Nature vs. nurture

Here's an interesting thing: all my pets reflect the same basic personality traits. This might not seem like a very revolutionary thing, but it's CONSISTENT. And it does make you wonder just how much of our human personalities, things we think immutable, are actually influenced by the way we're raised ... in very non-linear ways.

The two dogs I have been keeping for the last few months show many of the same traits as Frisky ... traits that I have not deliberately tried to train into them, traits that I don't usually see in other people's dogs. For example...

-They understand and respect "invisible walls" -- around, generally, the same parts of the house. Frisky would not enter the bathroom, upstairs (without coaxing) or the basement (where the wood stove was) in the house where I grew up. Similarly, neither Izzy nor Lucky will trespass in the bathroom, bedroom, upstairs, or boiler room of this house. I've never TOLD them not to come in. As far as I can tell, I've never even given them non-verbal cues (that I'm aware of) that they're not supposed to come in. What made me notice it was that the doggie guests we had this past weekend, my friends' dogs, would come and go in the bathroom, boiler room and so forth without a by-your-leave. Yet my dogs won't come in even when I call them and try to make them come. And I've never done a thing to keep them out.

-Frisky was very responsive to certain commands, and utterly unresponsive to others. Lucky is turning out the same way, no matter what I try to teach him. He is very responsive to coming when he is called; he sits on cue, and drops things from his mouth when I ask him. Yet he jumps up on me and doesn't seem to learn "tricks" (like Fetch) that I try to teach him. Exact same situation with Frisky. And this is NOT what I'm trying to teach.

-Both Izzy and Lucky are very docile and subservient dogs. It's not really that surprising with Izzy; I think probably the main reason why I adopted her is that I responded emotionally to her general behavior, and it was similar to Frisky's and to the behavior that I expect from my dogs. But Lucky is really a surprise. His genetic background -- retriever/spaniel -- would seem to make him a very energetic, outgoing, friendly dog. Instead, he is quiet and shy. I have no clue what, if anything, I am doing to foster this sort of behavior; I've tried to socialize him with different situations, but he's just timid and frightened of new things.

Generalizing from my dogs, I guess that my kids will be quiet, will try very hard to please their parents and will suffer from low self-esteem. VERY much like the kids that my own parents raised.

This is downright spooky. What makes it that way is that the dogs ... ALL my dogs ... obviously respond to social cues that I am not aware of sending. And it's not too much of a leap to assume that human children would be similarly affected, since so many of the dogs' personality quirks reflect those of my siblings.

*shiver*

Unusual visitor

We had a wolf in the yard last night ... that, or a really, really huge stray dog. But I think it was a wolf. I saw the tracks this morning when I took the dogs out -- like the biggest dog tracks you ever saw.

( Big track picture )

I thought it might have been a neighbor's dog -- one of our neighbors has a German shepherd mix, but I found some of *her* tracks in the process of backtracking these tracks, and this creature, wolf or whatever, was bigger than her.

Its tracks come down out of the hills, following an unused road (the dynamite storage road where I sometimes walk the dogs); then you can see where it becomes aware of human habitation up ahead and veers off into the woods. I think it hit my yard by accident; it was trying to avoid the parts of the road that are used, and rather than heading off down my driveway (like you would expect a dog to do), it veered off again and went through the deep snow into the woods. So even if it was a dog, it was a very feral one.

But I suspect wolf. The big difference between wolf and dog tracks (although it's usually not as clear-cut as it sounds) is that wolf tracks are all in a straight line, with the back feet stepping in the same tracks as the front feet. Dog tracks are more usually staggered, with the different sides offset from each other. And these tracks were mostly in a straight line. Hey, how's this for track-fu: I can even tell you what sex it was ... female. (I found a place where it had urinated. Males lift their leg; females squat.)

While I was out and about following the tracks, I took some more pictures of the snow-covered winter wonderland... ( ...also behind a cut. )