“Smart dogs earn fewer treats. How is that fair?”
She jumps masterfully, mind you – on terra firma. But she has always feared and doubted jumping down from a height, and I have done nothing to amend this aversion. Instead, I am happy to constrain her movements whenever I need to. Our conversation pit is her hamster trail: Room to roam, nowhere to go. In the mean time, I am waiting to see what she works out on her own.
And yes: When I am not selling and managing real estate, I am playing with a puppy to figure out how she knows what she knows. I’ve been writing little things like this at Facebook forever, typically precedent to writing something more momentous, but that’s a habit I have to break.
Here’s the fascinating part: Much like infants, dogs know almost nothing when they’re born. The snake-brain stuff works, but that’s more process than knowledge or even awareness. But instinct or race-memory or anything like an in-born wisdom of the workings of the world outside the womb seems to me to be utterly absent.
My take is that Cleo does not know anything that she has not learned from the world of experience. She has no thinking brain, but since all mammals are easily-trained, we know she has the ability to connect dots: Not A to C, but A to B on her own, all the time, and A to B to C with training.
I think much of what is denoted as instinct in mammals is actually learned, emulated behavior: Otters teach their young to swim and male dogs who don’t grow up around leg-hikers pee like girl dogs for life.
Cleo is two treats away – one for the jump down, one for the jump back up – from being mistress of the sofa. But she doesn’t know she can do it, even though she never couldn’t, even though she has always been more than up to the challenge.
There’s a lesson in there about self-limitation, but it won’t do you a damn bit of good unless you jump off the sofa and run it down yourself.
In other news:
Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: Balance is Slowly Returning as Homebuying Demand Moderates.
CNBC: Lumber executive says drop in prices has reignited demand for building projects.
Brad Polumbo: Biden’s eviction moratorium isn’t just illegal and bad for landlords — it hurts renters, too.
Fox News: Armed private security fills police void in downtown Portland where riots, shootouts occurred.
Michael Barone: California liberals flunking first duty of government.
City Journal: More Beautiful Backyards: Advocates of building new housing should persuade opponents, not attack them.
