more about dogs

I went for a walk with my dog today. It was awesome, we went through the woods, everything was covered with snow and looked really pretty. Normally, the path I take through the woods is very muddy because it's so shady it never fully dries up in there. So it was a good chance to check out the paths I never get to go on.

I watched this really interesting Horizon program about dogs and their relationship to humans. There's this place in Siberia where they started selectively breeding silver foxes for tameness and 50 years on, they have a whole bunch of tame foxes, and not only that, the features of the foxes changed, their colouring went from mainly black to mainly white or silver, and their ears stayed floppy a whole lot longer and their tales became curly. All the features of a cub... weird.

There was also a border collie in Austria that new over 300 commands! He could distinguish each of his toys by name and he could even pick out a toy when shown a picture of it. I got this idea to train Tia to distinguish between her ball and her stuffed duck, until I remembered she can't even distinguish between a sit and a lie down command, so maybe I should work on that first.