Dog Stuff.
Don't worry, this isn't one of those "Look at what my cute little doggies did" post. I generally don't do those.

However, my wife has an eclectic sense of humor, and a hawk's tunnel vision for e-bay auctions. And one day, she bought two very cool dog toys. The first was called the BowLingual (the dog translator). The way it works is that you strap a wireless microphone onto the collar of your dog, and you hold the cute little receiver. When your dog barks, the microphone picks it up, relays that bark to your receiver, which completely ignores all inputs, and rolls a 20-sided die to tell you what your dog is thinking.

At least, that's the way it seemed to me. I put this one on of my dogs, powered up the system, and in the first setup menu, it asks for the breed of dog. It had a huge list of dogs, many of which, I'd never heard of (like the Bovier de Flandres, voted breed most likely to have it's milk money stolen.) Well, crap. My dogs are both shelter rescues, mutts, so it was pretty tough to guess what breed the dog was. How do you tell it, "It's a black dog, about the size of a lab, but definitely not a lab because of that thin snout, and those thin legs. Also, it seems to have a greyhound's powerful back legs, and a terriers tail."

I went with "Mixed breed, Medium Size, large snout".

After setting up the rest of the dog's "profile", I went to "Bark Translation Mode". The system waited for a moment, processed and analyzed an incoming bark, then told me that my dog was threatening me. It showed a cute little picture of a dog growling. Now I thought that was pretty odd, because the dog hadn't even barked yet. I noticed that after a few minutes of the dog not barking, there were angry messages queuing up. My guess is that the problem was one of three things: 1) The system was totally random. I'm not discounting that one yet. 2) The ID tag, Rabies tag, and name tag were jingling enough to make the translator think that the dog was barking, or my personal favorite 3) The BowLingual was reading my dog's mind.

Now suddenly I found myself sitting not three feet away from an animal that clearly wanted to kill me, and it was only through the power of BowLingual that I was able to see into the dog's dark intent. Oh, you can hide a lot of hate behind cute, sparkling eyes, and a lolling tongue. If only Cujo's owners had been armed with a BowLingual.

After heroically jumping up and scrabbling away from the dog in, what now seems like, a awkward and cowardly way, I monitored the BowLingual from my post on the chandelier. My dog seemed to move through a series of emotions, through jealousy, anger, joy, and sorrow, all while staring up at me with her head cocked to one side.

When someone knocked on the door, and the dogs started barking at her, the BowLingual did relate threatening messages, but I just didn't trust it given how sensitive the microphone was.

I should point out that later, when we tried it on a purebred collie that belonged to a friend, the BowLingual performed like a champ, giving accurate (at least, context-sensitive believable) answers. So, maybe it just couldn't handle either of my mix-breed dogs.

You know what we discovered from hearing exactly what the dog was thinking? We found out that we already knew pretty much what the dog was thinking. They are apparently pretty good at getting their intentions across, without needing a common symbolic representation of ideas and things. When a dog puts his nose in your food, he wants your food. When a dog growls at you while you try to move it from your seat, you don't need a translator for that.

The other nifty invention that my wife found for our dogs was a bark inhibitor. It was a little battery-operated thing that you strapped onto the dog's collar. It also had a microphone, but whenever it heard a loud noise (like a dog bark), it would emit a high frequency sound. Now, I must say, that sounds fairly painful and inhumane, but after listening to it for a few days, it's really not a big deal. You see, the frequency wasn't any higher than human hearing, so whenever it heard a bark, it would emit a loud noise that was more annoying than the bark.

This microphone was also more sensitive than it needed to be, so any time the dog's collar would jingle, there would be a high-pitched screech. Every time the dogs barked, played, or moved, there would be a painful beep.

For a few minutes, the dogs were surprised by this. And, for the first few hours, it might have even stopped them from barking. Soon, though, they got used to it, and got to where they would ignore it. Now, I could hear the dogs barking outside with a loud beeping to accompany it. The dogs got so accustomed to it, that they would bark and play freely in the house, while their collars beeped incessantly. So, we got rid of that one.

The obvious social experiment was, what if you put the BowLingual on to translate barks, and the bark inhibitor to stop the dog from barking? First of all, I'm sure I was giving my dog cancer by putting so many battery powered things on its collar. It must have been pretty heavy, too, though the dog seemed not to mind. And, the first time she moved, the bark inhibitor went off, and the BowLingual caught it. A little picture of a dog holding it's paws over its ears came up, with the message, "Ow! Turn that stupid thing off!" So ends the grand experiment.

So now, I've got a new idea. This one should be cool. I'm thinking the real problem is that I don't have a way to just contact the dogs while they're out barking. Usually, by the time I get to them to stop them, they've already seen me coming and stopped on their own. I need a remote control to contact them, and that's what gave me this idea.

I'm going to sign up my dog for a cel-phone. I'm going to set it to vibrate, lock the buttons, and strap it to her collar. I'm going to set the custom ring tone to my voice shouting, "No! Stop! Bad Dog!"

This way, next time the dog starts barking, I can just ring her up and give her a shock!

Video of the day: DUI Stop
- posted by BrandG @ 12:40 PM