Dogs and letter carriers can be friends
Photo credit: Getty/MICHAL CIZEK | A Mastiff puppy rests during the XVIIIth International Dog exhibition on November 8, 2009 in Prague. AFP PHOTO/ MICHAL CIZEK (Photo credit should read MICHAL CIZEK/AFP/Getty Images)
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My dog is the nicest, sweetest dog in the whole world except when the letter carrier or UPS man comes to our home. Then he becomes a raging lunatic. He is fine when anybody else walks up to our door. Why does he hate them so much, and how can we get him to change his mind?
Max Healy, Baldwin
Dogs usually dislike delivery personnel because of the direct and purposeful way they approach your home. The dog feels this person is a threat to the security of the house, so it brings out its territory-defending instinct.
The problem is that, as the dog's barking and actions reach their peak, the offending person then finishes the delivery and turns around and walks away from the house. So the dog feels this was a job well done and calls it a day.
Then, the next day, the letter carrier returns to the house as if nothing ever happened. The dog goes through the whole routine again with the desired result. Then, the next day it happens again - every day except for Sunday.
This is why the dog's feelings about delivery people never change on their own; chasing them away from the house becomes a duty in the dog's mind. This is called a self-rewarding behavior, as the reward from the dog's point of view is that the offending party leaves every time the dog puts on the drama show.
In a perfect world, both you and your letter carrier would have time to visit with each other and chat and give the dog treats when the delivery is being made. Then the dog would feel that a visit from the letter carrier is a great thing and would look forward to it. When I was a kid, we had a letter slot in the door, and our mailman would slide a dog treat through the slot before he put the mail in; our dogs could not wait for him to show up. We always kept a jar of treats on our front porch for the letter carrier to use.
So, changing your dog's mind about delivery people is going to take a bit of cooperation among you, the delivery person and the dog.
When we purchased our aquarium, the salesperson at the store told us to change 10 percent of the water once a month. But we seem to have to put in more than that amount of water every month to replace what is lost through evaporation. Does this mean we do not have to do the 10 percent water changes if we are adding this water back in the tank all the time?
--Silvia Montalbano, Kings Park
Actually, you do. The reason why you change some of the tank water every month is to take out some of the impurities in the aquarium that the filter cannot. When water evaporates out of the tank, only the oxygen and hydrogen ions have left. All the unfilterable fish wastes and unwanted minerals are still in the water, and, as the water evaporates, the toxins in the tank become denser because there is less water in the aquarium.
That is why we have to actually remove these toxins by hand via the water change. The adding of water to replace evaporation is a separate issue and does not replace regular changes and other aquarium maintenance.
Our guinea pig seems to need to have its nails trimmed by our vet every two months. We tried to do it ourselves, but we are just too squeamish. Our dog does not even need its nails trimmed that often. What is it about guinea pigs that they need their nails trimmed so frequently?
-- John Corwin, Smithtown
In a state of nature, a guinea pig will constantly move around, looking for suitable grass and other vegetation to eat. So this constant friction on the nail tips keeps them trimmed naturally.
A pet guinea pig kept in a cage indoors gets very little exercise, and the surface that it walks on is always soft. Without the constant activity, the nails just keep growing around into circles that will actually injure the animal's foot pads. This is why the nails need to be trimmed so frequently.
