Dogster member Lola helps her folks, Adam and Wendy Leidhecker, run Paw Luxury.  It’s an online store that offers eco-friendly products.

Not only are the Leidhecker’s Dogsters, they’re also Twitterers who have just won a Twitter Shorty Award.

Adam and Wendy Leidhecker, owners of the eco-friendly, organic online pet supply company Paw Luxury, recently won social messaging and blogging service Twitter’s Shorty Award in the business category for providing the best short content on Twitter.com.

Congrats on the award, very cool. Also cool, is their store. They researched for over a year before launching the site, making sure every product chosen was something they would use on, or give to, Lola.

Our Mission

Our mission at Paw Luxury is to offer luxury, high-quality, durable, holistic and earth-friendly products for the everyday dog and their owners.

We strive to utilize green, sustainable, or recyclable materials in our day-to-day operations, because we believe you can have the best of both worlds: pampering your dog and saving the environment at the same time.

We believe in offering products that will promote the overall well-being of your dog while at the same time bringing you and your dog closer together for a happier, longer life. We give 110% service to our customers to make sure their tails are always wagging and you are always smiling.

So, whether you’re looking for treats and eats, toys and fun, or health and wellness, Paw Luxury is the place for one stop shopping.

Note to owners: Don’t leave your four-legged friend alone with the computer, or you may end up with a surprise on the doorstep.

*Photo courtesy Marc Nance/Sun Gazette

Its now June 1st and I’m officially no longer your Dogster blogger. This is one last post to bark so long and invite you to join me over at my personal blog, Joy Ward’s Writing Journal, where I’ll still be fighting the good fight. You can also find me at my web site.

As I announced a few weeks back, I’ve resigned from the For Love of Dog Blog to free up more time to write. I still love Dogster and all the Dogsters and Catsters who make up the world’s best online community. Unfortunately, the many hours it takes to write and edit this blog has made it impossible to write the many pieces I want to get done. Between my regular consulting work and the the For Love of Dog Blog, there just wasn’t much other time to write. And it’s getting VERY embarressing when people ask me for the sequel to Haint that was supposed to be out two years ago…

So I’m going back to my main blog where I’ll be posting less often. I’ll still be focusing on dog issues, reviews of books and products and who knows what, interviews (I’ve got a fun one with a well-known science fiction writer which I’ve got to get cleaned up), laws about dogs, and well whatever comes across my mind. I hope you’ll visit me there from time to time.

I just finished a chapter on ghost dogs for K9 Editor Ryan O’Meara, for an upcoming anthology on true dog stories. Thanks to Dogsters for sharing your stories, btw. Please keep an eye on my blog for information on when that’s coming out.

I’m also working on a sort-of fantasy story about a dragon and some dogs for an anthology of dragon stories from a publisher. More news on that in the blog, too.

I feel like so many of you are personal friends I just haven’t met yet. We’ve shared tears and tearjerkers. We’ve shared anger and outrage. We’ve shared a lot of laughs! But all of that was because we share a love of dogs (and cats). We’re all part of the worldwide pack that knows that dogs are much more than just protection systems. We know that dogs make us much more than we would be without them. And together, we’re much more too!

We are the ones who do and will make the world better. We’re the ones who open our hearts even though we know it will hurt. We’re the ones who give voice to the voiceless. We’re the people of the Dog!

Best barks to all of you! I look forward to hearing from you or meeting you somewhere on the road. You and the rest of Dogster have made my life richer! Thank you!

I’m here with lots of science fiction fans and great writers like Connie Willis (furmom to a bulldog and author of the much acclaimed Doomsday Book) and Peter Beagle (author of The Last Unicorn) who I interviewed a while back. I’m on a number of panels about a wide variety of topics. I would love to bark with some Dogsters and Catsters!

The event runs today through Monday.

As of June 1st, I’ll be moving my online home back to my own blog, Joy Ward’s Writing Journal. I would love to have each and everyone one of my Dogster and Catster readers come visit with me and the Ward Pack over there. We won’t be barking as often as we do over here but I’ll be keeping up our same high standards.

I’ll be covering many of the same issues and topics. I’ll be reviewing books and other pet-related items. If you’ve sent in a book or anything else to be reviewed keep an eye on Joy Ward’s Writing Blog for your reviews.

Although I’ll always love Dogster and all the Dogsters and Catsers who make up the world’s best online pet community but I need to free up the 40+ hours I usually devote to the For Love of Dog Blog to writing the Haint sequel (at least one and maybe more if I’m lucky). I can’t wait to get Dogsters YiPpY and Jade Snoop in their new roles in the sequel!

If you want to be notified when the Haint sequel comes out, please pmail via Sol, Annie, Star or Beatrice or email me directly at Haint@Sbcglobal.net. You can also contact me at my main site.

So to all of you — Best and brightest barks!

The Ultimate Dog Treat Cookbook should come with a warning — don’t read while hungry! These recipes sound so good I couldn’t help but get hungry as I read through them.

Author Liz Palika has put together a collection of tasty treats for all kinds of events and dogs. Looking for cookie cutter treats or special goodies for special occasions. The Ultimate Dog Treat Cookbook has got it covered. Do you need recipes designed for dogs with special needs? You’ll find yummy meat-free, grain-free, wheat-free and reduced-fat treats here.

Some of my favorite parts of the book are the Nutritional Notes scattered throughout. Want to know more about flaxseed and avocado in regards to your furbaby? Want to know Bisquick’s nutrition and how to use it in dog treats? Want to know the differences between nonfat, lowfat and whole milk yogurt? You’ll find all this and so much more in this colorfully illustrated cookbook.

The Ultimate Dog Treat Cookbook is tantalizing collection of recipes and information that may inspire you to cook more (or at all) for your canine family members.

101 Best Businesses for Pet Lovers is the book for all of us who’ve had some version of the following scenario —I’m sitting in a meeting with clients and as another client flunkie makes another inane comment about marketing all of a sudden I’m wondering if there isn’t something I could do that would keep me away from these kinds of humans and let me spend more time with dogs and other doggy humans. I bet you’ve been there too, haven’t you?

Authors Joseph Nigro and Nicholas Nigro have put together an excellent overview of pet business possibilities. They give nice sketches of each business including what it takes to start it, initial investments, required education and more.

How about raising crickets to sell to pet stores or selling pet products on ebay? you could run an online pet dating service or make pet caskets. Are you one of our marvelous Dogster admins and want to take those skills offline? Try becoming a pet party host.

Maybe I’ll just take copy of 101 Best Businesses for Pet Lovers with me to the next client meeting. When the meeting gets too boring or too stressful I can just pull out my copy and daydream.

Not only are Dogster’s great people and pawples, they’re talented too! Jackpot’s Tail: Lost in Las Vegas was written by one of our Dogsters (okay, she let her furmom get the credit). Not only that, but it’s really GOOD, too!

Are you looking for a well-written, fun book that helps kids understand what happens to dogs who go through the rescue systems? Have you recently adopted a furry family member and want to let your not-so-furry young ones know more about how their new furbrother or sister came to join your family? Then Jackpot’s Tail may be just the book for you!

Let me back up and tell you a little bit about Jackpot’s Tail: Lost in Las Vegas. Author KB Sisco, furmom to the real Jackpot and her brother Zeke, has written a touching children’s book about a lost dog, Jackpot. Jackpot is picked up by the dog catcher and, well it does have a happy ending. Melissa R. Sanchez has incorporated some entertaining illustrations that help move along this snappily-written tale (or is that tail?).

Jackpot’s Tail would make an excellent book to give to younger children (maybe ages 5 to 7) to help them understand dog adoption. It would also make a great book for dog rescues and shelters to sell as a fundraiser. It definitely should be carried in humane society stores as a gift item.

I’m working on a chapter for an upcoming book of news and unreported real stories on dogs. My chapter is about experiences with dog ghosts or dogs interacting with the Beyond. If you don’t mind sharing your experiences, please bark them in to me at the Bark to the Blog link.

Thanks so much in advance to everyone who is willing to bark me in their stories!

There are MANY excellent training books for humans working with dogs but Tess of Helena (a four-footer herself) has penned a fun and helpful training guide for dogs trying to get the best from their humans. Training Humans combines a touch of satire with a large helping of canine insight into a literary recipe that offers useful information with a twist.

Oh, I know, we’ve seen other books written by or from the dogs’ point of view. I’ve even written one myself. But Training Humans is well worth adding to your library. Its a short yet entertaining set of lessons told by a dog in the know,

Tess has a tongue-in-cheek way of delivering her message that keeps the tone adult and light-hearted. This light touch makes Training Humans an excellent book to give to dog guardians who need to learn a few pointers on living with their dogs.

Dogsters and Catsters know that dogs, cats and others animalshave a different yet important type of intelligence. So this National Geographic article will probably not surprize you too much. Bit it will confirm some of what you already feel and know.

Personally, I’m thrilled to see this information talked about openly by reputable publications because there are way too many people who still believe that there is nothing we can learn from dogs and other animals.

Those of you who have visited me at the science fiction conventions know I am usually on panels about how humans view and write about non-humans. A few years ago I was on a panel with a successful writer who actually has a good-selling series with aliens. But he has little interest in non-human animals on THIS planet. When i asked him why he said it was because there was nothing else we could learn from other species on Earth. I hope this writer gets a chance to read this article. There are so many excellent scientists who know better. I hope the writer and others like him can learn from these true scientific pioneers.

There is so much we can learn about and from our canine and feline symbiotes, as well as the other species with whom we share this planet.

Thanks to Michael K. (who saw the convention panel with the other writer) for barking in this article from National Geographic.

Minds of their Own
Animals are smarter than you think.
By Virginia Morell
Photograph by Vincent J. Musi

In 1977 Irene Pepperberg, a recent graduate of Harvard University, did something very bold. At a time when animals still were considered automatons, she set out to find what was on another creature’s mind by talking to it. She brought a one-year-old African gray parrot she named Alex into her lab to teach him to reproduce the sounds of the English language. “I thought if he learned to communicate, I could ask him questions about how he sees the world.”

When Pepperberg began her dialogue with Alex, who died last September at the age of 31, many scientists believed animals were incapable of any thought. They were simply machines, robots programmed to react to stimuli but lacking the ability to think or feel. Any pet owner would disagree. We see the love in our dogs’ eyes and know that, of course, Spot has thoughts and emotions. But such claims remain highly controversial. Gut instinct is not science, and it is all too easy to project human thoughts and feelings onto another creature. How, then, does a scientist prove that an animal is capable of thinking—that it is able to acquire information about the world and act on it?

“That’s why I started my studies with Alex,” Pepperberg said. They were seated—she at her desk, he on top of his cage—in her lab, a windowless room about the size of a boxcar, at Brandeis University. Newspapers lined the floor; baskets of bright toys were stacked on the shelves. They were clearly a team—and because of their work, the notion that animals can think is no longer so fanciful.

Certain skills are considered key signs of higher mental abilities: good memory, a grasp of grammar and symbols, self-awareness, understanding others’ motives, imitating others, and being creative. Bit by bit, in ingenious experiments, researchers have documented these talents in other species, gradually chipping away at what we thought made human beings distinctive while offering a glimpse of where our own abilities came from. Scrub jays know that other jays are thieves and that stashed food can spoil; sheep can recognize faces; chimpanzees use a variety of tools to probe termite mounds and even use weapons to hunt small mammals; dolphins can imitate human postures; the archerfish, which stuns insects with a sudden blast of water, can learn how to aim its squirt simply by watching an experienced fish perform the task. And Alex the parrot turned out to be a surprisingly good talker.

Thirty years after the Alex studies began, Pepperberg and a changing collection of assistants were still giving him English lessons. The humans, along with two younger parrots, also served as Alex’s flock, providing the social input all parrots crave. Like any flock, this one—as small as it was—had its share of drama. Alex dominated his fellow parrots, acted huffy at times around Pepperberg, tolerated the other female humans, and fell to pieces over a male assistant who dropped by for a visit. (”If you were a man,” Pepperberg said, after noting Alex’s aloofness toward me, “he’d be on your shoulder in a second, barfing cashews in your ear.”)

Pepperberg bought Alex in a Chicago pet store. She let the store’s assistant pick him out because she didn’t want other scientists saying later that she’d deliberately chosen an especially smart bird for her work. Given that Alex’s brain was the size of a shelled walnut, most researchers thought Pepperberg’s interspecies communication study would be futile.

“Some people actually called me crazy for trying this,” she said. “Scientists thought that chimpanzees were better subjects, although, of course, chimps can’t speak.”

Chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas have been taught to use sign language and symbols to communicate with us, often with impressive results. The bonobo Kanzi, for instance, carries his symbol-communication board with him so he can “talk” to his human researchers, and he has invented combinations of symbols to express his thoughts. Nevertheless, this is not the same thing as having an animal look up at you, open his mouth, and speak.

Pepperberg walked to the back of the room, where Alex sat on top of his cage preening his pearl gray feathers. He stopped at her approach and opened his beak.

“Want grape,” Alex said.

“He hasn’t had his breakfast yet,” Pepperberg explained, “so he’s a little put out.”

Alex returned to preening, while an assistant prepared a bowl of grapes, green beans, apple and banana slices, and corn on the cob.

Under Pepperberg’s patient tutelage, Alex learned how to use his vocal tract to imitate almost one hundred English words, including the sounds for all of these foods, although he calls an apple a “banerry.”

“Apples taste a little bit like bananas to him, and they look a little bit like cherries, so Alex made up that word for them,” Pepperberg said.

Alex could count to six and was learning the sounds for seven and eight.

“I’m sure he already knows both numbers,” Pepperberg said. “He’ll probably be able to count to ten, but he’s still learning to say the words. It takes far more time to teach him certain sounds than I ever imagined.”

After breakfast, Alex preened again, keeping an eye on the flock. Every so often, he leaned forward and opened his beak: “Ssse … won.”

“That’s good, Alex,” Pepperberg said. “Seven. The number is seven.”

“Ssse … won! Se … won!”

“He’s practicing,” she explained. “That’s how he learns. He’s thinking about how to say that word, how to use his vocal tract to make the correct sound.”

It sounded a bit mad, the idea of a bird having lessons to practice, and willingly doing it. But after listening to and watching Alex, it was difficult to argue with Pepperberg’s explanation for his behaviors. She wasn’t handing him treats for the repetitious work or rapping him on the claws to make him say the sounds.

“He has to hear the words over and over before he can correctly imitate them,” Pepperberg said, after pronouncing “seven” for Alex a good dozen times in a row. “I’m not trying to see if Alex can learn a human language,” she added. “That’s never been the point. My plan always was to use his imitative skills to get a better understanding of avian cognition.”

In other words, because Alex was able to produce a close approximation of the sounds of some English words, Pepperberg could ask him questions about a bird’s basic understanding of the world. She couldn’t ask him what he was thinking about, but she could ask him about his knowledge of numbers, shapes, and colors. To demonstrate, Pepperberg carried Alex on her arm to a tall wooden perch in the middle of the room. She then retrieved a green key and a small green cup from a basket on a shelf. She held up the two items to Alex’s eye.

“What’s same?” she asked.

Without hesitation, Alex’s beak opened: “Co-lor.”

“What’s different?” Pepperberg asked.

“Shape,” Alex said. His voice had the digitized sound of a cartoon character. Since parrots lack lips (another reason it was difficult for Alex to pronounce some sounds, such as ba), the words seemed to come from the air around him, as if a ventriloquist were speaking. But the words—and what can only be called the thoughts—were entirely his.

For the next 20 minutes, Alex ran through his tests, distinguishing colors, shapes, sizes, and materials (wool versus wood versus metal). He did some simple arithmetic, such as counting the yellow toy blocks among a pile of mixed hues.

And, then, as if to offer final proof of the mind inside his bird’s brain, Alex spoke up. “Talk clearly!” he commanded, when one of the younger birds Pepperberg was also teaching mispronounced the word green. “Talk clearly!”

“Don’t be a smart aleck,” Pepperberg said, shaking her head at him. “He knows all this, and he gets bored, so he interrupts the others, or he gives the wrong answer just to be obstinate. At this stage, he’s like a teenage son; he’s moody, and I’m never sure what he’ll do.”

“Wanna go tree,” Alex said in a tiny voice.

Alex had lived his entire life in captivity, but he knew that beyond the lab’s door, there was a hallway and a tall window framing a leafy elm tree. He liked to see the tree, so Pepperberg put her hand out for him to climb aboard. She walked him down the hall into the tree’s green light.

“Good boy! Good birdie,” Alex said, bobbing on her hand.

“Yes, you’re a good boy. You’re a good birdie.” And she kissed his feathered head.

He was a good birdie until the end, and Pepperberg was happy to report that when he died he had finally mastered “seven.”

Many of Alex’s cognitive skills, such as his ability to understand the concepts of same and different, are generally ascribed only to higher mammals, particularly primates. But parrots, like great apes (and humans), live a long time in complex societies. And like primates, these birds must keep track of the dynamics of changing relationships and environments.

“They need to be able to distinguish colors to know when a fruit is ripe or unripe,” Pepperberg noted. “They need to categorize things—what’s edible, what isn’t—and to know the shapes of predators. And it helps to have a concept of numbers if you need to keep track of your flock, and to know who’s single and who’s paired up. For a long-lived bird, you can’t do all of this with instinct; cognition must be involved.”

Being able mentally to divide the world into simple abstract categories would seem a valuable skill for many organisms. Is that ability, then, part of the evolutionary drive that led to human intelligence?

Charles Darwin, who attempted to explain how human intelligence developed, extended his theory of evolution to the human brain: Like the rest of our physiology, intelligence must have evolved from simpler organisms, since all animals face the same general challenges of life. They need to find mates, food, and a path through the woods, sea, or sky—tasks that Darwin argued require problem-solving and categorizing abilities. Indeed, Darwin went so far as to suggest that earthworms are cognitive beings because, based on his close observations, they have to make judgments about the kinds of leafy matter they use to block their tunnels. He hadn’t expected to find thinking invertebrates and remarked that the hint of earthworm intelligence “has surprised me more than anything else in regard to worms.”

To Darwin, the earthworm discovery demonstrated that degrees of intelligence could be found throughout the animal kingdom. But the Darwinian approach to animal intelligence was cast aside in the early 20th century, when researchers decided that field observations were simply “anecdotes,” usually tainted by anthropomorphism. In an effort to be more rigorous, many embraced behaviorism, which regarded animals as little more than machines, and focused their studies on the laboratory white rat—since one “machine” would behave like any other.

But if animals are simply machines, how can the appearance of human intelligence be explained? Without Darwin’s evolutionary perspective, the greater cognitive skills of people did not make sense biologically. Slowly the pendulum has swung away from the animal-as-machine model and back toward Darwin. A whole range of animal studies now suggest that the roots of cognition are deep, widespread, and highly malleable.

Just how easily new mental skills can evolve is perhaps best illustrated by dogs. Most owners talk to their dogs and expect them to understand. But this canine talent wasn’t fully appreciated until a border collie named Rico appeared on a German TV game show in 2001. Rico knew the names of some 200 toys and acquired the names of new ones with ease.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig heard about Rico and arranged a meeting with him and his owners. That led to a scientific report revealing Rico’s uncanny language ability: He could learn and remember words as quickly as a toddler. Other scientists had shown that two-year-old children—who acquire around ten new words a day—have an innate set of principles that guides this task. The ability is seen as one of the key building blocks in language acquisition. The Max Planck scientists suspect that the same principles guide Rico’s word learning, and that the technique he uses for learning words is identical to that of humans.

To find more examples, the scientists read all the letters from hundreds of people claiming that their dogs had Rico’s talent. In fact, only two—both border collies—had comparable skills. One of them—the researchers call her Betsy—has a vocabulary of more than 300 words.

“Even our closest relatives, the great apes, can’t do what Betsy can do—hear a word only once or twice and know that the acoustic pattern stands for something,” said Juliane Kaminski, a cognitive psychologist who worked with Rico and is now studying Betsy. She and her colleague Sebastian Tempelmann had come to Betsy’s home in Vienna to give her a fresh battery of tests. Kaminski petted Betsy, while Tempelmann set up a video camera.

“Dogs’ understanding of human forms of communication is something new that has evolved,” Kaminski said, “something that’s developed in them because of their long association with humans.” Although Kaminski has not yet tested wolves, she doubts they have this language skill. “Maybe these collies are especially good at it because they’re working dogs and highly motivated, and in their traditional herding jobs, they must listen very closely to their owners.”

Scientists think that dogs were domesticated about 15,000 years ago, a relatively short time in which to evolve language skills. But how similar are these skills to those of humans? For abstract thinking, we employ symbols, letting one thing stand for another. Kaminski and Tempelmann were testing whether dogs can do this too.

Betsy’s owner—whose pseudonym is Schaefer—summoned Betsy, who obediently stretched out at Schaefer’s feet, eyes fixed on her face. Whenever Schaefer spoke, Betsy attentively cocked her head from side to side.

Kaminski handed Schaefer a stack of color photographs and asked her to choose one. Each image depicted a dog’s toy against a white background—toys Betsy had never seen before. They weren’t actual toys; they were only images of toys. Could Betsy connect a two-dimensional picture to a three-dimensional object?

Schaefer held up a picture of a fuzzy, rainbow-colored Frisbee and urged Betsy to find it. Betsy studied the photograph and Schaefer’s face, then ran into the kitchen, where the Frisbee was placed among three other toys and photographs of each toy. Betsy brought either the Frisbee or the photograph of the Frisbee to Schaefer every time.

“It wouldn’t have been wrong if she’d just brought the photograph,” Kaminski said. “But I think Betsy can use a picture, without a name, to find an object. Still, it will take many more tests to prove this.”

Even then, Kaminski is unsure that other scientists will ever accept her discovery because Betsy’s abstract skill, as minor as it may seem to us, may tread all too closely to human thinking.

Follow this link to read the rest of the article.