A lazy dreamer

Pro: the dog has an amazing sniffer and can find the mushrooms better than i can

Con: He finds the mushrooms and promptly eats them

Balance: coming out ahead on this one, because he'll find a bunch and spend 15 minutes playing with one while I gather the rest

Pro: Solomon had an absolute blast and got some good off leash training in a safe area with good visibility

Con: Letting your dog run around in last year's wildfire scar is exactly as dirty as it seems. Soot. Ash. Loess. Charcoal. Plain ol dirty. Leaf litter and spruce needles. Burnt leaf litter and charred spruce needles. We are in the middle of our pollen boom and it's pileing up on surfaces so of course his fur is full of that too. This may actually be the filthiest he has ever been in his entire life. I am definitely the dirtiest I have been at least this season if not longer.

Balance: I have dog towels and we both jumped in the lake.

Couldn't figure out how to break this one into a pro or con : porcupine.

Kept the dog away from the porcupine. He may not have even noticed it. So he did not learn to fear it, or that there are negative consequences associated with porcupines, but we did not have to deal with quills in the nose.

Con: I got absolutely nothing I intended to get done on this lovely saturday accomplished.

It can almost certainly tell different species apart based on the shape of those air bladders. And it can tell if a fish has something weird inside it, like a metal hook. In Hawaii, false killer whales often pluck tuna off fishing lines, and “they’ll know where the hook is inside that fish,” Aude Pacini, who studies these animals, tells me. “They can ‘see’ things that you and I would never consider unless we had an X-ray machine or an MRI scanner.”

This penetrating perception is so unusual that scientists have barely begun to consider its implications. The beaked whales, for example, are odontocetes that look dolphin-esque on the outside—but on the inside, their skulls bear a strange assortment of crests, ridges, and bumps, many of which are only found in males.

Pavel Gol’din has suggested that these structures might be the equivalent of deer antlers—showy ornaments that are used to attract mates. Such ornaments would normally protrude from the body in a visible and conspicuous way, but that’s unnecessary for animals that are living medical scanners.’

I'm not sure if I ever shared this story before here, but in Curacao, when I was allowed to assist in a guest interaction programme, there was suddenly consternation in the pool behind us. A guest had entered the water and the dolphins were going crazy, paying no heed to the trainers anymore. The lead trainer that was with me gave the dolphins to me to watch over while she went to help. When she came back she told me what had happened. The guest that had caused so much uproar had left the water again and was asked if he had done anything to upset the dolphins. He hadn't, and he couldn't imagine what was wrong... until he mentioned he had a pacemaker. The younger dolphins in the pool had never seen someone with a pacemaker before and apparently it rocked their world.