A Puppy Spreadsheet

A small break from the U2 blog project to entertain a random thought I had yesterday as I was watching our new puppy, McKinney, hork on the floor.

McKinney is our 10 week old standard poodle that we drove to Ohio to pick up 2 weeks ago.  A large portion of her life is spent sleeping but of the non sleeping hours, the majority of time is spent chewing on things.  The range of things chewed goes from throw rugs to shoes to fingers to anything left on the floor.  Many of these chewed things end up being swallowed and a significant portion of those things that are swallowed are then (some time later) horked up (back onto the floor).

The wife tells me (and the internet backs her up) that the standard poodle is one of the most intelligent breeds (slightly ahead of Dobermans, but we are not telling Nina, our Doberman, this fact).  Assuming that we don’t have a puppy that falls on the low end of the intelligence spectrum for poodles, I can only conclude that all this chewing, swallowing and horking is part of some grand experiment that McKinney is conducting.  A strange thought popped into my head yesterday.  What if McKinney had a spreadsheet to track her experiments?  I think it would look something like this.

Item Swallowed	Date Swallowed	Taste Good?	Hork?	Elapsed Time
Throw Rug	Week 8 Day 1	No	No	N/A
Stick	Week 8 Day 2	Yes	Yes	4 hours
Manure (mine)	Week 8 Day 3	Yes	No	N/A
Manure (other dog)	Week 8 Day 4	Yes!	No	N/A
Book	Week 8 Day 5	No	Yes	2 Hours
Shoe	Week 8 Day 6	Yes	Yes	1 Hour
Chew Toy	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A

There might be other columns that only dogs would care about (smell, relative amount of trouble [measured by the level of the volume of human yelling to stop], etc) but this is how I imagined it.  I translated the first column into human words of course and the date measurement is probably different depending on how dog’s really measure time.  I am not entirely sure how the last column would be recorded in a dog’s measurement of time.  All in all though I think this is how McKinney is tracking her experiments.  Notice the phenomenal lack of data for the last row.  Why chew on a chew toy when there are so many other things to chew on?

I will keep you posted as the experiments continue.

Jon