The Washington Post has a great piece on how dogs have highly evolved abilities to communicate with humans non-verbally (“Duh,” quoth Cosmo.) I’ve seen stuff on this before, but it’s a nice update to the growing body of literature that demonstrates dogs are our wingmen on this mortal coil. As for the non-verbal communication, I find this particularly interesting because I’ve been experimenting with this and Cosmo for a while. Since we’ve had the baby, we do a lot of walking around the neighborhood with the stroller. This has required me to give Coz a lot more commands in terms of crossing streets, avoiding other dogs, where not to leave his calling cards etc. What’s interesting is that I’ve found that I can use hand signals and snaps often more effectively than voice commands. Part of this obviously has to do with the fact that Cosmo is a frick’n genius. We’ve never really spent any time teaching him anything because he always picks it up so quickly. He stops at every crosswalk and won’t even chase his tennis balls across the street without approval. But part of it has to do with the fact that dogs are genetically attuned to travelling alongside humans.

Anyway, as you know, I can talk a lot more and with more confidence about dogs than I can about the New Testament. But I’ll stop for now.