All Shots

WOOD-SHN-SHK, the Roof Material as ASPHALT-SHNG. Those dopes at city hall! Why not pick one abbreviation for shingle and stick to it? The assessed value, which is, I am happily convinced, below the market value, strikes her as high. The photograph shows a simple three-story red house with white trim and a little porch. What I find to be the charm of the place is lost on her.
    Google provides a tremendous amount of information about me. In particular, the other Holly discovers the opportunity to learn far more than she wants to know about dogs. That’s not hard: what she wants to know about dogs is absolutely nothing.
     

CHAPTER 14
     
    When I say that I never work on weekends, I mean that I don’t sit down and write. Because my work and play are both about dogs, my weekend play often does end up as the subject of a column or an article. For instance, when I returned home after my brief encounter with Mellie, I worked on a little project destined to find its way into print, namely the construction and application of what’s known as Shirley Chong’s doggie nail file. Unfortunately, I don’t know Shirley Chong, who is a dog trainer and, as her invention proves, an outright genius. Here’s the problem she solved: A lot of dogs hate having their nails cut, and a lot of dog owners bate doing canine manicures. The usual method requires the owner to grasp the dog’s paw and use clippers to trim the nails without hitting the quick. If the dog squirms, it’s easy to take off so much nail that the dog yelps in pain, bleeds all over everything, and forever after turns tail at the sight of clippers. What’s more, even experienced owners who can see and avoid the veins in light nails find it difficult not to quick black nails. At best, traditional nail trimming is a necessary but joyless process. With Shirley Chong’s nail file, the dog not only files his own nails but has a grand time doing it. Or that was the idea.
    I’d printed out the instructions from the Web site, www.shirleychong.com/keepers/nailfile.html , and on a recent trip to the hardware store had bought the kind of adhesive tape that’s applied to steps to prevent people from slipping. My basement had supplied a spare board about a foot across and three feet long. It took almost no time to stick the tape to the board and thus to construct a malamute-sized, very coarse file. After that, I crated Rowdy and Sammy, supplied myself with a clicker and cubes of chicken and cheese, and set out to teach Kimi to rake her front paws on the giant emery board. I could’ve used food alone, but the clicker, a little noisemaker that you pair with treats, was meant to speed things up, and so it did. Ten minutes after we started, I was sitting on a kitchen chair with the board propped up in front of me and pinned in place by my feet and knees, and Kimi was happily scraping the coarse surface with one front paw and then another. When she dragged her nails on the file, I clicked and fed her a treat. Magic! No, operant conditioning: behavior followed by positive reinforcement in' creases in frequency, intensity, and duration. Behavior: raking nails on board. Positive reinforcement: the clicker, a secondary reinforcer or event marker; and food, a primary reinforcer. Of course, I’d still have to trim Kimi’s dewclaws the old way, and teaching her to do the nails on her hind feet would be a challenge. Even so, success!
    As I was saying just that to Kimi, the doorbell rang, and she abandoned her new pursuit to dash to the front hall in the hope that UPS or FedEx was delivering goodies for dogs.
    “Sunday,” I said. “How do I explain that one? Nothing in this for you, good girl.”
    She was a good girl, too. Containing her impulse to leap on the door and subsequently to offer our unknown caller an exuberant and possibly unwelcome greeting, Kimi sat a yard away from the door. Her dark eyes were bright and eager, and her tail was brushing back and forth across the floor, but her stay was solid. I opened the door.
    The woman was about my age. There ended the similarity. Her hair was dark and almost as short as a man’s. She was only about five feet tall and so thin that everything about her was sharp and angular. Her nose was little and pointed, her eyes were dark and small, her lips were thin and pursed, and she had a slightly undershot bite. Her black jersey skirt and top could have been chosen to attract dog hair. On her bony little feet were black flats. She toed out