Alex Jones loves Lego, and loves Kisha, his little black dog. So, he made her a Lego doghouse, naturally. And Lego steaks, and a fire hydrant and a tree to pee on.

Of course, I’m sure she doesn’t appreciate any of it. Because Lego doesn’t smell like bacon! Ditto the collar he sized just for her.

Ah well. At least now, she’s all set to go to the Lego dog park.

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This Friday, the Sonoma-Marin Fairgrounds in California will host the 25th annual World’s Ugliest Dog contest. The winner usually has something in common with many Californian genital areas: Hairlessness. Many of these hair-free dogs are Chinese Cresteds who descend from ones bred by famous stripper, Gypsy Rose Lee. Lee liked to describe her pets as “naked dogs, for a naked lady.”

Lee was gifted her first Crested by her sister, June Havoc, and, through the years, she worked to secure the legacy of her favorite hairless dog, who she called Fu Manchu. 

Non-hirsute dogs are used in some cultures as one might use a water bottle — they’re pressed to aching body parts to ease pain. Just like so many hairless California genitals!

Actually, not all Chinese Cresteds are hairless. In any litter, there’s a one-in-three chance that a puppy will be born hairy. This variety is called “Powder Puff.”

I happen to think this breed is quite cute, with or without their fur coats. When I was an associate producer at Animal Planet’s Too Cute, I was lucky enough to work with two Crested puppies, Bella and her furry brother, Buttons.  Nothing ugly about these two.

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Me: “It’s possible that he likes when you’re not paying attention to him. Maybe, to him, the absence of your vigilance is a reward.”

Him: “No, that’s not it.”

Me: “Well, if a behavior keeps happening, it means that it is being rewarded in someway. Behaviors that are rewarded are more likely to happen again.” 

Him: “Not in this case.”

Me: “This isn’t my own personal theory. This is the science of behavior. If your lack of attention isn’t the reward, it’s possible it’s the cue. Maybe when you stop paying attention, it signals to him that he should investigate what you’re doing.”

Him: “But this isn’t just when we’re doing training, it’s all the time.”

Me: “Training is happening all the time! Every time your boss pays you, he’s bettering the chance that you’ll show up for work the next day. If he didn’t pay you, you probably wouldn’t show up. That’s training. If a waiter is rude to you, you may be less likely to go back to that restaurant. That’s training, too.”

Him: “Fine, but still, that’s not the case here. Every dog finds attention rewarding.” 

Me: “Not so. Dogs are as idiosyncratic as we are. Some dogs find being in their crate rewarding, others find i punishing. Some find it rewarding when a human stops touching them, or when another dog stops approaching them. Rewards aren’t always obvious. I mean, some humans are rewarded by things involving whips and chains, right?”

Sometimes, when I’m discussing dog training, the conversations reach this kind of weird point if I try to show the overlap between human and canine behavior. So, I shut up there. And we spent the last few minutes cueing the dog into sits and feeding him string cheese silence. Truth is, I don’t know why the dog is clingy sometimes and not other times. But I do know something about dog habits. And I know that there’s actually a lot of overlap between our habits and theirs, which means we know more than we think we do about how to control canine behaviors.  Take, for instance, the area of rewards — a major factor in habit formation. In this excellent video, Charles Duhigg, author of the The Power of Habit, dissects the rewards that were involved in causing a habit that led him to gain eight pounds: Taking an afternoon break from his desk to go buy a cookie. Just like with dogs, habits are just behaviors that reoccur because they’ve somehow been rewarded. Duhigg learned that his cookie habit wasn’t really being rewarded by getting to eat the cookie. The reward was something else that happened to occur at the same time as his cookie consumption… In the case of my client, the reward he’s experiencing might just be something that just happens to coincide with moments when the owner is not paying attention to him. For instance, might think your dog is rewarded by you patting him on the head when he sits next to you, but really the reward is that he’s getting to sit near your crotch, which is full of interesting smells. Or, you think the behavior of him kissing you is rewarded by your love, when really it’s rewarded by the opportunity to lick croissant crumbs from your mouth. My point is: Who knows! But keeping your eyes peeled to try to figure out what’s rewarding to your dog is a good way to start to investigate how you can change behaviors by manipulating the the rewards.  Of course, not all behaviors are reinforced. Some are punished, and are therefore less likely to occur again. Indeed, that’s the definition of punishment: It tends to make things stop happening. Like, if you have a dog trainer who is not buying the idea that your dog is an aberration whose actions cannot be codified by the rules of the science of behavior. That might make you not want to work with that trainer again. The behavior of training your dog with her would therefore be extinguish. Ah well. But that doesn’t mean training would stop. Because behavior is happening all the time. And there’s nothing we can do about it. I need a cookie.

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Dusty, a newbie drug-sniffing dog in Bremerton, WA, is the first in the state to be trained NOT to find weed.

Now that weed is legal in Washington, some drug-sniffing dogs are finding themselves with a skill set that is no longer necessary. All that hard work that went into training these savvy canines to smell out weed, and now the police don’t need them to find it. Indeed, much hubbub is being made of Dusty, pictured, the state’s newest police scent dog. He is being trained to sniff out all the illegal drugs other than marijuana. Meanwhile, other police departments are working on desensitizing the dogs to the smell they worked so hard to learn to detect. Lucky Dusty. It’s kind of like if it was suddenly announced that you wouldn’t have to take a language in order to graduate. It leaves Dusty so much more time to smoke up.

Pot-sniffing dogs could find alternate employment with a company like Dogs Finding Drugs, which rents out dogs to workplaces and homes where bosses or parents or roommates suspect drug use. Or they could just do pro bono work, lending their services to stoners who have misplaced their stash. Now, that’d be awesome.

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Like, for instance, pigs and ducks. Especially really cute pigs and ducks. I should know…

Last year I worked as an associate producer and animal wrangler on the Animal Planet show Too Cute. Among other duties, I wrote the mid-episode quizzes, corralled  ducklings and chaperoned pitbull puppies on their first trip to a dog park.

Me and two of the pitbull puppies on set.

Going to the park for the first time.

On adoption day, 5-year-old Theo referred to the “pitbulls” as “pickles.”

On another shoot, we rented ducks from a petting zoo, and I was responsible for training them to walk in a straight line over a bridge, on the other side of which they’d meet some Mini Aussie puppies. 

My duckling pupils on the set of Too Cute.

Here are the duckies and the puppies doing their cute thing in the final cut.

But the most fun part of the job was the trips to Spring Woods farm in Pennsylvania where I got to watch a litter of baby miniature piglets grow up.  

Piglets nurse from their mama at just four days old.

Piglet and me. I’m the one on the left.

The piglet breeder hangs out with her charges between shots.

Shooting piglets in the mud.

While it was exciting to get to know a new species, the best part of my time at the pig breeders’ home was getting to hang out with the piglets’ best friend, Penny the spaniel. I guess I’m just a dog person at heart. The show includes a lot of scenes where Penny works hard to get the pigs to like her. (You can watch the full episode here – it also features baby hedgehogs and bunnies).

But none of these piglets in this litter bonded with Penny like fellow Spring Woods farm resident, Petey. Indeed, Petey and Penny had been practicing being “Too Cute” together for years.  Here is a home video their owner made of them frolicking together at the farm years before the Animal Planet team arrived.

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At what point did you decide that you wanted to make a movie about dead pets? 

We had many types of animals growing up and I became very attached to them over the years. My parents were huge advocates of animal rescue, so we ended up with all sorts: dogs, rats, lizards, parakeets, gerbils (the list goes on). And no matter what the species, I found that I became unbelievably attached to each of them. As a result, I had a very tough time letting go when they died.

We’re so removed from death in our culture. We don’t talk about it; certainly not in public discourse. Once we got antibiotics in the 1940s, we became less accustomed to it. People used to die more frequently, and they died much younger, but today pet death is a more prevalent part of many people’s lives than human death. And it’s interesting to see how people deal with it.

A bronze mummiform for a cat named Shura. (Gregg Domenico)

For me, growing up, I had a lot of unanswered questions about the deaths of my pet friends. With non-spiritual parents, we never had discussions about soul or heaven or afterlife or anything like that. I’m not so sure that would have helped, as I’m not spiritual now, but it was certainly a tough blow to be told that my beloved animal ceased to exist any longer. That he or she had vanished, leaving behind nothing but a lifeless shell. It was extremely confusing. I knew there was something about the close physical relationship one has with a pet that makes the letting go even more difficult, which is why I put a whole segment in the film about the biology of the human-animal bond. It’s more than just a psychological attachment.

So, a few years ago, when I read a newspaper article about outrageous pet expenditures, and specifically about people freeze-drying their pets after death, I was intrigued. What comfort would a somewhat lifelike version of one’s pet offer? Did the pet owners believe they were cheating death? Where did they think the soul had gone, if they believed in that (which I suspected they did)? What was left in the preserved body of their late companion that offered such comfort? While their choices were unconventional, I empathized with their level of attachment to, and inability to let go of, their pets.

Furever started with a short segment on freeze-drying and it evolved into a feature-length exploration of many aspects of the pet death care industry, beyond pet preservation and cremains preservation. My goal was to capture the myriad memorialization options that exist, and to better understand the sociological evolution of pets in the U.S. today (especially as they relate to human death rituals, grief, religion, and our death-avoidant culture).

Do you think that your film reflects a sea-change in how people are viewing the human/pet relationship?

Yes, I’d say so. We spend nearly $53 billion on pets per year and they’ve migrated from residing outside the house to inside our beds. I wanted to look at how this evolution is affecting the veterinary and death care professions. Are pets gaining legal rights? Is there any regulation of the pet death care industry? Are our bonds with our pets strictly psychological, or physiological too? And, of course, who decides what kind of grief is acceptable or appropriate?

Koda meets Rudy, who is deceased. (Amy Finkel)

Also, how unconventional are these new-found rituals, really? Is there a cultural divide? It was interesting to me that a lot of these people were actually better able to deal with death than most. I became not only intrigued, but also impressed by the way that they were dealing with it. Very few believed that they were cheating death. One of the subjects, Mac, talks about how he’s had to explain to people that their pet is dead. That’s not the majority; that’s the exception. The majority of these people understood it in a way that I’m not sure I ever will, and whatever their memorialization method, found it offered a great deal of comfort.

Would you say this is a film more about pets or about loss in general? I can imagine that people who haven’t had a deep connection to a pet might come into a screening ready for ninety-minutes of eye rolling.

Well, I made the film with a very specific target audience in mind: pet people. I felt that I had to focus it in that way or else it wouldn’t carry the gravity that I wanted it to. I certainly wasn’t trying to preach to the converted (it’s not that type of film), but I figured that only pet lovers would likely enjoy the footage of live animals, which seemed crucial to include alongside the many dead ones. But to my surprise, numerous non-pet people are embracing it. I hadn’t anticipated that. I think they’re particularly drawn to the academic narrative that runs through it, and as a result of that content and the themes therein, they leave (or so I’ve heard), feeling more sensitive to their pet lover friends. Just the other day someone told me that her friend had to put his dog down, and that she’d initially mocked the fact that the pet had become a surrogate child to him, but that she had a new understanding and sensitivity to what he was going through, having watched the film, and that her instinct to mock had dissipated. I was, of course, thrilled. That’s the whole point.

That said, some of the scenes in the film are particularly polarizing. I’m shocked at screenings to see a large group of people in the audience crying, while others are laughing. It happens in every screening. But I can never gauge if it is, at times, uncomfortable laughter, because it is making people think about mortality in a way with which they’re totally rattled. I’m one of those people that unintentionally laughs at funerals and Bar Mitzvahs, so I do understand that reaction too. The film is asking people to confront a number of concepts that one is likely not thinking about regularly, so I’m of the belief that any reaction is fine.

Your film covers cloning, taxidermy, and mummification among other rather “out there” things. Was there one kind of pet memorialization that particularly appealed to you?

A soon-to-be-freeze-dried Schnauzer is secured to a wooden board (Amy Finkel)

Fortunately it’s not something I have to personally consider right now as I actually don’t have any pets — I live in a rent-controlled apartment that doesn’t allow them (although I did recently foster a dog, a Hurricane Sandy victim, Mortimer, who finally just found his forever home)! My family has only ever buried or cremated our pets, and I suspect that will still be the case even after they know about every memorialization method out there. I think my favorite, of all of them, however, is the process in which you record your pet’s voice and then press his or her ashes into a vinyl record, to keep in my record collection ‘furever.’

People do think I have a leaning towards taxidermy because I have a little family of freeze-dried and taxidermied animals in my apartment: Chompers, my groundhog, Fleischesser, my armadillo, and angel, my wild boar. My first subject, Mac, the pet taxidermist, gave them to me as thank you gifts for making his website for him. I feel a bit uneasy knowing that they, likely, did not die of natural causes, nor, unlike the boar, did anyone eat their meat, so it makes me feel better to treat them in death with the dignity and respect they never received in life. They get frequent positive affirmations and simulated food offerings. You know, for that extra dose of anthropomorphic affection (with a chaser of projection). Chompers and Angel spend time with me in my living room, and Fleischesser lives in my office, positioned so that he may stare in perpetuity at a gorgeous old mannequin whose arms frequently fall off, as an homage to his species’ leprotic leanings. I think I’m giving him a good afterlife.

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Last year, Silvie Bordeaux, a Los Angeles publicist, made a pact with God. Shortly after she learned that her 12-year-old toy poodle, Muffin, had gone blind, the dog ended up in the emergency room after he was accidentally lacerated during a vet appointment to inspect a suspicious mass. The prognosis was bleak. On her site she describes how, while he was in critical care, she was home “on my knees sobbing all night, surrounded by his bed, toys and clothes, I pleaded to God to please save my precious dog and promised in return, upon his recovery, Muffin and I would be of service and dedicate our lives to helping blind dogs.”

Muffin lived! So, Bordeaux started investigating what kind of aids exist to help blind dogs. Underwhelmed by her findings, she decided to develop her own product: Clear vinyl tubing, filled with wire and covered with plastic, to be worn around a blind dog’s head to protect them from bumping into things. She called it “Muffin’s Halo”. Here is Muffin wearing his angelic protective gear as he explores a hotel room for the first time.

I can be a little critical about gratuitous dog getups, but, like Doggles, Bordeaux’s patented invention is both cute and useful: The rim acts as a barrier to help give a dog a sense of where he is before his nose face hits a wall. The wings protect the side’s of a dog’s body. And the whole getup makes him extra noticeable, which probably means it less likely that he’ll end up underfoot in a crowded elevator.

For larger dogs, Bordeaux is developing a sturdier version of the device that makes the the dog look like a quarterback.

Muffin, who is now pushing 13, seems to really be benefiting from his halo. I will be curious to see if this product takes off. It certainly seems like there is a lot of heart behind that little halo. Bordeaux is selling them on her site, starting at $89.95.

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Doggles are goggles for dogs. They are used to help provide some UV protection (especially important for dogs suffering from pannus, a canine corneal disease), or to protect the eyes of Search and Rescue dogs from debris and danger and sand. Or, you might get them if you want your dog to ride in your sidecar. The company has even experimented with making dog goggles with corrective lenses, and completely opaque ones for blind dogs

At School For The Dogs, we just got a few pairs, but not so that our clients can learn how to dress their pup as Jacques Cousteau for Halloween. New York’s premier (and only) veterinary behaviorist, Dr. E’Lise Cristensen gave us a new idea for their use: Smear some vaseline in them and they can help obscure a dog’s vision in areas were he might other wise be overly stimulated. The calming cap, made of slightly sheer nylon, is a similar idea. But they look sort of Abu Ghraib prisoner-y.

Whereas doggles make every dog look like Tom Cruise circa 1986.

In the photo above, our spokesdogs Disco and Amos are modeling them. They must actually be pretty comfortable — we thought it’d take a while to desensitize
 them to having something over their eyes, but they were pretty psyched to try them on. Although Amos is holding out for Ray Bans.

Of course, they do not yet make dog contacts. Or monocles. Although Warby Parker did get our hopes up about that one.

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I’m a dog trainer. I work to help people solve issues they’re having with their dogs. But sometimes, I find that I can use the same solutions I dole out to my students to train another animal with whom I’m particularly well acquainted: Me.

Take my workout habits.

I should work out because of the long-term health effects on my body. I should have enough willpower to “just do it.” But I don’t. For dogs, theoretical long-term results don’t matter in training behavior. We might have a different temporal sense than they do, but, when it comes to the effectiveness of behavior modification, humans are not so different than canis familiaris:  We need instant rewards, well managed situations, and the removal of anything punishing.

Here are some dog training methods I employed to get myself in better shape.

1. Acknowledge that going to the gym is a behavior, and behaviors are maleable

If you only go to the gym to avoid guilt — an example of negative reinforcement — or if you are mean to yourself when you don’t go to the gym — an example of punishment — you will end up developing an aversion to even thinking about the gym. Every time you think about the gym, you have a bad consequences (guilt).

If you’re an unmotivated dog owner, go ahead and replace every instance of the word “gym” with “dog training” in the above paragraph.

How are these situations alike? In both cases, you have trained yourself to procrastinate. It’s not that you’re lazy, or weak, or any such labels. Your aversion is just a trained behavior. We can change that.

Behavior is shaped by consequences. If a behavior is followed by a good consequence, the behavior is more likely to occur. If a behavior is followed by a bad consequence, the behavior is less likely to occur. By manipulating the consequences of going to the gym, I can manipulate my future behavior.

2. Figure out how to associate the gym with good things

Classical conditioning is the reason Pavlov’s dogs drooled when they heard the bell. By pairing pleasant stimulus (in Pavlov’s dogs’ cases, food) with neutral stimulus (bell), the neutral stimulus becomes rewarding. Some rewards I use to get myself to the gym are straight up Pavlovian.

I eliminated my top gym-related aversives: looking sloppy and getting calluses. I bought nice gym clothes, and I make a point of getting my unruly hair under control and wear a touch of lipstick before spending twenty minutes in a room full of mirrors. To protect my hands, I bring grips (I don’t like gloves). 

There are little things, too. I decorated my gym notebook, and I use colored gel pens to track my workouts. I also use stickers, which are scientifically proven to be awesome.

My very pretty gym notebook.

All of these positive associations help make my gym visits more enjoyable. As famous animal trainer Bob Bailey says, “Pavlov is Always Sitting On Your Shoulder.” No matter what we do, we are always being classically conditioned to like or dislike our activities. Use this to your advantage. 

3. Reward good behavior

Figure out what’s rewarding to you, and you can use those things to positively reinforce the behavior of going to the gym.

Would you keep working if your boss stopped paying you? Pay your body for the work it does. For most people, checking off a box on a log is very rewarding, but you should tie it with a real life reward as well. 

I reward the behavior of going into the gym by logging the whole workout in a my notebook — seeing the pages fill up is rewarding to me. When I get home, I log the workout on Fitocracy, a fitness social network that gamifies fitness. I also get to see my long-term progress charts. Then, I eat a delicious meal. For humans and dogs alike, food is a “primary reinforcer” and as such has a lot of power in influencing behavior. I get to eat 20% more than my caloric needs on a workout day. Talk about reward!

Measurements are important so that daily fluctuations are drowned in the bigger picture. Most people track their weight. Since my goal was to gain muscle and lose fat, I knew my weight might not change much at all. Instead, I logged waist-to-hip ratio.

Waist-to-hip ratio measures general health better than BMI or weight. It also allows for a wide variation in body types. You can be skinny, athletic, or full figured–what matters to health is the ratio. For women, a ratio between 0.7 and 0.75 is ideal. A ratio above 0.8 could indicate a problem. For men, the ideal wait-to-hip ratio is said to be 0.9.

To find your waist to hip ratio, measure your waist at the narrowest point, measure your hips at the widest point, and then divide waist by hips. Here’s my data from the summer of last year until now.

Seeing the downward trend was rewarding. Taking photos can also be rewarding — sometimes more so than tracking weight. Here is another fitocracy.com user’s shots of herself.

Note that she weighs the same in both pictures. If she had only tracked her weight, she might have become discouraged and quit half-way to her goal. (Click here to read her thoughts on weight loss).

4. Create an achievable plan to meet goals and determined the most efficient route. 

There are many ways of getting results you want. If your dog eats the shoes in your closet,  you can either try to fix the behavior, fix the door on your closet, or stop wearing shoes. All would solve the problem, but some methods are just more convenient than others. 

Once you’ve picked a method, you need a plan. Why? Because when you have a plan, you can string together a bunch of behaviors into a “behavior chain.” Behavior chains are what makes a trained dog able to open the fridge, take out a beer, and bring it to you. It learned each behavior because doing one was reinforced by the opportunity to do another. And at the end of the chained-together behaviors, there is some kind of nice reward.

When you string behaviors into a chain, you have that feeling of flow: one behavior smoothly flows into the next, so the entire chain feels like you only did one behavior. For example, driving a car is made up of a million little behaviors, but when you think about how you got home, you just think “I drove” as if it’s one behavior. The same can be true for working out. Instead of having many unpleasant steps (getting to the gym, doing one exercise, walking around awkwardly, doing another exercise, and so on, then going home), you can have what feels like one behavior: “I worked out.” How? By becoming fluent in each individual behavior, and by knowing during each behavior what you’re going to do next. 

To become fluent in each lift, get someone to show you correct form. I watched a million how-to videos on YouTube. This guy is my favorite: free, clear, accurate, and nice to look at (primary reinforcer!).

Knowing what you’re going to do next becomes a reward. Your reward for doing your first set of bench press is that you get to go on to the next familiar behavior, which gets you closer to finishing your workout (and to your reward). If you finish one behavior and you don’t have your next behavior already lined up, your “behavior chain” is broken, and all the work you’ve done to that point goes unrewarded. The consequence of all your work to that point is “stand there feeling stupid.”  If a behavior is followed by a bad consequence, the behavior is less likely to occur. Feeling stupid is a punishment, not a reward.

5. End workouts on a high note

Dog trainers know to put the preferred, best known behaviors at the end of the chain. Might as well do that with yourself, too. I finish off my workout with something I enjoy: a three-minute walk on the treadmill. Short and sweet. 

6. Set things up to be as easy as possible

A seeing-eye dog has to learn to sit before he can learn to maneuver Madison Avenue. A marathoner starts off by taking just one step. Likewise, begin with short workouts. Keep the weights light at first. Make it easy. Reward lavishly. Remember that you’re really training yourself to love training. It’s not about the one lift; it’s about a lifetime of fitness. 

To make eating right easy, I stock my fridge with fresh vegetables and meats. The food battle is won at the grocery store. If it’s not in my house, I can’t eat it. It’s the same advice I gave my friend when his puppy mauled his phone charger: if you hadn’t left it out, she wouldn’t have destroyed it. Some things are just too hard to resist.

7. Train incompatible behaviors to tip the scales toward the desired results

To keep your dog from chewing the sofa, you might give him something more appropriate to chomp on. Have a dog who begs incessantly at the table? Train him to sit nicely on a mat in the corner. The dog can’t be on his mat and pawing your lap at the same time.

Similarly, the best way to “diet” is to have a belly full of vegetables and protein. Instead of fretting about what I’m not supposed to eat, I focused on all the wonderful things that I can eat.   

I’m not about to appear on the cover of a swimsuit magazine, but I’ve never looked better naked. I dance in my seat on the way to the gym because I can’t wait to get started. My body is healthier. I almost never get cold because I burn calories with my internal furnace. I can deadlift and squat my body-weight.

I never thought I’d be “the kind of person who” goes to the gym. I had an aversion to physical effort when I started out. Today I love to work out.  I must be a pretty good trainer.

Tags:  behaviorism, dog training, fitness, karen pryor, rewarding behaviors

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Rodriguez says that the tattoos are for identification purposes. Indeed, many vets, breeders and rescuers do tattoo animals, either to be able to ID them, or to indicate that they’ve been spayed or neutered. But usually it’s just a number or a line or something. Rodriguez’s dogs’ tattoos are far more elaborate, although no more attractive than other dog tattoos I’ve seen. I was hoping they’d be of, like, Scooby Doo. But they look more like Rorschach blotches.

Lady and the tramp stamp? North Carolina’s Stokes County Health Department and Animal Control are investigating Rodriguez, as some are saying it was animal cruelty for him to tattoo his dog.

According to the CNN report, Rodriguez did the inking on the dogs while they were under anesthesia from having their ears cropped. I find this doubtful, as I’ve never heard of a vet handing over a still-anesthetized dog. And considering the way my Yorkiepoo yelps if I accidentally pet him too roughly, I can’t imagine that a pit bull who is merely a little groggy would take too kindly to having needles poked in its belly. So, who knows how the guy did it. I just wish my eyes had been anesthetized before I had to look at the thing.

Is it unethical to do this to a dog? I think it’s an interesting question. I’d say, yes. It’s just unnecessary. Rodriguez claimed it was done for identification purposes, but it seems ridiculous to cause a dog pain in this way when a collar and a $3 ID tag would do the same job.

But is it really any worse than many of the other things that people do to their dogs for reasons that are purely based on human ideas of what looks good? Inbreeding to the point of physical deformity, for instance. Or tail docking and ear clipping –two practices which were deplored even by Hitler (he banned doing either one without anesthesia in Nazi Germany).

A cosmetic procedure that is probably more widely spread than decorative tattooing for identification purposes is decorative freeze branding. Wes Baker of Freeze-Brands.com, which specializes in cattle branding tools, told me that over the last decade he’s increasingly gotten request for small brands suitable for dogs. He makes several hundred a year. He mostly gets request to make brands that are numbers or letters, but he’s also done musical notes, hearts and skull-and-cross bones.

According to Baker, freeze branding doesn’t hurt. “Unlike the cattle brands we make, the brands for dogs are for pets, and no one raises a dog for twelve months and then slaughters and eats it. it’s a different thing,” he said. “That’s why I think people wouldn’t want to use a hot brand. You train a dog and you work with it and it trusts you. You cant walk up to it with a hot iron. They wouldn’t trust you after that. So, that’s why we suggest freeze branding.”

Here is a dog with a freeze-branded bum.

Freeze branding is done using dry ice. The brand is held to the skin for anywhere between twenty seconds and minute, depending on the thickness of the hair and skin. According to one devotee, it might be more painful than Baker lets on.

You’ll need at least two people, and three is even better. One person must brand, while the other two hold the dog. Sometimes you need one guy to hold the front end of the dog while the second person holds the dog’s back legs tight. Just depends on the dog. When we branded my dog, she curled up in my lap and acted like she was getting a relaxing massage. [Another] dog thrashed around like a Marlin out of water and peed all over my leg. I don’t think the branding hurt so much as she thought she was getting beat up by three people, and I’m here to tell ya, she wasn’t going down without a fight LOL!!! 

He adds:

You animal huggers can already quit your whining about how much it must hurt, and that’s why they struggle when they are being branded, and all of that whiny baby garbage. If you were going to PM me about what an a$$ I am to do that to a dog, and it ought to be done to me, save it. I’m telling you from experience that it don’t hurt. I wear the same iron as my dogs – I belong to them as much as they belong to me. They’d give their life for me; to return the favor is the least I could do.

Looking for a way to express yourself on your dog’s skin without someone PM-ing you calling you an a$$? Two British groomers are heralding a new trend: Pooch Patches, which are little designs shaved into dog hair.

There is also a product called Petattoos, made by Pet Science Labs, which makes tattoos for dogs. They are basically just stencils that can be applied with non-toxic paint and a sponge.

Of course, you could just leave your dog alone and tattoo yourself. Preferably, with a picture of your dog. Now that’s a trend a pup could get behind.

Featured image by Alexis Trice 

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