Give a dog a voice and she will use it

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, language, dogs, speech therapy

Meet Stella, subject of the book by Christina Hunger, How Stella Learned to Talk: The Groundbreaking Story of the World's First Talking Dog.

Ms Hunger, a speech therapist who works with pre-verbal toddlers and autistic children, got Stella as a puppy several years ago. She noticed that Stella's gestures and sounds were similar to the things a young child or other non-verbal person will do to communicate.

She frequently uses AAC (Alternative and Augmentative Communication) devices with her clients to enable them to begin speaking when it seems that the usual abilities aren't (yet) working. She bought four recordable "speak-back" buttons and placed them where Stella would go to request to go outside, or play, or eat. It took the dog a few weeks to first try pushing one of the buttons. During those weeks, whenever Christina would take her outside, for example, Christina would say, "Outside" and push the button that also said aloud, "Outside". Similarly for the others. Once Stella figured out what the buttons were for, she began using them.

Over time, Christina and her husband added more buttons, until they decided to attach them to a single board in one place, so Stella could use them in combination if needed (such as "outside" "play") without walking from place to place. It took Stella some time to get used to the new arrangement, but then she took off. The board shown here has 25 word buttons and one with the phrase "love you". That was a year or two ago. I think the number of words Stella can now use has grown beyond 40.

Throughout the book the author makes it clear how much repetition and patience are needed. She also discusses speech therapy issues that are common to Stella and the toddlers she works with, such as the frustration a child (or dog) experiences when she wants to communicate something more clearly. Sometimes Stella has used word combinations to express a thought not on the board, such as "water bad" when the bowl was empty; "empty" hadn't been supplied (this is my illustration, I couldn't find the place in the book where this first occurred, and the book has no index). Little children do the same thing, particularly those with an AAC that they are outgrowing. We learn that children pick up words faster than we expect, so she is always ready to add many words to a child's AAC. AAC devices for children can often use thousands of words. Time will tell how many Stella learns!

Christina's blog is here, and there are dozens of videos on YouTube about Stella's accomplishments.

Knowing dogs

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, dogs, science journalism

I am not much of a dog person. The three dogs I owned all lived less than a year, each dying when struck by a car. By the time I was fifteen I was done with dogs. I had better luck with cats, keeping one for 18 years, but that is a subject for a different article.

Can you tell what this dog is feeling? Wouldn't you say he has guilt written all over him? I find it interesting that, seeing a furtive look on a friend, we might say he has guilt written all over his face, but of a dog, we generalize to the whole body. Dogs speak with their whole body, while human "body language" is largely confined to our faces.

Until recently, no scientist would agree that this dog is feeling guilt. That was considered unwarranted anthropomorphism. No animal was allowed to have feelings in any way mirroring human emotions, or thoughts of any sort. The paradigm in Animal Science courses of the 1960s was that animals didn't think, had only the most primitive emotions (left unnamed), and didn't genuinely feel pain (which allowed experimenters to inflict agony without feeling guilt themselves).

Jane Goodall changed all that, by naming the chimps she observed, and writing about them almost as though they were human. After terrific resistance, the scientific community began to shift. Now animal scientist Alexandra Horowitz can write Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know, and escape excommunication from the scientific community. As she tells us, dogs do see, though differently; they do smell, and much better than we; and they certainly know things, but having much different interests they also know things we don't know, just as we know much that they won't ever know. The book's illustrations, like that above, are by the author.

It starts with size. Attach a video camera to your knee or even lower and go about your business while it is running. This is better than attaching it to your dog, who just may object to being "critter-cammed". How does the world look from about one foot above the ground? Even more so, how does it smell? Our noses are four to five feet above ground level, where the scents that waft upwards from ground-bound "things" are much diluted. A dog's nose is naturally carried less than a foot high, and can easily be lowered right to ground level. So even if a dog's eyes were identical to ours, and his nose identical to ours (a tragic thought), it is like real estate: Location, Location, Location!

But a dog's eyes are different from ours. They do see most colors, but not red (neither does that bull in the field see red; a red flag or cape looks black to him, making him think he is being challenged by a rival bull). A dog's vision is from greenish-yellow to violet. In addition, most dogs see horizontal motion much more keenly than we, the better to detect that rabbit starting to turn aside. Yet for many of the things we see well, dogs' eyes are less efficient. A dog's vision is used two ways: firstly, to spot things worth smelling or tasting, and secondly, to observe us and know us. They attend to us most persistently.

(I have heard preachers say that only humans have religion, because "you never see a dog making an idol to pray to." They don't have to. They live among their deities! Think about it. We feed and shelter them, heal their illnesses, and freely exercise the power of life or death with them. We are their gods. If you lived in your god's house, and could see your god, would you not be very, very attentive?!?)

But the eyes are secondary to the nose, the nose! Most dogs are a million times better at smelling than you or I. Not only do they have 10,000 times as many smell cells; they have anatomical flaps and spirals that do a much better job of getting those smells to the cells. Where "seeing is believing" for a person, dogs only believe what they smell. A person your size, disguised as you, might fool your dog for a moment, but as soon as the air shifts the imposter's scent the dog's way, he'll know right away! Thus, if you are walking your dog, don't drag him away from every smell. That is like making a friend you are walking with go blindfolded.

Dogs have co-evolved with humans for 15,000 years or longer, perhaps much longer. The original wolves who worked their way into human camps and, eventually, homes, were those who could tolerate human nearness and contact; those who were best able to respond socially to us social apes. Experiments with Siberian foxes, begun two generations ago, showed how quickly one could turn wild foxes into a doglike domestic animal, just by selecting those which were least fearful of humans for breeding, and the same with their offspring. In the time it takes a human baby to grow up, about fifteen fox generations, the experimenters had a bunch of foxes that liked human contact, barked instead of yipped, had softer ears and more curly tails, and higher foreheads. All these characteristics seem to come as a package, genetically. There's a PBS video on this; it is uncanny seeing foxes that look like dogs and act like dogs.

But what do dogs know? Can they know as we know? Have you ever watched a sleeping dog twitch during a dream? Maybe she yelps quietly and her legs kick. She is playing with a friend, or chasing something, in her dream. Now think about your own dreams. Do you speak and hear words in your dreams? I do. Do you ever smell anything in a dream? I never have. It seems dogs always do, as much as can be told from watching them and noting how they snuffle during a dream as during waking. We tend to think in a combination of sights and words. We know what we can describe. Dogs thinking has to be different, based on sounds and bodily feelings (for they do love the tactile sense). I, at least, am convinced that any animal (not just vertebrates) thinks and feels things; that is what brains are for. Dogs happen to be more compatible with humans than any other animal, partly because there is quite an overlap between our ways of feeling and thinking.

The book's title comes from a saying by Groucho Marx (or one of his writers): "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." Dr. Horowitz spent more than a year observing, videoing, analyzing, and learning a bit more how to understand that postural language, Dog. After reading her book, inside of a dog, it is getting easier to read.

Most faithful friend image gallery

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, photos, dogs

Dogs by Catherine Johnson, with a few words by William Wegman and others, needs few words. It barely has a thousand words itself. Ms Johnson, not the author of this book but its collector, has collected photos of dogs, mainly family pix with dogs in them, all her life. She shares the best of her collection with us. Here are a couple examples, one showing the format of the quotes about dogs, to be found on about one page in ten.



There's no telling what page number these are found on; the pages aren't numbered. This is a photo album after all, and do you number the pages in your photo album? If you've read the prior two posts, you now know the origin of the image I used as an example.

Omnibus Review

kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, nonfiction, dogs, grammar, humor

I note I haven't posted since August 24th. That's when I began physical therapy for tendonitis caused by excessive use of the computer mouse. I wear a brace along the top of my arm, anchored to my thumb. A foot-long contrivance, all to protect a bit of tendon a half-inch long while it heals. I've recovered enough to make one post, which I'll use as a mega-review of the eight books I've read in the past twelve days. These are not in the order I read them.

First, the dog books:

• The Light-years Beneath My Feet, science fiction by Alan Dean Foster.
• The Dogfather, a mystery by Susan Conant.
• Dog World and the Humans who Live There, nonfiction by Alfred Gingold.

To over-generalize, the world (in the West, at least) is composed of dog people, cat people, a smattering of bird-, snake-, and other ex0tic pet-fanciers, and those who wonder how a "dumb animal" can inspire such devotion. Of course, we pet people know animals aren't dumb; they speak languages that humans seldom care to learn. Yet many, perhaps most, house pets learn quite a lot of the human language used around them. So who is the dumb one?

In Foster's tale, which continues the alien abduction story told in Lost and Found, the dog has been equipped to speak, and given sufficient brain boost to do so rather eloquently. The dog and his man, plus two alien creatures allied with them, continue their quest to return home after being captured by "evil alien zookeepers". It puts an interesting spin on the experience of many animals captured in the wild for our zoological parks.

The Conant mystery, about a dog trainer "invited" to train the new puppy of a Mafia figure, is touted as "The dog lovers' answer to Lillian Jackson Braun's The Cat Who series." Ms Braun's protagonists are two Siamese who keep a retired, rich journalist and provide him with clues to solve murder mysteries. Both cats and journalist are urbane, witty, and noble, though the gentleman in question can be a bit of a bumbler. Ms Conant's canines are definitely the kept ones, here, and the trainer is anything but urbane or noble. There is really no solving of a mystery in this book, unless it is the detection done by the Mafioso in figuring out who offed his favorite hit man. Inside job, of course. However, the story is enlivened by a view inside the world of high-stakes dog shows. A fun read, but Braun's cat stories are in no danger.

The Gingold narrative traces a "why" person's conversion to dog lover. Anyone who has seen a Norfolk terrier will understand that Gingold had no choice: "resistance is futile; prepare to be assimilated." Being a writer by trade, however, he goes a bit farther than you might expect, becoming conversant with dog breeders, trainers, and the show circuit. So the title is apt. George the terrier is a foil for a world of dogs that Mr. Gingold observes, records, and finds amusing or admirable by turn.

Now, a couple SF&F collections:

• Wild Galaxy, an anthology of Sci Fi stories by William F. Nolan.
• Bedlam's Edge, an anthology of Urban Fantasy stories, edited by Mercedes Lackey and Rosemary Edghill, written by fifteen writers including the editors. All concern Urban Elves or Mall Elves, the Sidhe set in Ms Lackey's bailiwick.

Here, the difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy could not be more pronounced. Nolan's stories are near-hard Sci Fi, shorter on explanation than "really hard" Sci Fi, but set in a universe that, we understand in reading, could be explained if he wished to take the extra space. I found it interesting that nearly all his stories derive their tension from solipsism: as "mechanicals" (androids) replace humans, how do you know which you are? I find his obsessive attention to this boundary reminiscent of Asimov's "I Robot" stories and their successors. For Asimov, robots were sane—or they could by—, humans weren't, nor could they be. His non-robot stories primarily explore various neuroses. Nolan digs deeper. Once you have machines that mimic humans so precisely, how to distinguish? I most of the stories, mayhem is required, to see the gears inside. In only a few does the human protagonist come to terms with the thought that every other "person" may be mechanical.

Finally, a diversity of nonfiction:

• Bob Hope: My Life in Jokes, a brief autobiogiggle, with brief notes by Bob Hope held together by material collected by daugher Linda Hope.
• The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution, by David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard.
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, a grammatical guide for the true sticklers among us, by Lynne Truss.

Ms Hope has done us all a service by collecting hundreds of her father's best jokes, and ordered them by decades (nine of them, at the time of writing). I remember seeing a live TV special in which Bob Hope appeared, when he was about 95. I don't know if the cameramen were being cruel or just unfeeling, but they broadcast him from the time he stepped from a limousine, helped by a nurse to reach the stage. It was, inadvertantly, quite touching. We saw a bent-over, tentative, shuffling old man led to the steps and helped up to the stage. At its verge, he was handed a microphone, the nurse backed away, and he seemed to bloom. The ancient vanished, and there was Bob Hope! He could'a been forty. His piece wasn't long, time enough for thirty or forty jokes, and he said goodbye to the host, handed over the microphone, vanished, and the nurse returned to help an old, old man leave. With Bob Hope, at any stage of his life (I was a fan for fifty years, and watched a couple of his movies made when my parents were young), what you saw was what he was.

Messrs. Kusek and Leonhard present a more serious issue. With about half the online American public, and many millions more worldwide, downloading music freely using peer-to-peer and similar networks, are we all criminals, or the vanguard in a sea change in the music industry? Really, the answer is "both". However, downloaders are criminals in the sense that the flow of traffic on I-95 between NYC and DC is composed of criminals, because they are all going 70 mph or faster in 55- or 65-mph zones. They are not "nefarious pirates," as the recording tycoons would have us believe. Pirates attempt to profit financially. Downloaders don't; they just want music at prices below rip-off. There is a principle of jurisprudence, that if more than 15% of a population refuse to abide by a law, it becomes impossible to enforce, and will eventually be replaced or eliminated. The authors expect the music industry to change much as other industries have changed, when disruptive technologies drive some segments of an industry out of business while setting the stage for new ones to arise and thrive (buggy-whips, any one?). Fact is, the recording industry is going away, but the music industry as a whole will grow mightily. The authors' preferred method of music distribution is "music like water," where part of our subscription to online services is divvied up according to the services provided. It is quite doable now to record the number of times a particular entertainer's track is copied, and to pay accordingly. This will eventually work for videos and still images also.

Ms Truss has a visceral reaction to solecism. That means, these days she must feel pretty sick all the time. Unlike the vast majority in the "grammar advice" genre, her book is readable, entertaining, and educational. Having a sense of proportion, she knows where to stop. So, while she briskly explains a half dozen uses of the comma, for example, when she mentions as an aside one writer who lists seventeen (calling them an insufficient collection), she doesn't give us the seventeen. Considering that very few people could enumerate two or more uses of the comma, what's the use?!? While some writers decry punctuation almost in its entirety—in manifestoes that make copious use of punctuation—and the spread of phone texting and "emailese" (e.g. "CU B4 8" and "wrking on pres. - hav it dun by noon - boss wants rt aftr lnch") bid fair to replace almost every symbol with the dash, the author makes a good case that punctuation will survive, as writers find the need to ensure their readers will understand their writing. Had Matthew had the use of a comma in 55 AD, theologians wouldn't be fighting over the passage rendered "I say to you, today you shall be with me in paradise" by Protestants, and by Catholics, "I say to you today, you shall be with me in paradise."

OK, that's the lot. Tendon a bit sore, time to ice it then put my brace back on.