake Arrowhead, because it was her place to swim. Here she is pulling us in the direction of our dock.

But even more amazing to me was the whole sequence of events leading up to an outing to our dock. It started with my green backpack (full of flashlights, bottle openers, etc.) coming out of the hall closet. As soon as Jamie saw it, she would get a big drink of water and sit by the front door waiting for us to get in the car. When we parked the car, she would pull us to the correct path. Then she would pull us to the correct dock. Then she would stand by the storage box that contained her floating “floppy disc.” Not just by the storage box, but at the exact place where she knew her “floppy” was stored. Then she would carry her “floppy” to the gate and wait until someone opened it so she could run down the gangway. Then she waited for one of us to throw her “floppy” into the lake so she could retrieve it. Then she would swim and swim and swim until we knew she had to stop.

This may not be a scientific proof that Jamie was “smart,” but it was pretty convincing to me. It was a complex sequence of events that she was able to work through in order to do one of the things that she was bred to do and one of the things that she loved more than anything else in the world — to retrieve her “floppy” and swim in the lake.

Here’s an example, from My Doggie Says…, about how you have to figure out what your dog is saying sometimes.

One morning, Barbara’s picture was in our local newspaper. So on our morning jog, Barbara, Jamie and I went to a vending machine to buy four copies of the paper. I rolled them up into a bundle and started to carry them home. The jog home is about one mile up a pretty steep hill.

As we ran up the hill, Jamie kept slowing down and looking back at me. I wasn’t sure what she was thinking, or “saying.” Barbara said, “I think she wants you to pay attention to her. Try giving her a little head scratch.” So I stopped and gave Jamie a little love, and off we jogged again. But Jamie kept looking back at me.

I tried the “head scratch” a few more times, but Jamie kept slowing down and looking back at me, making eye contact.

Finally, Barbara said, “Maybe she wants to carry the newspapers.” So I stopped and put the roll of newspapers in Jamie’s mouth. She raised her head a little to show how proud she was, and she carried the papers the rest of the way home.

Looking back, maybe it should have been obvious. After all, what would a Golden Retriever want to do more than “retrieve?” But it’s not always easy to figure out what a dog is saying. You have to look for clues and keep thinking “what could he/she be thinking?” I think this is a good example of how you can do a better job of nurturing your dog if you learn what it is bred to do and what it likes to do.

In this case, we didn’t need to analyze what was happening with her ears or her tail. As is often the case, the message is sent with an action. Often, an action that seems a little out of whack. It makes you wonder “why is she doing this?” There’s often an answer, but sometimes, only the doggie knows for sure.