If anyone is seeking a good read for grins I'd like to offer an incentive for Stephen Baker's How to Live With a Neurotic Dog. Last week's Expository Writing assignments included a book review on the subject, animal awareness, in which I've chosen this semester for a blog project. I checked out a used bookstore near campus and actually scavenged up a plethora of books by Baker, including How to Live With a Neurotic Cat and How to Live With a Neurotic Person. Although neurotic dog wasn't necessarily backing my blog baseline of animal adoption or cruelty, I was engaged by the illustrations as I thumbed through the book. I was eager to read the information presented with the pictures so I decided to focus on it for the review.
For my readers who are dog owners I wanted to focus one of my posts on some tips and pointers Baker introduces for living with a neurotic dog, which according to him is pretty much every dog in the American society. The following information I've included from the book is what I found to be most interesting in the reading. As an experienced dog owner some aspects of the book were a bit elementary, but there were some fresh points I thought were worth knowing.
- Chapter 3 - One of the most successful ways of keeping the neurotic dog off your bed is by making a soft bed of his own. Dogs need 24 hours of sleep per day and its hard to get comfortable on human chairs, not made for the kind of support pups need. Also included in this chapter was that dogs will always sleep at a constant depth, rather than fluctuating up and down as we do. This can be useful to those trying to wake their dog.
- Chapter 6 - An important thing to remember when feeding your dog is that "man invented dog food, not dogs. They were not even consulted (Baker , 87)." I liked this aspect of the book because I've always believed human food should never be consumed by dogs. Baker informs that there's no need to make a separate plate for our dogs, but we should keep in mind that there stomachs can fathom things other than Kibbles N' Bits. Dogs will appreciate scraps of human food more often than not.
Here are some of the illustrations that caught my eye while thumbing through the book:
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| Chapter 7: The Neurotic Dog Vs. Baby |
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| Chapter 6: Feeding the Neurotic Dog |
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| Chapter 3: Sleeping Habits of the Neurotic Dog |
I have 2 lovely Dachshunds, one was rescued, where one is asleep all day long, and the other is outside barking. I've wanted to ask, my dogs have their own beds, and they're mildly well trained, to the point they don't do anything bad. I find it frustrating they pee in the beds and sleep in it. Is this something to do with their neurotic behavior?
ReplyDeleteTo be honest urinating in their sleeping area was not mentioned in this book, so I would say that the issue was more of a training situations. I guess it would depend on if the dogs properly go to the bathroom outside, and then just have a preference to lay in pee; or if they don't use the bathroom outside but rather in their beds. Both of which are very uncommon in dogs I will mention, they normally don't want the place they lay to be contaminated with feces or urine.
Deletemy gramps had a pretty unruly chihuahua that would bite at anybody that wasnt him. pretty good guard dog but terrible at manners.
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