13:36: Having a dog

Arthur is at the top of the stairs, whinging to be let into the bedroom so that he can curl up under the bed where my wife is sleeping. "Arthur!", I say, "Stop that! Come down here!". But he doesn't stop--he continues.

I said it too firmly. I said it out of frustration. I said it dominantly.

The interesting thing about Arthur is that he's such an excellent manifest example of how the way to get what you want is to make others want to give it to you. Arthur has a lot of... anxiety. He's nervous around new people, and he's even nervous around familiar people when they walk into the house after a day of absense. And, when left unoccupied, he whines and barks in hope that someone will just open the door so that he can find a hiding-space. Arthur has almost certainly been abused at some point, and has developed a sort of hyper-timidity that some people develop in response to the same sort of thing: if he's approached confrontationally, he shrinks away; if he can't find someplace to hide, he'll do laps around the available area, sounding as if he's got a klaxon attached to him.

He doesn't retort, he does what I guess would be `curling up in a foetal position and crying' if he was human. But his response is exaggerated in ways that human responses would virtually never be: if you yell at him, he'll cower and pee on your floor.

So I try to draw him down from the stair-top again, saying virtually the same thing, but with a higher-pitched, more-inflected voice. These things mean `love' and `enthusiasm'. These things work.

Learning to interact effectively with Arthur has tremendous potential to teach about interaction with human beings.

[Reply]