Archive for the Bond-related Category

Below are links to the show I did with Drs Kim Bloomer and Jeannie Thomason on June 17th about human emotions as they affect animal health and behavior. But as always happens with these two great folks, the conversation strayed to other areas, too.
For the written/streaming version, click here.

For the mp3/download, click here.

One of the wonderful things about working with companion animals is that I get an intimate view of how behaviors change as the animals mature. The puppy and kitten toddlers we get at 8-12 weeks give way to adolescents, young then mature adults, and then senior citizens, with each life stage adding its own unique [...]

Do you ever get the feeling that your dog or cat is trying to drive you crazy? I’m not referring to the way you feel when your dog rolls in maggot-infested dead animal guts 5 minutes before your boss arrives, or when the cat pees on your $75 French bra just because it’s new. I’m [...]

The Baby in this post is my 2-year-old granddaughter, but for alliterative purposes, I co-opted the name her cousin Lauren calls her, Baby Geneva. BeeBee and I stayed with Geneva last weekend while my son and his wife took some much needed time off and I saw a side of Bee I’d never seen before. [...]

At the end of my last entry about BeeBee, I was sitting in my car sobbing, but I didn’t remain that way for long. For one thing, there were too many nice people coming to the clinic who would surely come over to ask me what was wrong.  If they did, I knew I would [...]

On the drive to the veterinary clinic, BeeBee looked out the window for while, or at least she faced it for a while, then shifted her focus to the air coming in the vents. She soon tired of that, too, and curled up on the passenger seat and went to sleep as if riding in [...]

Did you ever congratulate yourself for having all the bases covered only to watch everything go down the toilet in an instant? That’s what happened to me the last day of April. I got up that morning and made a note on my calendar to set up an appointment to get BeeBee spayed in May [...]

 
Since my last post several weeks ago, a lot has happened  to remind me how much the quality of our realities depends on how we process the sensory stimuli we receive from the world around us. It began when winter ended. I don’t mean “ended” as in “It gradually started to get warmer and the [...]

A friend recently sent me the following lovely poem by poet extraordinaire  Mary Oliver. Because it was about a dog, I automatically compared that animal’s experiences with those of my puppy, Ollie. Once I did that, I could not resist the temptation to portray Ollie’s alternate reality poetically, too. Below are both poems, the exquisite [...]

Spring officially came last week and with it a lot of changes. Let me pause here to note that “spring” is a relative term. Last week that meant only one snow storm and one night with record-breaking low temperatures. However, in spite of the fact that the snow was very heavy and very wet, there [...]