Al Magaw

Odd and Interesting Facts about Dogs!

June 27, 2010 by teamineka

Odd and Interesting Facts About Dogs!

By Al Magaw

It is a myth that dogs are color blind. They can actually see in color, just not as vividly as humans. It is akin to our vision at dusk.
Dogs DO have better low-light vision than humans because of a special light-reflecting layer behind their retinas.
Like human babies, Chihuahuas are born with a soft spot in their skull which closes with age.
The breed Lundehune has 6 toes and can close its ears
Franklin Roosevelt spent $15,000 for a destroyer to pick up his Scottie in the Aleutian Islands
In Roman times, mastiffs donned light armor and were sent after mounted knights
The Russians trained dogs during WWII to run suicide missions with mines strapped to their backs
A one year old dog is as mature, physically, as a 15 year old human
In 2002 alone, more people in the U.S. were killed by dogs than by sharks in the past 100 years
Three dogs survived the sinking of the Titanic – a Newfoundland, a Pomeranian, and a Pekingese
An estimated 1,000,000 dogs in the U.S. have been named as the primary beneficiaries in their owner’s will
Dog’s nose prints are as unique as a human’s finger prints and can be used to accurately identify them
Humans have kept dogs as pets for over 12,000 years
Only dogs and humans have prostates
Every dog on earth likely descended from a species knows as the Tomarctus – a creature that roamed the earth over 15 million years ago

Daisy the Stray, Mixed Breed Dog

June 20, 2010 by teamineka

“Daisy the Stray Mixed Breed Dog”

By Al Magaw

Daisy charmed herself to a New York City family on vacation at a lake approximately thirty miles from the city. The family befriended her and gave her all of the food and love she demanded. After a short time, Daisy delivered four healthy puppies, which also received the love and care of the adopted family.

When the summer ended and the human family had to return to their home in New York, they gave Daisy and her puppies to a permanent resident neighbor. They felt that Daisy and her puppies would be happier in the freedom and space that the country offers, rather than their Manhattan apartment.

About three weeks after their return to the city, they heard a scratching at the apartment door. When they opened it, there was Daisy, carrying one of the puppies in her mouth. It was a happy reunion and nothing was too good for Daisy and her puppy.

The next day, Daisy was gone. The family scoured the neighborhood but with no success of finding Daisy. About five days later, Daisy came back with another puppy. This went on until she had her four puppies under the roof of her human family.

How in the world was she able to find her human family in an apartment she had never seen, in a city the size of New York? Nobody has a clue, and ESP would seem to be the only answer.”

It could be possible for “Daisy” to scent the tire tracks of her family’s vehicle, though I think extremely unlikely that a mixed breed dog would have that ability – I have read of a bloodhound being able to follow the fresh odor of human sweat coming from inside of a moving vehicle through heavy traffic, but from the sound of this story, any “sweat” given off by Daisy’s family wouldn’t have been fresh enough to follow – I have to put it down to another mystery of canine ability.

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Al Magaw is a musher from Salmo, BC. Al keeps a medium sized kennel of 20 – 45 alaskan huskies as well as several pet dogs of various breeds. Al has been training and racing for the last 33 years. Before becoming involved with sled dogs, Al, along with his family, kept and competed with horses for many years. Al can be reached through his website at http://www.spiritofthenorthkennels.com Al is a guest blogger for Denver Dog Works and can be reached through our website at http://www.denverdogworks.com

The Future

June 13, 2010 by teamineka

The Future

By Al Magaw

The dogs and other animals that ran for the hills before the tsunami in the south seas present an interesting situation – for 100’s of years there have been reports of strange behavior from dogs, and other animals, before earth quakes – the earth quake and subsequent under water land slide that caused the tsunami were far from where the giant wave hit – certainly far enough that the earth quake itself would have caused little damage to any habituated land, yet somehow the animals seemed to know that the tsunami was coming. The dogs didn’t bark and show their usual behavior that seems to be normal before an earth quake, and the cats didn’t just hide. They all ran for the hills.

I’ve had a few incidents in my own yard that still cause me to wonder.

“Argus” was a rock solid leader. He had the toughest head of any dog I’ve ever had the opportunity to deal with. Only once in his racing career did he ever refuse to lead a team out of the dog yard or race start chute. One morning I was running a team with 3 promising yearlings mixed in with some experienced dogs. I put Argus up in lead to hold the line out while I hooked up the rest of the dogs. This one morning, Argus refused to hold the line out. I would pull him back up and tell him to stay and he would just turn and try to run back to the kennel. Finally, I put Argus in wheel, and put “Pepsi”, the most promising yearling and another yearling in lead with the third promising yearling at single point. We left the start chute with no other problems. Pepsi and the other yearling set a good fast pace as we wound through the twisty section that comprises the first section of my training trail. As we turned onto the dike that borders the river, a pickup truck came speeding out of nowhere and ran over the front of the team, killing the 3 yearlings at the front of the team. The pickup was being driven by a teenager that had stolen it from his stepfather and gone for a joy ride. To be able to get the remaining team back home, I had to put Argus in lead. Argus showed no hesitation at that point to line the team out. He never ever refused again to leave the start chute. Did Argus have a premonition of the deadly accident?

My little border collie “Quick” never follows the teams out of the start chute, but will scold a dog that has screwed up out on the trail when we get back from a run. Not only does she seem to know what happened out on the trail, she’ll sometimes scold a dog before the run starts. That dog will screw up somewhere during the run. Are the dogs telling each other what they are planning to do in the future or is Quick having a premonition?

There are many stories of dogs getting excited about their owner coming home minutes or even hours before their owner arrives. It’s common enough that scientific tests have been done to see if the response is a reliable one. Unfortunately, the results were inconclusive.

Do dogs, and perhaps other animals, have an advanced sense of premonition? Like so many of their enhanced instincts, do they have a reliable means of seeing what the immediate future holds? Some humans have premonitions at times and some have them more often. They are often considered to be crazy, but crazy or not, some have reliable premonitions. Is this another area where humans have let an animal instinct wither from lack of use – it makes a person wonder.

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Predictions by Al Magaw

June 6, 2010 by teamineka

Predictions

By Al Magaw

“On December 26, 2004, an earthquake along the floor of the Indian Ocean was responsible for a tsunami that claimed the lives of thousands of people in Asia and East Africa. In the midst of all the destruction, wildlife officials at Sri Lanka’s Yala National Park have reported no mass animal deaths. Yala National Park is a wildlife reserve populated by hundreds of wild animals including elephants, leopards, and monkeys. Researchers believe that these animals were able to sense the danger long before humans.There has been no conclusive evidence as to how animals may be able to sense earthquakes. Some researchers believe the animals at Yala National Park were able to detect the earthquake and move to higher ground before the tsunami hit, causing massive waves and flooding. ” (copied from various news sources)

Reports of strange behavior from animals were common prior to the tsunami – (the tsunami was caused by an underwater landslide that in itself was caused by an earthquake)

The belief that animals can predict earthquakes has been around for centuries.

In 373 B.C., historians recorded that animals, including rats, snakes and weasels, deserted the Greek city of Helice in droves just days before a quake devastated the place.

Accounts of similar animal anticipation of earthquakes have surfaced across the centuries since. Catfish moving violently, chickens that stop laying eggs and bees leaving their hive in a panic have been reported. Countless pet owners claimed to have witnessed their cats and dogs acting strangely before the ground shook—barking or whining for no apparent reason, or showing signs of nervousness and restlessness.

There have also been examples where authorities have forecast successfully a major earthquake, based in part on the observation of the strange antics of animals. For example, in 1975 Chinese officials ordered the evacuation of Haicheng, a city with one million people, just days before a 7.3-magnitude quake. Only a small portion of the population was hurt or killed. If the city had not been evacuated, it is estimated that the number of fatalities and injuries could have exceeded 150,000.” (copied from National Geographic )

Research into this phenomena is “being held back not because of lack of money but dogmatism and narrow-mindedness” according to one expert

My own belief is that for phenomena like this to be understood, the mindset of 2 + 2 = 4 has to be forgotten and minds have to open to the idea that there are other things happening in the universe that can not be explained by conventional scientific thinking or religious beliefs.

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Intuition vs. Images

May 30, 2010 by teamineka

Intuition vs. Images

By Al Magaw

We have all met those people, often women, who have an uncanny intuition for reading other people, developing trust or reservations almost instantly. It’s uncanny how often people who have a good intuition make a correct assessment. After making many mistakes in my life, some serious, some not so serious, I’ve learned to trust my own faint semblance of intuition more than I used to. I realise now that the slight feeling of apprehension that I had felt in various situations was closer to the truth than what my brain, while weighing the more obvious evidence, evidence gained through the normal senses, had figured it was. How this works, I have no idea, but there are few arguments that would dispute that there is such a thing as intuition.

Dogs, and other animals, have developed a method of communication that uses no sounds, no motions, and no visible clues as to how it works. It’s very mysterious, and there is very little hard scientific evidence available to confirm it, yet virtually every pet owner that is close to their pet has stories of how their dog, cat, horse, etc, has shown a remarkable ability to know what it’s owner, with no apparent signal being given, is going to be doing or wants from his pet. There are some, including this author, that believe dogs communicate through their ability to read and send images – a question that presents itself to me is this, “Is our intuition linked in some way to an animal’s ability to communicate through images”? There are certainly some demonstrable comparisons.

“Gramma” insists that someone is a bad person after meeting them for the first time and only for a few moments at that. It’s a scenario that is common enough and accurate enough to get a laugh.

We’ve all seen or heard of the normally friendly dog that all of it’s life had greeted everyone with a wagging tail, that suddenly wouldn’t let a stranger out of their vehicle. One of my own dogs was normally a wuss in his day to day life, friendly to everyone, yet one day when a pickup drove into the yard with two men in it, he objected to one of the men in the truck. “Ozzie” didn’t mind that the driver got out of the truck and came to the door, but he insisted the passenger not set foot on the ground. “Ozzie” was a Shropshire terrier, all black, with large, very white teeth, and with teeth showing and the hair on his back all bristled up, no one was going to argue with him. Why did Ozzie object to the passenger and not the driver? It couldn’t have been the truck or he would have objected to both men. Was the man in the truck imaging some sort of harm?

A lady I know, had one of her Alaskan Huskies chained in the back of her pickup when she stopped to give a hitchhiker a ride. The man was no sooner in the pickup than the woman realized there was something wrong with him, an intuition that the man could be a threat. The sliding rear window was open, and somehow the big dog, “Zeus”, hampered by being tied in the back of the pickup, was able to wiggle in through the open sliding rear window and plant himself firmly between passenger and driver.

In all of the above cases there was no reasonable, no discernible, reason to come to the conclusion that they came to, dog, Gramma or lady driver, yet we have to assume there was some sort of communication before any of them could come to the conclusion that they did. Does intuition and silent, image based communication come from the same source, the same instinct? Does the evidence of other inherited instincts from our animal fore-bearers also include the ability, though faded, to understand images coming from a fellow human or some other creature? Is the dog’s heightened awareness a super strong intuition? I don’t have the answers to these questions, but the evidence causes me to ask them.

We rely so much on eyesight, hearing, and touch, that we’ve lost much of what it takes to understand other possible ways of communicating. Because we don’t understand something, or can’t see, hear, or feel it, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t so.

Do you have a remarkable story about one of your dogs? Contact us at live@dogdoctorradio.com We would love to hear from you.

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