"They're Dogs"

"They're dogs." This is a phrase I use a lot when talking about my dogs. Or any dogs. I realized recently that the phrase means different things to different people. It comes across as "they're JUST dogs", but really it means something very different to me.

I have two dogs: a 7+ year old rottweiler and a 6+ year old mutt. I love them immensely and I am a better person because of their presence in my life, but that will have to be the subject of another blog post. I believe that as a dog owner, it is my duty to provide mental, physical, and emotional fulfillment to my dogs. A dog that is fulfilled in these 3 areas is what I call a "balanced" dog. Most behavior problems in dogs can be traced back an unbalance in one of these.

A key to developing a balanced dog is realizing she is not, in fact, human - (contrary to the popular tagline on doggie collectibles, "Dogs are just little people with fur coats", although I think that is really cute). To me, they are neither less than nor greater than humans; "they're dogs." Dogs needs are different than ours. They're designed to live in packs, follow a leader (or leaders), have a job, and have plenty of physical exertion. Dogs that are not provided these basic needs may become unbalanced and that unbalance can manifest itself in erratic behavior - not listening to the owner, separation anxiety, incessant barking, and in the worst cases aggression towards other dogs or even people.

In the future I'll talk more about developing a balanced dog with some specific tips, insights, and anecdotes that have worked (or not worked) for me. There are few relationships in life as satisfying as the relationship with a fulfilled dog. Dogs have earned the name "man's (or woman's) best friend" - it's up to us to hold up our end of the deal by providing them the fulfillment they deserve.

First post (again)

I know something about a lot of different things, but I'm an expert on very few. I'm not a great writer, but I do a pretty good job of concisely conveying information. Often, I find myself pondering something during the day and thinking "I'd like to develop this futher", "I should share this with people", and building on the first two "I wonder what other people would think about this?"

With those thoughts in mind, I'm resolving to blog. Clearly I've tried before and failed, as all I managed was two updates on my trip to Australia last year. This time, I plan on simply putting things out there with however much time I have to develop them, so you can expect a mix of random thoughts along with well-researched ideas. Before I start linking to my blog I will have several posts written, so the chance of anyone actually reading this post is small - which is fine with me, because it's not very interesting. Fitting with my purpose of having the blog, I'm trying to develop my ideas about having a blog by posting on it.

I expect my topics to range from sports, to business and the economy, the arts, music, video games, dogs, food, nutrition and exercise, and whatever is on my mind at the time. Posts that I didn't write in the past but wish I did include the role of numbers in sports (everyone knows 715 and 755, right?) and how steroids affects/affected this, the leveraging and reselling of loans by financial institutions (I started reading about this back in 2005 and it scared me then), food experiments that worked or didn't (ever grilled a whole chicken?) among others. I may go back and address some of these as they come up again - especially the topics not related to current events.

I expect that my writing will draw on personal experience and/or what is going on with me at the time, but for the most part I'm not going to use this as a platform to announce to the world what I did last weekend. If/when I do write "e/n" (everything/nothing) posts, I'll attempt to put a spin on them to make them a bit more interesting.

There are also times when I will simply post a link to an article or another blog with some a few notes. Hopefully these will be minimal, but sometimes I read something and just don't have anything to add.

Here's to being interesting! Let's hope I can pull it off :-)

-jpw