Shallow Thoughts : tags : dog

Akkana's Musings on Open Source Computing and Technology, Science, and Nature.

Sun, 17 Sep 2023

Carrying Water for a Canine Companion

[Labrador retriever drinking from a water bottle] The weekly hiking group I'm in has quite a few members who bring their dogs on hikes, as long as the trail allows it (National Parks, Monuments and Preserves don't allow dogs).

I've seen various solutions for carrying dog water: bowls that telescope out in use, and can be compacted flatter. Bowls out of flexible materials like waterproofed nylon. Smallish cups. Then there's the tricky job of pouring the unused water from a flexible bowl back into a narrow-mouthed water bottle each time.

But dogs are more flexible than you might think. One of our canine hiking companions, Lewis, has been trained to drink from a water bottle. He just laps at the stream as it falls, and spills surprisingly little. So his person can give him a drink at any time, without stopping and digging around for a bowl.

I'd never seen this before, but it seems pretty handy for a dog and person who go hiking just about every day.

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[ 18:04 Sep 17, 2023    More hikes | permalink to this entry | ]

Sat, 29 Jan 2005

Vignettes: A Boy And His Dog

The maniacal barking of the neighbors' loony dogs brought me to the kitchen window one morning, to see the young man walking his dog along the street outside the house.

The man was tall, ponytailed, intense; the dog, a german shepherd with a look of abundant alertness and interest, yet heeling close to his master's side.

They had just stepped off the curb to cross the street when some minor transgression on the part of the german shepherd -- did he glance over at the loony neighbor dogs? -- called a halt.

They stopped still, frozen in the intersection, tense and alert, man and dog communicating using movements too subtle for me to discern them from the window where I watched, fascinated.

In a minute, the conflict, invisible to an outsider, was resolved, the two players merged back into one, and the pair continued on their way, the ponytailed young man and the alert, obedient shepherd.

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[ 11:33 Jan 29, 2005    More misc | permalink to this entry | ]