more Easter bonnet torture

Easter bonnet closeup
Originally uploaded by wombatarama

Easter Bonnet Misery

Lilly hates wearing outfits, hates it to hell.

Pug theories, 3: Experimental testing

Here's the new bed I mentioned in the earlier post. It occurred to me that I had changed too many variables at the same time: I got a new bed, AND I put the new bed in the spot where the old best bed used to be, changing the position of the old best bed.

I decided to see what would happen if this hallowed spot had NO bed in it. What if there was only one really good bed, but it wasn't in that spot? So I took away the second bed, and moved the pictured bed a couple of feet to the right.

For the couple of hours that this situation existed, Rose chose to lie on the carpet instead of in the good bed in the wrong place.

This suggests that it's not just the bed that matters - there is also a good spot, and all the other spots are inferior. Really there ought to be further testing, but I felt so sorry for her that I had to put the best bed back in the best spot.

(Lilly, of course, just goes and sleeps on the back of the couch if you mess with her beds. She can take care of herself.)

Pug theories, 2

I tried to restrain a pug to trim one nail recently, and realized how stupid it was to do this right when I was about to leave the house. Because when I released the pug I was covered with a perfectly astonishing amount of hair, almost enough to require a complete change of wardrobe.

I believe that this is actually a defense strategy that pugs have evolved. Just the way squid can squirt ink to repel predators, pugs can release astonishing amounts of hair as a means of defense against attacks of nail-trimming and the like. We often see in nature that such mechanisms are exquisitely tailored to a particular opponent, and this is one of them - it only works on a species that cares what its clothes look like.

spring pugs

spring pugs 1
Originally uploaded by wombatarama

Pug theories, 1

There are two dog beds in the living room and in my office. But in each place, one bed is the good one and the other is the bad one. If the good bed is already in use, the other pug will almost always choose to lie on the couch.

I recently ordered a nice new bed to replace what looked to me like the crummiest bed, and rearranged beds so that two desirable beds were in one room.

What I discovered is that 'two desirable beds in one room' is apparently an impossible concept. In the pug mind, if there are two beds, no matter how nice they are, one is the good bed and one is the bad bed.

This shouldn't have surprised me. I thought of ordering another bed to see what happens when two identical beds are in the same room. And then I remembered: when you give them two identical bones, they still try to steal them from each other, obviously sure that one is good and one is bad.

So I suspect that with two identical beds, there will still be one bad one and one good one. I am still trying to decide whether to spend another forty dollars to test this hypothesis.

Elsewhere on the Internet

The pugs are not the only ones who appear on other people's websites... Candy Addict is back up and running, and I've updated the links over there on the right so they take you directly to my posts.