Secret Warning: He ran quickly with a sound like raindrops & left his handwriting in all the secret places. I found this one underneath the big yellow rock in the garden. It said this: watch out for the little black dog. It can smell when you've had hot dogs.
Irma is old, deaf, blind in one eye and inefficient in the other. She can however smell and wag. All you need in a dog, really.
They scrub up quite nicely. Sometimes the best things in life are just waiting for us on the side of a highway in South Carolina, hungry, dirty, lonely and scared. Biscuit now lives in Washington D.C. where she is a source of joy, frequent laughter, unconditional love and reasons to go outside.
This Time Magazine Article referred by the Barking blog brings up issues of animal emotion, communication and ethics.
"At Bowling Green State University in Kentucky, psychologist and distinguished professor Jack Panksepp [Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions] is similarly leery of using words like morality and ethics to describe animal behavior. He is sure that rats and other animals do experience joy, sadness, anger and fear--because the wiring of the brain is set up to generate those feelings. (Actually, Panksepp discovered a few years ago that rats chirp in laughter, albeit in response to tickling, and in a register too high for the human ear to detect.) Nobody has yet found the neurocircuits for ethics or morality, however, so Panskepp is reluctant to comment about those qualities. But he does accept that some animals have strict rules of behavior. "Cockroaches probably don't have a sense of justice," says Panskepp. But dogs and rats, which are social animals, clearly do."
Nevada researcher Patricia Simonet of Sierra Nevada College believes dogs make a specific noise during play that is distinctive from other sounds made during passive or aggressive confrontation. Simonet describes the sound as a breathy exhalation that sounds to a human ear like a dog's regular panting. However, when the frequency of the "laugh" was analysed, it was found to have a far broader range of frequencies than a regular pant.
RBP demonstrates that in addition to joy, sadness, anger and fear, he feels boredom, frustration, humor, empathy, generosity and pride. Not to mention loyalty, unconditional love, and an affinity for napping and licking one's private parts. He chuckled over that, in the way he does. Just letting you know. 
