April 18, 2010. Sunday.
Situation: Work all day today. When I get home it is still light out, but Moi and the Boy confront me with a change in the Boy’s plans for moving to NYC, and I have to make a phone call to deal with that, which distracts me from taking Mway for any walk today.
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The Difficulty of Handling Reading Materials
Unlike most humans, including most human toddlers, the canine has no hands with which to hold and move reading material and no fingers with which to turn the pages thereof, which lack of hands and fingers puts it at a decided disadvantage in (1) accessing reading materials, (2) opening reading materials, and (3) maintaining reading materials in position for optimal perusal. In the absence of hands and fingers, the canine must perforce resort to bodily appendages designed for other uses: its paws and various features of its muzzle, namely, its teeth, its nose, and, to a far lesser degree, its tongue. In addition to these disadvantages, the canine is also challenged by its four-legged stature, which causes many reading materials to be of difficult access and certain reading materials to be effectively inaccessible. Let us look, then, first at the problem of accessing reading materials. If an item of reading material happens to be on the floor or on a chair, this poses no difficulty, but if such an item is on a table or a shelf, then the canine faces a situation similar to what it encounters when seeking access to food placed on a table or a countertop, and the solution to the problem is the same: it must fling its forelegs upward, bringing them to rest on the ledge of the table or shelf, and then with a single paw, or with its nose or teeth, drag the item of reading material to, or tilt it toward, the edge of the table or shelf. At this point, if the item of reading material has been seized by the teeth, the canine may be able to hold the item in its mouth and carry it to floor level. If, however, it is not able to maintain its hold, or if it has reached for the item with its paw or nose, then the canine may depend on the force of gravity to bring the item of reading material to floor level, where it is then in position for close examination. In falling to the floor, the item will have either landed with its pages opened (this is especially the case with a magazine or a newspaper, although the pages of a newspaper may have scattered across the floor) or (especially in the case of a book) with its pages closed in one of two positions, either on its back or front cover or face down on the pages themselves. In either of the latter cases, the canine will either have to nuzzle or push the covers open with its paws or nuzzle or paw at the book to flip it over on its right side. Once this has been accomplished, the canine then faces the daunting task of manipulating the pages. Unlike the human child, the canine cannot hold the item of reading material on its lap, grasp the item with two hands, and felicitously turn the pages with its fingers. It must, first of all, depend entirely on the surface of the floor (or of a bed or sofa if the item happens to have been found there) as a means of keeping the item in place, which surface is not well suited for the purpose, as the item will tend to slide around, close up upon itself, butt up against other objects, and even slide beneath other objects as the canine tries to manipulate it. The canine may discover that it can hold the item in place by resting its head or forelegs upon it, but this is only a temporary measure that can be adopted while examining whatever pages the item happens to be opened to, and to peruse other pages, the canine must remove its head or legs and relinquish the item again to the undependable floor surface.
Secondly, to manipulate the pages themselves, the canine has no recourse but to try to turn them with its nose or paws, occasionally flicking them with its tongue or gripping them with its teeth. This inexpedient manner of manipulation creates the tendency for pages to flip severally, or in bunches, the tendency for the item of reading material to close when examining pages closest to either the front or back cover, and the tendency of pages to become well worn, torn, or even completely destroyed, which latter tendency is especially a problem with newspapers and magazines, where the canine even finds itself walking upon and flopping its belly down on the pages. The canine thus finds itself nuzzling pages back and forth for long periods of time, plopping paws against covers that resist remaining open, crinkling and ripping pages, even biting, licking, and barking at them, until a single page presents itself for examination. This most inefficient manner of manipulation remains a problem for the canine throughout its reading lifetime, but at the initial stages of reading development, it has an even more serious consequence than sheer inconvenience, in that it hinders the canine in forming a proper conception of reading material (in English) as a system of signs that progresses in linear fashion from a starting point with a leftward orientation to an end point with a rightward orientation. Only when it seeks, after acquiring a rudimentary vocabulary of basic nouns and a few verbs, to try to comprehend the grammar and syntax of a sentence does it eventually understand that reading material begins at the front of a book and ends at the back, and even long after it has reached this understanding, it remains inclined to begin reading a book somewhere in the middle and to skip around it at random.
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