ADVICE: Boxes and Bafflement

During puppyhood (or kittenhood), one quickly learns that humans find it amusing when one plays with boxes or tackles paper bags. They even make smaller bags for dogs to be carried in. As especially beloved canine will often find odd little objects brought home in which one is encouraged to roll or toss it until some wonderful little treat falls out. Or there's that lovely rubbery thing that is often filled with peanut butter. You might even be invited to play a game of search, looking for an object filled with some taste tidbit.

So one could easily be misled at this time of year. For once the ceremonial tree is up, humans begin to pile up boxes on the floor under the tree.

Somtimes, they will put things that smell so lovely inside of boxes, wrapped in enormous amounts of a paper. From the smell of things and by the very fact these are placed on the floor where most dogs eat, where most dogs receive special treats after properly waiting for their signal, one might think these treats are just complicated puzzles for the dog to figure out and unravel and unwrap.

After all, humans don't normally leave a plate full of cheese on the floor. One rarely sees them eating from the floor and even then they don't know how to do it properly as a dog would, licking up every trace so the ants and other pests won't come around. Yet during this season of madness (the holiday season my secretary informs me it is called), they will place boxes of salami, cheese, candies, beef jerky, smoked salmon and cookies on the floor as if a thin box and a few layers of paper could easily disguise the smell.

One must recall that humans are singularly olfactory-challenged. This is the PC term to describe their inability to smell most things unless the air is simply laden with the odor. Smells and aromas must be strong because their senses are quite weak. So they think we can't smell it if they can't and thus must not know it is there.

Still this hardly excuses the placing of temptation within a dog's reach, on the floor where any dog would expect to find treats. One might want to assume that those sweet smelling treasures are meant for the dog of the house, but this would be dog logic and not human logic. If the humans had any sense at all, they would not leave a dog alone with food on the floor in any form and expect to leave the dog alone with it and not eat it. Not all humans have dog sense and my secretary tells me that common sense isn't that common at all.

Another peculiar thing they might do is they sometimes they might even hang up socks.

If one's companion is a logical and well-mannered human, one will know that socks are not for us to pull or tear into. Some of the sillier specimens of the human sort will encourage that in a young pup, only to become bitterly angry when the pup carries on the same habit into doghood. T'is a puzzlement.

So, of course, most well-mannered dogs will not pull down socks and yet silly humans will often put food in these socks and hang them up. What's worse, they might even fill them with food obviously meant for dogs and leave them there, hanging, within easy reach of one's snout or maybe just a slight hop above nose level. What ARE they thinking?

This is part of the madness of the so-called holiday season. There have been suggestions that it's the cold weather that makes humans somewhat mentally disturbed during this time period every year. My secretary states it is part folk custom and part religious, and yet how often does one find that customs are used to explain away natural occurrences such as covering one's mouth when one yawns?

Further research on biorhythms and the seasons as well as the effects of natural light should be carried out. Perhaps the answers lie there in.