Blog Post 3

Over the span of the past eighteen, almost nineteen years of my life my family has had numerous pets. Living on a fifty acre farm growing up, we owned Angus cows, horses, a rabbit, and the usual dogs and cats. Having all of these “pets”, if you can call cows and horses pets, it was very noticeable that each individual animal had their own way of expressing some sort of communication with each other. The cows had their own “conversations” while they congregated together in herds, excluding the horses who had their own place in the pasture and exchanged noises and motions back and forth to each other. The ones I grew especially close too were the dogs.

I am allergic to cats, so one can see why it wasn’t very appealing to me to curl up with one of our cats while sipping Benadryl out of a straw in the bottle and try to gain some sort of vision out of my unusually large and swollen eyes. A few years ago, my family and I decided to take a tiny family road trip to the local Petsmart to look at dogs. Little did I know when I walked in that I would walk out with the perfect, most affectionate dog adopted from the humane society. Maggie was my Christmas present a few years and she has been the best one yet. I have grown very close to her, and she does have a way of communicating herself to me and the rest of my family. Of course, she doesn’t talk perfect sentences in English, but she does have her own way of communicative means. When she needs to go potty, yes, potty outside, she lets me know by either sitting next to door and let out a whimper or she will come over to where I am sitting and whimper, while exchanging glances back and forth between me and the door. She shows affection by putting her head on my pillow with me at night to sleep or curling up next to my feet. On the flip side, she is a very protective dog. Whenever a person walks in front of our house or the doorbell rings, she is the first to greet the door with a very loud, booming bark that often scares the local neighborhood kids riding by on their bikes. She understands our commands and certain phrases we have taught her, along with the tone of our voices. She lowers her head when she hears our tone of voice and knows she has done something wrong by chewing on the wood paneling on the wall of our dining room but wags her tail and lets out short, high pitched barks whenever she gets praised for doing something good.