Animal Insting

This show is on Friday nights on the National Geographic Channel.  It's about the part of the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Utah where they keep all the dogs.  Most of these dogs come to Best Friends because they are really sick or really aggressive or really scared or have some other Big Issue that can't be solved by a regular animal shelter.  At Dogtown, there are lots of nice vets and vet techs and trainers, and they all love the dogs and work with them using positive training methods, and usually they make the dogs all-better so they can be adopted.

Some of the Michael Vick pitbulls went to Dogtown, and several have been adopted.  Last week, we saw Handsome Dan, who was very, very scared of everything, but he gradually got braver, and now he has been adopted by a nice family.  You can read more about Best Friends and about Dogtown on this website:  http://www.bestfriends.org/dogtown

How could any dog not like a show with a title like "Bones"?  The surprising thing is that they don't usually have any dogs on the show to dig up the bones for the detectives and scientists to examine.  Instead they wait until some human stumbles over a skeleton someplace totally by chance instead of letting a clever dog sniff it out for them.

Anyway, once they've found the bones, they try to put them all together to make a person and then they figure out all kinds of amazing things from the bones, like what size and shape of object made a stab wound or hit someone on the head.  Mostly it is Dr. Brennan who does this, and then the FBI guy, Booth, hunts down the murderer.  Dr. Brennan is played by Emily Deschanel, and the FBI guy is played by David Boreanaz, who was formerly a vampire.  Mom used to watch him on Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and then on Angel, where he played a vampire with a soul.  Now he plays an FBI agent with a thing for Dr. Brennan.

This show is on Fox on Thursdays, and it's pretty good, but it could be better if they had dogs to find the bones for them, like I mentioned before.  Also it would be nice if, at the end of the show, a dog sometimes got to chew on some of the bones.

This is a show about training dogs, and it's on the Animal Planet channel on Saturday nights.  In this show, a really pretty British woman named Victoria Stilwell goes to people's houses and finds out about their dogs' behavior problems.  Then she teaches these people how to use positive training methods to get the dogs to do something better than what they were doing before.  Like for example, a dog might learn not to snark and lunge at every dog he passes on the street.

Of course, since all the dogs in our house are already perfect, we don't need to watch this show as often as we watch some other shows.  But we watch it sometimes because we think Victoria Stilwell is so cute, and she drives a sexy little convertible.  Besides her TV show, she has a couple of books that you can read, plus a website with lots of good information about positive training methods.

I just wish that everybody would watch It's Me or the Dog instead of that Cesar Millan show, The Dog Whisperer.  I don't much like how Mr. Millan treats the dogs.  He just makes them scared, so that they will change their behavior for a little while, but he doesn't do anything to make the original reason for the bad behavior go away.

Right now this show is not on, but I think that is because they are busy making new episodes.  It's on the National Geographic Channel, and what it's about is this group of big guys with muscles and tattoos and motorcycles, and they look really tough, but deep down inside, they all love animals.  So they go around on Long Island and in New York City, and they make people take better care of their dogs and cats, like for instance by not leaving their dogs chained up in the yard all winter.

I like shows with bones and blood and guts, which is what Dr. G has, but I hate that they blur out a lot of the most interesting stuff.  Anyway, in this show, Dr. G, who is a real person with a long name, which is why they just shorten it to "G," has to figure out why somebody died.  Sometimes she has to figure out if the person was murdered, but mostly it's just what made them die when nobody was expecting them to die.

Mom likes to try to guess why some of the people died, so she will tell Dr. G, "I think it was a heart attack," but Dr. G can't hear her through the TV, so Dr. G will look at the person's liver and lungs and a bunch of other stuff before she finally looks at the heart.  And sure enough, the arteries are all clogged up, and that's why the person died.  I thought maybe Mom was smarter than Dr. G, but Mom said Dr. G probably has a good idea of what made the person die, at least most of the time.  So she looks in the wrong places first because this is called "building suspense," which is what you want to do on a TV show or else people won't watch it.

Oh, and Dr. G is on the Discovery Health Channel on Monday nights, but there are lots of re-runs, so you might be able to see it on a different night.

I think Mom and I have different reasons for watching this show.  I like to watch it because I want to learn the signs of hoarding so I can make sure Mom doesn't become a hoarder, which she might do if she buys too much stuff at thrift stores and on eBay.  Mom says she watches this show because of "morbid fascination," whatever that is.  Anyway, it's on the A&E Channel on Monday nights, right after Dr G.

Hoarders is about these people who can't bear to get rid of stuff, even if it is just garbage or trash or rotten food.  Or even if they can't walk through their house or use their bathroom because of all the junk they have.  Then the people who make the show come in with psychologists and cleaning crews with great big trucks, and they try to get the person's house cleaned out in only two days.  Except that it's hard because a lot of people just can't bear to throw their stuff away.

The worst is when people hoard animals, like dogs or cats.  There was one episode of Hoarders where this couple had like 76 cats in their house, even though they only thought they had about 20.  And some of the cats were dead and all dried up.  It was pretty icky to watch that show.

Anyway, sometime I'm going to write a whole blog entry about hoarding, but I haven't done it yet because my Chief Research Assistant hasn't got around to finding some photos I need and scanning them for me.

There are more shows that I could tell you about, but I just wanted to write about my very favorite ones.  Mom has some others that she likes a lot, but I don't find them very interesting, as a dog, so I mostly sleep through them.